She looks at me quizzically. Clearly, I’m expected to know something. Now she is trying to decide whether to continue.
“Bobby’s father wasn’t allowed at the school,” she says. “He had a court order taken out against him when Bobby was in the second grade. Didn’t Bobby tell you any of this?”
“No.”
She shakes her head. Beads swing from side to side. “I raised the alarm. Bobby had wet himself in class twice in a few weeks. Then he soiled his pants and spent most of the afternoon hiding in the boys’ toilets. He was upset. When I asked him what was wrong he wouldn’t say. I took him to the school nurse. She found him another pair of trousers. That’s when she noticed the welts on his legs. It looked as though he’d been beaten.”
The school nurse followed the normal procedure and informed the deputy headmistress who, in turn, notified the Department of Social Services. I know the process by heart. A duty social worker would have taken the referral. It was then discussed with an area manager. The dominoes started falling— medical examinations, interviews, allegations, denials, case conferences, “at risk” findings, interim care orders, appeals— each tumbling into the next.
“Tell me about the court order,” I ask.
She recalls only scant details. Allegations of sexual abuse, which the father denied. A restraining order. Chaperoning Bobby between classes.
“The police investigated but I don’t know the outcome. The deputy headmistress dealt with the social workers and police.”
“Is she still around?”
“No. She resigned eighteen months ago; family reasons.”
“What happened to Bobby?”
“He changed. He had a stillness about him that you don’t see in most children. A lot of the teachers found it very unnerving.” She stares into her teacup, tilting it gently back and forth. “When his father died he became even more isolated. It was as though he was on the outside, with his face pressed against the glass.”
“Do you think Bobby was abused?”
“St. Mary’s is in a very poor area, Dr. O’Loughlin. In some households just waking up in the morning is a form of abuse.”
I know almost nothing about cars. I can fill them with petrol, put air in the tires and water in the radiator, but I have no interest in makes, models or the dynamics of the modern combustion engine. Usually I take no notice of other vehicles on the road but today it’s different. I keep seeing a white van. I noticed it first this morning when I left the Albion Hotel. It was parked opposite. The other cars were covered in frost, but not the van. The windshield and back window had ragged circles of clear glass.
The same white van— or another one just like it— is parked on a delivery ramp opposite Louise Elwood’s shop. The back doors are open. I can see Hessian sacks inside, lining the floor. There must be hundreds of white vans in Liverpool: perhaps a whole fleet of them belonging to a courier company.
After last night I’m seeing phantoms lurking in every doorway and sitting in cars. I walk across the market square, stopping at a department store window. Studying the reflection, I can see the square behind me. Nobody is following.
I haven’t eaten. Seeking out warmth, I find a cafe on the first floor of a shopping arcade, overlooking the atrium. From my table I can watch the escalators.
H. L. Mencken— journalist, beer drinker and sage— said that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. I share his mistrust for the obvious.
At university I drove my lecturers to distraction by constantly questioning straightforward assumptions. “Why can’t you just accept things as they are?” they asked. “Why
Nature isn’t like that. If evolution had been about simple answers we would all have bigger brains and not watch
Bobby Morgan— I’ll call him by his real name now— had many of the hallmarks of sexual abuse. Even so, I don’t want it to be true. I have grown to like Lenny Morgan. He did a lot of things right when he raised Bobby. People warmed to him. Bobby adored him.
Perhaps Lenny had two sides to his personality. There is nothing to stop an abuser being a safe, loving figure. It would certainly explain his suicide. It could also be the reason why Bobby needed two personalities to survive.
11
Social Services keeps files on children who have been sexually abused. I once had full access to them, but I’m no longer part of the system. The privacy laws are compelling.
I need help from someone I haven’t seen in more than a decade. Her name is Melinda Cossimo and I’m worried I might not recognize her. We arrange to meet in a coffee shop opposite the Magistrates Court.
When I first arrived in Liverpool Mel was a duty social worker. Now she’s an area manager (they call it a “child protection specialist”). Not many people last this long in social services. They either burn out or blow up.
Mel was your original punk, with spiky hair and a wardrobe of distressed leather jackets and torn denim. She was always challenging everyone’s opinions because she liked to see people stand up for their beliefs, whether she agreed with them or not.
Growing up in Cornwall, she had listened to her father, a local fisherman, pontificate on the distinction between “men’s work” and “women’s work.” Almost predictably, she became an ardent feminist and author of “When Women Wear the Pants”— her doctoral thesis. Her father must be turning in his grave.
Mel’s husband, Boyd, a Lancashire lad, wore khaki pants, turtleneck sweaters and rolled his own cigarettes. Tall and thin, he went gray at nineteen but kept his hair long and tied back in a ponytail. I only ever saw it loose once, in the showers after we had played badminton.
They were great hosts. We’d get together most weekends for dinner parties on Boyd’s run-down terrace, with its “wind chime” garden and cannabis plants growing in an old fishpond. We were all overworked, underappreciated and yet still idealistic. Julianne played the guitar and Mel had a voice like Joni Mitchell. We ate vegetarian feasts, drank too much wine, smoked a little dope and righted the wrongs of the world. The hangovers lasted until Monday and the flatulence until midweek.
Mel makes a face at me through the window. Her hair is straight and pinned back from her face. She’s wearing dark trousers and a tailored beige jacket. A white ribbon is pinned to her lapel. I can’t remember what charity it represents.
“Is this the management look?”
“No, it’s middle age.” She laughs, grateful to sit down. “These shoes are killing me.” She kicks them off and rubs her ankles.
“Shopping?”
“An appointment in the children’s court— an emergency care order.”
“Good result?”
“It could have been worse.”
I get the coffees while she minds the table. I know she’s checking me out— trying to establish how much has changed. Do we still have things in common? Why have I suddenly surfaced? The caring profession is a suspicious one.
“So what happened to your ear?”
“Got bitten by a dog.”
