This still addresses traumatic issues, but is largely past the brutal subjects of the last two chapters. A goddess is invoked.

CHAPTER 16
She was staring straight at me, her mouth opening, and I realised she was about to jump up and come down from the stage, and for an instant I hoped she would, for it would all be over, and my darling Karen would take me home with her, and…and then I realised that this was a secure place, and she wouldn’t be allowed, and by the time she was able to tell anyone I might find myself in a shallow grave somewhere.

That was a sudden change of my feelings. For three years had been hoping, trying, to die, to get it all over with, and suddenly hope danced in front of me in a pretty dress and I wanted to live, really, really needed to live. I made the slightest of head shakes possible and saw her recognise my meaning, and after it was over we were allowed to file past the great man and his lovely wife, and I caught just the faintest whisper from her.

“Stay alive”

What happened afterwards I only know from what the people concerned later told me, so there will be errors and omissions, but from now on I will be omitting what happened on a day by day basis to me because you have already been told more than it is good for a decent soul to bear. I will make one point, though, and that is that I have named none of the boys, described none of them. I will not do so. There were so many of them, some of them brutal, some of them needy, many of them simply following their peers. For all of their sinning against me, they were still, really, only children, and children whose mentors, whose fucking ‘carers’, were people like Alf, and Charlie, and the hellbitch herself. Children who would have had their own little holidays in Thirlmere, and who only moved up the pecking order because I was permanently crucified at the bottom of it.

So, this is what I was told. It will seem disjointed; some conversations Karen could recount almost verbatim, some things were less clear. As I write this, I am both excited and seriously disturbed by the memories it brings back. Please allow for my difficulty with that part of my life.

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Karen had come along to the Borstal session because, well, it was what she had to do. It went with the position. Brian had indeed looked after her well, she had made that leap from poverty using her body, her smile and, in her pride, her personality. Most people recognised that she had no pretensions, though she did love to tease and flirt, and she was well aware of my lusting after her from afar. She was five years older than me, but at that age five years is an unbridgeable gulf.

She told me she had always found me cute, like a little puppy that just adores its owner, for those were the eyes I had when I was sound her. In my youthful conceit I had thought that I had successfully concealed my infatuation, but for a practised tease like Karen that was as clear as still water. I was sweet, she said, sweet and harmless and interesting, and then Emily was there, the spotty fat girl, and everything was even sweeter to watch. Not only that, but Emily had a mind, and they shared tastes, and there were so many delights to keep her smiling until Brian proposed.

And then, one day, I was gone. Just like some odd spy thriller, I had dropped off the world into–where? My girlfriend came round for months, just looking for any word or hint of where I was, and then as all hope drained from her eyes and her posture she started to do little things to help out, to be around the books she loved and not alone as she was in the crowds at school. At fifteen, she started officially working part-time as an assistant, and her acne began to ease as her body stayed plump.

It was Sid who seemed hardest hit. I had really clicked with him, as he spotted someone else with a mind that wanted to fly free and a body or soul that imposed restrictions. He had apparently gone to the school, along with Emily, to see if there was any way to track me down, and that turned out to be something that froze what was left of my spirit.

Apparently, Social Services were not able to release details to a non-relative. There were no relatives on file apart from my mother, who was in a ward devoted to chronic alcoholism and was hardly competent.

They asked about my grandmother. What grandmother? The person to whom Mam had assigned my guardianship had no knowledge of her.

Who was this person? We are not at liberty to say, but it is a medical practitioner.

Stonewalled at every turn, Emily had refused to give up. She had a rough idea of where Nana lived, and for some months she rode the Coast Line down on a Saturday, and the La’l Ratty up the Dale, and walked till her feet hurt, but she never found the cottage, never found Nana. Eventually, it all became like a dream, some Golden Age of the past that probably never existed, and she settled into her part-time job and her girliness with Karen, as more life drained from Sid, until the day when Brian finally did ask the Question, and my goddess was out of Maryport like a rat up a drainpipe.

That was all she knew up until that day when she looked out over a sea of bored little shits, and a lot of bored big shits, and in the middle a small group of bright colour, around a shocking pink T-shirt, and that boy was very girly, and…oh shit.

She had caught my eye, and seen my little gesture, “No!” and with a crash she understood. This was a juvenile prison, in all but name, and she wasn’t going to take my hand and just walk out, not past a whole row of screws, and if she made a fuss…well, a fuss would be made over me, and that would be something terrible. Some aspect of the situation, she said, something about my face, some little thing was tapping at her mind saying “Danger”

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Karen left the horrible place on Brian’s arm, smiling falsely at all around, until they were safe in the Jaguar and she started to shake.

“What’s up, pet?”

“Just get me home, Bri, I want to be well away before I tell you”

He drove them smoothly, but not too fast, well, not that much too fast, to the rather nice place she had picked out on the Eden bank, and as soon as he had parked in one of the double garages she burst into tears, real tears, the full-force scream of emotion.

“Christ, Karen, what’s the matter?”

“Bri, you remember me telling you about that tiny little kid, had the crush on me? The one I thought might be dead?”

