The Boy No One Loved Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘Who you think you’re talking to, you stinking little scruff?’

  Justin turned to see two boys he knew, both headed towards him. He was in the park now, having taken the long route to school. It was much too early to go the road way so he thought he’d go through the park and skim some pebbles across the duck pond.

  He dropped the stone he’d been holding and was about to throw, and shook his head. ‘No-one,’ he answered. These were bad kids, he knew. Always getting into trouble with the police and causing trouble on t
he estate His mum said so. And he should keep well away.

  ‘You’re a fucking little oik,’ said the bigger one. ‘And your mum’s a dirty whore.’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Justin even though he knew he shouldn’t dare to. ‘Or she’ll be round to your house and sort you out!’

  ‘What, give me dad a blow job?’ the other boy taunted, pushing Justin. ‘She’s a fucking junkie, she’ll do owt to get a score.’

  Justin couldn’t help it. He burst into tears. ‘Just leave me alone, I want to go home now,’ he cried, which made the two boys laugh at him even more. Then one of them, obviously still in the mood for more tormenting, pushed Justin over and quickly slipped off both his shoes. ‘Without these?’ he taunted, before lifting them high in the air and then lobbing them straight into the middle of the duck pond.

  ‘Hey!’ said Justin, scrambling to his feet and brandishing his fists now. He threw himself at the older boy and started to pummel him, which only made both boys laugh even harder. But not done yet with humour, and before he could do anything to stop it happening, they grabbed his arms and legs, tipped him up and ducked his whole head into the water.

  They then pulled him out, sniggering at all his coughing and his spluttering. ‘Bye, freak,’ they said. ‘See you at school.’

  It was some minutes before he found the energy to get up again, almost all of which he spent in silent contemplation of the sky. He was freezing, he was soaking, and he was covered in mud. He had no shoes, and he knew there was no way he’d be able to find them. They were too far out in the water. It was too dangerous. He might drown. He couldn’t go to school now. He wouldn’t go to school now. He’d go back home, he thought, and tell his mum what had happened. He’d limp home, in the freezing cold, barefoot. What else could he do?

  But when he got home, his mother wasn’t there.

  Chapter 7

  We’d been sitting there together for an hour by now. An hour in which I’d had to struggle to keep myself together as Justin talked. I knew it was essential that I do that, however. If I conveyed even a fraction of the rage and disgust I was feeling as he described the grim details of his early childhood to me – childhood, what bloody childhood? – I was sure he’d clam up and find it impossible to go on. These were dark secrets he was sharing and I knew from long experience that children who’ve been involved in such ordeals bore scars that, even with the best care and support in the world, would probably never really fully heal. Scars that ate away at their minds and hearts, like some horrible cancer, and muddied every aspect of their sense of themselves. Like any other child ever born, Justin would have felt guilty. Would have felt that in some way he deserved what had happened to him. Because that, tragically, was what children did.

  I wiped the tears that were forming steady tracks down both of our cheeks now, wanting nothing more than to beat the living daylights out of all these monsters. I knew I needed to keep a professional head on at all times, and that, considered rationally, these ‘monsters’ were also probably just people who had been profoundly damaged themselves, but, at that moment, I didn’t quite know how to feel anything for them but utter fury.

  What I did know was that anything in my power I could do to help Justin, I would do. He deserved so much better than the hand life had dealt him. He deserved happiness. Deserved nothing less. No child did. But also because not only had the adults in his life let him down, big time, but their cruelty and neglect had also sealed his fate with all his peers; causing him to be a target for bullies.

  But now Justin, still for the moment, and close beside me, once again brought me out of my reverie.

  ‘That was the day,’ he said.

  ‘The day?’

  ‘The day I burned the house down.’

  The day I burned the house down. I took this fact in. Not ‘the house burned down’ but ‘I burned the house down’. This was just heartbreaking to hear.

  But I knew better than to react to it. Instead I remained silent and let him continue.

  ‘I got back there,’ he went on, ‘and my brothers were in such a state. She’d just left them! Just gone and left them! Can you believe she’d do that? And they were in such a right state. An’ crying. And wanting food. And I just couldn’t bear it. I had nothing to give them and I didn’t know what to do. And just thought …’

  He trailed off. ‘That you couldn’t cope with things any more?’

  I felt him nod against me. ‘I just couldn’t. Casey. I just couldn’t. And the dog eating their shit, and all their crying, and everything … I just couldn’t believe she’d do that. Can you?’

