Nobody Came (16 page)

‘R
eady for the off then, Robbie?’ boomed Mr Smith’s voice. ‘Come on, the car’s outside. The drive won’t take long.’

One hand pushed me gently out of the dormitory, along the familiar corridors, down the stairs and to the front door. Sister Bernadette was there and gave a warm smile to Mr Smith and an inclination of her head towards me.

‘Try and behave yourself there, Robbie,’ were her final words of goodbye.

I just nodded in reply. If I had hoped for something more, some words saying I would be missed, some sign of caring, even a smile with just a little warmth, then I would have been disappointed. She just stood by the side of the door and watched us walk out. Once outside I took a deep breath and forced a smile. What did I care about Sister Bernadette’s indifference to my leaving? I was going to a better place, wasn’t I?

I climbed into the front seat of Mr Smith’s small black Morris Minor and looked round. The back seat was empty. ‘Where’s Marc?’ I asked. ‘I thought he was coming too.’ But Mr Smith didn’t reply. As the car moved off I gripped the edges of the seat. The engine purred as we travelled out of St Helier and through the countryside towards St Martin.

The drive to Haut de la Garenne passed in a daze. I looked out of the window but took in very little of the view. Too many questions were churning over and over in my head. What was it going to be like there? Would I make friends? Would Davie be all right without me? The couple of times John had visited me, he’d brushed aside my questions and told me very little about the place where he had spent his years in care. I felt another wave of sadness that he was no longer there. It seemed that forces outside our control were determined to keep us apart.

I was brought out of my reverie by the sound of Mr Smith’s voice. ‘Wake up. Robbie. We’re here.’

I looked around me and saw bright green lawns, a large building with freshly painted windows, and I realised that we hadn’t driven through huge locked gates. There was no forbidding spike-studded wall surrounding this building and no tribes of little boys digging and hoeing in the gardens.

The head warden was a tall man with a thick bushy beard. He greeted us at the front entrance, shaking Mr Smith warmly by the hand and patting my shoulder.

‘Come into my office, Robbie. You and I can have a little chat then I’ll get one of the boys to show you around before you have your lunch.’ He led the way into a small room with a desk piled high with papers, a filing cabinet and three chairs. He indicated that I was to sit on one of the chairs and took the seat opposite.

He favoured me with a small tight smile, without any of the warmth he had bestowed on Mr Smith, I noticed. He confirmed what I had already been told: that chores were minimal. You just had to make your own bed, keep your sleeping area tidy and take it in turns to help with the washing-up at weekends and in the evenings. That was all.

There was to be no running in the corridors and no raised voices. We had to ask permission of one of the wardens before leaving the premises; just because there were no walls didn’t mean we could wander off when we felt like it.

‘We caught your brother breaking the rules more than once, you know.’ He paused, then gave me a searching look. ‘He was very severely punished for that. So we don’t want the same behaviour from you, do we?’

I managed to say ‘No, sir.’ It was news to me that John had been punished and I wondered fearfully what they had done to him.

The other rules were: no fighting, no stealing, no shouting, no answering a warden back and never looking untidy. After what I had been used to with the nuns, it all sounded fairly tame to me.

He told me that disobeying the rules resulted in punishment but he didn’t clarify what form the punishment took. Nor did he tell me that it was the individual warden who decided if a boy was untidy or his voice too loud. If I had known then just how they punished us, I might not have felt so confident.

‘Now, let’s go and find someone who can show you around.’

I followed him out of the office and he called over the first boy he saw. ‘Come here, lad.’ The boy was snub-nosed with curly brown hair and he looked anxiously in our direction. He seemed very relieved when the head warden introduced us and said, ‘Martin will look after you, Robbie,’ and disappeared back into his office.

‘You’re John Garner’s kid brother, aren’t you?’ Martin asked. ‘Don’t look much alike, do you?’ Before I could answer, he carried on chatting. ‘We’ve been expecting you. Heard you were coming.’

‘I wish John was still here,’ I said sadly. ‘I thought he was going to be.’

Martin made no comment to that.

‘Come on, let’s show you around.’ He opened a door. ‘This is the dining room.’ I was surprised to see that instead of long tables and benches there were big round tables and proper dining chairs. He showed me the cloakrooms, then the shower areas.

‘They’re a lot better than baths,’ Martin assured me when I confessed that I had never used a shower before. Next he led me down a light, airy corridor where high windows looked over the courtyard and up a flight of stairs and into my dormitory.

