Another Mother's Son (17 page)

I repeatedly call the landline at home. No one picks up. I try Ewan's mobile and get his voice-messaging service. I send him texts but nothing comes back. I do not know how they are spending the day, Ewan and Ross. I am at work.

In the middle of the morning, Lloyd-Barron Academy sends me a message with the subject heading, ‘
Choices and Destinations
'; words that last week I would have taken for meaningless flannel. I break into a cold sweat and imagine a ‘managed move' to a pupil referral centre. I know the jargon, having tracked all possible outcomes, late into the night.

Throughout their studentship but notably from Year 10 the students at Lloyd-Barron Academy are strongly encouraged to consider their strengths and capabilities and potential future careers. Are you able to raise aspirations by participating in their Speaker Programme? Notable speakers in the past have included lawyers, sportsmen, web designers and politicians. Further information at
http://www.Lloyd-BarronAcademy.org/cobbling-rubbish-together/#sthash.p973000.16to24yearoldsunemployed

At lunch-time, I walk to St James's Park and sit on a bench by the lake. I have a low tolerance for squirrel worship but today the delight on people's faces as they spot a tail a few metres away strikes me as wholly innocent. A child squeals, ‘
Mama! Guarda! Uno scoiattolo!
' – or in some other language – and the family group stands rapt, gazing at the small grey animal that sits upright with its stomach exposed and its front paws pendant. The watchers, unfamiliar with London squirrels, are hushed, hardly daring to move, unaware, having just entered the park, that the creature is one of many and lost to wildness – nerveless as a gull or an urban pigeon, and capable of shinning up a trouser leg.

On the far side of the water, a pink umbrella held high like a flag precedes a squad of tourists in flapping, clear plastic capes. The bridge is thronged with people who take photographs with phones and cameras. Buckingham Palace one way; fairy-tale turrets of Whitehall the other. I hear a thrum of traffic at my back. The two tiny lake islands, West and Duck, screened by willows and reeds, are nesting havens. There are also notional islands on firm land, green areas of tranquillity, in sight of visitors but not disturbed by them. They shift from hour to hour, minute to minute, like a moving map. Waterfowl walk about on the grass and grub for worms. I call Ginny.

‘Yes, Grace mentioned the exclusion,' she says.

‘Tony Goode said he would get back – correction – “revert” to me. He might make an example of Ross so that it never happens again – or he might be lenient. It's all a stupid, hideous mess – though I still don't know precisely what—' I break off.

A brief pause. ‘The disclosure of where, precisely, Mr Child's death took place is causing massive problems.' Her parents' rep voice. ‘That more than the supposed contents of his rucksack – suspender belt, fishnet stockings, plastic bag, I think it was – and the assertion that at least he would die happy if it all went wrong.'

‘Oh God. Ross didn't say that, did he?' My heart thuds under my coat.

‘Students flocked to look at the door. The door,' Ginny repeats as though I am deaf. ‘It seems Mr Child was in the habit of using the cupboard to change into his cycling gear. It's a pity it wasn't kept locked. He went off on his bike in the lunch hour. I told you he stopped going into the staffroom, didn't I?'

I say yes, though it pains me to speak.

‘They are leaving bunches of flowers and soft toys. They stick up Post-it notes. Senior management closed the corridor but this had the unintended consequence of cutting off four classrooms on the first floor of Shearwater. Children piled up behind the barrier of tape. Heaven knows who put it up. It was like a cat's cradle. The kids screamed. Someone yelled, “Fire!” When Mrs Anstey got scissors to the tape and let them past they stampeded through the old building and flung themselves down the stairs. A girl in Year Eight fell and broke her wrist.'

‘So the whole school believes that Mr Child died in a sex game that went wrong. There might be copycat experiments.'

‘Oh, you are so funny, Lorna. They're all doing it, anyway. The window ropes! They come close to hanging themselves on a daily basis. A thrill is a thrill, you know. No, the students saw the photos and worked out what truly happened. They aren't interested in words and many of them are wilfully illiterate.'

‘The cupboard as a must-see destination. I had no idea. I'm so sorry.'

