CHAPTER 2
They weren’t the worst of the people I stayed with, but they were certainly far from the best. For a few months, I was moved from one set of carers to another, some of whom actually matching that description as people who cared. Several, however, were most definitely ‘other’ in their approach.

Once, and only once, I managed to get back to the family home, trusting in kinship and blood to take me in and away from the latest non-carers. It was an education in all senses when Mam answered the door.

“Yes?”

“Mam…”

“You have ten seconds to get away from this door or I call the Social”

“Mam?”

“You made your choice, Billy. You were the one who decided we weren’t good enough. Dad’s washed his hands of you, and I can’t say I blame him. You know your way back to Chester. Don’t come here again”

It was too many years later that I worked out what was really happening, but by then it was too late, and she was long gone from a lethal mixture of heart and lung problems brought on by her consumption of Player’s. It took me such a long time to realise how much wider my father’s habit of defining relationships through violence actually spread. It was the first hint I got that it wasn’t just me, that others also received what men like him were more than happy to give out. My mother may have come across as unfeeling, but in the end, she was almost as much a victim as myself.

Mrs Keegan had been, to be as fair to her as I can, only one of several women who added an equal-opportunity gloss to the world’s sum of brutality. I think it was number six or seven before the social services finally clicked into action. Perhaps it was the time they needed for the paperwork, or perhaps someone’s palm needed greasing a little more. Maybe it was the number of times I ran off, several of which involved a meeting with a certain police sergeant, and in the end, they had simply got fed up. I was moved on once more, and this time the blue-suited bastard’s prediction was on the money, and the windows had bars.

It was called ‘Mersey View’, in Runcorn, even further from what had been my family home in the days when my assumption that I actually had such a thing held at least a hint of reality. The building was old, a brooding lump of detached brickwork somewhere near the High Street, certainly well away from any notional view of the river. I suspect it had once been a hotel or similar, and it had that look about it. Red brick, white lintels over the windows, and a cramped entry hall with a little window where previous and rather more voluntary residents might once have checked in. I didn’t see it that day, for I entered at the rear.

“Wipe your feet, boy! What’s this one, then, George?”

My beloved sergeant had apparently decided I was to be delivered safely to my new home without the risk of any diversion on the way, and I was in the back of a Panda, some shitty little car or other painted in a depressing sort of grey colour scheme. He tightened his grip on my wrist, grunting at the woman who was standing at the door to a large kitchen. She was in a nylon overall, hair in curlers under a scarf wrapped turban-style.

“A little sod, Marie. Runaway little sheepshagger brat”

He actually laughed, just then, the first and only one I ever heard from him.

“Tell the truth, chuck, I don’t think he would, you know? Shag? Right little pansy, this one. Can I have a signature, then I can wash my hands”

“Cuppa first? I’ll get it locked away, then do you a brew, if that suits, like?”

“Aye! No hurry to get back to the station, am I?”

“Smashing! You: up those stairs. Now!”

The place had three floors, including the ground, and its previous life was clear in the layout. Well past its prime, the stairs she had indicated creaked loudly as we ascended, and I filed that one away as part of what was becoming a routine for me. Look for exits, girl. Look for traps.

Rooms lined the corridor, and ‘Marie’ opened one of them, the third on the left. Rather than a room, as I had expected, it gave onto a small triangular antechamber, a door in each face. As she reached for the handle on the left, the other door opened, revealing a boy of around my own age. My new carer turned quickly.

“Get back in that fucking room, you little shit! Move it, Benny Boy!”

“But I need… I’m still bleeding…”

“Get any on my fucking sheets, you cunt, and I will MAKE you fucking bleed like you’ve never fucking bled before!”

I found myself flying into what was clearly going to be my room, and before the door slammed, the woman turned her attention on me.

“You will not give me problems, Tinkerbell. Problems get dealt with. You don’t want to find out what that means. Any noise from you and I will show you exactly what that meaning is”

The door slammed, the plasterboard walls shaking at the impact, and as her heavy tread made each stair creak, I heard the quietest of sobs from the boy next door.

