Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT: Protectors Anthologies, #1

By Andrew Vachss, Charles de Lint, Joe R. Lansdale and 17 more

41 writers. One cause.
We've rallied a platoon of crime, western, thriller, fantasy, noir, horror and transgressive authors to support PROTECT's important work: lobbying for legislation that protects children from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. 
Powerful stories from George Pelecanos, Andrew Vachss, Joe R. Lansdale, Charles de Lint, Ken Bruen, Chet Williamson, James Reasoner, Charlie Stella, Michael A. Black, Wayne Dundee, Roxane Gay, Ray Banks, Tony Black, Les Edgerton and 16 more, with 100% of proceeds going to PROTECT. 

PROTECTORS includes a foreword by rock critic Dave Marsh, and fiction by Patti Abbott, Ian Ayris, Ray Banks, Nigel Bird, Michael A. Black, Tony Black, R. Thomas Brown, Ken Bruen, Bill Cameron, Jen Conley, Charles de Lint, Wayne D. Dundee, Chad Eagleton, Les Edgerton, Andrew Fader, Matthew C. Funk, Roxane Gay, Edward A. Grainger, Glenn G. Gray, Jane Hammons, Amber Keller, Joe R. Lansdale, Frank Larnerd, Gary Lovisi, Mike Miner, Zak Mucha, Dan O'Shea, George Pelecanos, Thomas Pluck, Richard Prosch, Keith Rawson, James Reasoner, Todd Robinson, Johnny Shaw, Gerald So, Josh Stallings, Charlie Stella, Andrew Vachss, Steve Weddle, Dave White, and Chet Williamson. 

Among PROTECT's victories are the Protect Our Children Act of 2008, which mandated that the Justice Department change course and design a new national nerve center for law enforcement to wage a war on child exploitation, the Hero to Hero program, which employs disabled veterans in the battle against child abuse, and Alicia's Law. 

Join the fight, with 41 stories by top writers. Be a Protector!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Pluck
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781516358380

Book preview

The Search For Michael

Patricia Abbott

---

Michael had been gone nearly ten years when my father looked out the window at a San Francisco restaurant and spotted him on a crowded pier.

Instinctively, Dad climbed on his chair and began to rap on the thick glass, arousing the interest of nearby patrons, the staff, and a few tourists outside. By the time Dad made his way down the three flights of stairs and found the right piling, Michael was gone.

Sure it was him, Max? one of his colleagues asked after Dad returned breathless and shaken. They had watched horrified as Michael, or the boy Max identified as his son, slung a backpack over his shoulder and disappeared. I never knew him but that kid looked awfully young. More like seventeen.

You only saw him from the rear, Max, another friend reminded him. Could have been anyone.

No, it was Michael. There was something about the tilt of his head, the way he propped his leg on the post, Dad told them, ignoring their looks of skepticism. And that backpack—I recognized it immediately.

Same backpack, huh? How long has it been now? the third colleague said.

Women would’ve known not to pursue it, but these men, used to solving problems, were determined to make Dad see it didn’t make sense. That the boy on the pier was not Michael—that Michael would no longer be a boy with a backpack.

Ten years. Dad’s voice had grown small.

And he’d be how old now?

When Dad remained silent, the one who knew him best answered for him. Thirty. Michael would be thirty by now.

• • •

I could never mistake someone else for Michael, he told my mother and me later. We nodded, believing that to be true. Or believing that he believed it.

Within a month, Dad accepted a retirement package with the idea of devoting himself to the search for Michael. He cashed in a portion of their stocks, down-sized the house, and used the money to travel the country, following any lead, however small, offered to him.

Mom, of course, went along with all of it.

• • •

It was Mom’s offhand remark that had sent Michael into the streets ten years earlier.

Lynnie, what was it you said to him again?

It was a cold March night and the furnace ran steadily in our Michigan home. Dad’s hands rotated a bottle of Michael’s prescription on the kitchen table. I edged out of the room, anxious to get back to my anatomy text, knowing what my mother had said.

I told him he’d do better in school if he were more like Beth.

Despite the wall separating us, I felt their two heads swivel in my direction. And with it came the familiar discomfort I had for being Beth and not Michael. What was easy for me came harder for my brother. My almost inaudible sigh was heard in the next room.

I know I shouldn’t have said it, but it popped out. Day after day, year after year . . . Mom’s voice grew low as she reminded Dad that his son was floundering, had always floundered.

But it was Dad who decided Michael could manage a residential college.

