Another Mother's Son (24 page)

I told Alan Child that I'd enjoyed speaking to him. As I turned to go – Simon still talking away – he touched my arm. I expect he'll be all right – your son Ewan, he said.

I walked on past when I saw him by the lake in Grovelands Park.

He flicks the light switch to make sure it is in the ‘off' position. Leaving the door ajar, he places the chair in the centre of the floor, opens the rucksack and takes out a light bulb still in its box. Children's voices echo in the well of the stairs and feet clatter in ascending and descending scales. In semi-darkness, he removes the packaging and climbs onto the chair, holding the bulb aloft by its glass. The unused cupboard retains the dry smell of old paper. The sturdy wooden shelves that go from floor to ceiling are empty but for a scattering of treasury tags and a single bulldog clip; obsolete items from the era of stationery, later captured by Jude Bennet-Neerhoff in a series of stills. Neatly stacked exercise books with chalky coloured covers have gone and never been replaced. Thousands of them. Red for history, blue for English, with square-crossed pages for maths and with printed bar lines for music, rough books made of coarse paper, little notebooks for vocab. Each one was a new start. A Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder stands in a corner. It is as sturdy as a piece of military equipment, with its grey box top, and Alan has it marked down as an additional aid if he fails to reach the ceiling. Finding the stationery cupboard has been a godsend. The last thing he wants is to make a spectacle of himself by changing into his cycling gear in an ostentatious manner and setting off in full view of the staffroom window. The sports department is always on the lookout for semi-fit volunteers who can be dragged onto the football pitch or basketball court. By stretching up into dusty space, he manages to reach the light fitting. He gets off the chair and presses the switch. The room is illuminated. Through the wall he hears a ball bounce down the stairs and children yelling as they pursue it.

The second shot of Alan Child entering the stationery cupboard also features a chair and a rucksack, though this time he drags the chair. Jude Bennet-Neerhoff aims her phone at him. The door shuts.

If Alan's mother imagined him in the staffroom, nursing a mug of instant coffee, somewhat on the edge of things, not part of a bitching faction but conversing in an intelligent way with like-minded colleagues, she was wrong. He started out that way and was now in flight, not during lessons or when obliged to do duties, but in those narrow bands of time that are, occasionally, his own.

Alan pulls his phone out of his pocket and checks the time. Twelve-forty. He has a good half-hour before he needs to be back for the first lesson of the afternoon and no lunch-time duties on a Friday. He slips off the rucksack, dips into it and produces a few tools, a wire coat hanger and a rope. He ascends the ladder again and drills a hole through the top shelf with a hand drill. He descends. He unties the laces of his black leather shoes. His actions are quick. Jacket, tie, shirt, belt, trousers; the teacher's clothes come off and are arranged over the hanger. He is off for a long bike ride. It will get him away from school and clear his head. That option remains open to him until he chooses the other one. Once he is down to his underpants, he rapidly pulls on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and zips up the matching top. Trainers on, laces tied; he is ready to go.

One of Randal's light-bulb jokes.

HE HAS HIS
art, maybe that will lead somewhere, Randal said, early on. The alphabet in biro. I don't think so, I said.

I examine again the everyday objects, buildings, plants, creatures, the luminous band of asteroids in a black sky, made from marks tiny as pixilation, and, staring further into them, I try to see the letter that they begin with – the letter ‘A'– that I know covers the whole page and is concealed in the design. I switch on the lamp, kneel down and put my nose close to the paper. My head is bowed, the soles of my feet upturned. I used to make paper boats for Ewan. He sailed them in the bath.

The event I feared has happened – though to another mother's son. It occupied a corner of my mind, pitched a small tent there. A ridge-framed object, flap closed, sleeps one. Not a refuge. We all contributed to the offence against Mr Child. It doesn't much matter who pressed ‘send'. Jude took the photos and got away with it. She has taken Ewan too. No help to Ross in his trouble. I am years behind with the products of technology. I read about things like Google-Glass and think, for God's sake. Why would anyone want to wear a headset that connects to the Internet? The next thing will be smart contact lenses and implants in the eyes because swiping and tapping a pair of goggles is a giveaway. People take pictures of everything. The subject has no significance. Whatever comes by is reflected. A picture on a phone; it's what they do. If I were into that kind of thing, I would have taken one of my ex-husband appraising Jude's breasts. What used to be lost is now preserved; trash, that is. Preserved and multiplied.

Slowly, I move in and out, near and away. The knack of finding the initial letter hidden in the design is to de-couple the two types of looking, the gaze and the focus, but the point where the trick works eludes me. I go for another approach, an ad-hoc type of geometry that locates the notional apex of a triangle at the top mid-point and traces imagined sides.
Isos
, equal, and
skelos
, leg. I envisage a cross-bar and the angle of the A's smaller triangle. I search for a pattern behind the pattern – or an angel that would fit on a shirt button. My youngest son crosses his room with thumping footsteps. Then his music comes on. If he remains pig-headed, I shall have to help him find somewhere else to continue his education. Life in the summer is easier – light for longer in the evening – though too hot here under the roof. There is nothing but sky above the slanting window. Half-remembering, half-dreaming, I hear my own mother's voice. It comes from a long way back, before I grew up, before I was born; the mother as mainstay infinitely regressing, turning into smaller and smaller copies of herself and bequeathing a diminishing feeling of safety.

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Copyright © Janet Davey 2015

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First published by Chatto & Windus in 2015

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