He was silent for a long, long moment, head hanging, then he lifted it and turned to me, his eyes meeting mine. And suddenly came this whole rush of words. ‘What’s to understand, Casey? My life’s been fucking shit! She’s a bitch, that’s all. A bitch. She got rid of me, told me all this stuff about how I was trouble and everything. But she kept Alfie and Mikey, didn’t she? Didn’t she? I understand alright. I understand all of it.’ He was crying now, I could see, except so softly and so silently. Leaking tears, almost. It wasn’t anger. It was if he had no fight left in him. Now instinct told me that it would be okay to touch him, so I moved closer and put my arm around his shoulders. I waited for him to stiffen, but he didn’t. Quite the contrary. He leaned into me, burying his head into my chest, and now he started sobbing much harder.
‘It was shit,’ he said again. ‘Shit. I mean, I knew she was on drugs. Couldn’t not know. All the kids used to take the piss all the time. But I never knew it was heroin. I never knew that. I mean I knew the name of it, and everything, but not what heroin was, what it does. All I knew was that she never got any food for us. Never fed us. An’ Alfie only needed fucking baby milk, that’s all. An’ she never got it …’
I squeezed his shoulder. ‘I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to live like that.’
He lifted his head away a little to look at me again. ‘Casey, can I tell you something?’
‘Course you can, love,’ I answered. ‘Though there’s something I need to tell you first, okay?’
I hated having to do it, but I really needed to say it. It was an essential, integral part of my job that I say it. ‘It’s just that you have to know, Justin, that if it’s something really, really bad that you’re going to tell me, that I have to share it. You understand? So that we can all try to help you. Okay?’
He nodded, though I wasn’t completely sure it went in. He seemed more focussed on continuing now than listening. And I needed to let him.
‘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