We helped him move into a dorm room in September, only to bring him home again in November. He’d stopped going to classes and seldom left his room. His roommate filled us in by phone. I think you better come up.

And we arrived to find Michael buried under piles of pilfered blankets in his narrow bed. His hair uncombed, his glasses lost, he looked more fragile than ever.

More than one person warned us Michael couldn’t handle the demands of such a competitive college. That any success would only come with a family on-hand to lend support. But we didn’t listen, convinced he should go to Ann Arbor after his high SATs, making good on the dream of the Wolverine pennants on his wall.

Delusional, we chose handsome luggage, a new computer, a green glass reading lamp—everything necessary to furnish his room handsomely.

Later—when we put our minds to it, encouraged by the clinic where Michael spent the next two months—we were able to pinpoint signs of his illness as early as sixth grade.

Remember the time he urinated in the water fountain—after his teacher told him he had to wait till recess to use the boys’ room.

Mom cleared her throat. He didn’t have any memory of it a few seconds later.

I had heard this story before, of course, Word traveled fast in a suburban school system, and if I were asked to identify the first signs of illness, I would mention incidents my parents never knew about: Michael staring into a mirror for an hour at a time, Michael out-cold for sixteen hours and still craving more sleep, Michael, hiding on a closet shelf when he was nine. Keeping silent when the rest of us had grown frantic trying to find him. It was as if he inhabited the wrong world—that the one he was meant to live in was galaxies away.

Mom’s remarks that day seemed almost insignificant given the years of harsher pronouncements doled out by relatives, friends, social workers, doctors, teachers, principles, and on more than one occasion, a police officer. But it sent him to his room, where he stuffed what he could into his book bag and left the house when our heads were turned.

Despite several documented incidents of his illness, it was difficult to get much help from the police. He’d left on his own accord, packed a bag even. The fact that underwear and socks were missing from his drawer seemed to make their case—that he was in control of himself.

They tracked him as far as the bus station in Detroit, ascertained he’d traveled to New York. Then the trail went cold. Just one of the thousands of college-age students who arrive in New York every day.

Ten years passed. Now and then, we made stabs at trying to find him. Certain leads would present themselves and Dad followed up on them. I finished medical school, interned at Detroit Receiving, began a residency at Henry Ford Hospital in pediatrics, joined a practice in Plymouth, married, had a pair of twin boys.

Mom worked as a docent at the art museum and Dad continued to teach at the Ed. School at the University. He collected coins and campaign buttons; he walked the beagles: first Fanny and later, Fred.

But none of us ever went to bed with a clear mind, nor celebrated a holiday with total joy, never answered an unexpected phone call without hope. Michael knew how to keep his silence—if he was still alive.

Dad’s search lasted less than a year. The eulogies at his memorial service all called attention to the search for his son. It became the defining characteristic of his life. If Dad’s cross-country, hands-on search suited his gregarious, peripatetic nature, Mom found a different method to suit hers after Dad died. Not liking to travel, nor being particularly independent, Mom began to look for Michael through psychics and mediums, through tarot cards, tea leaves, channelers and Ouija boards.

Six months passed before I discovered her secret. It never occurred to me until a bill for services from a psychic in Saginaw was misdirected to my office.

Mom, I said, placing the bill on the hall table, what’s this about? It never occurred to me it had anything to do with Michael. She’s always been somewhat interested in the occult. I could remember her watching IN SEARCH OF . . . when I was a teenager. Clinging to the words that Leonard Nimoy intoned.

Mom’s hand shot to her mouth and her eyes widened.

I’ve been looking for Michael. Now don’t look at me that way, Beth. Your father would’ve wanted it.

He would have wanted you to throw money at someone called Madame Rouschenko? I said, reading the name from the invoice. You’ve been driving all the way to Saginaw to see her? The bill was for $700.

Do we need the money? Mom asked. She shifted cagily to the offensive then. Is the practice suffering? Do the kids need braces?

At least Dad, I began to say.

At least Dad what! This may not have occurred to you but some of those endless trips he took were probably to get away from me. To get away from the one he blamed, the one he shared the blame with. She paused and pulled herself together. Well, I hope you never have to find out what something like this does to a marriage. How all you can see is the missing child when you look at each other.

Or the missing brother?

My mother blanched—as if this hadn’t quite occurred to her.

So finding something out about Michael now would change all that—those last years?

She shrugged. I’d be fulfilling his mission. Our mission.

• • •

Six months and several clairvoyants later, Mom located a woman in Buffalo who convinced her Michael was indeed alive and living near water in a warm place, which seemed like something the psychic might wish for herself amid an upstate New York winter.

