by Ann Cleeves
‘It can’t have been easy for him,’ I said. ‘Moving here. A new family, new friends.’
‘It’s easy to make excuses.’ Her voice was even. She was trying to sound reasonable. We were two professionals talking together.
‘Not excuses. I’m trying to understand.’
‘Everyone blames the family,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes me so angry.’ She didn’t look angry. She looked bitter, embattled.
‘I’m not blaming anyone. Really.’
She sniffed, as if you couldn’t believe anything a social worker said.
‘I’m new to the case. Perhaps you could fill me in on some of the background. I understand that Thomas never knew his father.’
‘What has that to do with anything?’
I thought then that she would tell me to leave. I added quickly, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’
She managed to keep her self-control. ‘I didn’t want to maintain a relationship with Thomas’s father. It wouldn’t have worked. He had other commitments.’
But Philip wasn’t married to Joanna then. That came later, after he’d started work. So what commitments could there have been? Was Stuart Howdon keeping some awkward details from me? A previous marriage? Other children? I was longing to know, but this wasn’t the time.
‘Thomas was close to his grandparents, though, wasn’t he?’ I asked.
‘He was close enough to them. But they spoiled him. I’m not prepared to buy his affection. He could never accept that.’
I was already wondering what Ronnie had seen in this cow.
There was a shout from the kitchen. One of the girls was asking for a drink. Kay went out wearily to help. I realized she must have been dealing with similar demands all day. Perhaps I was judging her too harshly. I stood up too. I was starting to feel jittery – too much caffeine, not enough food – and couldn’t sit still. There was a photograph on one wall of a line of trees in winter, sunlight slanting through bare branches. Next to it on a white shelf stood a row of books. There wasn’t much fiction – a few classics left over from Kay’s college days and some action thrillers, but most were natural histories, travel, autobiographies of explorers, books on wilderness survival. There was nothing else to hold my interest and I wandered through to the kitchen after Kay.
At first she didn’t see me. She stood with a milk bottle in one hand and a plastic beaker in the other, deep in thought. All around her was evidence of her ordered life: calendars, notes, lists. Pinned to the notice board was a reminder that the Methodist Wives outing would be to Hexham Abbey. Packed lunch required. Fish and chip supper on the way home.
‘When I met Ronnie, when we got together, I thought it would be good for Thomas. It’s not that I hadn’t thought it through. He was eleven, just the age when a boy needs a father. And Ronnie didn’t mind the fact that I came as a package with the boy. Not at all. He said of course we’d have a family of our own one day, but he’d always wanted a son. And he had this house. So much room . . .’
And wouldn’t the other Methodist Wives be jealous? I thought spitefully. How they’d envy Kay moving into the smart house in the most desirable street in Whitley Bay. And wouldn’t they be secretly delighted when Thomas got into trouble and things started to go wrong.
‘But Thomas wouldn’t make any effort to like him. Ronnie tried really hard. He didn’t have things easy when he was a lad and he understood. Thomas always had so much energy. Ronnie said it was like having an untrained puppy in the house. He only had to turn round and he’d knock something over. But Ronnie didn’t mind that. He took Thomas out walking and climbing with him. I thought he’d enjoy it. The exercise and the fresh air.’
In my experience teenagers hated exercise. They were allergic to fresh air.
‘And at first he did seem to enjoy it. He talked about training for a job in the countryside. Gamekeeper, something to do with conservation perhaps. But that phase didn’t last long. And it didn’t stop him doing the things he knew would upset us. Smoking, of course, although we both abhor it. Running away from school. “Attention-seeking behaviour”, the teachers called it. As if I couldn’t have told them that. He was caught shoplifting in the off-licence at the end of the road. Can you imagine how humiliating that was for me? I teach other people’s children but I can’t control my own. People look at me as if I’m to blame for the way he’s turned out, but I’m not. I won’t take responsibility for it. Thomas has to do that.’
‘Did you consider discussing Thomas’s problems with his father?’
