Veil of Darkness (26 page)

Bloody hell, it was all so unfair.

He never had the right start in life.

And now look what’s happening. He should be back in Liverpool by now, but the pigs are trying to pin this one on him, as if he’s ever heard of Ed Board, let alone
bumped him off.

Kirsty was in trouble yesterday—an unusual situation for Mrs Stokes to be tearing a strip off Kirsty because Kirsty is normally so reliable.

‘I just needed to go off on my own,’ Kirsty told Avril, and it looked as if she had been crying; she seemed so pale, so shaky. ‘It’s the thought of the kids coming down and all the responsibility of that… but here’s me going on selfishly while you’re in such a state.’

Avril’s voice quivered. ‘And there’s been no sign of Fluffy.’

‘I really meant Graham and your mother.’

‘Oh yes, yes, I know. And the press have found their caravan.’

‘Oh no. Why don’t they go back home? What’s the point of stopping down here?’

‘Guilt. That’s what it is. They feel they ought to stay here until this thing with Graham is finished. Punishing themselves, that’s what it’s about. Mother keeps saying, “But I’m still his mother, Richard, no matter what he’s done.” But she hates him, Kirsty! She hasn’t got a good word for him. And, oh God, I wish they would go home. I wish I was still living in at the Burleston and not stuck here ten doors away from them. Kirsty, the hassle, I can’t bear it.’

Preparing the caravan for Kirsty’s children doesn’t provide one hundredth of the kind of diversion Avril needs to relieve this hell. The mobile home is a spartan place, it would need re-designing to make it a home, but with colourful rugs and mats and lamps bought from a local car-boot sale the atmosphere can be slightly softened. But every moment Avril spends cleaning the place, stocking the larder and filling in the window gaps, is a selfish moment away from her mother, who needs her at a time like this.

‘So you’ve decided not to visit him?’ Avril’s voice is accusing.

Mrs Stott pales visibly. ‘In that place, Avril? You must be mad.’

‘But he must be out of his mind right now.’

‘He might well be out of his mind. But how about me? What do you think all this is doing to me, Avril? Your father took me to the local surgery this morning, but I didn’t think much of the doctor, not a patch on dear Dr Hunt who knows me, but even so, he gave me some stronger tablets, seeing the situation I’m in.’

‘But there’s not much point in you staying down here if you’re not going to visit Graham, is there?’

Mrs Stott views her daughter searchingly. ‘What is the point of you staying down here, that is the question I would like to have answered? Never mind me. You’ve given up a perfectly good job without the usual notice, so that means references are out of the question. You’ve moved into that terrible caravan and intend to live there with that woman and her children. On what, Avril? I ask you, how do you intend to live?’ Mother lets her eyelids flutter to signify instability. ‘The dole, I suppose, if that charwoman is anything to go by.’

‘You’re wrong, actually. Kirsty is still working.’

‘You will live a hand-to-mouth existence in the wilds of Cornwall on the dole while putting your faith in a silly venture that everyone knows is a five-day wonder.’

‘Mother, why don’t you listen to me? This is not a five-day wonder! They say the UK publisher has offered a record advance and in the States they have just agreed to a sum that’s more than they pay Stephen King. Mother, they are signing these contracts at the moment.’

‘
Who is signing?
Avril, talk sense. This is the kind of nonsense you read about, but you know none of it is true, it’s merely a lot of trumped-up nonsense. What has come over you to be taken in by all this, when I brought you up so down-to-earth?’

‘There is really no point in discussing this any further.’

‘Avril.’ Mother swirls the teapot over her little caravan sink and pours the dregs into a piece of newspaper. No newfangled teabags for Mother. ‘If you are coming into this sort of fortune, what are you doing slumming it down here with hardly a penny to your name and hardly able to buy your groceries? Now, madam, answer me that.’

‘I need to be here at the moment, Mother, so that Kirsty and I can liaise when the time comes for us to play our parts in this venture. I have told you before, this is a three-way thing.’

‘Liaise? Oh yes? So you let that little minx Bernadette scamper off to London with her playboy boyfriend.’

This is outrageous. ‘You don’t know her! You’ve never even seen her!’

