Blood Family (17 page)

Her head was almost on her chest. I had to lean in even closer to hear. ‘. . . got so
angry
. . . had to keep moving . . .’

I left it there, and by the time Eddie came back, Alice had soothed and charmed poor Lucy back to smiles and nods. But when the three of us were on our way back to the car, I drew ahead with Alice. ‘Well done for starting that. At least we know.’

She turned to check that Edward was still out of earshot. ‘So, will we tell him?’

‘Only if he asks.’

She kicked the gravel up in little sprays. ‘He won’t, though, will he? Poor Eddie’s totally
allergic
to any questions about himself. Asking
or
answering.’

And do you know, till Alice said that, I had never realized.

We had high hopes of him. He was so bright. When he moved to us from his primary school he was amenable and willing. Studious, even. Like several of the others, Edward used work to hide the fact that he found socializing quite a strain. He was quite often to be
found up in the library. And in the lunch hour, he would disappear for half an hour or so to get his homework done somewhere in school.

He was a pleasure to teach. You had to press him hard to make him speak up willingly in class discussions. But you could rarely fault the stuff he wrote, except in trivial ways. He had a very wide vocabulary for his age. And he was thoughtful.

Then, that term, he closed down – and it was pretty well overnight. It was the strangest thing. All of them go through changes. From time to time, the girls get in some weird moods. Tearful. Aggressive. Mardy. You have to cut them quite a lot of slack. We are quite used to that.

The boys change too. It helps to learn to ignore a lot of the sullenness, and not pick up on all the petty rudeness. It’s not an easy time. Some lad who never gave a thought to what he looks like suddenly comes out in spots. His face erupts, and it’s as if his personality implodes to match. He hides his head, won’t raise his hand in class, he misses clubs he’s always liked, and can’t scoot off the premises quickly enough after the buzzer sounds. The ones that haven’t started on their growth spurt become self-conscious as the others tower over them or flaunt themselves in the showers.

Then there are those who just lose interest in the work. They sprawl across the desks, and you can almost see them counting off the minutes till they can leave and, as they put it, ‘get a proper life’. You have to keep on
trying to kick-start them into a bit of effort, and stamp on all the tiresome waves of bad behaviour born of sheer boredom.

Sometimes you want to shake them all till their teeth rattle.

All normal. All in a day’s work.

But that term Edward was quite strange. It was as if his wits had wandered off. He wasn’t rude. He didn’t seem unsettled. How can I put it? More as if he
wasn’t there
. As if some alien craft had landed overnight to sweep off the real Edward and leave us with this dead facsimile who just went through the motions. If I am honest, he reminded me of my grandmother after Grandpa died. She smiled and nodded and she did her best, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was half-drowned in echoes and reminders: ‘Your grandpa loved that song.’ ‘That would have made my Eric chuckle.’ ‘Oh, how he
hated
beans.’ Whenever I visited, I felt as if there was another person in the room, far more alive and real than me.

Edward had gone a bit like that – as if he was beset with shadows.

We asked his parents in, of course. That’s standard. They’re a perfectly nice and sensible pair. Mrs Stead made a point of reminding us that Edward had a difficult start in life (though she admitted he had seemed to triumph over that). Her husband sat there with a worried look. ‘I’ll try to talk to him,’ he kept on saying. ‘I
have
tried, but I’ll try again.’

What can you do? We had to leave it at that.

Then, pretty well as promptly as it had begun, the phase was over. Edward was himself again.

I’d had a vile day. Mrs Tennant on at me about not listening in class. Nicholas watching me with that stupid worried look. Natasha nagging me about mess in the kitchen, and Alice screeching on about something I’d said in school that had got back to one of her best friends and caused a row.

I stomped out of the house, telling them that I needed to fetch some homework that I’d lent to Justin. I wasn’t bothered where I went, but I just had this passing thought that Nicholas might take it in his head to follow me. So I walked down to Justin’s street, and saw that elder brother of his hanging about in front of the line of garage doors on Lenby Lane.

That’s
when I thought of it. It wasn’t before.

