by Jessica Ryn
Peter jumps up and pulls the chair back for her. She lowers herself into it with a mixture of effort and grace. It’s only when Peter has sat back down that Grace realises he hasn’t told her he’s not Arthur.
‘How was your day, my love?’ she asks, looking at him as if she really wants to know.
‘It was rather stressful actually,’ he says. ‘Tricky day at work. It’s hard knowing the right things to do to help people very often.’
‘I’m sure you always do your best,’ she smiles, patting his hand that’s resting on the table. She then covers it with her own and leaves it there. Peter stares at their pile of hands and stays silent.
Grace catches Jack’s eye and suppresses a chuckle. ‘Should I do something? I’m supposed to be wing-woman-ing.’
‘He’s a big boy. And she’s got great chat. Why break into that?’ Jack breaks off a chunk of bread from the plate between them and grins before putting it into his mouth.
He even makes eating bread look sexy. ‘So, was there anything particular about the end of your speech you wanted to discuss?’
‘Mmm,’ Jack nods before finishing a gulp of water. ‘I really want to share my experiences of the care system with the kids. I want to be able to reach out to the ones who might be going through similar stuff and help the ones who aren’t to have a better understanding of them.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘But what I don’t want to do is make excuses for the things I’ve done. There are kids in the care system who don’t go off the rails. I want to explain the ways that my experiences contributed to my homelessness without suggesting that’s what will happen to any of those who are already in foster homes or struggling.’
Grace briefly covers one of Jack’s fingertips with her own. ‘It’s great that you’re being mindful of your message. The fact that you care about what the kids will take from it can only mean you’ll do a good job. What’s the one most important thing you want to leave them with?’
‘That they’re not alone. That they should always ask for help, even when they think they can’t. That life can be full of so much shit but doing the wrong things won’t put any of it right. And that we shouldn’t judge each other so harshly. We don’t always know what others are going through and people won’t ask for help if they think they’re just going to get blamed.’
Jack is fiddling with the handle on his spoon, his face flushed with emotion.
Grace swallows. ‘That’s definitely more than one thing,’ she says lightly.
The restaurant door opens and Hazel, the writing group leader, rushes through it, scanning the seating area with panic in her eyes until they settle on the older woman who is still talking away to Peter.
‘Mavis! I thought you were only nipping in to use the loo. We’re going to miss the bus if we don’t hurry.’
‘Why were you worrying? I’m with Arthur. Where else would I be?’ Mavis rolls her eyes at Peter and nods towards the woman as if she’s had a lifetime of trying to be patient with her and it’s begun to wear as thin as the soles of Peter’s decades-old shoes.
‘That’s not Arthur, dear, that’s Peter from St Jude’s,’ Hazel says, removing the sharp edge from her voice and cushioning it with concern and a manufactured brightness. ‘Why don’t we go and get a cup of tea and we’ll get the next bus instead? Then when we get back, we can have a game of scrabble.’ Hazel turns to Peter and lowers her volume. ‘Mavis lives next door to me. Her husband, Arthur, died years ago, but she gets confused.’
‘I see,’ Peter says.
‘Haven’t seen you at the café for a while,’ Hazel carries on. ‘The writing workshops are going really well. I’m always surprised by how many of your residents show up every week.’
‘I think they probably don’t have much else to do,’ Peter says.
Grace cringes at Peter’s clumsiness and braves a glance at Hazel. There is no sign of offence in her kind eyes, which always look like they hold the punchline to a clever joke.
‘You should come along one day. To one of my sessions, I mean. You might like it.’
‘Indeed.’ It’s all Peter seems to be able to manage.
Mavis jumps out of her daze. ‘Hello there,’ she says warmly, as if Peter had only just sat down with her. ‘Have we met?’
‘You thought he was Arthur. You were doing that thing again,’ Hazel says, with neither tact nor malice.
‘Ah,’ Mavis says.