‘Never. I’d had no contact with him since before Thomas was born.’
‘What was Thomas like at home?’
‘Always difficult. Moody and rude. I stopped asking visitors to the house because he embarrassed me.’
And what about him? I thought. Did he ask his friends here? Or did you embarrass him?
She sat there, rigid, unblinking. The sort of woman I’d take an instant dislike to, if I met her at a case conference or if she were sitting on the magistrates’ bench. The sort of woman who’d blow-dry her hair every morning and keep a small packet of tissues and a safety pin in her handbag for emergencies, whose life was ruled by timetables and certainties. But I remembered what Mrs Mariner had said about her crying her eyes out when her baby was born and I wanted to get through to her.
‘Don’t you miss him?’
Her head snapped back so she was looking straight into my face. ‘I’ll tell you what I don’t miss. I don’t miss the vomit in the bathroom when he comes in at one o’clock after a drunken party, the loud music in his bedroom and the unsuitable friends. I don’t miss the police turning up on the doorstep because the neighbours have complained.’
All that seemed to go with the territory of being a parent. When you have kids you know they’re going to grow up. Did she expect her little girls to stay in every night doing their homework when they were sixteen? They’d be down Whitley on a Friday night showing their knickers in Idols nightclub and throwing up over the sea wall. Of course they would. Then I tried to look at things from Kay’s point of view. One moment of freedom and she’d got pregnant. Perhaps she was just being bizarrely overprotective.
‘What was the final straw?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What made you decide to throw him out?’
‘We didn’t throw him out. He had a choice. We’d have made him welcome if he’d agreed to abide by our rules.’
‘Something must have provoked the ultimatum.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not prepared to discuss it.’
Had she caught him shooting up in the immaculate kitchen? Having sex on her and Ronnie’s bed? Whatever it was, she wasn’t prepared to face it now.
‘Does Thomas have a girlfriend?’
‘No one that he was prepared to discuss with me.’
What sort of answer was that?
‘Did he pass any exams in the end?’
‘Only GCSEs. He dropped out before A-levels. And nothing spectacular. Cs and Ds. B in English. He did manage an A in music. But music’s his obsession.’
I couldn’t understand why she was so dismissive. The grades weren’t bad, especially if he’d been bunking off school. But perhaps it was a good sign that she remembered them at all.
‘What did he do when he left school?’
‘He stayed in bed. For days on end.’
‘No job?’
‘How could he have a proper job? He was going to be a rock star. So he told us.’ The sarcasm was scathing and well practised.
‘Was he in a band?’
‘Apparently.’
I didn’t know how she could be so stupid. Music was his passion but she’d made no effort to understand what he was into. I couldn’t push it though. Soon she’d remember I hadn’t told her what I was doing there.
‘Were they any good?’
She looked at me as if I were mad. ‘How would I know?’
‘You never went to see them play?’
&
nbsp; ‘I’d be the last person he’d want there. And no, they never came here to rehearse. The neighbours are elderly. They wouldn’t have stood for it. The band practised in a garage belonging to another parent. Someone more tolerant than us, according to Thomas. Occasionally they were booked to play in a pub. It hardly counts as a career.’
‘Doesn’t Thomas work at all?’
She paused. I wondered why she was so reluctant to admit to the job with Harry Pool. Would she have preferred Thomas to be unemployed to justify her action in throwing him out? Or was she so snobby that she couldn’t bear him to be working as an invoice clerk for a friend of her dad’s?
‘He works for a haulage firm. There’s no future in it.’ She looked at me. ‘He’s not a stupid boy. With a bit of work and effort he could have gone to university. It’s the waste which makes me so angry.’ And this time she did look angry. Her hands were clasped together and the knuckles were white. ‘I don’t like the people he mixes with there. They’re a rough crowd.’
‘Did he enjoy the work?’
‘He got out of bed to get there on time, so I suppose he did. He was never prepared to do anything he didn’t want to. He’s not badly paid for what he does. I suppose he enjoys the money.’
