Girl A(43)

‘The Roach,’ I said.

‘Yes. And he’s right. She’ll outlive us all.’

We stopped at a bench, the first one on the lawn, and he sat as old men do, checking that the chair was still there on the way down. The last time that I saw him, he had been a teenager, installed in front of the London skyline, on the television.

The truth is, Gabriel was the early triumph. He was inaugurated in a modest family home, with proper parents and a new sister. His happy ending is still available on YouTube, for public consumption. Here he is, starting secondary school on BBC News; talking to the camera on an episode of I Survived; receiving a birthday present from a middling footballer on Children in Need. Gabriel, with his crooked smile, strolling into breakfast television studios, both for an extensive, anonymity-waiving interview, and as an artefact dusted off for a feature called The Big Debate, which, that particular morning, was ‘Child Abuse: Can we talk about race?’

‘Are you going to tell me how you’re feeling?’ I asked.

He sighed, pantomime-wide.

‘The thing about this place,’ he said, ‘is that I’m so bored of talking about myself.’

Gabriel’s new parents, Mr and Mrs Coulson-Browne, had made it quite clear that he was a special child, so school, when it finally came – after nearly two years of one-to-one tuition, and at least three appearances on the actual television – was a disappointment. His psychologist, Mandy, had advised his adoptive parents that he might have additional requirements, or difficulties settling into the routine of school life; Mandy had a whole arsenal of carefully curated distraction techniques which the teachers wouldn’t have the time to deploy. ‘He’ll be fine, I think,’ said Gabriel’s new mother. ‘If you’ve done your job.’

‘The important thing,’ Mandy said, in their final session before school began, ‘is to remember what we’ve learnt about communication. If you feel one of the Rages coming, you get up and out of that room. You tell a teacher, or you call me.’

The Rages had started at Moor Woods Road, although they only became the Rages afterwards, when Gabriel started working with Mandy. He might be chained to the bed, or exercising in the garden, and a minor occurrence – a fly in the room, or Evie straying clumsily into his path – would set off a mounting pressure in his head. It wasn’t something that he could subdue or ignore; the pressure would continue to build until he released it. He would writhe in the chains so much that they left raw, weeping imprints around his wrists. He would throw his whole body to the ground and batter his head against it. Once, he bit Father’s hand, as hard as he could and hoping that his teeth would meet. Although he was punished, terribly, he knew that he would do it again.

He had thought that the Rages would stop when he left Moor Woods Road, but that wasn’t the case. Sometimes they happened in the Coulson-Browne household, where there was an unfortunate number of precarious items. Mrs Coulson-Browne kept a collection of crystal animals, and there was a set of wedding china displayed atop an antique cabinet (fake, Gabriel later ascertained, when he researched whether it would be of any value). Once, unforgivably, a Rage came in the dressing room of Britain This Morning, when one of the runners insisted on taking Gabriel’s relics from the House of Horrors from his hands, in order that they could be cleaned before they appeared in the studio.

But he and Mandy had worked on it. There was a tepee in the corner of his new bedroom, and he retreated there when a Rage was on the way. Inside, he kept a projector night light and the bear the Coulson-Brownes had given him when he first entered their home, which wore a T-shirt imprinted with Survivor. If he wasn’t at home, he was to find somewhere quiet when the pressure began to build. He was to imagine the tepee and the slow movement of ocean mammals across the canvas.

‘It’s not going to be easy, Gabe,’ Mandy said. ‘A few steps forward, a few steps back. If you’re heading in the right direction, then there’s no shame in the stumbles.’

But school wasn’t just a few stumbles. On the first day, you had to introduce yourself to the rest of the class with a funny or interesting anecdote, and he got off to a good start: he had been on television. He started by listing the specific programmes on which he had appeared, and then provided some key background information about his family – he had the attention of the whole room, now – but the teacher cut him off. ‘Thank you for your contribution, Gabriel,’ she said, but he knew from her face that he had somehow misspoken, and he returned to his chair in a fuzz of embarrassment.

The Rages became more frequent. There were times, at school, when he decided not to think of the tepee and the childish little lamp inside of it, and instead thought of what Father had done to him, or the fact that Mandy was marrying somebody from Scotland and would have to discontinue their sessions, or Mrs Coulson-Browne’s failure to read the first page of his memoir. When he returned to himself, he would look around to see a ring of children’s faces, and delight in their horror.

Delight: there was something to be made of that. Through the Rages, he acquired a kind of notoriety, which meant that a select group in his year – the parentless; the awkward; the rebels, and the frail girls who clung to them – accepted his company. They called themselves The Clan. The leader of The Clan was Jimmy Delaney, who had three tattoos and was rumoured to have fucked a student teacher on last year’s geography field trip (although nobody, and least of all Gabriel, knew if that was true). At weekends, they gathered in parks, or in the bedroom of whoever’s family was absent that night, and smoked sparse joints, or took it in turns to touch the girls who had turned up. Gabriel wasn’t cool or useful enough to be at the centre of things, but he liked having people to sit with at lunch, and that they were interested in his story. When he was drunk, he would tell them everything that he could muster, but whatever he said, Jimmy pressed for more. ‘Why didn’t you just kill him?’ he asked, about Father, and, ‘Is it true that your old man was a pervert?’ They were the kind of kids whom the Coulson-Brownes detested, and Gabriel liked that, too.