Someone Else's Son (18 page)

‘Oh, I’m so sorry . . .’ A girl came running up, all flustered and apologetic. She reached down and picked up the ball, tentatively touching Leah on the shoulder.

‘That’s OK. Really.’ Leah grimaced and stood, smoothing down her T-shirt, trying to smile at the pretty girl, even though Carrie could tell she was still in pain.

‘Want to join us? We’re having this silly game.’ The other girl with her sweet face and long hair had already taken control of easy-prey Leah, Carrie noted with a pang of jealousy, and her friend had absolutely no idea what was going on.

‘Sure,’ she replied, giving a quick glance back at Carrie.

Carrie forced a smile and lay back down on the grass.

I would have said no, she thought, watching the cloud above morph from a cat into an elephant. A big emphatic no. Then I would have told her to chuck her stupid ball around somewhere else unless she wanted it thrown right back in her stomach to see how she liked it.

She heard Leah’s squeals as everyone in the game cheered. Carrie turned her head sideways and squinted. Leah was having fun.

‘Going with the flow,’ she whispered, wondering what it was in her past that prevented her from doing exactly that.

 

‘You don’t talk about your folks much.’ It was spaghetti again. Boiled within an inch of its life and blanketed with grated cheese. Leah handed the dish to Carrie.

Carrie was already on her feet. ‘Nope. Sorry. Can’t do this three nights in a row.’ She scooped the food into the bin, ignoring what Leah had said.

‘What are you doing? We can’t afford to throw food away.’

‘I swear I will die if I eat one more plate of pasta and cheese.’

‘Tell the guys next door to stop nicking our food then.’

Carrie halted, plate hovering over the sink. She always locked their door in the halls of residence. ‘They stole our food?’ It annoyed her that no one else ever bothered to lock up.

‘I bought chicken and salad earlier. I reckon—’

‘Don’t move.’

But Leah did move. She followed Carrie as she stormed round to the flat next door and banged on the door.

‘Carrie, don’t. It’s no big deal.’ Leah tried to pull her back, but when no one answered, Carrie barged right in. Clearly locking their door wasn’t a priority either. A couple of lads glanced up at her from cushions on the floor, nodded and ignored her as she went straight to their fridge and helped herself to the contents.

‘Is this it?’ she said, holding up a packet of chicken.

‘I . . . I . . .’ Leah pulled a pained face. ‘We can’t do this.’

‘Wanna bet?’ Carrie removed the salad drawer and marched back to their flat with the food. ‘Now we can eat.’ She took a chopping board and knife and began to hack up the meat. ‘It’s only fair,’ she heard herself saying, but by this time she’d fallen into a kind of trance – chopping automatically, tears filling up her eyes, anger welling in her heart.

Carrie was back at the military base. She smelt the musty walls of their bungalow, which she’d once believed were made of cardboard. She heard the rumble of army vehicles as they hauled equipment around the base. She heard the familiar claxon marking the start of manoeuvres, and she saw herself reflected in the impossible gleam of her father’s boots.

Charles Ernest Kent joined the army when he was sixteen. He met Carrie’s mother, Rita, while on leave aged twenty-two and they’d married almost immediately. Rita gave up nursing and followed him from base to base, watching, admiring and adoring her husband as he progressed through the ranks. She never complained about the lack of stability, or having a home of her own, or leaving newly made friends, or the loneliness that she felt bringing up a baby as if she was a single parent.

As a child, Carrie’s earliest memories involved only her mother – her soft hazel eyes, the red spotty apron she always wore in the kitchen, the way she carefully placed her wedding ring on a saucer on the table before tackling any chores.
Don’t want to scrub away the love
, she’d say. Then she’d sigh with relief as she put it back on.
Daddy will be home soon. One hundred and twenty-three sleeps to go
.

When she was old enough to know why, Carrie counted those sleeps too. While her mother couldn’t wait for Charles Kent to lie in bed beside her, to return from faraway places smelling of the sun, the desert, of oily tanks, Carrie breathlessly awaited her father’s return for different reasons. She was dreaming up new ways not to exist.

