Blood Family (2 page)

Right then, I heard men shouting. It sounded muffled and far away, so could have been from any of the blocks.
But I still panicked as I always do, and held my hand out for the book as if I wanted it, so we could all get out of there before Harris came back.

He read the title on the spine out loud before he passed it over. ‘
The Devil Ruled the Roost
.’

The police officer cast one last look around the flat and shivered. Their eyes met once again. Then I heard Rob Reed muttering quietly to himself as he steered me in front of him towards the door. ‘Didn’t he just? Oh, yes indeed. Didn’t he just!’

I noticed the police car parked across the road the moment I looked out of my window. It was unmarked, but I knew all of them. It was no later than half past six. I can’t think why they thought Bryce Harris might be up that early. If anyone’s a night bird, it’s him. The club he hangs about in doesn’t shut till God knows when, so he is rarely out and about much before noon.

That’s when I used to see the child – before Bryce Harris got up. I’d watch the waif’s face flattened hopefully against the window, longing for something to see, aching for something interesting to happen. That was before that overgrown criminal bastard caught sight of me across the yard one day, and stuck that newspaper all over. For just a week or two I’d sometimes see the corner
of the paper twitch, as if the boy was still shoving his face close enough to try to see out, maybe with only one eye. But then one day that side was taped down even more thoroughly. You saw the shadow of the mess Harris had clearly made, doing the job in a temper. And since there were no windows on the other side, I don’t suppose that, after that, the child saw anything except his own thin life.

That’s why I wrote the letter. It was quite obvious he’d get no help from his mother. She was a drab and hopeless thing who’d had the stuffing punched out of her all right. Everyone said so. When she and Harris first moved in to 314B, she used to creep out sometimes to nip down to Ali’s on the corner. I saw her in the queue there more than once and always took the chance to peep in her basket. Sausage rolls close to their date stamp. The cheapest cheese and bread. Pies. Cigarettes and cans of beer. It wasn’t much on which to feed a growing child. Small wonder that the small mite’s face always looked pasty.

I wondered why she never took the boy along with her. He could at least have carried back the toilet rolls, and he’d have had a breath of air. But then I heard a whisper that the three of them had done a flit from their last place, and so I guessed they kept the boy well hidden because, once people see a child who isn’t in a nursery or school, tongues start to wag.

I took a lot of care with my first letter. I know how stupid people can be, letting out names, and no one would have wanted Bryce Harris to find out that they’d
interfered in any aspect of his life. And so, although I write as neatly as anyone my age who can still hold a pen, and spell not just better than most, but well enough to have won prizes all through school, I found a grubby sheet of paper and wrote the scruffiest letter, almost along the lines of all those ransom notes you see in films where every letter has been cut out separately from magazines and newspapers, then stuck in wobbly lines across the page.

Theirs a boy in 314B
, I wrote.
They keep him hiden away, but he needs HELP
.

I waited for Thursday, when the woman from the Social comes in to visit Mrs McGuire. She stays for twenty minutes every time. Never a moment more or less. So with a minute or two to spare, I stuck it on the lift with tape, and scuttled back in my flat. I kept my ears pinned back. Nobody else came up or down. So when the woman had gone and I popped out to check, the note had vanished and I knew for sure she must have taken it.

And nothing happened. I tried to be patient, but by then the child was worrying me all day and half the night, and so I tried again. This time I wrote a proper letter, put it in a proper envelope and gave a nice-looking boy outside the Social offices a pound to give it to the man at the reception desk. I even stood there lurking under my umbrella until I’d seen the envelope change hands.

Still, there was no response.

In my third letter I was a good deal tougher. I said that everyone in the flats was worried sick about this child and knew he’d been reported to them more than once. I said two separate journalists had told us that responsibility for his death would be laid at the Social Services’ door if they didn’t send someone round to check on him at once. (I had no reason to think the boy was starving or anything, but I did think the threat of it might stir them into action.)