How about driving out there with me? Mom suggested on the phone, pulling me from an examining room to suggest this.

Can we talk about this later? I asked, smiling at a shy teenager standing on the scale three feet from me.

I have to let her know if we’re coming.

I’d think she’d know that already.

Beth! Mother said. She’s a caterer and works antique shows if no one’s coming."

Does that tell you anything, Mom? I sighed, picturing the woman handing out steamed hotdogs at a VFW Hall in Tonawanda. I had scheduled the weekend off, planning vaguely for some time at home.

Mom had her excuses ready, and before I knew it, I’d agreed to her plan, made the necessary arrangements and was driving across Canada.

The woman’s house was northeast of Buffalo.

Why didn’t I pull a map off the Internet, I said, looking futilely for a Highway #207 sign on the road ahead. Mrs. Quinn’s mapmaking skills don’t bode well for how she’ll navigate the beyond.

Mom laughed weakly, fanning out the page of directions on her lap. Included were markers like the gas station with the crates of Hires Root Beer near the air hose and the insurance agency with dented blue Civic by the side door.

There it is, Mom shouted, spotting the road sign for #207. Let’s give her a chance, Beth. Your skepticism will just make things more difficult."

Maybe I should wait outside.

No, no, I need you to hear what she says. I might go all funny.

I think it’s more likely she will.

Can you ever pass up the opportunity to make a joke out of things? Humor is worrisome in a physician. Look, she said, waving a white sheet of paper. She has a good resume. The Buffalo police have used her extensively.

I nodded, not having the energy to remind her that we only had the woman’s word for that.

Anyway, isn’t it nice being together for a few days. She gave me an indefatigable smile and applied another coat of lipstick to it.

From the look of it, the tea leaf reading business must have hit hard times in Buffalo. The small house keeled bravely toward the right, its hopeful ochre paint peeling in the October winds, the shingles on the roof trembling in accompaniment. The sparse lawn was decorated for the next’s week Halloween celebration with a dozen plastic tombstones, RIP painted in blood red. A witch rode saucily on a rope strung between two trees.

Mom looked at it grim-faced. Ready, she said finally, picking up her purse.

We picked our way to the door along a pathway littered with abandoned objects, mostly, but not solely, toys. It might have been easier to see into the future than into her yard.

Mrs. Quinn, a tiny woman, clad in the ubiquitous get-up of jeans, a sweatshirt, and white running shoes, opened the door before Mom’s finger was off the bell button.

Holding a cell to her ear, she waved us in. We sat in the living room while she finished a hushed conversation in the kitchen.

After a few minutes, when we had picked up on a few mumbled words, it became clear to us that Mrs. Quinn had a 900 number and was with another client. At some point, Mom began to lose her nerve. And when Mrs. Quinn finally made her entrance sans cell, Mom looked ready to bolt. Her torso had sunk into her lap and her face began to collapse too. I didn’t know what to expect from a tea-leaf reader and saw nothing in particular to alarm me, but clearly Mom was a veteran of superior performances elsewhere.

Mrs. Quinn’s prognostication closed with the words, Matthew,

Michael. I corrected her before Mom could. Michael Bright.

Michael, yes, of course, Michael, Well, I can tell you he’s leading a productive life despite his problems.

Mrs. Quinn’s words were heartening, full of descriptions of his house (split level), his car, (a newish Toyota), his new life in a warm, watery setting. I got the impression of sandy sheets, exotic drinks and spectacular sunsets. A postcard on her fridge, when I followed her to the kitchen to pay her, presented just such a vista.

As Mom grew more agitated with what she heard, Mrs. Quinn saw her chances for a long-term lucrative relationship wilting and began to offer less measured, more specific predictions, even suggesting at one point, Matthew (no, Michael) was living in a motel with a flamingo theme, was involved with a croupier at a casino, and was a skilled surfer. She tapped every cliché of Floridian life one could imagine.

Mom bought none of it, and she was soon out the door, with me fumbling for my checkbook. Mrs. Quinn took the check silently, seemingly expectant of just such a finish.

That’s it, Mom said when we had pulled away from the curb. I’ve put enough heart into this search. It’s your turn now. Struggling to hold back tears, she added, I’m too old for cross-country trips anyway.

My turn? I pictured travels, accompanied only by my faithful dog, Blue, my practice left in the care of the personable Bappaditya from Bombay, who was interning in the office this year. When did she lose you?

