Another Mother's Son

by Janet Davey

  ‘I get the picture. Not too attractive. Don’t make a habit of it, Lorna. The wind might change.’

  I feel ill imitating Jane Brims. ‘And another thing. When I said, “Gory!” – about Sweeney Todd – Dad said in the mildest voice without a hint of apology, “Jane likes Steven Sondheim.”’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Liz says. ‘It’s not a crime.’

  ‘But he didn’t add, “apparently”. That shocked me.’

  ‘I think he must sense your hostility. I can feel it now,’ Liz says.

  ‘If you spend all your life being gently ironic and suddenly that goes … I have this picture of him with his bony knees pressed into the seat in front, clinging to the overcoat folded on his lap, as he swooshes down the rake of the upper circle in some nightmare funfair ride.’

  ‘It’s possible he’s harboured a secret love of musicals all this time and suppressed it because of your mother. She was very clear about her likes and dislikes. I felt completely crushed when I told her that my favourite novel was Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.’

  ‘She hadn’t heard of it.’

  ‘Exactly. She was right too! It was utter rubbish. Don’t get obsessed with this Jane woman. She’s not important.’

  ‘What shall I give her to eat though, Liz? My mind’s gone blank.’

  ‘Does she have special dietary requirements?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Dad would have said, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘You’d better ask. If she’s not allergic to nuts, you could make the seared salmon with pistachio crust you told me about. I made it the other day. It’s dead simple. If you don’t have any Thai fish sauce in your larder, just use good old Worcestershire.’

  ‘I’m touched that you think I have a larder, Liz. You obviously don’t remember my kitchen. Not sure about the salmon thing. I mean, even though you say it’s not effortful it will look as if I’ve been trying. I suppose I could just tip it onto the plates, kind of upside down, so that it bears no resemblance to a cookery photo.’

  ‘Plonk a bottle labelled “Poison” on the table, why don’t you? You may be grateful one day that William has someone to take care of him. Pull out the long curly bits from his eyebrows – and far worse, as the years go by. Change his nappies. It will take the burden from you. Your brother won’t be any bloody use, will he?’

  I am shocked that Liz has deposited Jane in The Heronry as if the deal were done. I take a few moments to recover. ‘You’re right. Hugh will be hopeless but it won’t come to that. I expect Dad will peg out. Women rot slowly and men drop down dead. Mum was an exception. I’ll get left looking after Jane Brims! It’s because men go through a testosterone storm in adolescence. The memory of it kills them like a thunderbolt.’

  ‘Lorna, that is so unscientific. Their hormones make them drive too fast or stab each other. They die then and there in their late teens or early twenties and affect the statistics. It has no bearing on the way they age. How are your testosterone-fuelled lot?’

  ‘Thank you. They’re well.’

  ‘Ewan?’

  ‘Nothing new.’

  There is more give in Liz than is sometimes the case. I wonder whether to tell her about Ross. Liz can be severe. She never flinches from attacking me on the subject of Ewan. At some level, she grasps the nub of the matter. My spinelessness. Ewan’s spinelessness. In the department of philology and applied linguistics at Aberystwyth University, they must hold meetings at which it is decided that certain procedures are fruitless and should be discontinued. What these might be, I have no idea because, although I ask, the place and its workings are a mystery to me. Liz will be the leading light of such meetings and cut through the crap and tell them in no uncertain terms to change their ways. They will mosey back to their desks, or scurry – I really do not know how they behave there – and it will all be new for about five minutes.

  ‘Well, you know what I think,’ Liz says.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I say.

  ‘All this pairing that’s going on … how does that affect you?’

  ‘Cutbacks at work? Thank you for asking. It’s a disaster. I’m running the place on a shoestring.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Lorna?’

  ‘What are you talking about? The recession? The chancellor says we’re out of it.’

  ‘I’m lost. You do have a tendency to divert a personal question. I was thinking of William and Ross both at it like rabbits, one presumes. Richard Watson, is he in the picture?’

  ‘Like rabbits? Oh God. Don’t let’s go there. No. No, I told you before.’