It still took them eleven days to get their skates on. I had been planning to send a different note, to the police this time, to say that guns were kept at No. 314B. Everyone knows that talking about guns wakes that lot up. We have a story round here that some woman in B flats phoned the police about a burglary taking place across the way only to hear the lad on the desk replying that he was sorry but no officers were free to deal with her complaint.

‘It isn’t a complaint,’ she said. ‘It is a
burglary
, going on right this minute. These boys are kicking the door in.’

‘Sorry,’ the lad said. ‘Saturday’s a busy night. We don’t have anyone free.’

So she just added, ‘I think they’ve got guns.’

In less than half a minute she was hearing sirens. Squad cars surrounded the place. Megaphones. Uproar. Everyone herded out. She got a serious ticking off. They even threatened to put her on a charge. ‘Why did you
lie
?’
the officer demanded. ‘Why did you tell us they were
armed
?’

‘Who was it started with the lies?’ she snapped back. ‘It was you who said that you had no one free. Now look at the bloody swarm of you! Don’t you dare start on me!’

But I’d heard all about how many guns were waved about that night. I didn’t want there to be any accidents. So I held off and, sure enough, finally someone from Social Services took notice of my threatening letter and managed to stir stumps enough to come and look.

And they had clearly done a bit of homework first. A series of unmarked cars sat there all morning, then through my lunch-time snack. They knew enough to wait till Harris had gone. I saw him leave while I was steeping tea, sometime around two. He shambled over the yard as usual, the giant oaf, and less than ten minutes later another squad car cruised to a halt in front of B flats. I saw the five of them go through the door.

And then I waited. It was seventeen minutes by the clock before two of them led the mother out. My Christ, she was a mess. The woman could barely keep her feet shuffling between them, although they held her up. Her scalp was bald in patches, perhaps from the stress of living with that bully. More likely he had torn it out in one of his famous flare-ups. The car ticked over for a minute or two, and then, as if it had been waiting for yet another squad car that drew up behind, it did a turnabout, and left.

From then on I was sure – sure as I’m writing this – that what I’d see next would be one of the other officers carrying out that poor boy’s body, wrapped in a filthy blanket. I never touched the tea. I just stared, worried that if I even blinked I might miss what was happening.

Then this plump, balding, fatherly man led out the boy. The child came through the double doors and startled like a horse. It wasn’t even all that sunny, but he blinked hard in the light. I don’t believe he could have been much more than seven years old. He looked about the sort of height my Harry was when he moved from the infants to the junior school.

Someone inside the squad car swung the door open as the two of them came close. I knew the bloke who’d fetched the boy out of the flats could not be a policeman because he didn’t shove the boy’s head down as he pushed him in the car, the way they do. (You learn a lot about police habits when you live round here.) The boy clambered in the back as clumsily as if he wasn’t even sure which way he would be facing when he got inside.

The car door shut as one last officer rushed out of the flats to join the driver in the front. And then they drove away.

‘Job well done, Betty!’ I congratulated myself and, looking down, reckoned that I deserved a brand-new mug of tea. One hot and fresh, not stewed and stone-cold like the one sitting in front of me.

I put the kettle on again then, trembling, sat at the kitchen table and wept my heart out with relief.

I won’t try saying that I’d never seen the like before, because I had. By then I’d been in the police force for eleven years. I’d been the first to reach road accidents. I’d seen boys who’d been daft enough to tangle with rough-house drunks, and I’d rolled tramps and homeless druggies over in doorways, only to find them frozen stiff. I’d held down the flap on a girl’s bleeding face after a trivial cat fight turned into a full-on duel with broken bottles, and was at Mr Templeton’s the day the housing officers finally managed to winkle him out. (That was an object lesson in how much filth and garbage one mad man can fit in a one-bedroom flat.)

But I had never seen a sight quite like that woman. She was barely human any more. That bastard had ripped out so much of her hair that she was halfway to scalped. I thought at first the thin, weird keening I could hear was coming from that armchair – as if someone had left one of those joke rubber bags leaking under the cushion.

