Anyhow, I’ll cut to the chase. Kieran, who was taking just two subjects, finished his last exam before Lucas and against strenuous advice Lucas broke out from jail to celebrate with him – even though he had a maths paper the following afternoon.
‘You need to be in bed and asleep by midnight,’ I yelled after him on the doorstep, attracting a startled look from the neighbour across the road. By then, every interaction seemed to reflect badly on me, not him. Not Kieran.
Lucas came back far later than that, of course. I heard him bumping up the stairs and into the bathroom, laughing to himself. He was safe, I told myself, and so long as he was reasonably prepared, he could sleep late and still perform well in his exam.
In the morning, Justin and Freya already out the door, I gave him an hour’s grace before going up. ‘Lucas? Time to think about getting up!’
There was no reply, so I nudged open the door and went in. The room was dark and stiflingly hot, so I drew back the curtains and opened the window. Lucas was immovable under his duvet, his face covered, and I shook his shoulder gently. There was no response. A blade of terror passed through me. Was he breathing? I shook him again and at last he groaned, as if from deep underground, and I felt his breath soft on my arm.
‘Lucas? Wake up. Open your eyes.’
He moaned again, his lids twitched, and finally he managed to wake. As I helped him sit up against the pillows and reminded him how to put a glass of water to his lips, it was obvious this was different from a standard hangover. I had to discover what he’d taken.
‘If you don’t tell me, we need to get you to A&E.’
This drew a grunted protest – even with the water, he seemed not to be able to use his throat properly – and after several attempts to repeat himself, I caught the letters ‘MD’.
MDMA. Ecstasy in old money. I’d read a horrifying number of news articles about teenagers with bright futures overdosing on the drug.
Lucas slumped to the side, gently knocking his head against the wall, eyes closed. ‘Need to sleep,’ he pleaded, and began burrowing back into the bedding.
‘No, Lucas, you need to stay awake. You’ve got an exam this afternoon!’
I fetched him a Coke, hoping the sugar and caffeine would have an effect, which they did – a little. Though crusty-eyed and dry-lipped, he had colour in his cheeks and was sitting up in bed and breathing normally. It was by now eleven o’clock; the exam was at one. Satisfied he was in no real medical danger, I phoned the school and registered him sick. This was accepted without question, but we would need a doctor’s note if he was to be eligible for the alternative exam date at the end of June.
By the time I’d dragged him to the doctor’s, he was back to his customary self – uncommunicative by choice, not necessity – and in the car on the way home I let rip. ‘Are you completely insane? Doing drugs the night before an A-level exam! Why would you put your whole future at risk for a night out you could have had twenty-four hours later? Do you not realize they might not allow you the alternative date and neither of your unis will take you without three subjects? One night out and you might have to repeat everything!’
‘I know,’ he said, weakly, turning his face from me. In the glass, his reflection was of a young child, with a defeated, unclaimed quality to him, and I found myself thinking of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.
At the next set of red lights, I caught sight of my own face in the rear-view, eyes sunken, cheeks flushed, mouth a red-rimmed black hole. I looked like a banshee.
‘No need to ask who supplied the pills,’ I said, bitterly.
* * *
Believe me, there’s nothing you could suggest that I didn’t consider over the next short, fraught period. The crisis I’d been fearing for almost two years had hit at exactly the wrong moment. Whether or not maths could be saved, there were also two further papers in biology.
Justin and Vic both read Lucas the riot act – or their versions thereof – and I even reached out to Prisca, who of course insisted Kieran was a normal teen who had approached his own exams with diligence and responsibility (what planet was she on?).
‘Now wait a minute, Ellen,’ she said, when I raised the matter of Kieran dealing drugs. ‘You need to be very careful about making allegations like that.’
‘Why can no one see what’s going on?’ I snapped, which only strengthened her case, not mine. I felt like getting on the phone to the social services to complain, but I knew it would only make things worse, create a new reason for Lucas to hate me, the oppressor, and love Kieran, the oppressed.
