Other People's Children (29 page)

She stared at him.

‘You can't,' she said rudely.

‘I can,' he said. He stood up. He seemed, suddenly, enormously tall, standing there so close to her bed. ‘It's you that can't.' There was a beat. Becky couldn't look at him. She stared down, instead, at her fingernails which she had painted electric-blue and then picked away at. Matthew moved away from her bed towards the door.

‘If that's what you decide,' he said.

The house was very quiet. Becky supposed Josie was downstairs, marking books maybe, or making one of her I'm-a-perfect-mummy cakes, or mending. Becky had never seen anyone mend clothes before. Nadine never did, had never, as far as Becky could remember, sewn on so much as a button. But Josie mended. She'd patched Rory's jeans and sewn up a long ripped seam in Clare's Disney tracksuit. Becky couldn't think how they'd let her.

She sat on the edge of her bed. She was dressed, and felt rather fidgety, but, at the same time, directionless. She was also hungry. Despite Matthew's instructions, Josie had offered her a sandwich at lunchtime, standing at the bottom of the stairs and calling up, and Becky'd shouted above the music she'd started playing again that she wasn't hungry, that she didn't want anything. The thought of a sandwich made her mouth
water. She'd found half a packet of crisps in the boys' bedroom and two sticks of gum in the pockets of her jeans jacket and devoured them. She had no cigarettes. The last cigarette had been a week ago, when the man who'd run the café where the police had come had given her one. He'd also given her a fried breakfast that made her drool to remember.

‘Stupid bloody kid,' he'd said to her. ‘As if running away ever solved anything.'

But he'd given her the fags and the breakfast, and when the police came in, he'd stood by her table to defend her, if necessary. It wasn't necessary. She'd never tell anyone until her dying day, but Becky had been so thankful to see the police come in, she'd nearly run into their uniformed arms.

Downstairs, the telephone began ringing. It rang twice, three times, and then Josie answered it. Becky could hear the sound of her voice, but not what she was saying. After a moment or two, the sitting-room door opened downstairs and Josie called, ‘Becky?' Her voice sounded odd.

Becky stood up.

‘Yes?'

‘Becky. Can you come?'

She went slowly out on to the landing. Josie was at the foot of the stairs.

‘Becky, it's your mother—'

‘Yes?'

‘She – doesn't sound very well, she sounds a bit fraught—'

Becky clumped down the stairs, pushing past Josie. Nadine always sounded fraught, especially if she had to ring Barratt Road, had to risk speaking to Josie. She picked up the telephone receiver.

‘Mum?'

Nadine was crying.

‘You've got to come—'

‘What? What's the matter?'

‘You've got to, I'm not allowed to come to you, your father won't let me, and now this has happened—'

‘What has?'

‘Becky, I can't cope, I can't manage, you've got to come, you've got to come quickly—'

‘What's happened? Are you OK? Are you hurt?'

‘I don't know,' Nadine said, her voice ragged with tears. ‘I don't know.'

‘Jesus,' Becky said. She swallowed. ‘Have you taken anything? Have you taken any pills or anything?'

‘No,' Nadine said. ‘No. But I need you. I need you here. I need you to come. I haven't seen you since all that happened, I have to see you, I
have
to.'

‘OK,' Becky said. Her voice she noticed, was shaky, as if she was shivering. ‘OK.'

‘Quickly,' Nadine said.
‘Quickly.'

‘Yes.'

Becky heard the telephone go down. She stood for a moment, looking at the receiver in her hand, and then she put it down, too, and walked slowly into the kitchen. Josie was sitting at the table with an open cheque book in front of her, paying bills. She looked
up as Becky came in, and said in a neutral voice, ‘All right?'

Becky hesitated. She put a hand up to her mouth and began to chew at a cuticle.

‘Not really,' she said.

Josie put her pen down. She said, less neutrally, ‘What's the matter?'

‘She was crying,' Becky said. ‘She sounded awful. She kept asking me to go—'

‘To her? To Herefordshire?'

‘She said I must. She said she needed me. She said something had happened.'

Josie stood up.

‘Is she ill?'

Becky looked at her.

