The Deviants (32 page)

You keep me away from the raw grief, the awful first few weeks. I don't want to see that, anyway; I know how it goes, because I felt it when you died. So we don't hang around our houses and we don't go to the places we know they'll be. Instead, we wander, and we watch other things to keep ourselves occupied. The one good thing about dying is that you can go anywhere, do anything. I'd always thought Heaven was a big white place where everyone sits around in white clothes talking about beautiful things, but it's not; not for me, anyway. My heaven is everywhere. It's walking around, smelling flowers I'd never noticed, going to places I never knew existed. Walking, not running. It's having fun
with a friend and laughing all the time. That's my Heaven. It always has been.

I still see the odd thing I'm not meant to in those first few weeks. My dad sobbing as he puts the shopping into the boot in Tesco car park. Fallon and Corey taking the baby down to the seafront and looking at all the flowers people have left. Max going down there and ripping apart the flowers, bunch by bunch. People in the town I never met have left them there. People I went to school with. People who watched me run at Area Trials or County Champs and who've never forgotten it. Pete Hamlin leaves me some roses.

I see Max and Corey and Fallon going to the undertakers with my dad, the day before my funeral. They want to see my casket, lid closed, so it's not such a shock for them tomorrow morning. They're all still sucking on the pastilles my dad gave them in the car. I can hear them clicking against their teeth. I can taste the blackcurrant in the back of my own throat.

My casket is wicker, I don't know why they chose that, but it's quite nice, I suppose. The sides are laced with lemon ribbon and there's little lemon bows all along the lid. Max places his hand on the top, and Fallon puts her hand on his, then Corey too. They stay like that for minutes, until there's a knock at the door and Zane walks in. He looks embarrassed. He's late. His boss at Lidl is an asshole. He puts both his hands on top of theirs, and they all cry together.

I don't go inside the crematorium the next day. I wait outside on a bench, reading an Order of Service someone has dropped and listening to birds in the high trees. They chose a nice picture of me for the front. I'm holding my County Champs trophy and biting my gold medal. I look at the floral tributes laid out in the courtyard. A taxi pulls
up about ten minutes into the service and my mum gets out of the back, dressed in a black skirt suit about twenty years too young and two sizes too small for her. She's looking old. Even in death, I am such a bitch.

You come out and give me the edited highlights from the service when it's all over. How Dad and my brothers carried me on their shoulders, joined by Max, Zane and Corey. How Dad broke down in his eulogy when he referred to me as his ‘Little Fish'. How Ollie and David and David's husband Jack stood beside him throughout like his soldiers. How they all held hands. How Celestina, my dad's girlfriend, was there too. How she'd cried, even though she'd never met me.

How my four friends recited a poem together, a poem you had written yourself, that Max had found in one of your notebooks. The poem was called ‘Five Go Adventuring'. You wrote it about us. How you were always on the outside, while the five of us were ‘a solid circle of burning wonder and magic, all on fire with happy youth'.

Max helped Dad and my brothers choose the music and my favourite song played as my wicker casket disappeared behind the red curtains while everyone filed out. Only Max could have suggested that.

They all go to a nearby pub for my wake. Pete Hamlin's there. My dad shakes his hand and pulls him into a hug. He looks strange in a suit. He tells my dad he's moving back to London soon to run a gym with his sister. He says he's never seen anyone my age with as much fire in her belly as me. My dad agrees. They hug again.

I make myself known to them; you can do that, when you're dead. As my brother Ollie stands at the bar, I flick his ear. He looks around, but thinks nothing else of it. I do it again on his other ear while he's chatting to Corey – he
looks annoyed when he sees there's no one behind him, and then his face relaxes, like he knows. David comes back from the buffet with two plates for him and Jack. I bite a corner of his cheese and pickle sandwich when he's not looking and watch his reaction – his face trying to work out a reasonable explanation but only coming up with a smile.

Dad's saying goodbye to people at the door. I walk behind him, step on tiptoes and blow slightly on the back of his neck. He stops, his eyes dart from left to right. He closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out, opens them again and they're watery. He doesn't cry and he doesn't say anything, just carries on saying his goodbyes. But he knows I haven't gone yet. They all do.

