by Jill Dawson
So, first I call in at this Pupil Referral place. Actually, it’s not a school, as I imagined, not even one central building. It’s a service, and one I’m told is in danger of being cut. I meet the bloke who is supposed to be explaining it to me, in a damp, coffee-smelling community building in Littleport. Next to the Ex-Servicemen’s Club. A converted church hall with hastily added plastic chairs, colourful posters advertising events at ‘Ely Beet Club’ and second-hand computers.
‘Is it definitely going to be cut? What does that mean? What happens to kids who are expelled, then?’ I ask.
‘Quite,’ says this chap.
An English teacher himself, he’s already told me that he found the noise and chaos of large classrooms in the local school he taught in for years ‘a bit much’ and that this one-to-one tutoring work, and visiting pupils in their own homes, and getting them through exams, suits him much better. He has a stammer, I notice, but he’s intense, determined to say what he needs to, despite it.
‘It’s not all – misbehaving or – or – excluded children, you know. Sometimes it’s girls – it’s girls who get pregnant. There are three of those at the – at the moment. And I also tutor a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome who needs the – who needs the calmness and routine that only one-to-one tutoring can provide.’
The contrast with the school Ben and I visited could not be more stark. But although it’s shabby the atmosphere is cosy, comfortable. And from what he says, even if the service is to be cut, there will still be work of one kind or another with these children. I try to imagine myself here. Standing here. Facing the kind of children he’s describing. Is Alice right? Would they be too threatening for me, too foreign?
I consider whether I dare ask this teacher about Drew Beamish. I haven’t told him why I’m here, or who I am exactly (whatever that means), but it occurs to me that he must have taught him?
‘Was it – was he one of your kids? The boy who died in a motorcycle accident at Black Drove last year?’
It’s a small place. I won’t need to say more, I know that.
‘Drew Beamish,’ the man says, simply, and nods. Then, ‘I used to teach him at his old – at his old school too.’ A pause. I get the definite impression he is deciding what to tell me. His stammer intensifies. ‘He lost his – his father the year before. Very sad.’ Then, from nowhere he adds, rather breathlessly: ‘He loved birds. He was good at History, and Art. In Year Seven, he did an art project called – it was called “Birds of the Fenlands”. A kingfisher and a reed bunting and. And a – a greylag goose. The beak is – a – it’s a – salmon pink, you know.’
‘You grow fond of them,’ this man says, shaking my hand as I leave. ‘It’s good to be – to be useful.’
He’s young, I notice, barely thirty himself, and he’s clearly local from his accent. He doesn’t seem the least suprised that I would consider a piecemeal job like this, one with such an uncertain future and remit, rather than a big school or a new academy.
His parting words are barely audible: ‘The Fens. Most people find them – boring. Most people think they’re – a – a bit flat.’
As I start the long drive to Black Drove, the scar, the wound at my chest, draws tight. I expected this, there’s nothing I can do about it. Ruth Beamish has the door open, and is waiting for me, on the dot of four-thirty. This, she tells me later, is the time of day that Drew died.
The first small shock is that I was right: she does have big dark eyes, she is a woman of uncommon beauty. I put this down to how much time I have spent imagining. Many is the hour I have dreaded this encounter, that’s all. She isn’t exactly as I imagined her, but there is a shimmer, a shudder, some kind of recognition when she opens the door. She’s wearing a baggy shirt over jeans and she is slim, I can see, underneath it, and vulnerable, like a child herself. She has these extraordinary dark eyes, and long lashes, and young skin, skin with that bloom still on it, like Alice’s skin; that of a lovely young girl, not a woman of, what is she? Late thirties maybe. Her dark hair is gathered up from her neck in a ponytail, caught in an elastic band.
She launches in with no preamble. It was me who telephoned the hospital, she says, sopping the blood that poured from her son’s ears and nose with his T-shirt; rummaging in his pockets until she found his mobile, miraculously still working. As was his heart, she thought at first, when she buried her face close to Drew’s chest, breathing in the washed cotton of his favourite T-shirt, her own fanatical laundering, only the day before.