  There is a brief pause. Liz suspects something which in one sense is a fair response as I see Richard most weeks now. She is, however, wrong about the picture. Mine, an amateur daub, is now overprinted with Judge Jeffrey’s courtroom. I am answering the question that lies behind the question. Take into consideration the frame or the mount. No, avoid the word ‘mount’.

  ‘You should find yourself a man. A proper one this time.’

  ‘Oh, a proper one? Yes, of course, I must ask around.’

  ‘Libby’s come in,’ she says.

  I begin peeling potatoes and cannot stop. The repetitive strokes of the peeler, the digging out of eyes, the clean reveal – I am in the flow and end up preparing enough food for a family of six. Jude does not turn up at the usual time. Seven, seven-thirty, eight, nine. She does not turn up.

  42

  THE WEEKEND IS like a pressure headache that goes on and on. There is nothing to take and no relief. Every few hours, I look in on Ross who remains in his room. He is in bed or he is crouching on the floor, playing a game on his old Xbox. I try to get him to talk but he is as terse as he was in the IT suite. I detect both stoicism and recklessness in the front he presents. His sole contribution is to ask if I am going to tell his dad. I say that it is his choice. I won’t mention anything if he doesn’t want me to. ‘Same applies to Grandad,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t need to know anything at this stage, does he?’

  ‘What do you mean, at this stage?’ Ross says.

  ‘Your five days of exclusion.’

  ‘That’s not what you meant. You think there’s going to be a next stage.’

  There is a strong smell of boy in the unventilated bedroom.

  I go on up to Ewan. I tell him what has happened to Ross. ‘Be nice to him,’ I say. ‘You’re both at home. It’s an opportunity for brotherly love in action. A little rapprochement is in order. Have a word. Try to find out what he’s done.’

  Ewan sits at his desk. He half-turns his head and nods.

  ‘Ewan? Please say something.’

  ‘What a mess. I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you for speaking to me.’

  On the commute into London on Monday morning, a new light-headedness distances me from delays to the First Capital Connect train service. I stand on the platform at Palmers Green station, cold but strangely unconcerned. Noise is hyper-loud. The interminable train announcements, telephones breaking into snatches of tunes and recorded animal noises open into echo chambers of pain. It is a relief to get to the office and sit at my desk.

  I repeatedly call the landline at home. No one picks up. I try Ewan’s mobile and get his voice-messaging service. I send him texts but nothing comes back. I do not know how they are spending the day, Ewan and Ross. I am at work.

  In the middle of the morning, Lloyd-Barron Academy sends me a message with the subject heading, ‘Choices and Destinations’; words that last week I would have taken for meaningless flannel. I break into a cold sweat and imagine a ‘managed move’ to a pupil referral centre. I know the jargon, having tracked all possible outcomes, late into the night.

  Throughout their studentship but notably from Year 10 the students at Lloyd-Barron Academy are strongly encouraged to consider their strengths and capabilities and potential future careers. Are you able to raise aspirations by participating in their Speaker Programme? Notable speakers in the past have included lawyers, sportsmen, web des
igners and politicians. Further information at http://www.Lloyd-BarronAcademy.org/cobbling-rubbish-together/#sthash.p973000.16to24yearoldsunemployed

  At lunch-time, I walk to St James’s Park and sit on a bench by the lake. I have a low tolerance for squirrel worship but today the delight on people’s faces as they spot a tail a few metres away strikes me as wholly innocent. A child squeals, ‘Mama! Guarda! Uno scoiattolo!’ – or in some other language – and the family group stands rapt, gazing at the small grey animal that sits upright with its stomach exposed and its front paws pendant. The watchers, unfamiliar with London squirrels, are hushed, hardly daring to move, unaware, having just entered the park, that the creature is one of many and lost to wildness – nerveless as a gull or an urban pigeon, and capable of shinning up a trouser leg.

