Chapter One

Friday March 4th 1960

Philip stepped back from the urinal as the groaning started. He turned round fast. Only one of the stall doors was closed and he took a cautious step towards it. The noise came again but more animal than human. The sound ran cold lines down his spine and he wanted to run but the pain in that cry held him there, and then it changed.

He asked, “Hello?”

The noise stopped.

Philip moved closer to the door. He could hear what sounded like snuffling, as if some large creature had its nose to the other side of this pitted wood.

He said, “Don’t mess about.”

The snuffling stopped and a human voice began to cry, one he recognized. Philip looked into the stall to his left, saw he could easily climb over the partition if he stood on the porcelain bowl then the paper holder but he had always wanted to kick a door in and there was never going to be a better opportunity. He stepped back, raised his right leg and slammed the sole of his shoe into the panel beside the slip-lock.

* * * *

Present day

Whenever Michael Porter needed to make purchases at a pharmacy, he looked for that brown bottle with the red and green label: his life changing cold remedy. He knew it to be a waste of time, they hadn’t made the brand in years and it never was popular but that didn’t stop him.

Finding a new one didn’t become important until three years after the event it represented in his mind. By then the original had disappeared although he did ask about it once when Smithson and Company let him into the building again. It wasn’t the easiest request he had ever made, knowing at least two security guards would be following him every inch of the way as he searched. Despite that, it felt worth the effort: rummaging among his dumped belongings in the storage cupboard, things so familiar he wanted to vomit, just to make sure his catalyst was beyond finding.

For many years he had used keepsakes as a memory aid: old toys, his first school cap, a sixpenny piece with a hole in it. Although he knew that he would need to buy in high voltage support to forget the weeks around his stay in Hadenley Hall, gripping that bottle or its twin always felt as if it might encourage those memories to be stronger or more accurate somehow.

His eldest grandson, catching him one day, eyes closed in his favorite chair with a broken lead soldier held in both hands, had demanded a reason and Michael gave it. Later, the boy showed him a survey from the Internet, maintaining that his grandfather’s collection proved that he had serial killer tendencies. Michael acknowledged his interest with a crocodile smile and reminded him he had to sleep eventually.

Once the boy’s comment, even with a grin behind it, would have eaten away at him, ruined days or weeks but not anymore. If his grandson had known enough to ask, Michael could probably have given him the month, certainly the year, when thoughts of that kind ceased to be a problem.

They enjoyed their last dominance over his mind in the shag end of winter, nineteen-sixty: Dirty snow on the ground and a semi-permanent fog hanging round his family home in Upney, the lowest lying part of the borough. Not the best way to see his town as it clung, dull and crumbling, to the eastern borders of London, but the region had peaked fourteen hundred years earlier when Barking was the accepted capital of southern England and just surviving still, Michael thought, had to be worth something. Not that it mattered to him a great deal. He rarely looked further than his own self-obsessed thoughts in those days. Then, he still needed reasons and particular villains outside himself to blame for the disaster his life had become and in service of that near obsession, at the age of twenty, he considered two things pivotal.

The first happened at age five on a warm spring day or so his memory insisted. He couldn’t remember the exact events that lead to his torture, but it would certainly have been fuelled by the continuing problem with his father about being a “mummy’s boy”. It probably involved not wanting to get his hands dirty or close to worms in the garden, or refusing to go down to the allotment with his grandfather, or maybe to a football match. Any of these were guaranteed to produce anger and contempt in his father. Whatever the cause, his uncles were around at the time and their wives and girlfriends were not.

The new conscription laws had caught all of them in nineteen thirty-eight. They spent the following seven years in various armed services and had come out hard and unforgiving. Not much different to the way they went in according to Michael’s grandmother, just more casual about it. His father, saved from war service by working in a reserved occupation, was the worst of them although Michael didn’t know it then. They all admired “manliness”, which seemed to him at a later time to involve working long hours, smoking forty cigarettes a day, farting a lot and keeping their wives short of money and affection. At five, he was only aware of the cigarettes and farting. He had no idea these men felt uneasy with emotion or kindness and when he did grow old enough to be aware of this, still didn’t understand their reasons although it gave him the opportunity to despise them comfortably.

