Patchwork Man (2 page)

Pip and Jim sat either side of the suitcases, eyeing them and the man suspiciously. They were almost identical, but not quite. I could tell the difference because Pip had lost both his two front teeth at the time whereas Jim had only lost one, so it was easy to work out who was who. I always wonder why – given the fact that they enjoyed tricking everyone so much – Jim hadn’t already yanked out his extra tooth. Maybe I remember us all as both harder and more vulnerable than we were at the time? They were the lookers of our motley crew, sandy hair falling in wilful shocks round scrubbed-apple cheeks, freckles and bright blue eyes; tomboys with charm. I was just a scraped-kneed, stick-legged awkward version of them, with sallow cheeks, wary eyes and an apparently hard outer skin. Ironic that my hard outer skin was in reality softer than a baby’s, and my heart easier hurt than a girl’s.

‘You’re going on a little trip, whilst your mother gets better after having this baby. It’s all too much for her to cope with all of you at the same time. It will be nice, you’ll see.’ He was quietly spoken and seemed sincere. I remembered Ted’s trip to stay with his uncle. I liked the sound of the wide open spaces, the animals, the fresh air and time to roam. He’d even said the village school they’d gone to was all right. No more Jonno and his gang, or Pop and his belt.

‘Ted went to stay with his uncle when his ma was poorly,’ I told the twins. ‘It’ll be OK, you’ll see.

‘Will we all be together?’ Pip asked shyly.

‘I’m sure it will all be sorted out satisfactorily,’ the man assured him, but looked away at his watch. ‘We really need to hurry up though. You have a train to catch.’

‘A train?’ Jim was agog. ‘I’ve never been on a train before. Is it a big un? Is it taking us somewhere good?’ The man looked at him reflectively.

‘Yes it is.’ He said eventually. He went to stand by the window and looked out, face half in shadow. ‘Come on, get a move on then,’ he threw back at us over his shoulder without turning round. I bundled what little I had in my suitcase as quickly as I could and then went over to him at the window. He was looking out at the grassy sides of the communal air-raid shelters that were still standing from the war. Ma occasionally told us stories of how cramped and stuffy it had been down them and what it had been like when the bombs fell. My oldest brother Win had been conceived the year the war officially ended and Ma had named him after Winston Churchill in honour: Winston Kenneth Lawrence Juss. She’d rearranged the names for me and Georgie had a similar combination. There was no denying the connection between us – that was sure.

The speed at which you could run down the slopes of the shelters depended on how confident you felt at the time. It was the way we tested who was top dog locally. Jonno was the current holder of the fastest time then so he and his gang were in charge. I’d always intended to beat him one day. I chalked up that particular race as one that would have to wait until I was older – maybe a good thing considering my skinny body and scrawny muscles. Occasional trips and falls did no real damage, but I had still to develop the ability to put my hands out in front of me as a cushion so I usually had a good assortment of bruises, after-effects of nose-bleeds and the occasional black eye as rewards for my practice runs. Ma obviously thought that I was often in fights and would exclaim wearily over me when I rolled in with another set of injuries. I tried once to tell her it was all innocent but she wasn’t listening. It never seemed to matter much after that, other than that I didn’t like her thinking I was in trouble all the time, when really I was anything but.

Now, comparing the man to the child, I’m still largely unco-ordinated. My golf swing is only fair and I gave up on squash and tennis in my early forties once I married Margaret and handed on the baton of the social integration race. Her co-ordination was impeccable – like everything else.

Back to then: our road was quiet for a slum area. Unusual to even have one still around in the sixties, but the rag and bone man was possibly the most interesting thing that made its way down the street at this time in the evening. He was on his way home and just stopping by to see if there was any trade around before ending his day in the next road. No-one had ever been able to explain to me why he was called a rag and bone man, apart from that he sometimes accepted old clothes, even rags. There were no bones on his horse-drawn cart.

