Someone Else's Son (29 page)

None of their talk was driven by love – not true love, anyway, Dayna thought. Immunity to such emotion had pretty much swept through everyone in her generation, and she believed that probably included her. Or so she’d thought. They’d all been brought up tough, because of the way things were in the world, because of the way they lived, because of their families – or lack of – as well as their prospects. They lived life in line with that, surviving one day to the next. At least that’s what it was like round her estate, anyway. Neither Dayna nor any of the other kids had knowledge of anywhere else, anything better.

‘What you staring at, ugly?’ It was break time. The girl was tall with straightened hair ending in cropped strands of white-blond.

Dayna shrugged. ‘You.’ She didn’t care if she pissed her off. Nothing much mattered, the way she was feeling. She kicked the heels of her boots against the wall she was sitting on. She was hoping to see Max. They needed to talk.

There was a peal of high-pitched laughter. Someone spat. The group of five girls, all looking so similar they could pass as sisters, opened up and circled round her. Dayna swallowed, cursing herself for tensing up, for giving away her fear. What the fuck had she gone and said that for? She knew to keep her head down and hadn’t.

‘You staring at me?’ the tall one said again, eyeing Dayna up and down. ‘What are you, a dyke then?’The posse of girls laughed.

‘She looks like a dyke,’ another said.

‘You don’t fucking stare at me, right? I don’t want your filthy dyke eyes on my body, yeah?’ The girl lit a cigarette. Her nails were pink and sparkly, quite unlike Dayna’s bitten-down stumps. ‘Speak, dyke.’ She crossed her arms and jutted out one hip. Dayna would never look like any of these girls. She would always be different.

‘I’m not a dyke,’ she said so quietly she wondered if it had even come out. She wanted to hang her head in shame, accept her torture, then be allowed free. But a bigger part of her wanted to kick and punch and bite and rip and tear the life from the girl standing in front of her.

‘Speak up. We can’t hear you.’ The girls moved in closer.

‘Which one of us you got the hots for then, eh?’ More laughter, more cigarettes, someone’s mobile phone beeped from a text, one chewed gum, another swished back her hair.

Dayna shrugged. She felt a surge of adrenalin inside her chest, then the short, sharp breaths as the fear took hold. She stared at her feet, knowing that in a minute, two minutes, an hour, the rest of her life, it would all be over. She thought of Lorrell, knowing she had all this to come. What could she tell her? How could she make sure her little sister didn’t live through this shit every single day?

‘I said, you emo lezzie, which one of us do you wanna snog?’

Dayna lifted her eyes. She shuddered, trying to keep control of herself. It was the tall blonde one again. The ringleader. The one she’d inadvertently been staring at, thinking about Max and the kiss they’d shared. Nothing to do with the girl.

‘Maybe it’s all of us,’ another girl said.

‘I don’t like any of you,’ Dayna found herself saying. ‘I think you’re all disgusting.’ She held her breath, hoping it would prevent a full-blown display of panic. She saw their eyes all widen in unison, their mouths drop in shock.

‘Fuckin’ get her!’

Dayna leapt off the wall and ran for the school gates. Unlike the other girls, she was wearing flat boots, allowing her to charge off at a speed the others couldn’t match. The adrenalin made her fast.

‘Come back, bitch!’ Dayna heard as she charged from the school. ‘We’ll get you!’ She ran on and on, across the disused car lot, across the scrub ground and down towards the stream where she’d shared the picnic with Max. At the water’s edge, she stopped, panting, leaning forward with her hands pressing just above her knees.

Dayna sobbed. Tears of anger burnt tracks down her sweaty cheeks. She hated them all. Why couldn’t they leave her alone? She’d done nothing to them. She bent down and picked up a rock, hurling it into the water so it clattered on to an old shopping trolley. She imagined pushing the blonde girl’s head deep into the sludge at the bottom of the polluted stream, watching as the bubbles and her thrashing limbs slowly subsided. More than anything else in the world, she wanted to hurt someone – anyone – to get it all out; to leach the pain that had built up inside for so long.

