Tell Tale (17 page)

‘I wasn’t spying,’ I say again, just to make sure he knows. ‘I’ve told you the story. I had to get Katy to confess. I couldn’t see your job go down the pan. She’s grown up a lot these last few days.’

I’d decided not to let anyone else know that I’d witnessed the scene in the wood. Mr Palmer need never know that I was instrumental in bringing about the girl’s admission. I would rather he looked upon her as a brave young woman coming to terms with her mistakes, having the courage to confess. The ethos of the school, I imagined Mr Palmer telling Katy, while thankful the whole sordid business could be put behind them, is a lesson well learned.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus,
he would say to her. We do not learn for school, but for life.

‘So would you like to?’ Adam is talking to me and I’ve not been listening. The bell resounds through my head. ‘Come on a walk with me later?’ he repeats, standing up from the bench.

‘Yes. Yes, that would be nice.’ A few words, but some of the hardest I’ve had to say since I arrived. And as I watch Adam deposit his plate at the serving hatch, I realise that walking with someone, talking with someone, spending time
with someone other than in a rushed work capacity, goes quite against everything I ever vowed; goes some way, I realise, to making me feel normal again.

‘You’ve just saved me,’ I say. ‘So we’re even.’ I’ve put on a jacket. There’s an autumn chill at each end of the day now that October is midway through. Half-term break sits like a gaping void next week. The prospect reminds me of plans, of holidays in Scotland, of log cabins and long walks, of the casual kisses that were never counted, of the hugs and bickers that went unregistered. ‘My evening would have been spent with the weepies. Sylvia stepped in to cover.’

‘They do get very homesick at this time of year. I don’t think it’s so much that they’re looking forward to going home next week, rather it’s the coming back to school afterwards that some find hard. Especially the first-years.’

I nod. Roecliffe Hall reaches out its silent fingers around unsuspecting hearts.

‘I went to a kind of boarding institution,’ Adam continues. ‘And I hated every bloody minute of it. Ironic that I’ve ended up teaching at one.’ He scuffs the dirt on the track as we walk away from the school. There’s a public footpath stretching to the west of the building. Miles of flattened track, thousands of anonymous footsteps placed before ours. I think about what Adam has revealed – a speck of colour in the black and white of his life.

‘Where was it?’ I want to know more. It’s unexpectedly
sweet, this communication. A safe haven in all the chaos. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Katy’s behaviour. I pull my jacket round me, matching one of Adam’s strides with two of mine. ‘Banana land?’

He shakes his head. ‘No. It was a grim place in Birmingham. An odd situation, really.’

‘How come?’ We are in a field of sheep – white smudges on a canvas of olive green now that the light is fading. The animals stop eating and stare at us as we walk past.

‘Look,’ he suddenly says in a hushed voice. He stops and tenses, pointing to the corner of the field. ‘It’s a hare.’ Adam crouches, as if making ourselves smaller will somehow disguise our scent. ‘Meant to be lucky,’ he whispers. ‘A sign of fertility, according to the pagans.’ The hare sniffs the air and tenses.

‘He’s on to us, look.’ A second later and the creature has darted fifty feet towards the cover of the hedge. Then he stops rigid, his black eyes and long ears twitching as Adam stands up and speaks normally again. ‘There are stories about witches shapeshifting into hares.’ He looks at me and grins. ‘Seriously,’ he says.

‘Shapeshifting?’ I say, not so much a question as an audible thought.

‘Country folklore’s full of it,’ he continues. ‘Where one living thing is able to transform into another at will.’

‘I see,’ I say thoughtfully, kicking off our walk again. From the corner of my eye, I see the hare speed off into the hedge.

‘Do you think you’ll stay at Roecliffe forever?’ We’re in the staff lounge sipping hot tea. We walked several miles and, by the time we arrived back at school, my cheeks had turned a shade of red to match my jacket. Adam laughed at my breathlessness, saying I should get out more. I smiled, suddenly finding myself wanting to explain why I can’t.

‘Forever’s a long time. I want to get my book finished first.’

‘Book?’ I say, pretending I’ve not already heard about it. Adam reveals another layer. It saves me from doing the same.

He nods, almost shyly. ‘I’m writing a . . . a kind of history of the school.’