Lose me. Oh, you mean Mrs. Quinn. I guess when I heard her telling her 900 call that she had a vision of a body of water.

Didn’t catch that, I said, pulling back onto the highway. Perhaps her proximity to the Falls interferes with her accuracy.

You were too busy eyeballing the mold on the walls. Yes, water does seem to haunt her.

Rising damp, the English call it. I glanced over. So the handoff is official.

What? Oh, yes, you’ll find your own way to look for Michael. Doesn’t have to be mine or your father’s. She blew her nose.

Tears or mold?

Both I’m afraid.

• • •

When I began my search, I started where the police left off—fifteen years before, surmising that most people never left New York once they’d arrived, especially a person looking for cutting-edge medical treatment. If Michael were still alive—which I doubted—he was probably still in Manhattan. I also forced myself to go back over the months preceding his departure. Surely there were things other than my parents’ grousing that propelled his apparently abrupt decision to leave. What had been different that week?

Mom and I tried to reconstruct the months preceding his exodus. Recovering from a small stroke, she sat pale and fragile on a lounge chair in her tiny backyard, facing a surfeit of lemon lilies along the graying picket fence. The stroke had twisted the left side of her face a bit and I found it hard not to fuss over her. When had her fingers grown so thin?

The worst time for all of us was when he developed tardive dyskinesia from the Thorazine, Mom remembered, tripping over the difficult words. She shaded her eyes from the sun while she looked through the careful records Dad had kept. I was impressed by Dad’s innate ability to be concise yet thorough in his notes.

Michael was so ashamed. He couldn’t control the drooling and the lip-smacking. Remember how his arms flailed?

I remembered only vaguely because I was in medical school by then. I barely had time to shave my legs much less observe my kid brother’s reaction to the drugs he was trying out. He was used to feeling odd, but not looking it. I think he ran into some old friends down at school.

I remember him telling us about it—a boy he’d played tennis with in high school—before he got so sick. I remember him saying ‘You could drown in the slobber. Like I’m on drugs.’ He laughed in the odd way he had—almost hiccupping. And, of course, I am.’"

Look at this, Mom said, passing me a treatment chart Dad had prepared. The chart seemed like a medieval artifact fifteen years later, the bright blue ink fading to blackish, the ruled lines childish now that computer could produce high-quality charts in seconds. He tried insulin therapy, electroshock and two new drugs in this short time period.

I shook my head. None of this first generation of drugs helped him at all. And frankly, I’m surprised the protocol allowed him to sign up for so many trial treatments in such a short time.

What does that mean? Mom asked. The first generation?

Around the time Michael took off, they came out with a second generation of drugs. A drug called Clozapine was especially effective. I looked up. It was the most important drug for treating treatment-refractory patients for years. Of course, there are newer ones now.

Treatment-refractory? You mean patients who weren’t helped by Thorazine.

Or suffered such debilitating side-effects, for another.

She shook her head. Oh, if only he waited.

For the Clozapine?

No, for you.

• • •

For me? That took me back, too.

Michael had come to me for help. It was minutes after Mom had made that callous remark—the one comparing us. Michael sidled into my bedroom. I was getting ready for a date, probably with the man I’d eventually marry. He poked his head in the door, looking pointedly at the books on my desk. I never studied there, preferring the roominess of the dining room table, but I kept my books there when I wasn’t using them.

Found anyone like me in there yet? he asked. He yawned the kind of yawn he used to lighten a dark topic.

What? I probably said, more interested in finding a pair of leather gloves I’d misplaced. Or perhaps it was my purse. I was in the closet by then, my voice muffled by the thick robe on the hook on the door.

I asked if there was any help for your brother in any of these tomes. He was paging through the top one when I stepped out of the closet. I couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was with the desk light flooding up on him. His hands on the book were as delicate and graceful as a pianist’s. His dark hair curled across his brow, his blue eyes luminous. Why had I grown Dad’s face and he Mom’s?

I don’t think we get to cases like yours until the third year, I joked, looking under the bed for my shoes, not thinking about Michael’s problems for once.

Well, if I’m still around, I’ll stop by for your diagnosis then. His voice, and it was the last time I ever heard it, trailed off as the book fell shut and he stepped out of my room.

He left that day, and later that night, I let Mom take all the blame—never mentioning he’d come to me for help and been turned away.

Physicians have considerable access to hospital records and various other medical documents. But I found my brother on the Internet. Medical journals had begun to put articles online—even ones from the past. When I came across the case of Vincent Dark I knew I had found Michael. The name he was assigned in the article was easy to decipher. Vincent Van Gogh was one of the most famous victims of schizophrenia. And change the name Bright to Dark—Vincent Dark.