‘I have seen her picture,’ says Mother firmly, scouring the bases of the taps with a toothbrush. ‘And I don’t need to know her to realize what game that one is playing,’ she says archly. ‘The only thing that infuriates me is that you refuse to come home. And at a time like this, when families should be sticking together.’

Mother, of course, is very aware of the stigma attached to her and her caravan now that her son is in the news for such a grotesque offence. Passers-by pretend not to look, but they cast their eyes across just the same, and Mother huffs and puffs and wishes she could beckon them over and assure them that she is every bit as disgusted, and just as uninvolved as they are.

But Mrs Stott is not given this chance. Nobody wants to know her. All they do is gossip about her. Even when she goes to the shop the limp girl at the counter drops her eyes, and Mother has been forced to stop complaining on account of her new inferior status.

Avril knows very well why Mother has chosen to stay in Cornwall. Terrible though this notoriety is, it would be much worse back at 2 Maple Terrace, Huyton, the patch where the dire deed was committed. The shame, oh the shame. Mother is in hiding. She has gone to ground. They could well get offensive material shoved through their letterbox, bricks through their windows and obscene phone calls, so vigorous will be the fury of the local population who have taken seventy-nine-year-old Annie Brenner to their infamously warm Merseyside hearts. At least here at the Happy Stay nobody knows Mother; her fellow campers are ships in the night and, after one haughty look from her, they drop their excited eyes and sail on.

‘Stick and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,’ says Mother.

And as Kirsty reminds Avril constantly in their close and intimate conversations, Graham has ruined her life, Graham is the cause of her low self-esteem and the reason for her comfort eating, the reason for ending up doing business studies. ‘You wouldn’t be fat if it wasn’t for him and I don’t know why you should feel slightly concerned.’

But Avril cannot abandon Graham, and not for any noble reasons. She is pulled mawkishly towards him, to her he has the ghoulish fascination of a fatal accident. Her victim is down and blooded. A perfect time for attack. The torturer is helpless—that person who gave her such grief in her childhood, who moulded her weakness and insecurities as simply as if she were Plasticine, Plasticine gone old and brown, still warm from a vicious little hand. That brute is now at her mercy, safe behind stone walls and iron bars. She is compelled by some overwhelming urge inside her to go and visit him, to triumph at last, to mock, to enjoy.

‘That slob deserves all he gets, and the rest,’ says Kirsty.

Damn Graham.
Damn him
.

Sitting in the bus on the way to the prison Avril casts her mind back, finding it hard to remember exactly what he looks like, she hasn’t seen him for so many years. Her clearest memories are of the time when she was around ten years old and Graham was fifteen and well off the rails.

He was hiding under her bed one night when she went up to get undressed. She was naked before she heard him snorting in that particular way he had with a sneer in the snort, and a mockery. She leapt back in embarrassed dismay, scrambling to find a nightie or anything with which to cover herself.

‘You fat sow,’ said Graham, wriggling out, as large as a man, not a schoolboy who might be playing such classroom pranks. ‘Come on, jumbo, let’s have a look.’

‘
Get out, Graham
,’ Avril screamed, but he came at her and wrestled her nightdress from her hands and held her arms behind her back, all the time sneering and jeering at her new breasts, which were early, nobody else in the class had breasts or that suggestion of hair down there which Avril was trying her best to deny. Ugly, horrible, wiggles of hair which she dreaded the others might see when they were changing for swimming; they made enough fun of her as it was.

‘
Get out, Graham
,’ she screamed at the top of her voice, then pushed him with all her strength so that he fell back on the bed. She fled from the room out onto the landing and dashed into Graham’s bedroom because that was the only door that was open.

‘Mother!
Mother
!’ shouted Graham, hanging down over the banisters while Avril, an Everton towel round her waist, tried to barricade his bedroom door. ‘Get this tramp out of my room! This is the third time she’s forced her way in there and I’m fed up with trying to tell her—’

‘What on earth’s going on now, Graham? Why can’t you two manage to get on together for one second? We’re in the middle of
Eastenders
.’

‘I don’t like to touch her, Mother, not when she’s in this mood. I’m not going to lay myself wide open to her spiteful lies.’

‘Mum, Mum,’ cried Avril, cowering behind Graham’s door.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake…’ and then the sound of Mother’s nimble tread as she came, annoyed, up the stairs.

‘The last time she did this Nick was here.’

