Panic squeezed her throat, and gooseflesh rose down her forearms. What was this? Her mind – always primed to expect the worst – launched like a firework, spinning crazily through a ruined future where the police knocked on the door, where she had to find the money for solicitors, where people spat at them in the street and broke their windows, whether Patrick was found guilty or not.
Then she realized that the photo was not so much black and white as sepia.
And that the child was dead.
She gasped and bent her head over it more intently, with the little bedside alarm clock ticking suddenly loudly in her ears.
This was beyond odd.
The little girl in the picture was aged about five. Her face was pinched and workhouse poor, but her flaxen hair had been brushed and a dark ribbon tied into it over one bony temple. She wore a long, carefully arranged dress full of lace frills and impractical flounces. It was a dress worn only for such photos, Sarah guessed – likely to have been provided by the photographer, and probably the only decent dress the little girl would ever have worn.
The child in the picture was propped on a chair; Sarah could just see the tips of her shiny black shoes dangling below the pristine hem. The girl’s eyes were closed, but that might just have been the taking of the photograph, Sarah knew. Those Victorians had to keep utterly still during long exposures, and children often couldn’t make it. They blinked, they twitched, they yawned… they blurred. So the eyes might have been caught mid-blink.
No, it was the hands that gave it away.
A cheap doll had been placed on the girl’s lap and her arms arranged around it, as if she were holding a favourite toy. But this child’s hands were beyond holding. The wrists were curled inwards, and the fingers were slack – and the photographer had failed to notice that the pinkie on the girl’s left hand was bent backwards under the doll, in a way that no living child would have suffered.
This girl was dead.
Somewhere Sarah had heard of such photos, but she had never seen one. Pictures taken of the dead for their families to remember them by, in a time when few could afford to spend precious pennies on such fripperies for the living.
She felt overwhelming relief, then gave a short, nervous laugh at the thought that she could be relieved by finding a picture of a dead child among her son’s possessions.
Her brief illusion of normality popped like a soap bubble and she looked out across the Beacons, where sunlight illuminated the very top of Penyfan, throwing its swooping drop into ominous shadow. She remembered the day Patrick had been suspended from school – how she’d swayed on that crest, staring into the abyss, while fingers of mist caressed her calves and encouraged her to take a closer look.
She hadn’t been back since. This was close enough.
She heard again the smooth, cultured voice of Professor Madoc on the phone a few days after Patrick’s interview – talking in careful circles, tying her up in condescending knots about empathic response and special requirements – and her registering none of it but the single word ‘quota’. Patrick had got into college because of their disability quota. That was the bottom line. Not because he had smashed national academic records in A-level biology and zoology, but because of his Asperger’s Syndrome.
Professor Madoc could patronize her till the cows came home, but she wasn’t stupid; she’d had an education once; she’d had a life! And no amount of politically correct verbal acrobatics could hide the fact that, although they were letting him take anatomy, Professor Madoc thought there might be something badly amiss with Patrick.
At the time she’d felt killing tears scorch her eyes. Now – sitting on her son’s bed, with his cryptic notebook in one hand and a photograph of a dead child in the other – she wasn’t sure he was wrong.
6
PATRICK LAY ON his back and watched the clouds obey the breeze. The sheep-shorn grass was warm under him, and the smell of hay drifted over him from the farm in the valley below. Good enough to eat.
On late-summer days like this, with his eyes starting to close, it was easy to imagine his father was still alive – lying beside him in a silence that had only ever been broken by a quiet word or a gentle snore.
But even in this warm cocoon, he could never remember his father without thinking of that day…
He’d followed him out of the school gates, staring at the back of his blue overalls, and at the Doc Martens with the steel toecaps that felt like lead when he stepped into them at home to play Deep Sea Diver.
His father rarely walked so fast, so Patrick guessed he had forgotten he was behind him. Every few paces, Patrick had to break into a jog just to keep up.
He was glad to be out of school. Everybody looking at him, and all the loud words. Nobody had seen Mark Bennett punch him in the back. No adult, at least. But they had all come running to pick the bigger boy off the ground, and they had all seen the blood. Mr Jenkins had shouted and asked him if he understood how wrong he’d been, but Patrick didn’t feel wrong, and couldn’t lie about it, which made Mr Jenkins even louder. Then, when his father had arrived, Mr Jenkins had been loud with him, as if he were eight years old, too.
‘Follow me,’ his father had said as he left, without looking at him, and so that’s what Patrick had done – followed him out of the school gates and down towards the town.
The garage was at the other end of Brecon. Patrick knew he would sit and wait in Mr Harris’s broken chair in the grimy little office, which was always covered with pink invoices and black fingerprints, with Miss February forever on the calendar. Her name was Justine, she liked beach volleyball and kittens, and her nipples were dark brown.
Near the bookies, his father turned and took Patrick’s hand and started to pull him across the quiet road. Patrick stiffened. His father never just grabbed his hand without warning! The feeling of it made him want to scream. He twisted free and stepped back towards the kerb. His father spun on his heel.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Patrick! Take my hand!’
The car hit him so hard that it knocked him out of his shoes. One moment his father was coming towards him with his hand outstretched; the next there was a space, with only the Doc Marten boots to show where he’d been – one lying on its side, the other rolling awkwardly down the road, like a dumped dog trying to find its way home.
The car never stopped.
Patrick breathed hard into that space for a long, deafening moment, then slowly started to follow the second boot. Further up the road, people were running. Running from shops and cars, and out of the bookies. Running away from him.
Patrick reached the second boot, which now stood on the white line, upright and obedient, the way his father left it in the hallway every night.
All the running people had stopped in a bundle further up the road. Between their legs, Patrick could see something blue lying on the tarmac. Blue and jumbled, and with angles that made no sense.
‘Don’t let him come here!’ shouted the Milky Way man. ‘Keep him there!’
A young man in a striped shirt blocked his way, and Patrick stopped before he could be touched.
‘What’s his name?’ said Stripy over his shoulder.
‘Don’t know,’ said Milky Way. ‘Just keep him there.’
‘What’s your name, boyo?’ said Stripey.
Patrick ignored the question and craned around him, desperate to see what everyone was looking at. Then someone moved and – just for a second – Patrick saw his father’s eyes.