Boy A (13 page)

Still in his work clothes, lying in the upstairs hall, lit by the skylight, close enough to Kelly’s room to slip the book back in its preserved nook should he hear a key in the front door, Jack is studying, as if for an exam. At first he was aroused by the line drawings of the hippies in their carefully constructed coitus. But quickly this is replaced by worry, as he realizes the enormity of his ignorance. He practises,
where he can, when descriptions of movements are given. He moves his fingers, gently beckoning a dove, or stroking the underside of a cat. He balances upon his knees and one elbow, so that his pelvis and hand are free, and he tries to synchronize their action. Often Jack finds himself gripping his tongue in his teeth with concentration. Though he’s aware that it too might be needed in a practical.

The evening is spent with Kelly,
EastEnders
and bad sitcoms. But Jack is not really watching. He is studying again, rehearsing. Running through the unfacts that he has learned about his life. His legend, as the protection squad call it. Things that Michelle may ask about tomorrow. Things that he might have to tell her in order to make her fall for someone that he is not.

This is the house that Jack built. This hide of twigs and leaves. A little extra camouflage added every day. Another little sprig of lie, that he must himself remember and believe, or die. He can’t do anything other than stay inside his hut, and hope he’s safe from prying eyes. Except to pray, if he still can, that no one kicks the sand foundations. And no one checks the brittle sticks that support the straw roof. And most of all, that no one huffs and puffs.

Michelle’s house is a flat really. Town house, she calls it. But it only has a kitchen-cum-living-room and a bedroom, just that they’re on different floors. It’s new though, and Jack suspects it’s probably slightly beyond her comfortable means to rent. It’s also meticulously kept. Seat cushions perch on their corners like card-pack diamonds. Magazines and newspapers are neatly racked. Even seemingly chaotic elements show the underlying order. Strands of bamboo stick out of a glass vase, intimating a random spray. But each stalk is exactly equidistant from the others, confirming pride and precision.

Jack had assumed they were going to the cinema when
she’d asked if he wanted to watch a film, yesterday. But when she picked him up she brought him round here instead. Two Blockbusters boxes are stood on a stocky coffee table, next to a three-photo frame. One shot of a woman who must be Michelle’s mother by the resemblance, kind eyes, broad shoulders. A schoolgirl Michelle, thinner-faced, innocent, but something slightly sly in her smile. Then three laughing friends, threatening to flash flesh from their skimpy party tops.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Michelle asks. ‘I bought you some tins of lager. Or you could have wine if you want. Or a soft drink,’ she adds, with an edge of disapproval.

He goes for the lager, and examines the videos while she gets it. One is an action film he has seen advertised on telly, the title of the other means nothing to him, and the box looks battered, older. She brings the beer in a glass, expertly poured with an inch of froth.

‘I’m good at head, aren’t I?’ she says, and laughs guilelessly.

Jack can feel himself blushing, but tries to laugh as well. She asks which film he wants to see, and only knowing one, he expresses it as his preference. The other,
9½ Weeks
, sounded a bit boring to him in any case.

They sit side by side. Watching the surprise on the bad-guys’ faces, as they gradually realize that the refuse collector, improperly tied up, turns out to be an ex-Delta Force, kung fu master, crack marksman, down on his luck. There is not much opportunity for talking, of which Jack is pleased. But in the tense final stand-off, between the bin-man and the chief villain, who turns out to be his old Delta Force colonel, Michelle takes Jack’s hand. And she strokes it while the hero kisses the rescued hostage, who turns out to be his childhood sweetheart.

‘What did you think?’ Michelle asks, as the credits roll.

‘Good story line,’ Jack says. ‘You never knew what was going to happen next,’ which is a strange thing to say, because he did, all the way through.

‘Do you like surprises, then?’

She turns to face him, and her eyes are beautiful, but with a seriousness that Jack has never seen before. Not just in her, not ever. And there’s a heaviness to her breath. And, he realizes, to his. And then that is it. They are kissing. He is kissing. He can feel her lip on his lips and over them and between them, and she draws away, only to push forwards to kiss him again, and again, and her fingers are on the back of his neck, and her tongue is with his and beyond his, into him and his trousers are tight against him with twelve years of waiting, but he wants to wait even longer, because he wants this moment to last as long as it should.

