Chapter 1 Halfbreeds

this is the chapter that continues on from the prologue I posted last time

Part One

Child

1

On the scrubby, slightly overgrown and browning lawn behind a small Victorian terraced house, two fair-haired boys, five years apart in age, wrestled roughly, each prepared to beat the other into submission. A short distance away, around the yellow, worn Formica topped table dragged out from the kitchen sat three adults: the two parents of the boys and another man: Scott. Scott spent most of his spare time in the home of his best friend, Alex. The two men had been good friends since beginning school and had been inseparable since, something the marriage of one hadn’t changed.

Overhead, an azure sky only scudded by the occasional wisp of feathery cloud let down the hot sun that scorched the grass and parched the soil even more. It was late July, the beginning of the school summer holidays and the two boisterous boys were looking forward to the weeks of running riot with their friends in the streets, endless games of football, maybe the occasional ice cream.

As another news report began on the transistor radio perched in the open kitchen window, Scott almost groaned when it began with yet more about the pointless moon landing a few days ago. He was sick to death with hearing about it, Neil bloody Armstrong and Buzz sodding Aldrin. And what sort of stupid name was Buzz anyway? The sort of moronic nick-name only Americans could inflict on each other. It was all a waste of time and money, about nothing more than getting there before the Russians; yet another stick to beat the Reds with. As if any of that shit really mattered. Scott’s life consisted of working to pay for drinking in the pub and pulling a skirt whenever the opportunity arose. Though he knew he wasn’t an attractive man, there was something about him that women always fell for. He didn’t know what the something was but chose not to question his good fortune when it meant he got a bird pretty much whenever he wanted, regardless of his looks.

Around halfway between the scrapping boys and the group of adults, stood a very lonely, small six year old girl, Natalie. She had almost-ripe corn coloured hair scraped up in tight pigtails that pulled painfully on her scalp, and pale blue eyes that often disconcerted people. Her narrow face pinched with indecision about where in the garden she should go, Natalie hovered uncertainly on her own, knowing she probably wouldn’t be welcome whichever group she tried to join. Her brothers never wanted her company, the oldest, Robbie, always making that fact abundantly clear to the little girl, usually with a hard thrown fist. Natalie didn’t want to begin collecting bruises when Robbie was going to be around all day every day for weeks to come. By the time they all went back to school she would probably be struggling to hide the discolouration anyway, so there was not point getting started too soon.

If her mother had been out doing the shopping, Natalie wouldn’t have hesitated to go and sit with her father. Alex was the only one in the family who could bear having Natalie around. But Joan was at home and would unfailingly manage to make her daughter feel as if she shouldn’t show her face with the rest of the family, as if she didn’t belong. Natalie knew her mother didn’t want her, though didn’t know why. Most of the time the girl endeavoured not to attract the attention of her mother and brothers, kept out of their way as much as she could, so she couldn’t work out what it was she had done wrong. But Joan Woods made her daughter aware of the fact she was always to blame. If only Natalie knew what for.

Seeing his daughter was all on her own again, Alex called the girl over. Natalie ran to him immediately, one of her rare smiles lighting her face for a moment as he drew her up onto his lap and wrapped a thick arm around her skinny frame and held her close. She snuggled into the broad chest that was nearly all the comfort she had ever known. To Natalie, her dad wasn’t simply the only one in the house who loved her; he was his daughter’s god, a benevolent deity who gave her solace.

But Alex wasn’t her only god, not by any means.

Natalie’s eyes strayed to Scott.

The bloody kid was fucking staring at him again!

If it wasn’t for the fact Alex was the nearest he had to family, Scott wouldn’t come round here during the day. Between the bitch Alex had been duped into marrying and the freaky bloody kid that gawped at him endlessly, Scott didn’t feel all that relaxed. The two boys were just background noise to Scott, no more significant than a fly buzzing around, easily ignored or warned away with a waved hand of dismissal. But not this bloody kid with her constant staring that was really starting to give Scott the willies. There was something unnatural about her, something . . . wrong. He didn’t know what it was. Though he had never given a monkey’s about kids one way or the other, this peculiar daughter of his friend had always struck him as being different, strange, just not right.

It was better when Scott and Alex could escape to the pub, then they could both act as they always had, picking up birds for a quick knee-trembler after closing time. And drinking as much as they bloody well wanted, until they were both ready to spew, not caring that they would be suffering for it the next day.