29

Five Have a Wonderful Time

I
want to go to the trial. It starts at the end of the following summer, almost a year to the day after the night I drowned. My mum comes back from Mykonos for that too. She brings Firat with her this time. He seems nice enough, another pushover like Dad; he tries to shake Dad's hand, but Dad refuses. Mum chooses a quiet moment during recess to ask Dad for a divorce. Dad gets in first and presents her with the papers from his solicitor. Sucker-punched. Neither of my brothers speak to her this time. They stay beside Dad like two marble pillars, strong and silent.

Neil's lost a lot of weight. He has to be helped onto the stand by a couple of guards. Every single detail of what he's done comes out. I'd always been worried that four years and no evidence meant what he did could never be proved – that my selfish silence meant he'd get away with it. But it's been quite the opposite – my death has caused a landslide.

Max gets the best lawyer money can buy, Tamara Strallen-Sheppard, who is based in London but flies all over the world. And brick by brick she dismantles Neil's throne. That's the point of her whole case – Neil has made himself
untouchable with his money; a king amongst peasants. “But remove the king's court, remove the sycophants and the money and what is the king but just a man? Just one lone, pathetic man with delusions of grandeur.” She makes his defence lawyer look like a small boy on his first day of school.

The police have the diaries – six in all on the bookshelves, two more in the wardrobe and a journal hidden under the bed. Some of it's hard to listen to, but I decide I must. This is where it ends now. Zane gives a witness statement – what he saw when he was a child himself, what I told him that day we went to the island.

Corey gives a witness statement too. He remembers everything about the night I died – Max with the knife, my argument with Neil. The defence tries to discredit him – it was a blustery night, he has hearing difficulties, mobility difficulties. There's no way he could have heard much at all. But Corey is so strong. He knows what he saw, he knows what he heard. His replies are faultless. They don't know how marvellous Corey can be. I almost pity them.

Then Fallon takes the stand and her statement proves to be the most damning yet. She knows the location of my baby's grave – under the smallest stone in the Pirate Graveyard on Ella's Island. She'd placed it in a coil of toilet paper inside a small rectangular biscuit tin she'd found in one of our kitchen cupboards; a French shortbread tin that my parents brought back from their honeymoon in Normandy. Dad had been using it for cookie cutters.

The trial is halted while the police dig up the grave and perform tests. The tests prove positive. It's definitely been there for five years. It's definitely Neil's baby.

And then it's all just a matter of time as more evidence
piles up. Two laptops from Neil's home office, loaded with hidden folders of girls, are presented by the prosecution.

Jo Rittman hasn't spoken since the trial. She had a complete mental breakdown two weeks after he was arrested. Auntie ‘Call me Manda' Manda booked her into the Priory. New buyers took over JoNeille just before Christmas. Max hasn't spoken to her since. I don't know if he ever will again. He knows how to live without a mum. He's got that off me.

But the trump card was a living, breathing witness statement from a living breathing witness to Neil's crimes – his niece, Shelby Gilmore. She'd been molested from an early age, earlier than both of us. She was so nervous at the trial that her hands were shaking. She drank a whole jug of water throughout her cross-examination and the defence lawyer was brutal. He brought up her many failed relationships, he knew about her and Max and the six guys she'd slept with in the past year alone. He put all of it down to her being ‘naturally over-sexed' and made her go over what Neil had done to her, over and over and over again.

But Shelby is mighty. She's braver than all of us, as brave as a lioness. She does what neither I nor Jess could do in life – she stands up, knees shaking, hands fidgeting, dry-mouthed, and she looks Neil square in the face and she tells him and everyone else in that room the truth about what he had done to her since she was ten. How he had called her a ‘deviant' too. How she was the one who trashed his brand-new Porsche at her birthday party. How she'd been at breaking point too, that night – she was just better at hiding it than me.

