The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  And all of a sudden ‘the best for Lucas’ concerned Kieran.

  ‘What do you think of Lucas’s new bestie?’ I asked, when we met for a quick drink near the station. He’s an attractive guy, Vic, one of those wiry, magnetic types. Whatever cool is, he has it. Mind you, as I said, by this point Lucas had grown to look like him, to match him in height, which I suppose must have created a kind of nepotistic beauty bias.

  Vic’s job as a manager for a leasing company required a certain level of presentable attire, but out of work he wore the battered jeans and vintage band T-shirt of a student and on this occasion, if I remember, it was The Doors. I noted, but did not comment on, the progress of the hipster beard he was growing; it undoubtedly meant he’d secured another meeting with an investor to pitch his craft beer idea.

  ‘I assume you mean Kieran?’ He grimaced over the top of his pint. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think he’s a complete waster,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Nice of the school to consult us before they saddled our son with some problem kid.’

  ‘If it was only at school, it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s out of school, as well. They’re inseparable.’

  ‘We need to keep an eye on it, definitely,’ Vic said. ‘He’s bad news.’

  ‘I’m so glad someone agrees with me,’ I told him, and I felt the particular shame of an unattractive prejudice reinforced. ‘I’ve found him very rude, but Justin thinks I’m imagining it. There’s the whole foster placement thing and I think he finds my attitude a bit un-PC.’

  ‘He might feel a bit less PC himself if Freya was the one following him around like the Pied Piper,’ Vic said.

  ‘Oh, without a doubt.’ Though this was fondly said – we both knew that Justin adored Lucas as much as we did – it felt disloyal to be talking like this.

  Which is a joke when you think of the secrets Vic and I would keep from Justin later.

  * * *

  Frighteningly quickly, it began to feel as if Lucas was hardly ever at home, even on school nights, and when he was, he and Kieran were joined at the hip. There was still the odd gaming session in the den, but where Tom or other kids would leave for homework or family meal times, Kieran would always suggest going on to some party or hangout. Though there were no more overtly hostile gestures towards me (or not that I saw), I grew to loathe the distinctive spring in his stride – as if he hadn’t quite learned to put his heels to the ground – as he led my son down our hallway and out of the door, off to wilder neighbourhoods.

  The ‘Find a Phone’ app didn’t exist then, or if it did, I hadn’t yet heard of it (for Freya, later, yes, we tracked, but I think that’s understandable). Instead, we relied on texts from Lucas to say he was safe. Good old-fashioned trust. Vic was very good about picking him up from parties and Lucas seemed to prefer that option, maybe because Vic’s company car, a black Mondeo, could be passed off as a taxi, whereas I looked too much like a neurotic mum in my high-end silver Jeep with the ‘Child on Board’ sticker I’d never got around to removing.

  Occasionally an old red Corsa would pull up in the middle of the night to deliver Lucas home and this, I learned, was the car of Kieran’s foster mum, Prisca.

  May I take this opportunity to say I liked Prisca, still do, in spite of all that’s happened between us, the impossibility of true accord. I met her that first term of sixth form at parents’ evening, when we were both in the queue for the geography teacher. She was in her early fifties, about five five, dressed in a shapeless hooded jacket and knock-off Uggs. Compared to the typical Foxwell mum, who was ambitious and managerial in her parenting, she had the approachable, good-natured air of a grandparent.

  ‘You’re Prisca,’ I said, as the boys peeled away from us, and she agreed that she was and that I’d got the pronunciation right – Priss-ka. ‘I’m Ellen.’

  She seemed unsure what our connection was.

  ‘Your Kieran is chums with my boy, Lucas.’

  Accustomed to a culture of flattering others’ kids at every turn – ‘He’s a charming boy’, ‘She could be a model’, ‘He’s so clever he’ll walk into Oxford’ (you get the picture) – it felt strange when Prisca failed to compliment Lucas even in the smallest way. Then again, I wasn’t about to lavish praise on Kieran either. ‘They were buddied up to help Kieran settle in,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. Foxwell’s very good like that,’ she said. ‘Kieran’s old school was a bit more sink or swim.’

