by Casey Watson
I took the proffered water, and this time didn’t feel quite the same urge to smile at her assumption that I’d been absorbed in the fêted cats. ‘Yes, they are,’ I agreed anyway. ‘You must be very proud. Anyway …’
‘Yes, yes,’ she agreed. ‘But, as with everything, there’s an element of luck in these shows. Mind you,’ she added, clearly on a subject that was close to her heart, ‘it’s not all down to luck. There’s a lot of prep involved as well. Sometimes the difference between a silver and a gold can be the tiniest margin, as you can imagine. And that’s what I am good at,’ she finished, smiling fondly towards the cabinet. ‘Attention. Attention to all those tiny little details. Anyway,’ she said, claping her hands together. ‘Time is short, of course. So fire away.’
I duly fired. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s really just a question of you giving me some background. As much as you’re able to, of course …’
‘About Imogen’s mother? Well, what I suppose I can say is that she wasn’t any sort of mother. From what I can gather, anyway,’ she added, shaking her head. ‘As I’m sure Graham’s mother has already told you, he slaved all the hours God gave him, but it was never enough – not for Miss Fancy Pants. No, sad to say, as soon as a man with a larger pay packet came along, she was off with him like a shot. Graham was relieved, I know, but you can imagine, can’t you? She left the poor child reeling, and – sad to relate – I think Im blamed her father; she took it out on him, certainly, and then, when I came along – well, you can imagine, can’t you? Our getting together only served to make her worse. I tried everything, of course I did, but there was never any getting through to her, and, well’ – she lifted both hands, palms upwards – ‘what can you do? She decided I was the enemy, and that, I’m afraid, was that.’
‘And that was when she moved in with her grandparents?’
The other cat, Grace, left her spot by the fire, and came and wound herself around my legs. ‘Ah, she likes you,’ Gerri gushed. ‘And she’s very discriminating. Are you a cat person, Mrs Watson?’
‘Not currently,’ I said, smiling. ‘We’re in a pet-free period at the moment. My teenagers keep me busy enough, to be honest! So Imogen wanted to go?’ I asked, trying to get her back on track again. ‘You know, to move out and move in with your husband’s parents?’
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ she said. ‘It was Graham’s idea initially – you know, just for all of us to have some time out. It was so difficult for him, wanting to be loyal to her, but seeing what it was doing to me.’ She looked directly at me. ‘It was extremely difficult, Mrs Watson,’ she said in a voice that seemed suddenly full of emotion. ‘Some of the things she used to call me, the lies she’d tell about me … And, of course, you have to bite your lip and just take it, don’t you? What else can you do in my kind of situation? And I think Graham …’ she trailed off, and I wondered if she was going to cry. She was clearly upset.
‘Could see how much it was distressing you?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t doubt it. And from what I’ve heard from his parents, it sounds as though you had it pretty tough …’
‘Which is not to say I ever wanted that to happen,’ she said. ‘For Im to leave us. Far from it. I only ever wanted to help her. But in the end I think we all felt that, well … perhaps space was what was needed. And that perhaps she was better off where she was. And, of course, by this time she’d started all this sudden not-speaking business, which was distressing for Graham too, because he felt he’d lost her, that he’d failed her …’ She blinked at me. Seemed to gather herself. ‘So now we’re all at sea, aren’t we? I mean, what can we do? If her mother would only …’ She stood up now and brushed her trousers down again. It seemed an action so automatic that she wasn’t even aware of doing it. ‘If only – hark at me! That’s not going to happen, is it? Anyway …’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, rising and looking for a surface on which I could put my glass.
She took it and sighed. ‘I’ve not been a great help to you, have I?’
‘Yes, you have,’ I said. No, I thought, you haven’t. Not very much.
But then, perhaps she couldn’t be. Imogen had clearly taken against her, or, at the very least, taken against the idea of her. Nothing unfamiliar there. Perhaps the problem was that Imogen wasn’t a ‘cat person’. Whatever else she was, she certainly seemed a little flaky. But whatever the ins and outs of the current travails in this family, my principal feeling as I waved and drove off was that I’d just been an extra in some bizarre play.
