by Olivia Fane
When Eve herself was confronted, she replied in riddles. When asked whether Josiah could read, she replied, ‘Yes, and he can read your minds too. Take care.’ On being asked whether he could count and calculate, Eve told them, ‘Why, even a cow can count, even a sheep and a pig, too. Of course he can count, dammit.’
‘But can he add, can he subtract?’ they persisted.
‘Show me a seven-year-old who can’t!’
‘Well then, could he give us a demonstration of his skills?’
‘He’s in the garden dividing plants so that they might multiply. You can watch him, if you like.’
What happened to this young family was bad. Whether it’s excusable, you, the reader, be the judge. The baseline was, all the social workers who ever came into contact with Eve disliked her. They loathed her airy arrogance. If only she had cried, perhaps, or better still, if she had ever admitted that she was in need of ‘help,’ they would have come running to her side. Then the dreadful things which befell them might never have happened.
The idea of a foster placement was June Briggs’s. ‘Just a very temporary thing’ she insisted at the case conference in October 1991. ‘He’s a very solitary child, it’s not good for him. We can’t have him missing yet another year at school. If he starts on Monday, then he’ll only have missed a month of this academic year. He’ll catch up: there’s already an assistant in place at Arbury primary school who can help him. If the Nelsons won’t send him of their own accord, if the boy’s not learning anything at home, then it’s up to us to step in. That’s what we here for, is everyone agreed? Or do we just sit back and watch the kid fail in life?’
‘Do we know for certain he’s not getting an education at home?’ piped up one of the social workers.
‘Has anyone ever noticed a reading book in their house?’
‘Or a maths book, for that matter?’
‘Anyone ever noticed a Latin text book?’ (Laughter.)
‘Seriously, Eve insists her son’s a fine Latin scholar.’ (More laughter.)
‘Has anyone here ever read with the child?’
‘He won’t co-operate.’
‘Do you think that means he can’t?’
‘Probably. But it also means that even if he can read, he’s in need of help. He’s too withdrawn.’
‘Not just shy?’
‘No, he’s more than shy.’
‘Is everyone here agreed on that?’ said Miss June Briggs, taking the helm. ‘Listen, this is only going to be for a few days, until Eve sees sense and encourages him to go to school herself. What that woman needs is a short, sharp, shock, to make her wake up to the real world.’
And so Josiah’s fate was agreed: at seven in the morning, June herself, along with the Nelsons’ latest social worker, a young woman of twenty-three called Tracy, set off from the Social Services Department in a VW beetle to claim him. They took a policeman, just in case, who sat in the back.
Tracy was nervous, but was pretending she wasn’t. It was her first job since graduating, and this was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.
June was tired. She didn’t like the way Tracy never stopped talking. It was a fiery dawn that morning and Tracy said, ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’
June said ‘Humph’ and tried to demist her windscreen. The policeman, too, was bleary-eyed and sat, stiff as a rod.
‘Do you think it’s possible that Josiah is educationally sub-normal, and that Eve’s refusing to send him to school because she’s in denial?’
‘I don’t know,’ said June, in a tone which tried to draw the conversation to a close.
‘But it’s just possible, isn’t it?’ said Tracy, chirpily, trying to recall which psychologist might have agreed with her.
‘Frankly,’ said June, ‘I wouldn’t credit that woman with as much feeling. She wouldn’t notice if her son ate coal for breakfast.’
‘He seems well-enough fed to me.’
‘I don’t know what goes on in that house,’ admitted June, but disapprovingly, nonetheless.
‘So you think this really is the right course of action to be taking, do you, June?’
‘Of course it’s the right thing. Unless you can think of anything better.’
‘It just seems so extreme. The closer we get the more… violent it seems.’
June stopped the car and sighed. ‘Tracy, are you up to this?’
Tracy said, ‘What I mean is, is Eve really that bad a mother to deserve…’
June’s voice was unexpectedly sweet. ‘Tracy, she has a history. She has a mental disorder, a file on her as fat as the Bible. We’re protecting the child, Tracy. Have you got it?’
They drove on.
Mad or bad: a mere grey wash spills between them. In this final stage of the theft of Josiah, Briggs did not invoke Eve’s bad behaviour but the fact that she was crazy. And for those of us mortals who yearn to draw clear black lines where there are none, the truth is that June Briggs in this instance was right: Eve did have a screw or two loose, which loosened even further the morning they took her son away.
Even as a child Eve’s mother hadn’t managed to make her understand, ‘If you do this, I’ll do that.’ To link actions with their consequences was a mental feat that she simply couldn’t manage; Eve didn’t live so much for the day as for the minute. When they took her son she couldn’t conceive of the notion of ‘punishment’; she couldn’t understand that they were playing a game and had given her a role to play and a feeling to feel, namely that of remorse. When Eve looked back and tried to piece together what had happened, she could remember a second in which the house was full, yes, she could distinctly see Gibson giving Josiah a bowl of cereal and Josiah chattering away, they were making plans for the day, they were off to the fen again… and then she remembered a further second. The house was empty this time. She called for Gibson but Gibson was gone.