‘I’m mad for washing things,’ she says, ‘I love it.’ Then: ‘You don’t mind me telling you this? No one else lets me talk about him. But I want to.’
She settles down on her sofa with a cigarette. There are two cups of tea on the low coffee table in front of us. A cat on a cushion. And photographs everywhere.
She’d made calm replies to the questions of the Emergency Services – ‘Well, I’m a nurse, see, you’d expect me to, wouldn’t you?’ (No, he had not been wearing a helmet, no, he was only messing on the bike in a field, no, he wasn’t on a public road). They assured her they were on their way, and she hadn’t wanted to look, she couldn’t bear to, no, it’s true, she didn’t see the strange angle of Drew’s head, the fact that he didn’t open his eyes, and didn’t make a sound and seemed in all respects – apart from that one fact she clung to, ‘Just that, you know, that steady tick’ – to have slipped under the gate in the field and away from her.
‘Well, I’ve seen it before, you know, lots of times, being a nurse. I was with my husband at the end, too. You know when they’re there, and you know when they’ve gone. But I kept thinking, look, there’s tiny shoots of stubble on his chin, things still growing and living and moving . . . you know, that’s alive, surely?’
She draws on her cigarette. Doesn’t bother to offer me one. The craving hits me again, more powerfully. Did he smoke, I wonder, suddenly? Of course he smoked. The room smells of cigarettes, and cats, and also some menthol-type thing, some cold cure. I’m feeling quite choked, unable to breathe out, but I don’t like to say so. I’m trying to be quiet, and do as she asked, and let her talk.
‘He had sort of broad shoulders, but he was skinny, you know. You want to see a photograph of him?’
I grunt something. I try to make it sound like yes.
She reaches for one of the many photographs in frames on top of her TV screen. A child wearing a fake moustache and brandishing a gun. He stares hard at me; points the gun. Then another one, a boy and a man, fishing by a river. The man looks into the river, the boy examines me. He looks unconvinced; I clearly fall short in some way. Then a third, more recent, a teenage boy, brown eyes, dark lashes, as if he’s wearing eyeliner. Looking straight at me. An accusing look, challenging: What are you going to do with it, then, now you’ve got it? A prominent Adam’s apple.
(When he was eight, first hearing the phrase, Drew had cried: I don’t want Adam’s apple! I want my own apple! she says. She tells me he was funny. People liked him, he was so clever. He had a funny way of looking at things.)
The sudden hot stink of him: smoke and leather and motorbike oil, warm and tall and laughing, a rucksack over his shoulder, saying wot’s up, Doc? like Bugs Bunny, the old cartoon, like she says he often did, and grinning. In a frame, she hands me his History GCSE certificate. Grade A*.
‘They let him take his History and English GCSEs early. I don’t know if you know about the PRU? Did the exams on his own in a little room in the summer.’
‘He must have been clever,’ I manage to say. I know this is the right thing, because she smiles then. For the first time. Then she unfolds a piece of paper and shoves that towards me too.
‘This is his – I kept this. The order of service.’
I stare at the paper she puts in my hand. Another photograph of this handsome brown-eyed boy, on a photocopied sheet.
A Service for the Much Loved Andrew Beamish,
fondly known to his friends as Drew
24 October 1995 – 2
4 October 2011
Inside it states the hymns and the prayers and a poem.
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Nor Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
‘And we had Amy Winehouse. It had just come out, this duet she did just before . . . with Tony Bennett. ‘Body and Soul’. Do you know that one?’ she says, taking the paper back from me and smoothing it out.
I’m all for you, body and soul. I do. I nod. In my head I hear the Ella Fitzgerald version, but I know it all right.
‘I just expect him to walk in, you know? And I can show him it, and say did we pick the right music? Did we pick the right poem?’ she tells me.
I nod again. I swallow. The tea in front of us has gone cold.
‘Could I make us another cup of tea?’ I suggest. ‘Is it through there? Why don’t I do that? You sit down, don’t worry. I’ll find everything.’
