Nicholas Dane

  ‘I want to have a big brother.’

  She looked back down at the yard as if it was full of interest, gripped internally by a fever of malicious greed for mothers the world over.

  ‘She loves him as much as she does us, and she’s not even his mum,’ said Grace.

  Joe said nothing. Love wasn’t something he’d thought about, but now she mentioned it, it did seem a bit much. Grace glanced over at him again.

  ‘I know what she died of.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I heard her and that woman talking about it.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘She was poisoned.’

  Joe thought about it. It seemed unlikely.

  ‘No, she wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  Joe shook his head. Grace stared down at him and went on to stage two.

  ‘Do you want to know a secret?’

  ‘Yeah?’ Joe pretended to be fascinated by his toys again, but he was all ears. He adored secrets. They always seemed so much more true than things people just told you ...

  ‘Do you promise not to tell.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I heard him talking in his sleep.’

  Joe’s eyes turned as big as saucers.

  ‘And do you know what he was saying?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was saying that now he’d lost his own mummy, he wanted ours instead.’

  Joe’s eyes turned as big as soup bowls.

  ‘And he said that if he couldn’t, he was going to kill her, just like the one before!’

  Joe’s eyes turned as big as dinner plates, fell out of his head and rolled under the wardrobe, where the dead spiders lived.

  ‘Don’t forget, you promised not to tell!’ Grace left the room and skipped along the landing to her own bedroom. No way was she going to share her mum with some ugly tall boy just because he was too stupid to keep his own. Of course, she’d get found out - Jen would extract from Joe what she’d said, or something like it, and then she’d get done. And then she’d have to get Joe again and she’d get done for that, too. But hey! It was one way of getting attention. She felt better already for it.

  It was six o’clock. Ray should have been there an hour ago. The roasties were browning nicely in the pan, the guests were due to arrive at any minute and there was still no sign of Nick. Jenny was actually getting worried about him, now. Suppose something had happened? What if he’d done something silly? She didn’t know whether to ring the police or just keep her fingers crossed and hope for the best.

  She looked outside. It had started raining. Where on earth was that boy? She felt helpless, anxious and scared. Was this what it was like looking after teenagers?

  The doorbell rang just as Jenny was about to take the chicken out of the oven. She rushed downstairs hoping for Nick and opened the door to find Ray and Mrs Batts sheltering from the rain, standing uncomfortably close together in the porch. She ushered them down the hall to the living room chatting brightly. Being a smoker herself, who had asked the whiskey bottle for a little help just as Ray had that evening, she completely failed to notice what had been only too apparent to Mrs Batts standing so close to him in the porch. Ray stank of ciggies and whiskey, the result of an hour at the Stag down the road.

  Ray followed her through and stood behind her. ‘How’s it going?’ he whispered.

  Jenny turned round and glared at him. ‘Where were you? You said you’d come and help.’

  ‘... got held up,’ said Ray.

  ‘Well, don’t stand there,’ she said. ‘Go inside and make small talk. Tell her what a nice family we are.’

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ said Ray, tripping up over the mat as he went back. Poor Jen hadn’t time to notice - she was too busy. Why on earth had she picked a full roast dinner? She’d even done Yorkshires - no one ever did Yorkshires with chicken. Roasts always made her panic.

  Jen took the chicken out of the oven, decanted the roasties into another dish and popped them back at a higher heat to crisp them up.

  Then she put the baking tray on the hob to make the gravy, poured boiling water on the cabbage and shoved the plates in the oven to warm.

  A pause. She lit a fag and poked her head around the door to see Ray smoking a cigarette and shouting to Mrs Batts about family values.

  ‘But you don’t smoke,’ she muttered to herself. She watched curiously for a moment longer, but before she could do anything, the bell rang.

  Mrs Batts watched suspiciously as Jenny hurtled past and ran across to answer the door before anyone else got there. There was Nick, damp with rain, his eyes shining.

  ‘Nick, thank God you’re here, thank God,’ she gibbered. ‘Listen.’ She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in, her voice sinking to a conspiritorial whisper. ‘I found out today it’s not up to me if you stay here, we have to convince Mrs Batts. I’ve invited her round for a meal to show her how normal we are. You have to help me! OK?’

