Guilty One

2

‘He’s a runner,’ the social worker said to Minnie.

Daniel was standing in Minnie’s kitchen next to a holdall that contained everything he owned. Her kitchen smelled funny: of animals and fruit and burnt wood. The house was cramped and dark and Daniel didn’t want to stay.

Minnie looked at him, her hands on her hips. Daniel could tell right away that she was kind. Her cheeks were red and her eyes moved about a lot. She wore a skirt that hung right down to her ankles, man’s boots and a long grey cardigan that she kept pulling closer around her body. She had big boobs and a big stomach and lots of curly grey hair that was piled on top of her head.

‘Runs away any chance he gets,’ said the social worker in a tired voice to Minnie, and then, louder, to Daniel, ‘You’ve nowhere to run to now, though, eh, pet? Yer mam’s poorly, isn’t she?’

Tricia reached out to squeeze Daniel’s shoulder. He twisted away from her and sat down at the kitchen table.

Minnie’s sheepdog, Blitz, began to lick his knuckles. The social worker whispered overdose to Minnie, but Daniel still heard her. Minnie winked at him to let him know that she knew he had heard.

In his pocket, Daniel pressed his mother’s necklace in his fingers. She had given it to him three years ago, when she was between boyfriends and sober. It was the last time he had been allowed to see her. Social services finally stopped all but supervised visits, but Daniel always ran back to her. Wherever she was, he could always find his mother. She needed him.

In his pocket, with his forefinger and thumb, he could feel the letter of her first name: S.

In the car, the social worker had told Daniel that she was taking him to Brampton because no one in the Newcastle area would have him.

‘It’s a bit far out, but I think you’ll like Minnie,’ she had said.

Daniel looked away. Tricia looked like all the other social workers who had been entrusted with him: piss-coloured hair and ugly clothes. Daniel hated her, like he hated all the others.

‘She’s got a farm, and she’s on her own. No men. You should be all right if there’s no men, eh, pet? No need for all your carry on. You’re lucky Minnie said yes. Yer proper hard to place now. Nob’dy wants boys with all your nonsense. See how you get on an’ I’ll see you end of month.’

‘I want to see me mam.’

‘She’s not well, pet, that’s why you can’t see her. It’s in your best interests. She needs time to get better, doesn’t she? You want her to get better, don’t you?’

After she was gone, Minnie showed him to his room. She heaved herself up the stairs and he watched her hips knock back and forth. He thought about a bass drum strapped to the chest of a band-boy and the furred beaters that thump time. The bedroom was in the eaves of the house: a single bed looking out on to the back yard, where she kept the chickens and her goat, Hector. This yard was Flynn Farm.

He felt like he always did when he was shown his new room. Cold. Out of place. He wanted to leave, but instead he put his holdall on the bed. The bedspread was pink and the wallpaper was covered in tiny rosebuds.

‘Sorry about the colour scheme in here. They usually send me girls.’

They looked at each other. Minnie opened her eyes wide at Daniel and smiled. ‘If it all goes well, we can change it, like. You can choose the colour you want.’

He looked at his fingernails.

‘You can put your underwear in there, love. Hang the rest up in there,’ she said as she moved her weight around the restricted space. A pigeon was cooing at the window and she knocked the window pane to shoo it.

‘Hate pigeons,’ she said. ‘Nothing but vermin, if you ask me.’

Minnie asked him what he wanted for tea and he shrugged his shoulders. She told him he could choose between cottage pie and corned beef and he chose cottage pie. She asked him to wash up for dinner.

When she left him, he took his flick knife out of his pocket and put it under his pillow. He also had a pocket knife in his jeans pocket. He put his clothes away as she had asked, his socks and clean T-shirt sitting to one side of the otherwise empty drawer. They looked awkward on their own, so he pushed them up close to each other. The drawer was lined with flowery paper that smelled funny and he worried that his clothes would smell like that too.

Daniel locked the door in Minnie’s long thin bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath. The bath was bright yellow and the wallpaper was blue. There was dirt and mould all round the taps and the floor was covered in dog hair. He stood up and began to wash his hands, standing on his tiptoes so he could look in the mirror.

You’re an evil little bastard.

Daniel remembered these words as he stared at his face, his short dark hair, his dark eyes, his square chin. It had been Brian, his last foster father, who had said that to him. Daniel had slashed his tyres and poured his vodka into the fish tank. The fish had died.

There was a little porcelain butterfly on a shelf in the bathroom. It looked old and cheap, painted in bright colours that were yellow and blue like her bathroom. Daniel put it in his pocket, wiped his hands on his trousers and went downstairs.

The kitchen floor was dirty, with crumbs and muddy footprints. The dog lay in its basket, licking its balls. The kitchen table, the fridge and the counters were cluttered. Daniel bit his lip and took it all in. Plant pots and pens, a small gardening fork. A bag of dog biscuits, enormous boxes of tinfoil, cookery books, jars with spaghetti sticking out of them, three different-sized teapots, empty jam jars, dirty, oily-looking oven gloves, cloths and bottles of disinfectant. The bin was full and stacked beside it were two empty bottles of gin. He could hear the cluck of her chickens outside.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’ she said, looking over her shoulder at him as she ripped the leaves off a lettuce. ‘Come over here and help me make the salad.’

‘I don’t like salad.’

‘That’s fine. We’ll make a small one just for me. This is my lettuce and my tomatoes, you know. You haven’t tasted salad until you’ve grown it yourself. Come on, help me do these.’

Daniel got up. His head was level with her shoulders and he felt tall beside her. She placed a chopping board in front of him and gave him a knife, then washed three tomatoes and placed them on the board in front of him, next to the bowl of lettuce leaves. She showed him how to slice the tomatoes into wedges.