This time, Peter is saved from thinking of something to say by a very loud and deliberate clearing of somebody’s throat.
‘Are you Peter?’
A small queue appears to have formed behind Mavis. The question was from a familiar-looking woman standing behind Hazel. Grace realises as Peter tells her that yes, he is indeed Peter, that the reason she recognises her face is because it matches the photo of Caroline, the woman he is supposed to be meeting.
Mavis jumps up with impressive speed considering the time it had taken to lower herself into the chair in the first instance. She shuffles off with Hazel and they take a newly vacant table in the far corner.
Peter watches them go before glancing back up. Caroline is still standing there, staring at the back of the chair with a straight mouth. It seems she’s refusing to get in it until someone is gallant enough to come along and pull it back for her. By the time she is seated, Caroline’s lips are pressed even more tightly together.
‘Who was the old lady?’ Caroline asks.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Peter chuckles.
Hazel looks his way at the same time as he looks at hers and she waves. Peter waves back. Caroline makes a strange sound, something between a sigh and a hmmppff.
‘Why was she sitting with you if you don’t know who she is?’ Her voice is stiff, making her sound older than he thinks she is.
‘To be honest, the woman that was sitting in your seat – Mavis. I thought she was you.’
Caroline’s face changes to a few shades paler as she spins her head around to stare from Mavis and back to Peter. ‘You thought she was me?’ she repeats back to him. ‘Do I look like an eighty-year-old woman in my photo?’
‘To be fair, there was no information about your age on your profile.’
Jack snorts and turns it into a cough. Grace chews on her lip and prays for the waiter to come back.
‘Shall we just order?’ Peter asks.
Grace sneaks another look at Caroline over the top of her menu. Red, wavy hair falls to her shoulders. Ice-blue eyes, empty of sparkle and lined with carefully applied make-up.
Peter orders steak. Caroline orders a vegan pasta dish. Neither of them asks for a starter and Grace suspects they both want to leave. She should really try to get Peter out of this but she has no idea how, and she’s having far too much fun with Jack.
‘So, what is it you do for a living?’ Peter asks.
‘I don’t like to talk about work.’
Mavis and Hazel are giggling over in the corner and pointing at a humorous quote on the wall. Peter catches Hazel’s eye and smiles. Hazel waves back at him.
‘Am I keeping you from something?’ Caroline’s face is expressionless, closed for business, but her tone gives little room for misinterpretation. Peter doesn’t answer, he just glances at her phone, still on the table. Caroline has already checked it several times since she sat down.
‘So, how old do you think I look?’ Caroline obviously doesn’t want to let this age thing go.
‘Fifty-three and a half.’
Now it’s Grace’s turn to suppress a snort. It’s probably Peter’s best guess, but it turns out he’s wrong by over a decade, and not in the socially acceptable direction.
Peter later blames this blunder for his shaky hands that knock over his glass of orange juice.
Caroline’s phone enjoys a little swim across the tablecloth, buoyed up by three quarters of a pint of Sunny Delight, Florida style.
‘Which is a shame,’ Peter says after Caroline has left. ‘Everywhere else seems to
have stopped selling it.’
Chapter 17
Grace
DESPITE ARRIVING AT WORK early, the phone is already ringing as Grace jangles the keys in the lock of the office door. The room is a shit-tip. Lorna was working the late shift last night and she always leaves chaos in her wake, but this is worse than usual. Grace has to lean over piles of scattered files in order to reach the phone.
‘It’s Myra from head office,’ a cut-glass voice projects itself through the landline. ‘I know it’s early, but we’ve had a call from Supporting Futures? The ones who are due to do an inspection?’
Grace’s heart drops right through her, landing somewhere near her size five ballet-style pumps.
The voice continues. ‘They’re coming to see you today. They said they’ll be at St Jude’s around lunchtime, and then they will be visiting our other Kent hostels tomorrow and Monday.’