My tenth birthday was coming up fast, and I remembered my thoughts outside Chester station that afternoon so recent in time but long in experience. I didn’t want to be a boy when I reached double figures; I was now wondering if making it to ten years old was actually going to happen at all.

Best not think about that. I pressed my ear against the partition, and heard the sounds of stifled sobs. Why was the boy bleeding, or rather ‘still’ bleeding? That little word suggested a long-term condition, and I remembered something from school about each person having eight pints of blood, which made a gallon: how long would it take a gallon to leak out? How quickly was ‘Benny Boy’ leaking? I tapped on the partition, and his whisper came back, terse and urgent.

“Don’t! Mrs Parsons will hear you!”

“She won’t if we whisper”

There were a few moments of near silence, broken only by his breathing and the catches in it.

“OK. But don’t try at night. One of the others will hear”

“Other children?”

“No. Charlie or Don”

“Who are they?”

“They work here. They… They look after the place at night, and do the breakfasts. They…”

He stopped abruptly, as the stairs creaked. I managed to get to my bed just before Mrs Parsons opened the outer door, then the one to what now felt like a cell. Two things were thrown to, or rather at, me.

“Can you read, Tinkerbell?”

“Yes, Miss”

“That’s ‘Mrs Parsons’ to you, you little shit. Read that to me, then. Out loud, in case you didn’t understand what I said”

One of the two items was a piece of paper glued to a plywood board, the other a small alarm clock. I assumed she didn’t want me to read the clock, so started on the single handwritten page. The writing wasn’t too bad, and my reading level was quite advanced even for my age back then, so I puzzled it out. There were numbers that looked as if they were times, but some of them went a lot higher than twelve. I didn’t ask, because I was learning swiftly and surely that it wasn’t a course of behaviour that would result in any results I might appreciate. The paper was a sort of timetable, giving times for breakfast and tea, along with such things as ‘classroom’. When I had finished reading the whole thing out loud, she snatched it back. It seemed I was supposed to have memorised it as well as read it aloud.

“That clock is wound and set, so don’t let it run down and don’t you dare fucking overwind it. You come late for meals and you will go hungry. Come late for classes and you will get a hiding, and Mr Parsons doesn’t hold back. Spare the rod, spoil the child, and you can trust me, you will NOT be spoiled, Tinkerbell. There is a pot under your bed. It will be cleaned out every morning. Your bathroom slot is one. Can you count?”

I was already learning.

“Yes. Mrs Parsons”

“You get ten minutes in the bog in the morning. There are nine other boys in your section. right now. Your breakfast will be at seven thirty, so work out how early you have to be finished so the others can get their turn. You make any of them late, you both get a hiding”

Without a single question about how well I had understood her, if at all, she was gone, my inner and outer doors slamming one after the other, the partition between the cells shaking at their impacts. I worked through the arithmetic on my fingers, and came to one hundred minutes, which converted into one hour and forty minutes. I would have to be up early indeed.

The stairs creaked once more as the horrible woman descended them, and I looked out of my window for a while, trying to place my room into a mental map of the streets and the direction I was facing. There were bars, on the inside of the window, and they were clearly home-made, bolted onto some metal tabs that had been screwed into the wooden frame. The screws had then been drilled, so that the slots a blade might have fitted into had been obliterated. No prospects there. A real pity, as there was an outhouse or extension of some sort under the window, just a short drop away.

There was a soft tapping on the partition, and I gave up my search for exits, scuttling over to lean against the thin plywood, plasterboard, whatever it was.

“Benny?”

“You better be ready, lad”

“It’s Billy”

For some reason, my mouth ran away with me.

“For now. I’m really a girl”

“You can’t be! Only boys here! Anyway, five minutes before seventeen hundred”

“What?”

