by Olivia Fane
‘Excuse me,’ she said, a picture of innocent enthusiasm, ‘Can anyone direct me to the nearest school?’
‘You look like you’re about to burn it down!’ laughed one, who was handsome and wore a Breton cap at an angle on his head.
‘Oh but I am!’ she said, meeting his eye. ‘Only I’ve forgotten matches. Has anyone got a box of matches going spare?’
A box landed at her feet. She picked it up and tucked it into her cleavage.
‘Thanks boys,’ she said.
They laughed, and gave her directions to Chesterton Comprehensive. On Eve tottered, and they waved at her.
Eve might have been a lady of leisure, watering-can in hand, enjoying an evening stroll in her garden. She flitted about the town with her petrol, sprinkling a little over a community college here, a primary school there. She would make a pile of dry leaves on a window-sill, scatter a few drops of petrol, and then set them alight; or eagerly throw lighted matches through any letter boxes she found, only to lose interest even before they had hit the floor. But what a fine sunset there was that evening! How warm and glorious the shades of purple and pink! It was God’s handwriting sprawled across the sky, and was she not the saviour of all disaffected youth? And indeed, there wasn’t a lad who beheld the vision of her that night who remained unaffected, and they all concluded she was pretty hot.
When Eve got home she made herself a cup of tea. There was a letter on the mat but she left it there, probably from that twat Briggs, she thought. But it was enough to stir her mood; for she was a little more contemplative now. She envisaged nine schools reduced to a few charred splinters, and then the ensuing police investigation. Oh dear, she had witnesses of course. Why had she never learnt to take care? But then she relaxed. In fact, there was a moment when she was quite the heroine: she was waving to the crowds outside the Old Bailey in white kid gloves up to her elbows; they did a feature on her for Blue Peter in which the various children interviewed were beside themselves with gratitude for Eve’s initiative. And then she suddenly understood that she was an arsonist and she would be sent to prison.
Her initial response to this revelation was anger. Freedom was not just a right (rights were like sweets handed out by toadying politicians); freedom was given by God. Freedom was honest, natural and true. She had burned down the schools of Cambridge to fight on Freedom’s behalf, and now they were going to lock her up for what was only in the end (because of course they would build more schools) a mere suggestion. There were paltry, pock-pitted men on God’s earth who wanted to stop her from walking among its meadows, sheltering in its copses, breathing in the very air warmed by the sun – so who did they think they were? How dare they have that power over her?
Eve found her passport and it was in date by a month. Wasn’t it South America one was supposed to fly to at moments like this? But she had neither visa nor money: hadn’t she heard that the Costa del Sol was almost as good? Even at this moment they would be looking for her; she fancied she heard fire engines in the distance – perhaps they would have to call in more from neighbouring forces. And of course the police would even now be preparing her photofit. By morning there would be pictures of her all over town.
She packed a few things and called a taxi. Later, when she was on the plane to Naples, she took off those pink shoes at last, and was shocked to see the state of her feet, the blisters eating into her heels, the caked blood where the dainty straps of the shoes had dug into her. Good God, she thought, I hadn’t even realised I was in pain.
Eve caused at most perhaps two hundred pounds worth of damage. A window frame had been badly charred at Hills Road Sixth Form college. Close observers might have noticed a few blackened bricks at Milton Primary and Parkside; but even the early morning cleaners didn’t understand the significance of a couple of used matches near the door of several of the schools’ entrance halls, and they swept them up with as much indifference as they did the odd cigarette end in the toilets. And when the superintendent arrived at eight to inspect the charred window outside the toilets at Chesterton Comprehensive, he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head and mumbled, ‘bloody teenagers’.
Chapter Five
‘CALL ME MUM,’ said Mrs Sylvia Leatherpot, as she leaned over Josiah’s breakfast bowl and poured out his cornflakes, ‘and I want you to know, we don’t mind the teeniest, teeniest bit about your accident last night, do we George?’
George, who’d even given up smoking so that his childless wife could be a foster parent, smiled fulsomely over his newspaper and said, ‘Not one bit, Joe.’
‘My name isn’t Joe,’ said Josiah.
‘Well,’ said Sylvia, ‘we were thinking, weren’t we, George?’
