Other People's Children

Chapter Ten

‘But this is the third time,’ Clare’s form teacher said. ‘The third time this week you’ve said you couldn’t do your homework.’

‘I can’t,’ Clare said. She was wearing the approximation of school uniform that most of the kids wore, and the hem of her skirt had come down at one side. She didn’t seem to have noticed.

‘Is there somewhere at home you can do your homework?’ the teacher said.

Clare thought of the kitchen.

‘There’s a table.’

‘Is it quiet?’

It was quiet, Clare reflected, if her mother wasn’t in the kitchen but was upstairs in her studio making clay coil pots which were her new passion. There was clay everywhere. The bottom of the bath was gritty with it.

‘Yes.’

‘Then really you have no excuse. Your brother and sister have homework, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where do they do theirs?’

Clare considered. Becky spent angry half-hours on the floor of their bedroom with music on so loudly it made Nadine scream, and emerged announcing the shitty stuff was done. Rory never seemed to do any homework at all. He took his school bag into his burrow, but Clare didn’t think he even opened it. They both gave Clare the strong impression that, not only was it not cool to do homework, but that it was utterly pointless to do it. Homework was for nothing, it was just some meaningless discipline devised by teachers for their own obscure ends. Clare was not sure she believed this. Something in her didn’t mind homework, no doubt part of the same thing that didn’t mind school, either. It was nice belonging, it was nice going somewhere every day that stayed the same, that treated you the same as everyone else. It wasn’t rebelliousness that prevented Clare from doing her homework, but hopelessness. Every night, she got her books out and put them in the space she’d cleared in the remains of the last meal that was almost always still there, and sat down in front of them. And sat there. She sat and stared and could do nothing. She couldn’t look at words, she couldn’t pick up a pencil.

‘Where,’ the teacher said patiently, ‘do your brother and sister do their homework?’

Clare looked at her. She was young, with a round face and brown curly hair. Clare would have hated to have had curly hair.

‘Around somewhere—’

‘Clare,’ the teacher said. ‘You must do your homework. Do you understand? You must do it, not because I say so, but so I can see if you understand what you’ve been taught in class.’

Clare nodded. She felt, in the face of such a reasonable explanation, that she must be truthful in reply.

‘But I can’t.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘Do you mean, you don’t understand it?’

‘No,’ Clare said. ‘But when I get home I can’t do anything.’

The teacher regarded her. She looked tired, but then so many of the kids looked tired with unsupervised television sets in their bedrooms and parents too weary for repetitive discipline.

‘Is your mother at home? When you get home?’

Clare nodded.

‘Maybe I should talk to her—’

‘No,’ Clare said.

‘Why not?’

Clare said, quoting Nadine, ‘We’ve got to make a go of it.’

‘Because,’ the teacher said delicately, ‘you’re on your own?’

Clare nodded again. Her eyes were filling. She hadn’t seen Matthew for six weeks and three days and there’d been a battle that morning when Nadine had wanted to wash the Disneyland tracksuit.

‘You’ll shrink it!’

‘I won’t—’

‘You will, you will, don’t touch it, I don’t want it washed—’

Nadine had snatched it from her, and when she was in the lavatory, Clare had retrieved it from the pile of dirty laundry and hidden it inside Rory’s duvet cover. There’d be trouble, when Nadine arrived to collect her and confronted her about the tracksuit.

‘Can you have one more try tonight?’ the teacher said.

Clare sighed. It wouldn’t be any good. She said miserably, ‘I can’t think.’

‘I see,’ the teacher said. She stood up. ‘Are you sure I can’t talk to your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then I’d better talk to someone else.’

Clare looked up at her, with a gleam of hope.

‘My dad?’ she said.

In the sitting-room of the cottage, Becky sprawled on the sofa. It was broken-springed, inevitably, and she had padded the places where there were no springs at all, or they stuck up through the worn cretonne cover like spears, with a cushion and an old blanket. The television was on some kids’ programme with one of those pitiful over-zany presenters in big specs with scrubbing-brush hair, but Becky could hardly see it because of the snowstorm effect on the screen, as the reception was so bad. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to watch the programme anyway; she just wanted the company of having the television on, the illusion of having people around, things happening.

