Girl A(44)

At home, his career was floundering. Mrs Coulson-Browne lobbied publishers and television studios, and contacted local celebrities, asking if they might be interested in meeting her son. There had been a small spike in interest upon the anniversary of the escape, and again during Mother’s trial, but the story appeared to have reached its conclusion. It didn’t help that Gabriel no longer looked like the angular child carried from Moor Woods Road, captured in a policeman’s arms in a picture that was longlisted for the World Press Photo of the Year (Breaking News). Now, he was a scrawny teenage boy with glasses and Mother’s dry skin and hair which got darker by the day.

He could sense that the Coulson-Brownes were losing interest in him. There was no cruelty in it, but a gradual detachment, as somebody might set aside a toy from their childhood. When he had first been adopted, the Coulson-Brownes had liked him present at their parties, which weren’t really parties at all, but gatherings of neighbours, taking it in turns to see the insides of one another’s houses. He would be sent into the lounge, armed with toothpick cheese and a bowl of crisps, and instructed to Work the Room. But ever since the Lawsons had come for dinner, it had been suggested that he stay in his room.

The Lawsons lived in the only five-bedroom house on the street and had a car with a 2.5-litre engine. Gabriel, precarious on the spare chair, and eating twice as much as everybody else, had sat through ninety minutes of side returns; prawn cocktails; the influx of traffic to the new estate; beef Wellington; other people’s children. Finally, over caramel flan, the conversation became interesting. The Lawsons were narrating the story of their son, ever a risk-taker, who was encumbered in a Genevan hospital with a twenty-five-centimetre plate screwed to his left tibia.

‘What’s the one thing we told him?’ Mr Lawson said. ‘“Stay on piste.” And now where are we? Spending Christmas in orthopaedics, in bloody Switzerland.’

‘The price of those hotels,’ Mrs Lawson said, ‘at such short notice—’

‘I have a metal plate,’ said Gabriel, and the conversation crashed to a halt. He touched his jaw. Turned his head to show them. ‘Here,’ he said.

He had arrived at the hospital with severe malocclusion, he explained. He liked that he knew a word which they didn’t. The growth centre in his left jaw was damaged, so one side of his face had turned out different from the other. Gabriel and Mandy had been invited to the X-ray viewer to survey the damage, and they sat together at a desk while a maxillofacial surgeon – that was the mouth – talked them through Gabriel’s skull. It was funny, to see yourself in skeleton. The teeth were so much longer than you thought. At the end, Gabriel asked if he could come back post-operation, to see how the metal looked in his jaw. ‘We’ve got a medic, here,’ the surgeon said, and within a week, everyone on the ward was calling him Dr Gracie.

‘Holidays in hospital were actually OK,’ Gabriel said. ‘They had this big chocolate egg hunt, at Easter. Christmas is probably pretty cool.’

Nobody was eating, now. The Lawsons lowered their eyes. Mr Coulson-Browne gave a tight, humourless laugh, and picked up his spoon. ‘These hotels,’ he said. ‘How much are we talking?’

In her desperation, Mrs Coulson-Browne suggested finding Gabriel an agent, although she didn’t know of anyone in particular. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘you have to think about which avenue you want to pursue, Gabriel. Whether that’s television, or autobiography, or something like Matilda.’

Matilda was the Coulson-Brownes’ real daughter, who had once been destined to become a ballet dancer; then, when she was overly developed, a West End lead; and, when she couldn’t sing the requisite range, a backing dancer on a stadium tour. Finally, she worked as a choreographer on cruise ships, as far away from home as possible. Whenever she stayed with the Coulson-Brownes, she viewed Gabriel with a combination of trepidation and pity, and she tried to avoid being alone with him in a room. At the time, he had thought that she was frightened, although now, at the age that she had been then, he understood. She had been ashamed.

‘What do you suggest that he do?’ Mr Coulson-Browne asked, when Matilda was back from the Caribbean for Christmas, and they were sitting for dinner. Matilda looked at Gabriel, then at the table, and shrugged.

‘I don’t think I’m the expert,’ she said.

‘You must have some advice – from your experiences.’

‘In that case, I think that he should try to be happy.’

‘But his story!’ Mrs Coulson-Browne said. ‘That’s a story that needs to be told.’

‘There’s somebody that I know,’ Matilda said, ‘in London. He’s an agent for a few celebrities. They’re not big ones, though. And he’s not the most savoury of characters, from everything that I’ve heard.’

‘See,’ Mrs Coulson-Browne said. ‘I think that would be very useful.’

‘I’ll give you his number,’ Matilda said, to Gabriel. ‘If you really want it.’

She wrote the name and number on a CocoCruises pad, and he repeated it, in his head: Oliver Alvin. ‘You look after yourself, Gabe,’ she said, and squeezed his shoulder. When she left for St Lucia in the New Year, he thought for a strange, stupid moment of asking if she would take him with her.

The first time The Clan asked him to feign a Rage was in a mock examination, in January. ‘What we need,’ Jimmy said, as they waited at the assembly hall doors, ‘is extenuating circumstances.’ He surveyed his cronies, smiling. ‘Something traumatic,’ he said.