I look around the classroom at the rest of the pupils here and quietly pick them off one by one.
As our teacher Mrs Dennison continues talking about the earth’s tectonic plates – something Dad taught George and I about years earlier in his homeschooling – I’ve drifted off into my own world, one that is partly a new creation and part of my parents’ making. I’m splitting classmates up into categories of who Mum and Dad would’ve wanted me to bring home, those who they wouldn’t care for, and others who would never leave that room again.
Suddenly I remind myself of where I am and who I am now. I don’t have to think like this because I no longer inhabit that world. I am ordinary. Everyone in this class is safe because I am ordinary. I even sound ordinary, I have quelled my vocabulary so I’m more like them and less like my father. And now, if I bring anyone home with me, it will be to my grandparents’ house. These friends will leave as they arrived, conscious and breathing.
My relationship with my grandparents has improved in the time I have been living with them. I remember how shocked they were when I turned up on their doorstep, introducing myself as their grandchild and begging for help. Before that day, they hadn’t seen me – not by choice, apparently – since I was an infant. Attempts to visit had been rebuffed by my mother. The story of how and why I
escaped, along with George’s disappearance and everything else that went on under that roof, horrified them. But they never doubted me for a second.
My grandfather is far from being a little old man in a pair of slippers and puffing on a pipe. His faded merchant navy and prison tattoos tell stories he doesn’t need to. My grandmother is his female equivalent. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly but is perceptive of emotion – quick to offer hugs and just as fast to retract them if I recoil at her sudden movements.
Living with them means I’m having to change a lot of my mindsets and I don’t need to analyse who I should be making friends with. I don’t have to fear what mood they might be in when I return from school. Instead, I live a normal life now. Yet it remains stained by abnormal thoughts. I still fantasise about seeing new school friends slump unconscious over our dining room table, eyeballs rolling backwards, threads of drool falling from the corners of their mouths. Only now it’s my grandfather carrying them over his broad shoulders and up the stairs.
If I hadn’t been forced to attend so many clubs and groups, I might have found it difficult adjusting to school life and being surrounded by my peers. But the practice I had at befriending anyone means the transition has been smooth. The one and only time a group of boys tried to give me a hard time for being the new kid in class, I punched the ringleader so hard in the face that his black eye remained for a fortnight. He was too humiliated to tell on me.
I have even made a best friend, something I’d only ever had in George until I betrayed him. We spent much of the recent summer holidays in one another’s company, and sometimes, when we played together, I mistakenly called him George. I don’t think he noticed.
He made me wonder if making a connection with someone outside the family was what attracted George to Martin Hamilton. Because that’s what I feel with my friend.
We are already so close that I would kill for him if he asked me to.
It was soon after Martin appeared in his life that my brother wanted less to do with me. Our conversations were made up of ‘Martin this’ and ‘Martin that’ and the attention this stranger was getting far outweighed anything George gave me. By then, Mum was taking pleasure in pitting George and me against each other, praising one and criticising the other, encouraging us to snitch for even the most trivial of misdemeanours. So in retaliation against George’s neglect and being desperate to find favour with Mum, I told her about the friend George had confided in me about.
And I knew I had done the wrong thing the second the words tripped from my tongue. Just how wrong wouldn’t become immediately clear, though.
Mum and George rowed when he point-blank refused to bring Martin home, and it escalated later when Dad returned from work. My satisfaction at dropping George in it was so brief it couldn’t even be accurately described as short-lived. I had turned on the only person in the world who cared for me. Eventually, two beatings later, George caved, but our relationship was irretrievably damaged.
Soon after, Martin regularly came around for tea. He was a funny-looking boy with a big goofy smile and protruding ears. He told silly jokes, did impressions of film and TV stars and I reluctantly found myself liking him.
Mum also showed a surprising amount of interest in him; much more than any of the other kids George had befriended. She’d ensure his belly was always full, heaping strawberry-flavoured Angel Delight dessert into his bowl while we had none, and giving him a snack to take home. My like of him soon turned to resentment. Martin’s mum may have died while he was still a baby but that didn’t mean he could steal mine or my brother.
Dad wasn’t as drawn to him as Mum was. Quite the opposite, in fact. He seemed to grow tired of the boy’s regular appearances, and during one particular visit – and to everyone’s shock but Dad’s – Martin fell asleep at the table. We all knew what was to follow.
I swear there were tears in Mum’s eyes as she followed Dad carrying Martin in his arms into that room. When my parents reappeared shortly before bedtime, Martin wasn’t with them. We never saw him again. That was the day everything altered. From then on, no child ever returned once they were carried away.