In the kitchen I breathe deeply, lean back against the cold hum of the fridge. Close my eyes. On opening them I’m greeted by another photograph of Drew, younger, a school photograph with recently cropped fringe and best smile. This one is innocent. In this one he thinks he will live for ever and never lose anyone he loves. Me too, lad. I thought so too, back then, I want to say. Maybe you knew better than me, Dryden surely did: the joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Even the tea bags, once I find them, seem vulnerable, tender – small and crumpled – in a jar with a chipped lid. I stand there for a very long time, holding the tea bag and thinking: This is his house. This is his mother. This is where he stood.
Something tugs at me. Small fingers. Snatching at the fabric of my shirt. Tugging. Insistent. Hey. I shake them off, stare at a Mother’s Day card stuck to the fridge with a magnet. Childish writing. ‘To the best ever Mum – I mean it.’
‘I’m a bit out of my depth here, Mrs Beamish,’ I say, carrying the mugs. My voice comes out like the husk of a voice, with its centre missing. I feel it is a lie.
Here you are: this is it. Come on, Patrick. Square up. Be a man, look again, look deeper.
Drew, she calls him. Never Andrew. She prattles away. She didn’t approve of the donor card at first, she says. But she understood. It was about his father. His father had died from a heart attack and Drew believed – wrongly, of course, since only a few people with, like, certain illnesses can benefit from heart transplants – that a heart transplant would have saved him.
‘There was some trouble. That’s why he wasn’t in school. You probably know about that? He had this crush – this woman. This is a small place; Maureen must have told you. He really was crazy about her, that’s just the kind of boy he was. Nothing happened. It was just to do with – it was because he was upset about Billy, his dad, you know. And afterwards, after the accident, the police came round afterwards, asking. About the barn. But there was nothing there either. They had to let it drop.’
Now she’s lost me. It feels best to let her do the talking. She cries a few times, of course, but she pulls herself together pretty quickly. She’s tough, admirable. Her accent, I notice, is not quite the one I expected either. Yes, there’s a rural aspect to it but it’s more of a mixture. She doesn’t quite pronounce the ‘oo’ sound that I’ve been led to expect – ‘bootiful’ like the ad for Norfolk Turkey, but there is a suggestion of that, yes, now I’m listening hard.
‘He was stubborn, you know?’ she continues. ‘About the card, I mean. You could never change his mind once it was made up. He was always like that. Everyone said he was happy-go-lucky, sunny, that kind of thing. The vicar even said “sunny” at his – at the – but . . . they didn’t know him. He was like his father. Like all the Beamishes. Like his grandfather. Bloody stubborn.’
She has gone to the kitchen to get sugar, and I’ve followed her, standing in this tiny room backed up against the fridge, hugging my mug of tea. She crouches to the washing machine, opens the door and pulls out a sock. ‘Look,’ she says.
I don’t understand what I’m looking at.
‘I can’t bring myself to use this: I take myself off to the laundry in Littleport. He used to hide things in his socks,’ she says. She shows me a lumpy blue sock. Something stuffed down in the toe. She pulls it out. A boiled sweet. Yellow. A pear drop. She puts it back in; shakes the sock at me.
‘I think he meant me to find this. Drew. He liked his jokes.’
I stare at the sock in her hand, at the lump in the toe from the sweet. Like he just put it there yesterday.
‘People said, people say this thing: You’re still young. You could have another baby. Why do people say that? It’s horrible. It’s a horrible thing to say. As if Drew wasn’t special. Like one person can be just swapped for another.’
This isn’t the flipping exchange department in Marks and Spencer.
Back in the living room there’s the sound of the cat purring. A thrumming sound, machine-like. I glance at the window, at my car, silver and real, on her driveway. My cup is quickly empty. I reach forward and put it on the coaster on the table. She seems at last to focus on me. A glassiness lifts.
