A Fox's Tale - Chapter One

CHAPTER I

Shoplifter


CRIMES: 03/10/1987
THEFT
THEFT

John was a good wee thief, a precocious child.

By the age of fourteen, he’d been stealing for years.  He started out by wandering into shops and filling his schoolbag with sweets and chocolate.  He found shoplifting more than just easy; it was an absolute gift.  It also made him friends, who knew what his craic was.  John would steal to order and then sell the goods on the cheap.  The boy pilfered anything he could stuff into a pocket or bag.
John used his head.  With no Fagin to teach him the tricks of the trade, he had to learn through experience.  Often, the boy worked alone.  At other times, friends would accompany him, but he always did the stealing.  He was clever and soon became cunning.

John taught himself how to:
Use his body to obscure what his hands were doing from people and security cameras.
Act naturally to avoid attracting attention.
Recognise store-detectives, who were usually women. 
         Perform sleight-of-hand and diversionary tactics.  Draw attention to the left hand so that the right could act unnoticed.  Feign a fit of coughing, while simultaneously slipping things into a bag. 
         Make the most of secondary objects.  It was easier for him to lift things from an unattended shopping trolley than to approach the closely monitored shelves.  Standing displays provided cover.
         Be patient and walk away empty-handed if necessary.
         Trust his instincts, the subliminal anomalies that registered in the unconscious when he wasn’t paying attention, and then follow them.
         Leave the premises with his stolen merchandise, without acting nervously and drawing suspicion upon himself.
         Steal and, vitally, get away with it.

Considering that, from the age of eleven, he had been shoplifting at least twice a week, John was rarely caught.
The first instance occurred in Crazy Prices supermarket, Carrickfergus.  The boy was twelve; his schoolbag, filled with chocolate bars.  He was apprehended by the store manager on his way out through the doors and led to an upstairs office.  The RUC were summoned.  One of the uniformed Peelers was a woman.  Noticing a bruise on John’s cheekbone, she asked how it had happened.  He revealed that his stepfather, Richard Watters, had punched him in the face.  John was taken home to Knockleigh Walk, Greenisland in a police car.  Both his parents were out at work.  His stepfather was a foreman at the Courthauld’s nylon factory on the outskirts of Carrick, and his mother, Carol, worked as a childminder in Glengormley.
The Peelers returned that evening.  John, and his brother, Daryl, were in bed.  They heard the policewoman shouting at Richard.  She accused him of hitting his stepson.  Mr Watters denied the allegation, and claimed the boy was lying.  Although she knew the truth, John’s mother corroborated her husband’s false testimony.
After the Peelers left, Richard hurtled upstairs and dragged his stepson out of bed.  He punched and kicked at the twelve-year-old boy until he made the wee bastard cry.  Richard Watters always became faint at the sight of blood, so he rarely struck Carol, John, or Daryl in their faces.  After the beating, the thief couldn’t go outdoors, to school or play, for a week.
When Richard had finished and left the house for the working-men’s club, the boy’s mother made John watch as she burned his treasured collection of Fighting Fantasy game books, one after the other, in the fire.  The boy felt angry and frustrated and impotent.  He could do nothing to stop her.  From the expression on Carol’s thin face, made vulpine by the flames’ reflected glow, he knew that she was enjoying herself.  Her eyes were shining.  John had loathed his stepfather forever, but that was when he first began to hate his mother as well.  She’d deliberately destroyed the one place where he could hide away from the world; and burned up a slice of the boy’s soul in the process.

When John was thirteen, the family moved to a house on the Beersbridge Road, East Belfast.  The house had three storeys, including the ground floor.  The attic had been converted into two bedrooms, and John’s was the largest.  His parents slept on the first floor, Daryl’s room was beside theirs.
 
Three months after the move to Belfast, he was caught stealing action-figures from Dunnes Stores in Connswater Shopping Centre.  The toys were a birthday present for his wee brother, Daryl.  The manager sequestered John in a windowless office, and threatened to summon the Peelers.  The boy snivelled a bit until the man relented and sent him home with a warning that he would be phoning Mr and Mrs Watters.  John absconded for a few days, but the manager never told his parents about the incident.  The thief got a beating anyway, for running away. 