It was cold in the sitting-room. Becky had become quite adept at lighting fires, but there was something wrong with the way the wind was blowing, and the fire wouldn’t burn up properly. She had rolled herself in the duvet off her bed, but even all wadded up like that she felt cold inside, like you do when you’re scared about something. She moved slightly, so that the cigarette packet in her jacket pocket wasn’t pressing uncomfortably into her breast, and thought of what else was in that pocket. A white tablet, wrapped in foil, with a bird stamped on one side and a smiley face on the other. A boy at school had given it to her. He’d said he could get a fiver for it but he’d give it to her if she’d go out with him at the weekend. Clubbing, he said. He was a big, loose-limbed, heavy-looking boy from the year above Becky and most of the time that he was talking to her and nonchalantly tossing the little foil packet from hand to hand he was looking at her breasts.

Becky wasn’t sure why she had accepted the foil packet. It was flattering, in a way, to be asked out, to be offered, as a bribe for going out, membership of a particular group, and the boy who’d asked her was definitely one of half a dozen or so in the school regarded as a catch. He had a reputation, of course, a name for wanting to go all the way, for refusing to wear a condom, for knowing the scene, but that made him dangerous which in turn made him desirable. If she went out with him at the weekend, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know what she was in for and, in any case, part of her wanted to be in for it very much, wanted to feel high and wild and sexy. And free. But there was another part. It was a part which had only grown up in her recently and whose constraining effect she resented very much. But she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. She couldn’t tell herself, any longer, that as someone of not yet sixteen she had no responsibilities or obligations and shouldn’t be asked to have any. Burdens had arrived, whether she wanted them or not, with her parents’ divorce, and the most complicated of those burdens was Nadine. Nadine was a mother, a mother three times over, but she wasn’t what you thought of when you said the word ‘mother’ to yourself. She was more, Becky was coming to realize, like someone who needed a mother herself, a higher authority who’d help her get her act together. Becky could see – she thought the others could see, too, by the way they were behaving – that things were slipping out of control. It wasn’t just the household things, it was more a feeling that Nadine didn’t know where she was going or what the next days or weeks were for, and her fear of not knowing hung around her, almost like a smell. If Becky went clubbing with Stu Bailey on Saturday night and took her ecstasy tablet and ended up having sex – for the first time – in a multi-storey car-park at four in the morning, she might feel she’d made it, she might feel she’d broken out of some cage and was at last flying free, but she’d still have to come home sometime afterwards, sometime later, and find Nadine. It might be worth it, it might be worth anything Nadine could say or do, to get right out of their tangle of troubles for a single night and blow her mind. But then, on the other hand, it might not. You couldn’t separate things, Becky was unhappily coming to realize, you couldn’t do a thing and then not expect the consequences to come trolling back sometime later and smack you in the face. It was a risk she was facing, if she went out with Stu Bailey, and even if she wanted the risk, she wasn’t sure she could face the consequence.

She sat up and took her cigarettes out of her pocket and lit up. Then she took out the ecstasy tablet and unwrapped it. It looked as innocent as glucose. She sniffed it and then, with a small leap of excitement, licked it. It tasted of nothing. It smelt of nothing. It lay on her palm smiling up at her. It would cost her, it occurred to her, five pounds – her last five pounds – to own it, and, at the same time, to be free of Stu Bailey and his stare fixed on her breasts. If she wanted to be free, that is. If she wanted not to be wanted any more, never mind what he wanted her for. And he’d want her more, if she turned him down, anyway.

She folded the foil back carefully round the tablet, and put it in her pocket. Her cigarette tasted sour and tired. She closed her eyes for a moment. She ought to go for it, she knew that, she ought to take the brief power to decide that had been handed to her and use it any way she bloody well wanted. But … She opened her eyes and chucked her cigarette into the sulking fire. Suppose Nadine found out? Suppose Stu Bailey really hurt her? Suppose … Becky leaned forward and turned the volume up on the television until the room seemed to judder and then she flung herself back down on the sofa and pulled the duvet over her head.

‘That’s the fifth time,’ Tim Huntley said. He stood, legs astride, hands on hips, in Nadine’s kitchen, looking down at her. She was sitting at the table. Beyond her, with a rip in his black school blazer, stood Rory, leaning against the refrigerator and fiddling with the plastic magnets on the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said. Her voice was low.

