The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  ‘I’d prefer to keep him as far away as possible,’ I said. ‘But I’ve spoken to Vic and we’ve agreed he’ll relax things a bit.’

  ‘Really?’ Justin was surprised. ‘How did he persuade you?’

  ‘It was my idea. He was worried he wouldn’t ever see Lucas if he wasn’t allowed to bring Kieran with him.’

  ‘I think that’s a good move. Better they’re at his place than roaming the streets aimlessly, speaking in tongues. One of us needs to have a bit more…’ He paused, finding the word. ‘Access to what’s going on.’

  Well, our ‘access’ would increase soon enough. Towards the end of the summer term, Lucas was off school with a cold one Monday when Vic rang me at my desk at home. ‘Have you seen this email from the school?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘It’s from Friday, but I’ve been away and had my Out of Office on. You need to read it, El.’

  Checking, I found it in my junk folder, having come from an unrecognized address, FAST: Foxwell Academy Safeguarding Team. Safeguarding?

  Dear Mr Gordon and Mrs Saint,

  We are sorry to tell you that your son Lucas is suspended from school for one week…

  ‘What the fuck? I’ll phone you back.’ I disconnected Vic and hared upstairs, laptop in hand, to hammer on Lucas’s bedroom door. When he didn’t reply, I barged in and snapped on the light, ignoring both his protests and the appalling chaos within.

  I thrust the laptop in his face. ‘When were you going to mention this?’

  ‘What?’ He scanned the email through eyes glued half-shut, his already high colour deepening. His breath smelled foul.

  ‘Is this cold of yours even real? What’s going on?’

  He let the laptop drop onto the bed, muttering, ‘It was just some stupid photo.’

  ‘What stupid photo? You haven’t—’ My hand flew to my mouth. ‘Oh, God, you haven’t circulated a picture of Jade or one of the other girls? Something private?’

  ‘No, I fuckin’ haven’t,’ he said, indignantly.

  ‘Do not swear at me! What photo, Lucas?’

  He glanced away, grunting. ‘Law it, bruv.’

  Law it, bruv? I felt my own anger unleashing. ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you acting like this? It’s like you’ve been brainwashed!’

  ‘It’s like you’ve been brainwashed.’

  ‘I want your phone, now!’

  ‘Too late. School’s got it, innit.’

  ‘Get up,’ I ordered, tearing off his duvet. ‘We’re going into school to sort this out.’

  ‘You can. I’m not, no fuckin’ way.’

  The worst part was the scorn in that ‘you’, the loathing. It was Kieran’s scorn, Kieran’s loathing. By now volcanic with fury, I slammed his door, making the windows rattle, and went in search of my phone to get Vic back on the line.

  * * *

  Is there any gloomier procession than the one taken by parents – especially separated ones who have no other reason to come together – down a strip-lit school corridor to the door marked ‘Head’?

  Actually, there is, but we’ll come to that.

  I’d always liked Mr Avery. He had the buoyant energy of a young cabinet minister and was flexible in his dealings, pragmatic, a quality we hoped to appeal to now. As Vic and I settled in seats upholstered in the flecked grey-brown of quicksand, he got straight to the point.

  ‘Drugs were found in the sixth-form changing rooms and a routine phone check led us to Lucas.’

  He had confiscated Lucas’s phone and now showed us the photo of our son in what looked like a shower cubicle. Lucas had a spliff between his fingers, a great shit-eating grin across his face.

  ‘Couldn’t that have been taken in any public facility? A gym or somewhere?’ I said, knowing that without a link to school premises, the staff had no obligation to get involved.

  ‘It’s definitely the sixth-form boys’ changing room,’ Avery said. ‘Lucas has admitted as much, so I’ll spare you a site visit.’

  ‘Who took the picture?’ Vic asked. ‘You can see both his hands, so it can’t be a selfie. Moaning Myrtle, was it?’

  Avery chuckled, but I failed to crack a smile. ‘Do you really need to ask? It will have been Kieran. He’ll have put Lucas up to this.’

  Clearly disinclined to debate this, the head moved on. ‘Coming so soon after the unauthorized absences, we were concerned enough to decide on the suspension.’