“Teatime. Oh… It’s like they do in the Army: seventeen is five, twelve added to five makes seventeen. Seventeen is five in the evening. We have to be there on time”

Creaking stairs once more, and I found myself a quick learner indeed, standing ready at the door when the woman opened it. Not a word from her, just a flick of the thumb and Benny and I fell in behind her, joining a double line of boys, all around my age or slightly older. Not a word was said by any of them until we were in what had obviously been the dining room when the building had been a hotel, and a meal of mince and onions, marrowfat peas and two scoops of slightly grey mashed potatoes was in front of each of us.

If the potatoes were slightly grey, that colour was certainly that of the mince. No knives. No forks. A spoon for each of us, collected, along with the meal, from a little hatch, behind which were a couple of men in stained aprons.

I counted twenty-three other children, all seeming to bear out Benny’s claim of a single-sex establishment, and as soon as the hatch slammed shut after the last plate had been collected, the room burst into noise and life as conversations started from all corners. One boy sat silently, though, his face a mass of bruises. Benny caught the way I was looking.

“That’s Harry, Billy. He bit Don a couple of days ago, so he got a hiding”

I stared. Everything about ‘Harry’, from the stiffness in his movements to the way he seemed to suck rather than chew his food, shouted that he hurt, that his ‘hiding’ had gone far beyond what my own father had inflicted on me even in his most savage of moods. What sort of place was this?

Benny was still talking, although I had missed the words.

“What?”

“What did you mean you were a girl?”

Why on Earth had I said that to someone I didn’t know at all? Whatever the reason, it was out. I caught a couple of the other kids staring at me, and realised it wasn’t something safe to let out.

“Didn’t say ‘girl’, Benny, I said ‘Cymro’. Welsh, see?”

He stared at me for six or seven seconds before making a clear decision to drop the matter, so we moved on to other matters, such as where we were from, why we were here and so forth. What was then South Lancashire in his case, North Wales in mine; we ended up in silly childish jokes about leeks and sheep, before our meal was finished, my new friend licking his plate clean. Once he was done, we all lined up to hand back plate and spoon, no room there for sneaking one away. Back to our seats, the door opened and Mrs Parsons there once more. Not a word from anyone from then on. We were marched back up to our rooms, locked away one by one and left to our own thoughts, right up until I heard the soft tapping on my partition just as Mrs Parsons’ footsteps left the stairs in silence.

“Yes, Benny?”

“What did you mean you are really a girl?”

I sat as silently as he had, but without the hushed sobs or catch of voice. I am not sure why, but I suddenly needed a friend. It must have been the shock of my encounters with Mrs Parsons, or maybe a remnant of that other shock of being completely disowned, but right there and then I needed someone sympathetic, and all I had was Benny. He wouldn’t let it drop.

“Do you mean you’re dressed up as a boy, Billy?”

I sighed, but managed to keep it down to a whisper.

“No, Benny. I AM a girl, but just inside, just how I feel. All boy on the outside”

It broke then, my dam, burst in a surge of words that couldn’t even begin describing how I had hurt my entire life, however short it had actually been.

“I call myself Debbie when I can”

“Why Debbie? And how can you be different inside? Haven’t you got a willy? Girls don’t have willies”

“Ah, Mam has…”

I nearly broke just then, memories of her turning me away from her cutting through my soul, but I strangled my sobs at birth with a vision of the awful woman downstairs.

“Mam has a record by another Debbie, Debbie Reynolds, and she is so pretty and smiles and I just thought it might make me as nice as her”

Creaks on the stairs. I shot back to my bed, conversation finished, as the awful woman in question made her rounds. I remembered the timetable: in bed by two thousand, and the alarm clock showed seven thirty. My door opened, and she threw a pair of pyjamas at me.

“Get in them, get into bed, and keep fucking quiet!”

Slam, slam once more, and I hurried to do as she ordered.

At eight o’clock sharp, with a clunk, the light went out.

At eleven o’clock, for the first but far from last time, I met Donald Renfrew Harrison.

The following night I would meet Charles Cooper.