Of this day, whatever the primer, he had one permanent, vivid memory: his father sitting in the big almost-leather armchair, unfiltered Players cigarette smouldering between brown fingers and laughing while his brothers squatted around Michael and destroyed his life, explaining in quiet voices what would happen to him at age eighteen just a few years ahead.

He never forgot the big faces and the smell of beer and tobacco or those words. The army would soon rip him from his home. The army hated mummy’s boys and would make a man of him. The army was going to take away everything that represented safety and send him back, years and years later, a real man like them. Michael had laughed from horror, and this was misunderstood and set their taunting up a notch. From the time they let him run away in tears, looking for comfort that he didn’t find, he started a countdown to age eighteen and didn’t experience another safe day in his childhood, or so he always told himself.

The second moment, with his other villain, occurred two or three years later. This time, a late summer afternoon edging towards sunset, he lay on his bed, shorts and underpants round his ankles, masturbating hard. There were vague memories about the badness of his “thing” at that time, shouted into him by his mother, but the need had become urgent and Michael succumbed. He didn’t hear the bedroom door open.

The first hint of trouble was his mother’s blotchy and furious face looming over him. She called him a “filthy little turd” and “another dirty fucker in the making” then snatched up his wooden hairbrush from the dressing table, flipped him over on to his stomach and started to thrash his buttocks. It went on and on with Michael begging her to stop and getting his knuckles skinned as he tried to protect his bare flesh. She gave up when he urinated on the eiderdown.

They never spoke about it afterwards as he had never spoken to his father about the conscription torture. At times of deep self-pity or especial whimsy as a teenager, he liked to dig deep into these episodes, pretend he looked forward to being free of his parents at eighteen but it never worked. Occasionally he chose to believe this meant he loved them deeply. At other times his always hovering fear of being unprotected while in their company showed that as a lie, but he could never face reality: their indifference to him.

A few months after the beating, Michael began to suffer from violent nightmares that found him, two or three times a week, screaming on the bedroom floor in a fight with his covers. A punch in the stomach that he couldn’t remember afterwards, stopped his mother coming in to calm him. A cut lip and a bloody nose four days later, again leaving no memory, brought the same result with his father. After that, left alone with his terrors, night became as frightening as day and the days were bad enough.

Scared and on guard, he staggered through his school years, including two in the sixth form and somewhere during that time sexual fears joined the other problems. Whenever he was “full”–the way Michael thought of his sexual needs as a teenager–and tried to relieve himself, huge anxiety scampered in as if it had been waiting for the invitation and killed his arousal. That wilting frightened him badly, opening his mind to fears about being different and he started to monitor his thoughts for signs of madness. Inevitably he found them.

His ferocious conscience didn’t bother with mundane problems like cheating in class tests or disloyalty to the boys he almost managed to think of as friends but found a home with “mummy’s boyness” and not being a real man. He picked at every thought that he couldn’t have shared with his aunts, internally listed the times anxiety drooped his penis when thinking about girls, and, for a few months became convinced he was homosexual.

He entered employment in August, three weeks after he left school, taking the first job offered: Smithson and Company, fingers in everything. It was close to home and his parents insisted on a “career” and who cared what sort? Too busy in his head most of the time for conflict, he put up no defence against his father’s casual bullying and surrendered to accountancy, starting the type of work guaranteed to bore him and aggravate the hovering, depression-fuelled, obsessive fears. Dragging despair behind him every day, Michael reached the calendar age of twenty in those offices while harbouring the emotional age of a totally self-focused thirteen year-old. He wasn’t aware until years later that he could have stayed frozen like that in emotional time if Laura and his brown bottle hadn’t become involved.

The changes started in early March of nineteen-sixty: the first warm day of that month and a Thursday. The heat in his office was stifling as it had been all winter. The pre-war central heating had just two settings, according to Keith the Bastard: roasting and off. Michael looked at the pile of time sheets on his desk again, wishing he were allowed to remove his jacket. This need competed with a more permanent one, always bad on wages day, that he could sleep and never wake up.