Vincent Dark was a twenty year old man with a history of refractory schizophrenia who was not responding to conventional antipsychotic therapy when he was administered Clozapine, the drug of choice for schizophrenia after the late eighties, at an outpatient clinic at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. A baseline electrocardiogram (ECG) was administered and the result was within normal limits. In six weeks’ time, Mr. Dark’s illness had improved dramatically and he was stabilized on a moderate dosage of Clozapine. Within a few weeks of that notation, however, Vincent was unable to climb a flight of stairs and he was diagnosed with myocarditis with congestive heart failure. There was also evidence of pulmonary edema. Although Clozapine was discontinued immediately and he was treated with antibiotics, steroids and diuretics, Vincent died a few days later, one of a few dozen patients to suffer this reaction and die from the drug.

If this was Michael, and I thought it was, he’d died within a few months of leaving Detroit. There were other similarities in the article. An incident of urination in a water fountain was mentioned. His family history mentioned an older sister, a father in education.

• • •

Beth, can you come here straight from work?

I hurried through the sore throat in Exam Room 1 and the sprained ankle that followed it, arriving two hours later.

I got it in the mail today, my mother said excitedly. She picked up a postcard and handed it to me. It was an aerial shot of the beach in Miami. It was mostly ocean but you could also make out a few inches of sandy beach and a beachfront hotel.

Look closer, she said when I didn’t react.

Finally I saw the inked blue arrow pointing at a hotel window. Me, it said at the other end of the arrow.

It has to be Michael. Her voice trembled. Who else?

I turned the postcard over, looking for another clue. Nothing. I looked at the postmark and it was three days earlier. A chill went up my spine. Could I have misread the file on Vincent Dark? Had Michael really spent the last ten years as a surfer, a beach bum, a world traveler? Mom’s name and address were typed on a label—nothing there.

"Why wouldn’t he have written something? I asked.

Maybe he just wants us to know he’s alive.

My mind raced. Should I mention the incongruities in her reasoning? Should I tell her the story of Vincent Dark? I hadn’t yet. Had that woman in Buffalo decided to vindicate herself?

Mom’s face was serene as she examined the card. Even if I never hear from him again, I feel at peace. Florida’s a nice place for him.

I swallowed all the nay-saying my head wanted me to air. All the data that proved this scenario wrong. The idea that a charlatan had stepped in.

Let’s go out for dinner, Mom, I finally said. A little celebration seems called for.

E N D

The Drowning Of Jeremiah Fishfinger

Ian Ayris

---

Jeremiah Fishfinger began life between the wars, the youngest of six, three boys and three girls, a strain on their parents, every one. His father—a boatman and a bully—worked all day on the Royal Victoria Dock. He would come home from work, drunk and loud, and beat the children with a bicycle chain. And as he did so, Jeremiah’s mother kept to the kitchen, scrubbing the sink till her hands bled.

When Jeremiah’s father would eventually pass out in the armchair, his own tears blinding him to the barbarity of his actions, Jeremiah’s mother would gather the children to her breast and salve their pain with buttered crumpets and assurances that their father really loved them very much indeed.

But Jeremiah knew different, and fought back with spiteful words, sneering and snarling, until he felt the back of his mother’s hand on more than one occasion. As he lay awake at night, his father’s snoring filling the house, his mother’s sobs breaking his heart, Jeremiah would dream of what it would be like to be blind, to live in a world of complete darkness. And then, when he felt himself right on the edge of comfort, he would close his eyes, ever so slowly, and dream of colours.

It is a wonder Jeremiah survived to his eighth birthday, but he did. September the seventh, nineteen-forty. And on that day, young Jeremiah looked to the skies, planes like birds, rising and falling, bursting asunder like the colours in his dreams.

Jeremiah’s brother Charlie, the eldest Fishfinger, was sent away with the soldiers to fight in North Africa, Ernie, the next along, to Burma. The two eldest girls, Sophie and Mary, turned lathes in a munitions factory on the Commercial Road, and little Annie found herself in a sweet factory in Limehouse making Blackjacks.

Being on the docks, Mr Fishfinger carried on his important work, loading and unloading, moving things here and moving things there. He volunteered as a fireman from the first days of the war, carrying a small child from a burning building in Custom House, and gaining a reputation as a man reckless and brave. He was the last to leave the exploded munitions factory on the Commercial Road where Sophie and Mary worked, his face streaked with grease and black and blood—his daughters lost.