‘Yes, dear,’ said George, encouragingly.
‘We were thinking that boys can be cruel. And girls can be. Weren’t we, George?’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘And what with “Jozziah” not being a regular name, and seeing as you’re a new boy and all that and want to make the most of your new school, well we thought it best that you called yourself “Joe”.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Josiah.
‘You see, “Joe” is an ordinary sort of name.’
‘No it isn’t,’ said Josiah.
‘It’s more common than “Jozziah”,’ said Sylvia, gently.
‘My name is Josiah.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Sylvia, and looked at her husband for moral support.
‘You call yourself how you will,’ said George. ‘We were just trying to help.’
‘Yes, that’s all we were trying to do,’ said his wife, patting the boy on his shoulder.
Tracy arrived to drive Josiah to school. She had wanted to tell him he’d be going home that afternoon, but when she and June Briggs had gone to the Nelsons’ house early that morning they’d found the place empty and curiously, unlocked. So they’d taken the liberty of walking around. Yesterday’s toast was still on the table: interrupted, half-eaten.
Tracy had sunk down onto a kitchen chair. ‘They did know, didn’t they, that we’d only taken a temporary measure? We did make that clear, didn’t we?’
‘You know what?’ June had said, smiling, ‘That kid’s finally going to get a life.’
But that wasn’t how it seemed to Tracy when she saw Josiah. He kept staring at her, one moment furious, the next, desperate. And all the while Mrs Leatherpot kept chattering on, as happily as if she’d been given a puppy.
‘So how are you settling in, then?’ Tracy asked Josiah kindly (and thinking, did I really say ‘settling in?’ God help him.) And because she couldn’t bear to hear his answer, she quickly changed the subject. ‘So what did you think of your first day at school, then?’
‘School! School! Oh he had such a wondrous day, didn’t he, George? There was a slight leg-pulling at first I’m afraid, well that’s what the form-teacher observed, about his name, and George and I thought he might be better off to call himself “Joe” just to fit in, but apart from that it was glory all the way! He’s already at the top of his class, he is! He adds up faster than anyone, and takes away too! And he reads as well as a fish!’
‘Oh God,’ said Tracy. Josiah ran out of the room, and Tracy followed him.
‘I don’t know what’s got into him,’ said Mrs Leatherpot, ‘he’s been as good as gold, he honestly has.’
For a good few minutes the boy was completely lost: the three of them scoured the house and not a trace. Then from an upstairs window Tracy noticed a small, crouching figure at the bottom of the garden. She stopped the couple from following her, and as she walked up to him she noticed he was eating earth.
‘Oh God!’ she sighed, ‘I can’t take this.’
His back was towards her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
Josiah turned round: pale face, morose brown eyes and mud around his mouth.
‘What have you been eating?’ asked Tracy, gently.
‘Minerals,’ said Josiah. ‘Potassium, calciu
m, and a little zinc.’
‘Josiah!’ exclaimed Tracy, with feeling, ‘It seems you barely need to go to school! You’re a very, very bright little boy! And you’ll go home soon! I’ll see to it personally, I promise!’
‘Do you like children?’ asked Josiah.
‘Oh yes, I love children! I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t love children!’
Then Tracy kissed him on his forehead, she just couldn’t help herself.
‘Because I don’t,’ said Josiah. ‘I don’t like children at all.’
They never thought to phone the ports or the airports: after all, why would they run away? June Briggs said she’d eat her hat if they found Eve and Gibson together. They’d probably find Eve with Michael Fothering, who might finally claim his paternity. But when the police drew a blank with Fothering, Briggs got in contact with Eve’s mother: no, Mrs de Selincourt hadn’t seen her daughter for seven years, but she cared sufficiently about her to suggest places she might have gone. She even gave them the address of Gilbert Fitzpatrick’s cottage, and for weeks afterwards would ring to see whether Eve had turned up. In the end Eve became logged as an Official Missing Person, but after a few weeks of intense searching in London, spurred on by Tracy, the investigation flagged.