She’s only just put the phone down amongst the masses of paperwork when the door opens and spits Peter into the office.
Grace opens her mouth and gives him the news of impending doom, before ranting and raving about the state of the office whilst stomping about, gathering up papers and wiping the desks.
‘It’s fine, stop panicking. We have at least three hours to tidy up and get things ready. Stay calm,’ says Peter. ‘At least we’ve been given a heads-up. Be far worse if they just turned up out of the blue.’
‘Anyone working today?’ Teardrop Terry’s booming voice travels through the tiny gap under the closed hatch.
Peter tells him they’re just about to and puts the kettle on, and Grace hides the overflowing office bin behind the door of the staff toilet.
The front entrance buzzer sounds as soon as Grace has finished opening up.
‘Are you in the habit of opening up late to residents?’ Boris the inspector says after introducing himself and heaving himself into the foyer, beads of sweat running from his freckled brow.
Damn. They’d forgotten to remove the Office Closed sign from the door.
‘No, no, not at all,’ Grace blusters, as the man peels it off himself and hands her a lump of balled-up blu tac. ‘I thought you weren’t coming till lunchtime. It’s only ten past nine.’
‘We always arrive early. Don’t worry,’ Boris adds. ‘Just wanted to make sure your sign was gone before my colleague gets here. She’s parking the car and she’s not as understanding as me.’
The entrance buzzer sounds again, right on cue. Grace’s heart squeezes tight when she looks at the woman on the other side of the heavy glass-fronted door.
Wavy red hair, frosted blue eyes and a ‘Supporting Futures’ badge. Wearing the same scarf she’d worn on her date with Peter.
‘Good morning, Caroline. Fancy seeing you here,’ Peter sounds as if he’s being strangled.
Shit. Now they’re already off to a bad start.
‘Hello Mr Andrews,’ she says, peering at Peter’s ID badge. ‘And Miss Jennings, lovely to meet you.’ Her tone sounds as if she means anything but, and more like she’s addressing a pubic hair she’s found in her lasagne. ‘Shall we go to the office first?’
Grace nods and prays for someone to set the fire alarms off before Caroline sees the state of the desks.
During the two hours Caroline and Boris spend going through the files, they ask what seems like five hundred questions, many of which Grace doesn’t know the answers to.
‘So, how about the percentages on the outcome forms; what have you done to improve them since last time?’ and ‘How have you utilised the training budget to best optimise the service user experience?’
‘I’m sure I would be able to email most of the answers to your enquiries once we’ve checked with head office,’ Grace says, looking towards Boris and hoping he’ll step in and throw her a lifeline or an inflatable armband at the very least.
‘I see from your rota that only one of you is on shift on some days during the week,’ Caroline remarks. ‘I’m surprised you allow lone-working in a high-needs project this size. I imagine it would be next to impossible to deal with emergencies or give adequate support to clients this way.’
‘The residents we have here at present are fairly stable,’ Grace says smoothly. ‘Incidents have been kept to a minimum.’ She sends a silent prayer of thanks that things appear quiet and drama-free from the resident’s side of the hatch this morning.
Teardrop Terry chooses this time to reappear. ‘Just to let you know that the bike’s been nicked again and someone’s broken into the shed.’
‘He’s at it again, that bloody man, whoever he is.’ Dawn joins Terry at the hatch and thumps her fist down onto it. ‘You need to run better background checks on your residents. Somebody’s been in my room and chucked all of my tablets down the loo. I know they’re trying to scare me, but the joke is on them – I don’t even take them anymore. Maybe whoever it was took the bike too.’
Peter bumbles around trying to provide some reassurance, and Grace is acutely aware of two pairs of eyes boring into the back of her skull. Terry and Dawn wander away from the hatch and she hides a sigh of relief. She’s just put the kettle back on and begun hunting for biscuits to try and sweeten up the inspectors, when she gets her wish granted, two-and-a-half hours too late.
