Chain Reaction (15 page)

The Ford is in the drive. Just as she fears, Vernon is home before she is.

So Joy creeps round to the back and sneaks her purchases into the cedar gazebo before she lets herself in the door.

Just to see him there is a reprimand. He is sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. But a man’s face in repose is
meant
to be serious, isn’t it? When he sees her he looks up and tries to smile.

‘All right?’ she asks, dreading the worse, the latest worst.

Vernon nods. ‘I’m a little tired,’ he says wearily. ‘Just sorting through the essential bills that have to be paid. The electric. The gas. And I think the car clutch sounds as if it’s going… God knows if Norman Mycroft is going to honour these cheques.’ He looks up at her sadly as if this is all her fault. ‘We’ll just have to risk it—we don’t have any choice.’

‘We don’t seem to have any choice over anything at all any more,’ snaps Joy, sick with guilt. He is punishing her for crimes he is unaware of and that’s just not fair. She directs her nervous eyes to the chequebook. ‘And I’m cheesed off with it.’

‘You and me both,’ says Vernon, shaking his head heavily, as if he knows very well that she has just taken the kind of steps which could lead him, at fifty-two years old, into the world of the cold and hungry, the unwashed, the lame, the sick and the terrified homeless. Maybe Joy should attempt to torch the house. At least, if Vernon has kept the insurance payments going, they might receive more than the wretched Middletons are offering to pay.

What is she doing to him?

She sits down gingerly in the chair directly opposite. ‘I’ve brought you some liver from Marks,’ she says. ‘Liver and onion with gravy, and summer pudding and cream to follow.’

The wrong response. Vernon looks worried, keeps pushing his brown-framed glasses back on his head. Why couldn’t his wife stay home and cook something cheap and sensible? Why does she have to go over the top? She knows what the situation is, doesn’t she? You only buy food from Marks when you’re really flush. They used to joke, Joy and Vernon, that when the children left home not only would they go on that cruise but they’d either dine out or buy Marks’ food every day. It was a dream. Where’s it gone now? I mean, one packet of lamb’s liver and poor Vernon’s blood pressure soars through the roof.

But Joy needs him desperately; she loves him and she hates to hurt him. It’s all so perverse because why is her behaviour so bad? She looks at him with a warm glow of love. Thank the merciful heavens she’s got him, he is too fine a man to succeed in a vulgar world. Vernon is far steadier than her; Joy knows this and depends upon that fact. While she is like a tuft of down, blowing along with her moody and peevish emotions, Vernon’s a deeply-rooted tree. Defeated yet not disgraced, he bends but he does not break.

At least he hasn’t done so far. Phew.

T
HE SACRIFICE OF HIS
son. His only son, Jody, has been taken to the mountain, and just as Abraham offered his own son to God, so Len Middleton feels he is offering Jody to the God of this screaming decade—the Mob.

Jody is definitely innocent of the crime for which he has been accused. From what the boy tells him, and Len is used to believing a son who was rarely a liar, there was no force involved. Janice Plunket sacrificed her virginity quite willingly, and it’s not fair the State suggesting that Jody took wicked advantage of a woman with the mental age of a six year old. That’s not the point. She was battered and bruised and scratched all over, yes, but that happened as she struggled to find her way back home.

If only Janice would stand up and tell the truth instead of repeating over and over that she cannot remember.

One way or other, Jody has hurt her; perhaps he ought to be facing a charge of neglect. But
rape—
good heavens, never!

Yet the Middletons have been hounded out, and much as Len would like to turn his back to the wall and fight, he has his wife and two daughters to consider. Cindy and Dawn can no longer attend school because of the bullying there.

They have written off his son’s life.

Lenny loathes visiting Jody on remand, in a building that seems to have been designed precisely to magnify sound—doors clanging, scuffling, banging, someone crying, someone moaning. And the place stinks. It is dirty, ugly and noisy and it smells of despair. They are forced to talk to their son in that dreary room sitting round those terrible tables supervised by a bored official as they try to wring some sort of intimacy out of the couple of feet between them. Hopeless.
Hopeless.
Babs ends up weeping, trying to understand what she did wrong, and Jody terrified and negative, making things worse.