There’s an awkward silence.

‘Well,’ he continues when I don’t reply. ‘It’s a history of the actual building really, rather than just the school. I’m covering the village of Roecliffe, too. The things that went on.’ His accent stretches through the words, a twang that makes him as out of place as I feel. ‘It’s had a pretty colourful past, by all accounts.’

‘How . . . come?’ There’s ringing in my ears.

Adam shrugs. ‘How long have you got?’

My entire life, I silently reply.

He slides over an antique chess table and pulls out the drawer. Black and white carved pieces lie stranded on their sides. ‘Fancy a game?’ he asks.

I’m already playing, I think, while nodding that I would.

All that waiting, all that childhood, somehow turned into years. Strange how one glance at a clock, one look out of the window, one dash to the mail board to see if there’s a letter pinned up with your name on it can turn into half your lifetime.

I grew used to my dad’s absence. He came perhaps once or twice more after he drove off with his arm and his life wrapped around Patricia. I don’t really remember. To begin with, I used to ask her about him. She seemed to know more than I did; wore a dopey expression when she mentioned his name.
William Fergus,
she liked calling him, as if he were posh.
William Fergus took me out in his car,
she’d say.
William Fergus bought me a hat. William Fergus and I went to the pictures. William Fergus held my hand.

William Fergus, I thought bitterly. Couldn’t even be bothered with his own daughter.

Besides, when she told me they’d held hands, I knew exactly what that meant. We had a television in the home. We saw what grown-ups did after they’d held hands. I ran off when I found out. My tight shoes bit my toes, stopping me from crying, as good as a punishment. But what I didn’t
understand was if my dad and Patricia were friends, if they were together, then why did I have to live here? Why couldn’t Patricia be my new mum? Why couldn’t I go home?

Simple, I deduced eventually. My dad hated me.

And so the days went on, turning into weeks, into months, into years. All of us waiting, biding our time for something to happen, something or someone to save us. A few of us went to school. I was one of the lucky ones and was allowed to leave Roecliffe for six hours a day. Until the age of eleven, I walked to the village primary school with a cluster of other trusted boys and girls. We scuffed our way to the playground, where we suffered the taunts of the other kids. We were the ones without parents. The kids no one loved. The dirty kids. The troublemakers. The children who stank and who no one wanted to sit next to or hold hands with. As we got older, some of us went on the bus to the secondary school in town. Sometimes we got beaten, kicked, bullied, but sometimes we just kept quiet and got on with learning.

When we weren’t at school, we drifted around the children’s home. The boys scrapped and fought, broke things, ran away and screamed when they were dragged back. The girls turned inwards, became sullen and quiet, and spent their time making things. Always making stuff from nothing. Rubbish from the bin. Old clothes fit for scrap. Rags were woven, cardboard was glued, and string was crocheted. We made crude dolls. We made bracelets and charms. We made pictures and presents, some of us saying
they were for our parents. By then, we didn’t remember what parents were.

All the while we were waiting for something to happen.

Then she came. The girl that would change my life. There had been a quiet patch at the home. ‘No new customers,’ Miss Maddocks joked, when nothing had happened for weeks.

I found her by accident, standing in a puddle of pee. She was crying and her bare bottom had the sting of a handprint – the adult fingers reaching right across its width. She was naked apart from a stained vest.

I was nearly thirteen but my body looked two years older. Everything I owned was too small for me. I was virtually the size of an adult woman yet wore the clothes of a ten-year-old. When I stumbled upon her, the look on her face told me that she thought I was a carer –
one of them
. To her, I must have seemed a hundred years old.

There she was, standing in the dark corridor with a thousand confusing doors leading off, stretching out her arms to me as I walked past. She wanted me to pick her up. She was making a brave, last-ditch attempt to be loved by someone.

‘Hello,’ I said. I crouched down. She couldn’t have been more than three years old. Tentatively, she wrapped her arms round my neck. Her cherry-red face buckled with anticipation. She wanted to feel the warmth of another human; convince herself that she wasn’t alone. This little girl was acting on pure instinct. She needed someone to love her in order to survive.

‘What’s your name?’ Her face drew close to my neck. Every indrawn breath was a hiccup or sob.

