Blood Family (7 page)

And I remember Rob had tried again. ‘What did you call him, when you spoke to him?’

I probably looked blank. I’d never called him anything.

Sue tried. ‘What did your mum call him?’

She hadn’t, much. But still I said it, just to keep them off me. ‘Bryce.’

‘So did you call him Bryce as well?’

They waited. Maybe they were thinking that I was trying to remember.

‘Well, did you call him Dad?’ persisted Sue.

‘No.’

‘Harris?’ She tried to hide it, but she was watching me as if she thought I was pretending to be thick. ‘Or Mr Harris, even?’

‘I never called him anything.’

‘What if you wanted to call him over to look at something?’

Did I look frightened at the very idea? Who’d want him looking? I found a ladybird once, and he pulled her legs off, one by one, in front of my face. Then, holding me tight between his knees so I couldn’t get away, he crushed her tiny body slowly between his big fat thumbs. But in the end I couldn’t see for crying anyway. So I won there.

‘Right, then,’ I do remember Sue saying very firmly into the machine. ‘For now, we’re going to refer to Edward Taylor’s mother’s partner as “Harris” on this tape.’

And on we’d gone. ‘What did you eat? Did you have to tell them when you were hungry, or did they feed you anyway?’ ‘Who gave you food? Was it hot or cold?’ ‘Were you allowed to take food out of the cupboards by yourself or did you have to ask?’

Next time, they’d take another tack. I look back now and I can hardly believe that I had no idea what they were fishing for, with some of their questions. ‘Eddie, I must ask, did you see anyone apart from Harris and your mum? Did he have mates in ever?’ ‘Eddie, did Harris ever hit you?’ ‘Where on your body?’ ‘How often, Ed – can you tell me?’ ‘How hard? I know it isn’t easy to explain, but’ – Rob slapped a hand on his own thigh - ‘
this
hard?
Or was it harder, more like this?’ His hairy hand came down with such a thwack he made himself yelp.

After we’d giggled at that, it was Sue’s turn to lean forward. ‘Did your mum ever try to stop him hitting you?’

I tried so hard to hide the answer. But they were waiting.
Waiting
, just like Harris did.

Maybe I panicked. Anyhow, I must have nodded.

‘So what happened then?’

And when they’d finally dragged that answer out of me, and Rob had held me tight, and I’d stopped sobbing, he’d said, ‘Sorry, Eddie! God, I am so
sorry
! I had no
idea
!’ And I looked across at Sue and she was scarlet in the face and scrabbling on the carpet on her hands and knees, picking up hundreds of tiny bits of grey foam rubber.

I hadn’t meant to rip that cushion into shreds. I didn’t realize I’d been clinging on to it so tightly. ‘We will tell Linda it was not your fault that it got torn,’ Rob promised me. And he made sure he did, as they were leaving. He even called me back so I could hear.

Linda looked down at the carpet, which was still speckled grey around my chair. ‘Never you mind. We’ve had
far
worse than that.’

I couldn’t understand what she was saying. What, I was worried, could be
worse
than what Harris did to Mum that time she tried to stop him?

That was the end, that day. But Sue and Rob came back again, and I remember being mystified at how some
of the very same questions got asked over and over. I couldn’t understand why. It felt to me, back then, as if Mr Perkins had asked one of the people we visited, ‘Do the pancakes you’re tossing ever end up on the floor by mistake?’ and then, after she’d answered, kept asking the question again, but just a different way. I do remember worrying that they hadn’t listened, or they hadn’t believed my answers. Why else would they ask things like, ‘Was Harris ever nice to you?’ when they knew that he wasn’t? Or, ‘Did he ever come home with presents or promise you special things?’ or, ‘Did he or any of his friends ever put their arms around you or hug you – anything like that?’ I had already
told
them that no one ever came, and Harris didn’t touch me – no, never laid a hand on me, so long as I was crouched down quietly against that wall, gripping my legs so tightly to keep myself steady that I made bruises on myself, trying to stay safe by keeping what Harris called my ‘dirty little pink snout’ well out of it.

Being as good as gold so he wouldn’t get ratty.

Linda came round some days to borrow my baby sister. It was usually for swimming, but after their new boy came, sometimes it was for her to go next door and sit with him in their sandpit. (Dad dug ours over after I stopped
playing in it. Marie came years after me. She was a big surprise.)

