Where We Belong

by Anstey Harris

  Patch speaks to Leo before he speaks to me. He accompanies his words with Makaton signing, he does it effortlessly – as if he talks like that all the time. His arms are muscled in a way that suggests serious exercise but he is slow and gentle.

  ‘I’m Patch, I teach the art class. Have you come to join us?’

  ‘I’m Leo but I don’t know if I’ll stay.’ Leo is suddenly shy.

  ‘I have a lot to do back at our house – a lot of work. But I thought I’d have a look and see if I like this.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Patch smiles at him, and then at me. ‘It’s a drop-in class, no commitment. And you’re Leo’s mum? Well, well, well . . .’ Patch stretches his bear-paw of a hand out to me.

  When my hand disappears inside his and he squeezes it tightly, a ball of energy clenches in my stomach, an electricity I haven’t felt in a very long time. It is a moment of light flooding in, like turning over a brick or a stone in the garden that has been in place for years. Daylight pours in over bleached roots and scuttling beetles. Worms dive for cover and spiders stretch their cramped legs. Soft virgin soil dries in the warmth after decades of damp darkness.

  There is more to this than wanting to be Patch’s friend. So much more.

  Patch walks into the centre talking to Leo. I walk behind and try to get a grip. I am acting like a teenager. Patch is obviously years younger than me and his clothes are trendy and cool – worn sneakers, shorts and a long-sleeved shirt. His shirt is marked with paint and is tight across his broad shoulders. I feel like a fifty-something frump.

  He walks Leo to an office doorway where a beautiful young woman with blue hair and lots of face jewellery takes over.

  ‘Poppy will help Leo with the forms,’ Patch says as he walks back over to me. ‘This is a coincidence: shall I show you round?’ He stresses the ‘is’ in the sentence and I wonder whether he knows that it’s no coincidence at all and I’ve only enrolled my son in this class so I can find out more about the teacher.

  ‘You didn’t tell me your name.’

  Of course not: the alarm, my embarrassment. I blush more. ‘I’m Cate Morris.’

  ‘So you’re something to do with the museum? That place, it’s incredible.’ His cheeks plump up when he smiles, they are faintly rosy under his tan.

  ‘It’s my late . . .’ I can’t say the words, not to him. ‘Colonel Hugo is Leo’s great-grandfather.’

  ‘You’re so lucky,’ he says. ‘Leo, come into the common room and meet some of the other people before we go through to the studio.’

  Leo follows him without a second’s hesitation or self-consciousness.

  The common room, when I come in behind Leo, is exactly as one might expect: posters, flapping paper notices pinned to overcrowded boards, and three old and stained sofas in the middle of the room. Four or five young people mill about, all – as Araminta said – about his age. They are sitting and standing around, drinking coffee, chatting.

  A tall slender girl turns round to see who’s come in.

  She has wavy dark hair and an intense gaze. She wears the barest trace of shiny lipstick and a touch of it has coloured the corner of one of her front teeth. When she speaks to Leo, I see his hands drop to his thighs, tapping so gently and quietly against the legs of his shorts, palms flat and fingers splayed.

  ‘Hello. I’m Sophie,’ she says and the ‘s’ is blurred by a lisp.

  And just like that, despite an age gap of more than thirty years, my nineteen-year-old son and I find ourselves on the same unexpected page of life. Both smitten, blindsided, by people we barely know, people who just appeared out of nowhere and filled our imaginations.

  *

  When I get back to the museum, Araminta is pulling weeds from the gravel in the drive. She is wearing her customary tweed skirt and tights, her delicate gold wristwatch catches the sun as it peeks from her gardening gloves.

  ‘Don’t you ever stop?’ I ask.

  She looks round at me and smiles. ‘This never stops.’ She gestures up at the front of the house. It is an impossible task for one person: it is an impossible task for three – even if Leo and I added our efforts every minute of every day, we can’t keep it under control.

  ‘We need more volunteers, don’t we? For the time being, I mean. Until we start taking some money.’ I’m trying to keep my voice encouraging, build on the optimism of the day. ‘What about Malcolm? He seems keen?’