My mother and several friends suggested involving the school counsellor, but it seemed to me it wasn’t therapy Lucas needed so much as a proper old-fashioned sense of perspective. His newly acquired taste for a short-term high had blinded him to the concept of a long-term future. ‘Could Danny have a go?’ I asked Vic. ‘Give him a final pep talk, maybe a few stories about the mistakes he made at this age? That might scare him.’
Danny was Vic’s older cousin, a de facto brother and one of the reasons we’d landed in Sydenham after university: he’d lived there for years and still did. Though now making a good go of a painting and decorating business, he’d been in trouble with the police during a misspent youth and often voiced his regrets at having underperformed at school and missed out on college. No matter that he was still sometimes seen in South London pubs with an edgier crowd.
Vic obliged and the two of them arrived to take Lucas out for a stroll around the park. While we waited for Lucas to come downstairs, I chatted with them in the kitchen.
‘Thanks for doing this,’ I said to Danny, keeping my voice low.
‘No problem. I’m sure you’ve got nothing to worry about.’
Unsure whether to interpret this as a platitude or a comment on my tendency to catastrophize, I just smiled. He and Vic, the sons of brothers, looked nothing alike – Danny was stocky and almost bald – but their humour was the same, the cadences of their accents. When Lucas was young, I’d identified him as a bit of an undesirable influence, luring Vic out to the pub, reminding him that he was young, with a life – dreams – of his own. But now that our paths rarely crossed, I saw the value in his loyalty, a loyalty that extended to his nephew, demonstrated in the bear hug he gave Lucas when he finally materialized.
On his return, Lucas said nothing, of course, and so I rang Vic. ‘How did it go? Did he engage?’
‘Yes, a bit, but he seemed so exhausted, like he’d have crawled under a bush and slept if we’d let him. To be honest, I think we just have to get him through these last exams one day at a time and then hope that he’ll lose touch with Kieran when he goes to uni.’
‘If he goes,’ I said, dispiritedly. ‘Thanks anyway, Vic.’
‘Come on, El, don’t sound so glum. Some parents have it a lot worse than this. His timing is crap, but he’s not doing heroin or anything really serious.’
‘Oh, well, in that case,’ I said. But I was grateful for his support. I didn’t know what I’d do without him – and Justin, of course.
News arrived soon after that Lucas was allowed to take the missed maths exam on the alternative date.
‘I bet I end up getting a harder paper,’ he moaned.
‘I hope you do,’ I said.
‘That’s what Dad said.’
‘We’re saying it because we love you,’ I said. ‘We want what’s best for you and the best thing for you is to learn from your mistakes. I’m sure Prisca would say the same to Kieran if it was him who missed an exam. But it wasn’t, was it?’
It was a dig along well-worn lines and Lucas didn’t argue, surrendering to the demands of the final furlong with an attitude more disconsolate than resentful. There was a sense, too, that while we counted down to the end of exams, the end of school, he was counting down to the day he could get away from us. From me.
* * *
Summer passed with increasing unease. There’d be no Greek reprieve this year, for Lucas refused to come on holiday with us,
and Justin and I took Freya to Italy on her own.
‘One rule,’ Justin told me, as we buckled into our seats on the plane. ‘No one mentions the K word.’
‘Done,’ I said, and meant it. I simply could not stomach the stress of speculating where Kieran might lead Lucas in our absence, what altered chemical states the two of them might blunder into.
On our return, with exam results day approaching, we found Lucas fretful that he hadn’t performed at his best (finally!), talking about resitting anything particularly disastrous and reapplying to uni for entry the following autumn. I began to dread the words ‘I thought I might go travelling with Kieran’, dread them so intensely I crossed over into willing them. The sooner the worst happened, the sooner I could get on with surviving it.
I didn’t know the meaning of ‘worst’ then.
It was only when he went to pick up his results from the school that I understood just how anxious I’d become, too agitated to concentrate on the spreadsheet I was supposed to be working on, unable even to face a cup of tea.
Finally, he phoned with the news that he had the grades he needed for his first choice, Leeds. ‘We’re all going out to celebrate,’ he added. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’
The moment we hung up I ran to the bathroom and began sobbing into a towel. When I emerged, I saw Freya watching from her bedroom door.
