Death Row - Mark Pearson [1]
Billy Thompson. Just eight years old and his first trip to the seaside. His first trip anywhere more than five miles from where he was born and had lived his entire life. It was deep in the cold-hearted grip of a brutal winter and he was huddled against the passenger-seat window, shivering against the cold. It was a boxy, draughty, metallic rectangle-on-wheels of a car, with a hard bench seat and the wind whistling through gaps in the doors and window frames. It bounced and clattered on the uneven road, jolting him and sending needles of pain shooting though his thin, bony body. The wipers were scratching thick, flurrying snow from the windscreen and tears were pricking his eyes so that his vision of the changing landscape outside was softened, blurred. His life behind him fragmenting like the flakes of snow scattering into pin-points in the rear-view mirror.
Billy’s uncle was a crab-and-lobster fisherman living in a small village on the south-east coast between Southend-on-Sea and Herne Bay. This trip was the first time Billy had ever been away from his family home and he would never be returning. His father had been sentenced to three years in prison for battering his wife once too often; his mother had been hospitalised for three weeks, during which time Billy was looked after by his next-door neighbour, Grace Williams, a woman in her late sixties with a houseful of cats and a forgetful nature. When Billy’s mother returned from hospital she decided she couldn’t bear to look at her son’s face any more – she said he looked just like his father – and arranged for him to live with his Uncle Walter, her elder brother, who was looking to take on someone he could train as an apprentice. Billy had never met Walter before, a tall lean man with a face like a rusty hatchet, battered by sea and sun and wind, carved lines of cruelty written into it like the scratchings of a blunt bradawl.
Billy was bundled without ceremony from the car, shivering with the cold, the tears near-freezing on his cheeks, into a house that was only marginally warmer. He was put to bed with barely a grunt of welcome and a cold glass of water and then shaken awake at four in the morning to help his uncle at work. Cold, wet and hungry, he huddled in the back of the small craft as it slapped and danced on the yawing waters. Waves splashed over the sides, chilling his wind-blasted and sore face. He had made the mistake of complaining once – he didn’t want this, he wanted to go home – and his uncle had hit him. Not rebuked him or slapped him. But punched him. Hard, in the side of his face with a hand fashioned of sinew and muscle, knocking him to the floor where he whimpered but didn’t cry. He had long ago learned not to cry out. Then the boat was anchored. ‘Inside’ as his uncle called it, a mile out to sea. He was huddled against crates filled with shickle, the remains of the crabs and the lobsters after they had been processed. Empty, broken shells, claws, legs, eyes. The smell filled his nostrils, and the sound as his uncle tipped the crates emptying the eviscerated carcasses back into the cold water was like the sound of an army of cockroaches skittering on a dance floor.
Like the thoughts dancing in his head now. Building like a symphony as the blood roared in his ears and he remembered how it all began. Back in that boat shed with the smell of the shickle still ripe in his throat and his uncle tall in the shadows as he pulled the door behind him closed and looked down on Billy, with the inhumanity of a feral thing, his eyes empty. Billy remembered the sharp cuts in his knees as he was forced to kneel, the slivers of lobster and crab shell cutting through the thin fabric of his jeans.
His uncle crossed to the workbench and turned on his new transistor radio; music played. The one everyone tipped for number one that Christmas. Johnny Ray, ‘Walking in the Rain’. It was nineteen fifty-six and it seemed to Billy that