Home Truths

No one had ever told his parents about the county line gangs that infiltrated small communities, priming local gangs to prey on vulnerable children and turning them into couriers or addicts, or both. They’d had no idea until it was already too late just how cruelly Liam was being exploited, manipulated and brainwashed by forces so evil that neither Angie nor Steve knew how to combat them. Even the police seemed to struggle. By the time he was fourteen they’d lost all contact with the sweet, innocent boy he’d been. He behaved as though he despised them.

Steve became gaunt with worry, so stressed and fearful that it began affecting his health. Each time the police knocked at the door they expected the worst, that Liam had been stabbed, or he’d overdosed, he was in prison or he’d killed someone. Usually the police came because he was thought to be a witness to a crime, but they never found him at home.

It was the day Steve spotted five-year-old Zac with an old syringe, making to jab it into his arm, that he’d finally lost it.

Angie hadn’t been at home; if she had maybe she could have stopped him. As it was she’d been at the end of the phone when he’d said, ‘I’ve had enough, Ange. He’s no longer a son of mine.’

‘Don’t say that, Steve. Just tell me what’s happened. Where is he?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m going to find him and when I do …’

‘Steve,’ she cried in a panic. ‘‘Don’t go! Please … Oh God, no, please don’t …’

‘I can’t take any more, Angie. I swear … If you’d seen what I just have …’

‘Whatever it is …’

‘Our five-year-old son had a syringe in his hand.’

She’d all but choked on the horror. ‘Oh my God. Oh Steve …’

‘I’ve got to go,’ he told her. ‘I need to find Liam, and when I do I’m turning him in to the police along with every other one of those lowlife bastards …’

‘No! No!’ but the line had already gone dead.

She’d arrived home fifteen minutes later to find the house with its front door wide open, and no sign of Steve or his van. She tried telling herself that he wouldn’t actually go to that terrible estate, that he’d turn off and stop somewhere to calm down. But he wasn’t answering his phone and a sickening, terrifying intuition was taking hold of her.

It was around five in the evening when a female detective came to tell her what had happened on the estate. Angie would never forget the earth-shattering moment when her world had spun out of control. They’d beaten Steve to death. With iron bars, clubs, chains and heavy boots they’d laid into him with so much savagery that they hadn’t been able to stop, this was how a lawyer later described it in court.

Five of the attackers were arrested and charged the same day; Liam had also been taken in, but Angie received a call twenty-four hours later to tell her he’d been released on police bail.

‘Where is he now?’ she asked the officer who’d rung to let her know, her throat raw and tight with grief, her head gripped in a throbbing vice. Grace sat with her, holding her hand, dabbing away their tears, while Emma took charge of Zac and her own two boys. Angie felt almost as horrified by the thought of Liam coming home as she did by the fact that Steve never would.

It turned out no one knew where Liam had gone. He didn’t show up that day, or the next. Apparently he’d been present during the attack on his father. He’d told the police that he’d tried to stop it, and realizing he wasn’t the entire full shilling, as one insensitive officer had described him, they’d held back on charges for the time being.

He came home eventually, three days after his release, so foul-smelling and spaced out that he could barely speak. Angie didn’t even let him in the door.

‘Get out!’ she’d yelled into his stupefied face. ‘Get out of this house and don’t ever come back. You’re dead to me, do you hear that? Dead, dead, dead.’

What she hadn’t spared a thought for that day, or many days after, was what it must have been like for Liam to watch his father die in such a horrific attack. How had he felt when he’d realized he had no power to stop it, for she didn’t want to believe he’d been a part of it. No! No matter what else he was capable of, he surely to God didn’t have it in him to murder the father he’d once loved so much. Afterwards, he just hadn’t been able to cope with what had happened, and then his mother had lost her mind and told him he was dead to her.

