Ralph’s Children (3 page)

But instead, they had wanted her to throw it away.

It.

Sam.

He was eight years old now and living at the Mann Children’s Home because that was where Peter and Michele had decreed he should live, because Rudolf Mann House was like
a friendly version of a stately home with acres of land, including a petting farm and sporting facilities and gardens, all safely laid out so that children like Sam Moon could play without too much
supervision and still not endanger themselves.

The Mann was the only home Sam had ever known. Hospital visits, organized outings and Laurie’s days aside, he had spent his entire life there. It was his world, and there was absolutely
nothing wrong with it; it was a remarkable place, run by good people. The Mann had its own school and ran workshops and training courses for its older residents when they were ready to either leave
the Mann altogether or move into one of its ‘satellite’ flats or shared houses.

They did not all survive, depending upon the condition that had qualified them for residence in the first place. Down’s syndrome in Sam’s case. The most common kind, Standard Trisomy
21, with no additional health burdens; a tendency to chest infections when he was small, but no heart issues, which Laurie knew was a great blessing since the ratio for heart problems in
Down’s syndrome children was about one in two or three.

‘He’s a lucky little chap,’ her dad had said to her once, when Sam was three.

Laurie had never imagined she could ever want to physically attack her father, but at that moment she could have beaten him with her fists for his sheer stupidity. It had to be stupidity, she
clung to that, because both her parents
were
kind, even if the Down’s had made them denser than beasts, blinding them to what mattered.

Sam being Laurie’s son. Her beloved child.

‘You can’t really think we don’t know that,’ Shelly had said in an early battle.

‘If you do know it,’ Laurie had said, ‘that means you’re wicked, and I don’t want to believe that.’

* * *

Her first battle of any substance with her parents had been over her passionate wish to go to art school. Laurie’s only real interest in horses had been painting them,
which disappointed Pete and Shelly. They’d have been happy enough if Laurie had wanted to become a lawyer or doctor or, better yet, a vet, but studying art struck them as a total waste of
time and money. Still, her teachers felt she had talent, and the Nettlebed School of Art was close to home, so they’d given in.

Laurie thought she’d put all her strength of character into that fight, and then she’d slept with Mike Gilliam, a fellow student, just after a twenty-four-hour stomach bug which had
screwed up the effects of her pill. And Mike had told her very nicely three days after he’d made love to her that he was getting back with his ex, and Laurie was a really great girl, and he
hoped she didn’t mind too much, but he couldn’t see her again.

‘Of course not,’ Laurie had told him, though she had minded deeply because Mike was sexy and amazingly talented and she’d wanted him for ages, but he was never going to know
that, which was the only thing that made it bearable.

Maybe if she’d got pregnant by someone less special, she might have found it easier to contemplate the idea of abortion, but she doubted that, because she thought it both wicked and cruel.
Besides which, that extraordinary warmth, that
love
, had already taken her over.

‘We’re on your side,’ her parents had both said.

Which was precisely why, they had added, there was only one solution.

‘No,’ Laurie had told them. ‘
No!
’

Some strength of character left, after all. Enough to make them see that she would die rather than have an abortion.

‘I presume this means I’m banished forever,’ she told them when they arranged for her to go away, ‘since if no one’s to be allowed to see me getting fat, then they
obviously won’t be allowed to see my baby.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Pete had said.

‘What does that mean?’ Laurie had asked, then realized it meant they were hoping that either she would change her mind, or that nature might intervene and she would lose the
baby.

‘God forgive you,’ she had said.

Her father’s cheeks had grown hot and her mother’s eyes had filled with shame, and Laurie had decided that she had won another battle, because if they did send her to Provence to
stay with her Aunt Angela – her mother’s sister – she would take such great care of herself and her baby that nature would not dream of intervening.

T
he group of four had been drawn to each other even before the book had slipped into their lives and bonded them. Tentative friends until then, faintly
suspicious of each other, almost in the manner of warily sniffing dogs, sensing that trust without question was unsafe, unwise.