The fire alarm screams out around them.
‘That’ll be the new lad in number five having a spliff in his room too near the smoke detector again,’ shouts Terry over the obscene volume. ‘Oh, and about that bike… Cara’s just thrown up all over the downstairs hallway. Now, I’m not saying the two things are connected but…’
Caroline and Boris scribble something on their clipboards.
Grace shakes the stress from her shoulders as she takes a seat at the back of the assembly hall of her old secondary school. It’s been three hours since the inspection finished at St Jude’s, and she wants to purge it from her mind so she can focus on supporting Jack.
It’s surreal being back there after all those years, as if the past ten years have evaporated. The same smell of paper and disinfectant. The scrape of plastic chairs against parquet flooring. The nudges and giggles and whispers of those in front of her. Even the thick velvet curtains at the windows are the same.
Grace remembers standing behind those curtains, running through the opening lines for the hundredth time in her head. It was the first performance she’d ever been involved in at secondary school and to open the show as a humble Year 8 was a great honour. She had to get it right, though; her parents would be out there. They’d flown back from the US the day before but had things to attend to at their London branch first. They decided not to come to Dover until that afternoon but had promised to be there in time to watch the play. The curtain swept back, and a hush had fallen across the hall as Grace scanned the rows, front to back. Gran’s strained face with a painted smile, third from the right on the back row. Two empty seats either side of her. Grace pushed her lines out through a tight throat and ran off stage before anyone could see the tears.
The door to the hall slams behind Grace, jolting her back to the present and away from a myriad of memories involving countless other performances, false promises and her gran’s consoling face.
Grace makes a mental note to stock up on wine over the weekend before her mum arrives on Monday. At least the inspection is over now. And who knows, maybe she and her mum might actually have a nice time together.
Jack is on stage, next to her old head teacher. The paper his speech is written on is shaking in his hands and he keeps wiping his forearm across his brow. Grace feels sick on his behalf. Teenagers are not always an easy audience and Jack isn’t carrying an easy message.
Mrs Jacobs, the headteacher, introduces him and exits left, leaving him alone in the middle. He’s holding a microphone with a shaking hand. He opens his mouth and closes it again. He takes a step forwards and sound feedback screeches from the speakers. Giggles and fidgets rise from the audience.
Grace stands to her feet at the back and lets out a whoop befor
e clapping wildly. She’d hoped the kids would join in, but all they’ve done is crane their necks around to stare at her instead. She sees Jack take a deep breath and he grins back at her before opening his mouth again.
‘Thanks for the warm welcome from… one of you in particular.’ Jack’s amused voice sounds clear and strong. His hands are no longer shaking. ‘I’m here this morning to talk to you about what it’s like to be homeless. And what it’s like to feel homeless even before it happens.’
Grace listens with a tight throat as Jack speaks about his struggles as a teenager; his overwhelming need to fit in and be wanted.
‘My parents were both dead by the time I was in junior school,’ he says. ‘I went from foster home to foster home, hoping for someone to adopt me, but nobody ever did. I thought there must be something wrong with me. Then I tried to make the older kids like me instead. I started doing favours to help them out. Small things to start with, like nicking cakes out of shops. Then cakes became clothes and clothes became cars. I didn’t know how to stop.’
He tells them about his other mistakes, his time in young offenders’ programmes. How he’d got older, with no one there to catch him when he fell into homelessness. About how he once longed to be surveyed about his energy-supplier needs, just so he could have a conversation with someone who didn’t want to pee on his sleeping bag.
‘There are so many points in my life where I could have asked for help. I could have turned my life around just by taking a different path. I wish I hadn’t left it so long and wasted so many years. I can’t change that now. Instead, I’m choosing to start my life again at twenty-seven years old. The staff at the hostel I’m living in have helped me to get onto a training course that will get me back to work. I’ve learned the life skills I need to live on my own again and I’m learning to drive – legally this time.’