On Loving Josiah (8 page)

‘Show me a seven-year-old who can’t!’

‘Well then, could he give us a demonstration of his skills?’

‘He’s in the garden dividing plants so that they might multiply. You can watch him, if you like.’

What happened to this young family was bad. Whether it’s
excusable, you, the reader, be the judge. The baseline was, all the social workers who ever came into contact with Eve disliked her. They loathed her airy arrogance. If only she had cried, perhaps, or better still, if she had ever admitted that she was in need of ‘help,’ they would have come running to her side. Then the dreadful things which befell them might never have happened.

The idea of a foster placement was June Briggs’s. ‘Just a very
temporary
thing’ she insisted at the case conference in October 1991. ‘He’s a very solitary child, it’s not good for him. We can’t have him missing yet another year at school. If he starts on Monday, then he’ll only have missed a month of this academic year. He’ll catch up: there’s already an assistant in place at Arbury primary school who can help him. If the Nelsons won’t send him of their own accord, if the boy’s not learning anything at home, then it’s up to us to step in. That’s what we here for, is everyone agreed? Or do we just sit back and watch the kid fail in life?’

‘Do we know for certain he’s not getting an education at home?’ piped up one of the social workers.

‘Has anyone ever noticed a reading book in their house?’

‘Or a maths book, for that matter?’

‘Anyone ever noticed a Latin text book?’ (Laughter.)

‘Seriously, Eve insists her son’s a fine Latin scholar.’ (More laughter.)

‘Has anyone here ever read with the child?’

‘He won’t co-operate.’

‘Do you think that means he can’t?’

‘Probably. But it also means that even if he can read, he’s in need of help. He’s too withdrawn.’

‘Not just shy?’

‘No, he’s more than shy.’

‘Is everyone here agreed on that?’ said Miss June Briggs, taking the helm. ‘Listen, this is only going to be for a few days, until Eve sees sense and encourages him to go to school herself. What that woman needs is a short, sharp, shock, to make her wake up to the real world.’

And so Josiah’s fate was agreed: at seven in the morning, June herself, along with the Nelsons’ latest social worker, a young woman of twenty-three called Tracy, set off from the Social Services
Department
in a VW beetle to claim him. They took a policeman, just in case, who sat in the back.

Tracy was nervous, but was pretending she wasn’t. It was her first job since graduating, and this was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

June was tired. She didn’t like the way Tracy never stopped talking. It was a fiery dawn that morning and Tracy said, ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’

June said ‘Humph’ and tried to demist her windscreen. The policeman, too, was bleary-eyed and sat, stiff as a rod.

‘Do you think it’s possible that Josiah is educationally sub-
normal
, and that Eve’s refusing to send him to school because she’s in denial?’

‘I don’t know,’ said June, in a tone which tried to draw the
conversation
to a close.

‘But it’s just possible, isn’t it?’ said Tracy, chirpily, trying to recall which psychologist might have agreed with her.

‘Frankly,’ said June, ‘I wouldn’t credit that woman with as much feeling. She wouldn’t notice if her son ate coal for breakfast.’

‘He seems well-enough fed to me.’

‘I don’t know what goes on in that house,’ admitted June, but disapprovingly, nonetheless.

‘So you think this really is the right course of action to be taking, do you, June?’

‘Of course it’s the right thing. Unless you can think of anything better.’

‘It just seems so extreme. The closer we get the more… violent it seems.’

June stopped the car and sighed. ‘Tracy, are you up to this?’

Tracy said, ‘What I mean is, is Eve really that bad a mother to deserve…’

June’s voice was unexpectedly sweet. ‘Tracy, she has a history. She has a mental disorder, a file on her as fat as the Bible. We’re
protecting
the child, Tracy. Have you got it?’

They drove on.  

Mad or bad: a mere grey wash spills between them. In this final stage of the theft of Josiah, Briggs did not invoke Eve’s bad behaviour but the fact that she was crazy. And for those of us mortals who yearn to draw clear black lines where there are none, the truth is that June Briggs in this instance was right: Eve did have a screw or two loose, which loosened even further the morning they took her son away.

Even as a child Eve’s mother hadn’t managed to make her
understand
, ‘If you do this, I’ll do that.’ To link actions with their
consequences
was a mental feat that she simply couldn’t manage; Eve didn’t live so much for the day as for the minute. When they took her son she couldn’t conceive of the notion of ‘punishment’; she couldn’t understand that they were playing a game and had given her a role to play and a feeling to feel, namely that of remorse. When Eve looked back and tried to piece together what had happened, she could remember a second in which the house was full, yes, she could distinctly see Gibson giving Josiah a bowl of cereal and Josiah
chattering away, they were making plans for the day, they were off to the fen again… and then she remembered a further second. The house was empty this time. She called for Gibson but Gibson was gone.

She tried to put into some sort of order the intervening seconds. No, she hadn’t heard the social workers coming in. Perhaps Gibson had answered the door. She remembered Josiah saying to her, ‘See you soon, Mummy,’ and he was holding Gibson’s hand. He could have been off on a trip, for the lightness with which he had said it. Then he was gone, and Gibson was gone.

