Jake's Tower

by Elizabeth Laird

Mrs Judd’s hand dropped away from the door and she took a step forward, but then she felt the rain on her hair and moved back under cover again.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Marie,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have told the boy lies. Danny’s not his father. You know it. I know it. That was wrong.’

  I wanted to spit at her.

  ‘He is! He is my dad!’ I yelled at her. ‘Mum’s never lied to me. Why should she? Anyway, he wouldn’t have come to see me in the hospital, would he? He wouldn’t have written that letter, would he?’

  Mrs Judd looked puzzled for a moment, then she shook her head pityingly.

  ‘What about your family, Marie?’ she said, her voice a little bit softer. ‘I’m sure they’d help you out if you’re stuck for place to go.’

  Mum made an angry noise but didn’t answer.

  ‘You should have gone to your own mother, not me,’ Mrs Judd said. ‘Where is she anyway?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Mum snapped out. ‘Ask the children’s home where she dumped me. I never bothered.’

  Neither of them did anything for a moment, then Mum said, ‘It’s you or the refuge. If I take him there in this state, the Social will get him. They’ll put him in Willowbank like they did with me.’

  Mrs Judd seemed to dither all of a sudden. She was looking at me, but I didn’t look back. What was the point?

  Mum waited a moment, then she said, ‘OK, I get it. I didn’t expect anything better from you anyway. Come on, Jake. We’re not wanted here.’

  She’d gone sort of saggy in the middle, and when she bent down to pick up her suitcase she could hardly lift it off the ground.

  ‘Leave it. I’ll take it for a bit,’ I said.

  We got to the gate, and I said, ‘Which way? Right or left?’ and she started laughing. It was scarier than shouting or carrying on. Scarier even than crying. She just kept laughing and saying, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. What’s the difference? Right or left, Jake. Whichever you like. It’s all the same to me.’

  A dreadful cold, despairing feeling was closing in on me. I looked back to the house. Mrs Judd was still standing at the open door, her hands clasped together.

  ‘Marie,’ she called out. ‘I’ll give you some money for a taxi. Come back here. You can’t take the kid wandering round the streets in this weather. He’ll catch his death.’

  ‘Stuff your money, you old bag,’ shouted Mum. ‘I wouldn’t touch it if you begged me.’

  The thought of climbing into a warm dry taxi was too much for me.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Please. I’m freezing.’

  ‘Jake! It’s Jake, isn’t it?’ Mrs Judd said. ‘Come back here. I’m not going to bite you. Come on. Look, I’ll give you a tenner. Get yourself and your mum into the warm somewhere, OK?’

  I went back up to the door. She stepped inside and turned her back on me to open her handbag which was on a little table in the hall. For the first time I saw a picture hanging on the wall behind her. As I looked up at it, the hood of my jacket fell back off my head.

  ‘Mrs Judd,’ I said, ‘why have you got a picture of me on your wall?’

  She stiffened, and shut the clip on her handbag with a loud snapping noise.

  ‘Try anything, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘That’s not you. That’s Danny, as you well know.’

  Then she turned back to me with a couple of fivers in her hand.

  ‘Jake!’ Mum was shouting from the gate. ‘Come here. Don’t touch her money. Get away from her.’

  I don’t suppose Mrs Judd had seen me properly till then. I’d had my hood up and, like I keep saying, my face wasn’t exactly recognizable. Anyway, that was the moment when it happened. I think what did it was seeing the way my hair shoots straight up from my forehead, just like the boy in the photo. Whatever it was, something clicked in her eyes. Click. Like that. She recognized me.

  She put a hand up to the side of her face.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It is. Danny.’

  Mum and I were sitting on the edge of the sofa in Mrs Judd’s front room. We’d taken our outdoor things off and dumped them in the hall, but my other clothes underneath were wet and I was shivering. I could hear Mrs Judd in her kitchen at the back, making tea.

  Mum’s back was straight and her cheeks were red and she was saying things under her breath, nodding her head. It looked like she was working herself up, getting ready all the things she wanted to say to Mrs Judd. I’d never seen her like this before. I’d never known her to fight back.