  Not as concerned as they’d be if they knew what Lucas had been doing during that truancy. Thank God I’d sanctioned a cover-up or this would be his second school-related drugs offence this year and he’d be out on his ear.

  On the other hand, if I’d been honest with the school then, Lucas might have thought twice about pulling the stunt that had brought us here now. I was furious with myself, with him, with Kieran, who once again appeared to have ducked trouble.

  ‘Have you looked through all these photos?’ I asked Avery.

  ‘We have. But, as I say, we’re only interested in the ones taken on the Foxwell site.’

  ‘How did you get the kids to give up their phones?’

  ‘The threat of a call to the police did the trick.’ Seeing my expression, he hastened to reassure me that he had not involved them ‘on this occasion’. ‘Since we’re coming to the end of the school year, we thought the long holiday might be a good opportunity for Lucas to reflect on his time in the lower sixth. It’s worked well before,’ he added.

  He was softening the blow, suggesting this was unremarkable, fixable, but I wasn’t giving up on justice quite yet. ‘None of this would be happening if you hadn’t accepted Kieran Watts into the sixth form and made Lucas his buddy. We all know you choose the decent ones to buddy new kids – well, look how that worked out. Kieran’s behind all of this, we all know he’s brought drugs into the school, so why isn’t he being suspended? Better still, excluded.’

  ‘Ellen,’ Vic said in a low tone and he gestured that the head should disregard this demand. He was right, of course. On the current evidence, if anyone had brought drugs into the school, if anyone was at risk of being excluded, it was Lucas.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you what to do. But if your internal investigation begins and ends with Lucas, then we’d like it on record that we’re not satisfied with its rigour.’

  God, I know I sounded like some lunatic disciplinarian, but we had a right to hold the school at least partly accountable. They’d thrown Lucas to the lions and now they were turning their heads to avoid looking at the wounds.

  ‘Let’s regroup after the holiday, shall we?’ Avery handed me Lucas’s phone. It was decent of him not to insist on the gratitude we all knew he was owed.

  In the car, I thumbed through the rest of the photos. These days, there are passcodes and fingerprint recognition, not to mention the convenience of message apps with automatic deletion, but back then it was more basic and Lucas’s phone didn’t even require a code. The pictures were a record of his partying, basically. Some faces I recognized, others I didn’t. There were a few of Jade, smiling at the camera, private and adoring – those made me gulp a little.

  One image stood out: Lucas and a few other boys stared at the camera, blatantly stoned, while in the background Kieran was captured in profile, apparently mesmerized by something out of frame. There was a tension in his jaw, a tilt of his gaze, that made him look malevolent, scheming. Maybe even predatory.

  I considered sending the picture to my own number, evidence to consult should I ever feel my conviction weakening, but decided against it. If Lucas somehow discovered I’d done that, it would be hard to explain.

  It would look… well, not right.

  Chapter 9

  By now, Kieran had passed his driving test – I learned this from Vic, Lucas no longer daring to bring his name up in my presence. Anyway, the weekend after the suspension drama, I was driving Freya into Croydon when I saw Kieran at the wheel of Prisca’s Corsa two cars ahead.

  Without
thinking, I tailed him as he slipped through an amber light on London Road and into the entrance of a multi-storey car park I’d never used but knew for its reputation as somewhere kids hung out, smoking. An upgrade to the site’s CCTV was planned, I’d read, but for now security remained non-existent. What are you doing here? I thought. Meeting your connection to stock up on pills for your friends?

  The building was designed around a central spiral, cars directed one way up a narrow lane, with a central void just a few feet to their right beyond a curved wall. From the driver’s seat of an SUV like mine, the wall appeared treacherously low and I found it all too easy to picture myself yanking the steering wheel in a moment of madness and smashing through it. Hurtling, nose-down, into that yawning emptiness.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Freya said, voicing my own feelings as we followed the Corsa up level after level. ‘It’s making me dizzy.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, hoping she hadn’t noticed I was shaking.