Nights like that were rare these days; that bitch Joan always wanted to go with her husband when he went out, which basically put the kibosh on either man pulling. The trouble was, Scott always felt he had to ask Joan if she wanted to join them so she didn’t realise he could quite happily throttle her. Scott was pretty damn certain the lazy bitch had got pregnant deliberately, just so she could get Alex to marry her. Get knocked up and it was off down the aisle with the poor sod unlucky enough to get caught out. That was never happening to Scott, never in a million years. If he ever got stuck with a calculating, manipulative bitch like Joan and a bunch of fucking snotty kids, Scott would throw himself under the nearest bus rather than endure like Alex did.

Scott had earlier made the mistake of asking Joan if she wanted to go to the pub that evening, hoping it was too short notice for her to organise someone to sit with the brood of brats she had churned out in the last few years. The bitch had stumped him by saying she had already arranged for the neighbour’s teenage daughter to come round. Scott had very nearly groaned aloud at that point, knowing he had no chance of getting his leg over later with Joan around. Having a woman in tow guaranteed no sex. In a couple more years, the babysitter would be too old to put up with getting her evenings filled with other people’s kids, and Scott thought that once that happened, it would be game on for him and Alex once more. He didn’t fancy having to wait that long to shag another bird though. Fuck that.

Jesus Christ! Why was that bloody kid always staring?

Light a fag. Try to ignore it. Don’t look at her or you’ll glare, and Alex wouldn’t like that. Just keep pretending it wasn’t happening.

These sort of phrases had become a mantra to Scott, helping preserve his sanity when he was visiting. The mantras kept him from belting the bloody kid. One day he was sure he was going to snap, and then he would shout at her, lash out, just because he had to get her fucking eyes off him!

Natalie’s eyes roamed over Scott’s features. Though he had never spoken to her, didn’t even look at her if he could possibly help it, Scott Carling was Natalie’s favourite person in the whole world. Every time he came round to see her father, Natalie would spend as much time as she could looking at him, as if her eyes were permanently thirsty and Scott was the most quenching drink in existence. Just his presence in her home made her happier than anything else could, even going to stay with her granny, which was the only place Natalie didn’t feel like some kind of infectious disease.

As Natalie’s ice-blue eyes tracked over the features she knew by heart, she drank in Scott’s glossy, loose black curls that fell to the collar of his shirt, his bright eyes that were as blue as the practically cloudless sky above, his aquiline nose and high forehead, his sharp cheekbones and chin hinting at a five o’clock shadow as ebony black as his hair. His thin-lipped mouth was set in a harsh line; Natalie knew she was the cause of that. She knew every expression those features arranged themselves into, including the one he had now, the one he always had when he was trying to pretend he didn’t know Natalie was looking at him. It was the expression she knew most of all. She knew he was irritated with her, but then everyone seemed to get irritated with Natalie, so she didn’t take Scott’s irritation particularly to heart. At least he had to acknowledge Natalie existed when he got annoyed. If he was annoyed with her, then he was at least aware of her.

Just once, Natalie would love it if Scott would really look at her properly and smile. That would make up for everything else. He could do it now. Right now. Just turn your head and look at me, she willed, even as she knew it was pointless hoping for it to happen. Please look at me, she added futilely. But she had these thoughts every single day of her life. One day that dream had to come true. One day Scott would look at her properly and say her name and smile. If he didn’t, what was the point of her being alive?

Natalie had often wondered what it would be like not to exist. She never told anyone. There was only her daddy and her granny who would listen anyway. Natalie didn’t like to bother anyone. If she told her father or grandmother about the things she thought they would only worry, or mention it to her mother, who would then be on at Natalie constantly. Even more constantly.

But she did try to work out if there was a way she could simply not be any longer. She had seen safety films at school and wondered if there was a way to recreate any of the things the films said were so dangerous. She suspected pain would be involved, but just getting through an average day involved some sort of pain, so she thought she could deal with that.

It was only the thought of never being able to see Scott Carling that stopped Natalie climbing up to the high roof of her school and getting too close to the edge of it, or running out into the road when a big lorry was coming, or drinking the bleach her mother kept under the sink. She knew more ways than just those to die. Lots of them. She thought about each one. She went through everything she would have to do, practicing every step involved several times over within the privacy of her mind.