‘That’s your bed,’ he said, pointing at a small area where there was a bed, a shiny wooden bedside cabinet and a small wardrobe. I couldn’t grasp that all that space was just for me. At the orphanage we hadn’t owned anything so there was no need for our own storage area.

‘Come on,’ Martin said, ‘let me take you to the recreation room so you can meet up with some of the others.’

He led the way through freshly painted corridors into a large room furnished with comfortable armchairs drawn up around a black-and-white television set. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with what looked like hundreds of books divided the room and nearly obscured the green-covered table where a group of boys and a dark-haired man in his late thirties were playing a game of pool.

I gaped at my surroundings with open-mouthed amazement. Books, a television and a snooker table! Suddenly the dark rooms and strict regime of the austere orphanage seemed far away. This surely was the start of something better. I began to feel a flutter of excitement. Martin introduced me to two boys who were desultorily playing a game of cards – another pastime that was strictly forbidden in the orphanage. ‘Devil’s cards’, the nuns had called them.

I asked them if they had also known John.

‘Everyone knew your brother,’ was the answer, followed by the comment that I didn’t look at all like him.

I was aware that with my glasses, mousy brown hair and tall, lanky physique, there wasn’t even a passing resemblance between my handsome, blond, muscular older brother and me. I did push-ups every day in the hope that my wiry body would turn into a more solid manly shape but it hadn’t worked yet.

‘Mind you,’ said a boy who told me his name was Pete, ‘it might be better for you if you don’t look too much like him.’

‘Why?’ I asked. When I saw myself in the mirror and silently compared myself to my elder brother I couldn’t think of one good reason why it would be better to look like me.

An uneasy expression crossed Pete’s face and a silence descended on our group. I saw their eyes flicker across to where the group of boys and the dark-haired man were playing pool and I felt that somehow my questions had put them all on edge.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Tell you later, not in here though,’ Martin replied quietly, and there was something in the tone of his voice, a warning perhaps, that added a slight tremor of apprehension to my initial excitement.

Keeping their voices right down and glancing at the pool table furtively, they proceeded to fill me in a bit on the wardens.

‘The head warden is a right loony,’ said a third boy. ‘One moment he’s all smiles, the next he whams us. You never know with him what way his mood will take him. And that Parker – you’ll meet him later – he’s another hard bastard. So just keep out of their way.’

The words went straight over my head. Hadn’t I been beaten by the nuns for the slightest thing? Hadn’t I had to do numerous chores? Hadn’t I been denied books, television and games? I looked at the large television that dominated the room and smiled at the prospect of all this freedom.

‘When can we watch that?’ I asked.

‘At weekends when there’s a film,’ replied Martin without any of the excitement I felt. ‘There’ll be one this afternoon, most likely.’

Before I could ask any more questions the man who had been playing pool suddenly appeared at my elbow. He told me that his name was Blake and that he was one of the wardens.

In appearance he was cut almost from the same physical cloth as Dennis. Tall and muscular with thick, dark brown, wavy hair and hazel eyes. But as I got to know him better I saw the differences. His eyes didn’t crinkle up when he laughed but they changed colour depending on his mood. When they darkened so that they appeared almost brown it was a warning signal to beware of his rising temper. There were other differences as well. Whereas he worked out with dumbbells to keep his body in good shape, sport was not a passion of his – cars were. He had a little red sports model that the boys all wanted to sit in and admire. His walk was different as well; Dennis had been jaunty whereas Blake’s was the confident swagger of the predatory bully.

But I didn’t see all of that on that first day; I only knew that he made me feel uncomfortable.

He gave me a friendly smile and told me that he was one of the wardens. I felt the boys tense at his presence, and then visibly relax when it was me he addressed. What were they afraid of? My years at Sacre Coeur had taught me never to be disarmed by a pleasant face with a warm smile and not to take encouraging pats on the shoulder or offers of help on trust. At twelve years old I viewed the world and the adults in it with suspicion so I just waited for him to tell me what he wanted.

‘You’re a lucky boy,’ he said. ‘There are some nice new clothes waiting for you. Come with me and you can get changed. We need your shoe size then there will be new shoes too.’