The third instance occurred a couple of months later.  John was apprehended in Stewart’s supermarket, again in Connswater, while shopping with the family.  A store-detective spotted him slipping chocolate bars into his coat pocket.  The boy was stopped and searched as they left the checkout.  His parents were mortified, because people were looking.  John endured another gamut of recriminations, but the Peelers weren’t involved and he wasn’t arrested.  When the Watters’ got home, Richard threw his stepson down a flight of stairs, breaking the boy’s nose.  John wasn’t taken to hospital, and was grounded until he no longer resembled a raccoon.

The fourth instance occurred not long after that.  John was seized by two men after pinching hundreds of lead figurines from Leisureworld.  The miniatures were used in his favourite game, Dungeons and Dragons.  Leisureworld was a departmental toy and sports store in Belfast city centre, where John did much of his shoplifting.  Although he was marched across the road to Queen Street RUC station, no criminal charges were pressed.  The Peelers contented themselves with taking him home.  Mr and Mrs Watters were both at work, but the Peelers returned that evening, instigating another flailing assault by his stepfather, as soon as the uniformed officers had left the house.  By this stage, the boy had learned to cover up and roll with the punches. 

On Saturday, October 3rd 1987, barely a month after his fourteenth birthday, the shoplifter jogged into the city centre to meet two friends.
Both Hanny and Smitty were a year older than John was, but they were all fourth-formers at Grosvenor High School.  Having skipped a year at Primary School, John passed his 11-plus exam early, at the age of ten.
Throughout his schooldays, John was always younger than his classmates were.  He was a small skinny speccy ginger freckled boy, and an outsider who’d only moved to Belfast from Greenisland in January 1987, when he was thirteen.  He was bullied.  John existed in a state of perpetual trepidation, caught between the devil of a stepfather at home, and the deep blue sea of pupils at school who made his life a misery with taunts and blows. 
John fought back, but was usually outnumbered.  After a while, he negotiated.  He would steal for his tormenters, if they agreed to leave him alone.  The system worked like a charm, with his foes eventually becoming friends.  His status changed accordingly, from the outsider to an associate of the bad lads whom all the girls fancied and the boys either emulated or feared.
Though still a geek, he began to get a reputation for being crazy, too.

His friends were waiting outside the grounds of the City Hall.  John panted out an apology for being late; explaining that he’d missed the bus.  In truth, he’d found himself unable to afford the meagre fare.  Hanny and Smitty made noncommittal noises.  They were eager to be getting on with the business they had planned.
Shoplifting.

The thief pulled a folded-up Eason bag from his coat pocket and shook it open.  There was a paperback inside, heavy enough to lend the bag weight, but leaving plenty of room for other items.
         ‘What’s the book?’  Hanny asked.
         ‘Stephen King.’
         ‘Yeah?  What one?’
         ‘Different Seasons.  Have you seen Stand by Me?’
         ‘Yeah, it’s a good film.  Kiefer Sutherland’s in it?’
         ‘Yeah, he’s the bully, Ace Merrill.’
         The reference wasn’t a consciously sarcastic one.  The boy was too young to draw analytical analogies between the fictional narrative and his own subjective reality.

As they crossed over to Donegal Square and mingled with the teeming shoppers there, John’s companions listed the specific items they wanted and he suggested the best places to steal them. 
From experience, he knew which shops had high levels of security in place and which had none.  Many lacked CCTV cameras and security guards; only a very few employed tagging devices. 
Their tactics were simple.  Since John’s friends were much taller than he was, they would flank him on either side, shielding the boy from the scrutiny of store-detectives and staff, while he got on with the stealing.
The first target was Economy One, a discount store on Royal Avenue.  Hanny wanted a tub of gel for his spiky hairstyle.  John was shrewd enough to recognise that as an intrinsic part of the game being played.  Once they went into a place, the shopping list would grow as other desirable items were spotted.
He’d chosen Economy One because the business was busy, there were no guards, and only one camera.  Having been there many times with his mother, John was familiar with the layout of the interior.  He’d never noticed any store-detectives and had identified blind spots where customers couldn’t be seen by the staff at the tills.
         John was starting with somewhere easy.