‘A farm isn’t a play place,’ Tim said. He looked from Nadine to Rory. ‘A farm’s lethal. It’s not just the machines, it’s the poisons. I’ve got enough weedkiller there to finish off half Hereford. And a gun. You’re lucky I didn’t turn the gun on you.’

Rory mumbled.

‘What?’ Nadine said.

‘I wasn’t doing nothing—’

‘You were there,’ Tim said. ‘You were there, without my knowledge or permission. If you’re there, a stranger, you might do yourself harm and you might cause harm, too. A cow might miscarry, you might spread an infection—’

Rory bent low over the refrigerator door.

‘Sorry—’

‘I should think so. Why weren’t you at school, anyway?’ He looked at Nadine. ‘Why wasn’t he at school?’

She was trembling slightly.

‘I thought he was.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Rory said and then, muttering, ‘It’s boring.’

Tim moved forward and leaned on the table.

‘That’s no excuse. It’s the law you have to go to school and it’s the law you have to stay there.’

Nadine glanced at Rory.

‘Are you being bullied?’

He shook his head.

‘What’s wrong then?’

He hesitated. Then, with a sweep of his hand, he detached all the magnets from the door and sent them scattering across the floor.

‘I can’t stay there,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay here, I can’t—’ His voice shook a little.

‘You got homework?’ Tim asked.

Rory nodded.

‘Why don’t you go and do it, then? While I have a word with your mum?’

Rory kicked the refrigerator.

‘I’m hungry—’

‘I expect you know where the bread bin is.’

Nadine stood up.

‘I’ll get it—’

Tim watched her. He noticed, as she sliced the bread and spread it clumsily with peanut butter, that her hands were shaking. Rory didn’t offer to help her. Tim opened his mouth to tell him to get off his idle backside, and closed it again. He’d shouted at Rory enough for one day, hauling him out physically from the shed where the tractors lived and ripping his blazer in the process. Rory had accepted the shouting mutely. He hadn’t seemed frightened and he hadn’t seemed sullen. He just appeared to accept what Tim was bellowing as more of the same, more of what he was already tiredly used to. Tim had flung him into the Land Rover bodily, like a sack or an animal carcass, and had then relented and given him half a chocolate bar that was lurking in the mess in the glove compartment. Rory had pretty well swallowed it whole.

‘There,’ Nadine said. She gave Rory the sandwiches on a plate and then leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Don’t worry.’

He didn’t look at her. He took the plate and began to shamble towards the door.

‘Thank you,’ Tim Huntley said loudly, commandingly.

Rory paused briefly.

‘Thanks.’

‘That’s OK,’ Nadine said.

Rory went out of the room, letting the door bang behind him. They heard him cross the tiles of the hall, and then begin to climb the stairs, his tread slow and unsteady, like the tread of someone very much older than twelve.

‘I expect he’ll eat it in bed,’ Nadine said.

‘In bed—’

‘He’s made himself a sort of bedroom under the eaves. It’s very private. He won’t let any of us in there.’ She looked at Tim. ‘Coffee?’

‘Please,’ he said. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down on it, resting his forearms on the tabletop. He looked at Nadine. ‘We’ve been discussing you, Mum and me.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re not coping, are you?’

Nadine filled the kettle, plugged it in and put two mugs, very precisely, beside each other, on the countertop.

‘If it’s any business of yours.’

‘We’re neighbours,’ Tim said. ‘This is the country, not some bloody town where you could drop dead and nobody’d notice.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘There were kids here, four or five years back. Living with their dad in a caravan. If you can call it living. He was useless, the dirty devil. Stoned or smashed half the time. The littlest kid got killed on the Ross road, hit by a truck, wandering about on her own, famished. The other kids got taken into care and their dad vanished. We knew they were there, Mum and me. But we didn’t know how bad it was. We didn’t know the half until the little girl got killed.’

Nadine said nothing. She spooned coffee into the two mugs and screwed the lid back on the jar, very carefully.

‘You know what’s going on, don’t you?’ Tim said. Nadine put her hand on the kettle handle.

‘About what—’

‘Your kids.’

She bowed her head.

‘It’s not just the boy pitching off half the time,’ Tim said. ‘Is it? It’s the girls, too. The little ‘un looks half-starved and the big one’s playing around with one of the Bailey boys.’