  ‘Is that why he transferred?’

  ‘All sorts of reasons.’ Though she had an open, even guileless manner, she was adroit at closing down my lines of enquiry.

  ‘Do you have other kids besides Kieran?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Mind you, it’s a full house with a teenager and their friends, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though I was finding the opposite now Lucas was out so much. I proposed we exchange numbers, which she agreed to with the air of someone who knew how to pick her battles. And, as the queue for the teacher moved and Prisca summoned Kieran for his turn, I couldn’t help feeling that she regarded me as a battle not worth picking.

  * * *

  In late November, Lucas turned seventeen. ‘How about hosting a soirée for your birthday?’ I suggested, and he laughed at the word. I’d found that such High Society-speak was more acceptable to him than my trying to be down with the kids. (‘Anyone who still says “down with the kids” is not,’ Vic said.) ‘We’ll take Freya to Grandma and Grandpa’s, so you can have the place to yourself for the night.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Lucas said.

  Maybe, yes. The offer of an empty house was never going to be passed up. Beyond stringing lights in the kitchen and conservatory in the hopes of demarcating the party zone, I kept my interference to a minimum. A casual reminder to him not to advertise the event on social media. Of course, I knew better than to issue any more specific sanctions regarding the guest list, since they’d only be disregarded. It went without saying that Kieran would be there.

  There being no known temperance movement in their sixth form, Lucas’s guests would need booze and Justin and I favoured the approach of supplying it directly rather than leaving them to ship in their own 40 per cent proof vodka.

  No drugs and no smoking, we said, but we weren’t idiots. We were under no illusion that those little canisters of NO2 wouldn’t find their way in, too.

  ‘You’re not worried your house’ll get trashed?’ my friend Sheridan asked me. She was the mother of Jade, a girl Lucas liked who was, in my view, a natural match for him: attractive, charming, academic. They hadn’t overlapped in year eleven, but now had two subjects together. ‘Or the bedrooms used,’ she added.

  ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ I said, more with a sense of hope than any real insouciance. ‘Vic, Lucas’s dad, will be on call in case of emergencies.’

  Her face brightened. ‘Oh, yes, we know Vic.’

  Which meant Jade must now be hanging out at Vic’s flat, too. I could only dream that she’d displaced Kieran.

  ‘My sister-in-law just set up a hidden camera at my niece’s sixteenth,’ she said.

  ‘A camera?’

  ‘Yeah, you know you can do it on an iPhone now? There’s this motion detector app thing you can use.’

  ‘That sounds a bit creepy,’ I said. There were no locks on the doors in our house, even the bedrooms. Would a row of closed doors deter the rampaging hormones of teens? It was doubtful.

  Sheridan pulled a face. ‘I have no problem with creepy. You wait, Ellen, you’ll find out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Er, your other child? The one with two X chromosomes?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Sorry, I’m a bit preoccupied with Lucas.’ And as we laughed, I thought of all the mothers out there worrying themselves silly. It was a full-time job in itself and it didn’t seem to matter if the children were technically adults. They were always our cubs, always in need of our protection.


  * * *

  Having said that, I remember that night away as one of the last of the carefree times. We drove down to the Kent coast to meet my parents in St Margaret’s, the tip of England closest to France, and Freya, Justin and my mother walked up to the South Fireland Lighthouse while I stayed in a café in the bay with my father. He was in a wheelchair following hip replacement surgery.

  Though the sight of that cliff-edge path unsettled me, I loved my home coastline and its colours – grass-green, ocean-blue, chalk-white – have always been my favourites. Over the years, I painted the Tanglewood Road house in endless variations of them; there isn’t an interior design scheme in all the world to match it.

  The walkers returned, cheeks touched with high colour and hair blown into madcap shapes around their heads. ‘It was quite gusty up there,’ Justin reported. ‘For a minute there I thought we were going to be knocked off our feet!’

