The Dead of Summer Read online

  Patrick turned and called back up the stairs, ‘I’m coming, Lizzy. Daddy’s coming.’

  Then I understood. The voice belonged not to a little girl, but to Kyle’s mother. She sounded like a child and Patrick certainly spoke to her like she was a child but she wasn’t – it was Elizabeth, Kyle and Katie’s mum. Everything felt very strange in that hallway suddenly: queasy and off-kilter. I muttered a quick goodbye to Patrick, and left.

  That night was endless. I’d positioned my bed so my pillow was at the window end and I could look out onto the street. I had bad dreams from which I’d wake, sweating and anxious in the darkness. At about five, I woke again to see the sky had turned violet and as I lay there, staring at the street, I caught a sudden movement outside No. 33. It was Kyle, returning from wherever he’d run off to the afternoon before. I lifted the net higher to watch him. As he let himself into the house he turned suddenly and seemed to look directly at me. Could he see me? I let the net fall and lay staring up at the ceiling, my heart thudding as my sisters slept.

  seven

  New Cross Hospital. 4 September 1986. Transcription of interview between Dr C Barton and Anita Naidu. Police copy.

  That little shoe … I held it for so many hours … couldn’t let it go. And then, well in my head it kind of became the most important thing, more important than anything else. I held onto it like it could save me, as if it was the only way out, like if I dropped it that would be it. That would be … it. Silly, really. Fucking stupid. It was only a shoe.

  Damien, Carrie, Mary Bell, that girl from The Exorcist, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, Kyle Kite, Rosemary’s frigging baby. All evil little fuckers aren’t they? A rotten pick ‘n’ mix of pint-sized psychos, a fun-bag of stunted freaks: cut out and keep ‘em, buy two and get one free.

  It’s nearly 1994 and the James Bulger Show rages on. The why-why-why of it, the how-how-how of it, the hang-‘em-high, string-’em-up, eye-for-an-eye of it. ‘A nation grieves’ my arse. A nation fucking panics. I watch the news reports of those mobs outside the court and see the hatred in their faces and in the eyes of the girls in my factory (‘throw away the key’), the panic in the headlines and the venom on the talk shows. An aimless fucking raging against what? Does anybody even know? Look in your own backyards I want to tell them. Look at your own fucking kids. But their anger is nothing to the loathing, the absolute fury I’ve felt every single bastard minute of the past seven years since that end-of-summer day, that end-of-everything day when I was thirteen.

  Push comes sometimes. I’ve told him not to and sometimes I don’t answer the door but still he comes, filling my bedsit with his expensive aftershave and his gold jewellery and his cashmere coat. Sometimes he turns up outside the factory in his BMW (‘That your fella, Anita? Bit of all right’). He takes me out to lunch and he talks about his Docklands flat and his girlfriends and his holidays but never where the money actually comes from and I don’t ask. He talks and talks, always staring at me, while the waitresses stare at him and I stare at the table. He worries, he says. I don’t mind him coming but I don’t really like my routine interrupted very much. I like to do things a certain way. I measure out my days carefully, precisely.

  After it happened my dad and Janice moved back to Leeds (how I’d have loved to have seen Auntie Jam’s face when she copped a load of that). My sisters tried to keep in touch but in the end, when I never replied to their letters or phoned them back, they gave up. They’ve got their own kids now. I didn’t mean to cut them off completely, I just couldn’t stand the way they looked at me.

  It’s the blood, I think. It’s the blood nobody can get over. That image the world has of me running through the streets of Greenwich one Saturday lunchtime at the end of summer, my white T-shirt drenched in blood. Blood in my hair, on my face, down my arms, even on my legs and feet. Mingling with the mud and sand from the mine. Tearing through the tourists with their tie-dye bedspreads and second-hand lamps. People stopping to gape in shock at the sight of me. Did you see the TV drama? Not much of a likeness I thought.

  And after the funerals and the endless questions, after the policemen and the inquests, after the newspaper reporters and the psychiatrists – after they had all fucked off (no offence), still those looks, those glances, no matter how brief and how quickly disguised. Those quick, fearful eyes on me. That’s why I asked to be moved here.

