by Anne Fine
Then Nicholas came down, swinging three bottles from the fingers of his good hand: two empties from my backpack because I’d been too careless to get rid of them, and the one Alice had pounced on under the bed.
‘Edward? Do you think you could very kindly explain the presence of these bottles?’
It all came out. I was berated for falling behind in practically all of my subjects, lying to everyone and bunking off. But mostly for the drinking. It seems the janitor had seen me stumbling in the corridor and watched me going in the private lavatory. I stayed in there so long he worried that I might have fainted. Then, through the door, he heard the soft clink of the cistern lid.
After I’d gone, he’d found my bottle and told Mrs Miller.
Brilliant.
Natasha’s cheeks were burning. ‘Edward, where did the money come from?’
I wasn’t going to hang myself. ‘I cleaned cars. Ask them at Merryfield. I’m in their car park a lot. I wash the cars while people go into the shop. I don’t charge much, but most of the women tip me.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’
I turned on Nicholas. ‘You drink! You have a couple of gin and tonics pretty well every day.’
‘I’m not at school! I’m not fifteen and taking my exams! And I’m not telling lies and probably stealing things to get the money.’
I don’t know where I could have got the sheer self-righteousness to hurl at him, ‘Is that what you think of me? That I’m a thief? That’s nice! That’s trusting!’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Why should we trust you? That’s what all this is about! You can’t be trusted. Not here, and not at school, and probably, for all I know, nowhere at all!’
‘Well, thanks!’
It was Natasha’s turn to lose her temper. ‘Don’t you get uppity with us! It’s you who’s been behaving like a guttersnipe!’
We all froze then. Alice. Me. Nicholas. Even Natasha herself. She knew what she had said. I think we all were thinking of where I’d come from.
All of us had Harris in our minds.
She tried to cover her tracks. ‘Edward, all that I meant is that the people in a family have to be confident that no one’s keeping secrets behind their backs.’
Nicholas pitched in to help. ‘Look, this has been a really testing evening. I think we’re all worked up. What I’m suggesting is that we all calm down—’
‘And have a drink?’ I asked sarcastically.
He flushed, then just pushed on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘And we can try and talk about it all again, without getting upset, once we’ve had supper.’
I don’t blame Alice for coming out with it. It didn’t help, but still I think she had a right to say it.
‘Too late. We must have lost our table ages ago.’
‘Table?’ And then Natasha remembered. ‘Oh, God, Alice! I’m so sorry! Today was your last exam!’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
But we all knew the efforts Alice had made over the last months not to throw down her stupid test papers and slide off with the flock whenever they rang up. The hours she’d put in. The extra work she’d done. We’d all seen the revision chart she’d made and hung up on her wall, over her desk.
We all knew she’d been sitting there counting the days.
I bet they both felt terrible.
But I felt worse.
Louise Smith, Manager of Valentine House
You come across some tiresome people when you run a restaurant. The Stead booking was down for seven o’clock. No one had come by twenty to eight. And then a group of four called by my desk on the off-chance.
‘No hope of dinner, I suppose?’
‘Give me a moment,’ I said, and rang the contact number for the empty table. It was a woman who answered.
‘Yes?’
She snapped as irritably as if I had deliberately interrupted her while she was adding figures.
I told her, ‘This is Valentine House.’
‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘Oh, God! Well, I’m afraid to say that we’re not coming.’
If she had just said sorry I wouldn’t have told Rosalie to charge their credit card our No-Show fee. (It is quite steep. We only have one sitting.) And I did have four people staring at me hopefully. The restaurant would not be out of pocket.
But all she said was, ‘You wouldn’t want to have the four of us in any case.’ She raised her voice, presumably for the benefit of someone at her end. ‘Because one of our party is a bloody liar and a drunk!’
I held the phone a little further from my ear.
‘Thank you,’ was all I said to her. ‘Have a good evening.’
Then I turned to the waiting group. ‘Your table’s ready. Please will you come this way?’