I knew that because I’d lain in wait once and clambered up on to it to check when he was having a fag. Once or twice I’d been allowed to pat the horse and feel it blow gently from its great cavernous nostrils onto my open palm as I held out a handful of grass. Its nose felt like nothing I’d ever felt before, soft and smooth like the black velvet they’d draped over Grandpa’s coffin. I couldn’t understand the rag and bone man’s call either until on one of the occasions that I was patting his horse he explained that it was for the things he was after. Everyone dumped the things he might collect on the kerb for him. Opposite our house there was an old loo cistern that had been abandoned in the gutter and he stopped to load it on the cart as I and
The Authorities
man were looking out the window. A man was walking along the pavement and watching, maybe wondering what the rag and bone man would do with such a foul thing. He wasn’t looking where he was going and walked straight into the lamppost, banging his head with a clang we could hear from our flat.
The
Authorities man and I both laughed simultaneously and the brief moment of shared laughter encouraged me to ask him more.

‘Is it in the country or in a town?’ I hoped he would say the country so there might be some horses there and I could find out more about the strange way such a big beast as a cart-horse could also be so gentle when I fed it grass. He sucked his lower lip in and rubbed his hand across his face thoughtfully.

‘I don’t know I’m afraid, but I’m sure it will be fine. A nice place where you’ll be with other children your age and it will be fun.’ The words ‘Children’s Home’ were never uttered. Even at that age, and ignorant as I was, if they had, I would have made a fuss. Ma kissed us each weakly on the cheek and Pop nodded at us, still scowling, as we were led away.

*

T
he records I’ve seen since confirm my age then – nine – but, like Ma, I wasn’t entirely sure of it at the time. Birthdays didn’t feature much in our lives. There was no money so why would there be cake and presents? It’s only since adulthood and seeing the money lavished on modern day kids that ‘birthday’ means anything other than another day of grazed knees, rumbling gut and dodging Pop’s belt for some mischief I’d supposedly done and he’d found out about. I hadn’t done anything wrong that day, ironically, and it was that which worried me for so long afterwards. That and the fact that maybe I should have tried harder to explain to Ma that my bumps and bruises weren’t from fights or mischief, just from running down the side of the air raid shelter. Maybe she wouldn’t have assumed I was bad then and they would have kept me, otherwise why had I been punished when I hadn’t done anything wrong?

You can think something is your fault nearly all your life, but it’s not. It’s just the way it is and you’re the poor sod who got caught in the backlash at the time. So it was for me then, caught in the backlash of the grinding poverty, Catholic rigidity over birth control, and the sheer desperation to survive that was life for my family along with so many others at the time. When number eleven came along, something had to give. It wasn’t just me, of course. The other kids went too, and none of us had done anything wrong.

But it wasn’t anywhere nice, even though it was in the country.

Not anywhere nice at all.

I
struggled back to the present and the cold reality of now. I could still barely believe she was dead – or considering blackmailing me whilst alive. I studied Margaret’s blandly smiling face in the photo of her that took pride of place on the desk in my study, as if it might provide a reason for her treachery. She’d been at a charity ball, wearing the black and white silk dress with the splashes of red that now reminded me of blood on a skid-marked road. Ever the correct social hostess, it offered me nothing but polite platitude. It was then I noticed the case folder, lying forgotten next to her photo. The defence case she’d been so keen for me to take – and I’d been so reluctant to. I’d already made my name at the Bar, established my reputation, and determined my career path. Next stop High Court Judge. I didn’t need problematic little legal aid cases anymore. That was my excuse, anyway.

I put the incriminating list she’d left me to one side, sensing now it was the sweetener, not the main course. A morsel to whet my appetite and make me anxious for more – or bilious for less. I wondered which. It must have been very important for Margaret to go to so much trouble, but without her there to explain, sweetly, reasonably,
logically
– as she always did when I was being primed to do something she wasn’t sure I would want to – it was a mystery. The key to it had to be in the case. It was too circumstantial otherwise. She’d seemed to accept my rejection of it with nonchalance, and I’d been relieved, even though I’d tried not to show it. I knew it must be one of her
projects
, and her minute but unobtrusive observation of my reaction as I scanned its contents hadn’t gone unnoticed, but I’d naively assumed at the time she was merely gauging what I would do for next to nothing, in her do-gooder role, not assessing what the folder’s effect was on me or how well I could be manipulated. But as with all human life, vulnerability isn’t about the clever trick missed or the careless comment that later trips you up. It’s about the unseen and unplanned.