‘I don't know, she just sounded desperate. I – I've got to go, I've got to—'

‘How will you get there?'

Becky's shoulders slumped.

‘I don't know. Train maybe, then a taxi—'

‘I could take you,' Josie said.

‘You—'

‘I've got the car today. It's outside. I could drive you to your mother's. Just let me leave a note for the others and ring Matthew—'

‘No,' Becky said.

‘No?'

‘Don't tell Dad,' Becky said. ‘Please. Just do it. Don't tell Dad.'

‘Won't he think,' Josie said, looking straight at Becky,
‘that it's the second irresponsible thing I've done as far as you're concerned, in a week?'

Becky knew her face and voice were full of pleading. She couldn't seem to help it.

‘I'll tell him—'

‘What will you tell him?'

‘That you did it—' She stopped, gulped and then said, ‘To help me.' Josie went over to the refrigerator.

‘If we're going to Herefordshire, you have to eat something.'

‘No—'

‘Becky,' Josie said, ‘you've eaten nothing sensible for a week and you don't know what lies ahead of you now. What help will it be to your mother if you faint at her feet?'

‘We've got to go,' Becky said.

Josie stepped back.

‘Take three things out of there, to eat on the journey, while I turn the car round. And leave a note for your father.'

‘What'll I say?'

Josie went quickly past her and lifted the car keys from their hook by the outside door.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘That's up to you.'

Rufus sat at the desk in his bedroom and contemplated his new curtains. They were green-and-cream, checked, quite a big check, with a dark-green line running parallel to the edge. The line was made of something called braid, cotton braid. Rufus had chosen it when he went to choose the green-and-cream checks. He felt, surveying his first excursion into interior decor, very satisfied and rather as if he would like to go a bit further now, and have a new duvet cover since the arrival of the curtains had made the Batman print on his bed look babyish. Also a rug. Perhaps a red rug. He would ask Elizabeth. It was she, after all, who had taken him to the curtain place and just let him decide. She'd opened little fat books of pieces of material and said, ‘What about that?' and, ‘That sort of green?' and, ‘I think you said no patterns, only lines, didn't you?' and left him to it. When the saleslady referred to Elizabeth as Rufus's mother, Elizabeth had said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘I'm not Rufus's mother, but I am soon going to be his
stepmother.' Afterwards she never mentioned it, there by relieving a moment of deep, inexplicable embarrassment. She was, he was beginning to see, to be relied upon in this way; she could be trusted to see things as they were and not as they might be, or could have been or should be. She could be trusted not to make a fuss.

‘Rufus,' Dale said.

He glanced towards his bedroom door. Dale was leaning against the frame. She had shiny black boots on. Rufus looked at them.

‘Hello.'

‘Very smart curtains,' Dale said.

‘I chose them.'

‘Excellent choice. Nice desk, too.'

Rufus took his gaze away from Dale's feet and transferred it to his desk top. He kicked at the stretcher bar under his chair. He was never quite sure what he felt about Dale. He knew she was his half-sister, but she didn't
feel
like one, she didn't feel like someone who belonged to him. He'd known, all his life, that Dale didn't like his mother and that had always been disconcerting. He could see why people sometimes got cross with his mother, but not liking her was something else, something that made him feel he didn't want to be around people who thought like that. In fact, he'd always liked the house better when Dale wasn't in it.

Dale moved from the doorway and went to the window.

‘You've got such a nice view.'

Rufus said nothing. He picked up a retractable pen from his desk and began to click the point in and out, in and out.

‘It's much nicer than my view,' Dale said. ‘I don't know why I didn't choose this room when I was little. I expect I chose mine so I could see the street and then I could always see my mother and father coming home.' She turned round from the window. ‘I may be coming back here to live for a bit.' Rufus stopped clicking.

‘Why?'

‘I've sold my flat,' Dale said. ‘I sold it really easily, it was amazing. And I haven't bought another one yet. So I think I'll come home for a while and live up here. I could make Lucas's old room into a sitting-room, couldn't I?'

‘It's full of mess,' Rufus said.

‘I could clear that. Perhaps we could put some in here, in boxes, because you aren't here very often, are you?'

