Lifesaver (18 page)

But it was impossible to get to Max except through Adam—what was I going to do, invite
Max
for a drink at the pub? Yeah, right. The bigger and more elaborate the mural panels became, the more they represented my chances slipping away. I wished Max had never been at the pub that time. If I hadn’t met him at all, it might have been easier to let it go.

As far as I could tell, my options were as follows: One: to get myself on the reserve list for one of Adam’s art classes and hope that a place came up. That was my least favourite course of action, since, assuming I even managed to enrol in something, it would have been even harder to ‘socialise’ with Adam in a class situation than it was at Moose Hall with Mitch breathing down my neck, and Max definitely wouldn’t be around when Adam was formally teaching. Second option: be proactive and invite Adam and Max out somewhere. But where? And, more to the point from Adam’s perspective, why? Much as I liked Adam, it wasn’t as if we’d really had a chance to bond. Even spending whole days together on the project hadn’t created a deep and lasting friendship between us or anything. No, despite my best efforts, I got the distinct impression that although Adam liked me well enough, it wasn’t as if I was his new best friend. I imagined his forehead creasing with confusion and polite surprise, were I suddenly to announce that I’d like to take him and Max to the cinema, or out bowling.

Three—come clean and tell Adam who I really was. But I still wasn’t able do that. My original reasons for not wanting to reveal my identity seemed even more valid than ever now that I’d met Max, and I shuddered to imagine what Adam would think of me for
not
asking to see Max in the three weeks since I’d known him. It would make me appear as a total freak.

That left option four: to hang around near their house and ‘bump’ into them…Good grief, that would be like being sixteen again. Surely I couldn’t stoop to those depths?

But desperate times called for desperate measures…hich was how I found myself in their street one sunny humid afternoon, after Moose Hall had been locked up for the day and everybody had gone home, lightly frosted as usual with a greyish patina of tile dust. Adam had left early, saying he was going to collect Max from the childminder’s, and I’d judged that it could take anything from twenty minutes to an hour for them to get back to their house (although I wasn’t sure exactly how I figured that, since I didn’t actually know where the childminder lived). I knew where Adam and Max’s house was, though. I’d looked it up on BT online, which allowed me to print a handy street map of the location at the same time. I had the map folded up in my bag, and already knew the route from Moose Hall off by heart: take the Devizes road into town, cross two roundabouts, follow the one way system until you got to Dean Street, then Hardcourt Road was the third on the right. They lived at number 43.

I also knew that Adam drove an old yellow Saab, of which there was no sign as I drove slowly down the road. Number 43 was a shabby, unremarkable three storey terraced house, with no garage, unless it was around the back. I added this somewhat spurious piece of information to my mental Max files: likes chicken, mother not around, Dad drives Saab, no garage.

Hardcourt Road wasn’t in one of the better parts of Gillingsbury. There was a rusting hulk of a car on blocks a few doors down from Adam and Max’s, and loud music from three different open windows mingled badly. On the corner, four teenage kids and their small hanger-on, a boy of about ten, were doing what kids did best: loitering, smoking, laughing meanly and looking disaffected. I parked nearby and sat in the car for a while, with the engine running so I could keep the air-conditioning on. I wasn’t quite sure what to do next, so I flitted through the radio stations. On Radio Two, Steve Wright and his sycophantic posse were spouting spurious ‘factoids’: did you know that if your pillow is over five years old, ten per cent of its volume has become comprised of bits of dead skin. Ugh, I thought, remembering how I’d punched mine after my row with Vicky.

I couldn’t believe that Steve Wright was still going. He reminded me of a bygone era, of being seventeen and driving around after school in my friend Julia’s bumblebee 2CV, aka the Yellow Peril, or, pretentiously, the Deux Chevaux. What did Deux Chevaux mean, anyway—two horse-power? Chevaux—was that horses, or goats? Two goats? I wouldn’t have been surprised, such was the winsome quirkiness of those vehicles. It had a completely unfathomable gearstick, and windows hinged in the middle which flipped out and up. That car reminded me of trysts with Greg, of drinking Baileys out of paper cups in school lunch breaks, and of listening to Steve Wright in the Afternoon, circa 1982, on the ancient car radio. One of Steve’s jingles at that time had been a woman’s voice, protesting in a rising cadence, ‘No, no, no… then the brisk sound of a zipper, and then ‘…oooh
yes
.’ We’d repeated it ad infinitum, often shouting it out of the flip-up windows at attractive men walking along as we whizzed around the town centre.

