It was hung, controversially, in the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Do you remember? Exhibit by Jamie Wagg. Mothercare. Bootle Shopping Centre. Liverpool. A tiny figure, hand in hand with a bigger boy, is led away from the camera. Another boy, hands nonchalantly in his jeans' pockets, strides ahead. We know it now as the start of a journey which ended with the little boy's death. Mothercare; mother's loss; irreconcilable irony.
Several weeks ago, I was sitting with other convicts in a smoky television room in a prison in the southwest of England. We were watching, for the umpteenth time, Tarantino's seminal film Reservoir Dogs. This video is a favourite among the impressionable youngsters who make up the majority of the UK's prison population. We had reached the scene in which Mr Blonde cuts off the ear of his hostage police officer, douses the wretched man in petrol and dances menacingly around him with lit cigarette and lighter. The 21-year-old skinhead sitting to my left began to squirm in his wooden seat. As the scene progressed, his mouth widened into a fissure of wild malevolence."That's what I'm gonna do to the grass cunt who put me in here," he hissed. "Cut 'im to fuckin' ribbons just like that."
In Blake Morrison's bleak and disturbing meditation on the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger, the author ruminates inconclusively on the influence of the horror movie Child's Play 3, which one of the killers had seen prior to the murder. If Morrison had had a seat next to me in that prison television room, he might have come to a swifter conclusion. "You've seen it done, 'aven't yer. You've seen 'ow easy it is," my current cellmate Paul told me when I asked whether he thought we would be more likely to commit murder after seeing it on screen.
"I've learnt everythin' ah know from t' telly," Kitch from Barnsley admitted as we sorted through 800 pairs of sweat-encrusted socks in the prison's clothing exchange store. Judge Michael Morland, head of the northern circuit who presided over the Bulger trial, was more circumspect: "Exposure to violent video films may in part provide an explanation" as to why "an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity" was perpetrated by the ten-year-old defendants Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. In the end, only they will ever know what went through their heads on that February afternoon by a secluded stretch of railway track in Walton.
Morrison knows the hows, the whens and the whos. But there are deeper questions: Were the boys equally guilty? Were they violent by nature? Had they been deeply disturbed from birth? Nature or nurture-neither can be proved. As Morrison admits: "Whys but no wisdom. It's like living out Zeno's paradox." Psychiatrists, school teachers and representatives of the social services all weighed in with their ha'penny-worth of testimony. The reports they made available did not seem to answer any of the whys. They did prove, to Morrison's evident disgust, that Thompson and Venables had known the difference between right and wrong. This refuted doli incapax, an ancient statute which presumes that ten to 14 year olds are too immature to differentiate between an act of mischief and one which is seriously against the law. The court was certain that they did know. It did not help their lawyers' efforts when headmistress Irene Slack testified that pupils in her care showed a "moral sense" from the ages of four or five.
The trial was "mediaeval," according to Robert Thompson's barrister, David Turner QC. There was a need for a retributive public spectacle and because Turner's young client had continued to lie throughout the trial, his lawyer's claim of doli incapax was rejected. Co-defendant Jon Venables's hopes of a "diminished responsibility" verdict-which should have been more easily attainable because of his apparent contrition, his parents' supportive daily court appearances and, most significantly, his schoolmaster's observations of bizarre and disruptive behaviour-were dashed by the mood of universal hostility. His hearty lawyer, Brian Walsh QC, remonstrated in vain. It came as no surprise when the boys' legal team offered "no defence."
We live in an age of bad boys-or so Morrison initially postulates, citing a litany of child crime culled from newspapers post-Bulger to support the assumption of innocence lost. In France, three ten year olds kick a tramp to death. British boys of ten and 11 are charged with rape. In Chicago, a ten year old drops a five year old out of a 14th storey window. But there is nothing new in juvenile delinquency. In 1748 child child-killer William York was sentenced to death for the murder of a five year old. He was later reprieved, but the 18th century Lord Chief Justice Sir John Willis warned: "It would be a very dangerous consequence to have it thought that children can commit crimes with impunity." Willis would have certainly been at home among the Bulger case inquisitors. But what would he have made of Morrison, who quotes Rousseau and Jesus-whose "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" takes some earthly beating.