So perhaps that’s what had happened, perhaps they’d all gone to the fen together. But if that was the case, why was she looking in the garden for him? And she had kept with her this image, this dreadful image, of Gibson kneeling in a corner, burying his head deep into it, as though only two walls had strength enough to support its weight. So why hadn’t she gone up to him then, while she could? Why had she left the walls to hold his head for him? Where had she gone?

Nowhere far, geographically speaking. For the whole of her life she was to imagine that it was Gibson who had run away from her, who was found at the end of that week in a ditch of damp, black earth and taken back to Fulbright hospital. But the truth was, it was she who had run away from him.

She had lain between Josiah’s bed and the wall, squashing herself in between them as if in a coffin. And not a thought did she have for anyone in that little family. She was neither angry nor
resentful
, and was thinking as clearly as she had ever thought. Her mind was ruthlessly engaged on a track which had hitherto been virtually untrodden: namely that of looking for the
causes
of things. For Eve had lived her life timelessly, she had existed with no thought for past nor future. Already, Josiah seemed like a mirage to her, for he had been there, sweet thing! But now he was gone somewhere else.

And in the vacuum that ensued many images fought to be seen,
and the one which came upon her with the greatest force was the ghost of Gilbert Fitzpatrick, so physical she could have touched him, a velvet waistcoat and dark wavy hair, smelling of wood smoke. He was kissing her toes, stroking her soft, supple, girl’s feet, her smooth shins, her plump knees. He told her she had much to learn, and he much to teach, that they had a complementary mission in this life, and death, and eternity. ‘Gilbert’, she said to him, (and she spoke out loud to the room) ‘Did I ever tell you that I have a son, Josiah? Did I ever tell you that? Will you teach him for me? I’m so ignorant myself. Sometimes I’m just not up to it myself. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve no strength left. I want to crawl into your pocket, my love.’

Was it minutes, was it hours later? Up Eve sat to write Gilbert a letter. She looked for paper, envelopes. She went back into the sitting-room and wondered why she was curious at the sight of an empty corner there, and shook herself out of her reverie. She found paper and sat at the table to write to him; the mood she was in was scary, and the handwriting was too big for the page. Finally she was finished, satisfied. But then she tried to remember the name of the cottage where she was so happy with him, where he read to her while she lay her restless busy head on his lap to be stroked, and with words so beautiful shooed out the words so ugly from her brain. She couldn’t even remember the name of the county. The place had become a myth.

As Eve slumped in the chair, her cheek resting on the table, she recognised that other place as freedom, where her mind could
simultaneously
flit yet be contained by her lover, her body surrendered yet utterly true. Then for a fleeting moment she dared to sink into another reality. She cried out Gibson’s name. The good, kind, solid Gibson, father of her child! How ironic it was that this great act of freedom of hers, this running against the grain, should leave her so trapped: the dutiful wife and mother of suburbia!

Suddenly a nausea held her in its sticky, sickly clamp; the air itself
became reified: an unbreathable substance choking her lungs. She began to count to herself, one for every inhalation, one for every exhalation, as though she were beginning at the beginning of things, could start afresh and know for certain, this time, that two follows one and three follows two. Calmer now, she considered the seconds following each other in an indefatigable sequence, and it reassured her to know that time was hurtling heedless towards certainty and would carry her along for the ride. In the larger scale of things, there was nothing she could do about anything.

That knowledge began to exhaust her. How odd, she thought, that she ever thought her will might resist her fate. We are not players of the game but part of it. Even spectators are part of the game. No one can escape, no one can reach solid ground. We are all floating, gravity deceives us and makes us believe we have some hold on things, but we are like chess pieces in someone else’s space capsule, our weight is a random thing with no truth in it.

‘I am a drop of petrol in an ocean,’ she spoke out loud and laughed. She got up from the kitchen chair, swaying, as though
conscious
of her essential lightness, and found herself moving upstairs in an unspecified search for the horizontal, or the path of least
resistance
. She looked first in her own bedroom, but it smelt of Gibson, not that she minded the smell but that’s not what she was looking for; the bathroom was too cold and Josiah’s bedroom didn’t merit even a glimpse. She drew the curtains on the landing and lay down on the carpet. She didn’t sleep and she rarely closed her eyes, but the nothingness was sweet in itself.

At two in the afternoon, June Briggs was in bargaining mood. The morning had been a great success: the lure of school and other children, the first trip in a car in his entire life had made Josiah’s first journey
without his father an easy one. Even Tracy said she was surprised at how quickly Josiah had trusted them. And then, when Briggs had rung the school at lunchtime, the headmistress was full of enthusiasm, and astonishment that Josiah had never seen a television before. So, Briggs, in full possession of her moral victory, was off to put Josiah’s mother in the picture, to inform her that the school bus stopped in the Arbury estate at ten past eight for five minutes, and that if Josiah was not on that bus the following morning he would be taken into care.