He touched his favorite ballpoint, the one with the twisted barrel he had sculpted with his father’s old petrol lighter and felt something wrong. He frowned at the dented cap, saw teeth marks and looked up. Across the end of his desk, separated by the width of a filing cabinet, Philip was slumped in his chair busily worrying a fingernail.

Michael whispered, “You’ve used my pen!”

Philip looked across and smiled. “Not me.”

“You little bastard!” Michael yelped and pointed at the cap.

Philip shrugged. “It’s only a fucking pen, Mikey.”

Ramsden’s voice came nasally from the raised desk by the window. “Porter, White, I won’t tell you again about foul language!”

Both young men said, “Sorry, sir.”

Philip added, “Like fucking school,” under his breath.

Michael went back to the wages sheets, made his calculations then looked at the jobs this carpenter had been on for the past week telling himself they were all part of the Smithson family, blue and white collar workers alike, and that his mental struggle had real value. Building new homes and offices for the county’s residents was something to take pride in and only a self involved fool would view a life serving those ends as without meaning.

The lie rang in his head like a cracked bell as always and needing distraction, Michael fumbled a cigarette out of his crumpled packet trying not to count the butts in a rusty, tin-lid he used as an ashtray that lay by his left hand. There were eight and the day barely into its second quarter. Philip heard the match scrape and looked over waggling his eyebrows.

Michael whispered, “Buy your own!”

Philip pretended not to understand and Michael sighed loudly then slid the two boxes across his desk. He watched the boy select and light a cigarette then suck on it inexpertly and experienced a tiny jab of delight. “Corruption”: his beast-word. He was corrupting this kid, dragging him down into pain and misery. Michael imagined the smoke in his lungs, poisoning them, and wanted to loathe himself for the pleasure it brought then experienced a familiar slippery fear about not understanding why it felt so good. He pushed the thing away, mentally two-handed, and went back to his work. Or tried to.

Those forbidden, shameful thoughts had linked to others that stretched back as far as he could remember and seemed to be attached to his beast-word now. It shambled through his mind becoming, with relief, a real creature: a black bear on a rusty chain, the further links lost in darkness. The animal’s fur was matted and dull, muzzle dripping thick grey mucus. Michael shuddered, closed his eyes and called on Lather.

The Celtish boy heard and rose from the bed of straw, careful not to disturb Valed, his little brother. He picked up his hunting spear and moved quickly out of the hut then stopped to look round. Nearly dawn, dew almost frozen on the nearby trees and grass, but spring was close. Michael called again: spoke of fresh meat and Lather smiled. He began to run: short, ground eating strides as he had been taught by his uncle the hunter chief: Fredick, or was it Frederick? Michael frowned and called again, showed him the bear, made it plump and tempting in the boy’s mind. Lather increased speed, ducked round a tree, over a narrow stream bed and stopped. The bear swung its head. Michael asked for the strike, begged for it. Lather’s arm rose, took the spear to his shoulder…

Philip tossed a chewed eraser on to Michael’s desk and said as it struck his hand, “One o’clock, coming?” Michael gaped at him in shock. Philip blinked hard then whispered, “If you’re brewing up a fart, save it for outside. You know what Ramsden’s like.”

Michael said, “What?”

He pushed Lather out of his mind with an effort that raised both hands from the time sheets.

“Your face,” Philip said. “Never mind.”

He stood up and pointed. “Don’t forget that.”

Michael rose and picked up his newspaper. Like a malign magic wand it banished Lather’s power from his thoughts. Following his friend out of the office, he wished that he could forget. As they ran down the stairs the newspaper slapped against his leg, rolled tightly. Michael kept looking at it, furious with himself for buying the thing that morning while part of him said he would feel much better once it became certain there was nothing in today’s news that put him in danger.