She leaned close and whispered, ‘Betsy,’ in my ear. The stench of urine closed around me.

‘I’m Ava,’ I told her. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ I’d not heard that anyone had arrived, and I’d been here long enough to know how the system worked. Someone would spot the social worker’s car at the end of the drive. The news would quickly spread around the home that another one was being brought in, one grubby mouth whispering to the nearest ear. A writhing cluster of kids would congregate at the big old front door, straining at the window, waiting for the latest catch to be brought in. Then the whooping would begin, followed by ugly catcalls, dancing, play-fighting, poking at the new kid, until they were shooed away by the carers’ impatient arms. I would stand back, palms pressed together in prayer, sizing up the newcomer, before rushing to my bed to defend my belongings.

The little girl began to lick my neck. I prised her away and held her at arm’s length. ‘Where did you come from?’ I angled her into the light from the small window high above us. She wouldn’t speak. ‘Can you talk?’

She stared at me blankly, huge blue eyes set beneath red-gold curls that were matted with dirt and most probably full of lice. Then she pulled up her vest and started sucking on it. She was starving. ‘Come with me,’ I said, wanting to help her. Hot sticky fingers wove their way into my fist as I led her to my dormitory. Two other girls were sitting cross
legged on a bed. One was cutting the other’s hair with plastic play scissors.

I rummaged in my bedside cupboard and pulled out a crumpled paper bag. Sugar showered from a hole and the girl dived to the floor, pressing the grains against her fingers before sucking them clean. ‘You really are starving, aren’t you?’

I tipped the contents out on to my bed. We were given sweets once a week. Usually jellied sugary things bought in huge drums. I’d been saving up, just one or two a week, and now I had a fine stash that I was planning to eat alone, under the bedcovers when I was sad. Survival when those waiting moments turned into years.

The child greedily scoffed the coloured mess on my bedspread. Then she scooped up the fallen sugar until there was nothing but a damp patch left.

‘What’s her name?’ Alison asked. She tugged at her friend’s hair with the blunt blades. ‘Does she want a cut?’

I pushed my fingers through the girl’s hair, opening the knots down to the scalp. As I’d guessed, she was teeming with head lice. I pulled a face and nodded. ‘She’s called Betsy,’ I told them. ‘And cut it all off,’ I instructed Alison. Last time there were lice, Patricia went mad and we had a night awake gagging from the treatment she doused us in.

‘She’s sweet, isn’t she?’ I opened my chest of drawers and pulled out the smallest skirt I could find. ‘She’s mine,’ I warned the others. ‘Finders keepers.’ I handed the skirt to
Betsy, but she just stared at it. I opened the waist and the child stepped in, as if it was something she was used to doing, as if she once had a mother.

Patricia was in the doorway, glaring at me. ‘There’s the wretched creature.’ Then she smiled. ‘There’s a bed come free, child. You can have that.’ I’d never quite got the measure of Patricia. She was an unreadable force in the home. Her moods ranged from motherly, to fun, to downright sinister. I always knew if she’d been with my dad. Her mood was as light as meringue.

‘Whose bed will she have?’ I asked. The child launched herself at me. I felt as if I’d finally been given a purpose inside all this waiting. Something hot spread within me, burning my heart, racing through my veins, expanding them, thawing them, taking away the void. ‘She wants to stay with me,’ I told Patricia.

‘She can have Dawn’s bed. Dawn’s gone now.’ The words fell from Patricia’s mouth as if she were spitting out gravel. Her cheeks reddened.

I didn’t say anything. I knew better than that. Sometimes kids left without a trace. Sometimes they went away, then came back days later. Some of them never spoke again. Sometimes we asked what happened to them, and sometimes we got a clout.

‘Can she sleep beside me?’ The little girl had pushed on to my lap and balled up like a kitten. I pressed her safe against me, still feeling the heat driving through me.

‘Did you find out her name?’ Patricia’s thin arms winged out from her hips. Her face shot into an arrowed
expression, as if it was a test. Tell me her name and she can sleep next to you.

I stared down at the child, desperate to protect her. Close up, I saw the creatures on her scalp, the matting of her hair, the sheen of grime on her skin. I wanted to bathe her, to make her warm, brush her hair and feed her. Someone for me to care about when no one cared about me. My living doll.