He took me back to large cupboard and selected a pair of pyjamas, a dressing gown, a school uniform, and then a pair of trousers and a jumper. My eyes widened at the amount that was there. Carrying the pile of clothing, I followed him up to the dormitory where I put each item in my wardrobe. For the first time since I was five and had been given my new school uniform on the trip to the outfitters, I inhaled the fresh clean smell of new clothes. At the orphanage the combined smell of cheap soap and the staleness of years of use was impregnated into our clothing but these, to me, smelled of fresh air and hope.

‘You can put on the trousers and jumper,’ Blake said. ‘But first you’re to take a shower. We can’t put clean clothes onto a dirty body now, can we?’

I followed him to a wash area with communal showers. He leant against the wall, watching me as I undressed, and I felt his eyes on me as the water splashed down onto my body. ‘Here, let me help you,’ he said, and I felt his fingers rubbing shampoo into my hair before running a soapy flannel down my back. I tensed; I didn’t like being touched. He noticed and abruptly withdrew his hand.

A towel was thrown round my shoulders.

‘Dry yourself with that,’ he said.

I turned my back, but all the time I rubbed myself dry I was aware of his eyes on me.

‘I expect you’re pleased to be away from those nuns,’ he said in his deep, gravelly voice, giving me a playful slap across my bare buttocks.

I hurriedly wriggled into my underpants.

‘I’ve heard that they never managed to turn you into a sissy,’ he continued.

‘No, they didn’t,’ I said, trying to draw myself up to my full height.

‘Yep, heard you were a right little tearaway, just like your brother. Don’t try anything on my shift or we won’t be friends.’

He gave me a grin, told me it was time for lunch and pointed me in the direction of the dining room.

The next surprise I got was that the dining room was mixed. There were girls there as well. Our table was all boys and Martin had saved a seat for me. When the food arrived my mouth dropped open for the second time that day. Thick slices of ham, fluffy mashed potatoes, peas and carrots; this looked a lot better to me.

We spent most of the afternoon watching a John Wayne Western on the TV and then we had supper: shepherd’s pie followed by tinned fruit and custard. After supper we went back to the common room and I tried my hand rather clumsily at a game of pool, and then it was time for bed. I dutifully brushed my teeth, pulled on my new cotton pyjamas, snuggled down under my sheets and blankets and fell asleep with a smile on my face. The hints the boys had dropped about the wardens and the threat of punishment for misdeeds were all forgotten, wiped out by the happy memory of the two good meals, playing pool, seeing a film, a comfortable bed and new clothes. And I was going to meet girls!

This is the place to be, I thought, as I drifted into dreamland.

It was the muffled screams that penetrated my dreams, making my eyes fly open, that changed my mind.

‘G
o back to sleep,’ came a whisper from the boy in the next bed, whose name was Dick. ‘You can’t do nothing.’

But sleep evaded me. The thick walls might have muffled those screams, but I recognised them as being full of terror and pain. They lasted less than a minute before they were abruptly silenced, and somehow the silence was more terrifying than the screams.

The next morning I asked Dick about them.

‘Tell you later,’ he said nervously and his eyes darted over my shoulder. I turned around to see what had caught his attention. The warden called Blake was watching us. 

I had to wait until after breakfast when we were free to go outside. There was no mass to go to, so even on school days we had this time free. Groups of boys and girls hung around but I noticed that no one seemed to be chatting or laughing.

Martin and I walked out into the sunshine with another boy from my dormitory, who was called Pete. Martin beckoned us to follow him. We finally stopped around the corner where we couldn’t be seen from the main building and I could see the boys visibly relax as they leant against the wall. I noticed how alike Pete and Martin were – they could almost be brothers – and I smiled at this thought because John and I hardly looked alike, did we?

Martin spoke first. ‘Look, Robbie,’ he said, ‘it’s not a good idea to talk about anything you hear or see in front of the wardens, especially that Blake. There’s another one to beware of too, called Parker. Keep your head down and don’t draw attention to yourself when either of them are around.’ He looked at the ground, avoiding my eyes before asking: ‘Did Blake touch you up when he gave you the clothes?’

I shrugged and said, ‘Not really,’ as nonchalantly as possible. I didn’t add that he had made me take a shower in front of him or that there was something about the big, beefy man that made uncomfortable.

Anyhow I wasn’t going to let the boys distract me by changing the subject. I wanted to know what had happened in the night. ‘Where were those screams coming from?’ I asked.

‘From the punishment room, near the head warden’s office,’ Pete told me. ‘Usually we can’t hear anything but they must have left a door open.’

