Blood Family

by Anne Fine

  And underneath, in piles of four that neatly lined the bottom of the box to make it look far fuller than it was, all of the ancient video tapes of Mr Perkins.

  But all of it was stuff I’d left behind. I was a Leo now. Priya had told me that Leos liked changes and my whole life had changed. And so I shoved the yellow cardboard carton back, out of sight and mind, under the bed.

  There was no one like Miss Bright at my new school. No one to lead a crying child into the cushion corner to hear about the kitten who had been run over, the brand-new model glider whose wings had been snapped off by some rough baby sister, or details of classroom spite. No one to tell us sternly, ‘It’s only bullies who call it “telling tales”. Everyone else knows that it’s letting grown-ups know why someone in the class is feeling unhappy.’

  You had to stand up for yourself at Tandy Lane Junior School. Nobody picked on me, but still I found each day exhausting. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I just came home and shoved Nicholas’s great black leather-lined earphones on my head and listened to his favourite Roxy Music tracks till he loomed over me, pointing to the time. ‘OK, poppet. Feeling better? Ready to face the world as well as the music?’

  He was an architect who worked from home. Inside his office was a massive sloping board on which he pinned his drawings and plans. I used to stand behind and marvel at how he used his elbow rather than his ruined hand to hold down rulers or papers. Appointments and site visits must have been arranged so he could meet me every weekday for a while at the school gates. I didn’t realize quite how many outside appointments he must have till I got tonsillitis. In between barking coughs, I heard him on the phone over and over.

  ‘I can’t apologize enough. I realize you’re probably already on the way . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry but we must postpone the site meeting at noon.’

  ‘This chat about the plans. You couldn’t possibly reschedule it for later in the day? Or meet me here? You see, we have a sick child in the house, and my wife can’t get back till after five.’

  And that was early for her. Natasha ran a rental agency. I never understood the business properly. It seemed to cover, not just flats and cars, but huge marquees and smart green and gold vans with things like mobile bars and giant cooking cauldrons that could be wheeled down ramps and set up anywhere for outdoor events. Sometimes, at weekends, Natasha would be gone even before I woke, and not come back till after I was asleep. (Next morning she’d be in the foulest mood about her job. Alice and I would hear her crabbing through their half-open bedroom door. ‘Christ, Nicholas, you wouldn’t believe that family! Rude, arsy lot!’ We’d hear her wrenching open a dresser drawer. ‘Do you know, at one point the bride’s father even pulled out his copy of the contract and starting stabbing his stinking, cigarette-stained fingertips at one of the clauses! I could have bloody clocked him!’ The drawer slammed shut. ‘I tell you, Nicholas, that Beck family is going right at the top of our “Sorry, we’re fully booked” list!’)

  She took me to see a marquee. (‘You’ve never seen one? Oh, Edward. You must have. Surely you’ve been inside a circus tent!’) She knew my history. Rob had assured me that he’d told them everything. But still the idea that there were a host of things I’d simply missed kept slipping out of her brain.

  I quite liked that. If I was not the first thing on her mind, maybe that was because I didn’t need to be.

  Maybe I was all right.

  Certainly Alice seemed to think so. She welcomed me with great enthusiasm, showering me with small gifts. And even after that wore off, as it soon did, I never got the feeling Alice thought that I was odd. I can remember thinking that we were the same in some ways. Secretly I felt pleased when I heard Alice never knew her own real dad. And when she was my age, her mother had got sick. Then sicker. Alice did have an uncle, but he’d done little more than send the occasional present and Alice’s mother clearly hadn’t thought he was the right person to take care of Alice. So in the end she’d got in touch with Social Services. I didn’t ask too many questions, but I could tell from how Natasha and Nicholas talked that they had got to know Alice’s mother well while they were caring for her daughter during the last few months.

  But I was still surprised when, one wet afternoon, Natasha poked her head round my bedroom door while I was cutting out another line of grey scales for the dinosaur I had to make for school. ‘Edward, can I ask you a giant favour?’

  I looked up.

