Accidents Happen (8 page)

Jack saw his PE trainers by the stairs and grabbed them.

‘Jack. Please. You haven’t even done your teeth,’ she said. She was trying to say calm grown-up things in a voice that was all wobbly and confused and hurt.

As he took his blazer off the banister, he looked up and saw the stupid cage gate.

He was sick of it. Everyone feeling sorry for him. For his Dad. For having a weird mum, and now a stupid house.

He turned and scowled at Kate.

‘YOU go to London!’ he shouted, unbolting the door. ‘I’m not staying in this stupid house any more. I want to live with Nana. She said I could. I heard her. Nana’s kind.’ And, then, before he could stop himself, ‘AND, she lets me go to the shop on my own.’

He heard Kate gasp. ‘She WHAT?’

‘She LETS ME GO!’ he yelled defiantly. ‘EVERY Saturday at twelve o’clock when the baker in the village opens to get bread for lunch!’

His mum opened her mouth wide, eyes furious. ‘Bloody Nana,’ she spat. ‘How DARE she? I KNEW this had something to do with her. What else has she done? What has she said?’

He shook his head furiously. ‘It’s NOT Nana. It’s YOU. You’re . . . you’re . . . just the worst mother EVER! I just . . . HATE YOU!’

Turning to find the Chubb key for the lock, he saw his mother’s face. It looked as if it had dried on to her bones.

At that moment, the little boy realized with a strange curiosity that she was not in control after all. The power had always been his to take. He could blow her up whenever he wanted.

He turned and shoved the Chubb key in the lock and tried to turn it.

Behind him came a low moan. It sounded like the cat from across the back when it went into a coma in their garden.

He stopped.

He had seen her worried, seen her eyes furiously blinking back tears, but he had never heard that noise before. A picture came into his mind of that terrible earthquake he had watched with Granddad on the news, where everything was blown up and broken, and the people on the news said that nothing would ever be the same again.

A cramp tightened in his stomach so painfully that he bent over and grunted.

What had he done? He’d told her about Nana letting him go to the baker’s in the village. And now they’d fight about that, too.

To his shame, Jack felt tears coming into his own eyes. Desperately, he tried to grab the door knob and get out before she said anything else.

‘Jack!’ his mother gasped. ‘No!’

He turned the Chubb key and a piercing sound exploded into the air.

Jack jumped back, shocked.

The burglar alarm.

She hadn’t turned it off this morning.

The ear-splitting din filled his head, and he lifted his hands instinctively to cover his ears. At the same time he felt his mum grab the shoulder of his school shirt, pulling him back from the door. He jerked away from her.

‘No, Jack!’ she yelped.

His movement threw him off-balance. His body swung around in her grasp and veered sideways. He felt her try to grab him tighter to stop him falling, but he twisted loose out of her fingers.

Jack saw the hall radiator coming towards him out the corner of his eye. Before he could put out a hand, his forehead glanced off the side of it. It was sharp, and it hurt.

‘Oh my God – Jack!’

He landed on his knees, and stayed there for a second, jolted. He touched his forehead and felt something wet. There was blood on his finger.

The house alarm was squealing at full pitch now, stabbing inside his ears.

It all felt too much. All this blood and power and noise and destruction.

Jack sat stunned, as Kate jumped up, ran to the alarm box under the stairs and punched in a number.

Silence abruptly descended on the hall again.

Jack leaned back against the radiator.

Kate rushed back and grabbed his face, looking at the cut.

‘Jack. I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I was trying to stop you setting off the alarm.’

She wiped blood from his cut with her fingers. It smeared across her skin. Nana would do it with a tissue, Jack thought, jerking his head away. Nana always had a clean tissue. Nana would put a gentle arm round him that smelt of flowers, and talk calmly, not swipe at the blood with bare fingers as if it were attacking her, and look at him in terror. ‘I didn’t mean to pull you so hard,’ Mum was gabbling. ‘Is your head sore? Do you feel dizzy?’

He shook it.

She stopped speaking and let her hand drop. He saw her rub his blood between her fingers. She had retreated again. Lost in her head.

‘Stay there. I’ll get a plaster.’

She went in the kitchen, with her hand over her mouth. Jack sat in the hallway, fighting the tears that threatened to come properly now.

