33. Natalie

33

NATALIE

H e lifts me gently off him, settling me next to him. I curl into the warm bracket of his arm as he rifles through the box with his free hand. If I’d been asked a fortnight ago, I would have said Adam Wright was one of the most diabolical, immoral men I could think of.

Now I’m growing dangerously suspicious that he’s one of the most upstanding, loyal, dependable, despite how he treated my brother.

‘I think I said it earlier, but it was all a bit of a blur,’ he says, pulling out the original colour photo of Ellen and handing it to me. It’s one of those typical professional school photos, complete with brown and gold cardboard frame. She was a skinny little thing, but otherwise healthy looking, with dark blonde plaits and a gorgeous grin. Her front teeth still look too big for her face, and her incisors are missing.

‘She was such a beautiful little girl,’ I murmur. ‘What year was she in, when she…’

‘Year Five,’ he answers absently.

‘I was in Year Three when you—when Stephen was injured. So she must have been a couple of years ahead of me at St Benedict’s. Anyway, sorry. You were saying?’

‘Yeah.’ He sighs heavily, shifting next to me, his arm still clamped around me. ‘About your brother.’

It’s the oddest thing. Suddenly, the horrific damage he inflicted on Stephen feels like the least relevant part of this story, which is ridiculous. But the tragedy surrounding the events that autumn feels far more enormous, far harder to stomach, than the injuries Stephen endured.

I put a hand on his thigh and keep it there, a quiet sign, I hope, that I’m here to understand but not to judge.

‘It was a few days after the funeral,’ he says. ‘Mum was in prison. Dad was on compassionate leave from work, thank fuck, but he was a mess. Quinn was refusing to go to school, but I went straight back in. There was no way I could hang around that fucking house. I was ignoring Lisa, I was furious with everyone who’d failed Ellen—Mum, for being so fucking weak and the system, for not realising Ellen was in danger, and mainly myself.

‘Your brother pissed me off, I’m not going to lie. He was a whiny little shit, always moping about and looking down on the rest of us, and he just—he rubbed me up the wrong way. I was so fucked up, and people like him made me see red. I mean, what the fuck did he have to complain about?’

Not much, apparently. Stephen and I had had our own issues over the year leading up to that attack. Our instant, unwelcome transition to relative poverty was, until then, the defining moment in our lives. I know now how unhappy, as an intense, introverted kid, he was at his new school, even before Adam beat the shit out of him.

Even so, Adam’s right. Stephen had little to complain about compared to him.

‘One day I saw your mum dropping him off at the gates,’ he says, his voice strained. ‘Fuck, this is hard. I wasn’t doing well. Dad was barely functioning, I was looking after Quinn, everything was up in the air and Mum was still on remand.’

Adam doesn’t sound like a man who’s made billions and proven himself the world over.

He sounds like a scared, angry, messed up little boy.

He picks up my bowl and spoons up some chia seed pudding with a shaky hand, twisting so he can hold it up to my mouth. ‘Seriously, you need to get more food down you.’

I obey silently, sucking it off the spoon while I wait for him to continue. I can’t imagine how hard it is for him to relive this at all, let alone with a member of Stephen’s family.

‘I remember—um—she gave him this big hug and handed him his lunchbox, and I was like, for fuck’s sake. He’s eighteen , and he’s a weird, miserable fucker, and his mum is coddling him like he’s a fucking five-year-old and Ellen had no one who could even keep her alive .’

He makes a strangled sound. I sit there, my hand on his thigh, my body frozen less with horror than with pity so great it feels as though my heart is bleeding. Almost like all those reported sightings by saints of the Virgin Mary with her bleeding heart seeping through her clothes. My heart may as well be beating, bleeding, outside my body for all the clawing, wretched pain pulsing through it.

Of course, Adam’s missing a tonne of context. Mum was in pieces after Dad’s firm went down. She was used to being a stay-at-home mother in a lovely house in a nice neighbourhood, and she was probably completely unmoored in those days when Adam observed her with Stephen. I was too young to remember it properly, but her clucking around us was most likely an attempt to do anything within her power to provide us with stability and herself with meaning in a world that was no longer recognisable to her.

Not that it matters. Whatever the reality, Adam saw the narrative he chose to see, which was a vignette of family life so far removed from his own lived experience that it must have felt unbearable.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. And I mean it. He’s okay in this time-space continuum where he’s put these horrors behind him to achieve unimaginable success, and I’m okay with hearing his honesty. I can handle it. He can share his truth. He can recall his version of those bloody events.

I’ll take it all.

‘It’s no excuse, though,’ he grits out.

‘I’m not here for excuses,’ I say softly, rubbing his thigh. ‘I’m here to get to know you, remember?’ I nudge him with my shoulder. ‘Because I think you’re someone worth getting to know.’

He reaches across and covers the hand on his thigh with his own. ‘If you want to go home after this, I’ll understand. I’ll get Nige to take you.’

‘Adam, I’ve spent two decades hating your guts and rueing the day you were born. I thought you were a total fucking psychopath who didn’t deserve a second chance, let alone the success you’ve had. The only way is up, my friend. Believe me.’

That gets me a little chuckle and a kiss to the top of my head, both of which I’ll take.

‘Thank you,’ he whispers. ‘Right. So… I saw them, and I basically saw red. I was with some of my then-mates, who were just hangers-on, really. Typical sheep. Anyway, we followed your brother across the playground and I just let rip while they held him down.

‘I went absolutely. Fucking. Mental. It was like I was in some kind of frenzy. I wanted to punch his face in until I shut him the fuck up—I don’t know. I can’t really remember. I just wanted everything to go away, all this rage and—helplessness, and he was the outlet.’ He shrugs. ‘Simple as that. Wrong place, wrong time. And I don’t remember going for his eye, I genuinely don’t. The only thing that stuck with me afterwards was that his lunchbox fell and it split open on the ground and two tangerines rolled out. I remember them rolling across the astroturf and thinking good .

‘I’ve thought about those tangerines so many times. How lovingly your mum made that packed lunch for your brother, and how it all went to waste.’

The man who beat my brother to a pulp is sitting beside me, describing his actions in sickening detail, and I should be feeling many things right now. I am feeling many things, obviously, but I’m not sure my emotions are the exact ones they should be.

The tangerines, though. There’s something about the thought of them that makes my bleeding heart haemorrhage harder. It bleeds for Mum’s heartbreak, for Stephen’s pain and loss, for Dad’s guilt that his business failure had put Stephen in harm’s way. It bleeds for the young, horrified girl who screamed at the sight of that mummified boy in the hospital bed.

And it bleeds for little Ellen Wright and her terrified sister, her devastated father, and her poor, broken brother. The brother who I take in my arms now.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says, over and over, his voice cracked with emotion. ‘I’m so fucking sorry. ’

I hold him tighter. ‘I know you are. I know.’

And I do.