He winced, fighting with that “danger” again as he always did. It had no form, nothing Lather could kill or chase away. There was no picture to hold in his mind, just the permanent, looming sense that his future might be held in those pages. Not even a specific subject to look for. Nothing that easy. Every line had the potential to harm him in some way that was never quite understandable. Michael sighed deeply acknowledging that he just had to “know” things were all right: an indefinable anxiety that something important could be missed that eased if he managed to stay away from too much newsprint but read just enough. He thought as he ran, “important to what, survival? That was almost funny.” He whacked his paper against the stair rail. It didn’t help, just drew Philip’s attention.

The boy asked, “Can I look at the football?” He reached out a hand.

Michael’s, “No!” came so sharp and loud, Philip stumbled.

He bounced off the urine-yellow wall and said loudly, “Christ, Mikey! I won’t hurt it!”

Michael took a deep breath, hesitated then jabbed the rolled pages into the boy’s midsection, saying, “Just while we eat.”

He looked away as Philip struggled to open his newspaper at the sports section, making it flap around as he negotiated the stairs. Michael couldn’t afford to catch a word and risk being pulled into that close-packed print for the rest of the day, peering at it under cover of his desk as he pretended to work. He tried to keep his eyes averted, but they began drifting back, pushed by the thought that it might be that headline, or this advert waiting to ruin his life if he wasn’t forewarned.

When they reached the basement and the smallest staff café, Michael had no appetite but sat over corned beef and chips, eyes half closed, trying not to see the pages as Philip, sitting opposite, flicked through them.

Eventually, Philip dropped the paper and got up.

He said, “Lousy game anyway. Coming to play?”

“In a minute.”

“I think they’ve got a new box of balls,” Philip said. “Don’t leave it too long, you know what the kids from audit are like.”

Philip extracted another cigarette from Michael’s packet that had been lying on the table between them, patted Michael’s shoulder and left the café. Michael placed the last forkful of ketchuped chips on the plate as his throat tightened while reaching for the newspaper, closing his eyes tight as he refolded, glad he had his back to the room. He didn’t need any additions to the “Potty Porter” reputation.

That thought took him somewhere he didn’t want to go. Michael sat back in his chair and wondered again what anyone bored enough to be watching, thought they were looking at. He risked a glance. What constituted Michael Porter to the old man from audit sitting in the far corner? He put himself in that crumpled brown suit and made the sagging face look up. He would think he saw a young man, average in every way: middling brown hair and eyes, middling build and a shade over middling height. Just another young trainee accountant: The place was full of them, nothing special. Michael thought, “he’d be wrong.”

By the way he held his paper Michael judged the old man’s sight wasn’t good. He liked that. It felt safer. No chance of the vaguely puzzled expression he often received when he risked making eye contact.

People tended to look at him twice. He’d known that for years. Chloe from “Buildings” once told him he had the aspect of a poet: wan and haunted then walked away fast with her ears going pink. Some foreman from the Gatbry construction site once asked if he carried his passport all the time and then laughed too much. That worried Michael for weeks in case something was happening he had missed that meant he should leave the country and he would have demanded clarification if the man had still been working there the next time he did that wages run, however humiliating the act.

Whatever made him worth looking at, he had long ago decided that if anyone ever managed to see past the skull and took a peep inside his mind, they wouldn’t risk it again.

He dragged his thoughts back and started the ritual: eyes almost shut, fold the paper long-ways into column-wide strips. Hold it tight. Then a big wobbly sigh and begin to read. Panic clutched at him with the first line even before his mind had processed the black letters into words. There was always something. Today’s not too bad: tedious stories that no twist of fear could make relevant. He read all the words three times then tried to turn the page but his hands wouldn’t do it.

That took him to the day a week earlier when Maureen caught him standing over a waste bin, trying to make his hand open to release that day’s newspaper. “Embarrassing” didn’t begin to cover it. She had pretended not to notice but her face said it all and the looks from a couple of other young women in the department later that afternoon made it clear she had shared.

Jabbing himself with that, increased anxiety and Michael felt tears building as his fingers tightened on the newspaper. He begged silently not to have to read every page. Not today. He tried counting to ten, but it didn’t help. Nothing helped, not anymore.

