run with it or, shit, this stuff is real, deal with the madness’. That’s the only way, do you see? I thought about it. If I don’t know then I’ll just imagine, all the things I might not know, all the terrible things that are out there, without limits, without reason, I need to know that it makes some sort of sense!”
There was no reason not to tell her.
No sensible reason.
We couldn’t.
Good sense had nothing to do with it.
We couldn’t, and didn’t know why.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “Not yet. Not all of it. I promise, when I know, when it’s finished, I’ll tell you it all. But anything I tell you now would just be a white lie or a bad lie or a half-truth with nothing to sit on and that might be OK for a time, but when it’s done, if I got it wrong . . . I’m sorry. I am looking. Please. I just need to know a few more things about Mo.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. For the moment.”
“I see.” Her voice was the flat distant fall of the criminal who’s been caught, who knows it’s the chair, who knows the lawyer is just making noise, who knows there’s no way out, no point left in crying. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
And, as much as she could, she told me.
Mums and sons.
We struggled to understand. It was something people seemed to think would be instinctive. Flesh of my flesh. We found the idea distasteful.
There was more. Of course there was. Problem about asking questions is that most of the time, you only know what the question is once you have the answer.
He’d met some friends.
At the city farm, of all places. It was part of being young in the city; you got shipped off to do healthy, hearty things in order to make you a better person, until that day comes around the age of thirteen when you suddenly realise that goats are horrid, and the city is clean.
She didn’t really know them. They were from the Wembley area. Sometimes he’d come back late at night with them, but they never came in. Always polite - sort of - but never came inside, as if they were embarrassed or afraid of her. And in time, that’s how he seemed to be. Embarrassed.
And then he kept on not coming home.
And the school complained.
And she’d send him to school but what could she do? Her job didn’t let her stand at the school gate all day to watch him, a job meant no time; no job, no money. She knew the others weren’t going either, just knew, without having to be told - what’s there for a kid on his own to do, when the rest are in the classroom? He’d disappear and not say where he’d been. He’d come back stinking of beer and sweat - when he came back. He’d talk about being “down the club”. She didn’t know what club, or where.
Then the police had called.
He’d stolen a bike.
The whole gang had been involved, and he was the youngest, so he got a caution, because they couldn’t really nail anything bigger onto him.
Then they called again.
ASBO, they said. She’d thought it was just a phrase journalists used on the TV. Riotous behaviour, drinking, shouting, threatening behaviour. They’d grabbed an old guy’s shopping and thrown it into the street - not because they wanted anything in it, but just because they could. Just for something to do. You should keep an eye on Mo, they said, this is the start of a downhill path that ends in a very thorny thicket.
Not that the police were big on metaphor.
And then one day, a few weeks ago, he’d come home, and he was hiding something. Something in his bag, something he didn’t want her to see, and he banned her from his room and didn’t talk to her and just spoke to his friends and there was something . . . shameful. Something shameful had happened, had been done, he had done it, something shameful. And then he went away and didn’t come back, his friends didn’t come back, and she’d spoken to the police and it wasn’t just Mo. The patrols up in Willesden, where they used to hang, had noticed it, an absence. The whole gang, however many there were, had just stopped. No more hanging outside the pub, no more skating beneath the overpass, no more spitting in the off-licence, no more