  ‘I don’t want to hear,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘When did my mum know she had a fear of heights?’ I heard Freya asking her grandma as they queued at the counter.

  That was how I characterized my disorder to the kids: a fear of falling, not the urge to jump.

  ‘It was when she was about five or six,’ Mum told her. ‘We were walking on a different stretch of the cliff path and she held my hand so tightly I had bruises the next day.’

  ‘I like being high up,’ Freya said. ‘When I grow up, I want to live in a tall block of flats. Kieran wants to as well.’

  ‘Who’s Kieran?’ Mum asked, setting their drinks on the table. We accommodated the new seats in a tight huddle.

  ‘A new friend of Lucas’s.’ I sent her a look. ‘He was recently in trouble for climbing onto the roof of the school.’

  ‘He says when he leaves home, he’s going to live in a penthouse in Central London,’ Freya said.

  ‘He’ll need to improve his grades if that’s going to happen.’ I hoped I didn’t sound too scornful.

  ‘Is Lucas still thinking about Oxbridge?’ my father asked.

  ‘I hope so. If he does all the extra reading he’s supposed to. Not tonight, though, obviously.’

  The conversation moved on to Freya’s school grades and then to the cream tea we planned to eat when we got home. There were scones and clotted cream, and a neighbour of my parents had just dropped round a jar of homemade rhubarb jam.

  Rhubarb jam, so English! The whole thing strikes me now as the very picture of security and support and love. Smug, you might say, but I really don’t think so. I was too much of a catastrophist to ever be smug.

  * * *

  In spite of a reassuring text from Vic, when we pulled up at the house on the Sunday evening I still half-expected to see jagged gaps in the front door where the original stained glass had been. But it was intact. Inside was also impressively untouched. Friends who’d stayed over had helped clear up in the morning, Lucas explained, Jade’s name buried casually in the list.

  Meanwhile, no parents had left voicemails about stomach pumps at A&E, no neighbours queued at the door to complain of a pounding sound system or scratched cars.

  ‘Did you have fun?’ I asked Lucas.

  ‘Yeah, it was good.’

  ‘How many people?’

  ‘Thirty, maybe.’

  ‘Double that,’ Justin said. ‘Did anyone vomit?’

  Amid theatrical urghs from Freya, Lucas just grinned.

  I took our bags up to the bedroom, immediately noticing the spicy cedarwood scent of my perfume, a bottle of which stood on the chest of drawers under the window, its lid off. The window had been cracked open and I caught the faint smell of weed on the curtains as I went to close it.

  Remembering Sheridan’s warning, I searched for more clues of occupancy. I wasn’t proud of myself for running my fingers over the not-quite-smoothed-out duvet and examining the short red hairs I found there. I didn’t need a hidden camera to tell me who had been in here. I stripped the bed-clothes in a matter of seconds, but I knew I couldn’t strip my mind of the image of Kieran Watts rolling about on our bed with a girl or perhaps even alone. Lighting up, spraying toiletries, prowling the room.

  No care for the space he inhabited, the people he used.

  Killing Time (cont)

  What do we know of Ellen Saint? What do we remember of her brief prominence in the British media?

  She is a tigress of a mother, that comes first. That was what fuelled Lock Up Longer, the campaign for stiffer prison sentences that she launched in 2015 in partnership with a national tabloid. Less well known are her business credentials as a lighting consultant, her once-thriving roster of affluent clients. (It’s too easy to talk of her story as one of light and dark and it is to her credit that she resists the temptation in her own account.)

  She grew up in the North Downs, near the famous white cliffs of Dover, a problematic base for someone with a phobia of heights. Hers is a form known as ‘high place phenomenon’, characterized by a sudden compulsion to jump that may seem at odds with the sufferer’s normally conservative relationship with risk. Asked about it in a newspaper interview, she said, ‘I have intrusive thoughts about high places, yes, but I’ve never acted on them.’ She added, ‘Actions are what count. People should not be judged for their thoughts. Heaven knows, if we were, I for one would be serving back-to-back life sentences at Holloway.’