  It took Justin another hour to recount to me the full horror of the events of that day. That day that had been described to Mike and I so dispassionately, so matter of factly. The neatly recorded detail of this five-year-old child who’d been playing with matches and, as a result, had accidentally burned the house down and then been placed in care. This five-year-old who was such a handful that his poor mother simply couldn’t handle him and had had no choice but to allow social services to take him. And who could blame her? After all, this was a child who, in all the reports written about him since then, was ‘trouble’, was ‘off the rails’, was a ‘bully’.

  Except, perhaps all those reports weren’t true. Or wouldn’t have been, had his early life been different. There was clearly so much more that went on that day – and the days before it; the whole lifetime before it – that social services didn’t know anything about. I worked in the care sector. I had worked for several years in a big comprehensive with a very mixed intake, so I wasn’t naive. Yet I simply couldn’t comprehend that such things – such major things as a heroin-addict mother and the way she was failing her three tiny children – went undetected these days. Surely some neighbour or some friend of the family must have noticed? Surely anyone who had anything to do with the family, however briefly, must have known that things weren’t right?

  Listening to Justin now – hearing exactly what did happen, and how the fire had been deliberate, not the result of any playing with lighters or matches – it seemed clear to me that something had snapped in him that day, taken him past the end of his tether. And no wonder. He was five and had been living in hell, and not a single adult had done anything to help him. The sexual abuse, the crying babies, the bullying – it didn’t matter which. What most mattered, from what Justin was saying to me now, was that in that instant of returning home, wet, cold, miserable and needing his mum, he just knew it would never get better, never change, and that this was one way to get something done. He couldn’t have known what – he was far too young to make such rational decisions. Cliché or otherwise, it had been a cry for help.

  Justin had no explanation, and I didn’t press for one, for what made him do what he did. And how could he? He’d been five. Not this sad, damaged, self-harming eleven-year-old, that no-one had ever seemed to love, who was cradled in my arms now. But just five. Would he even have had an explanation? I doubted it. He just knew, seeing the dog licking the shit from his brother’s cot bars, that this was it. This was life. And he simply couldn’t cope with it any more.

  ‘I wanted Dylan to die,’ he told me, though I hadn’t actually asked him about it; I had only wondered, as I assume other people had before me, why he’d got his little brothers out of the house but not the family pet. But then, clearly, this was no sort of ‘family’ pet.

  ‘I hated him,’ Justin said. ‘I hated him because she loved him. He was her dog and she loved him better than us. She used to cuddle him and pet him. Do you know, she even had a photo of him on the front-room wall. Not of us kids. Oh no, just the dog. And he got food – she always seemed to be able to get food for him. An’ I wanted to pay her back. Teach her a lesson. And I did.’

  I felt a new tightness in my throat as I thought about just how high a price that five-year-old boy paid for exacting that revenge. ‘I know, love,’ I said soothingly. ‘I know.’

  It had taken some time for social services to track
down Justin’s mother on the day of the fire. She’d been with her ‘boyfriend’, somewhere else on the estate, far enough away not to hear either the commotion or the sirens. It had been the next-door neighbours who’d called the fire brigade to alert them about the house fire, and they’d arrived to find both Justin and his little brothers all huddled beneath the duvet, in the garden, the little ones terrified, but Justin himself seemingly mute.

  ‘She didn’t want them to take me,’ he said, as I finally gathered my wits about me and began dealing with cleaning and dressing the cuts and gouges on his feet. He seemed so much calmer now he’d told me his story. ‘She didn’t want them to at all,’ he repeated. ‘She did love me an’ my brothers really …’ he paused here. ‘She did. But she had to, they told her she did. They said if she didn’t let them take me away she’d have to go to prison. So I had to go with them. Or else she’d have gone to prison.’

  I bit my tongue, remembering John’s words when he’d first told us about Justin. Voluntary care order. That much was crystal clear. ‘I know, love,’ I said again. ‘It must have been horrible. Horrible for all of you. There,’ I finished, beckoning him to inspect his cleaned wounds. ‘It’s important we keep them clean now, so they’ll heal.’ I looked closely at him, realising just how much time had passed now. We’d been up here for hours. ‘You must be hungry,’ I said. ‘It’s way past your normal breakfast time. Shall we go down and I’ll get you something nice to eat?’

  But he wasn’t hungry – a first – and also, for the first time since his arrival, he wasn’t bothered about the clock or the schedule either. He told me he just wanted to lie on his bed for a bit. Chill out and watch some cartoons.

  ‘You sure?’ I said, making to rise from the bed now. ‘I could make you some toast and bring it up.’