  At the top, crawling past the empty bays that lined the outer wall, I chose a spot in the centre, while Kieran reversed with impressive skill into a tight corner space. He didn’t appear to have noticed me, but had his head down, I guessed to look at his phone.

  ‘That’s Kieran’s car!’ Freya exclaimed.

  ‘I know. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘You mean you were chasing him?’

  I flicked her a sideways glance and saw her shocked expression. ‘Not chasing. But I need to talk to him about something and there’s no time like the present.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just, like, phone him? This is weird, Mum.’

  I lost my patience. ‘Please stop questioning me, Freya. This is nothing to do with you.’ I released my belt and opened the door. ‘Stay here, I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘Mum, don’t!’

  I shut the door on her protests. Trying not to think of the sheer drop beyond the perimeter wall, the concrete posts that looked like they were about to crumble, I marched across the empty bays and rapped on the window of Kieran’s car. Brief surprise transformed into irritation and he shrugged at me – What? I gestured for him to roll the window down, which he did, sighing heavily.

  ‘I want a word with you,’ I said.

  He stared brazenly up at me with the same wrecked, bloodshot eyes as Lucas had. I’d never been this close to him before: his face was smeared with freckles and dotted with acne, his blonde eyebrows flecked with red. ‘What ’bout?’

  ‘Supplying drugs. Lucas was suspended from school because of you.’

  ‘For bunnin’ a zoot, yeah.’ He snorted. ‘Respect.’

  ‘No, not respect. Why are you laughing?’ I wanted to reach into the car and slap him. ‘This is serious, Kieran, he has university applications to think about next term!’

  This earned only a smirk. He raised his near elbow and began plucking at his hair, his gaze drifting beyond me.

  Wound-up practically to the point of pirouetting, I lost my temper. ‘Just because you don’t have anyone who cares about you, it doesn’t mean Lucas doesn’t. We care about him very much and we won’t allow you to ruin his future!’

  I was breathing hard. The most unnerving thing was how unaffected he appeared to be by the cruel thing I’d said. His expression was quite empty, his eyes unseeing. ‘At least have the decency to answer me,’ I said.

  He eased his chin forward in a weirdly reptilian movement and returned his focus to me. ‘You are cray cray, woman. Surprised you even up so high, real shit.’

  ‘What? Speak English, please.’

  He gestured towards the wall behind me. ‘There’s a hundred-foot drop just there, you know that? Fucking scary. I’ve seen kids walking on the edge like it’s a beam. Lucas, maybe, I don’t remember.’

  As I gasped in horror, I could tell he was pleased with the effect his words – in grammatically perfect English – had. How on earth did he know about my phobia? The niche frailties of friends’ parents were hardly everyday subject matter among teens. Then again, if you hated that parent, you might catch a passing reference and squirrel it away for future ammunition.

  ‘No one’s gonna survive that,’ he went on. ‘They’d go splat like a tomato. Why don’t you go and take a look? Go on, lean right over, you know you’re dying to.’

  I took a step back, feeling a tremble seize my body. ‘Just leave Lucas alone. Please.’

  But my desperation only confirmed Kieran’s power grab and I knew in my gut that approaching him had been a terrible mistake. Turning from me, he tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, started the engine and pulled forward. I watched as he re-parked in a spot near the doors to the stairs and then picked up his phone once more. Face burning, I scurried back to the Jeep.

  Freya’s window was open and she had obviously heard my part of the exchange. ‘Mum, that was so horrible, saying no one cares about him!’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ I told her, buckling my seatbelt. But, seeing her face so stern with disapproval, I couldn’t resist the urgent need to justify myself. ‘Did you hear what he said to me?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘He practically said I should throw myself over the wall! Do you know what incitement is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s when you encourage someone to do something they wouldn’t have done on their own. If you incite someone to commit a crime, that’s a crime as well.’ I started the car, released the handbrake. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s get out of here.’

  The route back to ground level did not involve the spiral, mercifully. I fed my unused ticket into the machine and sped through the barriers with nothing owed.

  Nothing gained, either.

  * * *

  It was telling, I suppose, that the only person I reported the episode to was Vic. I recounted it on the phone with a flush of the same heat I’d felt at the time, not sure if the emotion choking my voice was shame or pride.

