CHAPTER 34
School felt, some days, as if it was burning me at both ends, rather than a candle, and it was only the people round me who stopped the cracks from spreading.

Miss Graham was true to her word, doing her level best to get me into university, but sometimes I just wanted to let go and forget the whole thing. Sally, or Miss Stephenson at school, of course, worked harder than I then realised to keep me on track, and Emily did it in other ways, largely by being absolutely placid about everything.

Sally was tickled by the pure adoration that erupted from the boys when her bikini-clad form appeared in the Sunday Express, which at that time was a broadsheet, so the pictures could be larger than tacky tabloids like the Sun could manage. Half a page, that photograph Aidan took, of three girls in next to nothing, and the only thing that kept some of the more daring sixth-formers off her was the reputation Tom carried about with him. Emily and I, by contrast, were almost idolised, it seemed, as the school’s dream couple. Despite my physical problems, I knew I was well-liked, which was an amazing thing in hindsight. Even at the time, I kept waiting for the bubble to burst, for someone to have a go about nancy-boys, but for once I don’t believe it was Tom who stopped it.

Trying to analyse it, now, all I can suppose the strength of feeling came from is revulsion. Carlisle isn’t a huge city, and Maryport is a tiny place. What happened to me, and to others, including other children from Maryport itself, was not only shocking, but very, very close to home. Parents looked at their children and feared; brothers and sisters looked at each other and shuddered at the thought that any one of them could have ended up in Thirlmere, or with Charlie, or under a suburban garden.
I was a scapegoat in reverse, having borne the sin I had come back to them. It helped that I didn’t make a huge song and dance out of it, as some might have. Nana would never, ever have let me play the victim.

The first time I had a breakdown after my release, she tended me, and then asked the big question: was I going to let them win? I had my life back, I had the chance of doing something with it, and she wasn’t going to let me throw it away.

So, I slaved at the schoolwork, I talked for hours with Dave, and as often as we could Emily and I made love, and it never got stale.

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The Summer of 1976 was a famous one, with a severe drought and soaring temperatures sandwiched between two extremely wet periods. When the drought broke, it broke with a deluge, but up to that point the weather was a fever dream of heat and sunshine. I sat my four A-levels, after having done very nearly double the work of other pupils to catch up. Sally had been a huge help in spending time after school pushing me even harder, and although she had the excuse that Tom was about I still felt I owed her more than I could adequately repay. It got to the stage where there would be three or four teachers at our house, working me through mock exam questions and tearing my answers constructively into shreds, then showing me how to give better ones. Those were evenings where Em would join in as her own subjects came up, and Karen would float by with a tray of tea or, later in the evening, a great jug of Sangria and an array of snacks, and then the session would degenerate into a melee of teasing and tall stories.

And then there were two things. In June, my eighteenth birthday. Legally, they could never again touch me, but I could go after them, and Roger had been working on that one for some time. We had sued the Council, of course, and a tidy sum had arrived in my trust fund, but I wanted hellbitch.

That was where Simon and Dave got down to it, and as I should have expected Dave knew a man, and one day I had a phone call from Simon that delivered a lovely little bonus.

“Stephen, my dear, they do after all appear to have some funds. My little friends in the Revenue and H.M. Customs are rather good at ferreting, and we have a couple of off record accounts. By a couple, of course, I mean seven or eight. Elsie has some new charges to answer, mostly involving such terms as evasion, fraudulent, false….”

“Simon, she’s in Broadmoor. She’s officially mad. How can you do her for knowingly and with intent when she’s irrational?”

“Oh, darling Stephen, you know so little of the world. We’re going after the person, not the loony”

“Simon….”

“Legal person, my love. The legal entity for your suit is the home, which was run as a limited company. As long as we can trace the funds to the home, we can sequester them, no matter whose name they have been attributed to. I have another reason for this, and I have to be blunt. As long as that cow has access to any funds outside our control, she can threaten you. There may come a time when we can take such monies as a matter of course, but not yet, so we do it in other ways. Remember Al Capone? Never done for murder, but jailed for the rest of his life for tax fraud.”

“Yes…..and it’s just one more way to shit on her. Simon, if I wasn’t straight….”

“Darling, you are far too young for an old queen like me! I’ll stick to the other elderly monarch, I’ve almost got him house-trained”

And then it was exam time. No, I don’t want to go into detail about serried ranks of folding tables in the sports hall, or “Now turn your paper over”, “Thirty minutes!”, “Stop writing now!”

I had a couple of sessions where as my melted brain ran out of my ears I went straight from the exam hall to the track and ran my stress away.

It was over at last. All I had ahead of me now were three years of study…and more exams. I was eighteen, I was legally an adult, I was free, I was in love, I had the finest adoptive parents imaginable, the list went on and on, and yet there had to be more. Always more, because there was always that ghost at the wedding, the missing piece. Where the hell was he?

1976…I decided that I wanted to see other mountains, and almost fell out with Brian when I begged him to let me get down to the Alps.

“You won’t be safe”

“They’re in bloody prison!”

“Until Simon has stripped them, they can still get you, and Tom can’t travel too easily armed. Look, son, just one more season, and then we’ll have their hides and everything they own as well.”

He was right, and I had words with Simon and Roger, and they were the ones who came up with the suggestion that broke our deadlock.

“Darling, Roger and I want to go cottaging”

I didn’t get the joke, though I could hear him giggling in the background.

“Be quiet, Roger, or you shan’t come. Oh, you and your filthy mind. Stephen, we would like to take a couple of cottages in North Wales for a couple or three weeks, would you and darling Emily like to come along? There is the most wonderful walking, and the climbing is a delight, and for once it appears we shan’t have to worry about rain. We have an option of a couple of places right next to Rupert’s little shop”

“Rupert?”

“Rupert the bear, the strip cartoon. In Beddgelert.”

I rang Em, and she was definitely interested. Iain’s parents also agreed, and Tom just smiled and said that the sheep would be safe as Sally would no doubt join us. We had a plan.

Just before the holiday, though, Simon’s ferrets struck gold. The Crown took a huge chunk, in both arrears and penalties, and the rest….one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in damages to me. I didn’t quite follow Simon’s account, but words like “aggravated”, “exemplary” and “punitive” seemed to feature rather a lot.

“My darling boy, you do realise what this means?”

“That I’m rich?”

“Not quite, but now you are eighteen, and legal, and have funds, it is your turn to buy the bubbly!”

There was one other comment that struck me almost physically. Before we all set off for our strange foreign holiday, I was talking to Em about the funds I was getting from so many sources so suddenly, and she just kissed me gently and said “As long as you realise I’m not marrying you for your money, love”