The Lost Child (23 page)

Drugs! the woman scoffs. Oh come on. It's perfectly normal at their age to smoke a bit of dope. Luke had some friends round just the other night -

It's not a bit of dope, I say again, feeling my anger rising. It's skunk. For two or three years, he's been smoking skunk. Do you know about skunk? It's nothing like the stuff we all smoked at university.

Now she wavers.

Of course I know about skunk. But I'm sure that's not what they're smoking. Luke says they'd never buy it.

How does he know what he's buying? I mutter.

She ignores me.

Anyway, even if he smokes a bit too often, what on earth makes you think he's addicted?

Because his personality has changed completely. You remember what he was like at seven or eight? That bright, happy boy-

But all teenagers -

Because every aspect of his daily life has ground to a halt. Because he hardly goes to school -

But what do you expect when he hasn't got anywhere to live?

He wasn't going to school when he was living here. Day after day he refused to go, or went back to bed even after we begged him to get in the car, I tell her quietly and for a moment this stops her.

Look, please, I say. Forget whether he's an addict or not. May be addict is a difficult word. All I know is he needs to stop smoking cannabis and we just can't help him till he does.

I'm finding this really upsetting, she says. I lay awake last night wondering what I could do and I only rang to offer support but it sounds like you just don't want things to improve for him. I just can't understand where you're coming from. Whatever you think he mayor may not have done, he's still your son.

I'm sorry I can't tell you the things you want to hear, I say, but she's not there any more. She's hung up on me.

I discover I am shaking.
He's still your son.

I look at the boy's father, who is staring out of the window with a bleak face, one hand on the radiator, the other on his cheek.

Why does it feel so traumatic to have someone accuse you of not loving your child enough? I ask him.

He says nothing.

I do actually think she means well, I tell him as brightly as I can. I mean, I wanted to kill her, but I do actually think she genuinely believes she's acting for the best, doing the right thing.

She doesn't mean well at all. She's an enabler, he says, real fury in his voice. She may not know that's what she is, but she is. At best she's ignorant and utterly misguided, utterly wrong. If she's letting her own kids smoke skunk, then she's just giving up on them.

Not everyone who smokes gets addicted, I remind him, wondering at the same time why I'm bothering to defend someone who has just accused me of not caring about my child.

I sit down on the bedroom floor, my arms on my knees. We are both silent for a while. Kitty comes in, her tail held tall. She pushes against me but I don't stroke her. Then I relent and I do.

But - so - what do you think? Should we try and do this? I ask him.

I don't know. What do you think?

What do you think?

He sighs a very long sigh.

But we don't do it without some conditions. Conditions which, quite surprisingly, the boy agrees to.

We'll lend him the deposit and act as guarantors on a flat. But in exchange he has to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting every Friday - the same young people's one that I told him about months ago, the details of which (though I don't know it then) are still scrunched in his jacket pocket.

On top of this, he has to do a weekly drugs test for us. If he fails to be clean, then it's all over (though actually, of course, it's not, because we're stuck with the flat for six months either way and he knows it). But If he stays clean, then great - we'll happily renew on the flat after six months.

The boy seems very happy. In some ways almost his old self - reliable and chirpy and calm. He seems to think what we hoped he'd think - that staying clean is a small price to pay in exchange for having somewhere to live.

I've been wanting to cut down anyway, he tells me brightly. It won't be hard. I often don't smoke for two or three days at a time, you know.

Two or three days isn't very long, I point out - with a faint sense of deja vu because haven't we debated this exact point before? But even so I allow myself to feel a quick, sweet rush of hope.

May be he isn't addicted after all, his father says. may be he can just stop once he has a reason to.

We both agree: we'd give absolutely anything to have his friend's mother proved right.

A few days later, the boy tells us he's found the perfect flat, and someone to share it with - a nineteen-year-old boy with a mop of ginger hair who we've met a couple of times when they've turned up on our doorstep together.

Isn't he the one who always looks a bit stoned? his father asks, attempting to sound more humorous than anxious.

The boy looks shocked and says this is nonsense. Ginger has never touched drugs in his life.

Sitting in a cafe and working out the finer details of the rental deal with us, Ginger confirms this.

Yeah, I'm allergic. I've tried smoking weed but I can't really do any of that stuff It really so totally freaks me out.

He blinks and offers to pay for his tea.

Oh no, don't worry, I say. This is on us.

Don't give him any of the good stuff, his father begins to say, then checks himself .

And that's it - that's as close as he gets to saying he doesn't have faith. Because we both feel it, even though we don't dare mention or discuss it: an incredible, swooping sense of hope.

The first urine test is clean and the boy goes to the meeting. He tells us later that it's ridiculous, that he has nothing whatsoever in common with the fucked-up junkies in there. But, I remind his father, at least he went, and at least he stayed.

The second urine test he's very late for, but at least it's clean, although by the time he's done it there's no time left to go into the meeting. His father, who has driven through a Friday-night rush hour to meet him there, comes home feeling cheated.

OK, but he's always been a bit unreliable, I point out. A terrible time-keeper, even in the old days. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Yes, but he has a deal with us. It's part of the deal.

OK, but isn't it just so great that the tests are clean?

The third urine test he doesn't show up for at all. When he doesn't call us and his mobile is switched off, I start to worry.

Oh dear, this is bad, I do hope he's OK, I tell his father, who just smiles a grim little smile.

An hour later he rings to say he's at a police station because he was picked up for trying to
help himself
to some bed sheets in a shop.

You mean shoplifting?