  ‘Malcolm used to volunteer regularly. He and his wife worked in the garden before she became ill but then they both had to stop. Polly had early onset dementia, she died last year.’

  ‘Oh, how sad.’ I think about Malcolm’s enthusiasm, his loud laugh as he and Thierry polished off the extra glasses of wine they’d poured before the tour. Malcolm wears his sadness lightly. I should think more about doing the same.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be back by next season. He enjoys it.’ Araminta puts single daisy heads and tangles of dandelions in the trug beside her. Her fingers dig into the gravel.

  ‘Let me help you. Are there any more gloves?’

  ‘There’s another pair under the ticket booth counter. ‘Second shelf down.’ She looks up at me. ‘Thank you.’

  I don’t have any pockets in the skirt I chose this morning so I leave my car keys and phone on the shelf I took the gloves from. There’s a little lean-on kneepad there too that I take outside to stop my bare legs from hurting on the gravel.

  We dig and pull in silence for a few moments before Araminta speaks. Her thin neck bones whiten and her pearl necklace tightens, the beads rising away from her skin. ‘I do need to talk to you, about the alarm, about getting more people in . . .’

  I stay quiet: I can hear the scraping of the gravel against my fingers.

  Araminta exhales, a long slow breath. She turns back towards me. ‘It’s still true what I said, before you came. There is a very real threat hanging over us from the Board of Trustees. We are on a knife edge.’

  She clears her throat. ‘We have always had these glitches, these phases. There have always been quiet times, periods when the museum is out of favour, out of fashion and – in the past – we’ve been able to weather them. But there’s no money left at all. No money to do things like this . . .’ She points at the edge we’ve weeded. ‘No money to empty the bins in the car park or buy lavatory paper for the visitors. It’s not quite as simple as filling the museum for a day or two.’

  ‘Leo needs this flat. It’s all we’ve got. All he’s got. And we need to know that it’s our home now.’ There’s so much more I want to say. That I found that sad book of loss in the chapel. That I was awake half the night after yesterday, brimming with ideas. I have opened the Pandora’s Box of this discussion, I need to see it through.

  ‘There is a Board of Trustees who oversee the financial affairs of the museum – as you already know.’ She is still holding her trowel; there is not a single speck of dirt, dot of earth, on her skirt.

  I look down at my knees, scuffed brown within minutes.

  ‘It is made up of a collection of second cousins and distant relatives, all people Richard would have known of, I’m sure, or at least could have put a face to. Each and every one of them would like to see this museum closed, the artefacts put up for auction, and the remains of the estate sold off. They wouldn’t inherit as much as they imagine by the time it was all split up between them, but inherit they certainly would: Leo too.’

  ‘Leo would inherit?’

  Araminta nods. ‘A significant amount.’

  I take the gloves off and lay them on the drive. I am hot all over, my palms are sweating. ‘Enough to secure his future?’

  She nods again. ‘But even then, even with what it might buy him, I have to fight to keep this place together. I’m sorry.’

  A whirl of thoughts spins in my head: the worries we’ve had about money; the unopened bills, unanswered calls; the fear. And now, on the day that we have decided to stay, to be part of this, this cat lands among the pigeons.

  Aramin
ta sits back on her heels with surprising agility. ‘Colonel Hugo’s project, his life’s work, was for the people, for the public. He didn’t do it to have it sold to oligarchs and collectors, to have it hidden away in private collections.’ Her face is rigid and puce, her lips narrowed and stressed. ‘I promised the Colonel that his collection would be safe under my care: I gave him my word.’ She gets up and walks back into the museum.

  I want to tell her not to worry, that we’ll fight the sale whatever it takes, but I can’t – hand on heart – say that’s what I really feel. The whole collection – the antique beds we sleep on, the exquisite china we use as everyday crockery, the elephants, the giraffe: it must be worth millions. For every parent of a child with a learning disability – especially single parents – there is an almost constant quiet babble of ‘what happens when I die?’ running as internal commentary. Simon is Leo’s testamentary guardian if anything happens to me but, beyond that and my miserable teacher’s pension, his future is far from settled.

  I look up at the front of the house. Leo couldn’t run this alone, either but – surely – the future is more valuable than the past.

