Guilty One (29 page)

Madeline looked up into the corners of the court. Fraught in the witness box, she seemed exalted, and the room a hallowed space. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks.

‘I didn’t think of him,’ she said quietly.

‘You testified that you had to stop Ben seeing Sebastian. Is it then true that Ben
enjoyed
playing with Sebastian?’

‘No, he was a bully, he was …’ Mrs Stokes’s fingers tightened on the lip of the witness box.

‘You didn’t like Sebastian, Mrs Stokes, that much is apparent, but did your son not
ask
to play with him? You described him as being
in thrall
to Sebastian. Was it not the case that, despite your disapproval, Ben and Sebastian were actually friends who enjoyed each other’s company?’

Mrs Stokes blew her nose and took small breaths. The judge asked if she wanted a glass of water. She shook her head and looked up at Irene.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stokes,’ said Irene, ‘I know this is very hard. Was this not the case?’

Madeline sighed and nodded.

‘Mrs Stokes, can I ask you to speak your answers out loud?’

‘Maybe they were friends.’

Irene glanced at Daniel and then sat down. She could have gone further, he knew, but the jury were tense with sympathy for the young boy’s mother. This too Daniel respected about Irene; she could turn a witness when she had to, but she always remained kind.

The breaks were regular because of rules put in place since the Bulger trial. Daniel went to the gents as soon as court adjourned. He felt
heavy and tired. His heels sounded on the marble floors. The gents were familiar to him, with their blue walls and gold taps, but they smelled of ingrained urine and futile bleach.

There was a free urinal in the far corner. Daniel exhaled as he urinated into its white porcelain.

‘All right, Danny?’

It was Detective Superintendent McCrum. His shoulder nudged Daniel’s slightly as he unzipped.

‘Sometimes you wonder …’ McCrum said, his northern accent strangely warm and welcome in the cold Victorian toilet, ‘is there no other way? I can see this trial is going to be barbaric. It’s wrong to put them through all this.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Daniel. He shook and zipped and began to wash his hands. He didn’t know how Sebastian would cope with the long days ahead and the worst still to come. ‘And we’ve only just started …’

‘I know – that poor woman,’ said McCrum.

Daniel turned away. He left without saying another word, nodding at McCrum slightly as he passed. The older man watched him go.

22

One year folded
into the next like furrows of tilled earth. Minnie got the back windows fixed after the chickens pecked out all the putty. Some slates came off the roof in the wind and there was a leak which dripped slowly into a bucket on the stairs when it rained. She didn’t have the money to fix it and it went on for over a year. It was Daniel’s job to empty the bucket in the morning.

Minnie’s goat, Hector, died during Daniel’s third winter at Brampton, but the following spring she bought a nanny goat and two kids to replace him. Daniel was allowed to do the morning milking: creaming her udders and then milking her patiently, methodically. Minnie taught him how. They made a new pen for the goats and a special milking area that the other animals could not access. Minnie told Daniel that the milking area had to be kept very clean. At night they would separate kids from nanny, to allow her udders to swell. The nanny goat was called Barbara, and Daniel named the kids Brock and Liam after Newcastle United football players, although they were both female.

At night, after his bath and his homework, he would play backgammon with Minnie
as she swilled her gin and he sucked chocolate éclairs. She would marvel at his ability to count without tapping the numbers on the board. Or sometimes it would be cards: knockout whist or pontoon. She would play records while they played: Elvis and Ray Charles and Bobby Darren. Daniel would shimmy his shoulders as he sliced his cards down on to the table, and she would raise her eyebrows at him and toss a crisp at Blitz.

Daniel was thirteen years old and in the first year at the William Howard Secondary School on the Longtown Road. He was captain of the football team and had won two gold medals for long-distance running, but he was still smaller and thinner than the other boys in his class. He would start his GCSEs next year. He was good at English, history and chemistry. There was a girl called Carol-Ann who was a year older than he was and she sometimes came to his house after school. She was a tomboy and he taught her how to do keepy-uppies with the football and how to look after the animals. Minnie would have her for tea if her mum was working late. Carol-Ann wasn’t his girlfriend or anything, although he had seen her breasts when her bra came off while they were swimming in the Irving River last summer.