‘Did he fail?’
‘No. No, he did okay. He’s going to Leeds.’
As she looked up the exact distance between our postcode and her brother’s new campus, I found myself feeling more joy-filled than most mothers would at the prospect of their firstborn living so far away. Because surely Kieran would not attempt to make the journey regularly, if at all, which meant Lucas could forget all about him in the flurry of freshers socializing.
We baked a cake for him, with his favourite chocolate fudge icing, and unveiled it the next afternoon when he’d slept off the night’s partying. For once, he didn’t slope off, mouth full, but lingered with us, nowhere better to be.
‘So yeah, Mum, thanks for, you know…’ he said.
I paused. ‘For what?’
‘Just, you know, keeping the faith.’
‘Of course I kept the faith,’ I told him.
‘I always will.’ And I gave him a proper hug, the one I felt he’d been resisting for so long but that he perhaps believed to have been withheld.
He’s come back to us, I thought.
Just as he was leaving, he was back.
* * *
Not long after Lucas started at Leeds, we ran into Kieran at the shopping centre in Croydon. I’d known he hadn’t applied to uni and that vague plans for an apprenticeship had been shelved in favour of trying to start a business of some sort. (‘He’s already got one,’ I grumbled to Vic. ‘Pharmaceuticals.’)
Though we greeted each other cordially enough, he didn’t so much as glance in my direction after that, his gaze passing from Justin to Freya.
‘Hey,’ he said to her, with a note of appreciation. ‘You got tall.’
‘Hi,’ she said.
She was wearing make-up, expertly applied, as make-up is by her generation. They watch YouTube tutorials by strange creatures who dedicate their entire waking day to the pursuit and then helpfully present it in time-lapse video for those with less time on their hands.
‘What are you up to these days?’ Justin asked, with professional good-naturedness.
Kieran scratched his right eyelid with his thumbnail. ‘Computer stuff.’
Aka gaming.
‘Looking for a job while I start my own thing,’ he added.
‘Remind me what your A-levels were?’ Justin said.
‘Geography and computer science.’
‘I’ll keep my ears open for you.’
‘Cool. What year’re you in now, Frey?’ Kieran asked her.
‘Year eight.’
‘Enjoy it while you still can,’ he advised, and I had a tough time not rolling my eyes. As if he really thought sixth-form life had been tough. As if he hadn’t spent his whole time in pursuit of anything but study.
His phone rang then and I watched as he smirked at the caller ID. I had an overpowering instinct that it was from Lucas and wanted to rip the thing from his hands and delete it, delete Lucas’s details, scream at Kieran that the friendship was over.
‘Hey.’ He turned from us to speak to his caller. ‘You here yet? Which entrance? Safe, bruv.’
Safe, bruv: it all came back to me in a horrible toxic gush. And, knowing Lucas was over two hundred miles away in Leeds and could not on this occasion be the bruv in question, I felt the terrified relief of someone who’d been about to step into an empty lift shaft and pulled back just in time.
Chapter 13
In November, the weekend before Lucas’s nineteenth birthday, we went up to Leeds for a visit. Checked out the ransacked crime scene that was his room in halls, remarked on his paler-than-ever complexion and never-skinnier physique. Took him for the biggest steak he could eat.
‘Has anyone from the old gang been to visit?’ I asked, halfway through the main course – and I know you won’t believe me, but I swear I was thinking of Jade, at Durham studying French. The two of them were still together, which I admit was a surprise. Justin and Sheridan agreed with me: two confident, good-looking arrivals in their respective spheres, they’d surely have received plenty of attention by now. Only Vic called it, insisting Lucas was properly in love – if such an antiquated term was still in use.
‘Kieran came up,’ Lucas said, mouth full. ‘Everyone else is at their own unis. Jade’s coming down for the Christmas ball.’
‘It’s only an hour between you on the train, isn’t it?’ Justin said.
