Patchwork Man (6 page)

‘What you going on about little bruv? Don’t you like it here? Don’t I look after you?’ He punched me on the arm and it was meant to be playful but it was just slightly too hard. I rubbed it surreptitiously and shrugged my shoulders.

‘It’s OK Win – you’re great and all that, I just wondered about Ma and stuff ...’

‘Forget it. We’re here and here’s where we’re staying.’ He sounded harsh. ‘They don’t care about us. They got rid of us, remember?’ I didn’t like to argue with Win in this mood. I’d seen his face darken and that ugly curl to his lip appear, like Pop’s did when he was angry. He’d clipped me round the ear once and the red weal had stayed there for hours. Win stuck his thumbs in his belt like Pop and I instinctively tensed.

‘OK,’ seemed safest and I didn’t raise it again. I counted off more days and nothing happened. No call, no visit, no Ma. Georgie withdrew more into himself and I kept my thoughts private, but my vision of the world gradually narrowed and constricted. It seemed this might not be a temporary stay after all, but a permanent sojourn. I had resisted being completely assimilated into the ways of the home until then, taking part in the odd treasure hunt at Win’s insistence, but refusing initiation. There didn’t seem much point in persisting in that vein any more. Pressure from Win, who whole-heartedly embraced the ‘selective’ process, was making it increasingly difficult to function independently. The next time I was cornered on the stairs up to the dorm, I agreed the date and time of my ‘initiation’.

Under the Governor’s admin block was a disused cellar, by then partially under water, and at the far end of the grassy area before reaching the beach there was a dip which led down to an outcrop of the promontory. This led to an abandoned World War Two gun emplacement, now falling derelict. They were the most closely guarded of the initiation and hiding places for the groups, which under Win’s influence were now rapidly taking the stance of gangs. The other place of secrecy was across the fields on the other side of the building and into the thin line of woods that delineated the murky horizon from the muddy land heading away from the beach. Win chose the cellar for me.

The stairs down to the cellar in the Governor’s block were invariably flooded, sometimes by as much as two feet, depending on how much it had rained recently. The most common initiation was to wade through the water at the bottom of the stairs and go into the cellar and wait in the pitch black with the door locked on you for however long one’s examiners determined. There were other initiations, but this was mine. I went firmly down the steps, determined not to show any fear. Anyway, Win was one of the examiners so my big brother would hardly let anything bad happen to me, would he?

Logic does not withstand anxiety. Once I reached the bottom of the steps and the dank stagnant water reached above my knees, my courage was already failing. When the door swung shut and I heard the dull echo of the bolt being shot across the outside, pitched into the dense black of the bowels of the building, my imagination ran riot.

When there is no light, we rely on our senses. Sounds become louder, smells stronger, sensations more intense. So it was for me. I stood stock still and counted, trying to ignore the cold and the dark. I got to three hundred before my nerve broke. I stopped counting and that was my downfall, because then I listened. In the stifling black, at first I heard only the swish of the water around my legs and suffered its numbing cold. I stood very still, biting my lip and determined not to waver. Slowly other noises reached me. The creak of a pipe that sounded like a footstep – even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear a footstep under water, then the hollow drip of something into water – more like a subdued splash than a drip.

The book I’d most disliked at infant school had been the Pied Piper because the thought of all the rats following him, plague-infected, sharp-toothed, evil-eyed, swarming everywhere, had made me shudder. What if there were rats down here? What if the drip was the sudden immersion of a rat body as it dropped into foul water and swum steadily towards me? How many droplets had I heard? Five, ten, twenty. How many had there been whilst I was counting? There could be thousands of rats steadily making their way towards me – an army of gnawing, scratching vermin. My heart skipped a beat and turned into a drum pounding irregularly in my chest. My skin crawled with fear – the sensation of a thousand small bodies covering me in a rancid blanket of fur and limb and teeth. I shivered and panic rose further still. A wave of icy cold followed by nauseating heat swept over my body like fever, leaving me trembling uncontrollably and wanting to scream, scream, scream but no noise came out. I suffocated, voice paralysed like it is in a nightmare, but this was no nightmare – it was real. My legs were so cold from the freezing water, I knew I’d wet myself but I couldn’t feel it. All my being was fixed on not being overcome by the rats and consumed by their yellowed spike teeth and scrabbling claws. I opened my mouth again and this time the terror poured out just as light flooded in and blinded me.