Chapter 13
What was it about Gerri Hinchcliffe? The question vexed me. She had been unfailingly nice, unfailingly polite, unfailingly … what? Unfailingly correct. Yes, that was probably the word for it. Correct, neat and tidy – if a touch Stepford-Wifey – and though self-pitying enough to be ever so slightly irritating, not so much that I felt justified in holding it against her. After all, she had never even been ‘the other woman’ in this scenario. She hadn’t ‘stolen’ Imogen’s dad away from her mother, as Imogen herself might have seen it. She had just walked into an already unhappy family situation. Imogen’s mother had left her father long before.
Of course, it could have been that, unbeknown to everyone, she’d been having an affair with him all along, but the facts didn’t fit and, well, even if they had, it wasn’t for me to pass judgement on Imogen’s father’s love life, was it? My role was quite specific but at the same time quite general: to try and help children to reach a place where they could thrive in their new circumstances, whatever they were. And there were many children in situations like Imogen’s, after all.
Oh, but what was it about Gerri Hinchcliffe? It was a question I took home with me and pondered all that evening, eventually falling into a fitful, erratic sleep; periods of wakefulness punctuated by half-realised dreams involving wicked step-mothers, witches and other fairy-tale staples, all of which berated me for venturing opinions about them – damned if you do, as Gerri Hinchcliffe had said, and damned if you don’t.
It was almost four in the morning when it hit me. I’d woken up for what must have been the third or fourth time, and turned over, as I habitually did, to see what the time was, so I could calculate what the chances were of getting back to sleep before the alarm put an end to it either way.
The display read 03.57, glowing red in the darkness, emitting enough light to illuminate something else. It was as familiar a thing to me as everything else in my bedroom – a double photo-frame I’d had sitting there for quite a few years now, from which Kieron, to the left, and Riley, to the right, grinned goofy, self-conscious school-photo smiles.
I’d bought the frame years back – and chosen the photos to go in it – to take away on a residential course with me, back when I was working with vulnerable young people. It had been a big thing for me, going away on that week-long course, because it was the first time I’d spent so long away from my children since either had been born.
I looked at the kids’ faces now, in the darkness, and that was when it hit me. That was the thing about Gerri Hinchcliffe, I decided. That in her home – in the home she shared with Imogen’s dad – I didn’t see a single photograph of Imogen.
Big ideas at four in the morning don’t always seem quite as big in the cold light of day, but in the murky autumnal light of the next morning I realised, as I hurried from home to school, that, on balance, this one did have legs.
Yes, I’d only been in the sitting room, so I obviously couldn’t speak for the rest of the house, but this was a sitting room stuffed to bursting with mementoes. As well as the cabinet full of the various spoils of pedigree-cat war, it was a room that wasn’t light on ornamentation. I couldn’t bring much in the way of specifics to mind now, but the overall impression had been one of a room in which all the knick-knacks meant something. And then there were the wedding pictures, and they were what had really sprung to mind, for within them – and there were about six of them on the shelf – there had not been a single one that contained Imogen. Had she
even been there? That was what I most wanted to know.
So, given that I still had ten minutes before the bell went for registration, I went to the staffroom, made a coffee, then took myself off to the adjoining quiet room, which as well as couple of computer terminals had two external phones, one of which I used to telephone Imogen’s nan.
I had intended calling her anyway, just to thank her for paving the way so that I could speak to her son and daughter-in-law, and just to let her know that I had been round to visit Gerri. That much was a simple courtesy, and a chance to continue to build on good relations, but now I had a more pressing reason to get her on the phone; I wanted an answer to my as yet unspoken question.
‘Hello, dear,’ she said, managing to convey with two words how heavy was the weight currently on her shoulders. ‘How are things with Imogen in school this week?’
I filled her in on such progress as we’d been able to make, and was disappointed to hear our small increments of positivity weren’t matched by any change in her emotional well-being at home. Which I tried to steer away from, as I’d pretty much reached the conclusion that nothing would change all the while we hadn’t got to the bottom of whatever had caused the mutism in the first place. All I knew was that I wasn’t buying the bullying at school angle; not when there was a new potential angle bedding down in my head now, unsubstantiated but there nevertheless.
I spent a minute or two discussing Gerri and her facility with showing cats, and once again I heard nothing but praise. So I stepped lightly into the territory of the absence of photos, conscious that loyalties very much needed to be respected.