George and I never spoke of Martin again. When the police turned up at the house, as his dad knew he and George were pals, we didn’t need to get the story straight between us first. We just knew what to do to protect our family. We said that while we played with him sometimes after school, he’d never been to the house before and they had no reason to think we were lying.
I wonder now how different my life might have been had Martin returned. Would I still have developed urges? Would there have been any necessity to save people? To save my brother? Because he was the one I let down the most.
My last memory of George is the following weekend, his desperate eyes locking on to mine when Mum caught us watching a video cassette labelled Raiders of the Lost Ark that we found lying on the floor by the machine that suddenly appeared one afternoon. But after loading it into the top, the snowy screen perplexed us when it suddenly showed that room upstairs and not the movie.
The only person on the screen at first was Martin. It was a close-up of his tearful face, his eyes full of fear and his arms above his head, reaching up high as if trying to touch the stars. The camera panned out to show a rope around his neck and attached to a hook in the ceiling. Then someone
taller than him and wearing a jumper like Dad’s appeared, holding a plastic bag in both hands.
We both turned our heads as fast as lightning bolts when Mum began screaming from behind us. We tried to run but she blocked the door, and when Dad appeared, George grabbed a cricket bat propped up against the sofa and hit Mum hard across the chest with it, sending her sprawling to the floor. My hysterical brother was yelling at the top of his voice, pleading with me to run to the village for help as Dad grabbed the bat from his hands and dragged him up the stairs by his neck and towards the open loft hatch and ladder. Terrified and confused, I hid away in my bedroom instead. It’ll blow over soon, I kept reminding myself. By morning, we’ll be back to normal. Our version of normal.
Later, and as the house quietened, I crept out and along the landing. They had left the ladder down and the key in the lock of the loft hatch. Just one turn anti-clockwise and I could release him. I could save us both.
But I didn’t dare to do it. If I had and we were caught, we would both be in much more trouble than George was in now. Instead, I convinced myself that once tempers calmed, they would let him out and we could continue as we always did. So I returned to my room.
I must have drifted off because I awoke hours later to the sound of a heavy object being dragged along the landing. I opened my door a crack just in time to see Dad pulling his semi-conscious eldest son into that room. I panicked and ran towards them, stopping at the doorway. The orange sunset outside bathed the room in a soft light. Dad taught me to always frame beauty when I saw it, so that’s what I did. Trapped in that picture was George, lying on his side, next to an open suitcase and a pile of his clothes.
Dad didn’t reprimand me, he just slammed the door and a darkness smothered the corridor.
The final image of my brother was fleeting but one that I have spent time trying to both replicate and forget in equal measure.
‘Where’s George?’ I asked nervously over breakfast the next morning. The table was only set for three.
‘You were both warned what would happen if you were disloyal to this family,’ said Mum, matter-of-factly, lighting up a cigarette. She wrapped an arm across her chest and held it there. ‘Your brother threatened to tell other people about what happens here. We can’t let that happen, can we?’
I shook my head and looked outside to Dad, stoking a bonfire in the garden. Next to him on the ground was a pile of empty coat hangers. His face was drawn and his shoulders hunched as he threw a piece of clothing into the flames. I recognised George’s red and white jumper. I swallowed my tears. My brother had gone and it was all because of me.
Four years have passed and I miss him as much today as I did that morning over my first breakfast without him.
‘BABES IN ATTIC’ HUSBAND IS A SECRET LOVE CHEAT BY CAROLE WATSON, CHIEF CRIME REPORTER
The husband who discovered the bodies of seven children in his ‘house from hell’ is harbouring his own dark secrets, we can exclusively reveal.
Finn Hunter, 30, has been spending cosy nights with his ex-girlfriend behind his wife Mia’s back – and they have a daughter together.
Finn and Mia, who was once engaged to Strictly Come Dancing winner Ellis Anders, hit the headlines after discovering the bodies of the murdered children in the attic of their new home in March. Two adult corpses were also found in the garden last week.
But Hunter has been spotted several times since then sneaking into the home of his ex, Emma Jones, with whom he has a four-year-old lovechild. He also has a baby son with Mia.
A close friend revealed how the Hunters have been living under huge strain since the grisly discovery in their loft.
‘Mia will be devastated to learn her husband and Emma have not only kept in regular touch since they split up, but that they had a baby together,’ said our source. ‘He has been lying to her for years.’
Continued on pages four and five.