‘Kenny?’ It was Win. I scrambled back up the stairs on all fours, feet slipping on the rickety steps and hands grabbing at anything within reach. Win hauled me up the last couple and I stood retching and panting in the middle of the group. ‘They shouldn’t have left you in so long. I said only five minutes – not half an hour. You OK?’ I nodded wildly, teeth chattering and stomach rolling over and over; so relieved to be out – even though wet and stinking – and away from whatever had been down in that cellar, I would have danced and sung, and even shared my coloured ink pen with him if he’d asked. ‘That’s all right then. You passed by the way. You’re one of the Winners now – get it?’ He nudged me in the ribs and grinned delightedly at his gang’s name.

It was seemingly innocent to start with – the boyish ‘initiation’ and then the cosy camaraderie of belonging, but innocence is lost so easily. By then Win was going on fourteen and you didn’t stay a kid long in a children’s home. The group leaders progressed to disagreeing about such things as treasure division and privileges, and then to overt rivalry and finally to outright, but secret, war. It was but a short step for the dissenting members to defect and re-group. After Win’s derogatory jibe at some of the absconders, calling them the ‘Losers’ to his ‘Winners’, there were two gangs. They renamed themselves the ‘Looters’. Win and I were ‘Winners’. Although I was still only a junior member, I sensed the untapped aggression in Win that I‘ve seen so many times since in defendants – and victims – which tells me then and there that whatever they may claim, undoubtedly the desire for trouble originated from them. At ten, I could only put it down to a sense of unease which had no real root cause, other than merely being there at all.

Win made his bid for power not long afterwards. It started with a series of brawls ending with Win victorious. Once installed as gang boss of the Winners he set about naming his lackeys. I was one of them.

‘Can’t leave you out little bruv,’ even though I would have rather become as insignificant as Georgie. For a while I remained relatively safe, running the errands, being lookout, stashing ill-gotten gains, or recovering them. It wasn’t so bad. As long as I said nothing and did as I was told, I was safe, nestling under the protective wing of big brother Win and his buddies. Of course it had to come to a crunch some time though. I could neither stay far enough out of their activities to remain prissily ‘clean’ or resist being drawn in to the properly initiated – and not simply by standing in a flooded cellar in mortal fear of my own imaginings. It started with small things. Lifting something from Woollies, nicking fags from the corner shop at the end of the road – constantly under fire from the orphanage kids, apart from being Win’s original source of booty under the guise of his paper boy role. I’m surprised it stayed in business as long as it did.

The crunch came about six months after Win’s coronation as King of the Winners, when I had to join in a raid on a rival gang outside the home. At the pre-fight pep talk, when I was handed my set of knuckledusters I knew it would be the first time I would have to make an absolute choice – to run with the wolves or be eaten by them. That time I managed to be part of the pack without fully joining it, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before the next time came round and I would be pushed to the fore. It came a month later. Another raid, but this time on the local café where there were some bikers Win had had an argument with over a girl. Of course he wasn’t really bothered – he was fourteen and a half – but pride was at stake. As naïve as I was, it seemed unlikely that bikers – in their late teens – were going to be content with mere knuckledusters in a fight.

And I was right. It was the night that Tony Roberts got knifed.

They pushed me forwards alongside him and, to his credit, he elbowed me back when the biker with the dreads and scar on his cheek advanced on us. I was glad it was dark because no-one saw my cowardice, but I think he knew. I screeched my thin childish ‘watch it,’ wondering whose high-pitched wail it was that was piercing the thicker heavier sounds of bone on bone, and fists in flight as the knife blade flashed and then Tony stumbled backwards clutching his stomach as if he was belly-laughing. The blood streamed through his fingers as he staggered and then crumpled to the floor next to me. The biker froze, bloodied knife pointed at me but at Tony’s ‘ahh’ that rose in volume until it sounded like a banshee wail, he sheathed it and the whole gang seemed to melt away in a roar of exhaust. Only the heavy fug of petrol fumes and Tony’s agony remained hanging in the air. It all happened in slow motion for me and I can still replay the scene in fine detail if I allow myself – my first real encounter with death. I was still staring at Tony and his red top when Win dragged me away, finally finding enough voice to protest about leaving Tony behind.