Trust, like good faith, was at a premium at Challow Hall Children’s Home, where many of the more troubled children aged between seven and sixteen wielded private agendas and axes to grind,
having been brought to the home by a variety of local authorities and courts and feeling dumped, abandoned and generally shat upon.

Once the residence of a wealthy landowner, Challow Hall stood, a large, grey, weather-battered slab of a stone mansion, in the midst of rolling countryside near the village of Bartlet in
Oxfordshire, two miles south of the Ridgeway, the ancient pathway that wound some eighty-five miles over chalk downs from Ivinghoe Beacon in the east of England south-west towards Avebury.

Living so close to an area of officially designated ‘outstanding beauty’ and historical interest, but without so much as a cinema, let alone an arcade, within miles, meant that the
majority of the young inhabitants of the home were constantly yearning for something
decent
to occupy themselves with.

Bartlet itself had nothing but a village shop and a church. Swindon, over the Wiltshire border, was the only town worth visiting from the kids’ points-of-view, the only place where a
person could play machines and buy a decent burger or bag of chips, where the shops had stuff worth nicking. But that happy hunting ground was six endless miles from Challow Hall as the crows flew
– and if you weren’t a bird and had no wheels at your disposal, then you had to trek up and down hills and over bumpy, often muddy paths through acres of wheat and long grass before you
even reached a proper road.

Going to school was, therefore, the best chance of escape for many of them, since the authority saw to it that they were transported to and from their primary and secondary schools, and so, once
delivered, they were at least close to a
real
bus route and could, if they were unafraid of punishment, make a break for temporary freedom.

Almost any punishment was worth risking when you were bored to death.

The book had changed everything for the four.

A dog-eared old paperback found by one of them on the 47 bus and brought back to the home. Finders keepers, especially in a place like Challow Hall.

In a sheltered corner of what had once upon a time been a thriving vegetable garden, but was now a trampled, brownish grass play area, the finder had read the dedication out loud to her three
closest friends.

‘For my mother and father,’ she said.

One of them, a red-haired boy, had snorted rudely.

‘If I wrote a book,’ said the other boy in the group, a thin, freckled lad, ‘they’d be the last people I’d thingy it to.’

‘Dedicate.’ The finder, mixed-race and tall for her age, supplied the word.

‘That’s OK, I suppose,’ said the other girl, who was fair-haired and pretty, ‘if you got a nice mum and dad.’

‘Or if they’re dead,’ the thin boy said, and flushed.

‘Gotta
have
parents,’ the red-haired lad said, ‘to feel like that.’

‘Is it sci-fi?’ The fair girl leaned across and scrutinized the cover. ‘
Lord of the Flies.
Sounds like that film where all the people went blind and the plants ate
them.’

‘Triffids.’ The finder shook her head, turned the book over, looked at the back. ‘This is supposed to be a really
good
book.’

‘Do me a favour,’ the red-haired boy said disgustedly.

‘It’s OK, I think,’ the finder said. ‘It’s about kids and murder.’

And then she started reading it out loud.

* * *

The thing that surprised them most was that the book was more fun than they’d thought any book could be, and that none of them had any urge to walk away or even yawn. All
they wanted to do, right there and then, was go on listening to their friend reading them this tale about a bunch of school kids whose plane had crashed in the middle of some war, leaving them on a
desert island without any grown-ups to boss them about.

‘Cool,’ one of them said.

‘Shut it,’ another told him.

So the girl who’d nicked the book from the bus and was doing the reading, and who was particularly gifted at doing different voices, went on with it. And though none of them ever read
any
books if they could help it, this story seemed to fire up something inside them, and when the time came for them to have to stop, they found they were all looking forward to getting
back to it again.

Escaping from their real lives.

‘We need a better place to do this,’ one of them said, after two more sessions.

‘Somewhere
they
can’t spoil it,’ another said.

‘What about the Smithy?’ the reader suggested.

That was another thing that had turned it into something special.

