Back in Norfolk he put the boy on the sofa, got a beer, put some music on and sat down in the armchair to watch him die, wondering how he was going to dispose of him, wondering if he could cut up a body without puking. Minutes turned to hours, the boy's face swelled monstrously, hours turned to days and he breathed on, a glittering string of saliva connecting him to the pillow. His right arm and leg drew up on themselves like bird's claws, but by the third day, when Carl put a hand on his shoulder and shook him, he sat bolt upright and vomited down his mustard yellow T-shirt.
"Fucking animal." Tracey, still a teenager in those days, was furious with this intrusion. She stomped out of the house and went to stand next to the hangar, lighting a Marlboro and turning her back angrily on the house. Carl ignored her. He paced the room looking at the boy, wondering if he could kill him here and now. He should just drive him out to the motorway, he decided, and dump him on the hard shoulder but he didn't know how much he remembered of the night in the Nissen hut, who he could finger. Maybe he should just drive him down to London and dump him on Penderecki, but Penderecki was still an intimidating prospect. So he was stuck. He examined the child, trying to decide if he would be worth something to someone. The right side of his face was ruined, swollen and drawn downwards as if melted. He dribbled constantly. Basically he was useless. Over the next few days Carl made up his mind countless times that he was going to do it he was going to kill him. But countless times he found he didn't have the courage. And then, suddenly, something put an end to all his indecision. Suddenly Carl noticed that the boy was changing.
It was a slow process, but gradually, miraculously, the paralysis in his face began to correct itself and the dribbling stopped. He still grimaced and jerked, his head zagging back and forward like a baby trying to get out of a high chair, and when, a month or so later, he got up and tried to walk, his right foot pointed down like a horse hoof, but somehow Carl found all that easy to overlook. New possibilities were opening up to him.
The change in Carl's attitude didn't escape Tracey's attention. She was glad. He had stopped being surly and losing his temper every five minutes. One night she heard noises coming from the bathroom, noises that echoed around the dark house, animal screams and the thudding of a body being battered against the cast-iron bathtub. When she tiptoed upstairs she met Carl coming out of the bathroom, a grim look on his face. He was sweating, he didn't meet her eye, and she knew, without knowing how, that from now on the boy was going to be Carl's special friend.
And she was right. When he got boozed at the weekends Carl would come down the stairs in a T-shirt and Y-fronts, a fag in his teeth, down to the living room where she and the boy watched TV on a Saturday. He never spoke, he didn't snap his fingers or beckon or anything, he'd just switch on the light so they'd both look up and he'd stand there until the boy got up and limped out of the room. Tracey would turn up the volume on the TV and smoke a bit faster on those nights, trying not to think about what was going on upstairs. For days after these episodes the boy 344 would go off into long periods of non-communication he would sit in the corner rocking, a blanket over his head, a steady whinnying coming from his mouth.
"Just make out like it's our brother," Carl said. "Say he was born like that, OK? And we'll call him something else call him, I don't know, call him Steven." And so it was established Steven was his name, he was their idiot brother. The Borstal boys liked to beat "Steven' up: Tracey often found him lying on his side in the hangar, rocking and whimpering amid the engine oil, and after a few years Carl also lost his taste for him. Steven had started smoking on the sly and tearing photos of Debbie Harry and Jilly Johnson out of the News of the World to Sellotape on the wall. One morning Carl had woken up and found the pile of part-worn tyres in the garage burnt to a cinder from one of Steven's carelessly dropped cigarettes. He'd cracked the boy's nose open for that. He didn't have a child's body any more and was showing signs of growing up and now Carl prowled the house losing his temper every five minutes, if not with him then with anything he encountered: with Tracey, with the cars in the garage, with the Borstal boys. Steven was a young teenager now, an overgrown child in cancer-shop trousers whom Carl didn't fancy and didn't have the ingenuity or energy to get rid of. He started locking him in his room at night with a slop bucket and nothing else. "It's for your own good, you little fucker."
Tracey was pleased at last it seemed that Steven had reached the end of his useful life. But then one day, by chance, Carl discovered that Steven had been doing the work of the Borstal boys. While they sat back with their plastic bottles of cider and watched, it was Steven who was lugging the piles of car windows etched with vehicle identification numbers into the trees to smash. It was Steven who was doing the work with the angle-grinder, removing chassis numbers or cutting panels out. It was Steven who was growing bigger and more muscular and skilled around the garage. He couldn't string a sentence together but he could weld a plate over a chassis number in seconds. A light seemed to come on in Carl's head. If Steven could do the Borstal boys' jobs then, "What the fuck am I doing wasting me gin and Silk Cuts?" Before long he had set him to work he became a little grease monkey, filling and beating and grinding and "I don't even have to find him a mask for the re sprays Carl said. "He don't know any better. Absolutely pukka." Now any Borstal boy who couldn't help Carl in the bedroom was redundant, and the caravan stood empty for long periods of time.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, Steven said Penderecki's name. That really made Carl sit up and pay attention: "What d'you say?" He glared at him from over the News of the World. "What was that?"
"AhhhBan."
"Whassat?" Carl looked up at his sister, standing there biting her nails and pulling a face. "Whatsee say?"
"I don't fucking know, do I?"
"Iibaaan."
"Fuck me." Carl crumpled the newspaper and jumped up. "He said Ivan. Didn't you? Didn't you say Ivan?"
"Unnng!" Steven tugged his head back and his hands jerked up under his chin. "Ung."
"What's Ivan?" Tracey said. "His name?"
"Nah that's Penderecki's name, isn't it?"
"Uh-hh." He jerked his head back, his claw hand flailing under his chin. He had odd, wandering irises, which skittered across the top of his eyes like windblown leaves across a lake.
"Say it again. Who broke your head, eh?" Silence. "Come on, you stupid little shit, who done your head? Was it Penderecki?"
Silence.
"Come on was it Penderecki what broke your head?"
A sudden jerking and rolling of his eyes. "Ung!"
"Who?"
"BBeMBe – rrrrr-kki '
"That's it!" Carl was amazed. "And who helped you? Eh? Who helped you after? Was it me? Was it Carl?"
"Ung – ungV He jerked his head and rolled his eyes. That meant yes. Carl sat down on the sofa with an odd look of revelation in his eyes.
"That Polish piece of shit!" He slammed his fist into his palm and Tracey shrank back a little, not sure what was coming next. "I've got him, that piece of shit."
The way Carl explained it to her, that Penderecki was getting old, slowly drying up, becoming inactive, losing all interest in little boys and forgetting he had anything at all between his legs, that there was some leverage to be had here, that he, Carl, could drop hints about what really happened to the boy and soon have Penderecki eating out of his hands, it all made sense to Tracey in a way. He'd have a place to crash in London whenever he needed it, he'd have Penderecki's contacts if he wanted them, he'd have a second place to stash his collection of tapes if things got dodgy at the garage.
"Or if I have to go away for some reason. He'll guard them with his fucking life if he knows what's good for him." Carl was in a good mood now. "So, Tracey, you ain't to talk about who Steven is, right? If Ivan ever turns up here for some reason, don't you never let on -if there's talking to be done it'll be me does it."