He laughs.

Well, if you insist on putting it like that. But it's OK, the guy doesn't want to press charges.

But - I gave you sheets !

One lousy sheet?

Don't give him the good stuff.

Oh come on, Mum, you know I do these things. I've never tried to hide it from you. You know what my life is like.

By now our boy has been in his flat three weeks. By the fourth week, there have been so many complaints from neighbours about noise, disruptive behaviour and fighting in the street outside - Fighting in the street?! Oh, just a little disagreement that broke out between me and Ginger - that both Lambeth Council and the police are involved. The primary school whose playground the house happens to back on to also alleges that Ginger appeared naked at the kitchen window one lunchtime and fired a water pistol at the kids. We're speechless.

Is it true? we ask our boy. Is it really possible that he did such a thing?

He shrugs.

Oh, those police, they're so fucking over the top. I don't know If he did it or not, but If he did it was just a bit of fun, that's all.

He did it, his father sighs, eyes on the floor.

And they say he called your downstairs neighbour a cunt and yelled at her that he hoped she got breast cancer, I continue. Please, please at least tell me that's not true.

Our boy chuckles.

That woman downstairs is so fucking crazy. She so totally hates us.

And have you said anything to her?

Hey, don't look at me. You've no idea how hard I try - I'm the fucking peacemaker around here.

By the fifth week, the boy and his flatmate are evicted. We're told by the (very reasonable and communicative and, we think, remarkably patient) landlord that, if they don't move out by the Monday, we'll be liable for another month's rent. Which of course doesn't bother the boy, who, it turns out, has already left town.

He calls me from the train.

Hey, Mum.

I've been calling and calling you. Where are you?

On a train to Sheffield. Just had to get out of town for a while. The whole thing of the flat and all that, it was doing my head in. And there's this girl I met -

But - my head is spinning - you can't just go. Today is Friday and you know bloody well that we've got to move all your stuff out by Monday -

Yeah, well, I was going mad in there. What the fuck was I supposed to do? And anyway this girl -

Who?

We only met a week ago, but it's pretty serious and she's in Sheffield. Look, Mum, sorry, I've got to go, but I'll call you, OK?

But -

Next time I try his phone, it's off again.

That's when I rescue his cat.

Saturday morning we spend in pouring south London rain, stuffing his things into black bin bags and driving them back to our house. The things we only drove there less than six weeks ago. It takes two trips with a full car.

Even though we'd worried he might not, Ginger does at least turn up to deal with his stuff, accompanied - bafflingly, surreally - by the girl. The girl I last saw when I sat with her in Cafe Rouge as she picked at her chips and I attempted to describe what it would be like when my embryo grandchild was sucked out of her.

She has on high-heeled boots, brand new and unscuffed, and a powder-pink dress with a matching zip-up jacket and she is as smilingly polite as ever.

The two red leather-bound books are waiting for me on the dining table. She makes me coffee and chats to me from the kitchen while the two collies bump around my chair, sneezing.

Then she leaves me to it.

First I look at the photographs - endless dark Victorian photographs of mostly Tyssen relics. Jewellery and silverware, purses and knives, needle cases, buckles, thimbles, bracelets. All of them carefully arranged for the camera and caught - still and hard and cold.

I feel I ought to be interested - because most of this at some point belonged to your family, some of the items possibly even belonged to you - but it's relentless stuff The true deadness of old lives when all that's left is pot and plate. I realise that a real historian, a proper biographical researcher, might find significance and interest in each and every one. But they're not what I'm after. What am I after? Some emotion? Some clue that you really did once exist? A flavour of your face, your breath, your hair?

The collie who has settled at my feet heaves a sigh.

There are some small paintings similar to all those I've seen before. Interiors of rooms which mayor may not be Woodton. Not as clear or vivid as the ones that hang on Patrick Baron's landing.

And there's a nice little watercolour of a house in Epping Forest. I know about this house. In 1813, a couple of years before you are born, your older brothers and sisters are struck down by a bout of whooping cough, and your parents whisk them all away to Epping. Out of London, away from the germs.

But they recover from the whooping cough only to contract measles and, somewhere in the middle of all that, Nick is born - Nick, who is so poorly for the first part of his life that they have to wait six months before baptising him. Poor Nick, whose existence begins pretty much exactly as it ends. Three months after that, in the August, your sister Anna is born, there in that same pretty watercolour house. Then they all return, parents and eight children, back to Finsbury Square, where you come into the world. Ellen, as we know, is born at Carrow.

It's dark in the dining room. Squalls of chilly summer rain batter the window. One of the dogs has gone, but the one that settled under my chair is now snoring quietly. I carry on reading Florence's hand-typed text. Though much of it is identical or similar to my published version, now and then something stands right out. An extra sentence or paragraph. A little footnote. Pieces of information which, for whatever reason, were edited out of the published book.

Some enticing detail, too. Describing the house in Finsbury Square where your parents begin married life and where you are born, Florence notes that:

She goes on:

The drawing-room chairs were black, elaborately gilded, they cost 72s apiece and were sold by Mrs Seveme at Cavendish Hall. A mahogany bookcase with drawers under it was bought at Seddon's, and it is represented in one of the bedrooms at Woodton (sketched in watercolour by Anna).

The front of the bookcase is lined with yellow. This was left to Mrs Suckling by her mother and sent to Barsham. She also had from her mother 2 inlaid card tables that were bought at Seddon's for the Yelloly wedding, the table belonging to this set was left at Cavendish for Mrs Seveme.