She tried to put into some sort of order the intervening seconds. No, she hadn’t heard the social workers coming in. Perhaps Gibson had answered the door. She remembered Josiah saying to her, ‘See you soon, Mummy,’ and he was holding Gibson’s hand. He could have been off on a trip, for the lightness with which he had said it. Then he was gone, and Gibson was gone.
So perhaps that’s what had happened, perhaps they’d all gone to the fen together. But if that was the case, why was she looking in the garden for him? And she had kept with her this image, this dreadful image, of Gibson kneeling in a corner, burying his head deep into it, as though only two walls had strength enough to support its weight. So why hadn’t she gone up to him then, while she could? Why had she left the walls to hold his head for him? Where had she gone?
Nowhere far, geographically speaking. For the whole of her life she was to imagine that it was Gibson who had run away from her, who was found at the end of that week in a ditch of damp, black earth and taken back to Fulbright hospital. But the truth was, it was she who had run away from him.
She had lain between Josiah’s bed and the wall, squashing herself in between them as if in a coffin. And not a thought did she have for anyone in that little family. She was neither angry nor resentful, and was thinking as clearly as she had ever thought. Her mind was ruthlessly engaged on a track which had hitherto been virtually untrodden: namely that of looking for the causes of things. For Eve had lived her life timelessly, she had existed with no thought for past nor future. Already, Josiah seemed like a mirage to her, for he had been there, sweet thing! But now he was gone somewhere else.
And in the vacuum that ensued many images fought to be seen, and the one which came upon her with the greatest force was the ghost of Gilbert Fitzpatrick, so physical she could have touched him, a velvet waistcoat and dark wavy hair, smelling of wood smoke. He was kissing her toes, stroking her soft, supple, girl’s feet, her smooth shins, her plump knees. He told her she had much to learn, and he much to teach, that they had a complementary mission in this life, and death, and eternity. ‘Gilbert’, she said to him, (and
she spoke out loud to the room) ‘Did I ever tell you that I have a son, Josiah? Did I ever tell you that? Will you teach him for me? I’m so ignorant myself. Sometimes I’m just not up to it myself. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve no strength left. I want to crawl into your pocket, my love.’
Was it minutes, was it hours later? Up Eve sat to write Gilbert a letter. She looked for paper, envelopes. She went back into the sitting-room and wondered why she was curious at the sight of an empty corner there, and shook herself out of her reverie. She found paper and sat at the table to write to him; the mood she was in was scary, and the handwriting was too big for the page. Finally she was finished, satisfied. But then she tried to remember the name of the cottage where she was so happy with him, where he read to her while she lay her restless busy head on his lap to be stroked, and with words so beautiful shooed out the words so ugly from her brain. She couldn’t even remember the name of the county. The place had become a myth.
As Eve slumped in the chair, her cheek resting on the table, she recognised that other place as freedom, where her mind could simultaneously flit yet be contained by her lover, her body surrendered yet utterly true. Then for a fleeting moment she dared to sink into another reality. She cried out Gibson’s name. The good, kind, solid Gibson, father of her child! How ironic it was that this great act of freedom of hers, this running against the grain, should leave her so trapped: the dutiful wife and mother of suburbia!
Suddenly a nausea held her in its sticky, sickly clamp; the air itself became reified: an unbreathable substance choking her lungs. She began to count to herself, one for every inhalation, one for every exhalation, as though she were beginning at the beginning of things, could start afresh and know for certain, this time, that two follows one and three follows two. Calmer now, she considered the seconds following each other in an indefatigable sequence, and it reassured her to know that time was hurtling heedless towards certainty and would carry her along for the ride. In the larger scale of things, there was nothing she could do about anything.
That knowledge began to exhaust her. How odd, she thought, that she ever thought her will might resist her fate. We are not players of the game but part of it. Even spectators are part of the game. No one can escape, no one can reach solid ground. We are all floating, gravity deceives us and makes us believe we have some hold on things, but we are like chess pieces in someone else’s space capsule, our weight is a random thing with no truth in it.
‘I am a drop of petrol in an ocean,’ she spoke out loud and laughed. She got up from the kitchen chair, swaying, as though conscious of her essential lightness, and found herself moving upstairs in an unspecified search for the horizontal, or the path of least resistance. She looked first in her own bedroom, but it smelt of Gibson, not that she minded the smell but that’s not what she was looking for; the bathroom was too cold and Josiah’s bedroom didn’t merit even a glimpse. She drew the curtains on the landing and lay down on the carpet. She didn’t sleep and she rarely closed her eyes, but the nothingness was sweet in itself.
At two in the afternoon, June Briggs was in bargaining mood. The morning had been a great success: the lure of school and other children, the first trip in a car in his entire life had made Josiah’s first journey without his father an easy one. Even Tracy said she was surprised at how quickly Josiah had trusted them. And then, when Briggs had rung the school at lunchtime, the headmistress was full of enthusiasm, and astonishment that Josiah had never seen a television before. So, Briggs, in full possession of her moral victory, was off to put Josiah’s mother in the picture, to inform her that the school bus stopped in the Arbury estate at ten past eight for five minutes, and that if Josiah was not on that bus the following morning he would be taken into care.