  Nick nodded. Jenny gave him the thumbs up, took a deep breath and led the way through into the front room. Everyone looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Well!’ exclaimed Jenny. ‘Isn’t this nice?’

  Dinner didn’t last long.

  It was quickly apparent even to Jen how drunk Ray was by the way he poured about half a litre of gravy onto his plate and had to fish his potatoes out with exaggerated care to stop it slopping over the edges. It looked like he was eating a plate of soup. Shortly after, she realised that Joe was sulking furiously by the way he kept pulling faces at her across the table and glaring at Nick. Grace had her look of wide-eyed innocence on - a sure sign that she had been involved in some terrible machination, usually involving Joe.

  Mrs Batts was leaning away from the fuming Ray and trying not to wince or glare, which was doing some odd things to her face. Nick seemed to be the only normal person there. In fact, he was far from it. He felt like a mushroom - kept in the dark and fed on shit. The tight-lipped dinner table conversation was making him feel as if his head was going to explode. If he’d had a room, he’d have run up to it and wept.

  He ate the food on his plate in silence, put his knife and fork down on his plate, turned to Jenny and said in front of everyone:

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that my mum died of an overdose?’

  Jen turned to stare at him with a potato halfway to her mouth.

  ‘You still haven’t told him?’ asked Mrs Batts incredulously.

  ‘He was late... it was

  ‘I found out from Evelyn next door. It’s fucking outrageous.’

  ‘There’s no need for language like that,’ snapped Mrs Batts primly.

  ‘You’ve all been lying to me like Muppets.’

  ‘Muppets don’t lie,’ pointed out Joe.

  ‘I’ll handle this,’ said Ray.

  ‘You weren’t here when I got back at lunch today. How could I tell you when you’re not here? Didn’t you

  read my note?’

  ‘How come everyone else in Manchester knows what happened to my mum and no one tells me?’ Nick snarled. Jenny winced. ‘And what about you, what were you doing round there, anyway? Were you going to have some as well?’

  ‘No!’ insisted Jenny indignantly.

  ‘You and her were always going off together.’

  ‘Don’t speak to your mother like that,’ demanded Ray, pointing a stem finger in Nick’s face.

  ‘She’s not my bloody mother!’ yelled Nick.

  ‘Not yet, anyway,’ whispered Grace in Joe’s ear.

  ‘I think we all need to calm down,’ began Mrs Batts. Nick jumped to his feet. As he did so, he banged the table and Jenny’s water fell into her lap. She shrieked and leapt up.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done! She’s only trying to help!’ exclaimed Mrs Batts, jumping up to Jenny’s rescue.

  ‘She’s a lying cow,’ yelled Nick, reeling around the table in an agony of distress. He was trying to get upstairs to weep, but as he pushed past, Ray rose unstea
dily to his feet.

  ‘Don’t you dare leave this table without asking,’ he roared. He stepped forward to deal with the situation, but tripped up over the leg of his chair, lurched forward and fell into Nick, wrapping his arms around him in an effort to stay upright.

  ‘Ray!’ howled Jenny.

  ‘Get off me!’ yelled Nick, and shoved him violently backwards.

  ‘Fight! Fight!’ screeched Mrs Batts, mistakenly thinking Nick had attacked Ray and unconsciously echoing the cries of the playground. Joe burst into tears and started to try to fight his way upstairs, but was stopped by his sister, who pinned him to the chair by grabbing hold of the back of his jeans. She calculated, correctly, that his howls of fear and distress would better serve her purposes here at the table.

  Ray tumbled backwards. As he went down he clutched out and swept his arm across the table, knocking his dinner plate, the salt and the gravy boat after him.

  It was pandemonium. Joe wriggled free from Grace’s grip and ran howling upstairs in floods of tears.

  ‘Typical. It happens every time,’ observed Grace succinctly to Mrs Batts, and wandered upstairs after her brother.

  But Mrs Batts had already seen enough. Her unfailing social instinct warned her it was time to leave. She stood up and took her coat primly off the back of the chair. It had gravy stains on it, she noticed. She looked round for Nick - there was no way she could leave him here in this madhouse. But Nicholas Dane had already gone.