Arriving at the shop, Hanny pushed open the door and the lads filed inside.
The hair care products accompanied other toiletries on a rack of shelves in the middle of the shop.  John’s heart was pounding and his palms were sweating, yet he remained calm.
         ‘That one, there,’ said Hanny, on John’s right.
         ‘Get me one, as well,’ said Smitty, on his left.
The thief lifted the tub of gel, released his grip on one of the handles of the carrier bag, so that it lay open, and then he dropped the item in.  The second container followed, a heartbeat later.
         ‘Get me one of those combs, as well,’ Smitty instructed.
         He passed it over; it went into the bag.
         ‘Anything else?’  the shoplifter asked.
         ‘Come on, and we’ll have a wee duke about,’ Hanny said.
         Shelves stacked with periodicals lay at the end of the row, their garish covers facing outwards.  As one, the lads’ necks craned upwards to check out the pornographic magazines displayed on the top shelf.  Penthouse.  Mayfair.  Parade.  Fiesta.  Escort.  Razzle.
         ‘Here, Playboy’s got your woman, Madonna, in it,’ Hanny remarked.
John’s good friend, Glen Robertson, a mad Madonna fan, had mentioned that detail to him, but he only remembered it now, as he ogled the singer posing on the cover of the magazine.
         ‘Can you get some of those?’  Smitty asked.
         ‘There’s a camera watching, down at the tills.’
         They glanced over to confirm what John said.
         ‘Can you not do it, then?’  Smitty sounded disappointed.
         ‘All right, then, cover me.’
They walked over.  Hanny reached up and passed the boy down a copy of Playboy; Smitty chose Fiesta.  John took the magazines, holding them at his side, in the same hand as the bag.  He then turned and walked towards the rear of the shop, with his friends in tow.  Without moving his head, the thief darted his eyes about, to ascertain that there was no one watching what he was doing.  The shoplifter bent the magazines and jammed them into his bag.  That was risky.  He decided it was time to go.  Leading the way down an aisle, he turned towards the entrance, walking quickly.  As the lads passed the tills, John glanced over his shoulder to ensure that there was no one following and caught Hanny’s eye.
         ‘Come on, this place is shite, we’ll try Boots,’ John announced, loudly.
         Hanny just stared straight ahead with a stony expression on his face.  Then, they were outside.  The crucial moment. 
John knew if a hand was about to land on his shoulder that would be when it would happen.  Legally, store-detectives and security personnel could follow anyone at will, but they weren’t allowed to apprehend a shoplifter until the thief vacated the premises.  He tensed his muscles in expectation, getting ready to run.  It was an unnecessary precaution.
They got away with it.
All three lads wanted to peruse the porno mags, but they decided to wait until after they’d left the city centre.

‘I need some blank tapes,’ Hanny remarked.
The trio were walking back along Donegal Place towards the City Hall.  They stopped outside Golden Discs, a music shop.
         ‘This place is pretty tight.  I’ve never lifted anything out of here before,’ John hedged.
         ‘Come on to fuck, we’ll just go in and lift them, and then we can go and get our bus,’ Hanny coaxed.
John realised that his friend was hearing the seductive siren song of the magazines, and could empathise with his sense of urgency.
         ‘All right, but that’s all; just tapes,’ the shoplifter insisted.
         Hanny grinned in response.

As soon as the lads walked inside, John’s instincts started to screech.  Everything felt all wrong.  The place was too crowded cramped and intimate.  There were no blind spots; nowhere that he could hide what he was doing.  The thief counted a couple of CCTV cameras.  Worst of all, the rack of blank cassettes stood beside the tills. 
         They walked over.  John gnawed at a fingernail and pretended to be searching for a 90-minute tape.
         ‘This is no good,’ he muttered, sotto voce.
         ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re all right, there’s nobody looking, just lift them and come on,’ Hanny urged.
         The shoplifter’s hand snaked out.  The bag crackled when the pack of TDKs landed inside.  Despite the music pounding out of speakers all around the shop that rustle sounded loud to him.
         They walked out and then someone grabbed John.  He was caught by the balls.
         Snared, gripped, scooped, nabbed, pinched, lifted, nicked.
         The hand grasping his arm swung him around to face a balding heavyset man who glared at the thief, his florid face flushed red with rage.  John thought he was going to swing and tensed for the blow.
         ‘You stole my tapes!’  the man shouted, pointing at the bag. 
To the shoplifter’s surprise, his companions hadn’t fled.
         ‘Here, what are you doing?’  Hanny snapped.
         ‘What’s going on?’  Smitty’s tone was more conciliatory.
         ‘He stole my tapes,’ the red man prodded John in the chest.
         His mother, when she poked, poked harder.
The little drama was attracting some attention, though none of the shoppers stopped to intervene. 
         ‘He’s my mate, let him go,’ Hanny demanded.
         ‘Sarah, phone the police,’ the florid man called over his shoulder.
In the shop, a pale thin worn woman lifted the receiver and began to dial.  John felt numb and disconnected from what was going on around him.  Floaty.
         ‘The police are coming,’ his captor proclaimed.
         It never crossed the thief’s mind to pass the bag to one of his mates, who could have run with it, thereby removing the incriminating evidence from the scene of his crime.  Only two thoughts dominated John’s thinking.
         Caught.
         Peelers.
         A third mantra joined them.
         Shit.
Caught.  Peelers.  Shit.  Caught.  Peelers.  Shit.  Caught.  Peelers.  Shit. 
Like pop lyrics, the words kept running through his head.
         The verbal argument between the man and John’s friends continued, but no blows were exchanged.  The shoplifter just kept his mouth shut.