It was only her obsession with a grown man that kept her from finding a way to stop breathing. Scott was more important to her than anyone. His presence in her home, her life, kept her battling on through each new day.

Neither her father or her grandmother, or even the new friend Natalie had at school - the first friend Natalie had ever had in her life - were quite enough to make up for having a mother who hated her, a brother who made her want to curl up in a corner and cry until she had been completely washed away. Natalie never cried though. If Robbie ever saw her eyes looking red or her nose all snotty, he would punch her hard in the ribs, and Natalie had to hide the bruises from her father.

The one time Alex had seen the evidence of Robbie’s abominable behaviour on Natalie’s bony ribcage, he had questioned his wife over it. Joan claimed it happened to Natalie at playgroup - even though she had been watching Robbie as he threw his fist hard into Natalie’s body. Joan refused to see that her darling son ever put a foot wrong. It was always Natalie’s fault that she got hurt; she wound her brother up, Joan stated. When Robbie hit Natalie, Natalie got sent to her room for aggravating him. Danny was allowed to fight back. Boys will be boys, Joan said. But Natalie was always to blame for the batterings her brother gave her. She believed it herself but didn’t know how she could stop annoying him when she didn’t know what it was she did that he hated so much.

After that, Alex realised what had been happening and made a lot more effort to keep an eye on the goings on in his home, often keeping Natalie with him to protect her. But no amount of talking to Joan would make her change her attitude towards their daughter. Alex had tried his damndest to find out why Joan seemed to loathe the sight of Natalie. But Joan wouldn’t even acknowledge that was the case. And there was only so much Alex could protect his daughter when he was out at work every day.

The Friday night after that incident, with the then three year old Natalie, had been the first time Alex had resumed his previous womanising. Picking up a pretty young brunette in the pub, Alex had given her a thorough seeing to on the back seat of the family’s Ford Anglia. It was petty really, he knew, a small rebellion by a man who felt impotent at home, proof he was still a man. How could he change the way Joan behaved when she didn’t think there was anything wrong? It frustrated Alex and left him needing to deal with that frustration in the most basic way.

The rot had set into Alex’s marriage for good in that week, and now he was left contemplating divorce on a nearly daily basis. All that stopped him going to see a solicitor was the stigma that would attach to his children when people found out they came from a broken home. Yes, divorce was easier than it used to be, but kids of divorced parents still got called bastards. And how would he be able to explain to anyone that Joan was a perfectly loving mother to two of their children and an uncaring bitch to the third? No one would ever believe that.

The last few years might have seen women burning their bras to express a desire for equality, and Alex didn’t really blame them - who wanted to feel inferior? He certainly didn’t want it for Natalie when she grew up. Poofs didn’t get arrested for being poofs any longer, behind closed doors anyway. But not a great deal had really changed. It was still less than ten years since that barmy obscenities trial for Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

So Alex felt stuck in a marriage that had definitely lost its gloss, if it had any in the first place, something he found hard to believe now.

Alex knew what Scott thought about his and Joan’s marriage, though the two men never spoke of it; men didn’t talk about stuff like that. Alex had his own suspicions about his wife and when exactly she had got pregnant. He wasn’t entirely convinced Robbie was his. It might be Alex’s name on the birth certificate, but that didn’t mean it was his blood in the boy’s veins. At the time, he had been too distracted by how easily Joan had spread her legs to think about who else she might have done it for.

At least Alex knew Natalie was his daughter. She looked like the photos of Alex’s mother when she was young, right down to those penetrating light blue eyes that seemed to hold thoughts way beyond a child’s years. But Natalie didn’t have Alex’s mother’s humour. Natalie was a quiet, solemn little girl who hardly ever smiled, often didn’t speak much, unless Joan was out and then it was almost impossible to get the girl to stop talking.

Alex knew, deep down, Natalie was too quiet. He knew a lot of people found his daughter uncomfortable to be around and put that down to her sombre nature. Maybe if she smiled and laughed more, people would feel more relaxed around her. He knew Scott found Natalie unsettling, but then Natalie did seem to stare at Scott a lot. Maybe it was because Scott never looked back. Kids could be queer like that, like cats singling out people who hated them. Natalie was just contrary enough to do something similar.

Twining one pigtail round his fingers, Alex pulled the little girl closer for a moment, whispered to her she was Daddy’s favourite girl, and promised to read her a bedtime story before he went to the pub.