10

      For the best part of twenty years Jim Jackson worked in a timberyard, but then one Monday morning, blurred by the residue of a weekend’s heroic boozing, he lost his focus at an inopportune moment and lopped half of his right hand clean off with a bandsaw, and after that, one way and another, he wasn’t much good for anything and spent most of the day at home or in the park, drinking and sleeping and drinking some more. In the evenings he might smack his wife about a bit, and from time to time he’d read a bedtime story to his daughter, Jemima, and then, often as not, he’d do something with his daughter that was their little secret and stayed their little secret long after bedtime stories came to an end, until the day Jemima forgot to bolt the bathroom door and her mother walked in and saw Jemima cleaning herself up. So Jim received a hefty sentence and Jim’s wife jettisoned his surname and took herself and her daughter off to the other end of the country, where Jemima Kingham, despite the best efforts of her mother, grew into a desperate and highly volatile young woman, given to dicing her arms with razors and fucking any deadbeat who’d share his bag of glue with her. Jemima was a mess, but she knew she was a mess and when, aged eighteen, she found herself pregnant for the third time, she decided she’d see this one through and would do everything she could to make the kid’s life a good one.

      Jessie, her daughter, was born in February 1971. The father, whose name is lost to us, presented himself at the hospital the day after Jessie’s arrival. He put a bunch of flowers on the bed, kissed the baby, sat with Jemima for an hour or two. ‘I’ll be going then,’ he said, giving Jemima a peck on the cheek, and that was the end of his participation in the project. His vanishing was no great surprise to Jemima, nor a great setback, and she knuckled down to the project of raising Jessie alone. She’d do anything to provide for the girl. Saturdays and Sundays were for her daughter; the rest of the week she worked herself stupid. She cleaned other people’s houses during the day and cleaned offices in the evening. For a whole year she scarcely saw daylight, putting in nine hours in a basement laundry before going off to swab hospital corridors through the night. ‘Trust nobody,’ she’d tell the girl. ‘Don’t owe anything to anyone.’ In 1987 she was working in a flower shop from nine to five, in a pub from eight to midnight, and was giving after-hours blowjobs for a fiver. ‘Stay away from boys,’ she would tell Jessie, and Jessie managed to stay away from them until she was fifteen, when Ryan Tate lurched into her life.

      With Ryan too you wonder how much of the script was written for him, long before he came along. Semi-employed brawlers and boozers feature prominently in the roll-call of Ryan’s ancestors, and the family tree is richly festooned with convictions for burglary, theft, arson, assault and – in the case of the paternal grandfather – grievous bodily harm, the consequence of a dispute over a bet that ended with a Swiss penknife through the face of the simpleton who had dared to impugn the honesty of the senior Mr Tate. You look at where he came from and you feel they might as well have stamped ‘Go to gaol’ on Ryan’s birth certificate, though you wouldn’t have known he’d go as badly wrong as he did. He had one advantage over Jessie: both parents were around. On the other hand, they were present only in the technical sense for much of the time, because Mr and Mrs Tate were the family’s elite drinkers, never sober for as long as Ryan could remember. At the time of Ryan’s arrest neither parent was in work. His father, Dave, had for years been a man with no visible means of support. Aileen, his mother, had recently been working at a supermarket, a rare interlude of gainful employment that had ended when she was observed waving her husband through the checkout with four unpurchased bottles of vodka in his coat pockets, a routine which had probably been in operation from the day she started the job. As for Ryan, having continued the family tradition by renouncing education at the earliest opportunity, he did a bit of building work here and there, supplementing his income with regular ventures into breaking and entering, and regular spells in custody. He was also a courier for a local dealer, who paid him in cash and dope, and he’d inherited the family predilection for knife work. The Accident and Emergency waiting room should have had a bench named after him.

      The third person in this story is Abby Atalay, also aged fifteen. Abby and her parents and her younger sister shared a flat with her childless aunt and uncle, above the kebab shop that the aunt and uncle ran. Money was tight, but the Atalays weren’t poor in the way the Tates and the Kinghams were poor, and they were all perfectly law-abiding. An unexceptional, not terribly bright, somewhat overweight and vulnerable kid, Abby was also half-Turkish, which may be of relevance. Nothing ever happened to Abby, until she had the misfortune to go to the same party as Ryan Tate one night, and get drunk for the first time in her life, and let herself get fucked by him. She imagined that this semiconscious coupling might mean something.

      Ryan Tate lived less than half a mile from Jessie Kingham and went to the same school, but it seems their paths never crossed, not in any significant way, before Ryan was eighteen. The fateful meeting took place in April 1987, a month after the party, outside the florist’s where Jessie’s mother worked. Taking a fancy to her, Ryan offered her a cigarette. The cigarette was declined. They talked for a bit. Ryan offered Jessie one of the cans of lager he had in his bag. This too was declined. Ryan then took a rose from a bucket outside the shop, snapped off the moist end and handed the flower to Jessie. Noticing what was going on, Jessie’s mother came out to demand payment. Jemima knew about the Tates and didn’t like the look of Ryan one bit. To Jemima the eyes of a Ryan Tate were the eyes of a hopeless and very dangerous young man, and she could see in him more than a passing resemblance to her daughter’s father. To Jessie, however, the fierce blue eyes of Ryan Tate gave off the charisma of someone who knew how life really was, and the thick violet scar that ran across his jaw didn’t do his image any harm either. Her mother, upon being told by Ryan that payment was unfortunately out of the question due to lack of funds, sent him on his way, in a manner that made it clear to Jessie that his banishment was intended to be permanent. Less than a week later, Ryan came across Jessie outside the pub where her mother worked. The