  ‘Would you mind coming with Alice and me in the car? Nicholas can’t keep an eye on you in the house because he has to rush across town to see a client, and it’s Alice’s mother’s birthday.’

  She saw my look of utter bafflement and made a face. ‘God! Sorry, Edward. I should explain. Today is one of the days that we put flowers on Tamara’s grave.’

  I must have still looked confused.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But, you see, Alice loved her very much. So it’s a nice way of remembering. We do it twice a year – on Alice’s own birthday, and on her mum’s.’ Natasha waved a hand across her face. ‘You won’t need to come close if you don’t want. I can park on the drive and you can stay in the car. We’re never there too long.’

  And so we went. As usual, Alice raced ahead to bag the car’s front seat. ‘Careful!’ Natasha warned. ‘It’s flowers you’ve got there, not an entrenching tool. Don’t bash them all about.’

  Alice just stuffed the bright bunch in my hand. ‘You take them. More room in the back.’

  I knew that a real brother would have said, ‘No. They’re your flowers. You sit here.’ But I’d already learned to do what Alice said. In any case, the flowers weren’t for her. They were for someone dead.

  You wouldn’t have thought so. All the way across town, Alice was prattling cheerfully about some spendthrift friend of hers who was called Mary. ‘So it turns out she’s bought another locket, and there was nothing wrong with the one she had except that it kept falling open, and that could have been fixed, and Sarah says . . .’ On she went, on and on, while I amused myself by clouding the rain-stippled window with my breath and drawing faces till Natasha swung the car between two massive gate posts.

  Slowly she drove around the gracious curves between the lines of gravestones. Then she stopped.

  Alice twisted her head to order me out of the car. ‘Come on, then.’

  Natasha tried to rescue me. ‘I thought that Edward might prefer to—’

  But Alice wasn’t listening. ‘Be careful with the flowers!’ She’d already left the car, slamming her door shut behind her. Slavish as ever, I followed her across the soggy grass to the grave. Once there, as if obeying some invisible order, Alice burst into tears. Natasha slid an arm round her shoulders and the rain poured down. All about was gloomy green dark. I’d only brought my thin school waterproof and I was cold, standing there waiting for Alice to finish dabbing and sniffling. The bunch of flowers was getting heavier by the minute. I hadn’t realized it was gathering rainwater until a sudden creak of cellophane released a stream of it onto my foot.

  Too late, I jumped to the side. Seeing me, Alice sighed. ‘Here. Hand them over. Honestly, I’m all right now.’

  Natasha steered me away, but when I turned to look, though Alice had her back to us, I knew that she was talking to her mum, under the ground.

  Natasha ushered me into the front seat beside her. ‘I know you’re frozen. But I don’t want to start the car in case Alice thinks we’re rushing her.’

  Another small thing learned. To use the heater in a car, you have to start the engine.

  ‘That’s OK.’

  Natasha patted my knee. ‘You’re a good boy.’

  I waited, trying not to shiver, till Alice came back. She must have been halfway across the grass before she realized she still had the flowers. Back she rushed, to dump them against the headstone before running back to wrench the car door open on my side.

  ‘How come Edward’s in the front?’

  Natasha, who had only t
hat moment turned on the engine, said, ‘Just to be near the heater.’

  I took the hint. Alice stepped back to let me out. It took an age to warm up on the long drive home.

  The dead seemed to be closer than the living. Natasha never once mentioned my mother. But every now and again, Nicholas would steer me quietly into his office where, even if he left the door ajar, we’d not be overheard. ‘What about you, pal? Feel like visiting your mum?’

  I’d shake my head.

  ‘But you will tell us when you change your mind?’

  I nodded, determined to pretend I hadn’t noticed he had recently changed from saying ‘if’ to the more threatening ‘when’.

  He’d ruffle my hair. ‘Your call. I was just checking.’