Daniel was popular at school. He had friends because of football and he hardly got into any fights any more. But apart from Carol-Ann, no one came often to the farm. Danny was asked to birthday parties and went along to all the school dos. He had a group of friends he hung about with at school, mainly from the football, but there was no one he played with regularly after school and no friend’s home he visited more than a few times a year. After school, if there wasn’t a game or a party, he would be home with Minnie,
working with the animals, picking herbs for dinner, scrubbing potatoes or kicking cans for Blitz in the back yard. And then there would be dinner and games and gin and music. Year in, year out. It was the symmetry of the days, the thankful realisation of expectation, the structure of it all. It made Daniel feel safe.

He learned how to hope. His desires had to be clipped to fit the confines of her home, like the chickens’ wings she snipped in order that they didn’t flee, but anything he could wish for in that house, Minnie gave to him.

It was Saturday and Daniel woke up before his alarm. He stretched out like a starfish, feeling the stretch all the way to his fingertips. Outside the thin pane of his window he could hear the cluck and fuss of the chickens and the irritated bleats of the goats. He lay in bed with his hands behind his head, thinking, remembering.

Daniel tossed and yawned and then reached into his bedside table drawer. He took out his mother’s necklace and stroked the gold ‘S’. It felt smoother than he remembered it being and he wondered if he had made it so, in the same way that the sea rubbed smooth the sharp edges of glass. Almost a year the necklace had been in the drawer wrapped in a tissue but he hadn’t touched it. He had almost forgotten about it.

He lay back down, looking at the necklace. The memories that he chose when he stroked it were not real memories, but rather photographs his mind had taken and then drenched in hope so that they could be strung in the dark, dripping with his own expectation. One of the photographs was of his mother laughing in Minnie’s kitchen, laughing so hard that you could see her two missing teeth,
her eyes so tight shut with mirth that the laugh lines cut into her bones. Another was his mother feeding the chickens as Minnie waved from the window. In his mind, his mother’s hands were always bony and slow: they let go of the feed in slow motion, as if her joints were stuck. In another photo they were playing cards together and his mother won; she rocked back on the sofa with her knees in the air and a screech of disbelief.

Daniel placed the necklace back in the drawer. He wondered what Minnie would think of his mother, were they to meet face to face. His mother would be so fragile: a sparrow before her stomping bear. Minnie would feed her and love her and set her to work, as she had done with Daniel. Faced with Minnie, Daniel’s mother would be just another child. When he thought about it, it was that which made his heart break. His mother was a child to him and every year he felt himself age beside her, while in his mind she stayed the same: young, thin, needing him.

Since Daniel had been adopted, the way he thought about his mother had changed. Before, he had felt the panic of her loss, the rip and tear and sting of it. Now he wanted to comfort her. He remembered stroking her brow and pulling a cardigan over her as she slept on the sofa: black eyes and blue lips both smiling at him. He no longer wanted to run to her. He wanted the calm of his new life more than he wanted her chaos, but now he fantasised about bringing her into this new life. Minnie could adopt her too; she could sleep on the sofa listening to Ray Charles as Daniel plucked umbrellas of rhubarb from the garden and pushed vegetables into the nimble lips of the goats.

*

Downstairs, Minnie had
the porridge on. She was in her dressing gown, bare feet hacky-dirty on the kitchen floor. The soles of her feet were hard as leather. At night, she would watch television with her feet on a stool and Daniel would sometimes tap the quarter-inch-thick yellowed skin of her feet with his finger. She could stand on a drawing pin and realise a full week later, not because of the pain but because she heard the tap-tack of her foot on the floorboards. Then she would throw her ankle over her knee and remove the offending pin – but there would not be a drop of blood.

When she heard him she walked to the bottom of the stairs with the wooden spoon in her hand. She squeezed his cheeks and turned his face to the side to plant a kiss on his forehead.

‘Good morning, gorgeous.’

