This was chosen as the winning entry for DAIL Magazine's Murder and Disability short story competition. The story was originally published in DAIL issue 189.

I never worked out what was wrong with D——. He was tall and broad and had hinted to me of an interest in nature, and had once walked with me from school to the sand cliffs as we sought freedom from classroom captivity.

I was put in mind of this walk recently when I went to visit Colin and Midge in Kings Lynn, and drove with them to Hunstanton. Away from the fair and old pier are the layered sandstone cliffs that are falling into the sea but are free of people and full of history’s secrets. Midge was somewhat ahead of Colin and me when she became excited and waved us to come over. Stuck in the stone was a grey shell that looked like a ram’s horn. Of stone itself, it resembled a spiral staircase; spiralling up to heaven or down to hell, depending on which way you were imagining. Colin fingerspelt what it was that Midge had found: AMMONITE. We wondered, for a time, if it had feared the dinosaurs it had lived with.
With D——, that day in Yarmouth, we had only found empty shells of whelks, maybe thrown there by Tubby Isaacs who sold them with eels near the pier. For no reason, D—— said the shells were from cowries. I said I did not know what he meant and he said I was stupid, that’s why, and walked away from me and the whelk shells with a face that made me stay where I was and make my own way back to the school.
D—— joined the deaf school in the second year seniors and, although he talked about cars and bikes, he made few friends and was attached to no particular group. I was much the same and I guess this is why we drifted together.

D—— came from Acton in London, which is not far from Wormwood Scrubs prison. D—— said his dad was there for stealing from a Post Office, but later I learned that this was not true. He had never known who his dad was and lived alone with his mother. But his father must have been big and broad because his mother was small and thin. Where my Gran was staggered at D——’s size and width when he came to stay at my house, I was staggered by the thinness and smallness of his mother.

Acton is a scruffy part of London, like a frayed cuff on a grand shirt. D—— supported the local football team, QPR, but never went to see them play after being chased and beaten by the supporters of Burnley.
At school and in Norwich, D—— was about the only black person but in Acton he and his mum were among many. D—— never played with the other black children. He said they were cruel, and I thought he meant in the same way that the white children are cruel in Norfolk. But I came to think the cruelty he meant was different when I saw a group of them start to kick D——’s mother’s shopper on wheels as she was pulling it home. It was full of the religious pamphlets she handed out for the Baptists or such like along the Godless high street of Acton. They smiled as they kicked and shouted, and the words they mouthed were rude.

I felt sad for Mrs ——- as she was small and thin, had thick glasses and offered no harm or threat to anyone. D—— said he thought it was funny and later, for no reason, took money from his mother’s purse and pushed her into a seat when she made protest. He then held his head, threw away the coins and cried as his mother got up to hug him. Just before he held his head, his face wore the same expression as it had when we had argued about the whelks and cowries.

After Christmas I showed D—— a National Geographic book I had got from my Gran, that had the pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that had been taken by Voyager spacecrafts. We wondered at the size of those planets and at the tiny ness of the probes and of the terror of the blackness of space. We wondered what Voyager would feel if it were a person, thrown out of Earth into the blackness of space; maybe hoping for a new Earth.

About this time, D—— started looking at nothing and laughing and when I tried to ask him ‘what’ or get his attention, it was like I was waking him up from a dream. He said he found it hard to concentrate sometimes; that he kept thinking of those boys kicking the shopper. I asked him why, at the time, he had laughed. I told him that the boys had done a cruel thing to his mother, and you should never laugh at a cruelty. He said he had laughed because the boys didn’t know of the pamphlets and that by kicking God’s word they would be punished. I didn’t really know what he meant.

D—— left the EA* deaf school in the fourth year. There was a mainstream school close to Acton that had PHU** for the deaf. His education council were making cutbacks and there was no money to keep him at Yarmouth.

I wrote to D—— regularly, mostly about nothing, and we drifted apart from our friendship. Yet I was put in mind of those years one day in 1989 when I bought some whelks to eat on a day out to Cromer with my Gran, and, on returning home, I was surprised to find a letter from D—— with cut magazine photographs from either New Scientist or The Astronomer, and a letter of excited talk of Voyager’s arrival at Neptune.
Triton, Neptune’s moon, is so cold that the temperature is almost at absolute zero and, from its surface of soot volcanoes, there is the enormous expanse of Neptune; pale blue with clouds and a large black spot. It looks like the Earth but it is in fact a methane sea with storm winds of over 1500 miles per hour. D——wrote that Voyager had found another Earth at the end of its journey.