When I told Troy what I wanted, he looked me up and down as if I were some sort of plonker. ‘Blueys? I ain’t had any of them since longer than
for ever
.’

My disappointment must have shown. ‘Tell you what, though. I’ve got these.’ He dipped in his pocket. ‘Just as good. Some reckon better. Want a go?’

‘How much?’

He took me for a total ride that first time (though I smartened up and never paid so much again). But that night all that mattered was that I had it in my hand – a passport to what everyone wants. That sense of peace and warmth and calm. (Everyone in the world believes in peace. Believers pray for it. Newsreaders go on about the chance of it in practically every bulletin. I’d even heard Natasha mention it when her phone rang at night. ‘Oh, no! The only thing it seems you can’t have in this world is peace and quiet!’)

The quiet bit was easy. Nobody, not even Alice, bothered me once I’d announced that I was off to bed. And peace came stealing in almost as soon as I had taken them, those lovely little red pills. I did feel guilty, of course. But I could defend myself. After all, hadn’t Alice pretty well
insisted
I was a druggie?

So why not prove her right?

Those were some special evenings that I had, all by myself, sprawled like a starfish on the floor, safe from all thoughts of Harris. And all the good stuff lasted through the day, because a thin leftover thread of calm did seem to make it easier for me to look as if I might be trying at school. It helped at home as well. Knowing that I could soon be off in my own cradled, timeless universe made it far easier to bat away Natasha’s questions without a loss of temper. ‘Edward, what were you doing in the bathroom for so long last night? I reckon you were there for
hours
.’

I wasn’t going to say a raging thirst had sent me for a simple glass of water but, twisting off the tap, I’d seen the first drip gathering, silvered by moonlight, and taking a lifetime to swell in perfect beauty. I’d watched entranced as the slim shining rim of it along the tap edge tirelessly budded till, quivering, it broke away to drop onto the porcelain with such a rich and echoing chime I had to make an effort to remind myself it would not wake them in the other rooms. Regretfully, I’d watched the little tadpole of the drip slip down the plughole. And yet already, on the tap rim, another was gathering – fat, gleaming, mesmerizing.

Had I stood there all
night
?

I loved those pills. Natasha caught me on the landing once, staring down through the banisters at the rug in the hall. She didn’t know that it was swirling in obedient patterns. In my own head, I could make all its colours twist and turn, not clumsily like in a kaleidoscope, but with a buttery smoothness, as if the myriad shades of red and orange and ochre were merely following my will.

‘Edward?’ She smiled. ‘What are you up to? You look miles away.’

‘Just thinking.’

‘What about?’

‘Nothing.’ But even I could tell that sounded wrong. ‘Well, actually, something a little complicated to do with homework.’

She ran her hand over the top of my head as she went
by. ‘I am so pleased with you. And so is Mrs Tennant. I was just coming up to tell you that she rang today to say you’re doing
so
much better.’

And I was. Somehow the things my brain and I were doing together at night made everyone around look different. Once, after I’d ill-advisedly jumped the pill-popping gun, I was called back downstairs because of one of Rob’s rare evening visits. And it was magical. I realized that, under the skin of everyone round me, I could still see the creature they had been in childhood – just as, when I was taking my first bluey, I’d once seen Alice. I knew, just knew, that Nicholas had been unmercifully teased about his hand when he was young. Watching him join us in the living room, I saw how he unthinkingly made for the chair which best hid his bad hand, and I ran through my head the recent times I’d seen him take a seat.

At the pub picnic table.

In the dentist’s waiting room.

Down at the railway station.

Always the same, I realized. Always the chair that kept his left arm turned away as if it were a horribly scarred secret. Why did he still do that? None of us ever teased. Natasha even shared his bed. Why would it be a habit, if he’d not learned to automatically protect himself so much in childhood? I’d watch Natasha, and see her as the strained and anxious child she must have been when she
was sent away at ten years old, so eager to stay friends with everyone in boarding school that she could not relax, no, not even now, all these years later in her own home. I must have been much easier to live with in those months, while I was seeing both of them the way I did, as vulnerable children who had put on some toughened shell of grown-up habits. They were much happier now that I seemed less anxious in their company.