“Fuck’s sake, love, not in that shithole”

“Yes…”

Brian thought for a while, and she was chilled by the way his tone changed.

“Kaz, love, tell me…was he in overalls, blue overalls, or was he in a T-shirt and jeans?”

“A pink T-shirt”

“Oh fuck. Oh fucking hell. You told me he had a girlfriend, yes?”

“Yeah, fat little spotty thing, but lovely, really sweet, Emily”

“Then he is truly fucked. Look, Kaz, you know my background, you know I was a bad boy, that’s why we went to that fucking place today.”

Karen realised he was actually shaking.

“I spent a year in there, a year of…just let’s agree it was not a good time. Those T-shirts, that’s Flogger Cunningham’s little private hell.”

He was staring off into space, lost in some old vision. “Karen…do you remember me telling you about Eric Wildman, the coaching assistant? The one found dead at home a year or so ago?”

“Yes…I remember you saying how he made your skin crawl, always coming into the showers after training when you were an apprentice”

“Yeah, my skin crawled for a fucking good reason. He obviously liked ‘em a bit younger than most men, and a bit less girly.”

He sat silent for a minute. “It was when I was first seeing you, and he made a joke about you being rather mature, and then….then he suggested that if I ever fancied something a bit fresher, that was his word, fresher, he knew somewhere I could get it…

“We heard stories, in the borstal, about that place. About fucking parties, and bigwigs, and…..fuck, Kaz, we have to get the little sod out of there”

“They won’t talk to us, Bri, Sid and Em tried for months, and they got stonewalled.”

“Well, call Sid, call him now, and see what we can come up with. Kaz, if he stays there he’s as good as dead”

Sid answered first ring, and Emily was there.

“Can I please speak to her, Sid? Ta….Em, it’s Kaz, yeah, I’m fine, look, shit, hell...I’ve just seen Stevie”

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Emily stood in stunned silence as Karen continued to talk down the line. He was alive. He wasn’t dead. After an eternity that could only have been seconds, she looked at Sid.

“Karen’s found Stevie”

Sid collapsed on the floor, and she reached down to take his hand as a world of thoughts tore her mind apart. His Nana. His Nana.

“Karen, we have to find his Nana and tell her, she must be able to get him”

That was when Brian finally did become that Bad Boy Made Good, made very Good indeed.

I have tried to reconstruct what they said, how they felt, but I can only go by their words, not their inner feelings, so if I go overboard please forgive my overdramatic excess, but all of this WAS drama for me, it was real.

Brian knew someone, who knew someone, and that second someone was an independent muck raker, as his targets called him, or investigative journalist, as he actually preferred. Brian had him round at the house within three days, and locked Karen out of the room when he told his story.

That one detail disturbs me now, and I wonder what exactly Brian Dennahy went through in his own time at the borstal. Whatever it was, he didn’t, and doesn’t, want his wife to know. That both cheers me and appals me. It means that I was not alone in my suffering, and also that I was not alone in my suffering; in other words, comfort in realising that I was not some mad, bad, evil child that needed to be punished, but also that countless numbers of other lost children suffered at least as badly as me.

While Dave Embleton went off to do his bit, Brian drove over to Maryport with Karen, and as Sid locked up early four people armed with the Yellow Pages drove down the coast to Ravenglass and, pub by pub, worked their way up the Dale.

Emily had clear memories of the Ratty, and of things around the Estuary, but she was never a fells lass, nor a lover of pubs, and so they drove up the valley calling in at pub by pub, asking after a woman whose surname Emily had never heard, until, finally, they ended up in the Boot Inn and Arthur ended their quest.

Emily said that he immediately recognised Brian, then looked at her as if he knew her but couldn’t place her, saw something in her face, and then just said “Have you got him?”

Brian answered. “Not yet. Is she here”

Arthur called out to the bar “They think they’ve found Ada’s kid. Someone go and get her, please”

Ten minutes later, in Emily’s words, a leathery gnome of a woman came running into the bar, as a customer ran in behind her and pointed her at them. Her eyes went wide.

“Emily? Stevie’s Emily? Tha’s got my boy?”

Brian caught her as she collapsed, and Arthur immediately got a pot of tea going, and a rum on the table. Half the pub was gathered round them, and Karen smiled as nicely as she could and asked them, nicely, if they wouldn’t please leave them alone for a bit, while fighting the urge to scream at them. Nana was crying, and clinging onto Em as if she would drown if she let go, but the rum helped and eventually she was able to talk without her voice breaking. She looked at Karen.

“I know thee. Tha were that library lass that my boy fancied, went off with some footballer or other”

“That’s the some footballer or other there. My husband, Brian. Look, we’ve spent hours trying to find this place, we need to get something to eat and explain what we think has happened.”

“Arthur? Can tha feed this lot, I’ll sort thee in the morn”

Brian called out “No, pal, I‘ll sort you out now. And have you a couple of rooms for us, I’ve had a bit of a day of it and I need a drink”

“There’s room for thee in my cott!”

Emily smiled “I’ve told them about how you use the News of the World…”

And that wasn’t the start of it, and certainly not the end, but the first bricks were starting to come away from the wall.