The Other Child (9 page)

She certainly did not appropriate Greg when she took his picture the very first time, though he asked her to have a drink with him when she’d finished. They got a cab to a Pimlico pub and then later, a little drunk, he walked her through Victoria Station. As they crossed the concourse, she felt urgent messages buzzing between them but she told herself that he must be married, even though he didn’t wear a ring.

They said goodbye at the platform, a kiss on the cheek, both of them stepping back and laughing at the touch. Then the next day someone opened the main door below her studio and shouted up the stairs that she had a visitor. She came out, rubbing her hands down her jeans, shoving her hair back. He had driven down from London. ‘I thought I’d take a look at those photos,’ he grinned, his shoulders filling the door frame, blocking out the light.

Afterwards, as she watched his car pull away, she felt as if a grenade had crashed into her studio, blowing out the walls, leaving the structure exposed. It was just sex, she told herself – incredible sex, admittedly, but he really was not her type: too sure of himself, too inaccessible, and – surely – married.

But of course he wasn’t. He came for her that day because he wanted her. And what Greg wanted, he got.

‘I guess they have a lot to talk about, huh?’ Josh is also looking at Greg and Helena. ‘He’s a doctor I hear?’

‘Yes, he’s a cardiac surgeon. Paediatrics.’

‘Long hours? Travels all the time?’

‘Yes, actually, he travels a lot.’ But she doesn’t want to talk about Greg’s absences, or his brilliant career, and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about herself anymore. ‘So, what is
your
subject?’ she says. ‘What are you a professor of?’

‘I’m a medical historian – I’m interested in eugenics.’

‘As in Nazi Germany?’ From somewhere behind her she hears a low, throaty laugh. She decides not to look.

‘Actually, I’m most interested in the origins of eugenics. I just wrote a book about Sir Francis Galton, the Victorian who coined the word. Have you heard of him?’

‘I haven’t – sorry, I’m very ignorant.’

‘He was Charles Darwin’s cousin, heavily influenced by Darwin’s work. He was a troubled genius himself. He once wrote that geniuses are “within a measurable distance of insanity”. He proposed that successful beautiful people should be made to breed.’

Josh takes a sip of his beer and they both glance at Helena and Greg, who are still deep in conversation. ‘He’d have put those two together, that’s for sure.’

She tries to laugh.

‘Galton was a polymath. Among other things, he was the first person to devise a system for classifying fingerprints.’ Josh takes her hand suddenly, and pulls it up to chest level, arranging it into a star shape. His fingers feel warm and soft. She feels her face heat up. ‘He identified eight fingerprint types that are still used today – let’s see if I can remember them. There’s the plain arch,’ he touches the tip of her index finger, ‘tented arch, simple loop, central pocket loop, double loop . . . umm . . . lateral pocket loop, plain whorl, and . . .’ he touches her thumb, ‘accidental.’

She pulls her hand away – presumably this is Josh’s way of getting to his wife. Before she can say anything a terrifying wail rises up the basement stairs and Joe bursts through the doorway, into the living room.

He stands for a moment, swaying, scarlet-faced, his mouth a rictus of agony, looking for her. He spots her.

‘That boy,’ he shouts, ‘can just FUCK OFF!’

The adults give a collective gasp.

She runs across the room to Joe. There is genuine panic in his eyes. He has never said ‘fuck’ before – at least never in her hearing. ‘What happened?’ She bends and takes him by the arms and he tries to suck in a breath, but before he can speak the other children burst into the room, all yelling at once, and for a moment there is mayhem. She hears the word ‘strangle’ and sees Miriam rush to Owen, her breasts and belly jiggling.

Joe is sobbing and clinging to her as if he were a toddler. His whole body quakes. She kneels down so that she is at his level. ‘It’s OK, love, it’s all right. Are you hurt?’

Somewhere, a child says, ‘The British kid strangled Owen.’

‘He . . .’ Joe is struggling to speak, his face purple. ‘He . . . hit . . . me . . . I . . .’