  It is a conundrum, like everything else in this peculiar house. From the glaring dead animals conserved in their alabaster homes, through the millions of books that no one can reach to read, right into the wet green foliage of the unmanageable woods Colonel Hugo’s grandfather meticulously planted, this place contradicts itself at every turn, gives then takes away, frightens then comforts.

  Araminta’s promise wasn’t just to Colonel Hugo – it was to the whole family: that includes Leo. That promise – despite the fact it goes against everything that makes any sense – seems the right thing, it seems to hold water.

  ‘Tell me what to do, Richard,’ I whisper to the air. ‘Because I don’t fucking know.’

  *

  There are nine missed calls on my phone. My first thought, as I wait for the redial to be answered, is that they’re all from the same – local – number: whatever’s happened at the community centre hasn’t meant a trip to hospital. The ring tone runs on and on, each one adding to my panic. My second thought is how irresponsible I’ve been to wander away from it. I could have heard it perfectly from where I left it but I’ve moved much further down the drive since Araminta came back indoors. I only heard it this time because I brought the trug of weeds up to empty.

  I run towards the car, pressing the redial button over and over while no one answers. It is a five-minute drive to the centre. I throw my phone onto the passenger seat, Leo’s seat, and try and keep my hands from shaking on the wheel.

  The empty seat fills with memories, apparitions of panic, of moments where I’ve needed to be calm, times when I couldn’t help the natural order of events. I imagine twisting with pain in that passenger seat on the night Leo was born, and the crushing sadness of the day Richard died – Simon driving – holding everything we knew but couldn’t speak about. The helplessness terrifies me, and the silence of my phone fills the car.

  Chapter Twelve

  There are no flashing lights in the community centre car park, no ambulances or police cordon. It is an unremarkable squat sixties building with a ramp and railing leading up to the front door. No one waits anxiously outside, no striped tape flickers round a crime scene.

  ‘Curtis?’ The first person I see in the foyer has a dark grey hoodie up round his ears and an uninviting scowl.

  ‘We couldn’t get you.’ He talks to his feet.

  ‘We?’

  Before Curtis can answer, the door next to him opens and Leo comes out. His hair is wild and messy, there is a piece of blue sticky tape holding the side of his glasses together.

  ‘I’m going now, bruv.’ Curtis takes Leo’s hand in a complicated gesture of grips and grasps. Leo executes it perfectly.

  ‘Bruv? What exactly is going on? What are you doing here, Curtis? If you’d wanted to spend time with Leo, you could have done so up at the house.’ My terror has been replaced by fury. I don’t know what kind of a drop-in centre Patch is running here but it’s obviously not doing Leo much good.

  ‘Actually, I called Curtis.’ Patch steps out from the office into the foyer. ‘We were having trouble getting hold of you.’

  I momentarily think of apologising to Curtis but he’s gone. I have more things to think about. ‘What on earth is going on? Leo, are you all right?’

  He obviously isn’t.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’ I am eye to eye with him but he doesn’t want to look at me. Something is very wrong. I can see from his pale skin and the dark circles under his eyes that he’s been crying. His eyebrows are straight and dark, knitted close together. His breath is still shallow and fast.

  ‘Has someone hurt you?’ I reach out to gather him in my arms but he turns his back to me, his strong shoulder brushing me away. ‘Where’s your hat?’

  ‘Poppy’s sorting your hat out, isn’t she?’ Patch takes up a lot of room in this foyer. He is larger than he seemed this morning. ‘Unfortunately, Leo has been in a fight.’

  I am open-mouthed and it takes a full second to recover from the moment. ‘I don’t believe it. How could you let this happen? Is this anything to do with Curtis?’ I have been gone for less than three hours. The cloak of responsibility I wear throws itself heavily onto my shoulders, it gathers up closely round my throat and its weight is enough to make me stagger. ‘Have you called the police?’

  Patch puts his hand on my arm in a gesture intended to placate me. It’s patronising and I shake it away.

  ‘You had trouble calming down, didn’t you?’ he says to Leo. ‘But you had the smart idea to call a friend when we couldn’t get your mum. That’s good – it shows really sensible thinking.’ He turns to me. ‘Curtis was terrific actually, a real help. He’s a nice lad.’