‘The punishment rooms?’ I repeated. Just the fact that there were rooms called that gave it a sinister feel and I shivered involuntarily.

The boys looked at each other before Pete continued. ‘Don’t say anything to anyone. We’re not supposed to talk about this, but there are more in the cellars. They’re even worse.’

‘The one near the head warden’s office is mostly used for canings. But they beat you real bad in there,’ said Martin with a shudder.

I asked them what happened in the others but they clammed up and it was clear that even talking about it frightened them.

‘Who was in that room?’ I asked, but as the question left my mouth I felt prickles of apprehension down the back of my neck.

‘I think it must have been your friend from Sacre Coeur, that ginger boy – Marc, I think his name is,’ Pete said eventually. ‘There were no boys from our dorm missing last night.’

‘Yes, unusual that, on a Saturday night and all,’ muttered Martin. ‘Must have been the girls’ turn.’

At the time I didn’t take in the meaning of his words. I was too shocked to hear Pete saying that it must have been Marc making those dreadful sounds.

I wondered why he hadn’t come at the same time as me but just assumed that he would turn up later. Now it seemed that he had arrived and been taken straight to the punishment rooms.

‘What could he have done?’ I asked.

Martin shrugged. ‘Who knows? They don’t need you to do anything if they want to beat you; they just do.’

‘They’re bastards, all of them,’ Pete said with a flash of anger in his voice. ‘Supposed to be better than us, call us scum, they do. But they are the bleeding scum.’ And I saw a sheen of tears mist over his eyes and the anger turned to hatred.

‘Maybe he answered the head warden back,’ Martin continued. ‘That would have done it. Told you he’s a mad bastard, that one. Anyway if they want to give you a beating as a sort of welcome to your new home, then they will. If they think a new boy’s going to be trouble, that’s what they do. Shows them just who’s in charge, doesn’t it?’

‘You two must have been a right handful for the nuns to send you here; we don’t get many boys from the orphanage, just the tearaways the nuns can’t cope with. Is your friend older than you?’ Pete asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but only by about six months.’

‘Doesn’t matter, they’ll assume he’s the ringleader then, so it’s him they’ll go for first. Whop any spirit out of him. That’s what they try and do.’

I left it at that. I was worried about Marc, sorry that he had taken a punishment for both our misdeeds, if that was the case, and petrified that one day I would be taken up to that punishment room. With my shoulders hunched I walked back into the common room, took down a book and sat in a chair away from the groups of boys who were chatting quietly amongst themselves. I turned the pages but my eyes and brain were unconnected. I didn’t take in a word. I tried to empty my mind of all the thoughts that raced around in it and the day seemed to pass without my awareness of anything around me.

But that night, when I lay in my bed, the one thought that kept repeating itself over and over in my mind was: I’ve come to somewhere worse. What I didn’t know then was just how much worse it was.

They released Marc the next morning – a Marc I hardly recognised. It was just two days since I had seen him last but he looked older and thinner. I knew he was badly bruised; I could tell by the way he was holding himself. His arms were wrapped around his body as though to protect it from further blows.

His eyes met mine and I saw that there was no trace of childhood naivety or trust left: instead there was a blank deadness. It was a look I came to recognise, a look that settles in the eyes of the young when all hope and all belief that life will get better have gone. The boy who had brought us food and reassured me that Davie was all right when I was locked in the chicken sheds, the boy who had made my days working in the laundry bearable and had laughed with me on that beach just days before, had gone; in his place a hurt, bewildered shell remained.

He said nothing for a few seconds, and then sighed. ‘They’re bastards, Robbie; real bastards.’ And as he uttered those words I saw to my horror that one of his upper front teeth was missing.

‘Marc,’ I said, then my words dried up and I just stood there looking at him, my arms dangling uselessly at my sides. I wanted to comfort him as he had once comforted me, but I was too young to know the words to express what I felt, so I said nothing.

Later, in a secluded area of the grounds, he pulled his shirt up and showed me his bruises. His ribs were mottled and there were livid marks on his back. There were also bruises that had clearly been caused by a clenched fist and others raised into weals that he said were cane marks.

‘But there are ones you can’t see,’ he said grimly. ‘Those bastards have ways of hurting you where it doesn’t show. They roll up something hard in a wet towel then they beat you with it.’