Then I saw her leg move. I didn’t recognize it as a leg at first, because of the way it twitched. And it was black. Christ knows, I’ve seen some bruises in my time. Nursed some myself, after the odd weekend round-up of revellers
at the far end of Marley Road. But livid flesh like that – green, blue, purple, yellow, black. The woman was a rainbow in herself. That Harris must have gone at her pretty well every night. Small wonder she was just a cowering bag of torn clothes in a chair.

Strange job, this. We deal with all types, all ages. Posh ones who ask you in and patronize you as they make you tea. Loudmouths who jeer as you pass. Toe-rags who hurl rocks at the car from around corners. You have to learn to keep the world from getting under your skin. But every now and again you’ll see a small kid breaking his heart in a doorway, or some poor sod who just walked down the wrong street at the wrong time and had his head kicked in. And you’ll just want to pack in the whole boiling, go home and weep.

That’s how I felt that day. Partly the stink of the place! Hard to believe those two had lived in that flat, hour by hour, day by day, with that reek up their noses each breath they took. I nearly gagged. I watched that social worker – Rob, was it? – prowl round the poky place, looking for something better than that manky T-shirt and those raggy bottoms to cover the kid from prying eyes. And all I could think was, ‘Get a move on, mate! I just want out of here. You can come back some other time to trawl around for your report.’

But, no. We had to wait while he peered into every cupboard. What he was looking for I couldn’t think.

And then he pounces. On a
book
.

A book! I ask you. In that benighted, stinking hole.

I wonder about these social workers sometimes, truly I do.

Outside hit me in the face, the slap of it against my skin. I had forgotten. And it smelled – oh, I don’t know. Hard, somehow. Almost harsh. Like
crystal
. I think air shocked me almost more than light, and once or twice since, smelling chlorine as I’ve walked past swimming pools, I’ve been swept back to that strange moment when Rob opened the downstairs door.

I shan’t forget the police-car ride: how big and wide the world looked. The road ran through the park, and all I could think of was my old nursery because there’d been a patch of green there. It was like seeing something half-forgotten. Of course there are trees and grass on television all the time. But seeing half a park of it on either side of you is something very different. My head was swimming with green.

And sky. Even before Harris covered up the windows, we were far enough down the flats that I had to twist my head to see even a slice of sky. The window in the car was closed, but if I leaned against it and looked up, I could see masses of blue.

Everything rushed past so quickly. And everywhere was so
bright
.

Because it was a police car, I thought that we were going to the station. (Mr Perkins once went to the station.) When the car stopped, Rob Reed said, ‘We’re here.’ And when I didn’t move, he leaned across to push the car door open. After I got out, he let me stand and stare a little while before he said, ‘Come on, Eddie. Time enough for that later.’

This time I wasn’t so slow because I knew for certain that he meant me. (I know that probably sounds as if I was thick as a brick. But Harris had only ever called me ‘Stain’ or ‘Toe-rag’, and Mum used to call me ‘Sweetie’ when she still spoke at all, so I had half forgotten that my name was Edward.)

Rob Reed led me to a glass door that startled me when it began to open before he even touched it. Behind it were more people than I had ever seen in my whole life. And not a single one of them was looking at me.

‘Come on, Eddie,’ Rob Reed said. ‘We go this way.’

And then he led me down a corridor so long I thought we’d never reach the end.

It was astonishing, really, how well he seemed. When I was told, before I went into the cubicle, that the boy had not been out of his flat for years I do remember thinking, ‘Here we go. Vitamin deficiencies. Possible stunted growth. And no doubt so mentally impoverished he’ll be halfway to retarded.’

There were a few faint bruises on his lower legs, as if the brute who kept on kicking him couldn’t be arsed to raise his foot far from the floor, or put much effort into it. (I heard a different story about his mum. She’d been kicked halfway to pulp and was apparently so addled she could no longer speak.) The child had got off lightly. He did have one or two scars. But nothing you could pin down to a cigarette burn, or anything like that. I’ve seen far worse. Indeed, kids come in here looking a heap more battered than that after a rugby match.