  ‘Freya thinks I’m a bully.’

  ‘You’re not a bully,’ Vic said. ‘You’re just concerned. You want to protect Lucas from danger and that’s totally natural. I feel the same.’

  ‘I just hope I haven’t made things worse.’

  He sighed in sympathy. ‘Someone had to warn Kieran off.’

  ‘That’s the problem, I don’t think he was warned. Maybe we should ring the police?’ I suggested. ‘Tip them off about his dealing?’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ he agreed.

  ‘Except that might lead back to Lucas…’

  ‘Plus, we could be accused of slander,’ Vic said.

  He had a point. Grumbling between ourselves was one thing, but maligning Kieran publicly might rank as more antisocial than any of his own antics.

  Freya, meanwhile, must have said something to her father because the next time we were out on our own, Justin brought the incident up. This was – is – one of the admirable things about him, he knows how to bide his time. He’s never jerked a knee in his life.

  ‘I hear you had some sort of run-in with Kieran.’

  I dipped my head. ‘I’m sorry Freya had to witness it.’

  He eyed me with commiseration, but I wasn’t insensitive to the undercurrent. When it came to Freya, he was a shade less tolerant of my spontaneities. ‘I don’t think I realized just how bad it was, this personality clash of yours.’

  ‘It’s not a personality clash, Justin, he’s evil.’

  ‘Evil?’ He was taken aback. ‘Come on. You must hear how that sounds.’

  ‘Yes, and I know it’s hard to accept such a thing exists and I don’t expect you to agree, but that’s what I believe. And all I’m doing is trying to defend our family against it.’

  Bless him for leaning in when he could have recoiled. ‘Explain why you think he’s evil, besides the possible drugs connection.’

  I answered him as honestly as I could. ‘He doesn’t want other people to do what’s best for them or have the good things they deserve. He wants to drag them down to his level. He’s t
he opposite of the wind beneath your sails, he’s sucking the sails back. He’s trying to get you to capsize.’

  ‘By “you”, you mean Lucas.’

  ‘Yes. And others as well, I would imagine. Jade, for one. They’re all in thrall to him.’

  One of the side effects of banning the cult leader from Tanglewood Road was his disciples stayed away too – and, according to Vic, now reopened for business, Jade was as much of an adherent as Lucas. ‘Kieran makes them laugh,’ he’d said recently, in one of those devastatingly simple insights you simply cannot dispute.

  ‘That isn’t their perception, though?’ Justin said.

  ‘Of course it’s not. All kids love a hedonist.’

  ‘He’s had a tough childhood, don’t forget. He’s probably witnessed things we can’t imagine. Shouldn’t we cut him a bit of slack?’

  ‘Not if it gives him a free pass to screw with whoever he likes. This is part of the problem, Jus, he knows the school doesn’t dare punish him, he knows the parents don’t feel they can criticize him. They’re all too scared of looking like heartless rabid right-wingers. Well, I’m not – and nor is Vic.’

  There was a flicker of irritation in Justin’s gaze. ‘You really think Kieran wouldn’t swap his free pass – if that’s really what it is, which I personally doubt – for the kind of life Lucas has had? Come on, you’re usually so kind, El.’

  ‘It’s not my character that’s in question here!’ Did I really need to convince my own husband of my decency? Plainly, I did. Kieran had distorted me and I hated him for that almost as much as I hated him for leading Lucas astray. ‘What is it going to take for you to start believing me? When something really bad happens, will you believe me then?’

  ‘It’s not about belief, it’s about interpretation,’ Justin argued. ‘And I’m obviously interpreting events slightly differently from you and Vic.’

  ‘Let’s forget it,’ I told him, not unpleasantly. I wasn’t naïve. I had no doubt that if his and Vic’s paternal statuses had been reversed, he would be the one backing me and Vic the one questioning. They had different degrees of exposure to my complaints and different roles in Lucas’s upbringing. But neither of them had seen the look of malice in Kieran’s eyes when he’d talked of that hundred-foot drop. Only I’d seen that.