Cold Hands (17 page)

There were some upper-middle-class children at Lampeter, the sons and daughters of wealthy London or Home Counties families whom even the best public schools had failed to springboard into Oxbridge, Bristol or St Andrews. I went to my first dinner party later the same year, hosted by two girls (Hilary and Ally?) in their flat off-campus, the dining table set up in the hallway, candles flickering and classical music playing, the jokey, ironic attempt at ‘adult’ sophistication. I remember one of them sighing and saying ‘
Voilà!
The ubiquitous ratatouille . . .’ as she placed the heavy orange casserole pot on the table. I had never had ratatouille before. Digging among the tomato and peppers I fished something out and tried to eat it. Moments later, my cheeks burning as I picked strands of string and fibre from my teeth, Ally, or Hilly, explained what a bouquet garni was.

Later that night, on the chintzy sofa, I told Hilly – or Ally – that they were the first rich people I’d ever known. She laughed and took great pains to explain the difference between ‘rich’ and ‘wealthy’, telling me that her parents were doctors and that they were ‘comfortable’ but they had to earn a living. Being truly ‘rich’ meant having ‘capital’, not having to work. Where I came from it was difficult to imagine anyone further up the social scale than a doctor.

There were trips to the cinema to see strange new films with subtitles, strange new vegetables in the supermarket (I peeled my first clove of garlic aged twenty) and strange
new concepts in the lecture theatre: Providence, the Augustins, Structuralism, Ironic Distance.

The Unreliable Narrator.

Earnest discussions in the refectory, arguments in the pub or union bar, as, for three years, the university went quietly about its sophistry, its business of transformation. One of these girls – a Hilly, an Ally, a Becky – once took my hand in the corner of a party and held my gaze with her clean green eyes – eyes that had seen nothing bad or ugly, that had seen only pleasant things and expected to see a good deal more of them – and told me that I was ‘different’ from the others. I wasn’t ‘full of shit’. I was ‘interested’ in other people. I ‘listened’. I didn’t just ‘blah on about myself’ all the time.

Later, in bed, she also told me that my past seemed to be a ‘closed book’. I shrugged and smiled sadly and murmured the set backstory: the absentee father, the alcoholic mother, the abandonment as a toddler, the kindness of my elderly uncle. (No, my backstory hadn’t required too much tweaking at all.) And she did something for me I hadn’t been able to do myself. There in the warm single bed with the Welsh rain brushing at the window behind us, she wept.

My accent softened as, in and out of the lecture hall, my tongue found its way around strange new words, words that had had no place in my childhood: lunch, fresco, supper, Giotto. Croissant.

I was once William Anderson.

I graduated in 1992 with a BA in English Literature and Language. After a minor identity scare the following year (tabloid revelation, the wrong guy) I moved to Canada. It was far enough away with an English-speaking population
and a large Scottish ex-pat population. I wouldn’t attract much attention. I studied for my Masters at the University of Toronto. I moved to Regina for the postgraduate Journalism course. I met Sammy. Walt was born.

I am Donald Miller.

I STOPPED TALKING.
I don’t know how long it had taken to get it all out. Walt was looking at me. I could feel it, but I couldn’t look at him. She was still perched on the edge of the wooden table, her arms folded across her chest. It was quiet for a moment.

‘Thank you,’ Gill Docherty said. ‘You know, I really couldn’t believe it was you at first. After all this time?’ She was moving now, walking around the table, the knife in her hand. ‘And how you’d landed on your feet! Marrying the rich girl? Your huge house and your fun little househusband life. Having said that, I always thought you’d be the one I might get. Derek Bannerman? Sadly he’ll never see the outside of a prison cell again. Your friend Tommy? Well, you know what happened to him and good riddance to bad rubbish. But you, with your “model rehabilitation” . . .

‘And then, having to be so patient this last year? Getting your trust. Waiting for the perfect time. After I had my first winter here last year I knew, I knew the weather might give us the privacy we’d need. You see, I thought about just abducting Walt here. But your father-in-law’s money . . . it could have made things difficult. Besides, I wanted you to watch.’

‘Please. Just kill me. Let Walt go.’