‘It’s his motorbike,’ she’s saying. ‘That fucking Ninja. It’s in my garage where the police put it – where they put it that day – and – there’s not much damage, in the end. Hardly a scratch. I want rid of it and I need the money. I thought you could – put it on eBay or Auto Trader or whatever people do. Or just take it away for me. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to go in there. You said in your letter I could ask you—’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I say, relieved to find that the request after all – the offer I purportedly made – is something tangible, something within my capabilities. She nods to where the garage is, alongside the house, produces a key. I pocket it, ask if she minds if I come back for the motorbike tomorrow, today makes no sense as I can’t ride it, I can’t exactly fit it in the boot. (I’m thinking, though it would be tactless to mention it to her, that Ben would love to help me.)
‘Did Drew like broccoli?’ I ask her, politely, as if I had only just thought of it; as if it has no importance at all.
‘Broccoli. No. Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘You’re well, are you?’ she asks, suddenly seeming to remember that she should ask. Remembering that I must have been ill. ‘It’s worked, has it, the operation?’
‘Yes. I had – it was severe. If a donor hadn’t come along last year I would have. Died—’
There’s murmuring all around us, the vibration after a tuning fork has been struck. The cat purrs, louder than ever. In fact the whole room seems to be vibrating, thrumming wildly. I abandon myself to it, to the shaking. I feel I should move now, leave perhaps, but my legs won’t shift. A sluice of sadness. A sweeping feeling, so unlike anything I’ve ever felt. A memory of my own mother, sitting on a sofa beside me like this, and an envelope between us, unopened, a letter I was scared to open: a school entry letter. And Cushie saying, ‘Away, pet, I don’t even mind about any of this stuff, that’s just your father. There’s more to life than winning things, you know. Just be a good man, that’s all I ask.’ Oh Mam. Why did you set the bar so high?
My shoulders are shaking. I don’t know if this Ruth is looking at me but suddenly she’s moved around the table between us and is close to me. I smell her, a smell like cloves or something medical, and a whiff of warm breath.
‘I know this is a bit funny, but could I—’ she says.
And before I know it, before I can say yes (would I have said yes?), she has her ear squashed to my chest, and her warm cheek there, and she’s listening. She’s nestling against my shirt. She seems to suffer no embarrassment at all. I would undo the buttons on my shirt
to help her get closer but her cheek is pressed there, I can’t push her face away to do it. I seem to be holding my breath. She’s crying again – I feel the spread of warmth, of wetness, against the fabric. A soft ticking sound like a watch enveloped in cotton.
She’s listening to her son’s heart.
It pounds away: I think of mobile phones, their steady flickering light. Stars. A motorbike engine, throbbing. A yo-yo with no string, but still bouncing. Hospital machinery. That frown-line between Helen’s eyebrows.
We separate after a while, we return to polite behaviour; we’re both embarrassed now. Once, she looks out of the window and asks how come I haven’t moved away and when I mutter something non-committal about liking the Fens, she says, as if she’s been thinking this for a while, ‘I suppose we’re connected now, aren’t we? Like – if someone did a family tree they could include both of us.’ I am about to disagree – there’s no logic to this – but something stops me.
I agree to take the motorbike off her hands, to come again on Friday. The irony is not lost on me – the completeness of handling this boy’s bike, the temptation to ride it. Full circle: possession of something my new heart once loved, my heart’s desire. I’m so preoccupied – choked – that I don’t remember the one thing that Maureen insisted on before I came. I forget to thank her.
Stepping out onto the little close, I have the strong feeling of being watched. It’s early evening now, the sky darkening to lavender. I move further away from the Beamish drive, walk a few yards from the car, stare out towards the field.
Are you here again? I whisper. Are you here, lad?
My heart beats fast, in reply.
Above the tree, the tree with the cellophane flowers still bedraggled and hanging from it, though now reduced to scraps, in the whiteness of the air is a shape, a soft brown bird. A kestrel, hunting. It must have spied something on the ground, a shrew or mouse, somewhere near that cuddly toy. It skitters in the wind, its wings beating fast in order to hover there, seeming to gutter like a candle flame, and then rally. I watch it for a moment, noting how hard those wings beat, in order to stay poised like that. And then it dives and misses, and buggers off.