  On the far side of the water, a pink umbrella held high like a flag precedes a squad of tourists in flapping, clear plastic capes. The bridge is thronged with people who take photographs with phones and cameras. Buckingham Palace one way; fairy-tale turrets of Whitehall the other. I hear a thrum of traffic at my back. The two tiny lake islands, West and Duck, screened by willows and reeds, are nesting havens. There are also notional islands on firm land, green areas of tranquillity, in sight of visitors but not disturbed by them. They shift from hour to hour, minute to minute, like a moving map. Waterfowl walk about on the grass and grub for worms. I call Ginny.

  ‘Yes, Grace mentioned the exclusion,’ she says.

  ‘Tony Goode said he would get back – correction – “revert” to me. He might make an example of Ross so that it never happens again – or he might be lenient. It’s all a stupid, hideous mess – though I still don’t know precisely what—’ I break off.

  A brief pause. ‘The disclosure of where, precisely, Mr Child’s death took place is causing massive problems.’ Her parents’ rep voice. ‘That more than the supposed contents of his rucksack – suspender belt, fishnet stockings, plastic bag, I think it was – and the assertion that at least he would die happy if it all went wrong.’

  ‘Oh God. Ross didn’t say that, did he?’ My heart thuds under my coat.

  ‘Students flocked to look at the door. The door,’ Ginny repeats as though I am deaf. ‘It seems Mr Child was in the habit of using the cupboard to change into his cycling gear. It’s a pity it wasn’t kept locked. He went off on his bike in the lunch hour. I told you he stopped going into the staffroom, didn’t I?’

  I say yes, though it pains me to speak.

  ‘They are leaving bunches of flowers and soft toys. They stick up Post-it notes. Senior management closed the corridor but this had the unintended consequence of cutting off four classrooms on the first floor of Shearwater. Children piled up behind the barrier of tape. Heaven knows who put it up. It was like a cat’s cradle. The kids screamed. Someone yelled, “Fire!” When Mrs Anstey got scissors to the tape and let them past they stampeded through the old building and flung themselves down the stairs. A girl in Year Eight fell and broke her wrist.’

  ‘So the whole school believes that Mr Child died in a sex game that went wrong. There might be copycat experiments.’

  ‘Oh, you are so funny, Lorna. They’re all doing it, anyway. The window ropes! They come close to hanging themselves on a daily basis. A thrill is a thrill, you know. No, the students saw the photos and worked out what truly happened. They aren’t interested in words and many of them are wilfully illiterate.’

  ‘The cupboard as a must-see destination. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.’

  I am struck that I need not be having this conversation. I was calm enough watching the ducks. There is often something wrong with an out-of-doors phone call. The scene is broad and in motion. Wind blows through the trees. Drizzle pits holes in the water. Birds take off and land. On West Island, a tree surgeon found the remains of a man, together with vodka bottles and a yellow cushion. His identity, discerned from a passport, was that of a sixty-nine-year-old American, Robert Moore, known to the police as an obsessive who sent hundreds of packages and letters to the Queen. The letters were of extraordinary length, up to 600 pages, and some of the packages contained obscene photographs.

  ‘The fuss will die down,’ Ginny says. ‘They just have to wait. I’ll ask Grace to find out whether the security guard is patrolling. They might have dismissed him already. What I can’t understand is why Ross admitted to doing it. He used a false address – the school would never have traced him.’

  I am on the point of explaining that Ross has taken sole responsibility for what was likely to have been a joint offence with Jude Bennet-Neerhoff when Ginny continues. ‘Of course, if he hadn’t admitted it, the others might have grassed him up. They are against grassing up but they have a strong sense of respect. For their nans, for the armed forces and for the dead. Ross might have chosen to get in first. Grace showed me. She said she thought the pictures and comments had been up there a while. She’s not really into social media. I was disgusted, actually.’

  ‘So they were in circulation before he died? Alan Child saw them?’

  ‘I can’t say one way or the other, Lorna.’

  The phone slips from my gloved hand onto the bench beside me with a thud. A tinny voice speaks from it; pauses and speaks again. I pick it up.

  ‘… always complex reasons, Lorna, and there would have been a predisposition …’

  I can’t listen to this. I need reassurance on one point only. I cut across Ginny’s balanced explanations. ‘The photos were news to Mr Milner and Mr Goode. They’d only just seen them. So maybe none of the teachers—’

  ‘Senior management are slow on the uptake. They’d be the last to know, wouldn’t they?’

