Thicker Than Water

Complaints and formal warnings follow, and the housing department, as soon they’ve made their nod to the house rules, pick Kenny up by the scruff of the neck and drop him into the oubliette. I mean the Salisbury. There are no employment records from around then, by the way, but we’ve got him signing on at the social and showing up in the DSS database. He’s got a dodgy back and he’s on some kind of invalidity benefit. But he’s still got the two bedrooms, so I guess we can assume that his lady friend sticks around despite the abuse.

Maybe the bad back makes him less free and easy with the backhanders. She goes AWOL soon after, though. Kenny reports her missing on 16 December 20 {16 hi05. Police file the report, then do nothing, which is fairly typical copping for a missing-persons notice. File hasn’t been added to since and, like I said, the name goes nowhere.’

He started in on a fairly arid list of other official agencies whose records proved Kenny’s continued existence. ‘What about the kid?’ I said, cutting him off before he could get a head of steam going: I needed to see the wood right now.

Individual trees could be examined later.

Nicky looked aggrieved. ‘I was coming to the kid.’

‘I know, Nicky. But visiting hours are almost over. Let’s not piss off matron any more than we can help, eh? This is Mark, right? The boy who died?’

‘Right. Birth certificate has Mark Blainey. Local school records had him down as Mark Seddon.’

‘But he’s not Kenny’s son?’

‘No reason to think so, since he’s living with his mother at seven different addresses that don’t have Kenny in them before they all wind up together in Walworth.

But she tends to give him the surname of whoever she’s shacking up with at the time. Maybe she’s an old-fashioned girl at heart - or maybe she thinks it helps the family to bond. But it’s kind of a moot point now, since, as you already pointed out, the kid is dead.’

I felt a twinge of formless regret, thinking of that bare bedroom like an inadequate mausoleum: a memorial to a life, but from which all the visible signs of that life had been scrupulously erased.

Didn’t grieving parents keep their kids’ rooms the way they were when the kids died? Wasn’t that how it was meant to work?

In my mind’s eye I’d given this lost boy the face of Bic, the prescient kid with the bandaged hands. And I suddenly realised that the hands were the link I’d unconsciously followed.