Linda and Alan keep their old sandpit covered so the cats can’t mess in it. Marie really likes it. I thought at first their new boy would be only two years old, like her. But then I saw him. He was nearly as old as me! And he was wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas. I didn’t want to play with him when I saw that, and nobody suggested it. I don’t know why.

I don’t know either why the boy – his name was Eddie – would want to sit next to Marie, mucking about with sand. He did, though. She would crawl about, grabbing the spades and shovels, and bashing the top of buckets. He just sat jammed against the edge, scooping up handfuls of sand and watching it trickle away between his fingers. Over and over. Whenever Marie got upset because she couldn’t see her favourite yellow scraper, he’d push it back in view. And sometimes, when she was chattering her nonsense, he’d nod as if he might be listening.

He didn’t talk, though – except to say to Marie things like, ‘There it is,’ and, ‘Over
there
.’

I watched quite often. Usually Alan was gardening somewhere near, pretending not to keep an eye on things.

I asked Linda once, when I’d been sent round there to tell them that it was our tea time, ‘Why do you put him in there with a
baby
?’

She looked at me. I could tell that she was going to make up some excuse. But then she didn’t.

‘I think he finds it soothing,’ she told me. ‘And some days, when he’s had his visitors, it calms him down.’

I knew who she meant by ‘his visitors’. She meant the dumpy man and the smart lady they called Sue.

You cannot say I wasn’t used to questions. But
Eleanor
. She had braids wrapped around her head, grey hair and dangly necklaces. Her spectacles hung round her neck when they weren’t on her nose. I couldn’t stand her – well, not
her
exactly, more the way she made me feel, because that awful waiting that we always did reminded me of being near to Harris. It made my heart thump, knowing that she’d be saying something any moment, but not knowing what or when. I’d try so hard to keep still, then I’d look in my lap to see my hands squirm. Or I would notice red and realize I’d gnawed a fingernail so far down that it was bleeding again.

She wasn’t horrid. It was simply horrid being there, feeling like something she was studying. She’d sit me in the chair, give me a good long look, and then she’d say, ‘Today, I thought that we might talk about—’ And it would be this or that, and all those horrible long pauses after I’d done my best. And it was such a
cheat
because Linda and Alan had told me so often when I’d woken at night, ‘Those days are
gone
. They are all over now.’

And here was Eleanor, just going on about it all, over and over and over. ‘How did that make you feel?’ ‘Did you feel scared, Eddie?’ ‘Perhaps you felt very sad.’ ‘You probably felt—’

Linda would bring me home. I’d beg her, ‘Read me a story!’ and she would pull out
Frog and Toad
, or
Up the Faraway Tree
, or
The Smugglers’ Secret
. Anything that wasn’t to do with me and how I felt. I loved the way even the words on the page began to make sense. More and more often, Linda would drop her finger to the page and say, ‘You read this line,’ and I would find that I could do it. ‘No!’ ‘Stop!’ or ‘Frog said, “Yes, Toad.” ’

I read it properly, as well. She said I put expression into it right from the start. I knew how to do that because Mr Perkins often read to us. Never a story, though. We’d come back from the day’s visit and he’d say, ‘Now that reminds me of a poem I learned at school when I was around your age.’ He’d go to his yellow book shelf with the talking bookends, and run his finger along until one of the bookends squealed, ‘That’s right! That’s the right book!’ He’d prise it out, flick through the pages and read us a line or two. And he would always make it sound as if it
mattered
.

So even if I was just reading something simple like, ‘“Yes, Toad,” said Frog,’ I put my heart in it. And soon I found that Linda was pointing at the page for me to read not just a few odd words, but a whole sentence. It would be something like, ‘I won’t go there!’ or, ‘He is a fool!’ or, ‘You go home right now!’ And after that, I just took off.
(Well, that’s what Linda said.) And almost all of it was suddenly easy-peasy.

I could read.

And then, I don’t know why, I wanted to tell Mum. I knew that Linda would be very surprised. She had kept asking and I’d kept shrugging my shoulders and saying nothing. So after I changed my mind, there was a bit of a silence. Then Linda asked me, ‘Do you really want to go? Or is this Eleanor’s idea?’