Eddie
I had a rotten night. Maybe it was from missing my night-time beakerful. Maybe it was just guilt. By morning, though, my only feelings were resentment and bitterness. Natasha had been very rude to me, and Nicholas was treating me like a child. ‘I’ll drop you off at school today, if you don’t mind.’
‘Thanks, but I’d rather walk.’
He didn’t even try to soften the insult. ‘No, Edward. After what we heard last night about your attendance record this term, I think I’d rather make sure that you actually get there.’
So it was pretty well a challenge, really. And I was certainly feeling grumpy enough to take him up on it. I reached the gates, and fell in step with Tina and Martin, who were taking turns to tug at Justin’s scarf. I went inside with them, and then peeled off. As soon as the buzzer for registration sounded, I rushed past the monitors by the front door – ‘Forgot to lock my bike!’ – and left the school.
I crept around the far side of the hedge to find my bottles. One was stashed down a tree stump and the other one was pushed behind some crates stacked for the Friday pick-up.
There wasn’t much in either. But fortified by that, and by self-pity, I wondered what to do next. I don’t know why it sprang to mind to go to see Linda and Alan. Their house was over sixty miles away. I didn’t even know if they’d be in. But once the idea surfaced, I was determined to go. I didn’t think of it as ‘running away’ as such, though obviously after the meeting the day before, someone at school was bound to ring Natasha and Nicholas about my absence.
And I would be away for hours, getting to Beasley and back.
Still, off I went, stuffing my school jacket way down in my bag, and walking to the western roundabout where I’d seen people hitching often enough before. I think the white shirt helped because I got my first lift almost at once, along with a lecture about the dangers of hitchhiking. ‘Surely you’re old enough to know that half the drivers on the road are maniacs, and the rest fools. I tell you, if you were my son, you’d be in really big trouble for doing something so stupid.’
I grinned. ‘Is that the only reason you picked me up? To give me a ticking off?’
‘Yes,’ he said sourly. ‘And I would hope that someone else would do the same if my lad Larry acted as daft as you.’
That killed the conversation dead. But he did leave me in a sensible place for my next ride. That was a lorry driver who could barely string two English words together. He had an accent rather like Stefania’s. ‘Are you Romanian?’ I asked politely. You would have thought I’d asked if he were an axe murderer. God knows what nationality he was, but he went on and on about it really irritably. I didn’t understand a word.
But once again I was dropped somewhere good, and it was only another couple of short rides before I found myself crossing the park in which I’d learned to work my way up on the swings so many years ago.
They were both in. ‘Eddie! What a surprise! Come in! Come in!’ Already Linda had noticed that I was in uniform. ‘Taking a day off school?’
‘I couldn’t face it,’ I admitted.
I watched her take care not to miss a beat. ‘It’s ages since we’ve seen you. Light years! You’ve grown so tall! Come in the kitchen and tell us
all about everything! What do you fancy, sweetie? Tea? Coffee? Juice?’
I didn’t feel like anything except a proper drink. But there was no chance of that so I said, ‘Tea, please,’ simply from politeness, and sat at the table eating their chocolate biscuits and telling them about Natasha and Nicholas, answering questions about my subjects at school, and how well Alice was doing.
‘She got held back a year. But now that she’s switched subjects, everything’s fine and she’s made up her mind to go to university.’
‘And what about your mum?’
‘Lucy?’ I shrugged. ‘I still see her a bit. She’s much the same.’ Into the silence that followed, I added, ‘But she is happy. She likes the place she’s in a lot.’
‘And what about you?’
The nitty-gritty question. What about me?
If only lying weren’t so downright easy. I had a choice, clearly. I could have let it all pour out, about the drinking. After all, they must have known that something was wrong. Why else would I turn up there unannounced like that, nervously rattling my tea mug, fingernails gnawed to the quick again, looking like death? It’s not as if I didn’t give myself time to think what to say, because that was the moment I picked to ask to go upstairs. (The bathroom seemed horrifically bright. I had got used to Natasha’s stylish lighting systems. And on the way down, I opened the door to my old room. It was much smaller than I remembered it, and looked more dingy.)
