Blood Family (12 page)

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.

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.)

So nothing happened. I was allowed to drift along, and not unhappily.

Until the school library closed for nine weeks for the repair of the roof.

I managed for a while, with Nicholas driving me to the library in town every now and again. (Alice had given up on reading and taken to boys instead.) But then one of his architectural projects went awry, and he was working all hours to stay on top of things.

So there I was, early one weekend morning. No homework. Nothing to do. And nothing in the house I hadn’t read before or didn’t want to read at all.

Natasha pounced. ‘Stop
moping
, Edward! You’re driving me insane. You have been wandering around for two whole hours. Can’t you do something useful? Bake a cake, cook supper or something?’

‘Not in the mood.’

‘How about mopping the conservatory? The floor’s a mess.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, what about your bedroom? That’s a real tip. Why don’t you go under that bed of yours and sort out all your grown-out-of toys and games, so I can take them to the charity shop.’

‘I promise you I’ll do it soon.’

But I had pushed my luck, prowling so irritatingly around the house. ‘No, Edward. You can do it now. It’s that or mopping the floor.’

So up I went, and tugged the whole mess out from where it had been shoved, behind the bed cover. Old
toys and jigsaws. Plastic figures from crazes at school. Board games with missing pieces. Mud-encrusted football boots that can’t have fitted for years. A heap of comics, magazines and Alice’s tennis racquet, reluctantly lent to me and mislaid for so long they’d had to buy another.

And, right behind all that, my old Life Story Box.

At first I didn’t suppose I’d even look inside. I simply hauled it out to clear space under the bed before I made decisions about what to shove back. I started with Alice’s racquet, for fear of sparking everyone off again about the fact that I’d lost it in the first place. Then I began to put things into ‘Trash’ or ‘Treasure’ piles, just as Natasha did when she was clearing the conservatory or other rooms of all the stuff Alice and I left about. Naturally, when I got down to all the awkward things I couldn’t decide whether to chuck or save, I lost the will to carry on. Pushing aside that messy heap, I opened the box.

Rescue! Escape from drudgery! A book!

I had forgotten it was there because it had been in the box since almost before I could read. It had meant nothing to me. It did now! Who would have thought the
stink
of it could last so many years? I was
thirteen
. Yet, in an instant, I was back inside that flat, astonished to be able to turn the book the right way up with fingers whose ends weren’t bleeding raw, or stare at the silvery italic title without first tossing back my matted hair.

The Devil Ruled the Roost
.

What had Rob muttered as he led me out? ‘Didn’t he just!’ And now, repeating the words under my breath exactly the way Rob had, it came to me for the first time that he’d had Harris in mind.

So how long had it been?

Six years! Bryce Harris might be out of prison now. If we met in the street, I’d know that it was him, but he would pass me by without a second glance – me in my smart school trousers and my fresh white shirt, with hair that had turned lighter in the sun as the years passed.

He wouldn’t recognize my voice, of course, because he’d barely heard it.

I was safe from him.

Oh, but the smell of that book! It wasn’t just a sour, musty, clinging stench. It was a living memory of cold unhappiness, a grim reminder of all those endless hours of terrified waiting and gathering dread. The room blanched white. I tried to do what Linda taught me all those years ago – lower my head between my knees, breathe out as slowly as I could, and count to ten. Her comforting soft strictures now echoed through my mind. ‘Steady, my poppet! Steady! You’re safe now. He’ll never get to you again. Now, come on, Eddie. Get control. Breathe out. That’s right. Keep breathing. Slowly, slowly. There’s my own precious baby. There’s my boy . . .’

Gradually the panic passed. I wiped the sweat off my face and picked up the book again. This time I opened it
and read the first line. ‘
Right from the very start, my life was strange
.’

Hooked.

Scrambling to my feet, I went into Alice’s bedroom. On the shelf over her bed there sat a little spinney of tubes and bottles and sprays. I sniffed at them all. Some were so sickly I couldn’t think how she could put them anywhere near her hair or face or body. Some smelled quite nice, but didn’t seem quite strong enough for the job.

So in the end I settled on
Teen Flower
, which claimed to be ‘
eau-de-cologne
for the fresh girl about town’. I chose it partly because I liked the smell of it and partly because the bottle’s fussy, flowery design meant Alice wouldn’t be able to tell how much of the stuff had gone. Smuggling it into the garden, I sprayed the cover of the book all over. Then I replaced the bottle exactly where it had stood before, and went back to my room to read.

You’d think that story had been written for me.

It was the strangest tale. Just like myself, this boy had spent his early life hidden away. His mother had been clever, persuading him that he was ill. She kept him in a small back room, away from any windows through which he might be seen.

Like me, he had been rescued. Just the same way, in fact, after a neighbour caught a glimpse of him one day and started wondering. Like me he’d gone to a kind
family where he’d felt safe and happy. Then they had moved him – found some peculiar uncle miles away and sent him off. That’s when the worst trouble began. I
loved
the book. The plot was stuffed with ancient secrets and lies. There was a constant threatening mood about the story. And all the time, the boy was wondering about those early years. About his mother. What had she been about, locking him up like that? How could she possibly have thought it was the best thing to do?