Wayland’s Smithy was a Neolithic burial chamber close to the Ridgeway, guarded by enormous sarsen stones, nearly five thousand years old, yet part of the chamber itself and a passage
leading to it still surviving. The children had been taken there earlier that year, groaning through a talk about ancient remains, with some dopey legend about horseshoes they were supposed to get
excited about.

‘Fucking pathetic,’ had been the consensus.

Still, the fact remained that it had once been a place filled with dead bodies, which did make it sort of interesting, plus it was in the middle of nowhere, which meant away from the home.

Going outside Challow Hall’s boundaries after dark was strictly forbidden.

Wayland’s Smithy itself, therefore, massively out of bounds.

And seriously spooky.

They’d gone after lights out, leaving rolled-up towels in their beds (though bed checks were mostly cursory affairs, staff keen to get back to TV and supper) and making
their way silently, armed with torches – two bought, two pinched – along the chalky paths and grassy tracks, waiting until they’d reached their destination before lighting candles
nicked from the kitchens.

‘I don’t like it,’ the fair-haired girl had said the first time, down in the darker-than-dark passage.

‘Don’t be scared,’ the thin, freckled boy had reassured her.

‘It’s fucking brilliant,’ the other girl had said.

‘The dog’s fucking bollocks,’ said the red-haired boy.

They’d all laughed then, and heard their laughter bouncing off the ancient stones, the sound seeming to shimmer past the boulders at the entrance, and float on up through the beech trees
into the black sky.

‘Let’s do it,’ said the tall girl.

It became their own private ritual. Walkers and cyclists might visit the Smithy in daylight, sometimes even camp nearby in season, but the burial chamber was
their
place now for what
they called ‘doing’ the book. A kind of alternative world for them as they journeyed the two hundred and something pages, taking it in turns now to read, swapping characters as if
trying them out for size, growing ever more excited as they neared the end.

And then, when they had done with the book itself, they set it aside.

Which was when it
really
began.

The game.

E
ven now, almost a year later, looking back on the dark, painful period leading to their separation, it was still hard for Kate to make complete sense
of what had gone so horribly wrong between her and Rob.

A positive pregnancy test had brought joy in early January, sent crashing down in April with the news that a routine blood-screening test had shown abnormal levels of alphafetoprotein in
Kate’s blood.

She’d gone to her appointment alone, though it was the Easter break and she’d been advised to come with Rob, but he had a meeting that morning, so she hadn’t mentioned it to
him. At the time, she’d told herself she’d hoped to spare him unnecessary anxiety, but later she realized it had been more a case of burying her own head in the sand, because if Rob
wasn’t beside her listening to any bad news, then maybe it wasn’t real.

Except that after he’d come home, kissing her first, then stacking up his paperwork on the light oak dining table in their living room (where he usually worked, though they’d turned
one room into an office) she’d had to shatter his normality and tell him herself.

‘What does it mean?’ Rob had asked. ‘What does this protein do?’

‘It means there might be something wrong,’ Kate said.

She was fighting to remain relatively composed, had made up her mind that the only way through this for her was to at least
feign
calm.

‘Wrong with you?’ Rob asked quickly, alarm in his eyes.

‘Not with me,’ Kate reassured him.

He didn’t say anything, sat down at the table and looked at his work.

‘It means,’ she pushed herself on, ‘that our baby might have—’

‘“Might”,’ he interrupted, ‘always seems a bit of a pointless word to me.’

She knew right away how odd that remark was, yet felt a surge of compassion, and understood that it was his way of trying to fend off brutal reality.

‘That’s all we have right now, Rob,’ she said. ‘We need to be aware that our child might have spina bifida or—’

‘Don’t,’ he cut in again.

Kate pulled out the chair beside his, sat down quickly. ‘You need to talk to the doctor with me, to ask questions.’ She laid her left hand on the table, waited for him to touch her,
but he didn’t move. ‘Though we won’t know any more till after my next ultrasound.’