‘When did he leave home, Mrs Laing?’
‘About four months ago.’
‘And you haven’t seen him to talk to since then?’
‘No.’
‘How did he get on with your daughters?’
It wasn’t a question she was expecting. ‘He spoiled them. They adored him.’
‘So they were upset when he left?’
‘Children adjust easily at that age.’
‘Has he been back to visit them?’
‘He wasn’t invited.’ I said nothing, but she continued as if I’d accused her directly of being callous. ‘We couldn’t take the risk of upsetting them again. They’re settled now. Why disrupt them? My son is unreliable, Ms Bartholomew. He could promise to visit but not turn up. Or he could arrive drunk. The girls have seen enough unpleasantness. I’m not prepared to put them through more.’
‘Did he ever turn up out of the blue? Uninvited?’
‘I wasn’t here. Cath, the childminder, let him in.’
‘And?’
‘The girls were pleased to see him. Naturally. He bought a bag full of sweets. But he left them overexcited. They couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t good for them. I told Cath she wasn’t to encourage him.’
‘So he’s not been back?’
‘He tried once or twice. Not in the last few weeks.’
‘Thomas hasn’t reported to the office either,’ I said, ‘though I’ve sent him a couple of letters. He is at the same address?’
She looked at me, anxious for the first time. ‘Well, you’d know more about that than me. You found him the place. Absalom House. That hostel in Bennet Street.’
‘Of course. It’s just that he seems to be a bit elusive at the moment.’
I stood up. Despite my fascination with Ronnie Laing, I didn’t want him arriving now and recognizing me. But although she’d been so reluctant to talk to me, now Kay didn’t want to let me go.
‘Are you saying you’ve lost him?’
‘Of course not. Nothing like that.’
‘He is all right, isn’t he?’ she asked.
‘I’m sure he is.’
‘Can you call me when you’ve talked to him? Just to let me know. This is my work number.’
She wrote it carefully on a piece of paper. Why didn’t she want me calling her at home? It wasn’t as if she could be scared of Ronnie. I thought she liked to keep her life compartmentalized and Thomas didn’t have a place here any more.
I was letting myself out of the front door when she called after me.
‘I thought I was doing the right thing. Tough love. Isn’t that what they call it?’
I supposed she’d read about tough love in a women’s magazine. Or perhaps the Methodist Wives had been given a talk on it. To me, it seemed like an excuse.
Chapter Twelve
Absalom House was double-fronted, part of a terrace in a shabby street running up from the sea front. When family seaside holidays were popular and the workers of industrial lowland Scotland thought Whitley Bay would be a glamorous place to spend a couple of weeks in August, it had probably been a hotel. Now it was a place to dump homeless young people.
‘It’s not a hostel,’ said the woman who answered the phone when I rang. She sounded indignant. ‘I mean it’s not the sort of place where they’re pushed out of the door after breakfast and not let in until suppertime. We’re a real community.’
Maybe so, but from her voice – middle-class prim – I doubted that she lived there. More likely she went home every night to a nice home in a nice area. She could have been a neighbour of the Laings. I doubted too that she had much contact with the residents. I imagined her as one of the social workers of my childhood, locked in her office writing reports while we played fretfully outside, desperate for adult company and support.
This time I’d planned a different cover. I told the woman I was a journalist researching a feature on young runaways. She was sniffy until I implied that the publicity would be good for fund-raising and promised faithfully not to use individual residents’ details without their consent. If I’d said I was a social worker she’d probably have let me in more easily, but I knew I’d get nothing out of Thomas and his mates that way.
I conned a lift out of Ray again. It wasn’t much out of his way, he said, though I knew fine well his next job was in Berwick, in completely the opposite direction. He didn’t speak all the way down the Spine Road. He just sat with his eyes on the road and a daft, dreamy grin on his face.
‘What is going on with you and Jess?’ I asked suddenly. I wanted to know how things stood. I must have sounded like an angry father asking the intentions of a daughter’s suitor, because he blushed.
