Thicker Than Water

Bic’s hands were wrapped up in grubby dressings: Kenny’s were criss-crossed with the scars of old wounds. Even the ponytailed woman who was hanging out with Gwillam had her hands wrapped up. And my hands, when I’d visited the Salisbury for the second time, had itched so badly that I’d wanted to tear the skin off them.

You need hands to hold a little baby, Max Bygraves crooned lugubriously in some imperfectly locked room in my memory. When I was about eight, there was a certain level of drunkenness that would cause my mum to break out her LPs late at night and play them loud enough so that the sound came up through the floorboards to the bedroom I shared with Matt.

SingalongaMax was one that we came to dread.

‘Tell me about that,’ I said. ‘I mean, how he died.’

‘He was the jumper. I told you there was a jumper, right? Maybe eighteen months ago. Jumped off the walkway between Weston and Beckett Block. Lot of alcohol in the blood, and a lot of speed, too, which is never a good combination.

Couple of people saw him climb up on the concrete parapet, yell something and then jump. Verdict was accidental death, mainly because of the bloodwork. He probably wasn’t sober enough to make up his mind to kill himself and then stick to it.’

‘How old?’ I asked. Jean Daniels had already told me, but there’s never any harm in checking against the records.

‘Eighteen. Just.’"

"Okay. So here it all was in black and white, just as Jean had laid it out for me.

This was the tragedy that she didn’t think Kenny had ever got over: a tragedy maybe slightly qualified by the fact that this wasn’t his own flesh and blood. But that wasn’t the main issue here, was it? That wasn’t what was niggling me. It was just that I found it hard to imagine Kenny Seddon loving anyone. Beating up his girlfriend in a drunken rage, that I could see: and then turning his hatred on his own body when he ran out of other targets. Kenny sitting in his bedroom, on the double bed he now slept in alone, and carving out his indignation on his wrists and forearms . . . that was no stretch at all. But Kenny mourning a dead child? That wasn’t such an easy fit. And the bare room belied it, too, unless he cleared out all the kid’s stuff because it aroused memories that were too painful to bear.

I suddenly saw another anomaly, though, and the vivid picture faded.

‘Wait,’ I said.