The old man cleared his throat. Michael watched him make heavy work of standing and thought, “please don’t look at me”. The old man smiled over his head as he passed, asking, “Did you have a good game, son?”

Philip said, “Not so dusty,” and crashed down into the chair opposite Michael, grinning, “Ernie’s off to the boozer again.” He glanced down at Michael’s hands, adding, “Looks like you could use a nerve steadier.”

Michael heard no malice in it and said, “That wouldn’t go down well, you know my reputation.”

Philip came as close as he managed to a blush and said, “Oops, sorry I forgot.” He leaned forward and asked, voice almost a whisper, “Is it true The Bastard turned you in?”

Ready to process the words as a threat, Michael, asked, “Where did you hear that?” Philip shrugged as if it was of no importance. Michael thought about it for a moment, couldn’t believe he was considering loyalty to the department and said, “Yes, Keith did his usual. Told Ramsden I was asleep at my desk and didn’t he smell whisky.”

“Bastard!” Philip said.

“By nickname and by nature.”

Philip wriggled himself comfortable then said, “So, did you get him back?”

Michael shook his head. “No point. They could have sacked me.”

“That would have been a bad thing?”

“My father wouldn’t like it.” Michael hated the petulance in his voice.

Philip sighed then said, “Loads of jobs out there.” He reached across the table and picked up Michael’s cup. “You’re not going to finish this are you? Got a real thirst.” He took a mouthful then jerked forward, spitting it out over the newspaper and yelped, “No sugar!” He wiped his lips, saw what he’d done and said, voice full of laughter, “Sorry about that.” Before Michael could speak, Philip snatched his paper, wrapped dry sheets round the mess and tossed it into the waste bin then said, “Coming to play? We’ve still got half an hour and somebody brought in a new bat. You can have it and I’ll spot you five points.”

Keeping his eyes off the bin, Michael said, “Why not.”

The relief hurt.

* * * *

That evening, Michael lay on his bed with the latest lesson from the correspondence school open beside him unread, playing at how long he could keep the ash on his cigarette. A game that only worked when his hands weren’t shaking. He always felt more in control afterwards. If he won. Which wasn’t often.

Downstairs the signature tune of No Hiding Place had just begun. Michael sighed and felt hard done-by. The ash wobbled. Missing this programme meant he was serious about studying even when not doing any and that made him feel there might be a point to it all. The ash sagged and fell on to his second-best office shirt.

Michael said, “Fuck!”

Ash and book dropped to the floor together as he stood up.

He ground out the cigarette in his bedside ashtray, trudged to the window and stared at shining darkness. The new sodium street lamps sucked color from everything and made the factory-like sameness of these cheap houses even worse. He looked across at the Denby home. No light, but jumping blue shadows told him they had the TV on. He wondered if she was watching No Hiding Place too. He matched the downstairs music to blue movement and judged the Denby parents almost certainly were. He hoped that meant Laura lay snuggled beside her father on the sofa.

Michael pictured thin TV light shadowing her perfect face. She would be chewing that thick dark hair, the bits she could reach, feet bare or in some terrible, over sized socks, knees drawn up so her bottom curved the way it looked best. Head resting on one of the nasty orange cushions her mother had made. She would have jammed it into the curve of sofa arm and backrest for comfort in spite of her mother’s disgusted expression and be enjoying Mrs. Denby’s annoyance.

He tried to smile but the picture didn’t bring comfort as he had heard their front door slam earlier. That very distinctive noise with its loose-knocker accompaniment always clutched his stomach, starting the thoughts: “could it be her? Where was she going? Who with?” He stared hard at the Denby’s bay windows needing to see Laura’s reflection.

He knew he had no right to question what she did, she wasn’t his girlfriend, had never been his girlfriend. Michael told himself again that their families were just neighbors and Laura and he had known each other since she was eleven and he was fourteen. The age gap might as well have been a hundred years then but that had only ever worked in his mind when she was all knees and plaits. Now at seventeen, Michael couldn’t pretend he had no right to look. Even with barely enough room in his head for personal misery, she was still there every day.