Before long, a meat wagon pulled up on the other side of the street.  It was a grim vehicle, more tank than car, a grey armour-plated Range Rover.  Uniformed flak-jacketed Peelers clambered out.  John counted four.  People were stopping to look now.  Two of the Peelers approached.  The first one was younger and taller than his companion, and he bore a revolver in a holster at his left hip.  The butt of the firearm was attached to his belt by a spirally stretch of cord.  The other Peeler had grey hair, sported a moustache and carried a sub-machine gun.  Black and ugly, the weapon reminded John of the sten-guns he’d seen in old war movies.  It had a perforated barrel, a hollow triangular stock and the magazine protruded from the side.
         ‘He stole my tapes,’ the finger of accusation pointed directly at the thief.
         The young cop towered over him.
         ‘Open the bag,’ he commanded.
         Having been raised to respect conservative, Protestant values throughout his childhood, John knew that he was supposed to obey authority figures without demur.  At fourteen years of age, however, he was beginning to question the validity of that authority and its demands; actively resisting social conditioning and indoctrination.  Nevertheless, the juvenile bowed his head before all the eyes and opened the bag to the Peeler, silently confessing his guilt.
         ‘There’s my tapes!’  the man crowed.

The young Peeler took the bag from John.  He was brusquely led back into the shop and then up a dim claustrophobic staircase.  The big Peelers grunted and cursed in that narrow space.  It led to a short hallway outside a cramped office.  The shopkeeper and the younger Peeler went into the room, leaving the door ajar behind them. 
Standing in the corridor with the older cop, John could hear what was being said.  The owner of Golden Discs was adamant; he wanted to press charges and have the thief prosecuted in court.  To the boy’s amazement, the young Peeler was trying to dissuade the man from taking that course of action.  He called the shoplifter into the room to stand before the proprietor, who was sitting behind a desk. 
Familiar with the protocol from the times he’d been summoned to the principal’s office at school, John stood up straight with hands clasped behind his back, fixing his gaze upon a crack on the wall above the shopkeeper’s balding head.
         ‘What age are you, son?’  the young Peeler asked.
         ‘Fourteen,’ John muttered.
         ‘See, he’s only a stupid wee lad,’ he turned back to the boy.  ‘You won’t do this again, now, will you?’
         ‘No, no way,’ the thief was emphatic.  ‘I’m really sorry about all this.’
Sorry about being caught.  And ashamed.  And scared.
         ‘No, these wee bastards have me robbed blind,’ the man complained.
         ‘Have you ever stolen out of this place before?’  the Peeler asked.
         ‘No.’
He’d shoplifted from plenty of other places, but never Golden Discs.
Technically, John reckoned, he was telling the truth.
         ‘Aye, but, sure, if he gets let off now, he’ll only do it again,’ came the inevitable rhetoric.

John was arrested, taken out of the shop - where his friends still waited with glum expressions on their faces - and led to the rear of the meat wagon. 
He got in and sat on one of the wooden benches that ran along either side.  The last Peeler aboard, the young one who’d championed his cause in the shop, pulled the steel door closed and sat down facing him.  The whole vehicle rattled as its heavy engine rumbled over. 
It was murkily intimate in the back of the meat wagon.  Surrounded by huge intimidating Peelers, John felt frightened.  There was a pungent manly smell of sweat oil metal leather.  The lad’s heart thumped loud in his chest, for he expected to be set upon by the black-garbed RUC men at any moment.  Moving forward with a lurch, the jeep drove away from the scene of his crime.

