Blood Family (20 page)

‘We’re going to
celebrate
. At Valentine House.’ She saw my puzzled look. ‘You know! The end of my
exams
. You must remember! Nicholas reminded you this
morning
.’ Now she was studying me even more closely. ‘What’s
wrong
with you? Why are you acting funny?’

‘I am not.’

‘You are.’ She dived towards the bed cover. I lurched to stop her but I lost my balance and fell, hard, on the floor. By the time I had pulled myself into a seated position, Alice was back on her feet again, holding the half-empty bottle.

‘You cunning old soak!’

I tried to make light of it. ‘Oh, come on, Alice. Everyone has a drink now and again.’

She studied the label. ‘
Volkogonova?
Forty-two per cent proof! Well, that explains why Nicholas and Natasha aren’t even back yet!’

She was losing me. ‘Not back from where?’

‘Didn’t they tell you? Back from your school, where they’ve been called in to discuss the fact that you skipped half of your mid-terms and failed the rest.’

That should have made me stop and think. But all I wanted was for her to give me back my precious bottle and leave me alone.

I hadn’t noticed, you see. For one thing, it was our busiest time of year. All those June weddings. Malcolm and I were trying to decide whether to keep on renting extra marquees or take the plunge and borrow to expand the business.

And Edward had been so much
easier
those last few
weeks. Much more relaxed. Now and again he’d even followed me around the house, asking about my own childhood. (His foster mother Linda had told me he did that with her, and I remember being disappointed after he came to us that he seemed rather too shy to ask me questions. I worried that I might not seem the motherly type to him. But in my job I have to look smart and professional at all times. There’s no way round that.)

Nicholas too had just assumed that things were fine again. He was astonished when the phone call came to ask us to come in a second time.

I will admit that I was irritated at the thought of yet another meeting. It seemed to me that Edward was doing better all round. He was no trouble at home. He claimed that he was keeping up at school. He went to bed at reasonable hours. What was their worry?

I reckon half the staff must have been there. I was appalled at what they told us. It was a catalogue of sins. Copying other people’s work (or not even bothering). Failing his mid-term exams. Telling a host of lies. Bunking off school.

Drinking.

That came as such a surprise that Nicholas didn’t even grasp what they were saying. ‘What do you mean, drinking? Do you mean mucking about with water bottles in class?’

‘No,’ Mrs Miller told us. ‘Drinking alcohol. In school.’

We sat in silence, both of us, all the way home.

It was a God almighty bollocking. Of course they tried to be reasonable at first: calm looks, soft voices, gentle questioning. (Those therapy sessions with Alice when she went through her rebellious phase had clearly left their mark.) But as my inability to answer properly – or, as Natasha termed it, ‘stubborn refusal to even
try
to explain’ – began to rattle them, Natasha’s voice became more loud and hectoring, till Nicholas was spending almost as much time trying to calm her down as he was getting at me.

And he
was
getting at me. Alice claimed afterwards that they were especially angry because one of the staff implied that people with adopted children lacked the insight of natural parents. (She’d heard Natasha spitting tintacks about that the following day, threatening to write a letter.)

But I think they were furious because they hadn’t guessed. Now it was pretty obvious to both of them that they’d been blind. The moment they came through the door, Natasha called me down and Nicholas brushed past without a single word as I came in the kitchen.

Natasha kept her back turned, fiddling with the kettle lid while I stood waiting, not sure what to expect.

Then Nicholas came down, swinging three bottles from the fingers of his good hand: two empties from my backpack because I’d been too careless to get rid of
them, and the one Alice had pounced on under the bed.

‘Edward? Do you think you could very kindly explain the presence of these bottles?’

It all came out. I was berated for falling behind in practically all of my subjects, lying to everyone and bunking off. But mostly for the drinking. It seems the janitor had seen me stumbling in the corridor and watched me going in the private lavatory. I stayed in there so long he worried that I might have fainted. Then, through the door, he heard the soft clink of the cistern lid.

After I’d gone, he’d found my bottle and told Mrs Miller.

Brilliant.