I am struck that I need not be having this conversation. I was calm enough watching the ducks. There is often something wrong with an out-of-doors phone call. The scene is broad and in motion. Wind blows through the trees. Drizzle pits holes in the water. Birds take off and land. On West Island, a tree surgeon found the remains of a man, together with vodka bottles and a yellow cushion. His identity, discerned from a passport, was that of a sixty-nine-year-old American, Robert Moore, known to the police as an obsessive who sent hundreds of packages and letters to the Queen. The letters were of extraordinary length, up to 600 pages, and some of the packages contained obscene photographs.

‘The fuss will die down,' Ginny says. ‘They just have to wait. I'll ask Grace to find out whether the security guard is patrolling. They might have dismissed him already. What I can't understand is why Ross admitted to doing it. He used a false address – the school would never have traced him.'

I am on the point of explaining that Ross has taken sole responsibility for what was likely to have been a joint offence with Jude Bennet-Neerhoff when Ginny continues. ‘Of course, if he hadn't admitted it, the others might have grassed him up. They are against grassing up but they have a strong sense of respect. For their nans, for the armed forces and for the dead. Ross might have chosen to get in first. Grace showed me. She said she thought the pictures and comments had been up there a while. She's not really into social media. I was disgusted, actually.'

‘So they were in circulation before he died? Alan Child
saw
them?'

‘I can't say one way or the other, Lorna.'

The phone slips from my gloved hand onto the bench beside me with a thud. A tinny voice speaks from it; pauses and speaks again. I pick it up.

‘… always complex reasons, Lorna, and there would have been a predisposition …'

I can't listen to this. I need reassurance on one point only. I cut across Ginny's balanced explanations. ‘The photos were news to Mr Milner and Mr Goode. They'd only just seen them. So maybe none of the teachers—'

‘Senior management are slow on the uptake. They'd be the last to know, wouldn't they?'

AS I PASS
a bin, I discard the uneaten lunch-time snack that I hastily assembled at seven o'clock in the morning. It is still intact in its aluminium-foil wrapper. I head towards Queen Anne's Gate. Recently planted bedding plants, banked and ranked, all face the same way like a choir. The pedestrian crossing signal on Birdcage Walk beeps. Taxis come to a halt. Ahead, to one side of the path by the drinking fountain, a couple, a man and a woman, bend over a small child. The adults are tall, well dressed, both wearing trench coats over steam-pressed linen. Their smartness, unusual for casual strollers in the park, catches my eye. Once or twice, I have encountered wedding parties – shafts of colour against the green, a swirl of white – but there is no sign of a wedding. These people are on their own, hanging out by the water fountain that no longer functions. The seated boy was vandalised some years ago and now has a new white head and a line around his neck. He sits on his marble plinth and presides over dry basins and gasping fish.

The woman balances elegantly, in a practised way, on high heels. She hovers over the child, seemingly reasoning with him, or explaining, though he is below the age of reason; less than two years old. He holds a paper bag by one corner in a closed fist. He retains it through inertia and shows no interest in it, or in the contents. It seems that he might at any moment let go. This is a concern for the woman. She leans further forward and places her hand over the child's. Neither her action nor what she says makes any impression on him.

The man gestures at the little boy to get his attention. He points at the sky, then raises and lowers his arms a few times. The woman puts her free hand in the paper bag and, withdrawing it, makes a scattering motion. The child, up too close to the dumb show to see a meaning, continues to ignore them, obstinate or lost in a world of his own. Exasperated, the woman dips again and flings a handful of crumbs around the boy's feet. As two or three pigeons fly in low, she upends the bag and steps to one side. The man takes a backward stride. He raises his camera. Within seconds, the boy is surrounded. He bursts into wild, loud crying, puts up his hands and covers his face. The camera clicks repeatedly. Pigeon life engulfs him, convulsive movements of flapping wings and bobbing heads; they heave like the contents of an exposed gut. The child is rigid with terror. He ventures a look through splayed fingers, then stretches out his arms and tries to run forward.

‘No, Benny. Stay,' the woman calls. ‘It's fun.'

The man keeps clicking. ‘Hey, stop him crying, Rena.'

‘Don't cry, honey.'

I draw level. ‘He'll hate you,' I say – quite loudly. They are not expecting to hear from me.

