The Boy No One Loved (6 page)

It was then when I saw something that immediately swept away all my previously light-hearted thoughts about boys and their attention to personal hygiene. No, these socks weren’t just dirty, they were, all of them, bloody. The toe parts of all of them were liberally covered in the stuff, dried on and almost black in colour.

I got up from the floor and sat down on the bed, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was clear now just what the source of the foul smell was, clearer also why he’d so carefully squirrelled them away. Presumably till he could find some secret moment at some point, when he could wash them himself, away from my eyes.

I put the bag down, and started to search the room further. Which wasn’t something I’d ever dream of doing with my own kids. Not something I’d do, period, in normal circumstances, with anyone. But this was serious. This was necessary, because some instinct drove me on. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew there would be something hidden somewhere. I just knew there was something else to find.

I was on autopilot now and went methodically through his room, inch by inch, searching carefully in every nook and cranny. And after the best part of an hour spent pretty much ransacking Justin’s bedroom, I finally made my first find. I’d lifted up the mattress by now, to get a better look at the bed base, when I noticed a tiny tear in the mattress itself. It was very small, but also straight and clean and precise – it was clear it hadn’t happened accidently. Very gingerly, I pushed a finger inside.

My fingertip found it – somewhat suddenly and painfully. I had caught it on the end of something sharp. Not wishing to slice off the top of my finger, I very carefully winkled it out. It was the blade from a craft knife. One that had come out of the set we had bought for him, I imagined.

Once again, instinct kicked in and drove me on. Brushing aside my initial feelings of dread at what I might find next, I began my second search with renewed vigour. My attention to detail wasn’t disappointed. Within half an hour I had a decidedly grim haul, all laid out on the bedroom floor around me: a variety of knives and blades of all kinds, with which he’d obviously been cutting himself. There were some scissors, which I recognised, that I thought I’d mislaid – I’d even enlisted Justin’s help in trying to find them, I remembered – and two or three disposable razor blades, with the plastic blade holders melted off, which meant he must also have found a lighter or matches. Plus there was a small vegetable knife, which I hadn’t ever seen before, and a Stanley knife, which I guessed he might have taken from our tool box.

It was a gruesome display, and I sat there and surveyed it with both horror and a great sense of sadness. What would drive any boy to do such a thing?

This couldn’t have been new. Someone,
surely
, must have known this.
This
was how much Justin was hurting.

‘I just can’t help it,’ Justin said. ‘I know I shouldn’t do it, but I can’t help it.’

It was the following morning, and Justin and I were sitting in his bedroom, where, after much soul searching, I’d finally confronted him.

‘I know, sweetheart, I know,’ I said. ‘But we can’t have you hurting yourself like this, can we? It must really hurt you, and not only that, if I don’t know about it, I can’t help you to keep those cuts clean. They might have got infected, and could have turned really nasty, and then where would we be, my love, eh?’

I’d been feeling wretched since I’d made my grim discovery. I’d lain awake and tossed and turned all night, berating myself that I’d not been aware of his self-harming before. Surely, or so my mind went, with my long experience of damaged children, I should have noticed
something
that would have given him away? How had alarm bells not rung when I’d lost the scissors, for example?

I’d told Mike about how I’d even had Justin helping me to look for them, and how angry I was at myself that it hadn’t occurred to me then. And how had I completely failed to see anything? Notice his feet? Now I’d found what I had, it was clear that they must have been in shreds. And this child wasn’t just a visitor – he
lived
with us. I felt so guilty and angry at myself. How did he manage to keep something like that hidden from us so well?

‘Because he’s a very private person, Case,’ Mike had pointed out to me. ‘You
know
that. Keeps himself to himself. When exactly do you think you might have seen something? He’s either fully dressed, or in pyjamas, and he’s never without his slippers –’

‘And now we know why!’

‘Come on, Case. Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s not as if he’s a tot that you’d have to help to wash and dress, is it?’

Mike had been right, of course, but I still felt this huge sense of guilt. From now on I must be so much more vigilant. I looked at Justin’s anguished face now, and wondered if I should put my arms around him. It was difficult to judge whether to risk it or not. I didn’t want him to clam up now he looked like he was talking to me at last, and the physical contact might just make him do that.

He was in his pyjamas now – and the ubiquitous slippers – lying on his bed, watching cartoons. Or at least he had been, before I’d come in to confront him with my findings.

‘Come on, love. Let me take a look at those feet of yours,’ I coaxed instead. ‘Let me get them cleaned up for you, at least.’