‘Kill you?’ She laughed here. She actually laughed. ‘I’m not going to kill you.’ She crossed behind Walt’s chair and started pushing him in towards the table. Walt started screaming behind his gag, struggling against the ropes.

‘Oh please, oh God . . .’

She banged his chair up against the table and untied his right arm, flattening his hand down on the rough wooden surface, her hand over his tiny one. Walt strained and pushed and twisted against his bonds. She picked up the hunting knife. I couldn’t hear what Walt was screaming behind the gag but I knew what it was –
‘Daddy! Daddy!’

‘NO!’ I was screaming. ‘DON’T!’

She put the tip of the blade against the wood in front of Walt’s hand and brought the heel of the knife up above his pinkie. ‘Walt?’ she said to my son. ‘Remember, everything that is going to happen to you tonight is because of your dad. He did this to you. OK?’ Walt was struggling, trying to say something. Through my own tears and screams I flashed on when Walt was born, the howling blob of gore wrapped in a hospital blanket, the desire to protect and nurture – unfathomable, depthless.

Then she was bringing the heel of the blade down and, blissfully, I was fainting, the basement dissolving away into murk, but I could hear her talking, standing over me, holding my hair, telling me something.

YOU KNEW YOU
should never have sent him to that school. You’d argued about it. But, in the end, Stephen had prevailed. With his new job, the pay cut, the mortgage to pay, the fees at Hutchinson were out of the question. So off to Ravenscroft he went, your perfect, special wee boy. It used to break your heart to sit in the car, the old blue Triumph Dolomite, and watch him walk through those gates, through the scowling throng of boys who towered over him, the boys who were forever spitting on the ground. The kind of boys for whom school was prison, a sentence to be endured before real life could begin, real life for most of them being, at best, a job on the production line somewhere. Factory fodder.

Not for Craig. Always bright, always interested in things. He could hold a conversation when he was nine months. Read at three.

He’d been a difficult birth. Nearly killed you. Forty hours in labour before they had to perform an emergency Caesarean. Then the complications, the return to surgery, the hysterectomy. But you had Craig. And you were so happy for a while, the three of you.

Before that school.

You’d find Craig in his room, with his homework books, taking him his milk and sandwich, and you’d know he’d been crying. The time he came home with the black eye and bruised, cut face. You’d gone berserk. Went to see the headmaster, even though Craig begged you not to, and got the boy that did it suspended. You’d wept and he’d held you, your little boy, and said, ‘Don’t cry, Mummy.’ After that you knew he wasn’t telling you everything that happened at school. (You realised much later it was because he didn’t want you to worry about him, and the pain of that realisation, of his consideration, after he was dead was more than your mind could bear. Already buckled, it snapped in half.)

That May Saturday, the anxiety building within you as afternoon bled into early evening and then into nightfall and he still didn’t come home. Vomiting with fear. Then the drive to the police station, Stephen patting your hand while he drove, saying, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine. He’ll have got lost.’ And you already knowing, knowing something terrible had happened. The days that followed; a numbness, constant trembling, looking at the phone, watching the TV, the press conference and flashbulbs and people asking stupid, inane questions. (‘How do you feel?’) Then that moment – life ending – when the police car pulled up in front of the house that Thursday morning and you saw them walking up the drive, past the reporters who had gathered at the gate every morning for the last three days. You saw the expression of the lead policeman and you saw something in it beyond sorrow, beyond anxiety and nerves, you saw
fear
and that could only mean one thing.

Stephen screamed when they told you both.

You remember falling to your knees on the carpet, next to the coffee table, the world rushing around you, colours and smells seeming to intensify madly – the late daffodils on the table bright and pungent. The policeman’s shoes close to your face – boot polish and leather – as you folded in on yourself, shaking.

How well you would remember the events of that last morning together in the years to come. You’d replay every moment, bringing out details, burnishing them, making them shine, making your pain so severe it felt like you would burst sometimes.