During the months following Steve’s funeral, Angie had thought so much about Hari, their dear friend and landlord who she knew would have done anything to help her had he not lost his battle with leukaemia the year before. Having no other stabilizing or fatherly influence to guide her she’d acted alone, doing everything she could to find Liam, even venturing into the dreaded zone of Temple Fields when everyone had warned her to stay away. The streets, tower blocks, shops, pubs, were not so very different to any other housing estate on that side of town, at least on the outside. On the inside … things were different. Every other window was boarded up, burned-out cars lurked like decaying teeth between shinier new ones, the stench of urine, cooking and vomit soured stairwells, and a chilling sense of menace filled the air. The families and fellow gang members of those in custody for Steve’s murder were all in this area, and she was sure she could feel them watching her. No one wanted to talk to her; a pub landlord told her to go home if she knew what was good for her, and aware of the hostility and resentment her intrusion had triggered, she remembered her other children and took his advice.

The police hadn’t been interested when she’d tried to report Liam missing. Given his age and who he’d hung out with they didn’t even bother filing a report. As far as they were concerned the London gang that controlled him had reeled him in and no doubt set him loose on some other undeserving community a long way from here. Though Angie knew how likely that was, she’d still tried the homeless shelters, rehab centres, helplines, missing person charities, Salvation Army and even the government’s prisoners location services in her efforts to find him. If she’d had the money she’d have hired a private detective, but with Steve’s income gone and her own barely covering the rent that she now paid to Roland Shalik, Hari’s son, she’d already had to apply for benefits to help keep her reduced family going. Then, due to cutbacks in the local education budget, she’d lost her job as a teaching assistant. It had been the last straw. Grace had come home that day to find her mother scratching herself frenziedly, tearing her clothes, sobbing and begging God to tell her what to do.

Summoned by Grace, Emma had rushed straight over, rung the doctor, and eventually, between them they’d managed to calm Angie down. The sedative knocked her out until the following morning, and when she’d woken she’d been too groggy to remember much of what had happened. It had come back to her during the day and realizing how much she’d frightened her daughter, and her sister, she’d vowed to herself and to them that it would never happen again. She needed to get herself back in control, and to find another job before someone turned up from social services to take her children into care.

Two weeks later, after a soul-crushing interview at the jobcentre, Emma had called, all excitement, to tell her about the opening at Bridging the Gap.

Exactly why their predecessors had decided to recommend her and Emma as their replacements to run the organization’s two transition houses, Angie had no idea. What she did know was that it had been a lifesaver for her in so many ways, not least of all because it allowed her to focus on those in a far more vulnerable state than she was, and to take heart from their courage. It was as though helping them back to a better world was helping her too, and though she’d never admitted this to anyone, Craig at Hill Lodge had soon come to represent Liam. They even looked vaguely alike for her, with the same ragged mop of curly hair and lazy gait. Craig was older, but his learning difficulties made him seem younger, and Angie had it fixed in her head that as long as she took care of this boy, someone else somewhere would take care of Liam.

Liam was turning nineteen today and she still had no idea where he was.

He could be dead.

This was her biggest fear, the one that kept her awake at nights, that tore at her conscience so savagely that she wanted to scream as though noise could somehow drown the pain and madness of it all. Even after everything that had happened, the mother in her continued to see past all the horror and heartache to the small boy who’d never even thought about harming anyone. He hadn’t had it in him before the gangs had got hold of him, and she’d asked herself many times why they’d picked on him, what – or who – had really been behind the grooming and corruption of her and Steve’s innocent boy.

Steve. Oh God, Steve.

She missed him more than she could ever have imagined possible, and it wasn’t getting any easier. If anything it was becoming worse.

‘Mum?’

Angie was still at the bathroom mirror rigidly trapped in the worst time of her life, but as her eyes moved to the other face reflected behind hers, a smaller, younger image of her own, and yet like her father too, she felt her limbs start to relax.

‘Grace,’ she said, and bringing up a smile she was aware of her anxiety retreating into a small, contained ball, as love for her thirteen-year-old daughter eclipsed it. ‘What are you doing up so early?’

Grace’s normally bright eyes were circled with shadows of worry, and grief – Angie must never forget that the children were suffering too. Two years had passed, and she wasn’t sure any of them were close to getting over what had happened to Steve. Grace and Zac had loved their father every bit as much as she had, and the last thing they needed was to feel afraid that she couldn’t cope. It was how she often felt, but she must never let it be true.

