Circle of fight

CHAPTER 24

Mr Neil Blaine, sorry Neil Blaine SC, was quite something. A week later I was in Stratton waiting in a dowdy dark room to meet him. I was shivering with the tension of the past seven days and with the fear of what was to come. If I lost Gavin I would put that down as having lost everything. Of course I still had my friends, and good friends they were, but family are as different from your friends as your dog is from your cat. Families are cats I think.

I’d visited St Bede’s three times, and rung them every day, but of course Gavin couldn’t talk to me on the phone. When I went there he seemed OK, but it was impossible to have a normal time: we were like two polite cousins at a family reunion. Too many other people, staff and kids, hanging around.

Anyway, the pile of tired-looking magazines on Mr Blaine’s table, every one with a doll-like actress on the front and articles inside about how some boring person had switched partners or lost weight or had a fight with another equally boring person, didn’t have a lot of appeal for me. I sat looking at the covers wondering how I could ever have read that crap. Funny, because I am such a magazine person when I’m in the mood.

Then I was taken into a room so thin that some of the anorexic models in the magazines would have felt right at home, and there was this little guy who looked like a jockey bowing and ushering me to a chair. It was hard not to laugh. Here I was expecting a distinguished man with white hair and a bow tie maybe, speaking in slow pompous tones, and instead I get a garden gnome in a T-shirt and shorts.

‘Take a seat, Ms Linton, please,’ he said. ‘I do apologise for my appearance but I wasn’t expecting to be working today, until my very good friend Major Gisborne rang me.’

‘No problem,’ I mumbled. ‘And call me Ellie, please.’

He didn’t answer — he certainly didn’t invite me to call him Neil — but instead sat at his desk for at least five minutes reading a pile of papers from a folder that had been tied with a pink ribbon. It was sweet, all the piles of paper tied with pink ribbons, along one entire side of the room. I sat there with the tension in my tummy feeling like a hard lump of metal that I’d eaten a week ago and was now trying to come out. I kept wondering what was so special about this man that I should give him a huge amount of money. How could anyone be worth so much?

Suddenly he put down the papers and turned to me. ‘What on earth makes you think you and Gavin should live out there on your own without someone responsible to look after you?’

His voice shocked me. It had changed and now it filled the narrow room and made flakes of plaster fall off the ceiling. Well, anyway, it was a big voice. He wasn’t shouting, not at all, quite the opposite, but from somewhere deep inside this little person came such a huge voice. I stared at him then stammered, ‘We are responsible. I am responsible.’ I hadn’t known what to think of him before but now he was quite scary.

‘Oh everybody thinks they’re responsible, everyone tells you how responsible they are, then they go off, kill their best friend in a high-speed car accident, and blow. 15 into the bag.’

‘Well that’s not me,’ I said angrily. ‘I’m running a big property with three hundred and fifty head of cattle. I haven’t got time to be drinking and joy-riding.’

‘You’re a teenager and you don’t drink alcohol?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, thinking I’d better not admit to any under-age drinking if I wanted to get Gavin back.

‘Come now, Ellie, are you telling me that no taste of alcohol has ever passed your lips?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that exactly, just that I don’t drink at all now, and I never did drink much. Not as much as some people out our way.’

‘So you have had alcoholic drinks?’

‘Well, some, of course ages ago, but not now.’

I was floundering. Already he had caught me out in an embarrassing lie. I wondered whose side he was on. He seemed so hostile. I decided I didn’t like him much at all.

‘ Alcoholic drinks,’ he wrote down on a little yellow notepad, saying the words out loud as he wrote them.

‘That’s not fair!’ I said. ‘ I don’t drink. Occasionally before the war and during the war I did some stupid stuff, but that was ages ago. I don’t drink!’

He completely ignored me. ‘How many days off school have you treated yourself and Gavin to this year?’

‘We don’t treat ourselves to days off school. When we can’t get there we can’t get there. And yes, it does happen quite a lot, more than I’d like, but I try my butt off to get us both there. It’s a bit difficult though when the ute won’t start or some cattle have got out and are on the road or the bank manager is coming to have a look at how we’re spending her money.’

‘How many days off school have you and Gavin had this year?’

I realised with further embarrassment the point he was making, that I hadn’t answered the question. I slumped a little and said, ‘Probably about fifteen to twenty each.’

‘The school records show twenty-three for you and twenty-one for Gavin.’

I felt like saying, ‘Well if you knew, why did you ask?’ but if he wanted to beat up on people, that was his problem so I didn’t say anything.

‘Have you ever hit Gavin?’

‘What?’ I sat up again. Now he was going to accuse me of child abuse? Neil Blaine SC was the one inflicting bruises on me!

‘It’s a simple question. Have you ever hit Gavin?’

‘Has he ever hit me, you mean. He beats me up half the time. We play wrestle and stuff like that, just mucking around.’

‘Have you hit him in anger and frustration, when you can’t get him to do what you want, when you’re running late for school and he won’t switch off the television, when he hasn’t fed the dog like you asked him to and he still won’t move although you’ve told him a dozen times, when he’s whingeing and grizzling and picking at you for hour after hour?’

‘God,’ I thought, ‘he’s been talking to Gavin,’ and with even more embarrassment, and thinking that I was going to lose my custody battle before I’d even started, I said, ‘Yes.’

‘How many times?’

‘Well I’m not like a child basher! I just occasionally lose my temper and shake him or smack him on the back of the head or something, but not hard. Or I pull him out of a chair or I push him out the door to make him go and do his jobs.’

‘How many times?’

Oohhh this man was so frustrating.

‘About once in a blue moon. Every couple of months.’

‘About once a week would be more like it, wouldn’t it?’

‘No way!’ Who had he been talking to? Surely Gavin wouldn’t say something like that? ‘Once a month maybe. Not even that. He’s a really annoying kid sometimes, well he can be, but we have a good relationship. It’s true there are times I feel like giving him a good smack, plenty of times, but I know it’d be the worst thing if I did. He’s been smacked around a lot. I want to teach him that there are other ways of solving problems.’

And so it went on. I’d rather have faced a dozen enemy soldiers armed with AK47s than be interviewed by Neil Blaine SC. In the next ten minutes he got me to admit that we sometimes watched M15+ rated DVDs, although I’ve never let Gavin watch an R one; that in the last few months I’d been getting takeaways quite often, bringing them home and reheating them for dinner; that the house was nowhere near as neat and tidy as it had been when my mother was alive, and that Marmie practically lived in Gavin’s bedroom.

By the end of the interview I wouldn’t have entrusted a headless cockroach to my care, let alone an emotionally deprived child.

Then, with no warning, he jumped up and went over to the door, opened it and waited for me to leave. I thought he was giving me the flick, I’d failed the test and he was throwing me out of his office. Or chambers, they call them. But instead, as I got up hesitantly and walked to him, feeling quite ill, he stuck out his hand and said, ‘We’ll get him back from those Rottweilers, Ellie. They get a firm grip but once we start kicking them in the balls they’ll change their minds fast enough.’

I gaped at him. In a flash I saw what he’d been doing. He’d put me through the kind of experience I could expect in court. He was on my side after all. I said in a feeble voice, ‘So you’re going to take the case?’

‘Of course. We’ve got a fight on our hands, but we’re in with a chance. We need to teach the court to be imaginative, and sometimes that’s not as impossible as you might think. I’ll be in touch soon about information I’ll need from you. Goodbye for now, Ellie. You might like to talk to my clerk on the way out about making the first payment. I don’t come cheap you know. Hooroo.’

And I found myself out in the corridor, shellshocked, as the door closed quietly behind me.