Our Picnics in the Sun (26 page)

The kerosene smell and the muffled stillness: these things, as if coming from a place and time of warmth too distant for him to recall exactly, soothed Adam, suggesting an unreliable, half-dreamed kind of bliss, but bliss nevertheless; he could feel himself slowing down, he could not help thinking of safety and sleep. And all at once he was thinking of nothing, or thinking at least how much he wanted to empty his mind and think of nothing. He could not bear to do any more planning, or walking, or going anywhere at all. It amazed him that he’d ended up here, but now that he had, the echoing church and windy path and the streets beyond this friendly room were receding fast and becoming unreal; it was quite beyond him to negotiate any more of them today. He felt it happening again; he was
turning numb and giving in, going down, down, down—down past thinking or caring. Using the last practical corner of his mind, he dragged the floor cushions together into a sort of nest in the corner, and pulled down the blue robes from their pegs. He bedded himself down under them and, with childish pleasure, turned on his side, opened his backpack and ate all his sandwiches and crisps. After that he felt warm and full. He lay back, stretched, then curled up and drew the blue robes over his head. Once he’d rested for a while he’d go looking for a better place to hide. He wouldn’t fall asleep, he’d just lie quietly.

When he opened his eyes there was a woman standing with her hands on her hips, looking down at him. Her unsmiling face was familiar but he couldn’t place her. She was wearing a fleece and jeans and the stupid kind of shoes that look as if they’re on the wrong feet. He scrambled to his feet and started mumbling but had no idea what he wanted to say. He realized that now he really did need to pee.

“Ah, so you’re alive,” she said. “Lucky for you there was no Evensong today or they’d have woken you up ages ago. That’s the choir’s cassocks you’ve got all over the place. Come on, let’s get them hung back up. Can’t leave them on the floor, can we? Then I expect you could do with a cup of tea.”

Adam thought of diving for the door but with his bladder so full he didn’t trust himself to move fast enough. He stood with his backpack tight against his chest, trying to speak. But the woman didn’t seem interested in anything he might have to say. She was hanging up all the cassocks, moving the cushions back to the corner, and now she was picking up the litter from his sandwich and crisp picnic, tutting loudly. Then she opened the outside door. “Come on, then,” she said. “I have to get back to do supper. They’ll be starving. They’re always starving. Oh,” she added, “I should have said. I’m Pat. The Reverend Pat Dobbs. I’m the vicar. This is St. Mary’s. I’m locking up now so you’ve got to come along out of here, you can’t stay. But you can come back home with me for a cup of tea, all right?”

She walked extremely fast. Adam followed her almost at a trot along the path around the side of the church and through a gate into the back garden of a modern, semi-detached house. Pat stepped into
a kitchen in which everything seemed to be hanging up: socks and underwear from a drying rack on the ceiling, mugs and pots from hooks under shelves, cooking utensils from a metal grid on the wall. Curling postcards and photographs, coupons, takeaway menus and notes clung to a noticeboard next to a calendar covered in scrawled writing; a pink sweater was slung over a chair back, a satchel gaped open under the table. On the table were a dirty mug, an empty yogurt pot with a teaspoon in it, two or three open books, and a pencil case with its contents spilling out.

Pat binned the sandwich wrappings and crisp bags, filled the kettle, and walked with it in her hand to the door leading to the hall. She yelled, “Flora! Vince! I’m here!” and then turned to Adam. For the first time she smiled at him. “And you are?” she asked.

“Adam. Er, please can I use your toilet?”

He’d just use the toilet and leave. But when he came back into the kitchen from the cloakroom under the stairs there was a girl sitting at the table, and a tall stooping man in slippers over by the sink fishing teabags out of three mugs. Pat turned from chopping onions and introduced Flora and Vince with a wave of her knife. Over the top of his spectacles Vince raised a friendly eyebrow in his direction, and Flora swung a languid hand at him without taking her elbow off the table.

Adam gawped at her, and blushed. Give or take her glasses, and the clothes that were not hot at all (and maybe her hair was darker), Flora was as near as he’d seen in real life to
his
girl, the girl from the overturned caravan. Older by a year or so as well, but still. Flora. He realized he’d never even given a name to his girl. Flora wasn’t a bad name.

“Shift the junk off that chair and sit down, Adam. Make yourself comfortable,” Pat said.

“Oh, okay, uh, thanks,” he said. He lifted a pile of folded laundry on to the table and took the chair opposite Flora.

“If you’re okay with spag bol, you’re welcome to eat with us,” Pat said, turning back to the chopping board. “That’s if your mum isn’t expecting you back straightaway. Where do you live?”

“Oh, uh, no, I’m fine. Thanks,” Adam said miserably. He was ravenous. “Thanks a lot. It’s fine.”

“Fine your mum’s expecting you or fine you’ll stay?” Vince said, mildly. “D’you take milk? Sugar?”

“Oh, uh, yeah and one sugar, please.” He took a deep breath. “And I meant, if it’s okay with you, yeah, it’s fine. To stay. Thanks.” He’d had no idea before he said it that he wasn’t going to refuse the offer, drink his tea, and go. He felt himself blushing again.

“I guess you’d better ring and let her know you won’t be home for supper,” Pat said, adding the onions to a frying pan on the stove. “Phone’s in the hall.”

“Oh. Uh, no, no, it’s fine,” Adam said. “My parents—they won’t be bothered. They’re cool about stuff like that.”