And then they are in the bedroom. On the bed. On a duvet. Which is soft and pale like Michelle. She frees her breasts, which immediately capture Jack. They mesmerize, hypnotize, entrance him; seem to give him greater pleasure than her. And as he cups them, she cups him, through his jeans, and he believes that there cannot be any more to life than this. But even in the intensity, he feels a strange detachment, as if he is watching them both. As if he is not Jack at all.

Which he isn’t.

Still spectator, now to his own increasing nakedness, Jack’s mind reels around the fact that someone else wants him this way. Not for a strip search or a medical. He sees his own slapstick struggle with bunched-up jeans. Hears his mournful gasp, as a hand which is not his, for the first time in his life, grips him and pulls back his straining uncut skin. He feels for her, and having suddenly no memory of what his studies taught him, he kneads the whole plump, parted mound, which seems to somehow work. Michelle tries to kiss him through her moans, but he has to turn to watch his hand at work. To see his fingers through her hair. Which is
so blond as to be hard to see at all, and strangely soft, almost fleecy, unlike his own. Her hands keep working too, both of them, wrapping and enclosing and working him, with a proficiency that makes him sad. And at the same time happy, almost beyond his physical endurance of pleasure. And he realizes that his endurance is indeed coming to an end, because he is coming to a point which he knows well, though not in circumstances such as these. He doesn’t want to reach this point, but every nerve ending in him says that it is not only desirable, but necessary, and inevitable. One more stroke and there will be no going back in any case.

‘I want you, Jack.’ She stops and looks at him.

Taking his returned gaze as some sort of answer to some kind of question, she rolls away from him, bending her body over the side, to reach below the bed. Her beautiful bare flesh flexing away. Not so much a whale as a dolphin. Arched in the instant before diving beneath the duvet waves. She surfaces with a smile, and a fist-full of condoms.

‘Pick a colour,’ she says. And Jack picks the black one.

She tears it from its packet with her perfect nails. And, checking its direction, she pops it in her mouth; and smiles again, to show it sitting there. She is too practised. Jack feels suddenly like he’s in a performance. As she bends her head down to him, he feels himself retreat from her, lolling to the side. With her lips she tries to coax the condom on, but he falls away. She grips him in her hand, and attempts to tease him back to form, stroking the underside of his balls. He tries to concentrate on the sensations, but finds himself just watching, and thinking, and shrinking. Until she is working him with just two fingers, in the gesture people made in prison to be really offensive. It’s too much, and he stands up.

‘Jack, wait, it doesn’t matter. It happens to everyone. You’ll be fine in a minute, we’ll watch the other film.’

But he’s already got his clothes on, and he feels stronger in his clothes. He just wants to be out of this situation. He
just wants to walk, to think. And it seems to him that maybe he isn’t supposed to be happy – which isn’t unlikely, or probably even unfair. And he can hear that it’s raining outside, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to get away. So he tells her he’s sorry. Because he is. She’s wrapped in the duvet now, being naked is suddenly wrong. Like the serpent’s come along. She asks him to stay, again, just for a while. But he won’t. So they hug. Then he leaves.

The interior of the vans didn’t have windows. Not that anyone could look in or out of. Just narrow arrow slits of toughened Perspex. Translucent rather than transparent. This was probably for the best. The driver’s windscreen was smashed when one of the boys was brought to court the first time. Spread into shattered cobwebs with half bricks and bottles. The mob broke through police lines. Officers were swept to the floor by the force of the anger, which washed over the barriers and banged on the vehicle sides. Rocked stationary wheels, blocked by people baying, screaming, wanting a lynching. Faces contorted in rage and despair that such a thing could happen. That such little animals could have grown up in their midst, unspotted. So they howled and scratched at the van, and vented bestial threats about wearing entrails and eating hearts, and snarled at the ‘pigs’ for trying to stop them. For trying to prevent their brand of justice, which was only natural, only human.

Once inside the building though, order returned. Where Court and Queen, Crown and Country, honour and majesty prevailed. Procedural relics of an earlier, more dignified, age.