After they’d bullied me into eating one or two cheese sandwiches, we moved to the living room. I suppose they thought it would be more relaxing – make it easier for me to tell them what was going on. But I just bottled out. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I kept saying. ‘I simply woke up feeling really rough, and couldn’t face the idea of being in school. So I bunked off and hitched down here, just on the off-chance.’
‘Life’s batting on all right, though?’
‘Pretty well. I mean, I get fed up at times. But mostly things are fine.’
I’m sure they realized I was hiding something. But still they let it go. I suppose they didn’t have much choice. After another half an hour or so, Alan looked at his watch. ‘Righty-ho, Ed. If you plan to be back when they expect you, then it’s time to get you moving.’
I knew he’d give me a ride home. I could see Linda was very tempted to come along. But I think she decided in the end that Alan would have a better chance of getting something out of me if he and I were travelling alone.
Down at the garden gate she gave me an enormous hug, and then she told me something.
‘You know that television man of yours? That Mr Perkins? Well, Alan went online and found one of his programmes. Just out of curiosity, you understand.’ She found my hand and squeezed it. ‘Because we missed you.’
I couldn’t help but ask. ‘What did you think?’
She smiled. ‘I loved it. He was very sweet and fatherly. I wish they’d showed the programmes here, not just in Canada. They would have been a hit. The songs too. Though I must admit they do stick in the brain and drive you mad.’ She started singing the one about growing up to do anything we wanted.
‘Some things seem very hard to do
You think you won’t be able
To get them right,
But then you do
And you win through—’
To pass the last sticky moments while Alan was bringing round the car, I prompted her when she got stuck.
‘Because you’re strong and brave inside.’
We finished it together.
‘But most of all, of course, because you want to,
Want to, want to
Because you’re strong and brave inside
And really, really want to.’
Linda
You just can’t tell with people Eddie’s age. What’s for the best?
If he’d been four, or eight, or even twelve, I wouldn’t have given it a thought. The moment Alan drove off with him, I would have snatched up the phone. ‘Natasha? Nicholas? I ought to tell you Eddie bunked off school and came to us. And he seemed rather upset. Rattled. Distracted. Horribly unhappy. He couldn’t sit still and barely smiled. Is something wrong?’
But teenagers are so mercurial. One minute they act forty, the next minute three. You can’t judge much from a short visit and, for all we knew, the boy was being truthful when he said it was the first time he’d played truant. It was a year of constant, stressful school exams. And he had always chewed his nails until they bled.
I paced around the phone for quite a while, wondering what to do. I even phoned Rob Reed’s old number, but it didn’t work. (I didn’t fancy ringing any of the new lot. Eddie had been adopted now for years, and they would just have given me one of their lectures about ‘letting go’.)
So in the end I told myself not to betray his trust. And I tried to console myself that, if he was in trouble, my darling, darling Eddie would have the confidence and the good sense just to come back to us.
Eddie
Alan got me home in time – well, only a little late. And no one at the school had rung to tell them that I wasn’t there. I got away with it.
I suppose I could have taken the chance to settle down and start afresh, but I got irritated by the way they treated me that week. Nicholas did as good a job as any Gestapo officer of searching my room. He found the bottle tucked away under the shed. And when the restaurant at Valentine House charged his card that hefty whack for our No-Show, he made it clear I wouldn’t get a penny of my allowance until I’d paid him back.
Natasha was worse, though. Clearly humiliated by the way I’d got away with so much for so long, she started checking on me about everything.
‘You did go swimming, didn’t you? I mean, your shorts are damp, but they don’t smell of chlorine.’
‘How come you’ve got no homework? Mrs Miller made it crystal-clear that this is a crucial year.’
‘Nicholas told me that he drove past your school at half past three, but didn’t see you.’