  He’d let me scramble past and up the stairs. So I was happy enough living at Fairhurst. Rob’s visits became shorter, almost peremptory, as if he had more pressing things to do than check on me. Linda and Alan gradually backed off, with postcards and small gifts taking the place of visits. The weeks and months went past. I grew out of my clothes, and in and out of others. I learned to rollerblade, to kick a ball into goal, play ‘Planet Attack!’ as fast as anyone in my class, and even dive off the springboard at the local pool. I learned the layout of the streets around the house, and which of the dogs and cats I saw about the place belonged to which of the neighbours.

  Fairhurst had gradually become my home.

  George Atkins, Class Teacher, Tandy Lane Junior School

  I wouldn’t say that he was anything special. Bright, obviously. And he did the work. But if you’d asked me, after he’d been gone from us for a few years, I’d never have been able to put a face to the name.

  Except for that one day. I’d had a sleepless night and wasn’t in the best of moods. I set them all to do a piece of written work. Usually I give them choices, but on this one occasion I just scrawled on the board the first thing that sprang to mind.

  Ladybird.

  Normally, I would have noticed the hush that fell across the room. I expect I thought the kids had picked up on my ratty mood and had the sense to keep their heads down.

  But it wasn’t that, of course. Tara crept to my side and whispered, ‘Mr Atkins. Edward is crying.’

  I looked up from the marking I’d been ploughing through and I felt terrible. The boy’s face was a sheen of tears. In all my years of teaching, I’ve never seen a child look so distraught. Practically haunted.

  I almost had to lift him from the chair. He couldn’t walk. His legs gave way under him. There are strict rules about the way we interact with pupils. I never gave them a thought. I simply picked him up and carried him along to the office. Somebody phoned the Steads, who came to fetch him.

  That night his parents rang, each listening on a separate extension, to ask what set him off.

  ‘They were just writing about ladybirds,’ I said. ‘Apparently, he copied down the title and that was that.’

  The boy was back in school next day, a little pale but generally OK. We knew he’d had a difficult past, so I did not ask questions – well, not of Edward. But a year or so later, shortly before he left us, I saw his mother in the entrance hall and dared to ask, ‘Did Edward ever tell you what set him off that day?’

  She shook her head.

  That is the only reason I remember him.

  Edward

  Bit by bit, over the years, I must have got the knack of acting normally. But even after moving up to secondary school I worried constantly about what others made of me: how they might wonder about the way I knew some things, but not others; what they might think about the way I ate or spoke, or asked or answered questions. I think I worried that, without even realizing, I might let drop a trail of clues to lead them into guessing things about my mum and Harris. The idea terrified me. I’d hear their whispered comments about Nicholas’s ruined hand and couldn’t bear the thought that anyone might link me to worse: that hooded man who’d shoved against his escorts so aggressively as he was dragged into court; a photo in a hospital file of the bruised woman with the bleeding scalp who was led out that day.

  So I came home dead tired every afternoon. After a while, Nicholas would gently but firmly prise off the earphones that blocked everything except the softly swirling beat that helped to banish all the day’s frustrations and anxieties. I’d follow him into the kitchen, where he’d make tea, and I’d drink juice and root through the biscuit barrel while the questioning began.

  ‘Good day?’

  ‘All right, I suppose.’

  ‘And Mrs Hunter?’

  ‘She was OK.’

  ‘How was your music lesson?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Got any homework?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  This last was my daily lie. I did my homework in the old lavatory along the furthest corridor. Nobody used it. There was no sign on the door and I only knew a lavatory was in there because I’d been sent along to the janitor one morning to tell him one of the juniors had been sick. That’s where he stored his bucket. The smell of disinfectant wasn’t going to bother someone like me, and so in the long lunch breaks I’d got in the routine of hanging around the others for a while, then slipping away. I had no special friend to notice I’d picked up my school bag from the pile against the wall, and casually ambled off. I’d stroll along the corridor as if I might be making for the water fountain at the end. And when the coast was clear, I’d slip inside the tiny room and bolt the door.

  The lavatory had a lid so I could sit quite comfortably in cool, tiled silence, finishing every scrap of work I had to do so that the moment Alice slammed her way into the house, bursting with news about her own day in school, I would be free to slip off yet again, upstairs this time, to do what I loved most.