  She’ll get us thrown out if she loses her rag, I told myself, and all I could think of was being outside in the cold and the wet, and wanting to stay in here and get warm.

  ‘Do I really look like him?’ I said, touching her arm. ‘Like my dad? You never said.’

  I wanted to take her mind off being angry, but it didn’t work. She didn’t notice I’d said anything.

  I gave up and looked round the room. It was nice. Very clean and tidy, anyway. The little blue cushions on the sofa (four of them) were balanced upright on their corners, and there were lace mats under all the vases and jugs and china statues she’d arranged on a sort of sideboard thing.

  The only way you could tell someone lived here was the dent in the seat of an older chair with wooden arms pulled up near the gas fire, and a pair of glasses on the table next to it.

  Mrs Judd came back in carrying a tray. Her hands were shaking and the mugs were rattling against each other.

  ‘Pull that other chair up to the fire,’ she said, looking at me, not at Mum. ‘You look half frozen.’

  I didn’t move. She put the tray down on the little table, bent over to turn the gas up and straightened up again.

  ‘Sugar, Marie?’

  ‘No,’ said Mum, stretching out her hand for the mug.

  ‘What about you, Jake?’

  She was staring at me as if I was a ghost.

  ‘Two please, Mrs Judd,’ I said.

  I remembered what Kieran had said about sweet tea being good for shock. That’s what his nan gave him when he got beaten up, probably, and now here I was with my own nan offering some to me. Weird.

  She gave me the tea and sat down in her chair again.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said. ‘It’s a shock, just seeing him like that. He’s Danny all over again. It seems I did you an injustice, Marie. If I’d thought, for one moment . . .’

  Mum gave an angry laugh.

  ‘Oh, you thought all right. You thought I was a lying, cheating little money-grabber, trying to get my hooks into your precious Danny. You thought I was the scum of the earth.’

  The warmth of the tea, all hot and sugary, began to spread through me as I sipped it. I held the mug on my knees with my hands cupped round it. The heat was running up my arms and down my legs, but inside I was beginning to shrivel up again at the angry sound in Mum’s voice.

  Mrs Judd put her mug down on the tray. Her back had stiffened now.

  ‘If you mean did I want Danny going off and getting led into all kinds of things, no, I didn’t.’

  ‘Led into? Led into?’ Mum’s voice was rising. ‘Got no idea, have you? They were trouble, the pair of them, Danny Judd and Steve Barlow. Up for anything. It was them did the leading.’

  I felt as if an electric shock had run through me, a horrible tingling feeling.

  ‘What? Steve and my dad? You mean they were mates? You never said that, Mum. I never knew that.’

  ‘You can’t pull that one on me.’ Mrs Judd’s face was going red. ‘I kept Danny away from Steve Barlow. He was a bad influence. In trouble from the time he could walk. I never allowed him—’

  Mum snorted.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it. Danny was out of his bedroom window and down the drainpipe every other night. Good training, he said, for when he was in the SAS. They were after me night after night, the two of them. Wouldn’t leave me in peace.’

  Mrs Judd pounced on this like a dog on a titbit.

  ‘So how
was anyone to know, when you got pregnant, who the father was? I used to see you, down by the cinema, all dolled up in your skimpy little skirts, shrieking and falling about with half the boys in town.’

  Mum quivered.

  ‘I never looked at anyone but Danny. Never went with anyone. He was the only one. I thought I was going to die when he ran off and left me.’

  Mrs Judd was like someone left behind in a race, trying to catch up. I felt the same, about a mile back and out of breath.

  ‘That drainpipe, it wouldn’t have held his weight,’ she said. ‘It kept coming loose. Jake kept having to fix it.’

  ‘I can’t have done,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even here.’

  ‘Not you. Danny’s dad.’

  ‘You mean my grandad?’ I hadn’t bargained for a grandad.

  She looked surprised.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Yes, of course. Your grandfather. Are you sure you don’t want to sit nearer the fire, dear? Have some more tea.’

  ‘But he’s got the same name as me,’ I said.

  Mum looked down at me, and I had the feeling she’d forgotten for a while that I was there.