I kept my expression neutral as Justin slowly pulled off his slippers, though it was as hard a thing to do as I’d had to in a long time. His feet were, as I’d expected, in a terrible mess. You could see this was something he’d been doing for a long time. The nail beds looked infected and the skin around them looked horrible. He obviously dug into them regularly, causing copious bleeding. There were scabs and livid patches all over them. It pained me to think about how much this must have hurt, and again I mentally kicked myself for not realising.

I could have gone to the bathroom at that point, gathered some supplies and got the job done, but something told me that if I did so I might miss my moment. I got a very strong feeling that he wanted to talk. Just didn’t know how to start. He was staring at his feet now, as if seeing them with new eyes.

‘You know what I think, love?’ I said, sitting down beside him on the bed. ‘I think you must have been hurting a very great deal on the inside to want to hurt yourself so much on the outside.’ I paused for a moment to let this sink in, then continued. ‘I also know you’ve had a lot of bad stuff happen in your life. When you were little?’ He nodded. ‘And something else I know is that when young kids go through bad stuff – when kids are too young to really understand what’s happened to them and why, well, sometimes it makes them really angry when they’re older, and then they do things like you’ve been doing to your feet. It’s not your fault, Justin. I’m not cross with you. You do understand that, don’t you?’

He was silent for a long, long moment, head hanging, then he lifted it and turned to me, his eyes meeting mine. And suddenly came this whole rush of words. ‘What’s to understand, Casey? My life’s been fucking shit! She’s a bitch, that’s all. A bitch. She got rid of me, told me all this stuff about how I was trouble and everything. But she kept Alfie and Mikey, didn’t she?
Didn’t
she? I understand alright. I understand all of it.’ He was crying now, I could see, except so softly and so silently. Leaking tears, almost. It wasn’t anger. It was if he had no fight left in him. Now instinct told me that it would be okay to touch him, so I moved closer and put my arm around his shoulders. I waited for him to stiffen, but he didn’t. Quite the contrary. He leaned into me, burying his head into my chest, and now he started sobbing much harder.

‘It was shit,’ he said again. ‘Shit. I mean, I knew she was on drugs. Couldn’t not know. All the kids used to take the piss all the time. But I never knew it was heroin. I never knew that. I mean I knew the name of it, and everything, but not what heroin was, what it
does
. All I knew was that she never got any food for us. Never fed us. An’ Alfie only needed fucking baby milk, that’s
all
. An’ she never got it …’

I squeezed his shoulder. ‘I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to live like that.’

He lifted his head away a little to look at me again. ‘Casey, can I tell you something?’

‘Course you can, love,’ I answered. ‘Though there’s something I need to tell you first, okay?’

I hated having to do it, but I really needed to say it. It was an essential, integral part of my job that I say it. ‘It’s just that you have to know, Justin, that if it’s something really, really bad that you’re going to tell me, that I have to share it. You understand? So that we can
all
try to help you. Okay?’

He nodded, though I wasn’t completely sure it went in. He seemed more focussed on continuing now than listening. And I needed to let him.

‘It was Alfie and Mikey,’ he went on. ‘And we were, like, starving. All of us were. I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d got some food, because she’d been flat out, just, you know, lying there mostly, for days. And now she was out and I was minding them and she didn’t come back, and they just kept shouting and crying from upstairs and I didn’t know what to do. But then I remembered in next door’s garden they had stuff growing. Lots of things. An’ they had rhubarb. You know rhubarb?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. I know rhubarb.’

‘So I climbed on the dustbins and over the fence and I stole a load of sticks of it, just so they had something. But when I took it up to them, they were in their cot together, and they were just sitting there in it, nappies off, eating their own shit. Eating it, Casey! Both of them. Sitting there, eating their own shit!’

‘Oh, love, that’s horrible …’

‘She didn’t care, though!’ He was having to gulp back the tears now. ‘She didn’t even
care
! And she’d, like, come back, and bring all her druggy mates with her, and they’d just be there, then, downstairs. All laid out on the sofas and on the floor. And the babies would be crying, and no-one would even
hear
them!’

I could sense the anger building in him as he recounted all this to me. I was trying to picture the horror of it, and I was beginning to feel physically sick. I could sense, though, that I needed to brace myself even further, because it seemed clear to me that this was just the start of it.

I didn’t want him to become angry; not so angry that he became physical and unable to control his emotions. I just wanted him to keep talking to me. Getting it all out. Because I felt that this might be a major breakthrough. No, I
knew
this was a major breakthrough, him sharing all this with me. And there
was
more to come. He rubbed his sleeve across his face, and continued, his body still leant into me, the side of his head a warm weight against my upper arm. I held him tighter. How many times in his life had this child been cuddled, I wondered. Could you maybe count the times on the fingers of one hand? And what must that do to a child?