The memory made me smile, and I was away, lost in thoughts of my schooldays. Back when I was innocent, and my only worries were whether I’d get the lead part in the school play, and whether or not I ought to let Greg undo my bra and get his hands on my breasts.

I wondered what Julia and her Deux Chevaux were doing now. At least one of them would surely be on the scrapheap, and it was less likely to be the car. She’d been far too fond of those lunchtime Baileys, as I recalled. Her ‘O’ levels had passed her by in a sticky blur of coffee flavoured liqueur, and she failed them all, which was when our paths had diverged.

A sharp rap on my own car window made me jump. One of the boys from the corner was standing in the road right next to me. He bent down and leered in at me, as I lunged for the central locking button, and his mates all creased up as if that was the most hilarious thing they’d ever seen. Their small sidekick was trying simultaneously to smoke and look cool, and failed on both counts: he took two or three shallow puffs of a cigarette, stubbed it out, and replaced it in his mouth with a baby’s dummy - which disconcerted me almost as much as the slap on the window had.

Once I’d composed myself from the shock, and checked that it wasn’t just some innocent enquiry, I gazed straight ahead, refusing to meet any of their eyes, and waited, stock still, until they sauntered off, bored with making faces and rude gestures at me. My mother would have called them ‘youths’, in tones heavy with censure.

There were still no signs of life from number 43, or any yellow Saabs in sight, so rather than risk the ‘youths’ coming back again, I decided to get out of the car. I walked up to a small parade of shops at the end of the street which I’d noticed when I’d driven past earlier.

One of the shops was a picture framers, and as soon as I spotted it I knew I had my purported reason for being in the area - I could say I was just dropping something off to be framed. For the sake of authenticity I went into the shop, setting off a loud electronic two-tone beep when I trod on the doormat. It startled me, but didn’t even seem to register with the elderly woman sitting reading behind the counter.

I perfunctorily inspected a rack of handmade birthday cards, a shelf of small beaded lampshades, and a wall full of corners of picture frames stuck with velcro onto green baize. Eventually the woman looked up from her book, apparently surprised to have a customer. She gave me a vague smile before dropping her eyes back to the page again.

I didn’t pay her much attention either, though. I was gazing at the right-angled corners in all their different colours and textures and wondering, if I had anything in the world I could frame, what it would be. A signed photograph of Elvis Costello? That lovely ten by twelve of me as the lead in
All My Sons
? Max, beaming at the camera?

No, of course not, if this was
fantasy
photo-framing, it wouldn’t even be Max. It would have to be a montage of my own children. Holly’s school photo, gap-toothed and grinning, her hands folded in her lap in an unnatural piece of stage-management; Louis’s second birthday, perhaps, blowing out candles on a Thomas the Tank Engine cake, with Vicky’s Pat contributing puff (with those cheeks, I had no doubt that he’d be expert at it). Gemma sitting on a garden-centre Santa’s knee, looking as worried as she was ecstatic. And how about a baby photo of my youngest, my Joe, in a tropical-fruit print swim nappy, straddling Ken’s chest by a blue pool under a bluer sky.

(Yes, I didn’t care that it was indulgent; we’d given them all names. Even when, in the case of all except Holly, they didn’t grow enough for us to ever know what sex they would have become. Didn’t develop any further than lumps of liver-like tissue—but, hey, you worked with what you were given.)

So that was what I’d have framed, if I could have chosen anything at all.

I had to beep-beep my way out of the shop again. The woman was so engrossed in her book that I didn’t think she’d notice if I broke down in tears there and then, but I didn’t feel like risking it. I wandered along the pavement back towards the car, for a moment forgetting what I was doing there.

It was really hot, that muggy late-afternoon heat which seemed to jump out at you and take refuge in your armpits and crotch. I delved in my bag for the car keys, thinking longingly of cranking up the air-conditioning in the car and driving home again—this having been a stupid idea, obviously—when suddenly the four troublemakers were surrounding me. They had slunk out of a narrow gravelled and overgrown side alley that I hadn’t even noticed until then. Oh no, I thought, that’s all I bloody need. I surreptitiously dropped my car keys back into my bag, and clutched the bag more tightly to my shoulder.