He thought about how it used to be, the way she looked at him, acted around him. At first it was amusing. The skinny little kid, prominent joints and big feet, awkward and smiling when the Denby parents came over for a cards evening. He had encouraged her interest just because he could. Helped with homework, even danced with her to the new Elvis disc she brought with her one evening. She proudly told her parents about that when they came into the lounge an hour later and Michael had blushed scarlet. His father gave him a stony look.

When she joined his secondary school, they didn’t speak during the day although Laura would smile at him when they passed in a corridor. Michael was always careful never to smile back. The Denby parents continued to come over once a week for solo bringing Laura, and at some point, a moment he could never work out exactly, Michael started to look forward to it with a wobbly feeling in his stomach. That lead to ignoring her a lot more and making hurtful comments.

Now, staring at the window, he tried thinking about “uncaring Laura” to see if that might ease his pain just for once. Mobilise his legs enough to turn away, but it didn’t. She had gone out with boys her own age a few times during the period when they were still talking. She said it was nothing serious but always chatted about the invites and then the date itself when they were alone. He could never work out whether she was treating him like a big brother or teasing him sexually. Michael always told himself he preferred the big brother theory. They would sit in the back room, music on–usually Elvis or the Everly Brothers–and she would chat about the previous Saturday night as he struggled with her geometry. She knew the boys five-point scale and never let anyone get beyond ‘one’: above the waist, outside clothing but, Michael could never forget, she always made it sound unbearably sensual.

Sometimes, when missing her hurt most, like now, he tried to go with his mother’s evaluation. To her Laura was ‘forward’. She said the word a lot. On his mother’s scale, that was two above whore and one above slut. It never found a home in his mind however much he tried, just enlarged the resentment that hung between him and his parents. Again, as Michael stood by the window, he let the stupid lies drift away.

Laura stopped coming over during the spring of his first miserable year at work. Michael remembered how badly that hurt, even though he had plunged into his fears about being homosexual by then. Mister Denby said Laura didn’t need baby-sitting, it was only across the road after all and anyway, she liked to go to bed early and read. He hadn’t known what to think. Laura still smiled at him when they met in the street and he made sure that was often, but she didn’t come over again for any reason.

Michael lit another cigarette, staring out of the window and wished he could see Laura, just for a second, and suddenly he did. She was strolling across the road with a gangly blond boy who carried a heavy looking off-licence bag and had his free arm round her waist. She leaned into him as they stepped up the kerb and Michael’s stomach twisted.

They reached the gate but Laura didn’t open it, just turned, set her hips against the garden wall and reached up with both hands to clasp fingers behind the boy’s head. His back stiffened and he craned round to look at the Denby’s curtained window. Laura didn’t stop, just pulled his head down and kissed him hard. Libido soon overwhelmed the boy’s doubts and he moved his face against Laura’s, free hand sliding down to her bottom.

Michael heard himself groan and tried to move but his legs didn’t respond. The kiss was never going to end. He closed his eyes and opened them again fast. Internal pictures were far worse than reality. So he stood and watched the boy’s hand move over Laura’s body, puffing fast on his cigarette until it became mostly half-burned core.

Eventually, Laura pulled away placing both palms flat against the boy’s skinny ribs and nodded towards her house. The boy asked a question, received a negative head shake in answer, and reluctantly moved off. Michael watched Laura watch the boy out of sight and stood there until the Denby knocker stopped rattling after she closed the front door behind her. He flopped on his bed, telling himself he didn’t care. He didn’t even like her. That just embarrassed him and Michael gave up and began to undress. When in doubt, sleep. He tossed his course books on the floor and crawled under the blankets. As usual, his cheap, over starched sheets felt like cardboard but he knew they would soften enough to let him sleep. He closed his eyes and pulled the counterpane over his head, determined not to think any more. Sometimes it worked. That night it didn’t.

He lay there in sweaty darkness for several minutes then gave up and murmured, “Lather, I need you…”