‘She had this party, Casey, one time,’ he continued. ‘A whole bunch of people. Late at night. We were all of us supposed to be upstairs sleeping, but we couldn’t. It was mad down there. Mad. Loads of music. Lots of shouting. They kept playing this record. You know? Like, over and over and over. UB40 it was. You know them? My mum liked them a lot.

‘Then this man came upstairs. Just appeared in the bedroom doorway. And he, like, gave me this pound coin and asked me if I wanted to come down. You know. “Join the party” was what he actually said to me. An’ I was excited when he did that. I got a whole pound. There might be more. There might even be some
food
down there. So I went down with him and there were about, I guess, six or seven people in there. Mostly men. One other woman. I didn’t know who she was. Never seen her before. And then this bloke said did I fancy playing a game of dares with him. An’ I didn’t know what he was on about, and he said it was just this game …’

He was stumbling over his words now, as if he couldn’t find the right ones. How hard must it be to recount such grim memories? ‘A game?’ I asked.

Justin nodded. ‘And then he undid his trousers. And then he got my hand and put it in there and made me grab, you know, inside there. And he was laughing. They all were laughing. Even my mum was laughing. And they said I had to keep it there until they’d counted up to sixty out loud.’

His face contorted as he said this, his words now punctuated by heavy sobs. I stroked his hair. ‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I know, Justin. I know …’

We sat for some moments, then, without speaking further. But just as there’s a lull in the eye of a storm, I suspected there might be more. And there was.

The house smelled like it normally did, on that chilly November morning. Smelled of that familiar mix of urine and cigarettes. The heavy curtains were drawn completely across the dirty front-room windows and the sofa had been pushed back to make more room on the floor. And there, amid the sea of squashed beer cans, overflowing ashtrays, the filthy coffee table, all the sweet wrappers, lay Justin’s mother, spark out and barely conscious, on the sheepskin rug in front of the electric fire.

‘Suck it!’ barked the man who had Justin’s head clamped firmly between his hands. ‘Suck it, you little bastard!’ He pushed hard, frighteningly hard, against the little boy’s head, squashing his terrified face into his groin.

Justin was gagging and wriggling, and desperately trying to catch sight of his mother. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t helping him. Why was she letting this man do this to him?

‘You better make him do it right,’ the man was growling, ‘you fucking bitch. Or you can kiss goodbye to your fucking gear, believe me.’

He punched Justin in the back, then, causing him to struggle even harder. And now, at last, his mother became animated. Rising unsteadily to her knees, she shuffled across the cord carpet to kneel down beside them. ‘Come on, baby,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Be good for Uncle Phil now. C’mon, babe. You know mummy needs her medicine.’

It wasn’t the first time. He didn’t think it would be the last time. But what could he do except what his mum was asking? So he squeezed his eyes tight shut and thought about Father Christmas – thought hard about what he might bring him if he was a good boy. And about how important it was that mummy got her medicine. And he wanted her to have it. He really, really wanted her to have it. If she had her medicine she’d soon be all happy again, and might even want a cuddle on the sofa. So he just got on with it, praying that it might soon be over, and concentrating really hard on not being sick – he knew that would make Uncle Phil really angry.

And then, suddenly it was done, and the man pushed him away, and he could scramble at last towards the arms of his mother, trying to wipe the salty liquid from his mouth as he did so. But she was out of the door already, gone to get some tin foil, he guessed, for the man to put her medicine into.

Justin didn’t mind now. It was over and he could wait. In fact he waited very patiently, curled into the corner of the sofa, chilly in just his underpants. Because he knew, as he watched them hold the lighter flame underneath the tin foil, that soon – as soon as they’d sucked up all the smoke through her broken pens – she’d become different, and happy, and maybe his again.

Sure enough, she soon flopped down beside him, smiling dreamily. But there was no time for cuddles. She had other ideas.

‘C’mon, babe,’ she murmured at him. ‘Be a good boy, babe. Go and get dressed now. It’s time to go to school.’

He tried to argue – he wanted to stay and stroke her mass of bouncy black curls for a bit – but Uncle Phil roughly cupped his face in his big smelly hand and said, ‘Do as you’re told. It’s school time!’ So there was nothing else for it. He’d have to do as he was told.

His uniform was crumpled on the floor in the kitchen, exactly where he’d left it yesterday. And, just like yesterday, there was nothing there to eat. There was ketchup and there were Oxos and there was an inch or two of brown sauce, but nothing you could eat for breakfast. No proper food. He eventually found a single ginger biscuit, so he stuffed that in his mouth, and listened, as he dressed, to Uncle Phil shouting at Dylan, his mum’s dog. His mum, he thought, would probably be asleep now anyway.

He tiptoed upstairs. His brothers were sleeping too. And if they were asleep they weren’t going to ask for food or wail at him. Satisfied, he quietly left the house.