A few years later, having left the blackness of school for the greyness of work, Norwich were playing QPR and it entered my mind to go to this game to have an excuse to call on D—— to see how he was, where he was working and to tell him that Norwich aren’t Burnley.

I wrote but got no reply by the time I had arranged to take a coach to London to spend a few days at my sister’s. She lived in Camden Town at this point in time. Changing at Tottenham Court Road, I took the Central Line to North Acton. Acton was still as scruffy and frayed as before and, to my surprise, the corner lot of old second-hand cars (which were always a landmark in my mind to D——’s block of flats) was still open, selling junk only a fool would touch with a barge pole.

I felt a little nervous and also a little anxious when nobody answered, even though I could see a light flicker inside. I rang again and it was sometime before I saw a shadow approaching the door. It was very small and thin and, when the door opened, I smiled at Mrs———-. The only thing big were her eyes, magnified by glasses; her pupils looked like the moon in a solar eclipse above her irises. She couldn’t sign more than a few things and, even though she was hearing and knew little of the ways the deaf greet, I was surprised that her face remained rigid and sad. She took me into her front room and I instantly realised that it wasn’t a light I had seen but the flickering glow of television pictures. There were many statues and pictures of Jesus and Mary in the room, and one of D—— in the grey shirt and pullover we had to wear at Yarmouth, and a thin knotted black and white tie.

Mrs—— brought in a tray of tea and biscuits and turned on the standard light as she knew I would have to see her fully illuminated to understand what she said. She asked if I took sugar and milk. Then for sometime she turned her gaze from me to look at nothing in particular. As Mrs——— had no teeth, I had tremendous and embarrassing difficulty trying to know what she said, and as she could not understand my signs, she sought out paper and pen. She was sometime in writing a few pages of all that had happened to D——. I couldn’t fully understand what she had written - her writing was scratchy and it takes me time to adjust my mind from the meaning of signs to the meaning of English - but I understood enough of the words and from the face of Mrs——- all that had happened.

D had been teased at his new school, sometimes because he was big, sometimes because he was deaf and sometimes because he was black. Mrs——— said this had made D—— ill, but I couldn’t at the time understand what she meant. My mind could only refer to the teasings I had been given; of times when a boy had become my friend only to suddenly change, luring me into a trap where he joined in the fun of his real friends; of taking my hearing aids and breaking them and beating me with a stick. I had felt angry and hopeless. I felt I could tell no one of my foolishness and humiliation in thinking I’d made a friend. I felt forever afraid to trust people or to go out and play. I felt that God didn’t exist for the deaf. But I didn’t feel ill.
D——- was made to go to a hospital near Wandsworth, and then to another just outside of Merton. D—— always said he wasn’t ill and whilst at one of the hospitals he made friends with two women both aged about 50.

He went with them to somewhere in Devon. The hospital said he wasn’t to go, but when D—— promised to keep taking tablets, he was allowed to go with the women, who for some reason thought they could cure D——- without his need for medication.

I became very confused towards the end of Mrs——-’s writing where it said that D had killed the two women with a knife. He had suddenly thought they were evil when they threw out an old shopper, like the one Mrs——- had used for her pamphlets. D—— at first was taken to prison but because he was so big and strong and all the time fighting, they sent him to Rampton in Nottingham where, as far as I know, he still is to this day.

I sat that evening in Mrs——-’s front room with the flickering pictures and the statues of Christ, unable to understand how D——-, with his interest in nature and planets, had all of this hidden in his mind on the path of his life.

It was maybe three years ago that I was reminded of D——’s last letter to me when looking at a copy of the National Geographic. I saw a photograph that had been taken by Voyager from Neptune. It showed all the planets - Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter - as they appeared from the near surface of Triton. Earth was a tiny blue dot and I thought, from Triton, you would never guess what goes on here.

* Educational Assistant
** Partial Hearing Unit