All of a sudden, he felt ashamed. He was sitting on the floor, trying not to cry like a baby, with a scratch on his head. He looked up and saw himself in the hall mirror. What if Dad was watching him? Acting like a baby? Granddad had told him that he, Jack, was supposed to be the man of the house now Dad was gone.

And just like that, Jack’s hate for Kate disappeared as quickly as it had come.

As she hurried around looking in cupboards, her lips were forming words as if she were having a conversation with someone invisible.

It took him a moment to work it out.

‘You have to stop this,’ she was mouthing. ‘You have to stop this.’

What had he done? As she began to walk towards him, Jack dropped his eyes.

‘Jack?’

He stayed still.

‘Jack? Darling.’

Eventually, he looked at her.

‘Let me . . . do this . . .’ She knelt down and dabbed at his cut with an antiseptic cream that stung a little, and then placed a plaster over the cut. It was strange being this close to her. He could smell raspberry tea on her breath. He could see how the pale purple circles under her eyes grew deeper in tone under her dark eyelashes.

‘Are you sure you feel OK?’ She made him follow her finger with his eyes to be sure.

‘OK. Oh, Jack.’

She sat back and surveyed his face. He saw her eyes working hard, as if she was thinking.

She went to speak, then stopped – then tried again. ‘Jack. Listen. This is so bad. I don’t know how to say this to you, but . . .’ She looked him in the eye. ‘If anyone asks you how you got the scratch, I need you not to tell them that you hit your head on the radiator.’

He waited.

‘The thing is, they might not understand that it was an accident. Nana, for instance. Or your teacher. So, if it’s OK, you could just say you fell off your skateboard. Is that OK?’

There was such a pleading tone in her voice that Jack shrugged.

She leaped towards him and threw her arms around him. He was too surprised to resist. Her body pushed into his face and he smelt her anxious sweat through the silk nightie.

‘Jack. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what is happening to me, but I will make this right,’ she murmured. ‘I just . . .’ She sniffed. ‘I just want you and me to be safe.’ It was such an unfamiliar sensation, being in her arms again, that Jack let his face press against the protruding bone of his mother’s shoulder and watched, curious, as a trickle of watery pink blood from his forehead seeped into the pores of her shoulder strap. He found himself hoping the stain would finally force her to throw it away. He stayed there, even though he knew the embrace was to make her feel better, and not him. Knowing that she was trying.

The thing was, if he kept being angry like this, and destroyed her, he would also destroy any chance that his old warm funny mum, whom he was starting to forget, would return from behind those amber glass eyes. He had to do it for Dad, in case Dad was watching, counting on him to look after Mum, counting on him to be there waiting if she ever came back.

So Jack stayed there, still, inside Kate’s embrace, trying to stay hopeful that she was still somewhere inside.

It was after nine by the time Kate had cleaned Jack up and she could drop him at primary school, nervously gauging his Year Six teacher’s expression through the window as he entered the classroom. Kate left before Ms Corrigan could call her back. She knew that, under scrutiny, her eyes would expose the lie about the skateboard.

She drove home and ran upstairs to her office, sat at her desk and looked out at the rich green leaves of the magnolia tree that had months before shed its pink flowers onto the lawn. She sat there for an hour, doodling tight-knit webs and teetering towers onto white paper, then for another hour.

Jack’s face haunted her vision. Blood dripping from his forehead. The angry voice that sounded as if it had emerged from a long tunnel, thickened by echoes. His glance of disgust when she asked him not to tell Nana what had happened.

Social Services. That was what Helen had said on Friday.

Kate bit her thumbnail. The skin around it was raw and wet.

From nowhere, a forgotten memory of her mother-in-law returned. A memory from fourteen years ago that Kate thought she had long put to rest. It had been the first time, she had met Richard and Helen. She and Hugo had arrived at their house for Sunday lunch, trying to shake off the hangover from a student party in London the night before. Helen had come behind Richard down the hallway, drying her hands on a tea towel. Kate had smiled nervously as she went to hold out a hand.

‘Ah, my precious boy,’ Helen had said, ignoring her, instead reaching up to Hugo’s face. She touched his cheeks tenderly, while Kate stood to the side, feeling awkward. Hugo had given her a flutter of a wink over his mother’s head.

