Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  Although she replied ‘Fine. Thanks’ she wondered where she was going to stash the contents of the bags and cases she had hurriedly packed. Charles must have read her thoughts, or he must have noticed the slight hint of panic in the way she glanced around the room, because he was smiling as he walked to the door in the wall near the window and opened it “Here’s your bathroom and…” he walked into the room so Linda followed, “and through this door is another room, you could use it as a sitting room or move the bed in if you prefer it.”

  “This house is like Dr Who’s tardis.” Linda smiled, “It doesn’t look much from the outside but it’s gigantic inside!”

  Charles smiled back at her, an open almost childlike smile, that Ted realised was the first he had seen from Charles for some time.

  “Look you two must be tired after the drive, let me fix you something. Spag bog be OK? I’ve got some serviceable wine and then you can tackle unpacking in the morning.

  “I’ll leave you two to it.” Ted thought it best to let them get to know each other again. “I’ll pop over in the morning. I was going down to see Bill tomorrow anyway, shall we all go? We could take two cars.” When he saw the agreement in Charles and Linda’s faces he continued “I’ll get here at 10, make sure the tribe is ready.”

  “I will.” Linda had already taken charge.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  They took longer over their spaghetti than either of them had expected.

  Instead of his usual rushed meal Charles found himself lingering over the wine and twiddling the remaining strands of pasta round the tines of his fork. Conversation had been easy, their old friendship returning unforced. He had told Linda everything about his break up with Holly, some of which Ted had told her but a lot he hadn’t. He knew about her affairs, he had accepted them and would never have thrown her out because of them. Linda nodded and commiserated in the right moments, making Charles remember how much he had always liked her. Then she had told him about her life since they had parted company and she found it easy to tell him the thoughts she had only just formulated in the car on the journey up. How afraid she was that she had wasted the last years of her life by working so hard, when she should have been keeping in touch with friends and family. Charles encouraged her, told her not to blame herself for anything, she had plenty of time to make contact with everyone now.

  She had always liked the feelings of security Charles seemed to give those around him. She couldn’t understand what Holly’s problem had been.

  They were still talking around the table when they heard the key in the door and Josie’s voice ‘Hello! I’m back!”

  “Hi Josie.” Linda said brightly.

  “Oh Linda, Hello.” It was almost as if she had forgotten Linda was coming to live with them but she remembered her manners and politely asked if she had had a good journey.

  In the short time since Linda had accepted her new role she had wondered how she was going to approach being surrogate step-mother to Susannah’s children and had already decided on her tactics. She was going to treat them exactly as she had those people who had worked for her over the years of the business. She would never talk down to them, they would be her equals as long as there were no decisions to be taken, at which point she would be the boss and democracy wouldn’t come into it. She might, if necessary, share some of the decisions with Charles before the children knew there was a choice.

  “Hello Josie, nice to see you again. I had a good trip thank you. How was the film?”

  Josie picked up a glass from the draining board and sat down at the table, reaching over to the wine bottle. She noticed Linda’s look and said, rather defensively, “I am nearly 18 you know. I am allowed to drink.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just that…”

  “You can’t just come and live here and tell me what to do! It’s not fair. I’m an adult now and you can’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”

  “Josie.” Charles said in a warning tone, trying to intercede in what he thought was going to be a dangerous argument as boundaries between Josie and Linda were being established.

  “Josie, all I was going to say was …”

  “I know what you were going to say, you were going to say I shouldn’t be drinking wine ‘at my age’ well I’m old enough and it’s my choice anyway.”

  “So you say, Josie, but there’s one thing no one can do.”

  “What’s that?” Josie was still defiant, though sensing somehow that she was on weak ground.

  “No one can drink from an empty bottle. I was going to suggest you got another from the rack, this one’s finished.” And she smiled, not condescending, not as an adult would to a child, but the smile of someone who was making friends. Josie smiled ruefully, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to go all stroppy.”

  “Friends?”

  “Friends.”

  Charles’s smile was one of relief.

  The three sat round the table talking about what Josie wanted to do when she left school at the end of the year. Charles realised that whenever he spoke to Josie it was always about the boys, he had never asked her what she wanted to do, how she was getting on, whether she needed any help keeping up with all the work that would be required for her exams. It hadn’t even occurred to him before he heard Linda talking that Josie had moved schools in her most important exam year.

  “I moved schools for my final year too.” Linda told Josie how her parents had moved house and she had had to start at a new school in the final year before her A-levels. “I met up with …” she was about to say how she had met Holly and made friends with her and how they had worked for those exams together. Perhaps talking about Holly wasn’t the most tactful thing to do but Charles had picked up on the overriding honesty of the evening.

  “Holly.” He finished for her. “Linda and Holly met up and were the greatest of friends for a while.”

  “We went to university together.”

  “I’m not going to university.”

  “Why not?”

  “I want to go to work properly, learn on the job.”