The funeral of Sophie and Mary took place in the drizzling rain at St. Margaret’s and All Saints Church, on the Barking Road. Mrs Fishfinger sobbed into the shoulder of her husband, and Jeremiah looked on from behind a tree as his sisters were buried, wondering what it would be like to suffocate under so much earth.

Mr Fishfinger had lost a piece of his heart the day the munitions factory went up—he said so—and from that moment on, he ceased to beat little Annie. Indeed, it seemed as if a part of him had softened. He would hold Annie close, open himself to her tentative advances, and whisper into her ear she was his special girl. In his work as a wartime fire-fighter he became ever more fearless. Flames dare not touch him and huge lumps of masonry fell about him as if the grief he suffered shielded him from further pain.

Still he beat Jeremiah with the bicycle chain, but it was with a heavy heart and a stilled tongue.

Jeremiah jumped off the Southwark Bridge just short of his tenth birthday whilst playing with Johnny Cottle from across the street. Johnny jumped in to save Jeremiah, and was drowned. Mr Smithson, the haberdasher, pulled Jeremiah out and pumped the water from his lungs with big iron fists. And Jeremiah hated him for it.

The young Jeremiah continued to spend his days alone, spotting aeroplanes and sifting through the London debris for something he could make sense of.

Mrs Fishfinger was killed in forty-four when the Woolworths on the Bethnal Green Road took a direct hit from a V2. Jeremiah was twelve years old. Mr Fishfinger broke down at the death of his wife, and laid aside his bicycle chain for good. He continued his fire-fighting work until a concrete slab of street ripped his legs apart when a hitherto unexploded bomb went off on the East India Dock Road.

So, with little Annie working in the sweet factory in Limehouse ten hours a day, Jeremiah was left alone with the father he hated, the father he had to care for, to wash, to cook for, to clean.

Day after day.

Day after day.

And the fire burned.

Jeremiah was able to quell his hatred by locking himself into the day to day duties of his life—boiling the potatoes and peeling the carrots for dinner, scrubbing the front step, keeping the windows gleaming and bright. If not for this, Jeremiah would not have been able to block out the disgust that overwhelmed him as he washed his father in the tin bath in the kitchen. Even the occasional incontinence, though he felt his father’s shame, could be dealt with, mechanically, without fuss. But by far the worst were the drunken penitent looks from his father, one slurred word of tearful remorse about the beatings and the treatment meted out in days gone by, and Jeremiah would feel his blood begin to rise, the walls that kept him together begin to shudder and shake.

Charlie Fishfinger returned to the family home in March of forty-five, exhilarated by his wartime exploits at El Alamein and Monte Cassino. Ernie arrived back a few months later, a victim of the Japanese prison camps, his body and mind too badly broken ever to recover.

Charlie was a local hero. He had medals, and a mop of hair and a shoulders-back steady gait the girls swooned over. But he couldn’t stand to be in this house of misery. Meanwhile, Ernie sat in his mother’s old armchair, opposite his broken father, and spent his hours wide-eyed and mumbling.

And so the war ended. A new-found sense of hope filled the streets. A new day had begun.

But not for Jeremiah Fishfinger. Not for him. For him the scars would not heal, his heart was too ravaged, the cracks too deep. Charlie soon left to train the Hottentots in Botswana, whilst Ernie slept safe and sound behind the asylum walls.

• • •

It had been six years almost to the day since Jeremiah jumped from the Southwark Bridge. Six years of a life shattered beyond hope.

Jeremiah’s father faltered and stumbled from the front room—the place he’d bedded down in since the night his legs were ripped off by the flying slab of concrete—his whole weight bearing down on two wooden crutches, pain carved into his face. When he neared the table, he swung himself into his chair, and laid the crutches down, his entire face oozing sweat.

‘Morning, Jeremiah,’ he said, stern and functional.

Jeremiah continued to stir the porridge on the stove, his back to his father, his knuckles screaming white around the wooden spoon.

‘I said, morning, Jeremiah.’

Jeremiah inclined his head slightly to view his father from the corner of his eye, making sure he continued the same rhythmic stirring of the porridge.

‘Morning,’ Jeremiah said.

Satisfied the order of things had been set for the day, Jeremiah’s father settled himself at the table, and fell into a reverie, his head lowered to his chest.

And the porridge steamed and the porridge bubbled.

Jeremiah thought of little Johnny Cottle, all those years ago, struggling for breath in the water. And he remembered his eyes as they remained open, pleading, scared and unseeing, as little Johnny sank to the bottom of the river.