‘Don’t swear again,’ she says quickly. ‘Don’t swear. Just talk, OK? Just talk.’

Then Greg is at her shoulder, leaning over, his voice low and hard. ‘What you just said was not acceptable, Joe, not acceptable at all.’ This makes Joe sob even louder. Strings of saliva stretch between his jaws.

‘Not now, Greg.’ She holds onto Joe as his enormous, loud, very uncute sounds expand to fill the room. The other children are silent now, chastened by a shared understanding that Joe is out of control.

Greg reaches past her and takes Joe by both arms. ‘You need to stop this noise right now. You need to calm down.’ She sees Greg’s fingers digging into Joe’s arms and reaches out her hand but Joe twists out of Greg’s grasp.

‘Get off me!’ he howls. ‘Don’t touch me! You are not my dad!’

He hurtles across the room, wrenches open the front door and thuds away down the slippery steps.

She glances at Greg. His face is a solid mask. She turns and runs out of the front door after Joe, but Greg is behind her, he pushes past her on the steps, forcing her to grab hold of the bannister. It is raining properly now, thin, sharp, diligent rain. She peers over the railings and sees Greg reach the bottom in one leap and catch up with Joe in just two strides. He seizes him, whipping him around. Joe cowers and in the dim streetlight she sees fear flash across his face. She hurtles down the stairs after them, shouting, ‘Stop it! Stop!’

Joe’s upper body flips backwards and forwards in Greg’s hands. She throws herself at them, yanking at Greg’s arm, trying to force herself between him and Joe, but Greg is immovable, vast, bellowing into Joe’s face: ‘How dare you use that word? How
dare
you? You get back up there right now, you get back up there and you apologize to those people!’ He begins to drag Joe towards the steps, one hand clamped around his upper arm.

She hits Greg’s wrist. ‘Let go of him!’ She tries to open his hand, but his fingers are too strong. ‘Greg, stop! You’re hurting him! Stop this!’ But he doesn’t seem to hear – he doesn’t seem to register her at all.

‘Mum!’ Joe’s voice is high and terrified, his eyes enormous. ‘Mum!’ The sound of his fear jolts electricity through her nerve endings and she seizes Greg’s thumb, jerking it back and twisting it hard before letting go.

Greg drops Joe’s arm and holds his thumb, his jaw ajar, eyes startled. She grabs Joe and tucks him close against her side, sheltering him from Greg with both arms, one hand over his head. And then for a moment everything stops except the rain, which needles into her scalp. She hears Greg’s harsh breaths and her own pulse, thudding somewhere at the base of her skull. Joe lets out a frightened whimper.

A vein in Greg’s neck throbs, but he does not move or speak, he just stands rigid, as if he has been jerked back into the present and does not quite know how he came to be here – as if his mind is racing to work out what he has just done.

She lifts her chin. ‘Go away.’ Her voice is clear and sharp. ‘Go away and calm down.’ She takes a step back, keeping Joe wedged against her, as if they are one body. She takes another step back. ‘I am going to take Joe home now and you are going to go somewhere else, you are going to go and calm down.’

He nods, once. She turns and steers Joe across the street towards the mock Tudor house. She doesn’t look back to see what Greg does or where he goes, but she can feel him watching them as they go down the path towards the porch.

*

It takes her a long time to calm Joe down, lying next to him on his Arsenal duvet while he cries with his face buried in her chest. The image of Greg’s face – his mask of fury and then, when she twisted his thumb, the shock as pain snapped him back into an awareness of himself, of her, of Joe – is lodged in her mind. She wonders if she could have dislocated his thumb. This would be a disaster for any surgeon.

When Joe can speak again all he will say is that there was a struggle over an Xbox controller, everyone was teasing him, Owen punched him hard in the stomach and he lost his temper and grabbed Owen round the neck.

‘But I let go,’ he says. ‘I let go fast. I want to go home,’ he sobs. ‘Take me home. I want to go home.’