I’d fight back. ‘Probably because there are about four hundred of us pouring out of there. We’re all in the same uniform, and he might just have kept one eye on the road.’
She took against my tone. ‘No, Mister Clever Dick. He’d parked right by the gates. He said that he was hoping to give you a lift.’
I told her sullenly, ‘He must have been at least half an hour early, waiting to pounce, if he found anywhere to park near the school gates.’
She made me feel as childish as I must have sounded. I hated being watched. She studied me as if I were some specimen in a jar. She’d swung from over-credulous to ludicrously suspicious. It was quite obvious she didn’t believe a word I said. She was so hostile. Even Alice thought that, and she herself had given me a good few days of the curled lip and cold response.
But in the end she started sticking up for me. ‘Leave him alone, Natasha! He’s grounded. Isn’t that enough? There’s no need to be picking on him all the time. He’s said he’s sorry.’
Actually, I hadn’t. I’d hung my head, and I’d admitted things, and I had claimed that I’d turn over a new leaf. But I had never said that I was sorry.
I wasn’t, either. I was in a sweat, missing the constant swigging that took the edge off things. I went to school all that next week, and realized, in my stone-cold sober state, how far behind I’d fallen and how much I had to do to catch up with the rest – even some of the thickies.
Even Justin.
That hurt. The only thing that ever gave me any confidence was hearing people saying I was bright and did so well at schoolwork. Now that prop had been snatched away. And it seemed so unfair because the rest of them were hardly angels. I’d hear them in the cloakroom, bragging about how many tinnies they had downed last night, how off their faces they’d been, how they’d been ‘smashed’ or ‘mortal’. I couldn’t understand how they could binge like that, and come in looking pale as grubs and acting ratty and dull, but then next day, like Alice, they’d be bright as buttons again and
concentrating on the work as if the mere idea of this stuff being in the world had faded from their minds.
I couldn’t be like that. I thought about it all the time. How I was missing it, how I could lay my hands on some. When Jessica invited me back to her house along with Arif and Trish to see her brand-new puppy, I made an excuse at first. (I always made excuses.) Then I remember thinking, Perhaps her family has a drinks cabinet. I actually thought that. In break, I pounced upon a couple of grubby plastic bags blowing around the bike shed, so I’d be ready.
And then I tagged along. Jessica didn’t ask what made me change my mind. And while the three of them were letting the frenetic little fur ball tumble all over their feet and Trish was shrieking at the sharpness of its teeth, I slid away, reckoning that I could claim that I thought any door I might have been caught opening led to a lavatory.
I was in luck. They kept their bottles on a pantry shelf. I lifted off two full ones at the back. Vodka and gin. I stowed them in my school bag and left it lying by the door. Then I went back.
‘You found it?’ Jessica asked.
For one heart-stopping moment, I wondered if she meant their stash of spirits rather than their loo. But still I managed to nod.
‘Good. Sometimes there’s trouble with the flush.’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘You were lucky, then.’
And off the conversation went, on to the usual stuff about the times the girls had found themselves staring at something that wouldn’t flush away, and how embarrassing it was. Arif pitched in with some disgusting story about a coat hanger and a giant turd, and they were giggling and pushing him. ‘Shut up, Arif! Shut up!’
‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘You know I’m grounded still. If I’m not back by four fifteen, Natasha will go wild.’
‘Poor Eddie! Just for getting sozzled once.’
Is that what I had told them? I must have lied to everyone. I still faked coughing fits and went round the cloakrooms, pocketing anything that I could find to trade for booze money. I watched myself with Nicholas and Natasha because I knew that they were watching me, and even leaving money about to test me. Once or twice I even nicked a pound or two from Valentina, sneaking the purse out of her bag while she was busy cleaning. (She soon stopped leaving that about.) Now and again I dragged my plastic bucket out from where I stashed it, under next door’s hedge, and started washing cars again – until in desperation one day I sold my bike, pretending to Natasha and Nicholas that it had been stolen.