She would eat her tea in the garden if it was fine or hide out in her bunk if not. The dolls and books and jigsaws that lay strewn around the bungalow when he was away would all be tidied up days before his return. It was as if he could
smell
the mess. Noise, chatter, friends, television and any sort of physical contact – a hug, a handhold, even an accidental brush of arms – were all out of the question. Major Charles Kent was a man who lived life by his own set of rules, with strict policies. Quite simply, he had to be in control.

‘He never wanted me. He made that quite clear. In fact, he hated me.’

‘What?’ Leah had started to prepare the salad. She’d locked their flat door. How would she ever face the blokes next door again? Perhaps they didn’t have much money for food either. Surely it was only fair that they should share.

Carrie stuck the knife point down into the chicken. It missed her finger by a millimetre. She squinted at Leah, frowned and shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said, tossing the chicken pieces into the frying pan along with some oil, garlic and peppers.

To hell with him
, she thought, watching the chicken turn white, the garlic aroma opening her nostrils. Her mouth watered at the thought of a decent meal.

The likelihood of Max getting a snog was waning. At one point during the film, he’d hoped that Dayna might cling on to him out of fear. As it happened, all she did was lean over and whisper, ‘I saw that coming several scenes back.’ He was thankful it was dark. He’d opened his lips, truly believing she was going to plant a kiss on his mouth, and now he was sweating with embarrassment.

He should have realised, he thought while waiting in the corridor outside the ladies’ loos after the movie, that Dayna wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t the kind of girl to scream and jump and grab him for comfort. He doubted she was the kind of girl to throw kisses around freely either. He liked it that she wasn’t easy, unlike most girls in school who virtually kept a daily scorecard.

‘All done,’ she said. She wiped her wet hands on her jeans. ‘Shall we go back to your place?’

Max froze. That was the last thing he wanted. ‘The shed? Sure.’

‘No, dummy. Your real house. I want to see your room. I could meet your mum.’

Oh, Christ. What was he to do now? Perhaps she really was interested, after all. Whatever Dayna’s intentions, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. A girl – a girl he really liked – wanted to see his room. This might never happen again in his entire life. Even if they just sat at opposite ends of the bed, that was fine by him. In fact, he didn’t really want to rush it the first time. He wanted it to be special, to get to know her first, to take things really slow.

But how could he let her meet his mother? Everything would change. In Dayna’s eyes, he would become someone else and, while at first it might seem amazing and unbelievable to have a mother whose show was watched by millions each week, the size of her fame would sooner or later come between them.

There was only one thing for it. They would have to go back to his dad’s flat. He couldn’t possibly take her to his mother’s house. Even if she wasn’t home, the sheer opulence of it would be mind-blowing for Dayna.

‘Sure. But it’ll have to be Dad’s place.’ He thought for a second. ‘ ’Cos Mum’ll be pissed or something.’

They crossed the road and waited at the bus stop. Max pulled his phone out of his pocket and toggled through some texts.
Away till Sunday at conference. Dad
. They’d have the place to themselves. Max wondered if he ought to clean his teeth when they got back, just in case, but the flat was so small, the walls so thin, that Dayna would be bound to hear. He reckoned there might be some gum or mints in the drawer.

The bus was crowded so they had to stand. Max liked it that Dayna kept getting shoved against him, even though she scowled and grumbled at the man who kept lolling into her. They leapt off at the nearest stop to the estate where Max’s dad lived.

‘Brace yourself,’ Max said. He automatically tensed as they crossed the threshold from the High Street filled with second-hand shops, grocers with unidentifiable vegetables parked in boxes on the pavement, barber’s shops and all kinds of takeaways, to the colourless world of the Westmount estate.

‘Why?’ Dayna seemed quite at ease, despite the surroundings. Max knew she’d grown up in a similar place – a world apart from his life at boarding school.

‘It can be a bit rough.’ Max instinctively hung his head and shrugged his zip-up top further up his neck.

‘What you on about?’ Dayna was laughing and Max didn’t like it.

‘Things happen, right?’ He kicked up the pace as they walked through the concrete tunnel that led to the bowels of the estate. Nearly two thousand flats arranged in square blocks five storeys high occupied the western periphery of Harlesden. Residents referred to it as the local slammer. Max reckoned they were about right.

‘What things?’ Dayna pulled out the last of the sweets they’d bought. ‘Want one?’