Shelby got revenge for all of us, all the girls who couldn't speak up. All the deviants whom he held down and forced
himself into. All those little girls and babies in his laptop folders or on the CCTV tapes from the toilets at the garden centre, who didn't know what was happening to them or were too young to understand or too scared to stop it.

After the trial, more witnesses emerged. Girls on work experience at the arcades. Girls doing summer jobs in the garden centre café. Girls who didn't like the attention, the touching, the ‘after-hours chats'. In all, twenty-two deviants came forward after Shelby's testimony.

They jail Neil for a minimum of seventeen years. The judge calls him ‘the only true deviant in this room'. Neil cries out on the stand. Protests his innocence. Shouts at Shelby. Calls her names. Pleads with Max. They both just stare back at him as he is led away.

Two days later, Neil tries to hang himself in his cell, with a torn strip of bed sheet and an upended bunk. A man in the next cell tips off a guard who stops him just in time. Now they've given him stronger sheets and nailed his bed to the floor. They're watching him all the time now.

I ask Jess if we can haunt him, to make him suffer more. She tells me we already are.

*

The fireworks have started by the time we get to East Brynstan, but we're taking it slow. This is the last time so we're making the most of it. We go to Church Lane, passing Pete Hamlin's cottage. There is a new estate agent sign up in the front garden now. Three families have lived there since Pete moved to London. No one ever seems to settle.

I unlock the gate to the churchyard and we make our way up the path towards the Public Footpath sign. There's a burning wood smell on the air, and the tang of cooking meat and tomato soup. A couple of car doors slam in the
lane and two family groups emerge at the start of the footpath, chattering to one another, their kids wrapped up in big coats and wellies.

Solar lights illuminate a runway snaking all the way up the side of Brynstan Hill so people know where to walk. Lining the route are candy-floss trucks and popcorn stalls and vans selling roasted chestnuts and burgers. We let people pass us, chattering, excited, kids writing in the air with sparklers, groups of people linking arms. It's cold. I can feel it tonight.

Up on the summit of Brynstan Hill, the flames of the humungous bonfire dance high into the night sky – crowds of people are up there already, beetling around in thick coats and boots, marvelling at the one time of the year Volcano Town's volcano actually spews fire. We carry on walking as the gradient gets steeper and the bonfire grows bigger on the horizon.

‘There they are,' I say, unable to hide my excitement as I pick out Fallon in her oversized white puffa jacket and white moon boots on the edge of the summit. In her arms is the little girl I met briefly as a baby and who I've watched grow ever since – this is Ella. She is so wrapped up in woollen clothes that I can only see her little red cheeks and big brown eyes, but she is beautiful. She looks just like Zane only she smiles way more he ever did.

She looks in our direction and points.

‘Oh my God, can she see us?' I ask.

You frown. You don't think so. But she's smiling and waving right at us. Saying ‘Mumma, Mumma, Ella!'

Fallon's writing her name in the air with a sparkler. Maybe it's that.

When we reach the summit, Zane has lifted Ella into his arms to watch the bonfire.

‘Fire fire hot hot hot!' she screeches. ‘Corey, nook!'

‘I know, big hot fire,' says Corey, who stands beside them, still in his Costa uniform. He must have come straight from work.

Fallon laughs, folding her arms. ‘She ate a worm this morning,' she tells Zane. ‘She's got this thing about insects. Loves them. Keeps a whole bunch of snails in an ice cream tub out the back, doesn't she, Core?'

Corey nods, pushing his glasses up his nose and rubbing Fallon's arms on the outside to warm her up, like he has ESP when it comes to her being cold. ‘Yep. Has tea parties with them and then she kills them and eats them after. It's hilarious.'

‘Little weirdo fits right in, doesn't she?' Max roots about in the picnic basket they all stand around and pulls out a large silver thermos. ‘Anyone for soup?'

‘Yeah, go on then,' says Zane as Ella reaches for him. He takes her and lifts her onto his shoulders where she starts bouncing.

‘Did you see the flowers on the graves, Max?' Fallon asks as he pours out her tomato soup. ‘Ella picked them out.'

‘Yeah I saw on the way up. They're great. What do you think of the new headstones?'