See If I Care (2 page)

When he was eight, Luke ate his two front teeth. It happened on the day that everything changed.

He was playing a tin whistle at the time – or rather, playing
with
it, since he didn’t know how to play it. It was stuck in his mouth and his fingers were hopping over the holes and he was blowing into the mouthpiece, loudly. He was sitting in the back of the car, on the way home from a birthday party. The tin whistle had been in his party bag.

Luke remembered his dad saying, ‘Would you ever give that–’ and then Luke’s head was flung forward, and the tin whistle banged into the front passenger seat, and rammed back against Luke’s teeth with such force that it knocked the two front ones right
out of his gum. Luke felt them in his mouth for a second, just before he swallowed them.

Then lots of things happened very quickly. The door beside Luke was thrown open, and he was pulled out and almost smothered in someone’s coat. A woman started dabbing at his face with her hanky, and told him he’d be fine, he was a great boy.

And Luke could feel the wetness in his mouth, something gushing from someplace and filling it up, so he had to keep spitting, which Mum had always told him was one of the rudest things you could do, but nobody seemed to mind.

His mouth was sore, and the spit was red, which scared him.

He tried to ask people where his dad was, but he couldn’t get the words out properly. He pulled his head out of the woman’s hands and looked back towards the car, but there were too many people standing around it.

He couldn’t see his dad. Something was thumping in his head.

Then he was sitting in the back of someone else’s car that smelt like leather, and a woman – not the one with the hanky – was sitting beside him with an arm around his shoulders, saying ‘We’re taking you to the hospital, you’ll be fine.’ And because there was
nothing else he could do, Luke leant against her black jacket and held the bundle of tissues she gave him to his mouth, and stopped trying to ask her if his dad was OK.

In the hospital he was lifted up onto a trolley, and a coffee-skinned woman in a white coat looked into his mouth and told him that he’d have to ask Santa to get him back his two front teeth for Christmas. Then she gave him a blue drink to rinse out his mouth, and a silver coloured bowl to spit into.

Finally, after lots of rinsing, Luke wiped his mouth with a paper towel and managed to say, ‘Where’s my dad?’ His tongue felt too big, and the words sounded muffly.

The woman didn’t look up from the clipboard she was writing on. ‘I don’t know, lovey, but I’ll find out for you. We’re looking for your teeth in the car, by the way – we might be able to stick them back in if we can find them quickly.’

‘I think I swallowed them,’ Luke told her, and she looked up.

‘You did?’

‘I think so.’ He wondered if they’d have to cut a hole in him somewhere to fish out his teeth, but the woman just nodded.

‘It doesn’t matter – they won’t do you any harm,
and you can get false ones. Now, where can we get in touch with your mum?’

After Luke told her the name of the travel agency where his mother worked, she went away, and he was left sitting on the trolley in the corridor. His mouth throbbed as he listened to the crying and shouting all around him. He watched the doctors and nurses rushing past with tight faces.

He wondered where his party bag was. He remembered there was a little green dinosaur in it, and a mini Crunchie bar. He loved Crunchies.

It seemed like an awfully long time before his mother came hurrying through the glass sliding doors, although he found out later that it was only about twenty minutes.

Her eyes searched the groups of people till she found him. ‘God, are you alright?’ She still wore her red work blazer, and her hands shook as she put them on his shoulders. ‘Where are you hurt?’

‘I swallowed my teeth,’ Luke told her, and she drew her breath in sharply.

‘Show.’

He lifted his top lip and she peered closely at his top gum. ‘Is it sore?’

‘Not very,’ he lied, because she looked so scared.

‘Were you wearing a seat belt?’

Luke thought for a second about lying again, but then he shook his head. ‘I forgot. I had a tin whistle from my party bag, and it banged against my teeth and they fell out.’

She pressed her mouth closed and rubbed his arm.

Then, because Luke had to know, he said, ‘Where’s Dad?’