  “You want to go into the law. Ted told me.”

  “Yes. I really want to stand up in court and persuade people of the truth by argument.”

  “You want to be an actress!”

  “Same thing, but better paid.”

  “How are you going to do that without a degree?”

  Josie didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She couldn’t explain that she didn’t want to do what her mother had done. She wanted to work, experience the world, be a good lawyer because she has seen something of life before she committed herself to a possibly rarefied life in her chosen profession. Her grandfather had been a lawyer, Ted had told her. Ted was a lawyer. She wanted to help people like Ted did, but she was going to be able to do it better because she will have done other things first. She just said ‘I’ll do other things first’.

  “You’ll find everything easier with good exams though. Are you going to do well?”

  “Yes.”

  “In everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we won’t worry about you unless you ask us to.” Linda said, continuing quickly “The person we should worry about is Bill. We must get him home. Paper? Biro? Tell me what we need to do to the house to get Bill home.”

  The list included ramps, a bedroom downstairs (or a lift), changing the heights of the door handles, removing various doors and they were just tackling the need to buy a van or larger car that could take the wheelchair when they heard Al and Jack at the door. It was well past midnight.

  They were expecting to find the house dark and quiet and had wandered into the kitchen without seeing the lights were on until it was too late. They looked guiltily at each other expecting an argument.

  The strange woman looked up towards them as if it were perfectly natural for them to come in at midnight.

  “What haven’t we thought of?”

  Jack took the lead, as he always did. “D
unno whatcha talking about.”

  Linda ignored the slurred words and the wilful rudeness.

  “We’re making a list of all the things we need to do to the house before Bill can come home.”

  “But he’s sick.”

  “Not so sick that he can’t be home.”

  “What have you got so far?” Jack asked in a more normal, less argumentative tone and Linda handed over the pad.

  “Can you make us all some coffee Al? Please?”

  Unused to being asked to do anything Al did as Linda had suggested.

  Half an hour later Charles sat back and watched the miracle Linda had wrought. As Jack and Al were discussing how they would build the ramps and make all the adjustments that they had listed, Josie was noting down the materials they mentioned. Every few minutes Linda asked Charles a question about whether something was possible or not. Time wasn’t important. The fact that they should all have been in bed hours ago, that the boys should have been told off for coming in so late, that Linda hadn’t even started to unpack and must be exhausted all threaded their way through his mind but looking at the group he realised, for the first time since they had come to live with him, they seemed almost to be a family.

  “They don’t want you to come home until Social Services have checked everything back at the house, and they won’t let it be a weekend anyway.” Charles explained to Bill as soon as all they were all settled in the inhospitable room that was the only one available for visitors. “There wouldn’t be any back up if anything goes wrong’.”

  “What’s going to go wrong?” Bill asked “I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to, they know I’m not going to get any better until I have the next op and that can’t be for another year or more. They don’t want me in here all that time.”

  “They’ve got to come and check where you’ll be living, whether we’re OK to look after you. All that stuff.” Jack joined in.

  “They’re coming at the end of next week and once they realise we won’t be locking you in a cupboard.”

  “Or starving you to death because you’re so useless…”

  “They’ll say you can come home.”

  “It’s not quite like that. They have to check that there’s nothing dangerous in the house and that it’s as suitable for a wheelchair as we can get it.” Ted injected a serious note into the conversation.

  “I think we all knew that.” Jack said with the pitying voice he reserved for all adults who did not understand their sense of humour.

  “Of course you did.” Ted acknowledged. “It’s just that I didn’t want the nurses to hear what we really had planned for him.” The dangerous moment passed as the boys giggled. ‘Sometimes’ Linda thought ‘they seem so grown up and at others they are really very young children after all. I’ll have to be careful.’

  “I don’t mind what you do as long as I’m out of this place.” Bill’s supposedly light-hearted comment was tinged with a bitterness that Linda was not alone in recognising.

  “It’ll take a while to sort everything out.” Linda was business-like and Bill liked that. He was fed up with people skirting round the problems that would arise from having a boy in a wheelchair at home.

  “And I’ll need ramps if there are any steps.”

  “We know! We’ve made a list.” Al sounded pleased with himself as he took the pieces of paper out of his pocket and read them out.

  When he had finished Linda asked Bill if there was anything they had forgotten.

  “I don’t know.” He answered, “I don’t know what the house is like. Linda only then realised that Bill had never seen the house that was to be his home. “Haven’t they shown you any photos?”

  She turned to Al “Haven’t you brought any photos to show Bill? No? Well you should have done.”

  “Josie…”

  “It’s not up to Josie to do everything. You’re perfectly able to think of these things yourself.”

  It was probably the first time anyone had expected Al to be responsible for anything in all his 14 years.

  Al and Jack then explained to their young brother what they had planned to do to make life easier for him once he was home and Charles and Ted sat back as the four youngsters chatted around diagrams on Linda’s notepad.