In Golden Discs, having been asked about the porno mags and other items in the bag, John revealed where he’d stolen them.  The occupants were jostled around as the vehicle lumbered along the road, until it came to a stop outside Economy One. 
Two of the Peelers got out and went into the shop, leaving the back door open behind them, letting in precious fresh air.  The thief considered making a run for it, but knew he’d be caught.  One of the Peelers took the copy of Playboy out of the bag and opened the glossy pages.  He made a show of admiring the contents. 
         ‘Here, John, see the next time you’re caught shoplifting?’
         The boy looked at him.
         ‘Try to get us some more of these,’ he brandished the pornographic magazine in his big hand.
         His colleagues laughed.  They all ogled the pictures of Madonna.  The other magazine was also fished out, keeping them occupied. 
Sitting alone in the corner with only his thoughts for company, the shoplifter was ignored.  He still felt that woozy post-dental sensation that he recognised as denial.  John couldn’t stop himself from wishing he was dreaming, but knew his predicament was all too real.

Having verified that Economy One did indeed stock pornography, the pair of Peelers returned and then the meat wagon went to Musgrave Street RUC station. 
Once there, John learned that he was to be interviewed in relation to the offences he’d just committed.  As a juvenile - under the age of seventeen - an adult had to be present during his questioning.  Dreading involving his parents, John tried to waive his legal rights, claiming he was willing to be grilled on his own. 
The Peelers, however, were obliged to follow procedures, which eliminated that option.  By law, the young thief must be accompanied by an adult, or any statement he made would be inadmissible as evidence before a court.  John reluctantly divulged his telephone number, which a balding Peeler rang, rousing his stepfather from sleep.  Richard was working nights as a guard for Acme Security.
         Rather than being locked in a cell, the shoplifter was left on a bench in the waiting area of the General Enquiries Office.  RUC-men and women bustled about behind a Perspex-screened counter.  People came in and out.  Most made complaints about things they’d lost; or had stolen from them. 
The boy waited.

After a while, his stepfather, Richard Watters, arrived.  He was furious, becoming nastier and nastier the longer he spent in the RUC station.  He was righteously outraged about his stepson having been caught stealing, yet he’d been physically abusing the boy for as long as John could remember.  Richard had also started to assault him, sexually, not long after the family made the move to Belfast, in January 1987, when John was thirteen.
The first incident that John could remember occurred one Saturday morning.  Richard came upstairs to his bedroom and woke the boy.  Richard told his stepson to get up, that he was being lazy, lying in bed.  John instantly obeyed his master’s voice, reaching for the clothes he’d taken off and draped over a chair the night before.  Richard told John he was being dirty, that he should come over to the wardrobe, where his stepfather stood, and get clean clothing.  Richard watched as his stepson walked across and opened the wardrobe door.  All the boy had on was a pair of briefs.  Richard crept up behind John, grabbed his groin with his hand, and then pressed himself against the boy.  John could feel Richard’s erect penis moving against his buttocks.  The man roughly rubbed his stubbly cheek against the boy’s smooth one.  Richard stank of stale sweat; John almost gagged on the sharp meaty urgent reek.
         At thirteen, John was, apart from wanking, sexually unexperienced.  Not inexperienced: having little previous practice, but unexperienced: absolutely without any personal frame of reference whatsoever.  Innocent.  The boy knew, though, that what Richard was doing was deeply wrong.  Revulsion froze him.
         ‘You like that, don’t you, you fruity wee queer?’  Richard growled in his stepson’s ear, his breath panting hot on John’s neck.
To the boy’s misery and shame, as Richard’s fingers groped and squeezed, he could feel his penis beginning to swell.  Grabbing a shirt from its hanger, John pulled away, yanking the garment on, his head bowed in guilty mortification, frightened of meeting his stepfather’s glittering eyes. 
Richard slunk away.

Something occurred to the boy.  That was why his stepfather was so wrathfully uncomfortable about being in an RUC station.

Two detectives appeared and led the pair through a door into a long passage with magnolia walls and many doors.  They took the lift up to an open-plan office on the third floor, where the RUC-men seated themselves on one side of a desk, while Richard and John sat facing them.  The older of the interrogators asked questions; his colleague transcribed what was said.
When the boy mentioned the theft of the pornographic magazines, Richard punched him on the shoulder, deadening his arm. 
The two Peelers chastised Mr Watters for that, warning John’s stepfather that he would be arrested if he repeated the action.  Richard scowled and spent the remainder of the interview slumped in a surly sulk, muttering to himself.  The boy felt a tingling surge of elation at the prospect of the brute being punished for hurting him, as John believed he deserved to be.  He hoped his stepfather would strike him again, thus giving the Peelers the excuse they needed to carry out their threat.  The sneaky cowardly bastard was too shrewd to fall into their trap, though.
         