Meanwhile they found Gibson after about a week, almost dead with hypothermia in undergrowth on the fen. But even Tracy considered his condition too shocking to re-introduce him to his son: he couldn’t speak and he could barely walk, and his arms flailed wildly and indiscriminately at anyone in his path. One social worker even lost a tooth, while the duty psychiatrist had his glasses smashed and a piece of glass had to be extracted from his eye under a general anaesthetic. In short, Gibson Nelson had become dangerous: they deemed him lucky to be sent back to Fulbright.
So Josiah had to stay with the Leatherpots. He wet the bed every night and barely spoke to them. Mrs Leatherpot told Tracy that ‘it was evident that he’d had a very sorry life’ and asked to be told more about it, so that she might be more of a help to him. ‘Particularly as he might be here longer than you said,’ she argued. But Tracy was discreet.
Sylvia Leatherpot was very kind and patient with Josiah. When he came back from school she would sit next to him on the settee and tell him all about her adventures when she was a schoolgirl, and the kind of pranks she got up to. Then when she was done with chatting she would take out her set of emery boards and settle down to work on the beautification of her hands.
She would shuffle first towards the left, and then towards the right, as she held her hands up to the light, and more than once told Josiah the great wisdom of her auntie Joyce, who ‘always said there was something beautiful in all of us. “It might be your eyes, or it might be your hair, but God never left not one of us out,” that’s what she used to say, and she was right. And with me, Jozziah, it happens to be my nails. God blessed me with beautiful fingernails and beautiful hands.’
On one occasion, when Josiah had been there about a week, Sylvia Leatherpot said to him, ‘Now just stay there a tick and I’ll show you something.’ She blew the nail-dust from her fingers and levered herself out of an armchair. In the corner of the sitting-room was a book-shelf stuffed full of magazines, hundreds of them. She found a copy of Woman’s Own and brought it over to show him.
‘Now, look here,’ she said. ‘You have a look through here and keep your eyes peeled. You might just recognize something.’
Josiah scanned the pages of the magazine with dead-pan face.
‘No, no, no, Josiah! You’ve passed it!’ exclaimed Mrs Leatherpot. ‘I’ll give you a clue.’ She took the magazine and slowly thumbed through the relevant pages of eyeshadows, lipsticks, and yes, fingernails.
‘Do you recognize anything?’ she said.
Josiah shook his head.
‘Look, look again!’ Mrs Leatherpot wasn’t going to let him off lightly.
Josiah surveyed her coldly and pointed to an eyelid covered in ‘lavender’. Mrs Leatherpot giggled anxiously and was on the point of asking him to have another go but thought the better of it. (What is it? wondered Josiah.)
Tracy was ever the bearer of bad news. Within a fortnight the bad news was even getting to Mrs Leatherpot, who found herself being tetchy with her young charge, and she wanted Josiah’s mother to come and take him back.
‘He’s not grateful,’ she would complain. ‘He’s not grateful for anything. I don’t think he’s ever been taught to say “Thank you”. I say to him, I’ll not be giving you supper tomorrow, young man, if you don’t learn to say “Thank you” but it makes no difference. It’s as though he was completely deaf. Now, what’s the news on Mrs Nelson?’
Then one afternoon, after delivering Josiah back from school (which she did whenever she could), and after sitting through twenty minutes’ worth of Mrs Leatherpot’s complaints about his ‘rude behaviour’, Tracy was about to get into her car when she was aware of two small arms clasped about her thighs.
‘Please don’t leave me here,’ sobbed Josiah, ‘you have to take me to my father’. This was as long a sentence as he had ever uttered.
‘Your father?’
‘I want my Daddy’, he whimpered.
‘You want to see your father?’ Had they ever seriously considered that old sullen man that hung about in the shadows while Eve performed her circus tricks for them? So even he could inspire love. And why shouldn’t he, for God’s sake? Tracy turned to Josiah and knelt on the gravel in the drive so that she could take his small hands in hers.
‘Josiah,’ she said, solemnly, ‘I promise you, cross my heart and hope to die, you’ll see your father soon.’
However, June Briggs didn’t care two hoots about Tracy’s promise. She shouted, ‘Are you mad, Tracy? What did you say you’d promised him?’
Tracy held her ground. ‘Do you understand what we’ve done? Do you understand that we’ve just fucked up big-time? It’s our moral duty to mend what we’ve broken.’
