Visiting Gareth

Here are some reasons I want to be a grown up:

• I’ll be able to drive


• I won’t have to go to school


• I’ll be able to go to bed when I want to


• I’ll be able to visit Gareth on my own (although they’ll search me on the way in)

Driving’s what I’m especially looking forwards to, but today it’s visiting Gareth that’s mostly on my mind. Today is the first Tuesday of the month, which means that tomorrow is the first Wednesday of the month, and the first Wednesday of the month is visitor’s day. Mum has arranged with the school for me to take the first Wednesday of every month off, to go and visit Gareth. I remember hearing her telling Grandad about it on the phone one evening.

“It took some doing,” she said. “They don’t mind kids going for dental appointments, or hospital check-ups, but they take a very dim view of children having time off to go there.”

Mum explained to me when it first happened, when Gareth first went away, not to expect people to have any sympathy for me. She knew it was hard for me to, to have my brother taken away like that, but she said that Gareth had been “demonised by the media” and that no-one would have much sympathy for him or any of his family. It didn’t seem to come as much surprise to Mum that the school took a dim view of me having time off to go and visit Gareth, but she dug her heels in the way mums do and got her way, and so on the first Wednesday of every month I get up early and instead of dressing in my school uniform I put on whatever I like, and we set off while the roads are still quiet to go and see my big brother.

It’s weird the way Mum and I feel so differently about visiting Gareth. I get so excited that for two days before I can’t sleep, and I always end up sleeping in the car on the way home afterwards. Mum on the other hand gets more and more nervous over those two days, until by the time we come to leave early on the Wednesday morning she’s so tightly wound that she’ll snap at anything. I’ve learned to just be good on those mornings and do as I’m told. I’m always so excited that I’m never in the mood for an argument anyway, so being good and doing as I’m told is easy.

Mum won’t really talk about what Gareth did, or why he went away. I figured most of it out though; it’s not like I’m a kid or anything, and I hear a lot more than they give me credit for. When he first went away he was what’s called on remand, and that was a lot closer to home. Then there was a period when he was going to court every day, while it was decided exactly how wrong what he did was, and what to do with him as a result. Mum went to the court to be there for him to begin with, but she used to come home every day with her eyes red from all the crying she’d done, and in the end she stopped going. Also, there were people there who were really evil to her on account of her being Gareth’s mum and because of what he did. I think she found that really hard to deal with, especially because she was on her own. Like she said to me, not many people were going to have much sympathy with Gareth’s family.

It wasn’t until the weekend after the court case ended, when Gareth had been sent to the new prison much further away, that I really understood what had my brother had done. I had known that it had to do with Gareth and a girl, and that Gareth had hurt her, but I didn’t know anything beyond that. I assumed there’d been a fight at the pub or something, and that Gareth had hurt someone accidentally. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

That weekend, after the court case ended, we went to stay with my Aunty Kathleen in north Wales, to get away from it all, my mum said. I always used to enjoy going to Aunty Kathleen’s because she’d feed me and my cousin Paul first, ham and chips usually, and then she’d feed the adults separately. While she fed the adults Paul and I could play Pong on the telly or listen to music. At least, that’s what she suggested we do, but the first thing I made a bee-line for when the adults went into the dining room was the Aunty Kathleen’s copy of the News of the World. We didn’t really have papers in our house, apart from the local paper and occasionally the Mirror on racing days, so nothing prepared me for this lurid sensationalism, and the first time I opened it I was hooked. The mixture of sex and murder that made up the bulk of the stories was irresistible. Mum caught me reading it once and told me in the car on the way home, after she’d bid her sister farewell, that it was “a bit seedy” and I shouldn’t be reading it. But of course, the seediness was exactly what appealed to me. That and the headlines: “VICARS IN KNICKERS” and “BLOOD LUST OF AXE MANIAC” - what boy could resist?

So, there we were at Aunty Kathleen’s that Sunday afternoon, and Paul and I had eaten our tea and were left alone in the sitting room. Aunty Kathleen’s paper wasn’t on the coffee table where I usually found it, and I had to hunt around for a while before I found it, tucked deep into the rattan magazine rack. I jumped back onto the sofa, unfolded the paper and... there was Gareth, on the front page. The headline read:

LIFE FOR BEAST OF BOOTLE

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I didn’t know what I was most surprised about - that there was a picture of my brother on the front page, or that the front page story was about someone from Bootle, which was where we lived. It honestly didn’t occur to me that my brother was the Beast of Bootle until I read the opening sentence:

Evil Gareth Howard was beginning a life behind bars this week after a jury found him guilty of the brutal murder of schoolgirl Emma Davies. The judge in the case said that Howard, 23, should serve a minimum of 30 years before being considered for parole.

That was as much as I read, but when my mum came into the sitting room after her dinner I was still sitting there on the sofa, still holding on to the paper and with tears pouring down my face. My mum looked at me for a moment and said “What’s...?”, but then she looked down and saw what I was holding, and it was as if she’d been burned. She snatched the paper from me, then she stood there and clutched it, and her face went red. Aunty Kathleen came into the room, and Mum turned to face her, not saying a word. My aunt saw what she had in her hands, and she moved towards her sister.

“Oh God, I’m sorry Pat. I didn’t mean... I’d put it away.”

My mum didn’t say a word. She just turned and took my hand, and walked me to the car in bitter silence.

That was nearly two years ago. The weeks after that weekend seemed like a big blur; I didn’t seem able to concentrate on anything for a long time. With time though my shock gave way to curiosity, and I began to want to find out the facts. I used to go to the newsagents at the weekend, and look through the News of the World for the facts. It was a drip-feed of information, and I made notes of everything I found in a notebook that I kept in my school bag so I knew mum wouldn’t come across it when she was tidying my room. Here are the facts I found:

• Emma Davies was 16 years old.


• She lived not far from us, but she went to the church school which explains why I’d never heard of her.


• He stabbed her with a kitchen knife, which made the police think that he’d gone out to do it deliberately. You don’t just carry a kitchen knife around for no reason. That’s why the judge said it had to be 30 years.


• There were twenty seven holes in her, and the attack was described as frenzied.


• When the police found Gareth, he was still covered in blood. He told them that he did it, then he never told them another thing. But telling them that he did it was enough.

There was some other stuff too, but I didn’t understand most of it. For example, in one article it said:

Police think the motive was sexual.

I sort of know what that means, but I don’t see what it has to do with killing someone. I think it just means that he was a man and she was a girl, pretty much.

It’s pretty weird having a brother who’s a murderer. I mean, it’s not nice for a start, and it’s not something you can talk to many people about, but what makes it weird is that there are sort of two Gareths now. There’s the one in the papers who did the crime and who is always pictured with dark, brooding eyes. That Gareth is a beast, an animal, sub-human. Then there’s the brother I know and love, who is just how he always used to be. Between visits I have dreams about what he did, and I start to scare myself by thinking about him in that way. I start to see the monster from the News of the World. And then we visit again, and he’s just Gareth. He’s not a monster, he’s just my brother. He’s always pleased to see me, and he always gives me a hug and asks me about school. He loves it if I take some Lego and he’ll sit and play with it with me until the time’s up and we have to leave. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I just don’t understand how Gareth could have done what he did, and how two people so different can live in the same body. I don’t understand how he could be my big brother and yet still do what he did. Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever understand. Maybe one day, when I’m old enough, and can visit on my own, he’ll tell me what happened.