  Maybe that’s why I feel this way about Malcolm. He knows nothing about me, he likes the me of now, of today. I feel, Doctor Barton – I don’t quite know how to put this – but I feel suddenly that there are possibilities for me. That there is a possibility suddenly of my life turning out a different way. That perhaps I do not have to stay thirteen, down there in the dark, forever.

  Where was I?

  When I left Patrick that afternoon and came blinking out into the street, I went to sit on a bench in the little park at the end of our road. For the first time in weeks tiny clouds peppered the sky and though it was still hot and the park was filled with smiling people and the summer sounds of car stereos and a nearby football game, I had the sense that summer was coming to an end. That something was coming to an end. I wondered where Kyle was, and what the fuck was wrong with him anyway. I wondered how I could face going back to school in a few weeks.

  ‘Nit?’ I looked up to see Esha and Bela. They were wearing cut-off jeans and bikini tops, each carrying a bottle of cider. They looked a bit sunburnt, dazed, drunk. They had grass all over them and had that flushed, soft-eyed look of people who have just been laughing a lot.

  ‘What you doing, Nit?’ asked Esha. They flopped down on the bench, one on either side of me.

  ‘Want some of this?’ Bela passed me her cider. I took a few big gulps, warm and flat and sweet.

  ‘Easy!’ she laughed.

  ‘Aw fuck it. Let her get pissed if she wants.’ Esha handed me her lit fag. ‘What you doing out here by yourself?’ she asked. ‘Where’s that little skinny mate of yours?’

  I shrugged, took a drag of the cigarette and passed it back.

  Bela nudged me in the ribs. ‘He your lad, is he?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.’ ‘Course not.’

  ‘Aw, I’m only messing.’ She ruffled my short hair and gazed at me for a few seconds. ‘Want us to do you a makeover, Nit?’ she asked hopefully. Bela and Esha had been using me as a human Girls World ever since I could remember. It had been a while, though – not since before Mum had died. It had been a torment when they’d come hunting for me with their make-up and glitter and Krazy-color hair-dye, but right then I kind of missed it.

  ‘Nah,’ I said though. ‘You’re all right.’

  They got up then, already talking about what they were going to wear to the pub that night. Suddenly I didn’t want them to go. I wanted to sit there for a bit longer with my sisters smelling of their Impulse bodyspray, of cut grass and cider and fags beside me in the sun. So I told them about Dad and Janice. Hadn’t really meant to, just blurted it out. Told them I’d caught them ‘doing it’ and then I felt embarrassed. Should I have said ‘Bonking’? I wondered. ‘Screwing’, maybe?

  My sisters gaped at me open-mouthed then fell about laughing, clutching each other. ‘Naaaaaaaaaaaah!’ they said.

  ‘Dirty old dog!’ they laughed. They didn’t seem to care, just wandered off home then, still giggling, with their cider, leaving me sitting there on the bench, feeling stupid.

  Janice was round our house all the time after that, she practically moved in, and every time I looked at her I felt a bit sick. I cringed at her flabby belly, her loud laugh, the way she ate; stuffing it all in her gob and wiping her hands on her top. Hated her huge tits and her sweaty, orange-haired pits. She burped and laughed and spoke too loudly and took up too much room. She forced the fact of herself on you and I couldn’t stand that. That’s something I shared with Kyle, a hatred of the disgustingness of people. Do you know what I mean? I saw it in the way he looked at Denis sometimes, at the way he stared at Denis’s fat wobbling wh
en he ran, at the grunty noises Denis made when he ate. I recognised the look in Kyle’s eyes; a little bit sickened.

  And like me, Kyle hated to be touched. By anyone, I mean. Once, when I accidentally brushed my hand against him, he recoiled as if I’d burnt him. It’s funny because I was the same. In some ways Kyle and I were very similar.

  A couple of days later we went down to the river again. Kyle didn’t say anything about what had happened at his house so neither did I. We went to the factory where the hideout was, then on to one of the big scrapyards. We loved going there. Piles and piles of cars in various stages of fucked. And mountains of twisted bits of metal, colours all faded and rusty, cool as anything.

  It was easy enough to break into when there was no one there; you just crawled through a hole in the wire fence, but often there were blokes who walked around with dogs and who went spastic if they even noticed us hanging about outside and then there was no chance, we had to think of something else to do.