As Freya showed Lucas various Instagram posts of Jade’s that she’d liked, and then Justin asked after Tom, now at Cambridge and naturally dismissed by Lucas as a sell-out rather than the cause for admiration that he deserved to be, I watched them over my wine glass, waiting for a pause. ‘Kieran’s been up, you said?’
Lucas shot me a cautious look. ‘Yeah, a couple of weekends ago.’
‘How can he afford to gad about if he isn’t working?’
‘ “Gad about”?’ Justin and Freya snickered, and I recognized their instinct to try to divert the river surging their way.
‘He is working,’ Lucas said, raising his chin in a self-consciously brazen way that was pure Kieran. ‘He’s doing some freelance IT stuff and bar work to get the money together for a van. He wants to start his own delivery business.’
‘Well, that’s great,’ Justin said, sounding genuinely impressed. ‘He’s obviously made a lot of progress since we saw him a few weeks ago. It must be hard, with most of his friends at uni.’
‘Yeah.’ Lucas forked a mustard-smeared chunk of meat into his mouth and followed it with fries from his fingers.
‘Wouldn’t the insurance be astronomical for a van?’ I said. I’d always presumed Prisca covered Kieran for her car, but a van in his name only? ‘Those points on his provisional licence will have been carried over to his full one and at his age that’ll push the premium through the roof.’
‘What points?’ Lucas said, and he scratched his left eye, fork still in hand, almost stabbing Justin in the process.
‘Careful! From the incident in Dover. Driving without supervision, I think it’s called.’ As if I hadn’t looked it up and apprised myself of its minimum penalty at the time.
‘What does that mean?’ Freya asked, but before I could explain, Lucas was shaking his head.
‘There never were any points from that. Prisca told the police she drove us down there.’
I set down my glass. ‘I didn’t know that. Did you know?’ I asked Justin.
‘I don’t think so.’ With an air of blithe determination, he signalled to the waitress for another bottle of wine. ‘But even if she did, she wouldn’t be the first parent to cover for their child, would she? If Kieran had admitted to driving himself, th
ere might have been a court appearance, a massive fine. How would they have paid that?’
I gaped, outraged. Who were these adults colluding with their delinquent charges? But, hang on, I was one of them, wasn’t I? I’d registered Lucas sick to get him out of his maths A-level, when the effects of a recreational drug binge likely didn’t count as legitimate illness. I’d urged him to lie about the truancy, too.
‘You still thinking you’ll learn to drive next summer?’ Justin asked Lucas in a blatant change of subject, since Lucas had shared this plan with us only a few hours earlier. He’d bailed on his lessons earlier in the year after only two or three (the instructor’s Saturday morning slot had been too early and Lucas’s hangovers too heinous for the arrangement to be sustained).
‘If they parked at the port, it would have been easy enough for the police to check CCTV and see who was at the wheel,’ I said.
‘But they didn’t,’ Justin said, more firmly now. ‘Thank you.’ He took the new bottle of wine from the waitress and smoothly filled our glasses.
I cleared my throat. ‘So now Kieran has a clean licence and soon he’s going to be driving a van around our streets day and night. Thanks for the heads-up, anyway.’
Lucas glanced at Justin. ‘He’s not a dangerous driver, Mum. You make it sound like he’s going to be deliberately mowing people down.’
‘Whatever he does, it’s his business,’ Justin said. ‘He’s an independent adult now. Freya, tell your brother about your netball match last week.’
As I bit my tongue, my daughter’s eyes lit up. ‘Olivia twisted her ankle so I got to play goal shooter for the second half. I scored four goals.’
‘One girl’s tragedy is another’s opportunity,’ Justin said, raising his glass.
* * *
Oh, God. Anyone reading this must think I thought about nothing but this one teenager who happened to be friends with my son. That I ignored my daughter and crushed any sign of dissent on the part of my husband. It wasn’t like that, I swear. For the purposes of this project, Kieran’s are the only relevant scenes: the encounters we had; the conversations in which his name came up. The rest of the time, I was doing what we all do. Earning a living, cooking dinner, loading the dishwasher, reading a novel, signing up for Pilates and giving up after the first session. Kieran wasn’t mentioned from one week to the next.
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