‘I want to go.’

She squeezed my hand and said, ‘All right. I’ll talk to Rob. He’ll probably be the one to take you.’

I overheard the phone call. I made sure I did. I played the usual trick of thumping around my bedroom, then crept out onto the landing.

‘Rob, is this such a good idea? He’s been so settled . . . Yes, I know. But does it have to be now, when he is doing so well? . . . No, you’re wrong there. I don’t believe he thinks that any more . . . Oh, God! You social workers and your bloody
guidelines
. What about
Eddie
?’

I’d seen the headlines, of course.
WILD CHILD. OUR TINIEST SHUT-IN. BLUEBEARD BRUTALITY. MONSTER
!!! The usual mix of noisy hysteria and sentimental wallowing.
Every front page featured that grainy photo of the boy blinking so fiercely as he shuffled into the light. And, just like everyone else, I’d seen the television footage of Bryce Harris’s hand slipping out under the blanket covering his head to flip the bird at the baying crowd.

I never for a moment thought the child would come to me. I naturally assumed that this would be the sort of court case – kidnapping, false imprisonment, grievous bodily harm – that meant that Eddie would have to give evidence. Don’t ask me the ins and outs of how Harris wriggled out of facing such obvious charges. I know it was something to do with the fact that young children are seen as unreliable witnesses. And it did certainly seem odd that this man should have had the self-control to keep his hands off the boy while he was beating up the mother.

Which led to the next problem for the police, for Eddie’s mother was deemed to be incapable of giving evidence. The bruises on Eddie’s legs turned out to be self-inflicted. He’d gripped himself so hard that he’d left marks. So who was to say it wasn’t Lucy Taylor herself who’d stumbled hard into the furniture, pulled out her own hair in chunks and, in her seriously addled brain, decided for herself her son was better off kept hidden in the flat? Admittedly the rules have changed so, if a child’s mistreated, anyone who’s been present can be held responsible. But Harris had been smart, and Eddie Taylor came out of that flat well-enough fed, with nothing on
his body that you could photograph to show a jury. And though the child was weirdly innocent of life outside, and sometimes very shy, he did appear surprisingly normal. Everyone said so. One keen, persuasive barrister for the defence, a nice new suit, and Harris could have been acquitted.

Nobody wanted that.

So they went at him sideways, since it was obvious the drug dealing and extortion, added to one or two counts of blackmail and intimidation that they rooted out, could clock up much the same sentence. In the end, on the principle of safety first, they went for that, just to be sure he’d be banged up.

And after that decision, once it was obvious that Eddie wouldn’t have to tell his story in any trial, he came to me.

There he sat, in that chair over there, his thin legs dangling. He was a serious little fellow, still in the habit of peeking upwards surreptitiously, as though he’d kept that ratty fringe we’d seen in that, the first and only photo. (Judges move fast on a child’s privacy.)

I wanted to start off with what he thought about the things that had happened since he left the flat. I can’t remember quite how I began, but it was probably along the lines of, ‘So, how’s it going, Eddie?’

Just an open-ended question.

That didn’t get us anywhere, but over the next few visits the child did seem to overcome his fear of saying
anything at all in case it led to trouble. Gradually he became more and more confident about describing the small excitements of his new life with Linda and Alan. And that did offer some sort of a bridge for going back to talk of earlier days.

Then once, when I was asking him if he had visited his mother yet, he told me he was going there the very next day. With Rob.

‘It’s been a long time since you’ve seen her,’ I ventured.

‘When I was little,’ he agreed.

That floored me. Obviously my first thought was that he’d conflated the mother who had been in hospital (and possibly, in his mind, cured) with the mum he had known so long ago, before Bryce Harris thrashed her into something else.

That didn’t bode too well. ‘Do you think she’ll be pleased to see you?’

He nodded eagerly. I will admit, my stomach turned. We’d barely started, and that relentless
hope
young children specialize in had already sprung up, setting the poor lad up for horrid disappointment.

I said, ‘She’s been in hospital for quite a time.’

‘She’s in a nursing home now.’

‘That’s different, is it?’ I asked warily.

‘Linda says that it’s better.’ He studied his shoes for a while. ‘We wrote a postcard. I chose it and it was an owl.’