Blood Family (8 page)

‘What did you say on the postcard?’

‘I told her owls come out at night. And they eat mice.’
His voice brightened. ‘Their eyes are fixed. That’s why they have to turn their heads round if they want to see the sides.’ He thought for a moment. ‘They can’t see things near to them very well, though. Only things far away. And they have special sorts of wings so they fly very quietly and don’t frighten off what they were trying to catch. And some owls even eat fish. And baby owls don’t all hatch on the same day.’

I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You managed to fit all that on a postcard?’

For just a moment, he looked puzzled. Then he admitted, ‘No. Only the first bit.’

‘But you know a lot about owls.’

‘Yes. Mr Perkins took us to see a lady who kept lots of owls. She showed us a baby that was so tiny it weighed almost nothing.’

Even before the sessions began, Linda Radlett had filled me in on this Mr Perkins fellow. Indeed, she reckoned that the man had salvaged the child’s life. ‘If he’s still on the planet,’ she’d said to me, apparently quite sincerely, ‘I’m going to track him down and write to tell him so.’

And it was clear that simply telling me about the owls made Eddie feel a little stronger. So we pressed on. They are short sessions and I wanted to prepare him for the visit to his mother because it was so obvious that any hopes he was harbouring were set to crash about his ears.

Poor little chap.

So we talked about how she might still be poorly. How it might be a much, much longer time before she would be even halfway better. (It was important not to let him go on believing that she would ever be the old Lucy Taylor again.) We talked about how it was Eddie’s job to give her time, and keep his fingers crossed – yes, I said that. I know it isn’t very professional. But he was only seven, for heaven’s sake. And if the Social Services don’t have the sense to tweak their guidelines about children having the right to see an ‘innocent’ parent more or less on demand, then what am I to do? How could I let him go in there thinking his mum was going to spin around, shout ‘Eddie!’ joyfully and squeeze him tight when I knew it was far more likely that she’d be slumped in a chair, clutching a handkerchief and staring blankly at the wall?

We talked about how, if he was upset after the visit, he could ask Linda for an extra cuddle. She would understand.

‘She’ll give me biscuits,’ he said. ‘And read the story without asking
me
.’

‘Without asking you?’

‘To do the easy words,’ he explained. ‘She’ll read it all herself. Till I feel better.’

My watch was warning me that we were almost over time. I led him to the door. ‘Bye, Eddie.’ I squeezed his hand, but gently, since his finger ends still looked a little pink and raw. ‘And good luck with the visit.’

‘Fingers crossed,’ he said.

I put my hand up. It was a terrible mistake, taking Eddie to see his mum. The problem is, the things children imagine, left to themselves, are usually so much worse than simple fact. The times I’ve driven kids to prison to visit a mum or dad for the first time. All the way there, they’re pale as grubs – can’t answer the simplest question or focus on anything. Can’t even taste the burger I buy them on the way.

Then in we go. All these new family suites have toys and jigsaws, book boxes, beanbags, even bright and cheerful mobiles dangling over the cots for the babies. It’s like a daycare centre. The volunteers tend to be motherly ladies, pressing the young ones into accepting chocolate milk and fancy biscuits. No one is jangling keys or scowling. There are no bars in sight. And when the dad comes in, he and the warder who’s accompanying him are as often as not sharing a joke.

The child I take home is a child I wouldn’t recognize.

So when I heard he wanted to tell his mum how he could read a bit, and show her how well he could write his letters, I was very keen. Her bruises would have gone. The bald patches on her head would have grown out. (And, to be fair, most of them had.)

What I’d not bargained for was her dead face. It was a mask. I wondered if that monster Harris had somehow kicked her into some sort of embolism, or stroke. Lord
knows, he’d bashed her hard enough to do permanent damage. She seemed dead from the neck up.

The woman who had led us to the room said, ‘Here we are, Lucy. Here’s your lovely little boy, come in to see you. Say hello to Eddie.’

She put her hand out – even touched his fingers – but her eyes stayed blank.

The minder prompted again. ‘Come on now, Lucy. Say hello to Eddie. You’ve not seen him for a while, have you? But here he is, so let’s try saying hello.’

