Too many ghosts in me.
In my world, there are no rules.
The children’s home was right. I’m evil to the bone. I’m not Christlike.
It will take a fucking miracle to change me.
3
ME
MRS BLACK SAID my mummy was too busy working the streets to write. She said my mummy only dragged me to the church, instead of drowning me, because she couldn’t find a bucket.
But Diana Dunn, a foster support agent, told me a different story. I was just ‘the baby’, until Diana gave me a name. I was found on the steps of Greystone Church, a baby in a basket. Diana said I was a gift. Beautiful and mysterious like Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia painting.
A reading lamp lights what’s left of Diana in her room. I had her transported to Swan Lake the second the deed was transferred into my name. I’ve put her in Crow Ward. Nobody else lives on this side of the estate, except for her private nurse, Jennifer. Diana deserves the best care I can give her. I feel guilt for not visiting her enough. Paying for her care was never enough.
She’s so thin, she could be a puppet. Her yellow hands are crossed on her chest.
‘Now there’s a face,’ Diana whistles. ‘Sit down here, handsome.’ She smiles, her teeth a row of bombed houses.
Diana is fifty-eight years old. She’s too young to get Alzheimer’s, and now breast cancer. She’s as good as dead, under the ground. That’s what they’ve told me. I’m not gonna believe it.
When I was a kid, Diana told me a letter was left with me as a baby, but Mrs Black had stolen it. I figured it was senile talk.
‘You alright?’ I say.
‘I like Greystone’s forest close. And all the things that live in it, badgers and owls. I could sit all day listening to the trees sing. Hold my hand. I want to feel male warmth.’
I take her hand and hold it. I can feel knotted bones, fragile skin. ‘What do the trees sing?’
‘All the lowlifes who inhabit Greystone.’
‘Do you know who I am, Diana?’
‘Of course I do. You’re Greystone’s little Shepherd in the basket.’
Sometimes, Diana is real. Remembers. It never lasts. I take my window of opportunity.
I put Diana’s hand back on the bed, and take the letter out from my inside pocket. I find the photo and give it to her.
‘You were right. My mum did leave a letter with me. My mum . . . she was Violet Adams.’
Diana whistles through her remaining teeth. ‘Dear God . . . You’re Violet’s little baby.’ She edges upright in bed.
‘Did you know her?’
‘I did. Such a tragic life she lived.’
‘What was she like?’
‘She was pale, blue-eyed. She was very much like you, except for the eyes. She was the wild, bad girl of Greystone. She lived at the edge of Devil’s Woods in a broken-down cottage with a drunken mother and a long-gone daddy. By the time she was thirteen, she was knocked up and this small town’s dirty little secret.’
We sit in silence while I try to make good on my wild thoughts. My brain can’t hit the spot, can’t stop rocking. It’s like trying to pin a jellyfish to the wall.
‘I tried to look out for her,’ Diana says. ‘But I was ancient compared to a teenage girl. I did my best. I did.’ She smiles. ‘She had real in her singing voice. Sang like an angel. The girl would have burnt the stage down.’
I keep still, feel the dead drawing in. ‘Have I any family here?’
‘None at all. Your grandfather left when your mother was a child and your grandmother died long ago. They had no other children.’
I swallow hard. ‘And my father?’
‘None as would admit to it. Your mother was thirteen years old when you were born. She kept the father a secret. I think . . . I think she was a very frightened little girl.’
I tap my boot against the wooden floor. The need to fill my lungs with a nicotine hit consumes me.
‘Shepherd, I’m so sorry what they did to you in the children’s home. I didn’t know.’
‘I know you didn’t. Don’t carry guilt that isn’t yours, Diana. Don’t ever blame yourself.’
She swallows a lump in her throat. ‘It broke my heart when they took you away and locked you up in that hell.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
Bad choices, it was mine.
Where I sit in my head it’s like being on the bottom of a hot sunken pit. I can’t see anything else around me, no matter how hard I try.
A scuffling noise from the doorway tugs me out of my depressing thoughts.
I twist around and see . . . Amy.
She’s hiding like a little mouse. Just off to the side of the door, in a halo of light from the corridor.
‘Amy,’ I say. ‘I can see you. Don’t make me drag you in.’
She turns around slowly and treads into the room. She’s in a thin white cotton dress. Her long straight sunshine hair is twisted into the shape of a little white brain on the back of her head. She’s not wearing makeup, but her face is flawless.
Amy clicks and un-clicks a ballpoint pen in one hand. Again and again and again.
My heart starts to thump hard like a bass drum.
Were you eavesdropping, Amy? Did you hear something not meant for your ears? You’d better not have, because it’s none of your goddamn business.
‘Were you listening in on private conversation, Amy?’
‘N-No . . . ’ Amy says.
Diana cuts in. ‘Shepherd, mind she doesn’t get her hands on your willy. Just look at her — she’s sex-mad.’
I laugh. ‘Yeah, she looks it, Diana. Gotta agree on that.’