  “Is it home?” Charles heard Bill ask at one point. “Yeah.” Jack had replied, “Yeah, it’s all right.” On hearing this exchange Charles had glanced across at Linda who had moved away to talk to one of the nurses. She caught his eye and smiled at him and then at the boys and back at him. He realised she still had the talent he had noticed when they had worked together of holding one conversation but being aware of everything else that was going on in her immediate vicinity.

  When she came back to sit with them she had a sheet of paper the nurse had given her. “We’ve just got to make sure all these things are taken care of.”

  They worked through their list and the one the nurse had given Linda and smiled with satisfaction when they realised they had covered everything.

  “We’re bloody brilliant.” Al shouted in triumph. Jack nudged him in the ribs and they both looked to Linda to see if he was going to be in trouble for swearing but it was Bill who warned his brothers. “They don’t like shouting in the hospital, it upsets people.” And the moment passed when Linda’s control might have been questioned.

  When the bell for the end of the visiting hour rang they left Bill saying they would be back next week to pick him up.

  “Can’t wait.” Bill said as Linda gave him a hug.

  “Neither can we.” Jack spoke for them all.

  Linda had driven down with Ted and Josie. Linda, sitting in the back, had listened to the easy conversation between the young woman and the older man. She was again struck by how much younger Ted seemed. ‘Perhaps it’s me getting older’ she thought ‘but he doesn’t really seem old enough to be my dad any more.’ The radio was playing pop music, not the talks and discussions she would have expected. Ted seemed to be a bit of a chameleon, adjusting his manner to suit whoever he was talking to whilst managing to be relaxed and easy with everyone. She used the opportunity to learn more about Josie.

  She listened to a serious young woman who was well spoken, polite and with a dry sense of humour, who teased and allowed herself to be teased in an easy going way. It was obvious that the two knew each other well and liked each other. Apart from relationships between parents and their children she had never seen a friendship between the generations at close hand before. They talked easily, as equals. She realised that that was why the friendship worked, it was that, friendship, not an adult who knew better and a youngster who knew nothing. She took the lesson to heart and wondered, briefly, whether that was exactly what Ted had expected of her when he had suggested she travel with Josie in his car and had deliberately settled her in the back. She thought perhaps Ted had also had something in mind when he had insisted she drive the boys home in Charles’s car. ‘I need to talk to Charles so he’s got to come with me’ he had said as if it was the most natural arrangement.

  She knew she now had two hours in which the relationship between Al, Jack and herself would be settled; what she said or did would define their future relationships however well they appeared to have started.

  She fiddled with the keys as she watched the boys walking several yards ahead of her through the car park. They were very close in age and were so alike that some people thought them to be twins. ‘Heaven help anyone who tries to play one off against the other’ she thought, they were an inseparable team. And now they, together, would look after Bill. She knew, also, that her first test would be immediate. They would argue about who was to sit with her in the front, pretend to fight about it. She could almost hear them talking about it as they walked towards the car.

  “Right now, both of you in the back.” She said firmly as she unlocked the driver’s door. “And I’ll tell you why. I’ve never driven this car before, I have no idea how it works and where all the knobs and switches are so what
I don’t want is some eager beaver pointing things out to me as I go. If I can’t find something or I switch the windscreen wipers on instead of the indicators I don’t want any helpful fingers doing the right thing. So in the back. Both of you. Now.”

  She could hear what they said, as long as the radio wasn’t on too loud, and they had to listen carefully to hear what she was saying to them. She congratulated herself on a small success.

  She let them laugh at her for not finding reverse to get out of the parking spot and let them hear her berate Charles for not backing in to make it easier for her. She was careful not to swear, though she felt like it. She asked them directions, though she was pretty sure she knew the way.

  When Jack asked, rather tentatively, if she could tune the radio to get the football results she agreed and listened to their ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ as the results came through.

  “What team do you support?” she asked when the programme had finished. And the rest of the journey was spent as they told her, with great enthusiasm, that there really was only one team and she listened as they talked, seemingly quite knowledgeably, about its progress through the year. They didn’t seem to notice when she stalled the car as she drove through the centre of Chester, if they did they didn’t say anything, and they didn’t laugh when, for the third time, she set off the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator. All in all, she thought as she drove into the drive and parked alongside Ted’s car, the journey could have been a lot worse.

  The next few days were a whirlwind of activity. She drove the boys down to the local D-I-Y store to buy all the items that they had listed, and she bought some pot plants as well. She had noticed how empty the house had felt without flowers or greenery. She told Jack and Al to choose the oddest plants they could find and, although they had pretended to be bored by the whole idea, had selected pots with such a variety of colours and sizes she wondered what Charles would say when they took them home. Even if she had to put them all in her own room it was worth it to hear the boys arguing with each other about which was the weirdest.