So what had Margaret planned for me before the unseen had engulfed her? I opened the folder and was faced with yet another inevitability on the first page. I had no choice now but to take the case. Unbeknownst to me, Margaret had told the Chambers’ clerk to accept it – probably with the implied threat of repercussions if they queried it with me. That would have sealed it. They were more in awe of her than me. I silently cursed her for her deviousness but knew I was beaten. I turned the page and read on, head spinning as this time I studied every sordid little similarity between the defendant and myself, and tried to work out why my murdered wife had set me up to defend my doppelganger – an almost exact copy of the child I’d been, but thought in adulthood I’d managed to escape. In the aftermath of what the papers had called Margaret’s ‘untimely and tragic death’ I hadn’t anticipated anything worse could happen – and certainly nothing as bad as this.

With the careful juxtaposition of the two items on my desk, I suspected the list of names, places and dates she’d pointedly provided me with would become very relevant at some stage too, knowing her. Margaret was the only one who’d known anything of my past – albeit the most mean, meagre and insubstantial parts I could be forced to part with. It had been necessary. There are some things you have to tell a wife merely to explain your silence. When we first married I explained that without explaining, and she claimed to understand what I meant. Returning to the list, she’d filled in the gaps well – and with what appeared to be present-day names and addresses. It was a gift horse if I wanted to find or be found. But at forty-nine, and with a lifetime of burying the past, why would I want to unearth it now? Of course, I didn’t, but nevertheless, having read all those excruciatingly analogous facts, and obvious parallels, nor could I ignore it.

By the time I’d reached the final pages of the case folder, it was clear the boy was not only one of Margaret’s projects but that she’d also potentially had another far more private agenda sketched out in relation to it, although not why she’d chosen this way to achieve it. The boy in the folder was almost a duplicate of me – but in the modern day. And the crime was an almost text-book copy. But why should she specifically alight on it and him? There was more to this than coincidence. When this insignificant little case had popped up weeks ago, she’d ostensibly known virtually nothing of my past yet she’d immediately pounced on it and made the connection. The discomfiting thought that Margaret had known an awful lot more about me for a very long time pushed its way through my stunned dismay. Along with it came the lingering fear I’d overlooked something else very important tucked away within the pages of the folder, like I’d tucked away my past and my secrets.

‘W
eren’t me. Weren’t there. Didn’t do it.’ He folded his arms across his chest and the very defiance in his small bony face and East London twang made me want to slap him. It was our first defence case conference – a fact-finding mission, with him offering no facts. I forced the irritation down beneath a smoothly reasoned response. My clerk glanced at me nervously. I would rather not have brought him with me. He was a standing joke and I understood now why my partners in Chambers – Francis, Jeremy and Heather – had passed him on to me with such alacrity. He was pathetically keen to please, but pathetic. He needed toughening up. Less of the clerk, more of the bastard. Perhaps I should encourage him to cut his teeth on this, depending on the likelihood of controversy. It was only a kid involved, so surely he could hold his own against a child, and perhaps relieve me of some of the more tedious aspects of the case. For now, though, I had to get the little tyke to break and actually tell me something – anything.

‘You were caught red-handed by the police, so you can hardly claim you weren’t there. I have it here.’ My clerk obediently passed the statement to me, all fingers and thumbs, and I wafted it lightly in front of the child’s mutinous face. I thought of the stolen video that had been found in his rucksack – a ridiculous concoction based around a street gang who’d discovered they had supernatural powers that allowed them to slip between parallel universes.
Slipping the chains
, it was called. ‘Or maybe you want me to believe you were universe-jumping and it was your alter ego there beating the living daylights out of Mrs Harris?’ I knew the sarcasm was inappropriate but I had better things to do than waste my time on a vicious little thug – things like ordering the wreath for Margaret’s coffin and choosing the hymns for the service, or seeing what progress the plod had made in tracking down the driver of the hit and run. Apart from which, this was the very last situation I wanted to be confronting again. Margaret had been right about one thing though, and she’d made the point very clearly with all her own good works. Altruism was for putting on a show when a show was needed. But why now? I already had public approbation before all this and with her convenient death, I hardly lacked sympathy. It was catapulting me right into the public eye as the QC with a conscience – defending the underdog even whilst dealing with his own personal tragedy. A veritable knight of compassion.