– Don’t worry, Harvey, she said gently, in that beautiful caring voice that I will always love until I die. It’s me. I’m here.
– Mum! I breathed, choking on it. My mum was here, at last! And a huge weight lifted from my chest.
Bear with me. Psychology’s involved.
This miraculous, beautiful, fizzing mother in the salamander dress – more real than the real-life unremembered one ever was, I assure you – had wrapped me up in love. It was weird; she was sort of internal and external at the same time – a bit like God, I guess, or a good marketing message.
– This is what you do, she said. You’re to go straight to the matron. Now.
I was going to object, but she held up a hand to stop me. Her nails were painted a delicate peach. As we walked back towards the low red-brick building that was home, Mum told me I had a dad who’d duff Craig up, if he tried to threaten me again. And she let me know – quite how I’m not exactly sure, the memory’s hazy – that Dad was as strong as a tanker, and tough like cowboys in old movies. She also told me that Dad’s elder brother, Uncle Sid, was rooting for me too. So by the time I reached Mrs Lardy’s office, I was feeling quite euphoric about my new situation. I knocked hard on the door, high up, where a grown-up’s hand would knock, then strode in and sat down on the big chair in front of her desk. Mrs Lardy couldn’t hide her surprise at seeing a kid sitting there, dripping on to the floor.
– What are you doing here? Is that – she’s peering at my collar – is that Spirogyra?
– I’ve come to complain, I go. The charter of this facility states clearly that it’s your job to look after the children in your care, and I’m afraid you are failing in your duty.
Her eyes widened as I carried on. Weird, but I don’t quite know, to this day, where the grown-up words were coming from. It was true, I’d studied the charter the same way I’ll study any piece of paperwork, I guess. But quoting it at her like that – well, she must have thought I’d aged ten years in ten minutes. I knew better, of course, than to tell Mrs Lardy about my mother (who had dissolved for now, but was, I knew, on standby), but I told her the rest of the story, in a way I never could’ve done before.
– So I want something done, I said after I’d done this long spiel about the charter. Meanwhile I shall be sending an e-mail to the local authority about the standards of care in this institution.
She was pretty gobsmacked, I can tell you. But I think she was pleased too, because when I’d finished, she smiled, and said she thought I’d turned a corner.
Mum was as good as her word about Dad and Uncle Sid. They came to me that evening in the dormitory.
– I’m on your side, son, whispered Dad. And I always will be. Remember that.
– You’re our special boy, said Sid. Craig won’t lift a finger against you again.
And the funny thing was, he didn’t. The moment my family stepped out of the wings, I became immune to bullying. Nothing touched me. Nobody could hurt me. It was like I carried a bubble of safety around me. Craig got on with his career in commercials. He didn’t pick on me any more. He ignored me. No, more than that: he avoided me, like he was scared to come close.
It was the vibes.
It was only years later, when I got hauled into Head Office, that I actually had to go into the psychological mechanics of it – which were simple enough. How could any child grow up in a children’s home and not know that something big was missing? How could you avoid it, when you saw mums and dads with their shrieking kids in the open air, getting tangled in a kite and swearing, fighting over the last peanut-butter sandwich, or chucking a stick for a drooly Labrador? I knew happiness when I saw it. It didn’t all happen at once. It was organic, my family tree.
It grew from that one magic acorn of shock.
My older sister and younger brother first appeared about a year after I’d met Mum, Dad and Uncle Sid. I must’ve felt pretty much adored by the grown-ups in the family to risk introducing other kids who were a potential threat – but overall, it panned out pretty well, once I’d learned to keep my brother in his place.
The money side of things evolved organically too.
It was a labour of love deciding what they’d all look like and then doing the biz with my photomontage graphics package. For Mum, I first scanned in Mrs Lardy, and morphed her with a very skinny nurse from a TV soap, then superimposed the Tragic Princess. Somehow, through some further nifty palette-mixing, I ended up with a face that was pretty close to that of the ravishing salamander-woman I’d first seen by the biology pond after Craig Devon had administered his ‘purge’. Although I should really have called her Gloria, her official Christian name, to me she was just ‘Mum’. Dad was called Rick, and he was a combination of St Francis of Assisi, from an oil painting I downloaded from my Medieval Art CD, and a footballer I cut out from the back of a cornflakes packet, and scanned in. Uncle Sid was much older than Dad, more like a grandfather really, and I generated his picture from the policeman on the Say No To Drugs campaign. I swapped the left and right-hand sides of his face around, and relocated his eyes to make them friendlier. Then just added a moustache, took away the uniform, gave him a pumping-iron sort of body – too young for his age, really – and stuck a big scar on one cheek.
My sister Lola had freckles and pigtails and all the usual big-sister stuff. I scanned her in from the ‘after’ picture in an advertisement for spot cream, and superimposed a girl from a centrefold. I left the breasts in, so I guess from the start there was a hint of incest. Although I’d reckoned I always wanted a brother, once I had Cameron up and running, I never quite warmed to him, and often thought about killing him off altogether. He had a nerdy, I-haven’t-got-any-friends sort of face. The basis was a kid in one of Mrs Lardy’s ancient knitting patterns, but I morphed it with three separate baseball players. I made him smaller and skinnier than me, and then gave him crooked teeth, because even then I was jealous of him. Sibling rivalry. It’s pretty much normal, I think.
It was plain sailing after that. It’s easy enough to convince a set of machines that somebody exists. You trawl through old newspapers to get hold of dead people, resurrect their identities, generate their birth certificates by back-dooring into the Statistics Office, kick-start the automatic posting system, change their names by deed poll, generate a new set of paperwork, and Bob’s your uncle.
Or in my case, Sid.
Once I’d established their identities on-line, we were in business.
– Which would you prefer, begins John after breakfast.
We’re back in the cabin. Him sewing, me chewing A4 sheets torn from the criminal dossiers by the bed.
– Being stripped naked by Captain Fishook, who barbecues your goolies over red-hot charcoal pellets, or a JCB comes along and lifts you up on its arm thing and hangs you upside-down in a bath of piranha fish that gobble up your eyes and leave like, just the hollow sockets?
– Goolies and pellets, probably, I sigh. But actually, mate, I’m not really in the mood.
– Atlantica, he goes. He’s embroidering again. – Liberty Day, he breathes. Harbourville.
He knows how just the sound of things can knot up my intestines.
– And other stuff, I say. His Final Adjustment, is what I mean. – So can we just not talk, for a change? Can we just shut the fuck up?
He doesn’t like this. His voice changes to wheedling, but there’s menace behind it.
– C’mon, kiddie. Let’s have a conversation. Or a story. I don’t mind which.