They’d tried to convince him that the things he did were bad, and had almost succeeded, but by then he was old enough to know that they lied to him, because they didn’t understand. And because they didn’t understand, they would never know how good the things were which he did. How good they made him feel.
Yes, it had been a lonely place, childhood, where no one understood him or wanted to know about . . . the things he did. Because they didn’t want even to think of such things, let alone know about them.
Lonely, yes, the place beyond that beckoning door. And how much more lonely if he hadn’t had the dead things to talk to? And to play with. And to torment.
But because he’d had that – his secret thing, his clever way with creatures which were no more – being an orphan hadn’t been nearly so bad. Because he’d known there were others worse off than him, whose plight was far worse. And that if it wasn’t, then Johnny could soon make it worse.
The open door both repelled and attracted him. Beyond it, the mists of memory swirled, eddied and hypnotized him; until – against his will? – Johnny found himself drifting in through the door. Where all his childhood was waiting for him . . .
They’d called him ‘Found’ because he had been, in a church. And the pews had vibrated with his screams, and the rafters had echoed with them, that Sunday morning when the verger had come to see what all the to-do was about. He was still bloody from birth, the foundling, and wrapped in a Sunday newspaper; and the placenta which had followed him into the world still warm in a plastic bag, stuffed under the bench in one of the pews.
But lusty? Johnny had screamed to wreck his lungs, howled to break the stained-glass windows and bring down the ceiling, almost as if he’d known he had no right to be in that church. Perhaps his poor mother had known it, too, and this had been her attempt at saving him. Which had failed. And not only was Johnny lost, but so was she.
In any case, he’d yelled like that until they took him out of the church to the intensive care unit of a local hospital’s maternity ward. And only then, away from God’s house, had he fallen silent.
The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Johnny she didn’t survive the journey. Or perhaps she did, for a little while . . .
A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just beginning.
In the intensive-care ward Johnny had been washed, cared for, given a cot and, for the moment – and indeed for all his life – a name. Someone had scribbled ‘Found’ on the plastic tag which circled his little wrist, to distinguish him from all the other babies. And Found he’d stayed.
But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he’d stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly . . . that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one’s perspective. For his young mother hadn’t been quite dead after all. And perhaps she’d heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?
There Johnny’s unnamed, unknown mother had sat, beside his empty cot; and Johnny in her dead arms, sucking a dribble of cold milk from a dead, cold nipple.
Johnny was at an infant orphanage until he was five, then fostered for three more years until the couple who had taken him split up in tragic circumstances. After that he went to a junior orphanage in York.
About his foster parents: the Prescotts had kept a large house on the very outskirts of Darlington, where the town met the countryside. At the time they adopted Johnny in 1967, they already had a small daughter of four years; but there had been problems and Mrs Prescott was unable to have more children. A pity, for the couple had always planned to be the ‘perfect’ family unit: the pair of them, plus one boy and one girl. Johnny would seem to fit the bill nicely and make up the deficiency.