  Read.

  I’d grown a passion for books. It seemed to me that every single one I read offered me hints on how to be more normal. I felt as if they had been written just for me, to give me private, safe and restful lessons in how other people lived. More, they created in me gathering confidence that there were endless ways to go about the business without rousing suspicion. The family in one book might be chaotic, with every getting-up time a riot of alarm clocks and nagging, and every meal a horde of people shouting about what they did or didn’t want to eat; an endless run of noisy arguments and jokes, laughter and tantrums and tears. But in the next book I picked up, the parents and the children might bow their heads in prayer around the table before they quietly and politely passed the plates.

  They were all families.

  And you could learn about so many things. Wet camping trips in leaking tents, and luxury holidays in sun-kissed hotels abroad. Journeys up steaming rivers or over treacherous glaciers. Children who ran around in scruffy tops and muddy jeans, and children whose mothers dragged them into designer shops to spend a fortune on a blouse that would be far too small within a week. Sometimes, when I was in the middle of a book, I’d catch a wisp of memory, and be reminded of a visit we had made with Mr Perkins. But those had mostly been to adults doing interesting things. Now I was able to peek into the daily lives of people my own age.

  They were all different. All of them fascinated me. And the joy was that I could see into their lives with no sense that I was a trespasser – doing what people in my junior school used to call ‘goggling’ as they put their arms around their work to keep it from prying eyes, or moved behind a shield of coats to finish a whispered conversation.

  Books were so different. You could read about people of all sorts, all ages: brave, clever, miserable, amusing, shy. People from foreign countries. People who’d lost a leg in battle, or starred in films. You found out what they thought, saw how they ticked, learned everything about them, down to the thoughts that haunted them in their beds. Your worries might be about other things, but from the books you read at least you’d learn you weren’t alone in worrying. You need no longer fear that there was something odd in that.

  Nicholas thought I was a
laugh, with all my weird observations and handy hints culled from the reading matter I brought home from the libraries at school and in town. I’d wander into the kitchen to find him scowling at an almost-empty bottle of wine. ‘Just freeze it,’ I’d advise.

  ‘Freeze it?’

  ‘The mother in Harriet’s Happy Café always froze leftover wine so she could put it into casseroles later.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. And she kept a bag of grated ginger in the freezer for when they next had a stir fry.’

  ‘Now that is brilliant!’

  He was so easy to amuse and please. I’d ask him, ‘Did you know that the Duke of Orleans shot larks with the corks from his champagne bottles?’ Nicholas would roar with laughter. ‘No. I did not know that!’ Natasha, I see now, was more inclined to keep her distance. Of course she was busier, and didn’t work from home. Still, when she came back at night I always felt that she was happier if – how can I put this fairly? – if Alice and I had been somewhat tidied away. If we’d been fed already, she was pleased, and if the general round-up of evening household tasks had been completed before she came through the door, she was delighted – not at all like Nicholas, who showed his disappointment if he came home from a late meeting to find that we’d already gone our separate ways: Alice to the computer she still nagged to be allowed to take back to her bedroom where she’d apparently ‘abused the privilege’ by using it too late at night.

  And me to my books.

  That’s how I ended up back in the box under the bed, so many years after I pushed it there. Blame my school. Alice, by then, had been moved to some expensive girls’ academy in the hopes of keeping her in control. (Yes, I still listened at doors.) But my school was an easy-going place. Natasha showed her irritation every term when she saw my report cards. ‘What is this? What am I supposed to make of all these stupid shaded boxes? Why can’t the teachers send home a simple bloody sentence to tell me how you’re doing? Can’t they write?’ There was a deal of quiet talk about the possibility of moving me somewhere else. Then counter-whispers about how ‘yet more upheaval’ might be bad for me. I even overheard Nicholas suggest that they phoned Rob for advice. (Natasha wasn’t keen on that, insisting that anyone in Rob’s profession was likely to disapprove of private schools purely on principle.)