Chapter 1
It was late. After midnight, I think.
And so the boy begins his story.
He is in the bedroom he shares with his older brother.
It would be cramped with just one of them; with two the room is rendered impossibly tiny.
It is the length of the bunk bed and only twice as wide.
All their clothes are piled under the lower bunk.
The only other furniture is a battered wooden bookcase filled with cheap paperbacks and a row of tatty comics, stuffed in so tight that the paper has bunched and torn. There is no window.
The door opens directly onto the dim corridor running along the centre of the small house. It is shut, but – suddenly – outlined with light. Their mother has been in bed for hours. This is their father arriving home.
The boy holds his breath in the dark. Lying on the bed above him, he knows his older brother is doing the same.
Together but separate, they wait.
The boy is used to judging the world, on occasions like this, by noises.
When his father is whistling, there is a chance everything will be all right.
When he is talking to himself under his breath, it means someone has annoyed him at the pub: someone larger than him with whom he cannot pick a proper argument, so that he now needs to find someone with whom he can.
The little boy knows that his father is a bully, just like the children at school. When he told him he was being bullied, his father tried to teach him how to box. He took him out front and kept yelling at him to keep his hands up as he slapped him.
There is a clatter from the hallway, a stumble, and a thud against the wall.
Tonight, his father isn’t making any other sound at all, and the boy’s heart is like a frightened bird trapped in his chest. That is always the worst. It means his father is very drunk indeed, that the bitterness he carries inside him will be tight against the surface.
Every time he thuds drunkenly against the wall, it will feel instead like someone shoving him.
When his father is this drunk, everything feels like a shove to him. Everything is against him.
The boy hates him.
A shadow drifts across the base of the door.
Pauses.
The boy, already not breathing, somehow holds his breath deeper still.
BANG BANG BANG.
His father’s fist, rapping on the door.
From the corridor, there is a laugh, and then the shadow passes. He listens as, further along the hall, his father shoulders the wall again – or, as he will experience it, the wall shoulders him.
The boy lies there in the darkness for a time, picturing him.
Yes, he is father, never daddy. He cannot remember ever hugging him.
He cannot picture his father smiling. His face is an ugly thing: red and weathered, like a troll in one of the storybooks on the shelf.
His hair is brown and curly; he wears fluffy old paint-stained jumpers and brown cords.
His body is small and slumped. The only big thing about him anymore is his forearms and his knuckles, like an ape.
All the failures and disappointments of his life are there to see.
Sometimes he looks like a walking stick, throwing itself angrily along.
At the far end of the house, the bedroom door slams.
The boy wants to lie there, but he can’t.
He sits up in the dark and rests his bare feet on the carpet, clenching his toes against its wiry texture.
And when the noises start – the other slamming, his father’s raised voice, his mother’s muted shouts and cries – the little boy pushes his fists into his eyes and rocks back and forth, concentrating on the sensations of his feet.
He begins crying silently, the way he’s learned to cry over the years, limiting the inward breaths to hide the sniffles from his thick nose.
After a while, he realises his older brother is sitting beside him. He had not even noticed him clamber down the red stepladder. But John puts his arms round his shoulder, leans into him. They are both very small, hugging each other in the dark.
The policeman listens carefully to this story, and, although the boy’s face betrays no obvious emotion – no sign of either sincerity or guile – he finds himself believing that this much is the truth.
Having met both boys, and seen the house itself, he can picture them sitting there like that together. He can imagine the desolation and fear.
He says, ‘And then what happened?’
For a long moment, the boy does not reply. But then he gathers himself. And once again, there is something there in his expression. Something that seems older than the child.
‘And then what happened?’
The boy begins to tell him.
This is the point, looking back, when the policeman will be convinced the lies begin.