superpowers. And he’d come in with an armload of Superman and Spiderman and X-Man and Daredevil-Man, and sit on that sofa –’ she nodded towards the living room, one skin of brickwork away on the other side of the wall that faced her ‘for hours. In his own little world.
‘Then I found the poem.’
Tom’s face darkened at the word. ‘Show him,’ he suggested. ‘Show it to him.’
‘I don’t know if I kept it,’ Jean said. And then, abandoning the subterfuge immediately, ‘All right.’
She got up and turned her chair round. Using it as an ad hoc stepladder, she climbed up onto the seat and reached into the space on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. A moment later she got down again and handed me a sheet of paper: lined, folded into four, ragged along the left-hand edge where it had been torn from a pad or an exercise book.
I opened it up and read in silence. Twelve lines in small, neat handwriting with only one crossing-out.
The crossing out was in the fifth line.
‘Mark wrote this?’ I asked.
Jean nodded. ‘Or copied it from somewhere. And he gave it to Billy as a present. Because he thought Billy would get what he was going on about, Billy being such a bright little lad. So after that–’
‘I put my foot down,’ Tom said. ‘I told him to have nothing to do with Mark. Not even to talk to him. I said if he did, I’d stop his pocket money and pull him out of the school football team.’
Jean took the sheet of paper out of my hands and folded it up again, as though its dangerous doggerel had to be silenced. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she assured me. ‘So that was that, we thought. And then in the summer — I suppose that would be a year ago, wouldn’t it, so you’re right, Tom, it must be longer since she went — in the summer Mark jumped off the walkway out there and killed himself. And it came out at the inquest that he’d been cutting himself. For years. Which was what he was telling us, if we’d only cared enough to listen.’ She waved the sheet of paper like a tiny white flag of surrender. ‘What can you say, Mister Castor?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘What kind of love did he get at home, if his mother ups and leaves him for a brickie with a fancy hairdo, and his father is an animal who just hits out all the time at everyone around him? It was for me to say something, and I only thought about Billy. About my own.’
She relapsed into dismal silence. Tom seemed thrown by the sudden detour into moral philosophy, but he struggled on manfully.
‘We didn’t discuss it with Billy,’ he said. ‘John knew all about it, of course, because they were talking about it up and down the estate, but Billy mostly stays at home and does his own thing, like. He’s got his Playstation and his books. Or he goes off wandering, sometimes, with his mates. There’s half a dozen of them — no harm in any of them, not like the bloody teenagers we’ve got round here.
‘But as Jeanie says, Billy’s not stupid. He knew Mark had gone, and I imagine there was talk at school about what had happened. Must have been, mustn’t there? Anyway, he started brooding about it. Next thing we knew, he’s cutting stuff out of the newspapers and taping bits off the TV news. I suppose it hit him hard, this lad living right next door to him and being sort of his friend and everything.’
‘His best friend,’ Jean said softly.
Tom looked at her and shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There was five years between them.’
‘He gave Billy the poem,’ Jean said, talking to me more than to her husband. ‘That had to have meant something. I told you he had no friends his own age, Mister Castor. I think he thought Billy understood him. I think it must have hit him very hard when Billy stopped talking to him.’
She trailed off into silence.
There was an elephant in the living room with us, and I felt that it was time to try wrangling it a little. ‘When did Billy’s hands start to bleed?’ I asked.
Tom blanched at this blunt wording, but Jean took it squarely on the chin. ‘That was later,’ she said, her voice almost level. ‘The dreams came first.’
‘He dreamed about Mark?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really. At least, he didn’t see Mark in his dreams. He dreamed about a place. It was really dark there — so dark you couldn’t see anything, not even yourself. And he’d stumble around for a while, trying to find a way out. But he never could, so in the end he’d just sit down on the ground and wait.
‘The ground . . .’ She hesitated, as if she really didn’t know how to say this. ‘He said it was warm. Like skin. But not soft like skin: it was all ridged and rough and shiny. He said it was like lava after a volcano. When it’s cooled, he said, you get miles and miles of this stuff like the surface of the moon.’ She smiled faintly. ‘He’d just done volcanoes at school.
‘And then he’d start to hear this voice, in the darkness. And he was sure it was Mark’s voice, even though he said it didn’t sound anything like. But there it was, this voice droning on and on. Not really talking to Billy, so he said. Just talking.’
‘About what?’
She gave me a slightly haunted look. ‘What do you think? About hurting yourself. Cutting yourself open. About the way it feels when you cut into yourself and let the pain out. About how wounds are roses and blood is wine.’
One of those leaden silences fell between us: the kind where everyone is expecting someone else to be the next to speak, and it gets more awkward the longer you leave it.
‘Did the news articles mention that Mark was a self-harmer? ’ I asked.
‘Some of them,’ said Tom. ‘But he could have got most of it from the poem, couldn’t he? It’s all there. We just tried talking him out of it at first, because he’s bright and he’s a good lad, like Jeanie said. We thought it would be a nine days’ wonder, like most things are when you’re that age. We took the tapes and all the bits of paper away and locked them in a cupboard. And we kicked him out when he got back after school to play in the adventure playground or over in the park. We thought he just needed his mind taking off it.’
‘And that,’ said Jean, with heavy finality, ‘was when the bleeding started. Just a drop, at first, but how can you have blood, Mister Castor, if you haven’t cut yourself? And the more we wiped it away, the more it came. We took him in to see the GP, and then a dermatologist, but they don’t have a clue. They were talking about our Billy being a haemophiliac, as though that explains it. But his blood clots normally if you test it, so it isn’t that.’
‘And that bloody priest . . .’ Tom interposed, but then he seemed to think better of that line of discussion and