When the questions and note taking were finally at an end, man and boy were released.  As soon as they’d walked out of sight of Musgrave Street, Richard started to punch and kick at his stepson.
The boy ran on ahead of him.























CONVICTIONS:

Belfast Juvenile Court                    23/05/1988

THEFT
03/10/1987 to
Conditional Discharge 2 Years

THEFT
03/10/1987 to
Conditional Discharge 2 Years                                                              end of court

Although he could never recall the actual court hearing, that day, Monday, May 23rd, 1988, was imprinted upon John’s memory for two reasons.

He first met his solicitor, Kevin Lagan, LL.B. 

His mother was determined to have him legally adopted by his stepfather.

Since the age of ten, John had known he was the bastard result of the brief love affair Carol engaged in when she was seventeen, though he’d never met his biological father.  Just the ogre his mother married when he was an infant.  The boy knew why Richard hated him with such malicious passion.  The last thing John wanted was to become his stepfather’s legitimate property. 
His mother, encouraged by the advice of various social workers, had told him she hoped he would then do as he was told.  The boy knew there was no way he was going to do some of the things Richard wanted him to, regardless of any legal adoption.  The hidden causes of his instability remained a painful guarded secret.  John was sure that no one would have believed him, had he blurted why he didn’t want Richard to become his father.  He pretended to be pleased about what was planned.
         
The legal process involved amendments to the boy’s birth certificate.  After the court hearing, the four Watters’ - Richard, Carol, John and Daryl - went to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages office.  The building was situated on Chichester Street, right around the corner from the Juvenile Court.
         Just outside the doors, they encountered Mr. Lagan, the solicitor who’d represented the young shoplifter in court earlier that morning.  The thief’s mother told him about what was happening.  The last two names on her John’s birth certificate, Thomas and Browning, (Carol’s maiden name), were about to be changed to Richard and Watters, after his stepfather; the name her John had been known by all his life.
As he was having his surname changed, the boy could add another forename, of his own choosing.  That incentive was devised to make him feel more enthusiastic about, and involved in, the process.  John had taken his new name from his favourite novel, John Tolkien’s, The Lord of the Rings.
         ‘Really?’  Kevin Lagan LL.B. was amused.  ‘Which one…Aragorn?’
         ‘Eorl,’ the boy replied.
         The character was an obscure one; Kevin looked puzzled.
         ‘He’s an ancestor of Theoden, the King of Rohan,’ the lad clarified.
         Kevin nodded sagely. 
At fourteen, John had already read the fantasy trilogy several times, and knew the story of Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring inside out.  Added to that, there was a boy in his class at Grosvenor High called Erl, and the young lad liked the sound of that. 
Also, having flicked through Humphries’ biography of Tolkien and gleaned certain facts at the age of eleven, John knew the scholar and author had died on the very day he was born.  September 2nd 1973.
Two months premature, weighing in at less than three-and-a-half pounds, John’s mother had told him that he spent his first couple of months fighting for life in an incubator at Belfast Royal Victoria Hospital. 
In his imagination, John fancied himself as Tolkien’s incarnation. 
He’d been writing poetry and prose for a number of years.  While attending Carrickfergus Grammar, prior to his family’s moving to Belfast, one of his rhymes had been published in the school’s annual magazine, The Carriculum. 
At school, he’d also won a short story competition, the prize being the opportunity to meet the children’s author, Jan Leeming, when she’d visited the town’s public library.  Unfortunately, a few days before the event took place, an older pupil had tripped John while he was running.  The boy had sprained his ankle badly and was unable to attend the event. 

Kevin accompanied the family into the Registry Office, where it transpired that Richard had forgotten to bring any documentary identification.  He hadn’t a single piece of paper with his name on it.  The name-changing couldn’t go ahead.  After that, the subject of adoption was never mentioned again.  John remained as he’d always been.  A fatherless bastard.

For the two charges of theft, cassettes from Golden Discs, magazines and other items from Economy One, the boy had been sentenced to a conditional discharge.  It was intended as a cautionary deterrent.  If John managed to stay out of trouble until May 23rd, 1990, the court wouldn’t impose any further punishment.
He almost made it.