  5

  Meadow Hill

  The police came for him at his own home around lunch time the next day. He hid in his room when he heard them banging, but when they started to knock the door down, he went to let them in.

  They took him straight to Meadow Hill Assessment Centre.

  Nick’s first sight of Meadow Hill were the grand steps leading up to a pair of imposing stone pillars framing the door, glimpsed between the rhododendrons and sycamore trees that lined the winding drive. The bushes were all in flower, so they drove up through a forest of purple blossom, dappled in bright May sunshine, into a cracked tarmac car park in front of the house. It looked more like a church than a Home. The front door was big enough to admit giants. The two policemen who had picked Nick up led him up the grand but decaying steps.

  ‘There, you’re the Lord of the Manor now,’ one of them said.

  ‘Better than where you came from, eh?’ said the other.

  Nick followed them in anxiously. He asked them if Jenny knew what was happening to him but they just shrugged. ‘We’re just taking you where we were told to,’ one of them said.

  He was left inside with a fat black woman in a trouser suit, who signed for him, and then sat him down in her office with a biscuit and a glass of Cola, while she rang through to see if the head was ready to see him. Her call made, she sat opposite him and watched him as he ate and drank. He’d eaten nothing since his dinner the night before - just a chunk of cheese he’d found in the fridge at his house that he’d eaten in bed before he went to sleep.

  ‘How’d you come to end up in a place like this?’ the woman, whose name was Dilys, asked him. ‘Don’t answer, I have your notes here. I know everything about you. Mum died. Things not too good. Well,you’re going to have to make the most of it. Do as you’re told and keep your head down. It’s going to take a little time to find your feet in a place like this. Maybe you’re going to have to take a few knocks. Tell me, Nicholas,’ she said, tipping her head back and looking at him across her plump cheeks. ‘Do you know how to be invisible?’

  Nick shrugged. It didn’t sound like the kind of question that required an answer.

  ‘Because you have to learn to be invisible here,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘And don’t rely on getting rescued either. Who’s going to want to foster a great big brute like you? Your pretty face won’t help you in here. On the contrary. So. You have any family nearby, then, Nicholas?’

  ‘They’re all in Australia,’ said Nick defensively.

  ‘Well, it’s not like a family here,’ she scolded. ‘I don’t think there’s a soul in Meadow Hill who knows what a family is really like.’

  Nick swallowed his Cola and said nothing. Dilys picked up her pen and got back on flicking through the papers on her desk for another few minutes until the phone rang. She answered, and took Nick off to meet the headmaster of Meadow Hill, Mr William James.

  Bill James was a wide, pale man with soft pink ears that stuck out like mug handles through his thinning, shoulder length hair. He had tired, puffy brown eyes. The skin beneath them was so dark it was almost black. He was sitting well back from his desk, dressed in a scruffy black suit, dandruff on his shoulders, drinking instant coffee and dusting biscuit crumbs off his sleeves when Dilys delivered Nick to him. When he got to his feet and came round the desk to shake hands and introduce himself, he revealed an enormous waist. The headmaster must have weighed nearly twenty stone.

  Bill James had been the headmaster of Meadow Hill for over twenty-five years. He was a campaigning man, a reformer. He firmly believed that there was no such thing as an evil child, and that even the worst of them could be turned into useful adults. His motto: ‘Every child deserves a fresh start.’

  He settled himself back down behind his desk and looked at the boy sitting on the other side. Nick was pale and dirty and his face was red and slightly swollen on one side. He’d been in a fight recently. The usual sort of thing. Good-looking lad. Light brown hair, blue eyes. Trouble. He could see it coming. Funny thing, it was the pretty ones who were often the most trouble.

  He welcomed Nick and began his introductory speech. ‘Meadow Hill,’ he told Nick, ‘is the end of the road. We take care of boys that no one else will. They all come here. Juvenile delinquents, runaways, ne’er-do-wells, bullies and orphans. Outside of these walls, a great many bad things happen, as I’m sure you know, and a great many perpetrators of those bad things end up here in my care at Meadow Hill. And every one of them arrives at a level playing field. We’re all equal at Meadow Hill. Every child has the opportunity of a fresh start. I have to say, though, Nicholas, not many of them take up that chance. Very few. Just the odd one, occasional escapees from a life of crime. Nicholas,’ he said earnestly, peering hopefully at him from over his reading glasses, ‘I want to ask you - do you think you’ll be one of them?’