  ‘Danny chose your name. We agreed on it before you were born. Jake for a boy. Rosalie Michelle for a girl. I’d got used to it. I liked it. So I kept to it even after he ditched me.’

  ‘He always loved his dad,’ Mrs Judd said, looking away from me into the fire. ‘He never got over him dying like that.’

  ‘He’s dead, then, my grandad?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Judd. ‘When Danny was fourteen. You’ve got to remember that, Marie. He was only sixteen when he – when you had the baby.’

  The steam had started going out of Mum but when Mrs Judd said that it fizzed right up again.

  ‘Sixteen! Big deal! I was sixteen too. Sixteen, on my own, and pregnant.’

  Mrs Judd was picking at the bottom of her orange sweater.

  ‘Why didn’t he come and tell me? If he’d only owned up to it—’

  ‘Tell you?’ The scorn in Mum’s voice could have withered the plants on the windowsill. ‘I can see it, can’t you? “Oh, Mummy, all those nights you thought I was up in bed reading my comics and cuddling my teddy bear, I was down behind the Odeon smashing up the call boxes and getting Marie into trouble.” Scared stiff, he was, your precious Danny. Fight it out with anyone, down in town, but when it came to him facing up to his own mum, when it came to standing by his girlfriend and looking after his own kid, he was pathetic. A loser.’

  Mrs Judd seemed about to say something angry. Her eyes were locked on to Mum’s, and they were staring at each other. There was a question I’d been dying to ask, and at last I got it out.

  ‘Where is he, my dad? Am I going to see him?’

  ‘He’s in Lancashire,’ said Mrs Judd, her eyes still on Mum, ‘and when he gets back he’s going to get one hell of a shock. I never thought – I never dreamed – I can’t believe it, Marie. I can’t get over it.’

  ‘But, Mrs Judd,’ I said, ‘look on the bright side. If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

  For some reason, that made her laugh, and even Mum’s face cracked into half a smile. She stood up, pulled the other chair over to the fire and put her hands out to the warmth.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come here to ask for charity. I’m in a hole, that’s all, and I need a bit of help. Which, I think you’ll agree, I’ve got a right to.’

  She stuck her chin out as though she expected Mrs Judd to argue, but Mrs Judd just nodded.

  ‘It’s for Jake, see?’ Mum went on, as if talking had become more difficult. ‘I wouldn’t have come on my own account.’

  ‘Jake said something about Steve,’ said Mrs Judd, leaning forward too. ‘Not Steve Barlow, surely? You’re not shacked up with him, are you, Marie?’

  Mum pulled back.

  ‘I’ve been married – well, as good as – to Steve ever since Jake was a baby. You can turn your nose up, but he was the only one who stuck around. I kept him off as long as I could. Thought Danny might come back, didn’t I? But he didn’t, so I gave in in the end. You can say what you like about Steve, but he’s loyal, which is more than you can say for some. And he gave us a home.’

  She stopped and pushed her hair back from her face. It had been drying off and was going frizzy round the edges.

  ‘The thing is,’ she went on, ‘he keeps going after Jake. It was OK when Jake was little, well, most of the time. I used to keep Jake out of his way. It was me he went for then, being so jealous as he is. Locked me in, sometimes, he was that crazy. Broke my rib once. Now it’s Jake he goes for. It seems the more Jake turns out looking like Danny, the more it riles him.’

  I realized my mouth had fallen open. Things were dropping into place like coins into slots. Steve didn’t hate me because I was me, but because I looked like my dad. That was OK by me. That was just fine by me.

  The thing in the back of my mind, though, the thing that was bothering me now was that bit about Steve and my dad being mates. If my dad liked Steve that much, maybe he was the same kind of person. Maybe he wasn’t like I’d always imagined him, and he was a puncher and a beater too.

  Perhaps it was that thought, or maybe it was not having eaten anything since the ice cream at the zoo, centuries ago, or the knocks to my head, or getting so cold and wet. Anyway, the room and Mum and Mrs Judd and the china ornaments and the gas fire began to go round and round, and I started to fall. I didn’t even feel myself landing on the floor.

  ‘Take his legs. Get him back up on the cushions.’

  Mrs Judd’s voice came from a long way away.