Shocked to the very core of himself, Lenny Middleton has taken to going for long walks alone, seeking the time for contemplation. And while Babs, guilt-ridden and withdrawn, has taken up the role of insecure child-woman, after his initial anger Lenny has sunk into a cold, unfeeling lethargy, the only way he can take the strain. It started with dog mess pushed through the letter box. You read about things like this and you tend to assume that the victims in question must have done something to deserve their plight… why else would such malicious attention be focused on one particular party? But it doesn’t work that way. There’re background forces which stir the ever-simmering soup of crowd malevolence. It’s the way the police spokespeople handle it, the way the press describe it, the gossip that suddenly oozes from nowhere like a leak in a sewer, smearing everything with filthy insinuation.

Oh yes. Shit sticks.

Even to a kid who was once the most popular lad round here.

Oh, they have been lucky parents. The less fortunate, of which there are many, occasionally used to confide, ‘I don’t know where we went wrong. Look at you, look at your three. If only…’ Babs and Lenny would feel so self-righteous it makes him cringe to think of that now. ‘It’s so simple to produce well-adjusted, contented children,’ they used to compliment each other with pleasure. ‘It’s all in the way you love them. You show them they’re loved, you praise them, you discipline them and you lead by example.’ OK, Jody could be difficult, that’s natural after all. During adolescence the Middletons went through the normal traumas, but they talked them through sensitively and carefully, and Jody always knew where to come if he was unhappy or in trouble. Ever a popular boy, his close friendships helped boost him at any difficult times, as did his sport, his football and cricket. Was he too easy-going? Too good-natured? A kindly lad, a natural leader, he was bright, he was fun, and now look, Lenny is thinking of him as if he is gone for ever. There’s such an emptiness since they took him away.

The hair that was once a shock of gold is limp, now, and without lustre. The prison seems to have stolen his colours and Jody was such an attractive child with those deep blue eyes and that healthy skin. His body was rigid under Lenny’s hand last time he tried a reassuring squeeze to the shoulder, and the boy would not meet his gaze when he told him he loved him.

‘Talking’ was always their answer to everything. Talking and working things through. They didn’t need experts to tell them that. The boy had everything to look forward to, including a conditional place at Birmingham to read Law in October.

Where were the slums, the bleak poverty, the drug gangs and the loud house music? Everyone is nonplussed by the fact that Jody comes from a ‘normal family’, parents still married, homeowners, respectable middle-class people with two daughters to be proud of, never the slightest problem with either Dawn or Cindy. It’s not right that those sweet girls should suffer so. They have suffered enough already.

‘There’s people outside the house, Dad, I can hear them.’ Dawn woke Lenny soon after the nightmare started. It must have been gone midnight; he was sleepily befuddled while she was sobbing with fear.

‘What? What people?’

‘I dunno, I
dunno,
Dad, but they’re outside in the garden.’

This was the terrible night after Jody had been arrested. They were all dazed and confused.

Armed with a golf club, all the lights in the house blazing and his womenfolk huddled behind locked doors upstairs, Lenny was about to open the back door when a brick came crashing through the kitchen window and a slurred voice yelled, ‘Bastards!’

‘Who’s that?’ called Lenny, limbs shaking, heart playing tricks. He was too old and cowardly for this sort of thing.

‘Fuck off, you wankers! Shit’s too good for you. You’ll suffer for this…’

Len could not speak. His eyes burned. He breathed deeply, quickly, as if an overdose of oxygen would calm him. The violence in the obscene voice was worse than the shattering force of the brick. Shaking and vulnerable in his dressing gown and pyjamas, Lenny dare not open the door, and when he looked out into the darkness he could make out shapes but no faces. That was the most unnerving thing. He thought of the Ku Klux Klan and its cunning use of masks: it’s the faces that make a crowd human. When you have no faces, you have only a baying tide of violence and hostility.

‘RAPE, RAPE, RAPE’ chanted the faceless mob.

The following day a wreath was delivered to the door. Cindy answered.