She decided not to go back to school, but rather to go on to Max’s hut. She knew he wouldn’t be there, but she could sit and wait. She might even text him if she had any credit left. It was English this afternoon and she’d been looking forward to getting her essays back. Those girls, they changed everything in her life. From the route she took through the school to get to lessons – careful she didn’t go down corridors where she could be headed off and surrounded – to whether she ate in the canteen or skulked behind the science labs with a spliff and a Coke. They governed every breath, every blink, every heartbeat.

A train rattled the air in her lungs as it sped over the bridge. Dayna wondered how the little hut had stood up so long, given all the vibrations directly above it. She went up to the door and twisted the padlock. It came away in her hand. She backed off slightly, scared of who or what might be in there. She thought Max was in school. There was a noise coming from inside. Had she disturbed burglars, someone nicking all Max’s stuff?

She was about to replace the padlock when the door flung open.

Someone was there, brandishing a knife.

Dayna screamed and raised her fists. Then she let them fall limp as she registered who it was. ‘What the hell . . .’ She could hardly speak. She was shaking. She picked up the padlock that had fallen from her hands. ‘I thought you were at school,’ she said angrily.

‘I was.’ Max lowered the knife. He turned to go back into the hut.

‘Oi, wait.’ Dayna grabbed his shoulder and pulled him round. ‘You’ve been crying.’

Max shrugged. ‘So what.’ He squirmed away from her hand and went back inside. Dayna followed.

‘What’s been going on?’ She virtually pushed him down on to the car seat, beside which sat a half-smoked joint and a can of ale. She lit the smoke and passed it to Max. She took a swig of the beer and winced. ‘Tell me.’

Max stared into her eyes. She could hardly stand it.

 

Max’s heart took fifteen minutes to stop racing. He’d tried not to show how scared he’d been when he heard someone outside the hut, but Dayna noticed everything. Adrenalin had set light to his fingertips and his hands shook as he took the joint back from her. How had she known he was in there? Had word got round that quickly?

‘Please tell me,’ Dayna said again.

Out of all of them, Max knew she would understand, but after what had happened at the park – their kiss – how could he risk blowing it with the only girl he’d ever truly liked? There’d been a couple of others at his last school, but none like Dayna. Anyway, they were part of the reason he left. It had all been a set-up, a hoax, a big prank to ridicule him. The staff had turned a blind eye, almost as if they condoned such obnoxious behaviour between pupils, as if, until you’d been mercilessly bullied, picked on, spat at, beaten up, belittled, mocked and robbed, you just weren’t part of the Denningham community.

Max turned away from Dayna. He retched, but nothing came up. He could still taste it. ‘Really, it’s nothing. Just having a bad day, that’s all.’ He remembered saying the same words to his tutor at Denningham. Shrugging off all the shit as if he’d just tripped over or broken the lead of his pencil. ‘What’s up with you, anyway? You look as if you’ve been running,’ he said, trying to change the subject.

Dayna’s eyes went wide and she sighed. ‘Yeah. Running from them bitches.’ She sneered as if she didn’t care. Max knew she did.

‘What did they do?’

‘Usual. They came after me but I’m faster.’ She laughed in her chesty way. She pulled the smoke from his fingers and took a draw. He liked it when she gave it back and it was faintly damp, just a hint of Dayna. ‘But I want to know what upset you. You act all tough when I know you’re not.’

For some reason, Max’s entire childhood condensed into the next few moments, probably, he thought, because of what she’d said.
I know you’re not
. It was all muddled and crazy in his head, but he clearly saw – no,
felt
– that gang in the shower at Denningham, the boot in his temple as his cash card was swiped from him, the five year old who pulled the chair away as he was about to sit down and the peals of laughter from the other kids in the kindergarten, the way his parents were always too busy to listen, the taste of his school dinner after the pot of salt that had been tipped in, the broken ankle from when he was shoved down the stairs, the stolen property – calculators, books, his wallet, his lunch money, his phone, the watch his dad had given him – the teachers that called him names and cuffed him round the ear, the jibes and comments everywhere he went, the way no one had wanted to be his partner in class, ever.

‘Max?’

He felt Dayna’s finger on his cheek. She was wiping away a tear.

‘What is it? Tell me.’

‘Just tired of everything. You know how it is.’ He grinned and swigged the ale. Even that didn’t get rid of the taste of piss.