‘Don’t let that porridge burn, boy,’ Jeremiah’s father said.

Burn like the streets. Burn like the planes that fell from the sky. Burn like Mary and Sophie. Burn like Mum.

‘Did you hear me, boy? Did you hear me?’

Burn. Like. Mum.

Johnny Cottle Johnny Cottle Johnny Cottle Johnny Cottle.

Jeremiah scraped the wooden spoon one last time around the inside of the pot, and turned off the gas.

‘That’s it, boy. Now hurry yourself before it gets cold.’

Hurry? Hurry? There was all the time in the world. For what is time but the passing of days? Days in which your loved ones perish, your heart breaks, and your dreams shatter. Time, time means nothing when you are watching fragments of the world go by through the eyes of a grief-torn child.

Jeremiah poured the porridge into the three bowls set out beside the stove. He watched as the porridge glooped into place, until it glooped no more. He watched as the steam rose from the bowls in dancing pirouettes then disappear forever.

Jeremiah knew the time was not long.

‘Boy? Boy?’

Not long, Dad. Father. Oh father of mine.

Little Annie pranced into the room, hair tied back, the same old life-giving smile upon her face. A one of a kind, Annie. A beauty. An angel from on high.

‘Morning, Dad,’ she said, giving her father a kiss on the top of his head, taking her place at the table next to him.

And the darkness that was upon that man gently lifted in the presence of his only daughter, as if blown by a summer breeze.

‘Morning, my darling,’ he said.

Jeremiah set the bowls on the table, and sat opposite his father.

Boil and bubble. Toil and trouble.

Jeremiah scooped spoonful after spoonful of porridge into his mouth, not swallowing, not tasting, just filling the empty space.

‘Eat your porridge properly boy, or I’ll ram it down your throat.’

Jeremiah wanted to laugh. The stupid man. The stupid, evil man.

Jeremiah ate faster, filling his mouth entirely before looking up at his father and slowly swallowing the pain.

‘Boy!’

Little Annie jumped, her spoon tumbling onto the table. She picked it up, and carried on eating, her head down, dreading what was to come.

But those days were no more. Her father had no legs. The bicycle chain hung limp in the shed from a rusting nail. Little Annie spooned her porridge mechanically into her little mouth, the delight of the day now shadowed in fear.

Jeremiah finished first, his face red with pain, his throat burnt.

‘Come round here, boy,’ his father said.

But Jeremiah did not.

Little Annie took her bowl to the kitchen sink, tears cutting tracks down her cheeks, her heart pounding. And then left the two broken souls to themselves, for she could feel their pain no longer.

Alone in the house, sitting across the table—a table once filled with loved ones now gone—sat but two.

Son stared at father, father at son, neither one a word left to speak.

Jeremiah’s father cried inside for his wife and his two girls, and for not being able to love his youngest son. Jeremiah stared at his father blank, and felt nothing.

• • •

The first time Jeremiah Fishfinger had been swallowed up by the dark waters of the Thames, he’d been nine years old. He’d been dragged home by his father, and beaten to within an inch of his life. And now, six years later, he placed a note gently on the kitchen table for little Annie, left the house quietly, and headed for the Southwark Bridge, the bicycle chain trailing behind him, scraping red in his wake.

E N D

The Kindness Of Strangers

Ray Banks

---

There are few things as obnoxiously loud as a gymnasium full of children. It’s a strange, unearthly din, a combination of roar and shriek punctuated with high-pitched giggles, sudden shouts and the ongoing impatient swinging and shuffling of feet. Even when they’re just chattering amongst themselves, a couple of hundred kids will generate enough noise to drown out a 747, and it’s not something you can comfortably endure without blowing an eardrum first. I mean, I suppose if you taught the buggers on a daily basis, you’d get used to it, but for a visitor, even one as regular as I was, it could be excruciating. So when Miss Morgan asked me something, I had to ask her to repeat it.

She smiled. You asked if they were ready?

Ah. I matched her smile and raised her a couple of teeth. Yes.

She nodded towards the mass of children off to my right, all sat on benches. They’re arranged by year in alphabetical order. Is that okay?

I gave her the thumbs-up. Brilliant.

You need anything else?

Sorry?

Do-you-need-anything-else.

No, I don’t think so. Who’s my sheepdog?

Miss Morgan smiled again. When her face was in repose, she could’ve passed for a porcelain doll, and when she smiled she looked younger than many of the pupils in her Year Ten class. She wore grey and brown, tried to hide her bony little body in the folds of her clothes, but she had strong teeth and that smile meant that she was comfortable with me, which was a step in the right direction.