‘Did what, Graham?’ said Mother.

‘Pushed her way in stark naked. I didn’t know what to say. Tell her, Mother, for God’s sake. She must be a bloody nympho.’

‘Avril, Avril, what on earth is the meaning of this?’

Avril squeezed herself round the door, sobbing violently now that she was safe. But Mother grabbed her arm and held it in a vicelike grip. ‘Avril, what are you doing in your brother’s bedroom?’

Avril gulped, ‘I ran in, I had to get away—’

‘But why not the bathroom, Avril?’

Avril stared, wet-eyed, along the passage. The bathroom had seemed an impossible distance when she was running so blindly, while Graham’s door was wide open.

Mother asked in horrified tones, ‘Is what Graham’s saying true?’

And on Mother’s face was the same disgust and revulsion as Graham had shown at the sight of Avril’s naked body.

‘Graham was hiding under my bed,’ Avril said tonelessly.

‘Graham is fifteen years old, Avril, and not likely to be messing about playing such infantile games.’

‘But he was…’

‘That’s right, Mother, believe Avril, you always do.’ Graham shrugged nonchalantly.

‘But why, Avril?
Why
?’ Mother’s voice was cold and unreasonable. ‘And Graham says this isn’t the first time! Why do you need to flaunt your body, and you a budding woman?’

Avril nearly puked with disgust she so hated that phrase. Budding—that’s exactly what her horrid new breasts were doing, and woman, that is what she was turning into. A smelly, bloody, bulging vessel into which men would push their penises and through which babies would come with awful agony because of Eve.

A boiling sense of injustice gave Avril the courage to shout fiercely, ‘You’re filthy, both of you, with your filthy, filthy minds and your filthy, filthy words.’

Mother’s slap left a hand print on the top of Avril’s leg that lasted for four days.

And that was just one example of the way Graham used to get her in trouble. There were many, many more.

Kirsty is right. He does deserve all he gets, and the rest.

Avril’s bus arrives at the prison and she gets out surreptitiously, not wanting to be identified as a visitor with somebody close inside.

As she queues with the other beleaguered-looking passengers, as they tick her name off the list, Avril still isn’t sure what she’s doing here, what she hopes to achieve by this visit. All she can feel is a hot joy inside her, mixed with a sickly fear. The more uncongenial the prison surroundings, the happier Avril feels in this violent schizophrenic place. Vengeance is almost hers. She revels in this novel release of malevolent spite. If she had felt outrage before she had never acknowledged those feelings till now, not even to herself.

And yet, another, softer part of her needs to see Graham once more—the real Graham, not the memory—so she can put him behind her for good. He had cast such a dark cloud on her childhood, hanging over everything: birthday parties, family outings, the most innocent childish games in the garden. He had caused much of the mental distress that had turned Mother melancholy, although whose fault it was to start with was impossible to tell.

He looks like all the others in his faded blue jeans and T-shirt.

‘It’s good to see you, Graham,’ she says.

‘Good to see me inside, you mean.’ His voice is as ugly as his eyes.

Avril sits down awkwardly, casting her eyes round the room at her fellow visitors looking uncomfortable at their own square, metal tables. Well, she didn’t expect a loving reunion but…

‘You bleeding cow,’ growls Graham, one elbow on the table and his fist clenched tight, as if he’s about to take part in an arm-wrestling contest. ‘All you needed to fucking well do was tell the bleeders I was with you.’

She struggles to conquer her weakness, to say something quickly, to fend off this familiar shock of unexpected, hostile attack. ‘I was so surprised I couldn’t think. I mean, I didn’t even know you were down here.’

‘You retard. You’ve done it for me now. You, Avril, just you. If it wasn’t for you I could have got off.’ And he flicks open a packet of cigarettes and leaves one hanging at a petulant angle between his sneering lips. Avril remembers him smoking like this when he was in junior school, trying to be big.

She can’t help her next question. ‘You did it, didn’t you, Graham? You killed that old woman.’

‘Don’t talk shit,’ he answers savagely.

‘You probably killed Ed Board as well. They’re saying you might have done it.’ Avril rambles on, aware that she’s always done this when face to face with her brother, so afraid that a pause might be the signal for further abuse. ‘I was quite friendly with Ed Board; he was teaching me to play golf—’