Natasha’s cheeks were burning. ‘Edward, where did the
money
come from?’

I wasn’t going to
hang
myself. ‘I cleaned cars. Ask them at Merryfield. I’m in their car park a lot. I wash the cars while people go into the shop. I don’t charge much, but most of the women tip me.’

‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’

I turned on Nicholas. ‘
You
drink! You have a couple of gin and tonics pretty well every day.’

‘I’m not at school! I’m not fifteen and taking my exams! And I’m not telling lies and probably stealing things to get the money.’

I don’t know where I could have got the sheer self-righteousness to hurl at him, ‘Is that what you
think
of me? That I’m a
thief
? That’s nice! That’s trusting!’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Why should we trust you? That’s what all this is about! You
can’t
be trusted. Not here, and not at school, and probably, for all I know, nowhere at all!’

‘Well, thanks!’

It was Natasha’s turn to lose her temper. ‘Don’t you get uppity with us! It’s you who’s been behaving like a guttersnipe!’

We all froze then. Alice. Me. Nicholas. Even Natasha herself. She knew what she had said. I think we all were thinking of where I’d come from.

All of us had Harris in our minds.

She tried to cover her tracks. ‘Edward, all that I meant is that the people in a family have to be confident that no one’s keeping secrets behind their backs.’

Nicholas pitched in to help. ‘Look, this has been a really testing evening. I think we’re all worked up. What I’m suggesting is that we all calm down—’

‘And have a
drink
?’ I asked sarcastically.

He flushed, then just pushed on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘And we can try and talk about it all again, without getting upset, once we’ve had supper.’

I don’t blame Alice for coming out with it. It didn’t help, but still I think she had a right to say it.

‘Too late. We must have lost our table ages ago.’

‘Table?’ And then Natasha remembered. ‘Oh, God, Alice! I’m so sorry! Today was your last exam!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

But we all knew the efforts Alice had made over the
last months not to throw down her stupid test papers and slide off with the flock whenever they rang up. The
hours
she’d put in. The extra work she’d done. We’d all seen the revision chart she’d made and hung up on her wall, over her desk.

We all knew she’d been sitting there counting the days.

I bet they both felt terrible.

But I felt worse.

You come across some tiresome people when you run a restaurant. The Stead booking was down for seven o’clock. No one had come by twenty to eight. And then a group of four called by my desk on the off-chance.

‘No hope of dinner, I suppose?’

‘Give me a moment,’ I said, and rang the contact number for the empty table. It was a woman who answered.

‘
Yes?
’

She snapped as irritably as if I had deliberately interrupted her while she was adding figures.

I told her, ‘This is Valentine House.’

‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘Oh,
God
! Well, I’m afraid to say that we’re not coming.’

If she had just said sorry I wouldn’t have told Rosalie
to charge their credit card our No-Show fee. (It is quite steep. We only have one sitting.) And I did have four people staring at me hopefully. The restaurant would not be out of pocket.

But all she said was, ‘You wouldn’t want to have the four of us in any case.’ She raised her voice, presumably for the benefit of someone at her end. ‘Because one of our party is
a bloody liar
and a
drunk
!’

I held the phone a little further from my ear.

‘Thank you,’ was all I said to her. ‘Have a good evening.’

Then I turned to the waiting group. ‘Your table’s ready. Please will you come this way?’

I had a rotten night. Maybe it was from missing my night-time beakerful. Maybe it was just guilt. By morning, though, my only feelings were resentment and bitterness. Natasha had been very rude to me, and Nicholas was treating me like a child. ‘I’ll drop you off at school today, if you don’t mind.’

‘Thanks, but I’d rather walk.’

He didn’t even try to soften the insult. ‘No, Edward. After what we heard last night about your attendance record this term, I think I’d rather make sure that you actually get there.’

So it was pretty well a challenge, really. And I was
certainly feeling grumpy enough to take him up on it. I reached the gates, and fell in step with Tina and Martin, who were taking turns to tug at Justin’s scarf. I went inside with them, and then peeled off. As soon as the buzzer for registration sounded, I rushed past the monitors by the front door – ‘Forgot to lock my bike!’ – and left the school.

