Our Kind of Cruelty(63)

‘You would be hard pushed to find a worse case of neglect,’ she said, ‘although undoubtedly worse things do happen to lots of children. He wasn’t sexually abused, which is always a blessing, but he hadn’t been provided with basic care, which certainly left physical and mental damage.’ On the day I let them into the flat I was ten years old and weighed five stone. I was wearing clothes for a six-year-old. Lots of my teeth were decayed and I was infested with lice.

I could feel V reaching out to me as Sarah spoke, as if she wanted to lean over and take my hand. But I kept my head down because I don’t want V to think of me like that. I have told her everything, but I don’t want her to hear it from someone else, I don’t want the knowledge to be out in the open. It taints me somehow, taints me with the infection of that time.

The court was shown photos of the flat, which I could only bear to look at peripherally. Everyone in the room was able to see the piled plates and overflowing ashtrays, the black mould on the walls, the encrusted toilet, the black sink and the bath so filled with rubbish it was unusable. The pictures weren’t lying, but what they didn’t show was how the whole flat smelt of rot and decay, how it caught the back of your throat and made your eyes water. I coughed because it was as if the pictures had released the stench, as if it had found its way back to me so that sitting in court I could taste the yeasty, sour smell of my childhood home which, towards the end, made me think about new life forms. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I opened the door to the social services that day was not because I wanted to save myself, but because I thought something was actually going to materialise out of the atmosphere, something worse than was already there.

As I looked I had to tuck my hands under my armpits, a trick I learnt when I lived with my mother, as if they had once again become raw and chapped from the freezing water I used to try to wash a plate so I could eat off it, using a blackened sponge and no washing up liquid. I felt again the rush of sweat break on to my forehead as I heaved over the rotten toilet, never learning the lesson not to eat food that had grown white fur. My mouth dried at the memory of days-old pizza stuck to the top of the box, or at least the remnants of toppings.

I noticed an older woman in the jury dabbing at her eyes when they were shown my bedroom, which made me want to stand up and roar and cover V’s eyes with my hands. I wanted to spare her the sight of the curtainless window, like a large bruised eye, the mattress as thin as paper and the filthy duvet. A shiver started deep in my body, an involuntary memory of all those nights when a freezing wind passed over my head and the cold seeped into my marrowbone so it felt like I would never be warm again.

But those photos missed something else, something rare but nevertheless true: the times it was just Mum and me on the sofa, snuggled under a blanket with the telly on. When she’d used her money for food rather than vodka so my belly had stopped hurting. Before the fourth can, when she was still the right side of lucid.

‘It’s going to be OK, Mikey,’ she’d say, drawing me into her. ‘I just need to get through this and then we’ll start again.’ I would nestle into her sweaty, threadbare bathrobe and wish she was telling the truth. Wish that I hadn’t reached an age when I knew that people could lie to themselves as much as others.

When Louise gave her evidence I realised that she is a different sort of liar than my mother, a worse sort. There are people out there who see nothing wrong in lying at all. There are people out there who inhabit lies, who let them soak in and devour them. I will never be one of those people, but at the same time I am not sure the jury would understand the bald truth of what happened between V and me. I look over at them and their flat, bland faces and I know they are so disappointingly ordinary. There is no way they could ever understand the space which V and I occupy, no way they could understand our truth.

‘None of our friends ever liked Mike,’ Louise said. ‘We all tried for Verity’s sake, but there was no getting through to him. It was almost impossible to engage him in conversation. He would come out with us, but he always stuck by Verity’s side, staring at her and whispering in her ear. And he didn’t have any friends of his own, so he was always there and he didn’t like it if she went out without him. We found him creepy, the sort of person you didn’t want to be left alone with …

‘Yes, Verity did confide in me towards the end of her relationship, probably a year or so after Mike went to New York. The things she told me were quite frankly worrying. We all told her it was unhealthy, but she seemed enthralled by him, if that’s the right word …

‘I think it is fair to say she was scared of him, yes. But also some of us worried she was a bit obsessed by him …

‘Angus was so much better suited to Verity. We all breathed a massive sigh of relief when she met him. It was like getting the old Verity back, fun and carefree, not always looking over her shoulder …

‘Mike seemed very agitated at the wedding, almost at times as if he wasn’t sure where he was. I bumped into him outside the marquee after the speeches and he was in quite a state – he was bent over, as if he couldn’t catch his breath. I asked him if he was all right, but he didn’t answer. I tried to rub his back a bit, like you do when someone’s sick, but he didn’t move, so I asked him if he was still in love with Verity. He stood up at that and pushed me so hard I fell over. Then he stood over me and he looked so furious that I really thought he was going to hit me or kick me or something, but he just walked away.’