‘I heard you screaming,’ I said eventually. I thought for a moment and remembered that even when he was eight he had never screamed when the nuns beat him.

He didn’t tell me then what had made him cry out and beg them to stop. I put the story together over the next few days as he told me little scraps of what they had done to him.

Three men had taken him down to the cellars, stripped him and put him into a bath filled with icy cold water. They held his head under so long that he thought he was drowning. Then they brought him back upstairs and beat him. They threatened him with the icy bath again and started dragging him to the door, punching him on the back.

If that hadn’t made him scream, what had? I wondered. I needed to know what had happened to Marc and what could lie in wait for me if I didn’t toe the line in this place.

It was later that day when he told me the rest. We had taken ourselves to a sheltered part of the grounds, where we thought we would be unobserved from the main building. The wardens didn’t seem interested in keeping us apart even though Marc had been put in a different dormitory from me. I suppose they thought that after Marc’s punishment we’d had enough of a warning. We were sitting on the lawn, both deep in thought about his ordeal. As though reading my mind, he finally had the courage to answer my silent question.

‘They put things on my willy,’ he said suddenly. ‘Things that hurt.’

I was listening so hard I could hardly breathe. A tear rolled down his face. He wiped it angrily away with the cuff of his shirt. ‘It was that that made me scream, Robbie. I couldn’t help it.’

He got up off the grass and walked away, his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets. I sensed that he didn’t want me to follow him.

At the time I couldn’t imagine what he meant. What could they have put on his willy? Over the next few days I worked it out, partly from what Marc told me, partly from what I managed to get out of Martin and Pete.

The wardens kept a small generator locked up in the cellar. They had switched it on when they took Marc down there the second time. They showed it to him; let him know it was electric. He knew that electricity and water mixed together could kill you and he started to shake with terror. They laughed at his fear and picked up the metal probe they had attached to the generator. It was the sort that farmers use to stun cows before they’re killed. He had seen them used on the dairy farm where he had once lived when he was little. They touched his genitals with it. The pain was so intense it would have made a grown man scream. Marc was still only thirteen. It was a torture that, once used, had even the bravest boys reduced to a shivering jelly at the very sight of it.

It was then he had screamed and screamed, sobbed uncontrollably and begged them not to do it again. When they had brought him upstairs he thought that they were going to let him go at last, but that was just another way of tormenting him. They knocked him about some more, then, when he was on the floor, they grabbed his legs and started dragging him towards the door.

They threatened him with that probe again, that and the cold bath. His body had writhed and jerked with remembered pain, his hands had reached for the door jamb and gripped it so hard he broke his nails. They just laughed and kicked him again. He screamed as he had in the cellar and begged them not to take him back there. It was these screams we had heard as we lay in the dormitory.

Satisfied that they had broken his spirit, they didn’t torture him any more after that. They just left him in a room where there was only a thin mattress to lie on and nothing to keep him warm. He was in shock from the beatings, his body chilled by the cold water, and he was still twitching from the remembered agony of the electric shock. He spent that night shaking and crying with the cold and his pain.

In the morning when they had come for him he had promised to be good.

He hated himself for crying.

He hated them.

Even between ourselves we rarely admitted that we were scared. Shame kept us quiet. Shame of our fear, at what the wardens could, and did, do to us. Shame at how they reduced us to what we thought of as pitiful objects and how they had made us cry and beg.

We all knew that there was no use asking for help from people outside the home. We were there because we were unwanted. We were all there for a reason. Some boys had committed crimes and were considered too young for prison; others were abandoned; some had a single parent who had become ill and could no longer look after them; and some had learning difficulties or personality disorders and had been placed there by a family who didn’t want them or couldn’t handle them. Everyone knew we were problem children. We had all at various times been told we were useless, failures and scum. The head warden and his team were respected citizens; they helped keep Jersey’s streets free of troublesome youths. They knew people in high places; they told us no one would ever believe us. They would just say we made up wicked stories. The only people our stories would harm would be ourselves.

Then there was the threat that had followed us from Sacre Coeur – the mental hospital. Boys who were not believed were clearly compulsive liars. Liars were either sick or bad. The sorts of stories we had to tell were so dreadful we might qualify on both counts. Sick enough to go to the hospital, be locked up with the loonies and have to stay there at the mercy of doctors who might decide never to release us into the world.

At least we knew that, in the home, reaching the age of fifteen would bring us freedom.