She smiled then. Not a proper smile – the stupefied dead sort you might see on a widow’s face as she thanked people after the funeral. She said, ‘Hello.’ The greeting was so flat you would have sworn she’d not met him before, and wasn’t fond of children anyway.

I’d usually prompt a child to greet the parent back. ‘Well, say hello, then.’ I didn’t, though. I don’t know why. I think I might have been too angry to speak. I know the theory – misery breeds misery. And that is true, and we must understand and try to sympathize all the way up the family line, right back to where trouble began. But sometimes that is
hard
. Most of this misery is so
unnecessary
. If Lucy Taylor had only had the simple wits or guts to walk out on that man the very first time he gave her an aggressive nudge, none of this would have happened.

Sometimes I’d like to punch the parents of my clients really hard. Smash in their faces, in fact.

Oh, God! Don’t write that down.

What happened after we left? Well, that was even worse. I got him in the car and waited while he strapped himself in. (He was still clumsy at that, he’d had so little practice on different cars.) We drove down the narrow nursing-home drive, and waited for the barrier to lift. Eddie said nothing, just stared out of the window for a while. And then he broke the silence. ‘Rob, why did that woman call my mum “Lucy” all the time?’

My heart sank. I could feel it plummeting. I was too down at heart even to pick my way around what I guessed must be coming. Simply to get it over with, I asked the question outright. ‘Because you thought her name was—?’

‘Mum. And Harris always called her Bitch.’

It worked out well, in a way. Because Rob took that painful little anecdote, along with one or two more, back to the panel, and they agreed that Eddie needed more time in a domestic setting, developing his social awareness and skills, before he could be thrown into the bear garden of primary school.

I didn’t mind, and Linda was delighted. She had been making such good progress with his reading and arithmetic, explaining things, taking him places. She knew he would find school a massive strain, and every
month we kept him home with us would pay off handsomely.

In any case, I liked his company. Usually I am quite glad, at half past eight each morning, to see the back of the kids we have and know that, unless they bunk off school and are delivered back to us, we’re free till half past three. We’re not spring chickens any more. I need the break. But Eddie was so easy to have around. (In that way, he was like Orlando.) He wasn’t challenging. He didn’t keep tiresomely pushing his luck, or testing the boundaries, like so many of them do. He was a bit like some well-meaning stray who’d had a rotten deal in life, knew it, and had the sense to recognize when he had landed on his feet.

Oh, he was strange. (I know, I know, they
all
are.) And yet the strangeness didn’t seem to run right through his personality like letters stamped in red through seaside rock. It just burst out now and again. Sometimes it was almost amusing, like on that blazing hot day I sprawled on the sofa watching Wimbledon for hour after hour. On the last supermarket shop, we’d bought a case of ginger beer, and I must just have taken to the stuff because I sat there in that dripping heat, sipping all day.

(Amazing I didn’t explode.)

Anyhow, Linda wandered in some time before supper. Hearing the ‘phut!’ as I prised up the tab of yet another can, she said to me, ‘Blimey, Alan. How many’s
that
?’

And then, from underneath my arm, we heard this clear little voice. ‘Seven.’

‘Never!’ I told him. ‘Never in your life.’

Linda went off to count up how many cans were left. ‘He’s right,’ she reported back. ‘You must already have finished seven.’

‘You shouldn’t have taught the little beggar how to count.’

‘He could count anyway,’ she reminded me. ‘It was the taking away and stuff he’d never learned to do.’

I squeezed him. ‘Is that right?’

‘Yes,’ he said proudly. ‘I could count by myself even before I came.’ And neither Linda nor I knew any way of telling him it was an odd habit for a little boy, to keep such close track of the number of times in a day he’d heard a man open a drink can.

Sometimes it wasn’t funny at all. Take that time in the shed. He’d been in with me for an hour or so. ‘Helping,’ we called it. Our damn electric bill had shot up yet again, so I’d been fitting insulation sheets on all four sides, hoping to save myself from having to use the heater for so many months of the year. I’d fixed all the facing panels up again, and I was hammering back the nails on which I hung my tools.