Max shook his head. ‘Stuff.’ He didn’t want to put her off by telling her about the gang rape a couple of weeks ago or the burglaries – just about every flat had been broken into at some time – or the cars that were squealed around the estate on a Saturday night before being set alight, still glowing and smoking and stinking of rubber the next morning.

‘Stuff happens everywhere. My street isn’t exactly Paradise Row.’

Max wasn’t listening. Up ahead, at the stairwell entry, was a group of lads. Maybe there was a girl there as well, he couldn’t be sure. He considered diverting, but they’d already been spotted.

‘Eh, there’s da skinny bastard.’

Dayna drew breath to answer back, but Max pinched her.

‘Don’t say anything. We need to go up those stairs. Just look down.’

‘Like hell I will.’ They were blocking the opening. Their concrete hideout smelt of urine, marijuana and sweat. There was a pile of dog muck in the corner. ‘’Scuse me,’ Dayna said. She attempted to pass, but one of the boys stretched out his arms. They were tattooed from wrist to shoulder – violent green-blue swirls of anger and hate. ‘Can we get past?’

‘S’all right,’ Max said. ‘We can go the other way.’

‘What you got for us today, fuckhead?’

Max mumbled something. Their faces flashed through his mind, along with the computer. The youth stepped away from the stairs and went round behind Max. ‘You ask dat whore if you can fuck her?’ The rest of the crowd laughed. ‘You know what I got in my pocket, little halfie boy?’

Max shook his head. He could smell the boy’s sour breath – fags and lager.

‘I got summat that I want to slip inside ya skinny black ass until it comes out ya mouth, right?’ The youth pushed a finger into his belly. ‘This is my patch, yeah? You come through it, you ask my permission, right?’

Max nodded. The boy spat down his front.

‘Wanna sweet?’ Dayna shoved the bag in between Max and the youth. He grinned and took the whole bag. ‘Remember this,’ he said, beckoning to the others who lurked in the shadows. ‘You fuck me off, man, and my blade gonna shank you so fast there’s gonna be two of ya.’

Max watched them walk off, hoods up except for the girl whose short skirt showed the curve of her buttocks below it. Dayna still didn’t latch on to him for comfort – in fact, the opposite. She was already holding open the door to the stairwell.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Show me your palace.’ She let the door swing shut when Max took the stairs two at a time. He hated this part of visiting his dad. No wonder he never had any visitors. The gangs were his personal firewall.

They walked along the concrete balcony, which was strewn with washing and plastic toys, and Max tried to stop his legs from shaking. He took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door. His heart was still racing. ‘It’s a bit messy,’ he said before opening it. ‘And sometimes Dad forgets to wash up.’

‘Stop making excuses.’ Dayna opened the door and went right in. ‘Where’s your room?’

Max was about to say that he didn’t have one, that there was only one bedroom and that was his dad’s, but he didn’t want to risk Dayna leaving because he didn’t have a room to hang out in. Besides, questions would be asked. ‘This way,’ he said, turning down the dingy corridor.

‘Nice,’ she said when they went in. ‘Not much stuff though.’

Max exhaled. Clearly Fiona had sorted things out before they’d left. When Max was younger, he used to go with his dad to the various conferences he attended each year. He got to stay in posh hotels and got food brought up to the room – anything he liked – while his dad spoke and presented and impressed other mathematicians with his work. He couldn’t afford to think about all that now.

‘Has your dad got a job?’ Dayna smoothed out the sheets and parked herself on the bed. ‘My stepdad’s a twat and doesn’t work mostly.’

‘He’s a mathematician. A professor at the university.’ He was so relieved that Dayna believed this was his room, he completely forgot to make something up.

‘He’s a what?’ Dayna was incredulous. She pulled a face.

Max swallowed. ‘He works in the maths
department
, I mean. Nothing special.’ He looked away to hide his embarrassment and sat next to her on the bed. She sank towards him a little.

‘If he’s a professor, it doesn’t sound like nothing. What’s he live here for then? Is your dad loaded?’ Dayna whipped a smile across her face. Max thought it made her look so cute. He wanted to tell her everything, truly he did, but what would that do to them apart from open up a chasm?