  ‘He’s my best friend.’ It’s the first Leo’s spoken since I got here.

  ‘A fight . . .’ I’m shaking my head. ‘I thought this was an art class, an organised art class, Mr . . .’ I can’t call him ‘Patch’, can’t use a stupid nickname when he’s put my son in the way of this kind of danger. I stop just short of calling him ‘Mr Samson’.

  ‘My son does not have fights.’ I’m wearing pomposity like armour; I can hear it but I don’t know what else to say or do. Part of me enjoyed this break, the interaction with Araminta, a physical task: beginning to understand the museum and what it could bring me. And all the time, Leo was frightened, bullied, vulnerable. He needed me and I wasn’t there. I didn’t do any research about this man or his organisation, I didn’t look for reviews: I saw a straw and I clutched it.

  Patch is speaking. ‘And, I’m afraid, it was very much Leo’s fight. He started it and he finished it.’

  ‘Leo has never had a fight in his life.’ I look at the dishevelled young man in front of me.

  He looks hard at the floor. Whatever has happened, Leo doesn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘I want to go home now,’ he says.

  ‘We haven’t had a fight here before, Cate, I assure you.’ Patch is smiling slightly, his face is solemn but his eyes crinkled at the edges. He is clearly not taking the matter seriously but is stopping short of any measure where I could chime in with righteous indignation.

  ‘How on earth was this allowed to happen? Who was this fight with?’

  Poppy – who turns out to be the blue-haired young woman we signed in with – comes out into the foyer to join us. ‘Here’s your hat, mate. Pretty much back to how it was.’ She hands Leo his chequered hat and he turns it round and round in his hands, assessing the damage.

  He nods. ‘It’s all right. We can go home now.’

  Patch puts a hand up, stopping Leo from moving towards the door. ‘I think you have some apologies to make, Leo. Some hands to shake.’

  ‘There must be some mistake.’ I can’t believe my gentle son could suddenly, at the age of nineteen, develop a vicious side. ‘Leo has literally never been involved in anything like this in his li
fe.’ I use the word ‘literally’ for emphasis, as if I am a teenager. It makes me wince.

  ‘I think he may never have been in quite these circumstances before.’ Now Patch is definitely smiling. ‘Never had quite this provocation?’

  A penny drops. ‘Sophie?’

  ‘And Martin, one of our students.’ Patch says the name quietly, clearly wary of the effect it will have on Leo. ‘To be fair, Martin could try the patience of a saint. Often does,’ he says, and points at Poppy.

  Leo sits down hard on the orange plastic chairs lined up against the wall. The signs and posters on the board behind him flutter and flap in the breeze of his umbrage. ‘Martin isn’t Sophie’s boyfriend. Sophie told me.’ He bangs his hands hard on his thighs, over and over, the hitting a spiky rhythm on his jeans. ‘You can’t say someone is your girlfriend if they don’t want to be. Curtis says so.’

  He looks up at me, his eyes are full of heartbreak. ‘Sophie doesn’t want to be Martin’s girlfriend. But he said she does. And she doesn’t.’

  ‘So Leo, unfortunately, felt he needed to defend her honour.’ Patch is his keeping his smile from Leo but it’s there in his voice, in the curve of his mouth, in the way he holds his wide shoulders.

  ‘Martin is a twat.’

  ‘Leo! You can’t say that.’

  ‘I can. Curtis said it too.’ His chin is dipping into his chest, his voice and pride muffled. He stands up, waving his arms in fury. ‘Sophie doesn’t want to be Martin’s girlfriend and Martin said she did and so I punched him. Right here.’ He folds his own fists into his stomach.

  Patch steps forward. He puts one arm round Leo’s shoulder and Leo lets him. ‘We’ve been through this enough, I think. Why don’t we try and look at some of the positive things we’ve done today? Are you ready to show your mum the start of your project?’

  Before I have a chance to object he says, ‘And we’ll have a proper chat about what happened, look at the incident in the day log and so on, before you go. Is that okay . . . Cate?’ He hesitates before he uses my first name and his eyes are positively sparkling now.