Death and religion have provided the raw material for great art throughout history. Morrison's High Victorian poetic prose aspires to a place in the loftiest citadels: "The dark economy of heaven: so short the path from womb to cloistered tomb; so brief the dolorous stumble from rag pallet to grave." This is how he describes Bulger's body: "The transected torso, the hanging lip, the torn eyelid reddened by brick dust, the leaf stuck by blood to a naked foot."
Cleverly, the poet-author inserts dark thoughts from his own subconscious. He questions the propriety of his relationship with his own children-bravely, given that he admits to an erection while reading a story to his young daughter. But I wonder whether this is not a deliberate attempt (see the death bed intimacies of his earlier work And When Did You Last See Your Father?) to create a literary succ?s de scandale by pushing the frontiers of confessional autobiography past the last taboo. The chattering classes of Blackheath may find his food digestible enough, but my cellmate Paul was flabbergasted. Morrison defends his erection as "not desire, but love's ecstasy, suffusion, bliss, warmth in your lap, the rub of a little bottom on a prick..." Paul's retort was predictably dogmatic: "He's nowt but a fuckin' nonce. Nobody get an 'ard on with his own daughter." But then Paul was severely abused himself as a boy; he has strong views on protecting the young.
This theme is woven around the investigating police officers' obsession with a set of batteries scattered about the scene of the crime, which may have been "introduced" into Bulger's anus before (or after) Thompson and Venables murdered him. Sex abuse was vociferously denied by both boys during the 12 hours of taped interviews, regurgitated time and again during the trial. Morrison dwells on the mystery as insistently as Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby (whom he met, incidentally, in the gentlemen's toilet at Preston Crown Court). Again, there is no satisfactory conclusion. The author says that in the end "there's an understanding on all sides: go easy-the case is bad enough without fondled willies and batteries up the bum."
Earlier this year, another well publicised case shocked and horrified the public. Eight teenagers had ambushed and gang-raped an Austrian tourist who had got lost in the red light district around King's Cross. The boys were sentenced to long terms in prison; their names were plastered across the front pages of every national newspaper. I mention the case because the question of naming names provoked long legal arguments during the Bulger trial. Before the court sat, Thompson and Venables had been identified as Child A and Child B. As the world's assembled press awaited the jury's verdict, counsel for various tabloids rose to address the judge. Why should the murderers (no one noticed that the boys had not yet been found guilty) be granted anonymity when poor James Bulger's name had been public property from the start? The judge procrastinated, but eventually the tabloids had their sport.
Through regular correspondence with inmates at the juvenile unit at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution (YOI) I have become friendly with one of the King's Cross boy rapists. Nicky (whose mother sold his story to the News of the World, headlined "My Sex Beast Son") received ten years for his part in the wrongdoing, just after his 16th birthday. He tells me he cries every night over those few minutes of drink- and drug-induced animalism. For what it is worth, I believe Nicky's remorse. Nothing connects the letters I receive with the Daily Mail's banner headline "Faces of Evil." Because of the wide media exposure, every boy on the wing knows what Nicky is inside for. Daily he is physically and verbally abused by his peers; there have been punchings, beatings, buckets of urine and excrement thrown under his cell door.
Perhaps the most ridiculous statement Morrison quotes comes from Detective Constable Phil Roberts. "They were evil," he announced to a news conference. "I think they would have killed again. I think they would have become like the Kray twins." What Thompson and Venables did to young James Bulger was wicked, and the punishment-that they be "securely detained for very very many years"-was right, just and necessary. But to compare them to the Krays? To parade them in front of the world in an adult court, with the braying mob outside, when they had only just turned ten? I agree with Blake Morrison. That was also wicked-and unnecessary.
Thompson and Venables are now undergoing "rehabilitative therapy" in unnamed local authority secure units. While the legal arguments about the lengths of their sentences grind on towards the European Court of Human Rights, the boys will shortly turn 16 and transfer to juvenile units in YOIs. Everyone will know who they are. Will their reception and treatment bear any resemblance to Nicky's? At 21 they will be hard and cynical convicts-like me. Morrison still hopes for a happy ending: "It's inhuman not to forgive damaged children. You can't lock up for life those whose lives have barely begun."
As if
Blake Morrison
Granta 1998, ?7.99