Rufus jabbed the pen into the palm of his hand.

‘I am.'

‘What, once a month—'

‘I don't want mess in here.'

‘It would be very tidy, all in boxes—'

‘No!'

‘OK,' Dale said. ‘It was just a suggestion. I'll find somewhere else.'

Rufus slid out of his desk chair. He wanted to say that he didn't want Dale there at all, he didn't want Dale up on his floor with him, where it was private, he
didn't want her living there beside his room when he wasn't there himself, because he was in Matthew's house. But somehow he couldn't.

‘I'm going downstairs,' he said.

In the kitchen, Elizabeth was reading the news paper. She had it spread flat on the table and she had her glasses on and a mug of tea beside the newspaper. She didn't look up when he came in, but she said, ‘There's a story here about albino frogs in the West Country. They aren't green, they're orange and pink and white. I shouldn't like that at
all.'

Rufus hitched himself onto a chair opposite her.

‘Sometimes there's toads in the garden here.'

‘Are there?'

‘I took a baby one to school once, in some wet stuff.' He began to fiddle with the edge of Elizabeth's newspaper, scuffling the pages about. She didn't tell him to stop. Instead she watched him for a bit and then she said, ‘Is Dale upstairs?'

He nodded. Elizabeth sighed. She took her glasses off.

He said, ‘Where's Daddy?'

‘In the office.'

‘Dale said she was going to live in her room again.'

Elizabeth looked down at the paper.

‘I know.'

‘She wants to put some of the junk out of Lucas's room in my room.'

‘She can't do that,' Elizabeth said.

‘Does Daddy know?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is he cross?'

‘No,' Elizabeth said. She looked at him. ‘Don't worry. Nobody's putting anything in your room that you don't want there.'

Rufus wondered whether to say it wasn't just junk he didn't want, he didn't want Dale up there either. He glanced at Elizabeth. She was still looking at him, very seriously, as if to reassure him that nobody was going to say, ‘Oh Rufus is only eight and he's hardly ever here and he won't mind anyway,' and get away with it.

‘Shall we go out?' Elizabeth said.

‘Out?'

‘Yes. We could go and look at something or visit my father or go for a walk.'

‘Could we buy a rug?'

‘A rug?'

‘For my room. A red one.'

‘I don't see why not. Would you like to see my father, too?'

Rufus nodded. Elizabeth stood up.

‘Would you like to go and tell Daddy we're going out then?'

Rufus hesitated.

‘Aren't you going to?'

‘No,' Elizabeth said. ‘I'm not.'

Rufus slid off his chair.

‘Will we be hours?'

‘We might be. We might decide to have lunch somewhere.'

‘What about Daddy's lunch?'

Elizabeth picked up her handbag and opened it, to put her glasses away.

‘Dale can do that.'

Rufus moved to the kitchen doorway and then stopped.

‘Is Daddy cross?' he said again.

Elizabeth took a lipstick out of her handbag.

‘No,' she said. ‘It isn't Daddy that's cross. I'm afraid it's me that is.'

Lucas lay full-length on one of the sofas in his flat, with his eyes closed. There was jazz – Stan Getz – coming softly from his disc player, but otherwise the flat was quiet, blessedly quiet, because Amy had gone to see a film with a friend and Dale had changed her mind about coming over because she was all fired up about this new plan of hers, for moving back into Tom's house, into her old bedroom, and Lucas's old bedroom, until she got another place of her own.

‘Only until—' she'd said to Lucas. ‘Only for a few weeks.'

He'd shaken his head.

‘You shouldn't—'

‘Why not? Why shouldn't I? Because of her? Because of her and Dad and' – her voice thickened ominously – ‘their
privacy
?'

‘No,' Lucas said. ‘Because of you.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘I mean you'll never go forward if you keep taking yourself backwards.'

‘I'm not,' Dale said. ‘I'm just being sensible.'

‘She doesn't know the meaning of the word,' Amy said later. ‘She can't do anything unless there's some great emotional doodah hanging off it. Everything she does has to be a big deal – she can't even pick up the dry cleaning without it being a three-act drama.'