I even started asking them all sorts of questions.

‘Natasha, do you get much time to read at boarding school?’

I wonder if she thought I wanted to leave home. ‘It isn’t easy, Edward. Everywhere you are, people are always there.’

‘But you can surely slip away and read?’

‘There’s not much slipping away.’ She puffed her cheeks out childishly, as if simply remembering had sent her back in time. ‘And every time people in my school left a book somewhere, either it vanished or some grim teacher made a scene.’

‘A scene? About a book? In a
school
?’

‘Oh, not about your reading it. About it
being
there. You know.’ She launched into an imitation of some fusspot teacher. ‘“Whose is this book, Marie? Who left this on the windowsill? Hermione, is it yours? Have you just left it lying about for someone else to pick up? No? Then, Clarissa! Was it
you
who left it here?” ’

‘It sounds quite horrible.’

‘I’m sure that things are far, far better now. But back in my day you were kept so busy that the only time you had to read was in the dorm before lights out.’ She scowled. ‘And even then somebody else had probably borrowed your hair.’

‘Borrowed your
hair
?’

‘To practise plaiting. So it was hard to keep your eyes steady on the words.’ She smiled at me. ‘I’d never have been able to even
try
to read that smelly book with tiny print that you’re forever stuck in.’

‘
The Devil Ruled the Roost
?’

‘It would have been impossible to even
start
.’

‘Except in holidays.’

She gave a hollow laugh. And I had heard enough about the way Natasha’s school breaks had turned into running battles between her warring parents and their second families, to guess that escaping into books had not been easy then. Alice had confidently claimed that was the reason why Natasha wanted us – so she could have a second stab at living in a peaceful family.

So maybe I can’t blame her for never noticing my drifting ways, my times of quite unnatural reverie, the hours I spent locked away.

Or all the money vanishing from her purse and Nicholas’s wallet. ‘Don’t trouble Trouble till he troubles you,’ she always said. And after all, I was no longer wandering around the house at night. I slept much better and was worrying less. All that I had to do to calm
myself was count the hours till I heard one or another of the family come out with what I had begun to equate with buzzers signalling the end of the school day. ‘I’m really bushed. I think I’m turning in now.’ Sometimes I did catch Alice watching with a quizzical look. But she was busy now – falling in love with boy after boy in headlong fashion, all of them somehow staying friends and rushing off whenever possible in some merry, ever-changing group that Nicholas began to call ‘Alice’s flock’.

He only ever dared to steal from me once. He slid a single note out of the money clip I kept in my desk drawer. I suppose he hoped I hadn’t counted it.

Well, he was out of luck.

I went downstairs to Nicholas’s office and took a couple of squares of plain white card. I cut out arrows – twenty-five of them. Then I went into Eddie’s room and took down one of the photos that Natasha had framed of Eddie looking thoughtful in the garden.

I hung a mirror on the hook instead.

I laid down arrows in a trail across the floor from the door, then stuck a few more running up the wall, to reach the mirror.

Above the mirror I stuck another arrow, pointing
down. I wrote in tiny print, so he would have to go up close to read it:

Face of a thief
.

Not only did it work, it shook him up so much that he said sorry. It was quite obvious that he’d been crying.

I felt so
mean
– using a mirror to torment poor Eddie with his own face. I know that I cried too. And then the two of us made up.

That summer, Justin’s brother lost his usual source. ‘Try these instead.’

‘No thanks. I’ll stick with the reds.’

Troy scowled. ‘You’ll have to find them somewhere else. I’ve not got any more.’

Weakly I took the twist of paper he was offering me. ‘Same price?’

‘You’re lucky, Eddie. Even cheaper, these.’

But I threw most of them away. I tried them only twice. Both times the dreams I had were vivid. Terrifying. Worse, they were
unforgettable
. I’d rather have had Harris haunting me than those vile crawling things that made their stinking home inside my brain. I swear that I could actually
smell
them.