I crept around the far side of the hedge to find my bottles. One was stashed down a tree stump and the other one was pushed behind some crates stacked for the Friday pick-up.

There wasn’t much in either. But fortified by that, and by self-pity, I wondered what to do next. I don’t know why it sprang to mind to go to see Linda and Alan. Their house was over sixty miles away. I didn’t even know if they’d be in. But once the idea surfaced, I was determined to go. I didn’t think of it as ‘running away’ as such, though obviously after the meeting the day before, someone at school was bound to ring Natasha and Nicholas about my absence.

And I would be away for hours, getting to Beasley and back.

Still, off I went, stuffing my school jacket way down in my bag, and walking to the western roundabout where I’d seen people hitching often enough before. I think the white shirt helped because I got my first lift almost at once, along with a lecture about the dangers of hitchhiking. ‘Surely you’re old enough to know that half the
drivers on the road are maniacs, and the rest fools. I tell you, if you were
my
son, you’d be in really big trouble for doing something so stupid.’

I grinned. ‘Is that the only reason you picked me up? To give me a ticking off?’

‘Yes,’ he said sourly. ‘And I would hope that someone else would do the same if my lad Larry acted as daft as you.’

That killed the conversation dead. But he did leave me in a sensible place for my next ride. That was a lorry driver who could barely string two English words together. He had an accent rather like Stefania’s. ‘Are you Romanian?’ I asked politely. You would have thought I’d asked if he were an axe murderer. God knows what nationality he was, but he went on and on about it really irritably. I didn’t understand a word.

But once again I was dropped somewhere good, and it was only another couple of short rides before I found myself crossing the park in which I’d learned to work my way up on the swings so many years ago.

They were both in. ‘Eddie! What a surprise! Come in! Come in!’ Already Linda had noticed that I was in uniform. ‘Taking a day off school?’

‘I couldn’t face it,’ I admitted.

I watched her take care not to miss a beat. ‘It’s
ages
since we’ve seen you. Light years! You’ve grown so
tall
! Come in the kitchen and tell us all about everything!
What do you fancy, sweetie? Tea? Coffee? Juice?’

I didn’t feel like anything except a proper drink. But there was no chance of that so I said, ‘Tea, please,’ simply from politeness, and sat at the table eating their chocolate biscuits and telling them about Natasha and Nicholas, answering questions about my subjects at school, and how well Alice was doing.

‘She got held back a year. But now that she’s switched subjects, everything’s fine and she’s made up her mind to go to university.’

‘And what about your mum?’

‘Lucy?’ I shrugged. ‘I still see her a bit. She’s much the same.’ Into the silence that followed, I added, ‘But she is happy. She likes the place she’s in a lot.’

‘And what about
you
?’

The nitty-gritty question. What about me?

If only lying weren’t so downright
easy
. I had a choice, clearly. I could have let it all pour out, about the drinking. After all, they must have known that something was wrong. Why else would I turn up there unannounced like that, nervously rattling my tea mug, fingernails gnawed to the quick again, looking like death? It’s not as if I didn’t give myself time to think what to say, because that was the moment I picked to ask to go upstairs. (The bathroom seemed horrifically bright. I had got used to Natasha’s stylish lighting systems. And on the way down, I opened the door to my old room. It was much smaller than I remembered it, and looked more dingy.)

After they’d bullied me into eating one or two cheese sandwiches, we moved to the living room. I suppose they thought it would be more relaxing – make it easier for me to tell them what was going on. But I just bottled out. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I kept saying. ‘I simply woke up feeling really rough, and couldn’t face the idea of being in school. So I bunked off and hitched down here, just on the off-chance.’

‘Life’s batting on all right, though?’

‘Pretty well. I mean, I get fed up at times. But mostly things are fine.’

I’m sure they realized I was hiding something. But still they let it go. I suppose they didn’t have much choice. After another half an hour or so, Alan looked at his watch. ‘Righty-ho, Ed. If you plan to be back when they expect you, then it’s time to get you moving.’