His mother closed her eyes, and Luke looked at the blue veins in her eyelids. Suddenly he didn’t want her to answer.

‘He’s still unconscious. We’ll have to wait till later to find out.’ She put out her two hands. ‘Come on, I’d better get you home. Careful now.’

Luke hopped down easily from the trolley. He looked up at his mother. ‘I don’t want to go home without Dad.’

But already she was walking him towards the door. ‘I’ll come back later – it could be ages, and I have to collect Anne from the Farrell’s.’

Luke’s father didn’t come home for four months. Helen was the only one of the children old enough to visit him, and she came back from the hospital pale and silent, and slammed her bedroom door to keep Luke and his questions out.

His mother never mentioned Luke’s father either –
not unless Luke asked her, and then she just said, ‘Getting better’. Granny came to stay with them for a while, and moved into four-year-old Anne’s room.

When their father finally came home, Anne wouldn’t go near him. She hid behind Granny’s dress, sucking her thumb and watching him as he shuffled slowly around, pushing his walker in front of him.

He looked at Luke as if he hardly knew him. ‘Well,’ he said, in a voice that didn’t sound familiar. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘Fine,’ said Luke, but his father had turned his head sharply towards the window, and was staring out. His hair was too long, and he was thin, and he had a black and grey beard.

‘Look,’ his father said, in a soft voice. ‘Look, the …’ He frowned, trying to think of the word. His thin finger pointed shakily at a small, brown chirping bird on the hedge. ‘Look, there.’

And Luke looked out the window, and he knew that everything had changed.

His father never went back to work at the bank. A few of the people he’d worked with came to see him, soon after he came home, and sat with him in the living room, sipping tea loudly and talking about the weather, and how lucky Luke’s father was not to
have to head out in it.

When Luke was sent in by his mother to see if they wanted more tea, they kept him talking for ages, asking him about school, and wanting to know what soccer team he followed.

His father played with a loose button on his jacket sleeve, and didn’t join in the talking. He slept in the dining room now, not upstairs any more.

As they were leaving, one of the people from the bank gave Luke’s mother an envelope that she pushed quickly into her pocket.

And now, nearly three years later, Luke’s mother still wasn’t talking to Luke’s father. She looked after him, because she was his wife, and because he couldn’t. She fed him and she helped him to bed, she cut his nails and his hair, she shaved off his beard and she washed him, but she never talked to him.

He’d drunk two glasses of wine at the birthday party, when he went to pick up Luke. In the car he hadn’t told Luke to put on his seat belt. And a quarter of an hour later he’d driven through a red light, straight into the path of a jeep.

Two days after he came home from hospital, Anne started wetting the bed. It still happened at least three times a week, even though she was seven now.

As soon as Mam left for her overtime, after tea
every Tuesday and Thursday, Helen went out with her friends instead of doing her homework. And Granny, who never went back to live in her own house, and who was supposed to be in charge when their mother was out, said nothing, because she didn’t want to make things any worse than they were.

Luke looked at the letter in front of him, written on a ragged-edged copy page – at least
he’d
used a proper notebook for his letter. He wondered if this Elma had asked him for a photo of the horses because she suspected he was lying about them.

Not that he cared. It was only a stupid penfriend, not anyone he was ever going to meet. And even if he did meet her, he still wouldn’t care.

Trust him to get a girl, who sounded like a right dork, with a cat called Snowball, and her dorky sister – and how could someone only ten months old have long hair? Luke thought babies that age would still be practically bald. So this Elma was probably lying to him too, which would be the only interesting thing about her.

And what did she mean, she was too grown up to add on the months of her age, ‘like some people’? Was she getting at him? What was wrong with being exact about how old you were? Stupid girl.

His stamp this time had a picture of a man with a little moustache and round glasses. Under his head Luke read
James Joyce 1882 – 1941
. James Joyce looked a lot more interesting standing on his head.