  43

  AS I PASS a bin, I discard the uneaten lunch-time snack that I hastily assembled at seven o’clock in the morning. It is still intact in its aluminium-foil wrapper. I head towards Queen Anne’s Gate. Recently planted bedding plants, banked and ranked, all face the same way like a choir. The pedestrian crossing signal on Birdcage Walk beeps. Taxis come to a halt. Ahead, to one side of the path by the drinking fountain, a couple, a man and a woman, bend over a small child. The adults are tall, well dressed, both wearing trench coats over steam-pressed linen. Their smartness, unusual for casual strollers in the park, catches my eye. Once or twice, I have encountered wedding parties – shafts of colour against the green, a swirl of white – but there is no sign of a wedding. These people are on their own, hanging out by the water fountain that no longer functions. The seated boy was vandalised some years ago and now has a new white head and a line around his neck. He sits on his marble plinth and presides over dry basins and gasping fish.

  The woman balances elegantly, in a practised way, on high heels. She hovers over the child, seemingly reasoning with him, or explaining, though he is below the age of reason; less than two years old. He holds a paper bag by one corner in a closed fist. He retains it through inertia and shows no interest in it, or in the contents. It seems that he might at any moment let go. This is a concern for the woman. She leans further forward and places her hand over the child’s. Neither her action nor what she says makes any impression on him.

  The man gestures at the little boy to get his attention. He points at the sky, then raises and lowers his arms a few times. The woman puts her free hand in the paper bag and, withdrawing it, makes a scattering motion. The child, up too close to the dumb show to see a meaning, continues to ignore them, obstinate or lost in a world of his own. Exasperated, the woman dips again and flings a handful of crumbs around the boy’s feet. As two or three pigeons fly in low, she upends the bag and steps to one side. The man takes a backward stride. He raises his camera. Within seconds, the boy is surrounded. He bursts into wild, loud crying, puts up his hands and covers his face. The camera clicks repeatedly. Pigeon life engulfs him, convulsive movements of flapping wings and bobbing heads; they heave like the contents of an exposed gut. The child is rigid with terror. He ventures a look through splayed fingers, then stretches out his arms and tr
ies to run forward.

  ‘No, Benny. Stay,’ the woman calls. ‘It’s fun.’

  The man keeps clicking. ‘Hey, stop him crying, Rena.’

  ‘Don’t cry, honey.’

  I draw level. ‘He’ll hate you,’ I say – quite loudly. They are not expecting to hear from me.

  ‘Pardon me?’ the woman says.

  ‘Your son will hate you.’

  ‘Oh my God, Carl, did you hear that? This woman is some kind of witch.’ The mother sweeps forward and gathers up her wailing child. ‘It’s OK, Benny, it’s OK. This lady is not a nice person but she is going to walk away and we are never, ever going to see her again.’

  ‘Leave it, Rena,’ the man says. ‘Maybe the woman is sick.’

  I keep walking. I leave the park. The crossing signal is red for pedestrians but I step off the pavement. ‘Achtung!’ I hear from a warning voice behind me. A lull in the traffic enables me to reach the opposite pavement unharmed. I go along Queen Anne’s Gate, the goods entrance to the Ministry of Justice to my right. I cross the road at Petty France by the entrance to St James’s Park Tube station. People mill about, check their phone messages, top up their Oyster cards, queue for the cash machine. I plunge in among them. For a moment, I am drawn towards the ticket barrier and the lure of escape but carry on moving. In the safety of the throng I slow down a little. I walk through the arcade towards the bronze-and-glass doors of the Transport for London entrance, breathing unevenly. The smell of coffee calms me, the ordinary voices chatting on telephones. In his kiosk, the shoe mender is re-soling a shoe, trimming its edges on the abrading wheel. The high-pitched rasp, like a recording of crude dentistry, sets off memories of pain.

  44

  I TELL ROSS that I know something of the content of his malicious messages and that he should give me a proper account in his own words.