  Something else we know about Ellen Saint: she’s held on to her sense of humour.

  Sunday Times magazine,

  December 2021

  Chapter 6

  I’d like to emphasize that it was very rare for me to feel animosity like this – make that unprecedented. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the people in my adult life that I’ve truly disliked.

  And for my nemesis to be a seventeen-year-old boy! I should have known better. I should have done better. But whether or not self-improvement on my part would have altered the outcome, I really don’t know.

  As for Lucas, if any doubt lingered in his mind that I would have preferred a version of his sixth-form life without Kieran Watts in it, then it evaporated after the ferry incident.

  It was the spring term by then and the two of them were supposed to be on a geography field trip to the Wye Valley. At 7pm, I got a barely decipherable text from Lucas telling me they were back and he was at Kieran’s and would eat there. I was in the bath an hour or so later when Justin took a call from the police explaining that the boys had been escorted from a cross-channel ferry arriving in Dover, having been caught smoking cannabis on one of the decks.

  ‘A cross-channel ferry? They’ve been to France?’ There was a split second of confusion – had the school changed the field trip destination? – followed by furious understanding. They’d phoned in sick and gone on this unauthorized jaunt instead.

  ‘Thank God it was only dope, the police don’t bother with that so much these days,’ Justin said. ‘They’ve been let off with a caution, but they’re in no fit state to make their own way home. I thought maybe your mum could take them in while we talk to Prisca and decide how to mobilize?’

  It was arranged that my mother would pick the boys up and keep them overnight, then Justin would drive down early to collect them. He knew I’d be too emotional to drive. Mum echoed this sentiment when I phoned to speak to Lucas.

  ‘He’s not making much sense, Ellen. Let him sleep it off and get to the bottom of it tomorrow.’

  I knew exactly what was at the bottom of it – or rather who. The whole caper smacked of the rule-breaking Kieran specialized in. It meant nothing to him to party on a school night, climb onto the roof of a public building or, apparently, take a drug-fuelled day trip when he should have been in class.

  I hardly slept that night, already awake when Justin prepared to leave for his daybreak taxi service. Outside, the blackbirds and robins were in full voice, but all I could hear was the contemptuous jangle of Kieran’s laughter seventy miles away, making it seem like Justin’s rescue mission was just another over
reaction on the part of other people’s parents.

  ‘I assume you’ll drop Kieran home first?’ I said, from bed.

  ‘Actually, no. His situation is slightly more complicated,’ Justin said. ‘He drove them down in Prisca’s car and so I’m picking her up and taking her to get her car from the port. Then she’ll follow me to your parents and collect Kieran.’

  I jerked upright. ‘He drove them down? You mean alone, just him and Lucas?’

  ‘As I understand it, yes.’

  ‘Didn’t Prisca notice the car was missing? Or the keys?’

  ‘She was at work, apparently.’

  ‘He’s still got his L plates, Justin! Learners aren’t supposed to drive on the motorway unless they’re with their instructor.’

  ‘I don’t know which route they took,’ Justin said, infuriatingly matter-of-fact. ‘Maybe they stuck to B roads.’

  ‘Any route is illegal on their own!’ I cried. If I was irate about the drugs and the truancy, I was terrified by this.

  ‘Prisca says he’s taking his test in a couple of weeks,’ Justin said. ‘Apparently he’s a natural.’

  A natural delinquent. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this last night?’

  ‘Because you were upset enough as it was.’ Justin turned from me. ‘Look, I need to get going. I’ll phone you when I get there.’

  I fought hard to conceal my internal commotion when Freya came down for breakfast. I hadn’t forgotten that remark of Sheridan’s, humorous though it had been: Er, your other child? Lucas was my priority, thanks to this parlous new influence, but the last thing I wanted was to neglect my daughter. I made her waffles and Nutella, a sure sign that I was burying bad news.

  ‘When’s Lucas coming back?’ she asked.

  ‘Later this morning.’

  ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘A bit, but nothing for you to worry about.’