Though they were old enough to be tried as adults, in this country if not in most of the western world, the toes of the defendants did not quite reach the ground from their seats. Which, both boys being slightly less than four and a
half feet tall, had been placed on low plank scaffolds, so they could look around the room. Or be looked at. They did not look at each other. Some of the many concerned and curious, who queued to watch every day of the trial, would maintain that not once in the four weeks did either of the accused glance at his former friend.

The older boy had his parents behind him. His dad sat hunched by the strain, often with his head in his hands. The mother, high-backed, carried a kind of nobility. A bodily assertion that, whatever her faults, she would not be broken by this shame. She met the eyes of those who stared at her hoping to have a glimpse into the soul of one that makes monsters. She listened intently to every word that passed the plummy lips of the barristers and judge. And just as closely to the thick Durham drawl of the witnesses, though no doubt she found them easier to follow. She wore dresses which were smart and plain and similar. To each other, and, in a way, to those of Mrs Thatcher.

By the side of each of the boys was a social worker. Appointed by the state to support and help two children teetering on the edge of an abyss. Though they weren’t allowed to talk with them about anything related to the case, for fear that this might taint the evidence. For the same reason, British justice felt, psychiatric help should not be given, at least until after sentencing. Though many in the gallery whispered ‘psychos’, when they saw the boys brought up from the holding cells.

There should have been a revival of phrenology in fact, around the courtroom: so many people could tell, simply by looking, that the boys were born evil. Some said just one was; acknowledging the unlikelihood of finding two such freaks of nature in a school so small. Concluding that the other must have followed, though they divided on the choice: child
B
being from a gene-pool clearly predisposed to crime; but the other, an academic year older, was brighter
and had the mark of the beast, in his face and teeth. Folie à deux was the theory of the better-educated onlookers, frequently expressed in the eleven o’clock breaks. Where they tended to stick together, huddled in the fog of other people’s Berkeley 100s and Lambert & Butler’s. They would sip bad coffee and agree that each boy had egged the other on, gradually, like wading into a pool; until both found they were up to their necks in it.

The victim’s family also watched from the gallery. In the front row, which was their rightful place. There was sometimes subtle jockeying for other seats, but nobody would have willingly taken the bench the Miltons sat at. The whole nation felt the sadness of Angela’s death. It brought people together, bonded them, like a royal wedding. Angela was blameless, beautiful, classless – a true people’s princess. She was normal, knowable and yet extraordinary. Ten years old. Would never be any older. And already the sweetheart of a country. An entire people in mourning, for the passing of a girl they never knew existed, until she didn’t. But the public couldn’t feel the heart-rending personal loss of someone who lit their lives, like those in the front row did. There were traces of Angela on many of those faces. Faces fixed in anger and undiminished grief. Some had her hair, some her delicate oval chin. But none seemed to have all the things that made her. She was the treasure and measure of this clan, all its parts were exemplified in her. She was its chosen one, its representative to the world, and the world itself. Its darling, daughter, scholar, student and future teacher.

The teachers who gave evidence at the trial mostly said they’d seen something coming. Though strangely, they hadn’t alerted authorities to the fact that neither boy had been seen in the classroom for some time. One in particular, a Ms Grey, gave a frank and eloquent account of a number of occasions on which she had been forced to punish Boy
A
. Which tended to take the ground from those who claimed
an old-fashioned clip around the ear would have prevented the tragedy.

The ears of the jury were assaulted with hours of audiotapes. The sobs and squirms and barefaced lies of children telling tales on each other. The acts of brutality gradually weaned out, over weeks of police interviews, each blaming all on the other. Boy
B
constantly changed his story, until eventually he accepted he had played some part. The older child, Boy
A
, stuck throughout to more or less a constant path of guiltlessness. But the transcripts pointed out his slips and inconsistencies. Both were still pleading innocent, on the grounds that their friend alone was guilty. Sometimes the tapes that most upset the jury weren’t the ones about the crimes. In the twisting devious way they both feigned innocence, the accused were easy to condemn; but not when they described robots that turned into racing cars. When they talked about childish things not yet put away, it was hard to pretend that they were not just children.