The Dead of Summer. Camilla Way

twiddling the knob between stations, listening to the static until Bela shouted at me to pack it in and I went to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked at my face a lot back then. Not because I thought I was pretty – I knew that I was not – but because eventually, if you stare long enough, you stop recognising yourself; you lose yourself. It’s like if you say the same word over and over again – gradually it becomes just a sound. Meaningless. If you stare at yourself long enough you begin to look like someone else entirely or like no one at all. Sometimes I could pass half an hour like that, scaring myself witless with my own reflection.

      My face and eyes are small and brown, the sockets dark like I’ve been punched. Two bruises that match the ones on my father’s face. I have inherited his wounds. The backs of my hands, my knees and feet are also darker than the rest of me and like I’ve said, I’ve always cut my black hair short. In bright light, my arms look quite furry, like a spider’s. I was small for my age and skinny. When I was thirteen I wore Push’s hand-me-downs rather than my sisters’, and strangers, if they thought about it at all, would assume I was a boy.

      Later, when my sisters had come back drunk, and my dad had fallen asleep on the sofa and Push had gone to bed, I lay awake and listened to Bela and Esha whispering in the dark. In the few weeks we had been here they had fallen in love with their new life. They were mad about London. They never talked about Leeds or their old friends, or Mum.

      They threw themselves into trying out the pubs in Deptford and New Cross, starting college and planning their escape from our dad, our crappy house, and from me. They were sixteen and sick to death of death. They didn’t want sadness anymore. Didn’t want anything to bring them down. A soppy song on the radio? ‘DePRESSing!’ They’d switch stations. A tragic movie on the telly? ‘BORing!’ They’d kick Push to turn it over. Dad sitting in the dark, drinking beer? ‘Just ignore him, silly old bat.’ They weren’t having any of it. Life was too short. Turn up the music, cheer up, have fun!

      While I listened to them whisper I remembered how after Mum died I suddenly began to see her everywhere. Out of the corner of my eye I’d spot her in the strangest of places. As I wandered the streets when I should have been at school, a breathless laugh, a flash of red coat or a whiff of Anais-Anais would have me swivelling my head or snuffling up the air like a dog.

      My mother had a lightness in her looks and in herself that spilled into Push and the twins but that ran out by the time it was my turn. I, alone, was the dark dregs of my father’s cup. And yet she loved us all and our house was a happy place, in its way. My dad, vague and quiet and usually to be found pottering with our beaten-up old Ford out front, or in our backyard’s flower beds, she loved fiercely, protectively. If she’d find him sometimes staring into space or brooding somewhere by himself she’d bustle and boss him and kiss and hug him like she would with us and he’d blink into life with a surprised, delighted smile. Sometimes I’d catch them sitting together on the sofa or at the kitchen table, my mother laughing and the big, black bruises of my father’s eyes holding her face in tender astonishment.

      She was the life of our house, of us. The life, the glue, the point. Her broad Yorkshire accent, her wide lap, her laughter and her love would gently calm Push’s restless energy, force my sisters to share their secret twin world with the rest of us, pull my father from his fuggy silences and forgive me, forgive me, stubbornly, determinedly, forgive me for being the person that I was.

      And the rope that kept my family tethered was unbreakable, I thought. Strong. After she died I would often sneak into her wardrobe, just stand there in the dark among the coats and dresses and fill myself with her smells. The perfume mingling with the sweet-sour smell of armpits and soap powder and that perfect smell that was just hers alone. But every time I returned the smell seemed to get a little less, like one of those scent-drenched strips you get in magazines that have been opened and discarded and left to fade. Eau de Mum. Until someone packed away her clothes when I was out one day. My mother was stacked neatly, violently, quietly, in boxes in our attic and that was that.

      When my sisters finally fell asleep that night I knelt on my bed and lifted the nets to smoke one of their fags through the open window. I blew rings into the orange-tinged blackness for a while and then I saw Kyle come out of No. 33. He stood on his doorstep for a few seconds and I glanced at the radio-alarm clock. It was way past two. As I watched he knelt down to put on the shoes he’d been carrying, quietly closed the front door, then disappeared off down the street.

two

       New Cross Hospital. 4 September 1986. Transcription of interview between Dr C Barton and Anita Naidu. Police copy.

       Kyle’s dead. They’re all dead. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.

      They think I’m strange no doubt, the people who live in this block. They’re students, mostly. Of course I’ve changed my name since I was thirteen, and they don’t recognise me as that little grim-faced girl with the black bar across her eyes in all the papers seven years ago. They don’t recognise me in the way they would if it was Denis or Katie or Kyle (especially Kyle) who they passed in the hallway or on the stairs. For being alive – the sole ‘survivor’ – and still a child, I had the luxury of having my identity protected. No, my neighbours just see a skinny, short-haired boy-girl who has no visitors and won’t return their smiles. In fact, except for Malcolm, I don’t think I’ve ever said a word to a single other person living here.

      I came here to Bristol not long after that summer. It was thought best, all things considered (I could hardly go back to Lewisham High, could I?). I was fostered out to a family up here, trained in dealing with people like me. And after I turned sixteen I got a factory job and just stayed.

      Now and again I hear my name mentioned – my real name, I mean – and I freeze in shock. Whether it crops up in conversation with the girls in the factory, or there’s a programme on TV, or the papers mention us in connection to some other case (James Bulger, for example), my reaction is always the same. A slow, creeping dread; the same sick fear that I’m going to be found out. Luckily the girls at the factory already think I’m odd, are used to my silence and my solitariness, and don’t notice when I react like this.

      When I first moved into this block of flats, my neighbours – the younger ones – tried to befriend me, taking me to be a student like them, I suppose. They’d bang on my door, ask to borrow a bottle-opener, invite me to their parties. It took them ages to understand I would never come. I watch them sometimes from my window when I cannot sleep, watch them returning from their raves and parties; hear them in the hallways boasting of the lads they’ve pulled, the girls they’ve had. I watch them stagger home at five, six, seven in the morning, their arms around each other’s shoulders, and then I lie back on my bed and without even meaning to, I am back there, reliving that summer, wondering when it was, which particular point it might have been when I could perhaps have stopped what happened from happening.

      The next day at school went pretty much the same as the first, with Denis cheerfully babbling away by my side. In the weeks that followed I grew used to having him about and even missed him when he went off to his special classes without me. He proudly told me that he had learning difficulties (no shit, I thought), and that it was in the special classes he’d first met Kyle (Kyle was different, he explained. Kyle had behavioural problems). And we’d see Kyle sometimes, sloping through the corridors by himself, sticking to the shadows, always staring at other people’s feet. His hair was greasy, his uniform too long in the sleeves, too short in the legs. Skinny as a stick, he was the sort of kid you suspected would smell faintly of piss. The sort of kid nobody notices and you wouldn’t remember if you had. Except I did, and I don’t know why.

      The same thing happened every afternoon. I’d walk out the gates with Denis then he’d sidle off to wait for Kyle, leaving me to go home on my own. But one day we were a little late coming out of class and Kyle was already there, waiting. This time I didn’t let Denis shake me off and walked over to Kyle with him. He must have seen us coming but he kept looking at a spot just