DCI Masters didn’t recognise the pain inside his chest as anything but indigestion after Carrie had left the station with Leah. Max’s father and his assistant had gone first, leaving him and Marsh to placate the most implacable woman in the country. In a flash, his working relationship with Carrie Kent had dissolved into a mess of cop versus victim – ghastly at the best of times. This, however, was the worst of times. A boy had lost his life. The son of a famous person. A person with whom his department had formed close links. The television coverage that Carrie gave the Met at least once a month, with a police crime special aired every three, was invaluable in terms of leads and arrests. Plus, if he was honest, he enjoyed the glamour of the studio. In the past, working with Carrie had been known to have its benefits.

‘It’s fucking awful,’ Alan Marsh said as Carrie’s waif-like form was escorted away by Leah.

Masters stared at the detective. He spoke abruptly. ‘It’s a disaster for the borough. We need an arrest.’ He placed his hand on his chest. Not indigestion, he realised as he went to his office to fetch his keys, rather something akin to regret.

‘I need to speak to your daughter again, Mrs Ray.’ It was habit to flash his ID. The woman ignored it.

‘Hasn’t she said enough?’ She flung the door wide – an invitation, Dennis supposed, to come in. ‘Day-na,’ she screamed. ‘That cop’s here again.’ She pointed to the living room where a man was sprawled on the sofa. A dog was splayed across his legs. There was nowhere else to sit. Before he could speak, he heard the girl behind him.

‘Hello,’ she said, almost sounding pleased to see him.

Dennis offered a broad yet sensitive smile. ‘Dayna,’ he said, nodding. ‘I’d like to talk to you again, if that’s OK.’ He glanced at the man, who was showing no signs of moving. ‘How do you fancy going for a walk?’

She shrugged. ‘Sure.’

Dennis watched her struggle into a jacket that was clearly too small for her and wondered if the black eyeliner around her eyes was actually tattooed in place. He noticed how she kindly yet firmly resisted when her younger sister begged to come along. ‘Grown-up talk, Lorrell,’ she said, stroking the child’s hair.

Now, walking along the pavement, heading east through the estate, Dennis could see the sadness and pain stitched into her face. The make-up – black and harsh, making her look tougher than he suspected she really was; her hair, again black, cropped on top but reaching down to below her shoulders in angry choppy strands of black and burnt orange. Her nails were short and grubby, the fingertips stained yellow from smoking.

‘Want one?’ Dennis always kept a pack in his pocket. He didn’t smoke himself, but most of the people he dealt with did.

‘Ta.’

Dennis clicked the lighter at her mouth. ‘I know it’s the last thing you want to talk about, love, but we need to get things straight while they’re still fresh in your mind.’

Dayna nodded and sucked on the cigarette. ‘Yeah.’ She looked up at Dennis, one hand pushed deep inside her jacket pocket, the other at her mouth.

‘You are the only witness we have. Max needs your help. It’s your chance to do one final thing for him.’ He could see the girl was thinking about this, the way her eyes narrowed. She sniffed.

‘Yeah, all right. What do you want to know?’

‘Start just before you met up with Max on Friday.’

‘I’d been to get chips.’ She paused, as if she might get told off. ‘I was bunking off. I hate science because those girls are in my group.’

‘Where did you get the chips from?’ They walked slowly.

‘The chippy down from school. Everyone goes there.’

‘And after you’d bought the chips?’

‘I went back to school. I was going to eat them on the wall. Thought I’d wait for Max. He didn’t like science either.’

Dennis was thankful that Dayna seemed more willing to talk. Twenty-four hours could make a huge difference. ‘So did you sit on the wall?’

‘Yeah. Kids smoke there all the time. No one really gives a shit.’

‘How long did you have to wait until Max arrived?’

Dayna thought. ‘Maybe ten minutes or so. I hadn’t eaten all the chips.’

‘Did he sit right next to you?’ Dennis watched as the girl ground the butt beneath her boot. He wouldn’t offer another just yet. She knew he had them; she could wait.

‘Yeah.’

‘How did he seem? Was he troubled? I’ve heard that he was a bit . . . well, different.’

Immediately, Dayna let out a throaty hoot of disgusted laughter. ‘A bit
what
?’

They walked in silence for a few minutes, Dennis annoyed with himself for having touched so obvious a raw nerve.