  But that day it was empty. We found an old Mercedes and got in, Kyle behind the wheel, me next to him and Denis in the back. Some of the windows were smashed through and most of the leather of the seats had been ripped, big gashes pissing yellow foam. We ate Denis’s bag of sherbet lemons, sucking them down until our mouths were cut to shreds and we could blow the fizzy gloop through the hole at the end, Kyle and I aiming it at the smashed windscreen in front of us.

  Denis was talking to himself in the back seat, reciting from the A-Team, doing all the different voices, doing all the different faces. Endlessly, boringly in the stuffy heat of the back seat. First he’d do Murdock, ‘Say, are we a groovy, happenin’ bunch of guys or what?’ then he’d answer himself in Mr T’s voice, ‘You been greezin’ your head with battery acid again?’

  On and on he went, I swear he knew every episode word for word. Finally Kyle turned to him and said, ‘Stop being a fanny, Denis.’

  ‘Damn fool,’ said Denis quietly.

  ‘Spastic,’ said Kyle.

  We talked about the castle near Greenwich Park that Kyle thought had a secret bunker in its grounds.

  ‘I want to come with you,’ I said suddenly. ‘I want to come with you to look for it one night.’ I just came right out with it like that. No big deal.

  And he just shrugged and said, ‘All right.’

  It was so hot in that car. A fly buzzed drowsily in and out of the glassless windows and kept landing on Denis’s head. Every time he batted it off it would buzz fatly away then return to land on his big, sweaty cheek or his ear or his glasses. He just kept flicking it away and eating his sherbet lemons. I could tell by the expressions he was pulling that he was still doing the A-Team, silently inside his head.

  Then we heard the voices. Two men talking loudly to each other, arguing about something. They sounded like they were on the other side of the nearest stack of cars. The three of us ducked down and waited. The voices got nearer. I peeked above the window and saw two men standing 50 yards away from our car. They had the biggest Doberman I’d ever seen with them. ‘Shit,’ I said to the others. ‘They’ve got a fucking dog.’

  It started barking and straining at its lead, a frenzy of dribbling jaw and angry eyes and rippling muscle. It was looking straight at our Merc. So far the men were ignoring it. ‘Shit-shit-shit,’ I said. ‘It knows we’re in here.’

  We heard one of the men say, ‘Shut it, Tiffany, you noisy cunt’ then carry on rowing with his mate.

  ‘We’ll have to make a run for it,’ said Kyle. We looked over to the hole in the fence that luckily wasn’t too far away, on the side where the dog and men weren’t.

  They had stopped arguing. We heard one say, ‘Let’s do a quick check round, then go and have a pint.’

  As soon as they moved off and disappeared behind a stack of cars, Kyle and Denis opened their doors and keeping low, eased out. Then they legged it over to the wire fence. I was about to slide over to their side of the car and follow them but suddenly the dog was back. She had been let off her lead and was steaming after Kyle, a black, gleaming, rippling, barking frenzy of teeth and slobber and muscle. Kyle hadn’t reached the fence and the dog was almost on him, its mouth inches from his ankle. And without even thinking about it I got out of the car, whistled at the dog and shouted at the top of my lungs, ‘TIFFANY!’.

  Scooby doo-like, the dog skidded to a halt and stood looking from me to Kyle, an expression of utter confusion on its face. ‘Tiffany! Here, girl!’ I shouted, desperately slapping my knees like a half-wit while Kyle threw himself at the hole in the fence. Suddenly the dog made up her mind and as she tensed and readied herself to fly at me the sight of her enormous mouth and the noise of her frantic, hysterical barking was almost enough to make me fall to the floor in terror, to make me give up and just let myself be torn to pieces, but instead I legged it round the other side of the car and over to the fence. Propelled by fear, I was over it in seconds, ripping my arm on a loose end of wire as I did so. I could hear the two men shouting furiously somewhere behind me.

  Me and Denis and Kyle ran until we were back at our hideout, the three of us laughing so hard it was impossible to carry on. ‘I love it when a plan comes together,’ said Denis smugly, in his Hannibal voice.