‘I think I want to marry her,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, you think?’
‘I mean I do.’
‘What does she say?’
‘I’ve not found the courage to ask yet.’
But he would. I could tell by the self-absorbed smile. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was there, with him, at every sooty boiler and leaking radiator. I wanted to ask what would become of me then. Would they sell the house in Newbiggin? Would they keep it for themselves? In the end I didn’t say anything. I left him to his marshmallow fantasies. But the thought of Jess as a married woman added to my edginess and uncertainty. If she settled down with Ray, where would I go? Somewhere like this?
There was another jolt when the door was opened to me by Dan Meech. We stared at each other on the doorstep. Inside there was the sound of music. Through an open door I saw a couple of lads bickering over a pool table, but they took no notice of us. I was embarrassed. It occurred to me that Dan was living there. He’d never made much money at work. Like most actors, he seemed to be without a job for most of the time. Perhaps Acting Out, his community theatre group, had finally disbanded through lack of interest. I suspect he felt equally awkward. I’d behaved very oddly when we met the day before, lurking outside an estate agent’s. Perhaps he’d heard rumours of the incident in Blyth – these things are hard to keep quiet – imagined I’d had a breakdown, been kicked out onto the streets.
The silence was broken by the prim voice from the phone. It sailed over the upstairs banister, followed by an eccentric woman in a long velvet skirt, trailing scarves and big boots. She had dyed ginger hair backcombed into a bush, and very bright lipstick which strayed wildly from the outline of her lips. She was more elderly than the voice suggested and quite different from the social work clone I’d pictured.
‘You must be Ms Bartholomew,’ she said. ‘Come in, my dear. Dan, this is the journalist who’s promised us some publicity. Dan Meech, one of my part-time staff. He and I are the only ones who live in.’ More shattered preconceptions.
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��Lizzie and I are old friends,’ Dan said. ‘We were at university together. Journalism is it now, Lizzie?’ Not giving me away, but making it clear to me that he didn’t believe a word.
‘Can you do the tour of honour?’ the woman said. ‘I’ve just had Charlie’s social worker on the phone. His mother wants him home. Apparently. I don’t believe a word. We need to talk.’ She drifted away towards the arguing voices, leaving a cloud of patchouli behind her. We watched her go.
‘That’s Ellen,’ Dan said. ‘She runs the place.’
‘A character.’
‘That’s the impression she likes to give. She’s not as dotty as she makes out.’
‘And she’s your boss?’
‘That’s right. I’ll show you upstairs first, shall I?’ Sarcastic, as if he knew I had no interest in the fittings and furnishings.
‘What happened to Acting Out?’
‘I still work there. It was never exactly a full-time commitment.’
I followed him along the top floor, peering round doors, interested despite myself. Ellen had been right. This wasn’t an institution. It was a big, shabby home. The ceilings were high and the rooms were airy. Most had their own bathrooms. If Jess did decide to sell up Sea View, I could do a lot worse.
He was leading me back to the main staircase when a door opened and I had a glimpse of two faces. Girls with dark eyes wearing soft white headscarves. The door shut again quickly, although they must have been on their way out before we appeared.
‘Who are they?’
‘No personal details, Ellen said.’ He was still hostile.
‘I’m not asking for names. I’m interested, that’s all.’
‘Looking for a story?’ He was sneering again.
‘That’s right.’
‘They’re sisters,’ he said. ‘Eastern European originally. They’ve been through a bad time.’
I would have liked to know more, but that wasn’t why I was here and I didn’t want to antagonize him with more unnecessary questions.
We went back downstairs and sat in the kitchen. It had that grubby untidiness which you always seem to get when young people live together. Biscuit crumbs on the floor and unwashed mugs piled up in the sink, a fruit bowl of shrivelled oranges and overripe bananas. But it was a pleasant room. An open door led into a glass lean-to and then an overgrown garden. Dan put on the kettle before he turned on me. Perhaps being in charge of all these people had gone to his head.