  Nicholas was confused. ‘I haven’t done anything, Sir.’ Mr James smiled grimly. ‘No one has ever done anything in my experience.’ He flicked through the notes on his desk. ‘Mother,’ he observed. ‘Heroin.’

  Nick stared sullenly at him.

  Mr James sighed and waved a hand at the window. ‘Tell me, Nicholas. What do you see out there?’

  Nick followed the hand. ‘Nothing, Sir.’

  ‘Trees,’ prompted Mr James.

  ‘Trees.’

  ‘Trees, Sir.’

  ‘Trees, Sir.’

  ‘The darling buds of May. It’s a fresh start. Away from the streets and the drugs, away from the inadequate parent

  ‘She wasn’t inadequate.’

  ‘Ah. Perhaps a good parent would have been a little more careful with the carer of their child, don’t you think? But the good news is, Nicholas, that a life on the streets with no solace but cheap drugs is no longer the limit of your horizons.’

  Mr James lifted his eyebrows and stared across at Nick, waiting for a useful response. Nick scowled. ‘I haven’t done anything, Sir,’ he said again. The fact was, he liked the streets. He liked the drugs too, when he could get his hands on them, although all he’d ever really tried was a bit of weed.

  Mr James shuffled his papers. ‘I don’t think I’m really getting through to you, am I?’

  ‘Fuck you, Mr James,’ Nick replied. But not out loud.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Nicholas. We can’t offer you a mother’s love here. That has been taken from you. What we can do, however, is offer you an education of sorts, plenty of exercise and a secure home. There’s a lot of boys would give a great deal to
have that - although precious few of them seem to end up here,’ he muttered to himself, half under his breath. ‘So, Nicholas! Make the most of us, and we will make the most of you!’

  Mr James went back to the file.

  ‘Good at school. No weaknesses, the report says. Wonderful - a boy with no weaknesses! An all-rounder. Marvellous. But! - what’s this? Attendance, awful. Ah. No weaknesses - but without the gift of hard work.’ He shook his head. ‘I never met a truant who didn’t regret it in years to come,’ he remarked. ‘But it’s hard enough teaching you boys geography, let alone wisdom. Well, there’ll be no skiving off here. We have everything here on site - home, school, play, all in one place.’ He smiled across the desk. ‘No escape. Nowhere to run off to! And no stealing, either. There’s nothing here to steal!’

  He leaned back and laughed at his own joke - which was, sadly, pretty nearly true.

  Mr James picked up a telephone and asked for a lad to be sent up. He sat and waited, smiling vaguely and twiddling his thumbs. After a few minutes there was a knock on the door.

  ‘In,’ hooted Mr James. The door opened and in came a pale, slight boy, a year or so younger than Nick, with a head of wavy blond hair.

  ‘Oliver, this is Nicholas,’ said Mr James. The two boys looked at each other cautiously. ‘Take him to Mr Toms, will you? He’s to be settled in. Keep an eye on him. I think he might need a bath.’

  ‘Will do, Sir,’ piped Oliver. Mr James dismissed them and the blond boy led the way out of the office and back into the grounds.

  After the two boys left, Mr James sighed and straightened the papers in Nick’s file. He didn’t feel optimistic about the lad’s chances. A bad age to lose your mother, even if she was a junkie. He offered a fresh start, yes - but the material he had to work with was far from fresh. In fact, by and large, it was pretty rotten. Only the dregs came to Meadow Hill. They were under-educated from years of skiving off, under-fed from years of poor food, they’d been set bad examples, been badly cared for and had no respect for anything, least of all for themselves.

  ‘I haven’t done anything, Sir,’ muttered Mr James to himself. Hadn’t been caught doing it yet, that’s all. He’d seen and heard it all before. Well, you could take a fish to water but you couldn’t make it swim, as his wife always said.