‘Yes?’ I said, in my most schoolmistressy voice, trying to sound bored yet aggressive. ‘Could you move, please, you’re in my way.’

‘
Could you move, please, you’re in my way
,’ mimicked the tallest one, pulling a po-face at his friends. He folded his arms and moved closer to me. I looked up and down the street but it was empty. I could still hear music, though. I thought if I shouted loudly enough, people would surely appear at windows. I contemplated a judo kick—I’d done a few years’ of martial arts at college, once a week—but decided it was too risky. I couldn’t take on all four of them, however weedy they were. Poor Max, having to live near those losers.

Then I heard a click, and saw a flash of silver from the boy next to the face-pulling one; a shorter, spottier one. He was slyly brandishing a penknife, with a three inch blade. ‘Give us your bag,’ he said, conversationally.

I’d always considered myself a tough woman, brave and, despite my skinny frame, reasonably strong. Now, when the chips were down, I wasn’t so sure. Regardless of the adrenaline whooshing around my body, I felt my knees weaken. I looked around again. Bloody marvellous - fifteen years of living in London, many nights walking home in the wee small hours without any sort of incident; and now, in a sleepy Wiltshire market town at five o’clock on a summer’s afternoon, I was being mugged at knifepoint. Penknife-point, maybe, but I still felt scared.

Then—and it was just like one of my teenage fantasies—I was unceremoniously rescued.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you little toe-rags? Get lost. NOW.’ Adam had marched up behind me, pushing a terrified-looking Max behind him to keep him out of range. He pointed at the one with the knife - and I had to admit that he looked kind of sexy when he was angry. ‘I’ll be on to your mother about this.’

‘Yeah, I bet you will,’ sniggered one of the other ones. ‘A right motherfucker, ain’t you?’ They all joined in with the laughter, but it was half-hearted and slightly nervous. Then they turned as one and, without another word, sloped back off down the alley.

‘Hello Max,’ I said, rather rudely not thanking his father for saving my Quorn bacon; but at that moment I couldn’t cope with looking at Adam in case I burst into tears. I still felt as if someone had removed my kneecaps, and it was a relief to crouch down, under the pretext of talking to Max on his own level. Stupid, I thought, to be so frightened by some spotty kids with a penknife. ‘Remember me? We met before. I’m Anna.’

But Max jerked his head away and hid his face in Adam’s leg.

‘What is it, mate?’ asked Adam, tilting Max’s chin up with a cupped palm.

‘I don’t like those boys,’ Max whispered. ‘They scared me.’

‘You know what, Max?’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘They scared me, too. They weren’t nice boys, were they? Lucky we had your dad to look after us.’

Adam tousled Max’s hair. ‘You’re OK now, Max,’ he said. Then he reached out and gave my bare arm a little reassuring squeeze too. His fingers felt sandpapery and solid, and I imagined them stroking the hair back from Max’s forehead when he was sick.

‘Are you OK?’ he repeated to me. He jerked his head towards number forty-three. ‘Listen, we live just over there. Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea?’

I didn’t need asking twice. My legs were like jelly, and I badly needed to sit down properly, so I wobbled off across the road behind Adam and Max.

Max insisted on turning the key in the lock, and I waited while Adam lifted him up so he could reach it. ‘Sorry,’ said Adam. ‘Just one of our little rituals.’ I could help looking behind me, to make sure we weren’t about to be ambushed, but the road was empty once again, apart from a large ginger cat who sat on the bonnet of a nearby car, licking its bottom and glaring at me over an outstretched back leg.

I’m going into Max’s house! I thought. It was obviously a meant-to-be. And I hadn’t even lost my handbag in the process. Suddenly I felt a bizarre wash of gratitude to the four teenagers who had inadvertently helped me achieve my aim.

Max eventually managed to get the door open, and Adam set him down inside the threshold. ‘Do come in,’ he said, standing to one side to allow me through. I stepped into a narrow hallway, dingily painted but with a lurid orange and lime green batik wall hanging. It wasn’t to my taste, particularly, but it did have a kind of chaotic brightening charm. The same could have been said for the rest of the downstairs. The décor was most definitely a few steps up from hippy chic, with Indian throws over the two sofas in the front room, and a shabby but beautiful Gabbeh rug on the floor. Max’s toys were strewn around the place, and newspaper was spread on a dining table to protect it from some kind of painting activity which hadn’t yet been cleared away.