‘Who,’ Nadine said tightly, ‘are the Baileys?’

Tim grunted.

‘You wouldn’t want to know. They’re a load of trouble. Four boys as bad as their dad. You don’t want your girl mixed up with the Baileys.’

The kettle blew a noisy stream of steam into the air and switched itself off. Nadine, holding her wrist with the other hand to steady it, poured water into both mugs.

‘Milk?’

‘Please.’

‘Sugar?’

‘Two,’ Tim Huntley said. ‘Cheers.’ He watched her set a mug down in front of him. Then she sat down herself, opposite.

‘Becky is in the sitting-room,’ Nadine said, ‘doing her homework. I take her to school every day and I collect her every day and I know where she is, all the time.’

Tim eyed her.

‘You don’t know what she’s doing at school. And you can’t keep her shut in forever.’ He thought, briefly, of Becky’s overdeveloped, un-girlish figure. ‘She’ll break loose soon. One trip to Hereford or Gloucester and you’ll have lost her.’

Nadine bent her head over her coffee.

‘Go away’

‘Look—’

‘Go away!’

Tim Huntley leaned forward.

‘Don’t shout, because I’m not going. I haven’t come to interfere, I’ve come to help you stop something before it starts, before your kids really lose it.’

Nadine lifted both hands and put them in front of her face. ‘We’re getting there, we are—’

‘No, lady,’ Tim said. ‘You aren’t. And if I find your boy in my yard again, without my permission, I’m calling the rozzers.’

Nadine took her hands away and stared at him, aghast.

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘I would. For his sake, for yours. It’s no help to anyone to be allowed to run wild.’

‘I don’t allow it.’

‘But you can’t stop it. And soon there’ll be more you can’t stop.’

Nadine said, unsteadily, ‘We’ve had a bad time. We – well, we got thrown out, or at least, that’s what it amounted to.’

‘Sorry,’ Tim said. ‘Why you got here’s nothing to me. It’s what happens now that counts.’

Nadine swallowed.

‘I — don’t know what happens now.’

‘You shouldn’t live alone,’ Tim said. ‘You look to me like you’ve had a bit of a breakdown. You should live with other people. Maybe that commune place over towards Hay.’ He looked at the clay around Nadine’s fingernails. ‘Art and stuff. Gardening.’

Nadine closed her eyes. She said, in the most decided voice she had yet used in this conversation, ‘I love my children.’

Tim hesitated a moment and then he said, ‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘Their dad’s a head teacher, isn’t he? The lad said—’

‘Deputy,’ Nadine said with contempt.

‘Maybe—’

She fixed him suddenly with her penetrating blue stare.

‘What?’

‘Maybe,’ Tim said, cradling his coffee mug. ‘Maybe you should let their dad take his turn for a while?’

Matthew sat by the telephone in the sitting-room. He sat very quietly, as if his quietness might suggest to Josie, next door in the kitchen, that he was still speaking. He needed her to think that because he needed time to think, himself.

It had been Nadine on the telephone. She seldom rang him at home – had hardly rung him anywhere, except twice about Rory, for over a month – and Josie had answered the telephone.

‘Hello,’ she said, and then her expression blanked. Matthew took a breath.

‘I’ll get him,’ Josie said. She held the receiver out to him.

‘For you.’

He took it. Josie was looking at him, as if she wanted something badly and he was supposed to guess what it was. Slowly, he turned his back, putting the receiver to his ear.

‘Hello.’

Josie rushed past him into the kitchen and slammed the door, shudderingly. Nadine was crying. She was crying and crying the other end of the telephone and through the crying she was trying to accuse him of all the things she had always accused him of.

‘There’s no point to this,’ Matthew said, disgusted.

‘There is! There is!’

‘Then tell me,’ he said. ‘Cut the abuse and tell me.’

He heard her blowing her nose violently.

‘They’re in bed,’ she said. ‘They can’t hear me.’

Matthew waited. She blew her nose again. Then she said, ‘They’re coming to you.’

‘What?’

‘They’re in trouble,’ Nadine said. Her voice was now a fierce, hoarse whisper. ‘They’re playing truant and not doing their homework and getting into bad company. That’s what you’ve done to them, that’s what’s happened because you—’

‘Shut up,’ Matthew said. He was gripping the telephone receiver.