Vince put the mugs of tea on the table, ruffled the back of his wife’s head, and left the room. After two or three sips, Adam dared to look up. The girl was looking at him over the top of her mug. Through the steam on her glasses, her eyes looked friendly.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hiya,”
Flora breathed. Then she put down her mug, sighed, took off her glasses, and threw them across the book in front of her. She leaned back, tipping her chair on to its back legs. “Do you have to do Biology? I hate it.”

Adam shook his head.

“See, Mum? See?” she said, swinging back farther. “You so do not
have
to do Biology. So why do I? Why, Mum? I really hate it.”

“I know, Flora, Biology is awful but you just have to get on with it. And please don’t do that with your chair,” Pat said. Flora sighed again and glared at the ceiling. “Or you could go and lay the table.” Pat was stirring meat into the onions now. “Actually, darling, please would you go and do that? Adam and I are going to have a word.”

The front legs of Flora’s chair crashed back to the floor. Behind her mother’s back she cast her eyes upward and threw Adam a look that said
God, parents
. Then she got up, clattered about in a drawer, and left the room with a handful of cutlery.

Over the soft fizzing from the pan, Pat said, “So, Adam, what’s
going on, that you bedded down in the vestry? And don’t want to talk to your parents?”

“Going on? Oh, nothing’s going on!” he said. “I’m fine. I suppose I was just tired.” He shrugged with embarrassment at how bad a liar he was.

“I mean, I don’t get the impression it’s drugs. Or drink,” she said. “I can usually tell.”

Adam swigged some tea and said nothing.

“Okay, so how many nights have you slept rough? You’re, what, about fifteen? They’ll want to know you’re safe, you know.” Adam squirmed. “Unless they’re
really
not interested in you. Some parents don’t care. Not many, but some.”

“No! They do care, of course they do! But there’s no point talking to them. They don’t listen. It’s no big deal. Anyway … thanks for the tea.” He got up and reached for his backpack. “I gotta go.”

“Whoa, there,” Pat said. “Hang on a minute. Adam?”

“I’m not talking to them. It’s none of your business. I’m not going back.”

“Adam, it’s okay. Sit down.”

At once, Adam did sit down. He wiped a hand over his face. As soon as he’d got to his feet he’d realized he could hardly bring himself to leave behind his half-finished mug of tea, the smell of frying onions and meat, the cluttered, safe kitchen. He couldn’t bring himself to leave behind Pat’s offhand kindness.

“So, want to tell me what’s so terrible?” she said, glancing up from the stove. The meat was sizzling now, sending wafts of steam through her hair.

“They don’t listen. They don’t care what I want,” he said, staring at the table. Tears began to roll down his cheeks.

“Well,” Pat said, more gently, pulling the pan off the heat, “even so, we can’t have them worried sick. Suppose I ring them, just to let them know you’re safe. That okay?”

Adam raised his face and wiped his eyes. “No! I don’t want you to, I never asked you to! I don’t want to go back. I just want to—”

“Adam, it’s okay. Finish your tea. Then suppose you tell me what you think I should do. Tell me what it is you
do
want.”

While she waited for him to answer, he looked around the kitchen, at the scrawled wall calendar, Flora’s books and pencil case, the photographs, the washed and folded clothes. He hadn’t worked it out for himself yet, the way these ordinary things—just
stuff
, after all—were different, somehow, from things at Stoneyridge, and for that alone were already precious. They just made a kind of clean, cheerful sense to him; they belonged to a family life so much lighter-hearted than his own. He wanted to tell Pat about the Stoneyridge kitchen, just as cluttered but where the stuff was always wreckage of some sort and always grimy or broken or scavenged, and where his mother worked from half-empty sacks on the floor to make pots of bulky, joyless food that always lacked something she couldn’t grow or afford to buy.

Most of all he wanted to tell Pat that because the rest of their house was always freezing it was at the kitchen table that he’d endured as much as he could stand of his father’s scattershot and wayward home schooling: the abacus maths, the clumsy models and futile experiments, all of it stuff that somehow he’d always known wasn’t the kind of thing he had to learn if he was going to get anywhere. He’d had it with woodcraft and pottery and the pointless collections of fucking bones and feathers, but he couldn’t tell her that.

Pat had turned back to the stove. She opened and tipped a tin of tomatoes into the pan, sprinkled on some herbs from a jar, stirred some more, and tasted. “No hurry, Adam. Drink your tea,” she said. He obeyed. “Most things can get sorted, you know,” she added.

He didn’t believe that for a minute. And where to begin? He wanted to tell her about his parents’ worn-out commentaries about themselves—the number of times they came out with statements beginning “Well, we happen to believe …”—and he wanted to tell her about the even worse silences between, about the tarnish of monotony and tension and unspoken fury that lay over everything around them. He’d walked out of there in the nick of time, he felt, carrying with him the whole of his life so far: the worry that he was backward or strange compared with other people, his fear of real girls, his rampant curiosity about them. He’d walked out carrying, barely intact,
the few things for which he felt an excited, secret, and uncertain love: the beauty of numbers (it was a mystery to him, where that came from), cities he’d only heard the names of, music so loud it made his teeth buzz. But most of all, and harder to carry than all of those, was the craving to become the person he was meant to be. He did not know how he came to be a misfit in his parents’ lives, only that he was, and he did not wish to live another day feeling also a misfit in his own. He didn’t know how to lay claim to the kind of life that could be lived in a kitchen like Pat’s, only that he had to try.

“I want to be normal,” he said. “I want ordinary stuff, I want to be ordinary. I want to go to school.”