16

Friday 9 March

‘Johnny!’ his mother bellowed from her bedroom. ‘Shut up! Shut that noise up! Do you hear me?’

Standing on the chair in his bedroom, he removed another of the nails clenched between his lips, held it against the wall and struck it with his claw hammer. Blam! Blam! Blam!

‘JOHNNY, BLOODY WELL STOP THAT NOISE! NOW! STOP IT!’ She was screaming now.

Lying neatly on the floor, exactly the same distance apart, were each of his prized collection of high-flush lavatory chains. All fifteen of them. He’d found them in skips around Brighton – well, all except two, which he had stolen from toilets.

He took another nail from his mouth. Lined it up. Began hammering.

His mother ran into the room, reeking of Shalimar perfume. She wore a black silk camisole, fish-net stockings with suspenders not yet fastened, harsh make-up and a wig of blonde ringlets that was slightly askew. She was standing on one black stiletto-heeled shoe and holding the other in her hand, raised, like a weapon.

‘DO YOU HEAR ME?’

Ignoring her, he began hammering.

‘ARE YOU BLEEDIN’ DEAF? JOHNNY?’

‘I’m not Johnny,’ he mumbled through the nails, continuing to hammer. ‘I am Yac. I have to hang my chains up.’

Holding the shoe by the toe, she slammed the stiletto into his thigh. With a yelp like a whipped dog, he fell sideways and crashed to the floor. Instantly she was kneeling over him, raining down blows on him with the sharp tip of the heel.

‘You are not Yac, you are Johnny! Understand? Johnny Kerridge.’

She hit him again, then again. And again.

‘I am Yac! The doctor said so!’

‘You stupid boy! You’ve driven your father away and now you’re driving me crazy. The doctor did not say so!’

‘The doctor wrote Yac!’

‘The doctor wrote YAC – Young Autistic Child – on his sodding notes! That’s what you are. Young, useless, sodding pathetic autistic child! You are Johnny Kerridge. Got it?’

‘I am Yac!’

He curled himself up in a protective ball as she brandished the shoe. His cheek was bleeding from where she had struck him. He breathed in her dense, heady perfume. She had a big bottle on her dressing table and she once told him it was the classiest perfume a woman could wear, and that he should appreciate he had such a high-class mother. But she wasn’t being classy now.

Just as she was about to strike him again the front doorbell rang.

‘Oh shit!’ she said. ‘See what you’ve done? You’ve made me late, you stupid child!’ She hit him again on the thigh, so hard it punctured his thin denim trousers. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

She ran out of the room, shouting, ‘Go and let him in. Make him wait downstairs!’

She slammed her bedroom door.

Yac picked himself up, painfully, from the floor and limped out of his room. He walked slowly, deliberately, unhurriedly down the staircase of their terraced two-up, two-down on the edge of the Whitehawk housing estate. As he reached the bottom step, the doorbell rang again.

His mother shouted, ‘Open the door! Let him in! I don’t want him going away. We need it!’

With blood running down his face, seeping through his T-shirt in several places and through his trousers, Yac grumpily limped up to the front door and reluctantly pulled it open.

A plump, perspiring man in an ill-fitting grey suit stood there, looking awkward. Yac stared at him. The man stared back and his face reddened. Yac recognized him. He’d been here before, several times.

He turned and shouted back up the stairs, ‘Mum! It’s that smelly man you don’t like who’s come to fuck you!’