‘You made the problem,’ Nadine said. ‘You got them into this. Now you get them out.’

‘What’s brought this on—’

‘You know, you two-timing bastard, what brought this on!’

Matthew took a deep breath.

‘You want the children to come here—’

‘I don’t want it!’

‘OK, OK, the children are to come here. Permanently? School and everything?’

Nadine said faintly, ‘Yes.’

‘Have you asked them?’

‘No.’

‘Before you start shipping them wholesale about the place, hadn’t you better ask them?’

Nadine said, spitting the words out separately, ‘There isn’t any point.’

‘Because you don’t intend them to have any choice?’

She shouted, ‘Because there isn’t one! If you don’t help, if they go on like this, if something happens, then we’ll neither of us have them!’

‘What?’

‘There’s someone watching me,’ Nadine said unsteadily, ‘someone who saw some other children go wrong, someone who—’ She stopped.

‘Might report you?’ Matthew said.

Nadine said nothing. He could hear her breathing, quick and ragged. Something close to pity stirred in him for a second, and then stilled.

‘I see,’ he said. He glanced towards the closed kitchen door. His heart was rising in him, with a sudden, luminous happiness. He said, trying to keep his voice empty of all potentially provocative emotion, ‘Do you want to discuss arrangements now?’

‘No.’

‘Tomorrow? I’ll call you from school—’

‘OK,’ she said. She was beginning to cry again.

He opened his mouth to say, ‘Give them my love,’ and closed it again, in case his rejoicing betrayed itself. Instead he said, ‘Till tomorrow then. Bye,’ and put the phone down.

Then he sat there. He sat beside the quiet telephone, with his eyes closed and said thank you, fervently, to somebody. His children back, his children home again, his children where he could encourage them, protect them, supervise them, see them as he hadn’t seen them for almost eighteen months in the precious, trivial, course of ordinary daily dull family life. He felt almost dizzy, almost tearful. He had been gearing himself up for the last few weeks for a protracted, ugly, exhausting wrangle with Nadine about the children, about reasonable access to them, about even being able to telephone them in some kind of freedom – and he had never dreamed that this might be the alternative, that he might simply be handed the children with a suddenness that almost knocked him over. He said their names to himself. He visualized them.

‘Thank you,’ he said silently. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

He opened his eyes. Across the room, the kitchen door stood firmly shut. Behind it, he could hear Josie clattering things in the kitchen and the sound of the classical-music radio station she played all day, carrying the portable set around with her from room to room. He stood up. The first radiance of relief and happiness was dimming slightly. It was no good hoping Josie would share it. It was no good expecting Josie to greet the news of his children’s coming to live with them with anything other than alarm. She might be horrified. She might be angry. She might, even, refuse. Matthew went across the sitting-room and opened the kitchen door.

‘Hi.’

Josie was washing the saucepans left over from cooking their supper. She didn’t turn round.

She said, ‘Why does she have to be so bloody dramatic?’

‘She is dramatic,’ Matthew said. ‘She just is. Always has been.’ He came further into the room and stood behind Josie. ‘And she was in a state tonight.’

‘So what’s new?’

‘Josie,’ Matthew said.

She turned round, holding a pan and a coiled wire scourer. Her hands were dripping with suds.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Some kind of crisis. I don’t know exactly what because I didn’t ask because if I ask I get another earful about how it’s all my fault—’

‘The children?’

‘Yes.’

Josie put down the pan and scourer and wiped her hands on a tea towel.

‘In trouble?’

‘Yes.’

‘Serious trouble?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked at him. His eyes were alight. A small, cold dread settled heavily and suddenly in the pit of her stomach.

‘Does she want you to go there?’

‘No—’

Josie bit her lip. He put his arms round her but she wouldn’t let him pull her to him.

‘Honey, she can’t cope. She’s sending them here.’

‘Here!’ Josie said. ‘To live?’

‘Yes.’ He leaned forward and kissed her unresponsive neck. ‘Yes, to live here, go to school here. With us.’

Josie said nothing. He put his nose tip to tip with hers. He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Is that OK?’

She closed her eyes for a moment and then she said, in a hard, bright voice that neither of them recognized as hers, ‘Of course.’