Luke sighed and pulled his notebook towards him. Better get it over with.

Mrs Lawrence was all excited when the next letters arrived – like letters from stupid, lying penfriends were such a big deal. She handed them out with a big ceremony, as though she was handing out maps to a treasure island or vouchers for trips to Disneyland or something.

‘Here’s your letter, Tara, and what nice neat writing your penfriend has.’

‘And yours, Ellen. Look, your friend has decorated the whole envelope with tiny flowers.’

‘Hmm, Elma Davey, looks like your penfriend doesn’t know up from down. Look at the stamp. Poor James Joyce is standing on his head.’

Elma took her letter, and said nothing. OK, so
Luke Mitchell was a big stupid boy, but she didn’t want the teacher and the whole class mocking him. That was her job.

She opened the letter and read it quickly. Then she read it again, a bit more slowly. She smiled to herself. Maybe Luke Mitchell wasn’t as stupid as she’d first thought. Still, if he was going to be a brain surgeon, he’d better learn how to tell the truth. She could just imagine him –
Mr Smith, now I know why you’re getting headaches: you’ve actually got three brains, and one of them appears to belong to an anteater.

Still, that was a clever answer about the racehorses. She knew that Luke had made them up, though, and she wasn’t letting him away that lightly.

And he was right about the non-existent baby’s long hair. What could she have been thinking of? No baby would have long blonde hair. Still, she couldn’t change what she’d written.

Elma laughed out loud when she got to the bit about Snowball. Luke thought he was so clever, mocking her pet’s name. Whatever would he think if he knew Snowball was a huge fierce Alsatian with a growl that could frighten children two streets away, and breath that could make an oak tree wilt?

Suddenly Elma felt a bit sad. Christening
Snowball was one of the last things Dad had done, back when he had a sense of humour. That was before the accident. Back when everything was different.

It was another horrid day. Evil Josh spent the whole afternoon whispering in her ear and calling her his favourite mean name – Lumpy Gravy Davey. It wasn’t fair. After all, it wasn’t her fault that the gravy on school dinners was always lumpy. OK, so Elma’s mother was the dinner lady, but that was hardly Elma’s fault, was it? Elma was sure that having your mother as dinner lady in your school must be the worst thing ever. It was bad enough when all she had to do was heat up the Turkey Twizzlers. Now, though, when dinner ladies were expected to cook ‘real food’, it made things doubly bad for Elma, because her mother was probably the worst cook in the world.

First there was the teasing she got from the other children (and with Evil Josh around, there was always plenty of that). The second bad thing was that her mother always gave her huge portions of everything, so she had to eat more lumpy gravy than anyone else. It was cruelty to children, and there should be a law about that kind of thing.

Dad was still in bed when she got home, so once
again Elma had to tidy the house and cook the tea. It was after half past seven when Mum got in. She threw herself into a chair, and said, ‘I’m so tired, and my feet are killing me. Make me cup of tea, Elma, there’s a love.’

Elma felt like saying that she was tired too, and that her feet were killing her after doing all the housework and taking Snowball on his walk, and that she still hadn’t started her homework. But she didn’t say any of that. Complaining never changed anything.

Even since Dad’s accident, Mum had been doing three jobs. She left the house early in the morning to do her first cleaning job. Then she did the dinner-lady thing, and after that she had another cleaning job. Sometimes Elma thought that having all those jobs wasn’t just about the money. Sometimes she thought Mum worked so much because she couldn’t bear to be around Dad during the day. But how could Elma say that? It would only lead to another big fight, and in the end nothing would change – it never did.

So Elma made her mother a cup of tea, and then made her way upstairs to start her homework.

Zac was already asleep in bed. He looked cute, sucking his thumb and cuddling his teddy. She
would have liked to write to Luke about him, but it was a bit late for that. How could she suddenly invent a six-year-old brother? As far as Luke was concerned, her only sibling was the unusually long-haired Jessica.