‘How are you, my darling?’ Helen asked.

Hugo took her hands in his own, physically turning her to the left. ‘Good! Mum! This is Kate.’

Kate knew from the emphasis he placed on her name that he was introducing her to Helen as someone significant. Someone he and his mother had already discussed. But, as Helen turned her pale watery green eyes on Kate, Kate suspected, already, that she’d failed. Right there, hungover, in her studenty jeans and scuffed boots, with her Shropshire accent and her state school education, she knew that everything Helen, in her grand riverside house, had been hoping for had not appeared this morning.

‘Hi,’ Kate said, holding out a hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Hello, Kate,’ Helen said, taking it. She displayed a modest smile. The smile stretched as she turned back to Hugo, only to find him watching Kate, mesmerized.

Later, Kate would wonder if that was when Helen decided that whatever concerns she had about Kate’s suitability for her ‘precious boy’ were to be packed away immediately. That the glow in her son’s eyes as he looked at Kate told her that this was deadly serious. There was no going back for him.

Certainly, Helen had never treated her like that again, to the point where Kate had convinced herself that she had imagined that first encounter. Blamed it on her hangover.

Till now.

She looked out of the window as the sun disappeared around the back of the garden. What if that malevolent undercurrent she’d glimpsed in Helen on their first meeting
did
exist? Had
always
existed, but been hidden for Hugo’s sake, then Jack’s?

On impulse, Kate sat back and opened a drawer in her desk, to take out a photo.

She hesitated, her fingers outstretched in mid-air.

The photo was turned on its front, not face-up as she had left it on top of her work diary.

Her heart pounding, Kate glanced round her office. Had she been burgled again?

Helen’s irritated words flew back to her about the casserole. ‘It had
not gone
.’

Kate stopped.

‘Must have been Jack,’ she reassured herself out loud.

She removed the photo, propped it on the desk, then lifted her eyes to meet Hugo’s. It was a good photo. Saskia had taken it secretly through the kitchen window of their Highgate house five years ago. Unaware, Kate was lying back on Hugo’s chest, his hand casually lying across the breast of her shirt. She was wearing a headscarf from painting Jack’s room. Her face was tilted up, laughing. He was trying not to smile at her bad joke. Behind them was the magnolia tree, just a baby then, in a pot, its first pink blossoms yet to burst through.

Kate shook her head, the irony of it, painful.

‘Don’t laugh at me,’ Hugo had been saying, putting on his hurt voice.

His fingers played on her rib below her bra, slowly, with no intent, while he used his other hand to write on a pad placed on the garden table.

‘But how can I help it? You’re so funny. See? I can’t stop laughing at you . . .’ Kate opened her mouth as if to laugh – then froze. ‘Oh wait – yes I can.’

‘Fuck off.’ He pinched her skin through her top, and carried on writing.

She lay back on the garden bench, looking at the baby magnolia tree.

‘What are you writing?’ she asked.

‘Instructions for your assassination.’

‘No, really.’

‘Instructions for your assassination.’

‘That’s a nice thing to say to your poor wife whose parents were killed,’ she said in a whiny voice, screwing up her eyes and laughing silently at her own mean joke. They both knew he was cornered.

He sighed loudly, and she grinned with satisfaction, feeling his chest reverberate under her.

‘Some notes for the refurb on Algon Terrace,’ he grunted.

She sat up sideways to see one of his neat sketches of a room dominated by a Georgian fireplace.

She lay back again, wondering where to plant the magnolia. If they put it just to the right, it would grow under Jack’s bedroom. By the time he was eight or nine, the blooms would reach his window.

‘It’s not that I think you shouldn’t do it . . .’ Hugo started.

‘But . . .’

‘Well, I just don’t want you to do it.’

‘Hugo,’ she groaned, hitting his chest. ‘Honestly. Don’t start. It’s what I want for my thirtieth. You can’t say no.’

‘What about Jack?’ he said, grabbing her hand and playing with it.

‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ she asked, running his fingers through her own. ‘I thought you wanted me to get back to normal again. Have some fun?’

‘You are back to normal.’ He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. ‘Normal for a weirdo, anyway.’