  Kyle stopped, gasping for breath, his eyes on me. ‘Shit, Anita,’ he said, and I felt overwhelmed suddenly by the way he was looking at me. The admiration was all for me, just for me. We both laughed, and I looked modestly at my feet, trying hard not to grin with pride. ‘Thanks,’ said Kyle, and I could feel his eyes on me still. ‘I was almost Pedigree Chum back there.’ He spoke softly and when I looked at him he held my eyes for a moment then leant across and to my absolute astonishment picked up my arm and examined my cut. I could hardly breathe. He frowned while he peered at it, then quickly let it fall with a dismissive ‘You’ll live.’ I could only stand there, staring dumbly at my arm for a while, as Kyle and Denis wandered off, talking about something else.

  We hung about in the hideout for a while, discussing the bunker at the castle, planning when we’d go there. Then we drifted towards the river and sat in silence for a while, watching some kids playing football on the shore below us. Eventually, Kyle asked Denis what the time was. Denis had a Casio digital watch his Uncle Richard had given him for his birthday. He loved that watch and was usually chuffed to bits when anyone asked him for the time. But right then he didn’t answer. He was staring intently at a load of ants marching in single file over a lolly-stick by his foot, and he was oblivious to the rest of the world.

  ‘Denis,’ said Kyle again.

  Nothing.

  ‘Denis!’ said Kyle, more loudly.

  Nothing.

  ‘Denis!!’

  Nothing.

  ‘DENIS!!’

  Nothing.

  ‘DENIS, YOU SPASTIC!’

  Nothing.

  Finally Kyle picked up an empty Lilt can from the floor and chucked it at Denis’s head. It bounced off his short neat afro and he slowly came to, blinking in surprise.

  ‘Who, me?’ he asked, wonderingly.

  ‘No!’ shouted Kyle, suddenly so loud it made his usually quiet voice crack and both me and Denis jump violently. ‘The other fucking mongoloid called Denis sitting on this bench.’ Kyle’s usually chalk-white face was red, his eyes bulging with a fury that had come suddenly from nowhere and I tittered nervously as Denis looked slowly from left to right, a baffled expression on his big moon face.

  ‘Jesus-fucking-Christ, Denis.’ Kyle thumped the bench in irritation. ‘You’re a fucking-stupid cunt sometimes.’

  Denis looked down at his shoes, while Kyle examined him from head to toe, disgust on his face.

  ‘Look at the fucking state of you.’ Kyle reached over me and spammed Denis on the forehead. Denis carried on staring at his feet. I froze, staring straight ahead and scarcely breathing. I didn’t want him to start on me next. Kyle got up, went and stood in front of Denis where he sat, still staring down at his shoes. Kyle licked his fingers then spammed h
im again. Harder, this time.

  ‘Come on, fatso,’ he almost sang. ‘What’s the matter? Is Mummy’s little sack of lard gonna cry?’

  I looked at Denis out of the corner of my eye. Noticed he had tears welling in his eyes. I kept looking straight ahead, too chicken-shit to say anything. Eventually Kyle sighed, looked at both of us and shook his head. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘why the fucking-hell do I waste my time with you two?’ Then he walked off.

  Me and Denis stayed sitting on the bench for a few moments, not meeting each other’s eyes. Then we shrugged, got up and hurried after him. That was what it was like with Kyle. One minute he’d be laughing, the next he’d be going batshit about something. It was just the way he was.

  As we walked, the sun began to fall and the shores lengthened in the twilight, nibbling and biting at the receding river. And as always at that time the freaks with their metal detectors emerged from nowhere in the dusk, scuttling across the muddy shores like welly-booted crabs, their machines whining, their silhouettes grey against the pinkly dying light. Only the gasworks were golden, caught in the last glow of sun where the river curved round in the distance. We stopped to lean over the railings to watch the treasure hunters, hating them. There was something intensely irritating about that army of idiots invading our beach, scavenging about in the muck and the filth for what?

  Some shiny piece of beauty, something important and worthwhile? Fuck off, we shouted silently, me Denis and Kyle. Fuck off, you’ll find nothing here.

  As we watched, Kyle said, blankly, angrily, not looking at us, ‘My granddad wants you both to come round next Saturday.’

  I remembered then, what Patrick had said. ‘For your birthday!’

  He didn’t look at me, just said ‘Yeh.’

  We wandered off to the bus then, and he didn’t say another word the whole way home.

  eight