‘Jesus Christ, Kenny! Shut the fuck up! He’s snuffed it – do you want to get us all caught?’ I hadn’t realised until then that I’d been screaming. Win collected up the weaponry from us and it was carried away to the secret stash in the gun emplacement. We all made a vow of secrecy – on pain of suffering Tony’s fate at Win’s hand – and slipped away to our dorms. Tony’s body was found the next morning after he’d been reported missing at breakfast. From that point on life changed again – from impending fear of violence to continual fear of being caught. Lennox’s advice came back twofold about keeping lives separate and I purposely distanced myself from all and every source of trouble at school. Whereas the initiation in the cellar had been my downfall, that was probably my saving. I had no choice now at the home. I was an initiate. Death and joint guilt had made me one. When Win told us what to do, I no longer flinched from my duty, whereas at school, I was the quietly clever child who did no wrong. I always remembered Tony, and it was the determination to never be falling backwards with a knife in my gut that kept me safe until Jaggers arrived.

‘I
f I tell you about all this stuff, how are you going to get me off? You ain’t God.’

‘No, but I have a one hundred per cent success rate in court – that means I always win.’ The social worker – Miss Roumelia – raised her eyebrows at that. OK, it was a boast and probably not strictly true, but the kid needed to hear it.

‘Shit, no way – really?’ He stared at me like I was an alien – or one of the universe leapers from the stolen video he’d been charged for originally.

‘Cool. You’re as good as God then?’ I considered it. Maybe I was, for him.

‘But I can’t win without you telling me what went on so I know what I have to do to win. That’s why I need you to tell me the truth. Will you do that now?’

‘Do I have to tell you everything?’

‘Everything that’s relevant.’

‘Rellyvent?’

‘That makes a difference to things.’

‘Oh.’ He looked at me and wrinkled his nose as he thought about the proposition.’ ‘How’d I know what’s rellyvent?’

‘Well, try telling me something and we’ll test it out.’

‘Me Dad’s a fence.’ An admission I wasn’t surprised by but didn’t want to have to record. I exchanged glances with Miss Roumelia and she shrugged. I’d expected her to be shocked but her expression said
you asked ...
I suppose like me – but for different reasons – it wasn’t an unusual profession for her clients to be in. ‘Nothing big – just phones and TV’s – that kind of stuff. He smokes too much to go proper burglering. He’d never be able to leg it fast enough!’ The boy laughed harshly. Getting his father a prison sentence wasn’t going to help the boy out of care or off my list so I decided to diplomatically explain the ‘rules’.

‘OK, Danny, remember how I said that anything you told me, I would know, and anything you didn’t I wouldn’t know? Well there are some things I might not
need
to know in case they get someone unrelated to this case in trouble. Those are the irrelevant things. Do you think you’ll be able to tell which things I need to know –
the relevant things
– and which I don’t because it’s unrelated to your defence?’

The boy’s eyes glazed over as he considered my complicated meanings. I wondered what the truth was about his supposed intelligence, but his response suggested it might be his way of internally processing information.

‘You mean, don’t tell you me Dad’s a fence in case you have to tell someone else an’ he gets sent down?’

‘Something like that.’

‘OK, so what about other stuff where I do want them to get sent down?’

‘If it’s wrong-doing that needs punishing, then you should tell me.’

‘Right.’ He paused and a sly smile spread across his face. ‘So, me Dad’s a fence and me Mum has it off with blokes for money when the rent needs paying.’

‘Danny, you don’t really mean that – remember what Mr Juste said about wrong-doing and being punished if he knew about it?’ This time Miss Roumelia did look concerned. ‘Don’t you want to be able to go home when this is all over?’

‘They shoved me out. They should get done too.’ The boy looked her coolly in the eyes. She stared back, open-mouthed. Perhaps she had as little real experience of kids as I had, despite her job. His anger was my anger, from years ago, but I had moulded mine into determination to reach the top – to show them it didn’t matter they’d abandoned and rejected me when I was young and vulnerable. I would never be vulnerable again – just as no-one would never matter to me again. I stopped short of damning people these days. It had been a long hard road to get to there, though. Danny had only just started his journey, and I was at risk of becoming part of it. Whatever they’d done I gave them a get-out clause more because Danny needed one – a get out from a children’s home.