It was summer and although it was before seven, the day was bright, the sky a spotless blue. Daniel slipped his feet into his boots and went outside to feed the animals. His hands were cold and Barbara kicked and stamped when he placed them on her udders, so he warmed them in his armpits before trying again.

Together once more, the goats nuzzled and sniffed each other and Daniel carried the milk in to Minnie.

‘You’re a good lad,’ she said, placing his porridge in front of him with a hot cup of tea, which Daniel knew she would have already milked and sugared for him. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

When she came back, Danny was making toast. He asked her if she wanted some.

‘Just half a slice, love. I’m fine with my tea.’

Daniel gave her a whole slice, knowing that she would eat it anyway. She chattered
to him about the garden and the leak in the roof and how she might get someone out to fix it next week. She had been saying that for months. She asked what he wanted to do today, since it was Saturday. If it stayed nice they might go for a walk, or if it rained they would watch afternoon films and eat packets of crisps. Sometimes Minnie would cook or bake inside, while Danny kicked a ball about in the yard.

Daniel shrugged. ‘You know what I was thinking,’ he said, taking a tiny bite of his toast and watching her face.

She smiled – all blue eyes and red cheeks. ‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’

‘Do you think the social worker would find out where me mam is now?’

The light in her eyes faded.

‘Darlin’, you know what they said. Eighteen and then you can have contact if you still want to. I know it’s hard but that’s the law and we have to obey it. You need to try and move past it.’

‘I can, I am, I just … I wanted to maybe show her the new goats, and my room now it’s done. She’d like it. I just wanted to talk to her, like.’

Minnie sighed. Her breasts rose up from the table and then fell again. ‘Danny, look at me.’

‘What?’ he said, looking up at her, his mouth full of toast. She was frowning at him.

‘You’ve not to run away again, you hear me?’ She put a hand on her heart. ‘I just can’t take it again, love.’

‘I’m not going to run away. I just wanted to tell her about the new goats, like.’ He looked away and finished his toast, putting too much into his mouth, daring a glance at her. She was sitting watching him, with her hands in her lap.

Daniel too
looked away. ‘I thought it might be good if she came and lived with us,’ he said. Saying that out loud, it now seemed impossible, stupid, but still he turned to watch her response.

‘You know that can’t happen, Danny,’ she said, very quietly.

He nodded, feeling a pain at the back of his throat. ‘I just know she’d like it here. She needs looking after and I could look after her here.’

Daniel felt her heavy hand in his. ‘You have to realise that it’s not your job to look after your mother. It’s my job to look after you.’

Daniel nodded. His nose was stinging and he knew he would cry if he spoke again. He didn’t want to hurt Minnie. He loved her and he wanted to stay. He only wanted to make her understand that his mum should come and live with them too. Then everything would be perfect.

‘I’m not going to run away, like,’ he managed. ‘I just want to talk to her. I want to tell her about the farm ’n’ stuff.’ He wiped his fingers over his left eye. ‘I just want to talk to her, like.’

‘I understand, my love,’ she said. ‘Let me talk to them. I’ll see if they’ll give me a telephone number or something.’

‘D’you mean it?’ He leaned forward, smiling with relief, but she was frowning at him.

She nodded.

‘D’you promise?’

‘I said I would.’

‘Do you think they’ll tell you?’

‘I can only ask.’

Daniel smiled and sat back in his chair. Minnie was cleaning up: putting away the butter and the jam and wiping the half of the kitchen
table that they ate off – the other half was piled with books and dog biscuits and old newspapers. Daniel felt a warmness spread inside him, up from his stomach to his ribs. It lifted him and he sat up straight and raised his shoulders.

Later in the week, Daniel jogged home across the Dandy. He found a tin can and dribbled it for a quarter of a mile or so, his school tie loose and his shirt hanging out and his school bag off his shoulders. The air was threaded with the smell of freshly cut grass. Daniel could hear his breath and feel the sweat forming at his hairline as he tacked the can forward with his mud-specked school shoes. He enjoyed the bounce and spring in his muscles and his joints and the warm sunshine on his forearms and his face. He was happy, he decided, happy to be here and running home to Minnie.