‘Pardon me?' the woman says.

‘Your son will hate you.'

‘Oh my God, Carl, did you hear that? This woman is some kind of witch.' The mother sweeps forward and gathers up her wailing child. ‘It's OK, Benny, it's OK. This lady is not a nice person but she is going to walk away and we are never, ever going to see her again.'

‘Leave it, Rena,' the man says. ‘Maybe the woman is sick.'

I keep walking. I leave the park. The crossing signal is red for pedestrians but I step off the pavement. ‘
Achtung!
' I hear from a warning voice behind me. A lull in the traffic enables me to reach the opposite pavement unharmed. I go along Queen Anne's Gate, the goods entrance to the Ministry of Justice to my right. I cross the road at Petty France by the entrance to St James's Park Tube station. People mill about, check their phone messages, top up their Oyster cards, queue for the cash machine. I plunge in among them. For a moment, I am drawn towards the ticket barrier and the lure of escape but carry on moving. In the safety of the throng I slow down a little. I walk through the arcade towards the bronze-and-glass doors of the Transport for London entrance, breathing unevenly. The smell of coffee calms me, the ordinary voices chatting on telephones. In his kiosk, the shoe mender is re-soling a shoe, trimming its edges on the abrading wheel. The high-pitched rasp, like a recording of crude dentistry, sets off memories of pain.

I TELL ROSS
that I know something of the content of his malicious messages and that he should give me a proper account in his own words.

‘Who told you?' he snaps back.

‘That's not your business. Have you written the apology? Have you taken the photos down? I can't find them anywhere but I'm probably looking in the wrong places. Do you want to be permanently excluded? I can't believe what you've done.' I wait for a response. Then I leave the room.

Ross has all the time in the world and does nothing. He says nothing. The hours in which he might communicate with Tony Goode are fewer and the air seems thin, as if we now live at a higher altitude. I check my emails constantly. I pray that Alan Child never saw the offensive material and that I will discover conclusively that this is the case. The word ‘hope' does not describe what I do. My mental exertion – backward in conjectures and forward in previsions – has earth-moving equipment behind it.

What is this stuff? Oliver asked, pointing accusingly at the piles of papers on the kitchen table that accumulated in the months after Randal departed. He had hated interrogating me. He meant not to do it because asking made the situation worse. He held out until the last possible second and then words erupted in a splutter. Is this a division of assets? He had come across the phrase but it was as alien to him as the words ‘Mortgage Agreement' that appeared on the uppermost file. Whereas. Now therefore. His voice cracked with anger. I suppose the grilling was intended for Randal and concealed a different barrage of questions. Within weeks, there had been less money to go round. That shocked the boys. I kept their small allowances going but the casual handing over of the debit card for this, that and the other stopped.

To persist is not to clear up a matter. An answer can leave the questioner as much in the dark as I am at present. In these circumstances, it is as though the tricks of empathy – connecting and imagining – are subverted and made malign.

I trudge up the stairs to visit both sons. I harangue Ross and then spoil the effect by adding sentences about supper, the longer hours of daylight. I remark that next week is a new one. I can do verbal optimism, the bolstering, maternal kind though in the manner of someone who continually scrubs her hands raw, fearing violent implosion if the ritual is omitted. I give him permission to buy a new phone. ‘On condition you answer my texts. Do you understand?'

For months, a bunch of flowers was tied to a lamp post to commemorate a pedestrian who had died on the crossing in Grosvenor Gardens at the junction with Lower Grosvenor Place. Fresh flowers replaced the old and then the last lot turned brown in the cellophane wrapper. In other parts of London, I have seen white-painted bikes. It happened here, they seem to say, not at the crematorium or the garden of remembrance: here. I cannot square these desperate memorials with my son's casual cruelty.

AT TEN TO
eight on Saturday evening, the doorbell rings. Ross shoots out of his room and hurtles down the stairs. I am washing a Savoy cabbage in the sink. I undo it as though it were a huge tight-petalled rose. The front door opens and shuts. I hear nothing above the trickle of water on the leaves. Then, perhaps because of some slight movement, I sense that they – Ross and whoever is there – remain in the hall.