‘Oh yes, and you think a little trip to Fulbright hospital to visit a man who’s so sedated he probably wouldn’t even recognize him, you think that’s going to do the trick, do you?’
‘June, he’s his father.’
‘We don’t even know that, do we?’
‘Well, he’s been a father to him, and that’s what matters. Josiah needs to see him! And even if Eve doesn’t come back, it’s ten times better to have Gibson and Josiah living together again than the awful, awful situation we have now!’
‘Tracy, you know what? You’ve become too emotionally involved with this case. I’ve told you before, social work is a profession, and I expect you to behave as a professional.’
Shortly after this, Tracy resigned. And as Tracy could no longer do anything for him, Josiah had to take matters in hand himself. One evening he sidled up to Mrs Leatherpot while she was watching TV. There was a moment, just a moment, when Sylvia fancied he was showing her that much yearned-for affection, and she didn’t even resist it when Josiah took her hand in his own. Josiah then proceeded to cut off one of her fingernails with the kitchen scissors he was hiding behind his back. The ensuing drama was their last as a little foster family in Cambridgeshire: he was picked up by Social Services within the hour, ‘for his own safety’ as Mrs Leatherpot put it.
There were now so many people looking after Josiah that he couldn’t remember which was which. There was the magisterial June Briggs herself; there was a friendly old lady in charge of adoptions who gave her opinion; there was a younger lady in charge of foster placements but who was new and who needed the older lady to advise her. June Briggs decided Josiah needed a man, firm and consistent, in fact the most reliable social worker in her team, but the man in question already had a caseload of over eighty, and at least four cases which were equally pressing. None of the above loved Josiah or took up his cause, and his first few placements ended before the first week was out.
His placement after the Leatherpots was, in fact, with one of his teachers, who was a curio
us woman in both senses: she was both strange and nosy. The teacher had been asked to help out in such emergencies before (she had earned herself the reputation of being a ‘safe house’). Josiah would come home from school only to be mercilessly cross-examined over half-moon spectacles about his first memories of his mother et al. Josiah naturally stayed mute.
In his next placement he shared a bedroom with a three-year-old boy who bit him. As the child had never bitten anyone before, his parents naturally blamed the interloper and ten days later he was gone. Two further placements later there was a flurry of activity to find him a relation who might look after him. The first port of call was obviously his grandmother. Mrs de Selincourt said she would think about it, and the foster lady told June Briggs that she was optimistic she could persuade her to take on her grandson. The adoption lady piped in that Mrs de Selincourt might even in the end consider adoption, but June Briggs said, ‘I’ve met the lady. She’s like the worst sort of Victorian imperialist, and I don’t hesitate to blame her at least in part for Eve’s appalling character.’ So when Mrs de Selincourt asked to meet the child about a month later (and she was now, to do her credit, working in a soup kitchen for the homeless in London in the vain hope of finding her daughter), they told her he was now happily installed with a family of very good standing and it was better not to visit as it might unsettle him, and, as she put it, ‘rock the boat.’ For a couple of days Mrs de Selincourt was very set on rocking that boat, but her husband persuaded her against it. He was intent on taking up a post in the US for a couple of years, and if the Social Services deemed Josiah ‘quite difficult,’ then was she really prepared to repeat those miserable years she’d had with Eve?
Nor were the Social Services lying when they informed the de Selincourts that Josiah had, at last, been placed successfully. Lady Brack had been persuading her husband for years that fostering children was ‘a good thing’ because ‘It was right that they should put back into the community just a little of what they had taken out.’ And there was another reason, too: her favourite Labrador bitch Clover had come to the end of her breeding life, and after that last dear puppy had been sold, and while she was slowly, pensively clearing away the newspaper from the little pen in the hall which she had made for Clover and her nine children, she came across a peed-on advertisement from the Cambridge Evening News. ‘Have you ever thought of fostering?’ it said, ‘Do you have a spare room?’ (Lady Brack smiled and thought, ‘We have six!’) ‘Do you have patience and understanding?’ (Yes, yes! thought Lady Brack). ‘Could you give a child a loving home?’ (Yes, yes! thought Lady Brack). ‘Then phone Pat on 632148.’ And she did.
