Justin didn’t mind now. It was over and he could wait. In fact he waited very patiently, curled into the corner of the sofa, chilly in just his underpants. Because he knew, as he watched them hold the lighter flame underneath the tin foil, that soon – as soon as they’d sucked up all the smoke through her broken pens – she’d become different, and happy, and maybe his again.
Sure enough, she soon flopped down beside him, smiling dreamily. But there was no time for cuddles. She had other ideas.
‘C’mon, babe,’ she murmured at him. ‘Be a good boy, babe. Go and get dressed now. It’s time to go to school.’
He tried to argue – he wanted to stay and stroke her mass of bouncy black curls for a bit – but Uncle Phil roughly cupped his face in his big smelly hand and said, ‘Do as you’re told. It’s school time!’ So there was nothing else for it. He’d have to do as he was told.
His uniform was crumpled on the floor in the kitchen, exactly where he’d left it yesterday. And, just like yesterday, there was nothing there to eat. There was ketchup and there were Oxos and there was an inch or two of brown sauce, but nothing you could eat for breakfast. No proper food. He eventually found a single ginger biscuit, so he stuffed that in his mouth, and listened, as he dressed, to Uncle Phil shouting at Dylan, his mum’s dog. His mum, he thought, would probably be asleep now anyway.
He tiptoed upstairs. His brothers were sleeping too. And if they were asleep they weren’t going to ask for food or wail at him. Satisfied, he quietly left the house.
‘Who you think you’re talking to, you stinking little scruff?’
Justin turned to see two boys he knew, both headed towards him. He was in the park now, having taken the long route to school. It was much too early to go the road way so he thought he’d go through the park and skim some pebbles across the duck pond.
He dropped the stone he’d been holding and was about to throw, and shook his head. ‘No-one,’ he answered. These were bad kids, he knew. Always getting into trouble with the police and causing trouble on the estate His mum said so. And he should keep well away.
‘You’re a fucking little oik,’ said the bigger one. ‘And your mum’s a dirty whore.’
‘Shut up!’ said Justin even though he knew he shouldn’t dare to. ‘Or she’ll be round to your house and sort you out!’
‘What, give me dad a blow job?’ the other boy taunted, pushing Justin. ‘She’s a fucking junkie, she’ll do owt to get a score.’
Justin couldn’t help it. He burst into tears. ‘Just leave me alone, I want to go home now,’ he cried, which made the two boys laugh at him even more. Then one of them, obviously still in the mood for more tormenting, pushed Justin over and quickly slipped off both his shoes. ‘Without these?’ he taunted, before lifting them high in the air and then lobbing them straight into the middle of the duck pond.
‘Hey!’ said Justin, scrambling to his feet and brandishing his fists now. He threw himself at the older boy and started to pummel him, which only made both boys laugh even harder. But not done yet with humour, and before he could do anything to stop it happening, they grabbed his arms and legs, tipped him up and ducked his whole head into the water.
They then pulled him out, sniggering at all his coughing and his spluttering. ‘Bye, freak,’ they said. ‘See you at school.’
It was some minutes before he found the energy to get up again, almost all of which he spent in silent contemplation of the sky. He was freezing, he was soaking, and he was covered in mud. He had no shoes, and he knew there was no way he’d be able to find them. They were too far out in the water. It was too dangerous. He might drown. He couldn’t go to school now. He wouldn’t go to school now. He’d go back home, he thought, and tell his mum what had happened. He’d limp home, in the freezing cold, barefoot. What else could he do?
But when he got home, his mother wasn’t there.
Chapter 7
We’d been sitting there together for an hour by now. An hour in which I’d had to struggle to keep myself together as Justin talked. I knew it was essential that I do that, however. If I conveyed even a fraction of the rage and disgust I was feeling as he described the grim details of his early childhood to me – childhood, what bloody childhood? – I was sure he’d clam up and find it impossible to go on. These were dark secrets he was sharing and I knew from long experience that children who’ve been involved in such ordeals bore scars that, even with the best care and support in the world, would probably never really fully heal. Scars that ate away at their minds and hearts, like some horrible cancer, and muddied every aspect of their sense of themselves. Like any other child ever born, Justin would have felt guilty. Would have felt that in some way he deserved what had happened to him. Because that, tragically, was what children did.
I wiped the tears that were forming steady tracks down both of our cheeks now, wanting nothing more than to beat the living daylights out of all these monsters. I knew I needed to keep a professional head on at all times, and that, considered rationally, these ‘monsters’ were also probably just people who had been profoundly damaged themselves, but, at that moment, I didn’t quite know how to feel anything for them but utter fury.
What I did know was that anything in my power I could do to help Justin, I would do. He deserved so much better than the hand life had dealt him. He deserved happiness. Deserved nothing less. No child did. But also because not only had the adults in his life let him down, big time, but their cruelty and neglect had also sealed his fate with all his peers; causing him to be a target for bullies.
But now Justin, still for the moment, and close beside me, once again brought me out of my reverie.
‘That was the day,’ he said.
‘The day?’
‘The day I burned the house down.’
The day I burned the house down. I took this fact in. Not ‘the house burned down’ but ‘I burned the house down’. This was just heartbreaking to hear.
But I knew better than to react to it. Instead I remained silent and let him continue.
‘I got back there,’ he went on, ‘and my brothers were in such a state. She’d just left them! Just gone and left them! Can you believe she’d do that? And they were in such a right state. An’ crying. And wanting food. And I just couldn’t bear it. I had nothing to give them and I didn’t know what to do. And just thought …’
He trailed off. ‘That you couldn’t cope with things any more?’
I felt him nod against me. ‘I just couldn’t. Casey. I just couldn’t. And the dog eating their shit, and all their crying, and everything … I just couldn’t believe she’d do that. Can you?’
It took Justin another hour to recount to me the full horror of the events of that day. That day that had been described to Mike and I so dispassionately, so matter of factly. The neatly recorded detail of this five-year-old child who’d been playing with matches and, as a result, had accidentally burned the house down and then been placed in care. This five-year-old who was such a handful that his poor mother simply couldn’t handle him and had had no choice but to allow social services to take him. And who could blame her? After all, this was a child who, in all the reports written about him since then, was ‘trouble’, was ‘off the rails’, was a ‘bully’.
Except, perhaps all those reports weren’t true. Or wouldn’t have been, had his early life been different. There was clearly so much more that went on that day – and the days before it; the whole lifetime before it – that social services didn’t know anything about. I worked in the care sector. I had worked for several years in a big comprehensive with a very mixed intake, so I wasn’t naive. Yet I