Hunched together in the back of the van as it trundled ever closer to the big city, the boys made a pact. They agreed that Seth was a scary guy, so they’d keep their heads down, do everything he told them to do, never question him, always look if they were sure of what they were doing, then once he started to relax a little around them, give them just that bit of leeway, they’d grab their chance and do a runner.
It came at a service station just outside London. All three of them went to the toilet, where Seth announced loudly that he needed a shit. Wait for me at the sinks, he told the boys. They nodded. And as soon as Seth snibbed the door on his cubicle they were out of there.
In the car park they approached a number of lorry drivers, most of whom told them to beat it.
After what felt like hours, and feeling anxious that Seth would be out of the toilets and making his way into the car park, Thomas approached one more driver.
‘Who are you running away from?’ he asked. Everything about this man was plus-sized. His head, his chest, his beard.
‘Not from. To,’ Thomas said. ‘Our dad took us away from our mum, and we want to get back to her, so we’re…’
Whether the man believed his story or not, he didn’t say, but after looking the boys over, as if assessing whether they might be more trouble than they were worth, he gave a little nod. ‘My old man was an arsehole as well,’ he said. ‘We’re over here.’ He started walking towards a large lorry.
On the way to London the driver got chatty. When they told him why they’d really run away he told them to make their way to Euston Station. ‘That’s where the Jocks get off the train,’ he said. His thinking was that they might give the boys a little more cash when they heard their Scottish accents.
In the absence of anything else, this seemed a reasonable course of action to the boys, and after some persuasion the lorry driver agreed to a large detour and dropped them there.
‘Why do we have to beg?’ asked Robert. ‘Why don’t we just go to the cops and explain what happened?’
‘Brilliant idea,’ replied Thomas, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Then they’ll arrest me for helping to kidnap you. I’ll get banged up, but you’ll get a chauffeur to drive you all the way home.’
Robert saw the sense of this and rather than have his only friend in the world locked up, he agreed to do the begging. He was the youngest and was better looking. People were more likely to feel sorry for him and empty their wallets.
On the first day they raised five pounds, and with the naivety and optimism of youth calculated that they’d only get better at this, raise more money and have enough in a few days’ time to get them both back up to Scotland.
Trouble was, Seth had the same thought regarding their location and caught up with them just a couple of days later.
He waited until after midnight, then pulled them out from under the cardboard box they were sleeping in and hauled them over to his van. There, he punched them both full in the face before throwing them in the back. Then he drove through the streets of the city for what felt like hours, before parking, and then dragging them both up the path of a house and throwing them into a room, where the floor was covered in thin mattresses and the glass in the window was painted over with black paint.
‘There’s a bucket in the corner,’ Seth said. ‘Do your toilet in there. And get some sleep, we’ve got work to do tomorrow.’
Next morning, he took one look at Robert and cursed his bad temper.
‘Look what you made me do, you little shit. No one’s going to buy you looking like that.’
Thomas hadn’t really looked at Robert the whole night; he’d been too full of his own pain and frustration. When he took in the other boy’s face now, he gasped. Robert’s nose was badly swollen and he had heavy bruising around both eyes.
Robert wheezed.
‘Got a broken nose, eh?’ Seth said. ‘The people I was going to sell you to want someone who’s perfect. You won’t do at all, my son.’ He sighed, cursed and then gave out a loud whistle. Two other men appeared at the doorway.
‘Hold them, will ya?’ Seth said.
The boys protested, kicked out and squealed but they were helpless against the strength of Seth’s new allies. They were held down and injected with something.
‘What are you doing to us?’ Thomas yelled.
‘Just a little something to make you more biddable,’ said Seth with a satisfied look. ‘You little shits won’t be doing a runner on me anytime soon.’
What followed was then a nightmare of muddled sleep, horrific dreams, strange hunger and continued injections. It was only a few years later that Thomas realised he’d been forcibly fed heroin and set firmly on the road to addiction.