‘Anyway, all of this bullshit is too rich for the neighbours’ blood. Complaints and formal warnings follow, and the housing department, as soon they’ve made their nod to the house rules, pick Kenny up by the scruff of the neck and drop him into the oubliette. I mean the Salisbury. There are no employment records from around then, by the way, but we’ve got him signing on at the social and showing up in the DSS database. He’s got a dodgy back and he’s on some kind of invalidity benefit. But he’s still got the two bedrooms, so I guess we can assume that his lady friend sticks around despite the abuse. Maybe the bad back makes him less free and easy with the backhanders. She goes AWOL soon after, though. Kenny reports her missing on 16 December 2005. Police file the report, then do nothing, which is fairly typical copping for a missing-persons notice. File hasn’t been added to since and, like I said, the name goes nowhere.’
He started in on a fairly arid list of other official agencies whose records proved Kenny’s continued existence. ‘What about the kid?’ I said, cutting him off before he could get a head of steam going: I needed to see the wood right now. Individual trees could be examined later.
Nicky looked aggrieved. ‘I was coming to the kid.’
‘I know, Nicky. But visiting hours are almost over. Let’s not piss off matron any more than we can help, eh? This is Mark, right? The boy who died?’
‘Right. Birth certificate has Mark Blainey. Local school records had him down as Mark Seddon.’
‘But he’s not Kenny’s son?’
‘No reason to think so, since he’s living with his mother at seven different addresses that don’t have Kenny in them before they all wind up together in Walworth. But she tends to give him the surname of whoever she’s shacking up with at the time. Maybe she’s an old-fashioned girl at heart — or maybe she thinks it helps the family to bond. But it’s kind of a moot point now, since, as you already pointed out, the kid is dead.’
I felt a twinge of formless regret, thinking of that bare bedroom like an inadequate mausoleum: a memorial to a life, but from which all the visible signs of that life had been scrupulously erased. Didn’t grieving parents keep their kids’ rooms the way they were when the kids died? Wasn’t that how it was meant to work?
In my mind’s eye I’d given this lost boy the face of Bic, the prescient kid with the bandaged hands. And I suddenly realised that the hands were the link I’d unconsciously followed. Bic’s hands were wrapped up in grubby dressings: Kenny’s were criss-crossed with the scars of old wounds. Even the ponytailed woman who was hanging out with Gwillam had her hands wrapped up. And my hands, when I’d visited the Salisbury for the second time, had itched so badly that I’d wanted to tear the skin off them.
You need hands to hold a little baby, Max Bygraves crooned lugubriously in some imperfectly locked room in my memory. When I was about eight, there was a certain level of drunkenness that would cause my mum to break out her LPs late at night and play them loud enough so that the sound came up through the floorboards to the bedroom I shared with Matt. SingalongaMax was one that we came to dread.
‘Tell me about that,’ I said. ‘I mean, how he died.’
‘He was the jumper. I told you there was a jumper, right? Maybe eighteen months ago. Jumped off the walkway between Weston and Beckett Block. Lot of alcohol in the blood, and a lot of speed, too, which is never a good combination. Couple of people saw him climb up on the concrete parapet, yell something and then jump. Verdict was accidental death, mainly because of the bloodwork. He probably wasn’t sober enough to make up his mind to kill himself and then stick to it.’
‘How old?’ I asked. Jean Daniels had already told me, but there’s never any harm in checking against the records.
‘Eighteen. Just.’
Okay. So here it all was in black and white, just as Jean had laid it out for me. This was the tragedy that she didn’t think Kenny had ever got over: a tragedy maybe slightly qualified by the fact that this wasn’t his own flesh and blood. But that wasn’t the main issue here, was it? That wasn’t what was niggling me. It was just that I found it hard to imagine Kenny Seddon loving anyone. Beating up his girlfriend in a drunken rage, that I could see: and then turning his hatred on his own body when he ran out of other targets. Kenny sitting in his bedroom, on the double bed he now slept in alone, and carving out his indignation on his wrists and forearms . . . that was no stretch at all. But Kenny mourning a dead child? That wasn’t such an easy fit. And the bare room belied it, too, unless he cleared out all the kid’s stuff because it aroused memories that were too painful to bear.
I suddenly saw another anomaly, though, and the vivid picture faded.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘If Kenny’s girlfriend had left, why was the son still living with him? Didn’t he move on with the mother every other time she switched boyfriends?’
Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That seems to have been the pattern. But not this time. This time she hit the road and he hit the concrete. Everyone leaves the nest sooner or later.’
I found I wasn’t in the mood, somehow, for Nicky’s flippant little homilies, but as I opened my mouth to launch a put-down a nurse stuck her head in through the door and called out ‘Five minutes!’ in a ringing tone to the room at large.
‘Man, you should ask for a cavity search,’ Nicky scoffed. ‘That’s all you’re missing for the full institutional experience.’
‘That and some decent food,’ I reminded him. ‘Nicky, did you get anywhere with that drawing? The teardrop thing?’
‘The shiny vagina? Not so far,’ Nicky confessed grudgingly. ‘Still working on it.’
‘Okay. I want you to do me another favour.’
‘Well, Jesus, what a surprise.’
‘Gwillam. Find out where he lives.’
Nicky’s eyes lit up, but he couldn’t resist the cheap shot when it was sitting there right in front of him. ‘I thought that was Humpty-Dumpty territory,’ he reminded me.
‘It is. But hey, they cracked me once and I didn’t break. Not all the way. So now it’s my turn.’
‘Then I’ve got some good news for you.’ Nicky reached inside his pocket, fished out a folded sheet of paper and waved it in front of my face before dropping it onto the sheets. ‘I took the liberty. He hides himself pretty fucking well, and it took a while. But it was a labour of love.’
I unfolded the sheet. It was an address in St Albans: The Rosewell Ecumenical Trust, Church Street.
‘That one you get for free, by the way,’ Nicky added.
‘Truly, this is the ending of days.’
‘Get well. And get bent.’
He walked away with a laconic wave, and I immediately turned my attention to the papers he’d left me. Not Gwillam’s address — that would keep — but the incident reports and statistics.
They would have made dry and difficult reading even if I’d been in better shape than I was. Nicky’s hacks get him into all kinds of interesting places, but he usually loses a certain amount of formatting along the way, so I was facing vast blocks of prose with pretty much no punctuation apart from line breaks.
And in that typographic ocean, dark shapes moved of their own volition, against the sluggish tide. People hurt and killed each other, or themselves: broke against pavements, were impaled on railings, swallowed razor blades, carved gnomic messages on their own flesh or the flesh of their loved ones. There was blood, and there was pain. It drew me in, until I couldn’t see the land any more.
Was self-harm just another current within that sea, or was it something else? Mark, the dead boy, had cut himself and written poems about it: the wounds were clearly part of his inner life; the most intense and precious part. And Kenny had got the habit, too: as though it was something you could catch. As though . . .
‘Felix Castor!’
The voice was acerbic, angry, the emphasis very pronounced. I came out of my grim reverie and found myself looking up at the nurse, who was standing at the foot of my bed with my chart in her hand. And I understood her tone immediately, because she already knew me. But not by that name.