Mr Grant, she said, and pointed at a wide-shouldered, heavy-stomached man with a full beard. Mr Grant wore a tracksuit that made him look like a refugee from The Krypton Factor circa 1986.

He was my sheepdog, charged with arranging the children as well as pushing them through at a fair clip. From the look on his face, he knew what kind of hellish chore it was going to be, and he’d obviously already decided that I was the one to blame.

He’s a PE teacher, isn’t he?

Miss Morgan’s smile became a grin, and she arched an eyebrow. What gave you that idea?

He looks like Bullet Baxter.

She laughed. I waved a hand at Mr Grant and he snapped into action. He arranged the Year Sevens into a line. The first kid—a tubby boy with a mop of blonde hair and cut lip named Michael Adler—was sent forward. He pulled himself up onto the seat in front of me and gave his best photo smile.

Just look at the camera there, Michael.

I pointed at the webcam. When he looked at my finger, I clicked the mouse, took the picture, and then signalled for the next child. Miss Morgan sent Michael on his way. A little pigtailed girl named Andrea Barker dropped into the seat. She gave me a gummy, wet smile and I clicked the mouse again.

That was my job. When I told people I took pictures of children for a living, they normally did a bit of a double-take and then looked around the room until I told them that, hey, it really wasn’t as creepy as it sounded. Sometimes I didn’t tell them for a while, though, just to torture them. After all, people’s minds did tend to go to the darkest places, and sometimes I wanted to see them think of me like that, just to see what it looked like, before I explained myself and that look of mild alarm was replaced by one of mild guilt.

The truth of the matter was that I worked for a large multinational corporation that specialised in access control and cashless payment systems, which is about as rock ‘n’ roll as it sounds. In layman’s terms, if you’ve ever had to use a plastic card on an electronic reader to pay for something, enter a building, or even prove you were who you said you were, the chances are both card and reader came from us. Right then, the biggest market was education. Some universities and colleges, but mostly schools, because if there was one thing parents cared about, it was their child’s attendance. And if there was something elsethey care about, it was their child’s diet. So what the large multinational corporation did was make a series of deals with local authorities and schools up and down the country. We supplied each child with his or her own triple-function plastic card. The children used the embedded chip to enter the school and log their attendance. There was also a mag stripe on the card which could be loaded with money by the parent to spend on school dinners. The beauty of this was that the parent could specify the kind of food their child was allowed to purchase, so no more kets for chunky Michael Adler. Finally, the card itself was printed with the child’s vital information and his or her photograph.

And that was where I came in.

Now, you might not have thought there was much work involved with something like that, but when each kid needed a new photo each year, and there was a good two-three thousand of them in one school alone, then that was quite the to-do list. Throw in the fact that I was covering pretty much every school in the North East, from Berwick down to the arse end of Teesside, with occasional jaunts into the No Man’s Land of Cumbria, where the men were men and so were the women, and you could be forgiven for thinking that there weren’t enough hours in the day.

Tell you, sometimes, it certainly felt that way. But then, I took a great deal of pride in my work, and if there was ever a photo that didn’t immediately resemble the child in front of me, I’d take it again. Sometimes I might have even taken an extra moment to make sure my subject looked their best, but only in those rare cases when the boy or girl in question looked as if they’d rather chew off their own fingers than have their photo taken. The way I saw it—the way I remembered it from my own school days—is that those kids were going to have a battered, frightened year ahead of them anyway, so why remind them of their physical faults every time they swipe for a Mars Bar?

Case in point: last year, over at Benton Manor School, there was a girl named Mary Yanoulis who was the last of the Year Tens and nicknamed Virgin Mary by her giggling classmates. She was fourteen, taller than the rest of her class. She carried herself in a kind of round-shouldered forward lean, as if she’d been shoved out of the house that morning and hadn’t quite caught her balance yet. She was an ugly duckling who was destined to grow into an even uglier duck, and she was all too painfully aware of how people saw her, all too conscious of the disdain and amusement she inspired. When the other girls—two of them in particular, interchangeably blonde, pretty in an obvious way—called Mary names she bristled in her chair as if an electric current had shot through the seat. She tucked a few thick strands of black hair behind her ear in a futile attempt to make herself look presentable and then let her hands fall to the folds of her grey skirt like a couple of buckshot doves.

If you’d just like to give us a smile for the camera, Mary . . .

She looked up and frowned at me. There was a mark on her cheek, close