‘I know.’ She strokes his hand. ‘I know you do, love.’ It is all she can do not to say, ‘Me too.’

‘Take me home.’ He looks up at her and the combination of the desperate look on his face and the words reminds her of her mother, who would pace the house saying those words over and over, bewildered, afraid, besieged by longing for a safety and stability that only ever existed somewhere else.

She strokes his hair. ‘This is our home right now, OK, Joey? Home is where people who love you are – and I love you. I love you so much. And Greg loves you too, even though he got angry tonight and he scared you. Things won’t always be this hard, love. It’s not easy to settle into a new place, but it will get better. We’ll make sure of that.’

‘It won’t get better.’ He turns away, hunching under his duvet, a small creature in its burrow. ‘And I hate Greg. He scares me.’

‘I know you feel that right now. He lost his temper and it was very wrong of him to grab you like that. He was angry and upset because you said the F-word – that was pretty bad, you know; I was shocked too when I heard you say it. You mustn’t swear like that ever again, OK? But even so, Greg shouldn’t have done that, and I know he feels really bad about it now.’

Joe lies very still. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him off anymore. Greg’s behaviour was far worse than anything Joe did, and they both know it.

*

She is almost asleep herself, lying next to Joe with the baby dancing and twirling inside her, when she hears the key in the front door and the creak of its big metal hinges. She glances at her watch. It has been almost two hours since she left Greg in the street. She slides off the bed without waking Joe and goes to the top of the stairs.

He is taking off his coat in the hall. He looks up at her. His eyes have dark circles beneath them but he does not look deranged anymore, he just looks tired.

She comes downstairs, folding her cardigan around her body. ‘Where have you been?’

‘At the Schechters’.’ He frowns. ‘Where else would I be?’

‘You went straight back there?’ She imagines him taking his anger back up the stairs and into that front room. But of course he would never expose himself like that. He would have hauled everything back inside and by the time he got to Sandra’s front door he would have appeared perfectly calm. He has probably spent the last two hours smoothing everything over, explaining that Joe has been unhappy, is having trouble adjusting. None of the neighbours will have any idea what happened in the street. None of them will have seen what she and Joe saw in his eyes.

She reaches the bottom of the stairs. ‘You hurt him – you terrified him. Don’t ever do that again.’

‘I lost it, I’m sorry. He crossed the line and I wanted to show him that it wasn’t OK – but then I guess I crossed the line too.’

‘You really did,’ she nods.

‘I messed up and I’m sorry.’ He looks up at her, but his face isn’t soft or apologetic. He tilts his head. ‘But the thing is that these are nice, kind and reasonable people, Tess. They were appalled: nine-year-old kids around here don’t say fuck, and they don’t wrap their hands round other kids’ necks. Owen’s mother is particularly outraged.’

‘Is Owen OK?’

‘He has localized bruising around the windpipe and some superficial abrasions.’ He turns away and hangs his coat in the hall cupboard.

‘
Superficial abrasions
? Why are you talking in jargon?’

‘Joe’s fingernails almost broke the skin on Owen’s neck.’

‘OK, well, that’s awful, but think about what it would take to make Joe do something like that. Owen punched him in the stomach, and before that they were all teasing him. Joe’s not a violent boy – you know that, he’s not aggressive, he’s never done anything remotely like this before. He’s had months of this sort of teasing at school. He just lost it.’ The irony of defending Joe whilst attacking Greg for exactly the same thing does not escape her. But Greg is an adult and Joe is nine years old. ‘He’s never been in a fight in his life,’ she says.

‘Well,’ Greg shrugs, ‘he has now.’

He turns away and double-locks the front door, putting the keys on the shelf above the radiator. Then he walks off down the hall into the kitchen. She pushes her hair back. A headache glimmers between her eyes. It is cold in the hall – there is a draught coming under the door and she can hear the wind gusting down the chimney in the front room. She hugs herself, feeling the baby flip and kick deep in her belly. A gust of rain hits the porch. She hears Greg in the kitchen, filling the kettle, putting it on the hob, the gush of the gas, the click and tiny roar as it lights. She feels a sudden, irrational longing for a simple, efficient electric kettle.