As it was the weekend, you’d all had a leisurely breakfast together: boiled eggs and toast and tea for you and coffee for Stephen, Craig with his soldiers (he was growing out of it but you still liked to do it) and orange juice. That spot of yolk on his bottom lip, you can see it still, shining in the spring sunshine that flooded the kitchen. Radio Clyde on in the background, Stephen with the sports pages of the
Herald
and you with the news.

He went to his room after breakfast to do some homework. That was the kind of wee boy you had – one who would do homework, unasked, on a Saturday morning. You popped your head round his door a little later to ask what he wanted in his sandwiches; cheese and ham, or just ham? He was at his desk, books and jotters spread out around him. ‘Just ham please,’ he’d said. (Did he? Did he say ‘please’? He often did, but not always. You so want that ‘please’ to have been there in this exchange.)

He loved to go fishing in the spring and summer months. Stephen had always taken him when he was small but, just in the past year, since turning thirteen, he’d been allowed
to go on his own as long as he was back well before dusk fell. And he was. He always was.

You’d put the sandwiches in a Tupperware box and packed them in his canvas knapsack along with a carton of juice and a KitKat.

Your last motherly duty.

They fished the knapsack out of the river later, not far from his body. The sandwiches were still dry and uneaten, safely waterproofed in their plastic box. There was a ball of tinfoil in the knapsack too. He’d eaten the chocolate quickly, unable to wait. You often picture him doing this: breaking a finger off and munching it as he walked along the riverbank with his rod. Had he just finished eating it, you couldn’t help wondering, when he met them? Was there thick chocolate coating his tongue, bits of wafer between his teeth, when he came round the bend at that weir? He hadn’t been eating it when he met them, you knew that much. That ball of tinfoil, you knew it was from the KitKat wrapper – he hadn’t just thrown it on the ground like so many boys his age would have. If he’d been eating it when he met them he wouldn’t have had enough time to ball up the tinfoil and put it in his knapsack. He hadn’t littered. For many years, remembering just this detail would be enough to tear you apart, to have you pouring an extra inch or two of vodka into your glass.

Not that Craig was perfect of course. He’d reached an age where his intelligence was beginning to outstrip your own and this occasionally brought out a sarcastic streak in him. He could be verbally witty, but he hadn’t yet learned to use it appropriately. More and more you’d found yourself having to tell him off for being cheeky. Stephen was more
relaxed about it, feeling that by the time he was sixteen or seventeen he would be a formidable conversationalist, a shoo-in for the sixth-form debating team, which would look good on his UCCA form.

He wasn’t sure what exactly he wanted to do yet – he loved science, he especially adored his physics teacher Mr Cummings – but Stephen was already talking excitedly about Craig going to Glasgow University, where he had gone. About how the two of you would go up and visit him: lunches on Byres Road, walks through Kelvingrove Park and the leafy Gothic quads in the autumn of first term, Craig’s first term, October 1987. ‘Och,’ you would say, ‘he’s only thirteen. Let’s see how his O levels go first . . .’

The trial, those three boys, bored, nervous and smirking in the dock. The details that emerged.

Splinters of fibreglass in his rectum.

Five days in the cold salty water.

Your baby boy.

‘Full fathom five thy son lies; of his bones are coral made: those are pearls that were his eyes.’

Fish feeding on the blood and viscera. Burrowing inside him. Flies laying their eggs inside him, maggots ripening in his flesh, in the beautiful smooth skin you used to bury your face in, tickling him, inhaling his baby perfume. Rats gnawing at him as he floated face down in the dun river. His expression as those boys beat and whipped him and he looked up and felt the incredible degree of cruelty ranged against him. How he must have screamed when they . . .

And you do this every night. Every hour. He dies again and again. New details are imagined and added. Every night Craig screams for you to help him and you just sit and watch.

So. You go insane. Little by little you go completely insane.

In a way it was better for you. You just shut down. You stopped living. You’d be clearing away the breakfast things in the kitchen and your legs would buckle beneath you. You’d sit down on the floor, your back against the wall, and the next thing you knew the front door would be opening and Stephen would walk into the kitchen with his briefcase and you’d look up, blinking, and realise it was five o’clock. The afternoons alone in the house with the baby pictures, making him live again in your head. Making him walk and talk for you. Laughing and clapping when he did something funny or great.