Except it was already true.

‘I could ask you the same question,’ Grace responded. ‘It’s Sunday. I thought we were having a lie-in.’

Relieved that Grace hadn’t come into the bathroom to find her mother filling the luxury shampoo bottle with the same colour washing-up liquid, a regular occurrence, Angie said, ‘And so we are. Come on, let’s go and snuggle up under the blankets.’

It was still only seven o’clock; the heating was due to kick in at eight – always later at weekends, even if they had to get up early for one reason or another. Every little saving helped, or it was supposed to anyway. She wasn’t sure that the smart meter she’d had installed was really onside, for it wasn’t making anything less expensive, it just kept going round and round like a horror ride at the fairground, showing her how much it was all costing.

She wouldn’t have minded a cup of tea, something warm to help soothe her gently into the day, but it took electricity to heat the kettle and they were going to need what was left on her key card for showers in a while. She just hoped the remaining credit would be enough to cover all bases, since the post office was closed on Sundays and so were the nearest PayPoints.

She should have sorted it out yesterday while everything was open, and she would have had she not needed to put petrol in Steve’s van, now hers – five pounds’ worth instead of ten, so there was enough left over to give Grace some spending money for bus fare and a coffee in town with her friends. The other twenty in her purse had gone to Lidl, so at least there was food in the cupboard – for now.

It was the roll-out of universal credit fourteen months ago that had tipped her from the precarious edge of just about managing into the terrifying downward spiral she was now caught in. Nine entire weeks had passed without any benefits at all, so she’d simply been unable to pay her bills. True, she’d still had her widow’s pension – something they hadn’t taken into the universal system for some reason – but thirty-four pounds a week was an impossible sum for a single person to live on, never mind a family. The only way she’d managed to survive was by running up her credit cards, going overdrawn at the bank and selling her car. Her rent, council tax and utility bills had gone into arrears and that was how they remained, with the outstanding amounts getting bigger all the time. She could no longer bear to open the envelopes when they dropped ominously through the letterbox like voices with only doom to deliver.

She was receiving her benefits again now, but she was two hundred crucial pounds a month worse off than before, over three hundred if she counted the loss of her widow’s pension. That was only paid for the first year following a death so it had run out eleven months ago, and she supposed she had to feel thankful that Steve had been forty-five by the time he died, any younger and she’d have got nothing.

Her head began hurting as she ran through everything she had to pay out this coming week. By the time she’d topped up her electricity key, retrieved Grace’s boots from the repairer’s, put a fiver aside for Zac’s upcoming birthday party, paid a token amount towards the water bill and covered their school lunches, there might be enough left over to pay a little bit more than the interest on her credit card.

There would be nothing at all for the rent, or the council tax.

The breath was so tight in her chest that it felt like a solid mass of fear. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but things were moving out of her reach so fast that she was terrified of where they were heading.

A cuddle with Grace might help to relieve some tension and even somehow set her up for the day.

Feeling her teenager’s slender body folding into hers, those smooth, gangly limbs and the sleepy morning smell of her opened Angie’s heart to how blessed she was to have her. She was a beautiful girl, full of life and fun, but thoughtful and patient with an understanding of situations and people that sometimes made her seem twice her age. She worked hard at school, was a favourite amongst the teachers and other students, and possessed not a mean bone in her body. She was, in fact, just like her father, always seeing the positive side of a situation; the first to help in a time of need, and able to summon a sense of humour when the rest of the world was losing theirs.

Angie guessed Grace didn’t find it so funny losing her beloved Lush cruelty-free cosmetics, Boux Avenue undies and weekly pop magazines – or the subs she had to pay to belong to the Fairweather Players. Her great passion was acting, and she was good at it. She’d been cast in many parts for the local am dram society since the age of eight and always received great reviews. She sang too, and danced, but for the time being she’d had to give up those lessons along with her Players membership – although her best friend Lois had bought her three months’ worth of dance classes for Christmas. What a blessing that had been, and how guilty it had made Angie feel knowing she was unable to do it herself.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Grace had whispered when she’d realized this. ‘I know things are difficult now, but it’ll all come good in the end. Promise.’