She does not want to follow Greg into the kitchen. She could just go up to bed. She is weary and chilly. But she knows she should not leave things the way they are. She walks down the hall and into the kitchen.

The lights bounce off the appliances. He has his back to her and his hair glistens from the rain.

‘Let’s just hope the MacAlpines don’t take it any further,’ he says, without turning. It takes her a moment to realize that he is looking at her reflection in the kitchen window.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, when a child gets strangled here the parents don’t always sit around playing nice.’ He tosses a chamomile teabag into a mug and slams the cupboard shut.

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’ve known people litigate for less.’

‘OK, you have to be kidding me. That’s bloody ridiculous.’

He shrugs. ‘It is, but it happens.’

‘Joe was punched!’

‘Owen’s the one with the damaged neck,’ he says, ‘not Joe.’ He turns round, leaning on the counter. The kettle on the hob begins to rattle.

‘This is nonsensical. They’re in fourth grade.’

‘I’m not saying anyone’s suing anyone, I’m just saying there are some fairly major cultural differences going on here and you don’t seem aware of them. You need to go down the street tomorrow morning
with
Joe, and smooth things over with Miriam. I spent a lot of time trying to appease her this evening but she is clearly not the forgiving type.’

The kettle is whining now. Greg snaps the gas off and pours steaming water over the chamomile teabag. Then he turns and scoops coffee into the espresso machine, twisting the handle with a jerk of his elbow.

‘You’re making coffee? Now?’

‘I have work to do tonight. The chamomile tea’s for you.’

The coffee machine shudders and growls. They both watch the thick, brown liquid stream into the cup. He snaps the off button, then walks across the kitchen, pausing as he reaches her, waiting for her to step out of his way.

She moves aside and hears him get out his laptop from the bag that’s on the dining-room table and the metallic ping as it switches on. Her lower back aches and she feels faintly sick. He has left her chamomile tea on the side, but she doesn’t want it, she doesn’t want anything Greg might give her right now.

There is no way she is going to drag Joe down the street tomorrow to apologize to that woman. If it ever came to anything as ludicrous as police involvement, then Greg – the paediatric doctor who witnessed this – would defend Joe. He is saying this because he wants to punish her. She has demonstrated to all the neighbours that she is not the beautiful English wife with the perfect little boy. Their family is messy, unpredictable and slightly out of control.

She thinks about the shock on their faces when Joe shouted ‘fuck’. In England someone would have made a joke or called out ‘steady on’ or laughed, or said something, anything, to defuse the moment, but the neighbours tonight had all been genuinely – understandably – aghast. They probably now think that she is the sort of mother who teaches her child to say fuck when he’s annoyed. It would be funny, if it weren’t so awful. She rests a hand on the countertop, feeling the cold, smooth marble beneath her fingers. She has never felt as culturally adrift as she does right now.

Greg has sealed his rage back up, but in doing so he has shut her out. She hears him clear his throat as his fingers clatter lightly on the keyboard. She looks at him through the archway. The light of the screen illuminates his strong features. He works like a predator, his body terribly still, his brain arrowed in on the task. He will keep this up for hours now.

She remembers how he once described the intensity of emergency surgery: ‘It’s not just my emotions that shut down,’ he explained, ‘everything does – even basic needs like hunger, thirst and tiredness. I don’t need anything at all, no food, no bathroom breaks, nothing. It’s like I only exist for one purpose: to get the job done.’

It is clear that they won’t resolve anything tonight. She couldn’t get through to him now even if she had the energy to try. But whatever is buried inside him – the grief, loss, anger, self-blame and terror – pushed its way to the surface tonight and for those few moments out there in the rain she’d seen the part of him that she had, until now, only sensed intuitively.

She switches off the kitchen lights and turns away. Of all the people she has dealt with this evening it is Greg who feels the most like a stranger.