Babs was hounded by anonymous phone calls. She’d had to give up working at the surgery straight away, just as Len stopped going to the golf club. Nobody said anything, but sometimes you just know when you’re not wanted. When Babs answered the phone, there was just silence, or sometimes abuse, even threats against her life and the life of the girls. The police could do nothing, they said, unless they had proof, or a name. There was no point pushing it, you could see you’d get no sympathy there.

At work, those who did not visibly recoil were a bit
too
nice, going out of their way to speak to Len, avoiding all references to children, family, home life, finding sanctuary instead in sales figures, office gossip, new and interesting brands, conferences and the incredible behaviour of upper management. He wanted to hold out his hands and beg them to be natural. Whatever natural was. He has already forgotten. It is disconcerting and uncomfortable to say the least and he was weak with relief, quite overcome by the man’s understanding when his immediate superior had him in and suggested he move to the West-Country branch.

Len is finding it hard to be loving and tender these days, although he knows it is desperately required of him at this time. After all, his tranquillised wife isn’t to blame—or is she? She was the mother after all, the one who brought the children up while Len made perfunctory gestures at helping.
Jody should never have touched Janice Plunket.
What made his boy do something like that? Babs loved Jody deeply, she still does. Did she spoil him, pamper him, reward him for the wrong behaviour, give Jody too much attention? His sisters were often jealous. The lad had certainly been given most things he wanted—most kids are these days, but then Jody frequently helped in the house and the garden without being asked. The Middletons used simply to feel glad that they had the resources to be benevolent like that.

So what a blessed relief it was when the agents phoned yesterday with the offer from the Smedleys in Clitheroe, of £98,000. Up until then it had been unofficial, but it meant they, in turn, could make an offer for the house in Milton and their offer was immediately accepted. No attempt to push them up, and Len would have been perfectly happy to pay another £10,000, even £20,000, to escape from here.

He prays that the Smedleys do not find out about the notoriety of the place, or that if they do, this odious taint will not put them off. After all, they are not talking about murder here, it’s not like the West house in Gloucester with bodies under the floorboards although, from the local reaction, you would have to believe it was equally sinister. No crime has been committed on these premises. Perhaps the settling in to a new lifestyle, the organising of a new home will be the healing of Babs who, contrary to his reaction, loathes being alone these days having nothing to do but think.

But today the house he comes home to is unnaturally quiet, no whir of the mixer, no hum of the Hoover. The television is seldom on nowadays. Babs just sits and frets and loses weight, or gardens compulsively. She won’t be leaving friends behind, not after this. You soon learn who your friends are when you are struck by this sort of disaster.

They haven’t had sex since the day they took Jody away. If Len tries to approach her Babs looks disgusted, and he, in turn, feels ashamed that he should require this basic animal satisfaction when their only son is in jail. He feels the same when he finds himself inadvertently laughing. Will they ever laugh naturally together again?

‘Sometimes I wish he had died,’ Babs sobbed to him, ‘or been the victim instead of the criminal. I would so love to have all that sympathy, and it does feel as if Jody has died and yet everybody hates us. You think I’m awful for saying that, don’t you?’

No. Comforting her was easy, for there are times when Len wishes this himself. Particularly when the girls are involved. At school they’ve been sent to Coventry, not invited to the homes of their friends any more, excluded from the usual social roundabout so essential in a teenage world. No longer do they sit on the stairs hugging the phone and giggling. They daren’t go out any more in case they
bump into someone they know, and their former companions have started crossing to the other side of the road when they see Dawn and Cindy approaching. Cindy has had her satchel snatched. Dawn found her PE gear in the swimming pool; there was a brand-new badminton racket with it. It is all so terribly cruel. Len never knew the world could behave so callously towards the innocent. He should have known, he supposes. After all, he reads the papers, he watches the news.

If this move goes well, they will make new friends, build new lives, and all without Jody’s unjust notoriety to cast a shadow over everything and everywhere they go. The trial itself is bound to be awful but there is still hope, and it’s hope that keeps them going, hope that Janice Plunket will tell the truth—if she knows it. Hope that before the trial, Jody’s story will be believed by somebody other than his closest family. Hope that the highly-respected barrister who is representing Jody will manage to convince the jury…