She parked the car immediately outside the house. The curtains were closed. Good! Eve must be feeling suitably cowed. But Briggs was too professional to gloat, and she straightened her face in the car mirror. The doorbell made a sing-song chime. No one answered it, but nor did she expect them to.
‘Eve,’ she called through the letter-box. ‘I’ve got good news for you! Josiah likes school! He’s mixing with the other children very well! Let me in and I’ll tell you more!’ Her voice had the same tone as the doorbell. ‘Eve! Gibson!’ she called again. When there was still no reply, she shouted, ‘Look, I need you to open the door!’
Eve, meanwhile, was calmly filling a bucket with water in the bathroom. This was a first for her, she needed the light relief of it. She was pleased to notice through the crack in the curtains that Briggs had dressed herself up, and had a proper hairdo, which suddenly reminded her of her mother.
‘Hello June!’ called Eve from the landing window, all smiles. ‘I’m so sorry, I was in the bathroom and I didn’t hear you. Is there anything you want?’
Briggs craned her neck to look at her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want to tell you about Josiah’s progress today.’
‘Josiah’s progress?’ Eve mulled over the word. ‘Progress?’ she repeated.
‘Eve, I’m getting neck-ache. It would be good to speak to you face to face, you know. Could you be a love and let me in?’
‘Love? You’ve never called me “love” before? Does that mean that I’m making progress? Or does it mean that you’re making progress?’
‘Open this door!’
‘Hold on a second!’ said Eve, disappearing from the window.
Briggs looked down, satisfied, and waited for the front door to open.
Eve fetched the bucket, and spat in it for good measure. Gleefully she surveyed Briggs’ coiffured hair. The moment before is always more delightful than the moment after, she thought to herself. The bucket was heavy; it took all her strength to balance it on the sill. Eve was as icy-calm as a ferret. She watched Briggs looking at her watch.
‘I hope that’s expensive,’ thought Eve.
She tilted the bucket, surely and steadily, and the water fell, fast and furious, a perfect hit.
‘Bad weather we’ve been having!’ Eve shouted down.
The woman walked, wet but professional, back to her car.
Eve never learnt of Briggs’s strategies for revenge, for within twelve hours she had left the country.
Wars happen when language runs out, and that is how it was with Eve that night. Not that she did not rant first, hour after hour, striding from room to room, declaiming that schools were breeding grounds for stupidity and cowardice, places where fear begot fear and like begot like, where homogeneity stifled every living soul.
‘That’s what they want to do to him!’ she cried out. ‘That’s what they want to do to my son! They want to kill his soul, and when it’s dead we can only pray his body will follow suit. I shall ask the doctors to release him from the machine, and I shall say, let him die now, and let us pray that he finds God in the hereafter because he was never given a chance on earth, he was only taught fear! You morons! You morons that think you know better than I do! You dried up, shrivelled up, life-forms, the word ‘human-being’ is too big for you! And how dare you ridicule my husband! He has more spirit and understanding in his little toe than the whole lot of you wankers put together! You ignorant, empty worms, you pen-pushing, arrogant, stale idiots! You’ve never had an original thought in your lives, and in your trudging blindness you make a bloody sloth look alert!
‘But I shall kill you all before you kill Josiah! You’ve taken away my chance to breathe life into him, so I shall take away your chance to breathe death into him. I shall take away your evil schools, I shall burn the whole lot of them to the ground! I shall tackle the cog factories themselves, for that is all they are, manufacturing cogs to keep the world turning in its dire course, mindless cogs with less humanity than a cat!’
That was more or less the gist of it. Then Eve stormed out of the house at 5.45 only to return a few minutes later. She took a good look at herself in the mirror. ‘My God, I look quite mad,’ she said, flattening down her hair and trying to look serious. She went upstairs to
change into smarter clothes. The only thing Eve found which was suitable was her wedding dress, a Laura Ashley floral number she’d picked up in a charity shop especially for the occasion.
‘I never thought I’d be wearing this again,’ she thought, as she stretched her arm behind her back to do up the zip. ‘And I’m sure I bought shoes to go with it!’ She rummaged around on the floor of her fitted wardrobe and found a pair of pink stilettos. Eve brushed her teeth, combed her hair and smiled at herself in the bathroom mirror. ‘Just a little lipstick’, she thought to herself, and applied some, though the only colour she could find was red. ‘This will be some party’, she said to her reflection.
Eve’s first stop was the petrol station. She opted for the leaded petrol, deciding it would be the more flammable, and bought two full gallon containers. She smiled happily at all the people in the queue, remarking that it was a warm night for the time of year.
As she frankly didn’t know where any of the schools of Cambridge were, not even the primary school where they had sent Josiah, she had to ask directions. And who better to ask than the gangs of drunken, smoking teenagers hanging around the street corners, all of whom, she was quite sure, would love to see their schools burnt down. Teetering on her pink heels, she swayed her petrol cans as happily as if they had been fancy bags from a boutique.