  ‘Jake! Can you hear me? Open your eyes, love. Please!’

  It was Mum, and she sounded upset.

  I felt them lift me and guessed I was lying on the sofa. It was soft anyway, and smelt of old cloth. I didn’t dare open my eyes in case I passed out again.

  ‘He’s not got concussion, has he?’ Mrs Judd sounded disapproving. ‘You shouldn’t have let him out, Marie, after a head injury. He should have gone to bed and stayed there.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mum flared up. ‘That’s what I should have done, is it? Put him in his bed and wait for Steve to come back and finish him off after he’d tanked himself up at the pub? That’s all you know about it.’ Her voice softened. ‘Jake, love, please. Can you hear me, darling? Open your eyes.’

  It took more effort than pushing a bus up Mount Everest, but I got my lids open, and gave her a bit of a smile. Then I let them close again.

  ‘There. He’s coming round,’ said Mum. ‘You’ll be all right in a minute, Jake. Just lie still.’

  ‘I ought to get the doctor,’ said Mrs Judd.

  ‘He didn’t have his tea,’ said Mum, ‘or anything at midday either, come to think of it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’ Mrs Judd sounded almost relieved. ‘Danny always used to come over funny if he missed a meal. I’ll do some beans on toast. You could probably do with some and all.’

  I heard the door open and close.

  Mum was kneeling on the floor beside the sofa. I could feel her presence really close to me, and smell the peachy stuff she put on her face. She was holding my hand in one of hers and stroking it with the other. It felt great.

  ‘Mum,’ I managed to croak out.

  ‘Oh, Jake,’ she said, all choked up. ‘You looked so bad I was scared. I thought the old bat would go for the police and have you taken away. Can you sit up a bit? She’s getting you something to eat.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I whispered. ‘Just really, really tired. Can we stay here? I don’t want to go out again.’

  ‘You’re not going to,’ Mum said, in her new fighting voice. ‘You’re going to sleep here tonight. Me too.’

  She took her hands away. I wanted to grab hold and keep her there, but I didn’t.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said, and went out of the room.

  When she opened the door I caught a whiff of the baked beans, and th
e smell turned me up. I rolled over to face the back of the sofa and closed my eyes again. I could feel sleep creep up through me like a thick fog.

  A bit later, I heard them come back into the room, and Mum said, ‘It’s no good. He’s dead asleep. You can never wake him up once he’s gone right off.’

  And Mrs Judd said, ‘We’d better leave him here, then. I’ll get a blanket down. You can sleep in the back room tonight, Marie.’

  There was a bit of coming and going, and then a couple of blankets were tucked round me, and someone turned off the fire and switched out the lights, and the fog rolled on over me and swallowed me right up.

  I feel as if I was in church. This room is sort of holy, and I don’t dare touch a single thing. Only look. It’s OK to look.

  It’s his room. I’m lying in his bed.

  The thought does my head in, it’s so unreal.

  You can tell he left home when he was young, only a couple of years older than me, because there are boys’ things still in here. There’s a model of a B52 bomber on the shelf above his bed, and a biker poster stuck up behind the door.

  There’s other stuff too, though. Army stuff. A picture of a badge in a frame, and a shield like you get if you’ve won a race.

  The best thing is a photo of a whole lot of soldiers in their combat gear, in a desert somewhere, perched all over a tank. They’re grinning and waving and giving the V sign. I’ve looked and looked at it, till my eyes have gone crossed, trying to work out which one’s him.

  That’s so pathetic. I can’t even tell which man is my own dad.

  My best guess is the guy at the back, with his face a bit in the shade.

  There’s another photo too, much posher, with a lot more soldiers in really smart uniforms. They’re standing in rows with the real toffs sitting in chairs in front. The trouble is, they’re all wearing caps with the brims down over their noses, so I can’t see which one has the tufty hair. None of them are smiling. The sergeant major’s just yelled at them, ‘Eyes front! Stand to attention! Wipe that smile off your face, you horrible little man!’

  There are three bedrooms in this house. Mrs Judd’s is at the front, and there’s another quite big one at the back, next to the bathroom. And this little one, my dad’s old room, is over the front door.