‘Don’t you want to try one?’ She held a wedge out to his lips.

He shook his head and she popped the slice of tomato into her own mouth.

He sliced the first tomato, watching her as she put ice into a tall glass, squeezed lemon juice over it then emptied the remainder of a bottle of gin over the top. When she added the tonic the ice cracked and fizzed. She stooped to place the gin bottle with the others then returned to his side.

‘Well done,’ she said, ‘those are perfect slices.’

He had thought about doing it since she gave him the knife. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he wanted to frighten her. He wanted her to know the truth about him right away. He turned and held the knife up to her face, the point about an inch from her nose. Tomato seeds bloodied its blade. He wanted to see her mouth turn down in fear. He wanted her to scream. He had tried it before with others and it had made him feel powerful to see them flinch and recoil. He didn’t care if she was his last chance. He didn’t want to be in her stinking house.

The dog sat up in its basket and barked. The sudden noise made Daniel flinch, but Minnie didn’t move away from him. She pressed her lips together and sighed down her nose. ‘You’ve only done one tomato, love,’ she said.

Her eyes had changed; they were not as friendly as they had been when Daniel arrived.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ he asked, tightening his grip on the knife so it shook a little before her face.

‘No, love, and if you’d lived my life you wouldn’t be scared either. Now get that last tomato chopped.’

‘I could stab you.’

‘Could you, now …’

Daniel stabbed the knife into the chopping board once, twice then turned away from her and began to slice the other tomato. His forearm ached a little. It had twisted when he stabbed the knife into the wood. Minnie turned her back on him and took a sip of her drink. Blitz came to her side and she dropped a hand so that he could lick her knuckles.

By the time she served dinner he was starved, but he pretended not to be. He ate with his elbow on the table and a hand supporting his face.

She was chatty, talking about the farm and the vegetables that she grew.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked her, with his mouth full.

‘Well, Cork originally, but I’ve been here for longer than I was there. I was in London for a while too …’

‘Where’s Cork?’

‘Where’s Cork? My goodness, don’t you know Cork’s in Ireland?’

Daniel lowered his eyes.

‘Cork is the real capital of Ireland. It’s about half the size of Newcastle, mind you,’ she said, not looking at him as she cut up her salad. She paused, then said: ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mum. Sounds like she’s not very well right now.’

Daniel stopped eating for a moment. He tightened his fist around his fork and stabbed it gently into the table. He saw that she wore a gold cross around her neck. He marvelled for a moment at the tiny suffering which had been carved on to it.

‘Why’d you come ’ere then?’ pointing his fork at her. ‘Why leave a city for ’ere? Middle of nowhere.’

‘My husband wanted to live here. We met down in London. I worked as a psychiatric nurse down there, after I left Ireland. He was an electrician, among other things. He grew up here, in Brampton. It was as good a place as any to me at the time. He wanted to be here and that was grand with me.’ She finished her drink and the ice rattled. She had that same look in her eye that she had when he held the knife at her.

‘What’s a psychiatric nurse?’

‘Well, it’s a nurse who looks after people with mental illness.’

Daniel met Minnie’s gaze for a moment and then looked away.

‘Are you divorced then?’

‘No, my husband died,’ she said, getting up and washing her plate. Daniel watched her back as he finished his tea. He scraped the plate a little.

‘There’s more if you want it,’ she said, still with her back to him. He did want more, but said he was fine. He took the plate to her and she said thank you, and he noticed that her eyes had changed, and were warm again.

When she was finished with the washing up, she came up to his room with some towels and asked if there was anything he was needing, like toothpaste, or a toothbrush.

He sat on the bed, looking at the red swirls on the carpet.

‘I’ll leave one out for you in the bathroom. I have a couple of new ones. Anything else you need?’

He shook his head.

‘You’ve not got much stuff, have you? We’ll maybe need to get you clothes for school.’ She was opening the wardrobe and touching the hem of the one pair of trousers he had hung there.

Daniel let himself fall back on the bed. He put his hands in his pockets and pulled out the little porcelain butterfly. He lay back examining it. She was talking at him, bending down and picking things up from the floor, closing the windows. When she bent down she made little grunts and sighs.

‘What’ve you got there?’ she said suddenly.

Daniel put it back in his pocket but she had seen it. He smiled. He liked the look on her face. It was wobbly with concern. Her lips were tight and she was standing at the foot of the bed, frowning at him.

‘That doesn’t belong to you.’

He looked up at her. Strange that she did not flinch with the knife but would lose it over a stupid porcelain butterfly. Her voice was so quiet he had to sit up a little on the bed to hear her. He had to try not to breathe.

‘Daniel, I know we don’t know each other very well. I know you’ve had a hard time and I’ll do what I can to make things easier for you. I expect a certain amount of trouble. I wouldn’t be in this game otherwise. But there are some things that you have to respect. It is the only way that this will work. The ornament’s not yours for taking. It’s important to me. When you brush your teeth, I want you to put it back on the shelf.’

‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘I want to keep it. I like it.’

‘Well, I can understand that. If you’re careful, you can look after it for a couple of days, but then I would like you to return it to the shelf in the bathroom, where we can both appreciate it. Mind you, that is two days only, a special treat for you because this is your new home and I want you to settle in. But in two days I will ask for it back, if you have not yet returned it.’

Daniel had not been spoken to in this way before. He was not sure if she was angry, or indulging him. His elbows were hurting a little from the strain of sitting up.

She pulled her cardigan around her, and left the room. The scent of lemon juice followed her.