Thicker Than Water

‘Didn’t seem to have any mates at all, to be honest,’ Tom chipped in.

‘He just sat, out there on the walkway, the livelong day. Bouncing a ball off a wall, or reading a comic sometimes. And sometimes some of the younger kids would sit with him, on a weekend or after school, because he had the comics - the American ones, you know, with Spiderman and whatnot - and he’d let the little ones take them away when he’d finished reading them.’

‘So that was how Billy got to know him.’ Jean’s tone became more sombre and her eyes defocused. This part she was remembering more vividly. ‘He’d sit with Mark for an hour or more, just talking about superheroes and superpowers. And he’d come in with an armload of Superman and Spiderman and X-Man and Daredevil-Man, and sit on that sofa -’ she nodded towards the living room, one skin of brickwork away on the other side of the wall that faced her ‘- for hours. In his own little world.

‘Then I found the poem.’

Tom’s face darkened at the word. ‘Show him,’ he suggested. ‘Show it to him.’

‘I don’t know if I kept it,’ Jean said. And then, abandoning the subterfuge immediately, ‘All right.’

She got up and turned her chair round. Using it as an ad hoc stepladder, she climbed up onto the seat and reached into the space on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. A moment later she got down again and handed me a sheet of paper: lined, folded into four, ragged along the left-hand edge where it had been torn from a pad or an exercise book.

I opened it up and read in silence. Twelve lines in small, neat handwriting with only one crossing-out.

If I could talk, I’d talk. It’s the easy choice.

But I can’t, so my knife has to be my voice.

I sing. Do you hear me sing? But what you don’t know

Is what that sounds like inside me, in the depths below.

I’m full of pain. Like a bottle full of coke.

I take the blade and it just needs one stroke.

It comes out, but it changes as it flows.

Water becomes wine. My wound becomes a rose.

The pressure is balanced, outside and in.

The torment is over, the future can begin.

In that moment I know where I belong.

So you see why I need the blade to make my song.

The crossing out was in the fifth line. I’m full of pain had originally been I’m full of darkness.

‘Mark wrote this?’ I asked.

Jean nodded. ‘Or copied it from somewhere. And he gave it to Billy as a present. Because he thought Billy would get what he was going on about, Billy being such a bright little lad. So after that—’

‘I put my foot down,’ Tom said. ‘I told him to have nothing to do with Mark. Not even to talk to him. I said if he did, I’d stop his pocket money and pull him out of the school football team.’

Jean took the sheet of paper out of my hands and folded it up again, as though its dangerous doggerel had to be silenced. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she assured me. ‘So that was that, we thought. And then in the summer - I suppose that would be a year ago, wouldn’t it, so you’re right, Tom, it must be longer since she went - in the summer Mark jumped off the walkway out there and killed himself. And it came out at the inquest that he’d been cutting himself. For years. Which was what he was telling us, if we’d only cared enough to listen.’ She waved the sheet of paper like a tiny white flag of surrender. ‘What can you say, Mister Castor?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘What kind of love did he get at home, if his mother ups and leaves him for a brickie with a fancy hairdo, and his father is an animal who just hits out all the time at everyone around him? It was for me to say something, and I only thought about Billy. About my own.’

She relapsed into dismal silence. Tom seemed thrown by the sudden detour into moral philosophy, but he struggled on manfully.

‘We didn’t discuss it with Billy,’ he said. ‘John knew all about it, of course, because they were talking about it up and down the estate, but Billy mostly stays at home and does his own thing, like. He’s got his Playstation and his books. Or he goes off wandering, sometimes, with his mates. There’s half a dozen of them - no harm in any of them, not like the bloody teenagers we’ve got round here.