Getting the last one in where I needed it was proving awkward. Maybe there was a wood knot in the upright behind. The first two nails bent and I threw them in the rubbish pot, and tried another. Same again. And then a
fourth. I will admit that I was getting testy. I rather pride myself on how I work with tools, and Eddie was standing watching. So I reached out for three more nails, shoved two between my lips, and had another go at hammering one in.

To this day I’m not sure exactly what I said. Clearly I said it from between clenched lips. (Who wants to swallow a nail?) I think it was probably something as simple as, ‘Now you’re beginning to
annoy
me.’

I was talking to the
nail
!

But he had vanished from my side. Melted away. I didn’t think much of it – simply tapped the nail’s head into the wood slowly and carefully. And when I turned to see what he was up to, there he was, crouched in the corner. He had practically turned into a hedgehog ball, his head buried between his knees. You wouldn’t think that even the smallest child could curl up so tightly.

‘Eddie?’

I wasn’t sure whether or not to touch him. Even a gentle hand can trigger such bad memories with some of these kids that they can go berserk. The place was full of dangerously sharp tools.

‘Eddie?’

I would have gone to fetch Linda, except I was worried he would do a runner. And so I gradually talked him down. You know: ‘Eddie, you’re not back there. And I’m not Harris. No one in this house is angry with you. I was getting cross with the
nail
.’ I just kept at it – very
much like soothing a horse. (Not that I’ve ever done that.) And finally I must have got through to his frozen brain, because I sensed a relaxation in the tiny ball of him.

‘Eddie, I’m going to touch you now. I’m going to put my hand on your shoulder and I want you to try to unfold. You don’t have to look at me, but I do want you to stick out your legs and try to straighten your back.’

It took a bit of time, but finally he managed it. I led him in the house. He looked like death. Linda came back from next door, where she’d been fixing up to borrow wee Marie for the next swimming session. In front of Eddie I explained to her what had just happened. (He probably needed to hear a sensible account of it as much as she did.) She nodded and then led him off. I saw them sitting close together on the sofa. Her arm was round his shoulders. But it was only later, when she peeled off his shirt before his bath, that she saw all those splinters he had driven in his back when, trying to make himself invisible, he had slid down that rough, unsanded joist.

After he wrote that postcard to his mother, one of the treasures I bought him was a tiny feathered owl. There was a shelf of them in Tanner’s toy shop – spin-offs from something on telly. Each of them had a name on its pottery base. The one I chose was called Olly. (Oh,
surprise me!) Eddie was thrilled with it. We had been having quite a time persuading him there was no need to hide the things he valued at the back of cupboards. So it was rotten luck that, just a few days later, Dolores came.

Dolores. I ask you. And anyone who looked less like a fancy Spanish dancer would be hard to find. The phone rang in the middle of the night. Less than ten minutes later she was on the doorstep, sturdy and scowling, with a nervous-looking female officer. Oh, she was angry. She had been lifted from her home at two in the morning, trying to intercede in a scrap between her mum and stepdad. It was the neighbours who had called the police as the fight ratcheted up. Both of the adults were, as the police officer put it, ‘royally rat-arsed’ and so Dolores had to be removed. (Guidelines.)

She was dead angry with the officer. And she was angry with us.

We had no choice but to stay up the rest of the night. I didn’t fancy leaving Alan alone with her – she was the sort who’d make up stuff just to cause trouble. And he was worried about leaving me because Dolores looked as if she could pack a smart punch. She wouldn’t go to bed. ‘I’m not going to sleep in your stupid, smelly house! Forget it!’ She turned a chair round and slumped down in it with her back to us.

So we made tea, and listened to her beefing about the fact that it was
her
business where she spent the night, not anything to do with us or the police. Then the tears
started and we heard the sadder side of the story, about not being able to see her real dad any more because of his mean-minded girlfriend. And how her elder sister had given up on the whole family, and gone to ground in Sheffield. Poor Dolores was obviously so lonely, downright rubbish at school and (as we gathered) pretty unpopular with teachers and classmates alike. She was a car crash of a child.

Alan kept listening while I fetched her a Coke. (She’d been quite rude about the idea of hot chocolate.) And when I took it to her, that’s when I saw the tiny feathers around her feet. I’m sure she hadn’t ruined the owl out of spite. Quite sure. She was just picking at it nervously, the same way Eddie gnawed his nails.