‘Oh, and something I forgot to ask,’ I added chattily, aware this could be sensitive ground. ‘Your son’s wedding. I saw the pictures. It looked lovely … did Imogen go? Only I saw some of the photographs, but no sign of Imogen being bridesmaid, and I wondered …’
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Mrs Hinchcliffe, without any hint of edge. ‘She wasn’t there. Not really feasible, what with them having it abroad and everything – Graham got such a good deal on a package through one of his contacts at the tour operators, it seemed silly not to. So we looked after her. Money was tight, and it wasn’t really that sort of wedding. They didn’t want to make a big fuss of it, for obvious reasons …’
‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, of course.’
I put the phone down feeling something akin to a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck prickle. Again, of itself, it was no big thing, really. Lots of people getting married for the second time did things in the same way. Small, unfussy wedding, no big occasion, no pomp and circumstance. So why did something about this one feel so wrong? It was just a simple tying of the knot, after all – and perhaps Imogen hadn’t even wanted to be there. She clearly hadn’t wanted to be landed with a step-mum, had she? And I had heard from her own lips that she hadn’t wanted to be landed with this step-mum. She had been happy as she was – just her and her dad. She’d been his princess, and now perhaps she felt she’d been usurped. Perhaps she made a big fuss about not being there to witness it.
It was a familiar enough scenario, trying to ‘blend’ a family in that way; one that would have needed tact and sensitivity, so that the child – in this case Imogen – didn’t feel pushed out. And perhaps they’d all tried their best – they certainly seemed to think they had – but had they?
Try as I might, I just couldn’t talk myself out of the feeling that, actually, the evidence was beginning to tell me something different. Which made it doubly frustrating that Imogen couldn’t – or more correctly, now, wouldn’t – talk to me.
I made my way back to the Unit feeling that frustration very keenly. I had to get that child to open up.
Imogen wasn’t the only child in the Unit, however, and though the morning passed peacefully and harmoniously enough, by the time the lunchtime bell went it became clear that this happy state of affairs wouldn’t continue, as Gavin hadn’t brought in his midday pill.
ADHD was a condition that was frustrating for all, but in Gavin’s case, so far, things had been reasonably well managed, in that he was generally responsible enough to do what was required of him, i.e. take his morning pill with breakfast and bring his second into school, which he would leave with the medical room, ready to go and take as soon as the lunchtime bell went.
I didn’t get involved in this arrangement. The deal since day one had been that Gavin himself would take responsibility; it was part of the package of strategies that had been agreed when he was moved into the Unit for assessment. It was also one of the ways he could prove to the school generally that he was responsible about managing his difficulties.
But there was no doubt that being on Ritalin wasn’t a universal panacea. I’d had dealings with kids on Ritalin more than once over the years, and there was one constant – it came up regularly, both in my experience and from what I’d read. Where the world when unmedicated was kind of ‘spiky’, like a heart-monitor trace, all zig-zags of highs and lows, with the drug the spikes became more of a flat line – while not exactly level, certainly reduced to a smoother, flatter route, with the result that the world became a ‘whateva’ kind of place. It wasn’t uncommon, therefore, for kids to ‘forget’ their meds or pretend they had taken them when they hadn’t, just so they could ‘feel’.
I didn’t think for a moment that Gavin had forgotten his pill on purpose, not least because he was the one to tell me. Yes, that was prudent, because the information would have filtered to me in any case, but his explanation – some complex story involving a crying sibling and a dead goldfish – was delivered in such a way that immediately rang true.
And it was too late to do anything much about it. I knew Gavin’s mum worked, so it was unlikely that she’d be able to get it to us – she’d have to leave work, travel home and then make another trip to us with it, by which time it would probably be way too late. ‘So,’ I said to Gavin, ‘you will just have to be very Zen-like this afternoon, won’t you?’
‘What’s a Zen?’ he wanted to know.
‘It’s not an “a”,’ I said, ‘it’s a religion. One that’s all about sitting quietly, thinking deep important thoughts.’ I took his hands and clasped them together as if in prayer. ‘Kind of like this,’ I said, chanting ‘Tomorrow I will remember my pill, tomorrow I will remember my pill …’
Which had sent him away giggling, but the minute we got back into class I could tell there wouldn’t be much sitting around, going ‘om’ a lot, happening. In fact, we were on course for a bit of a nightmare; though Gavin wasn’t literally bouncing off the walls, he was definitely doing his Duracell bunny impression, and very quickly getting on everyone’s nerves. Had Kelly been around it was one of those situations where I’d have had her take him out and engage him in some focused one-to-one time, but with two TAs off sick she was having to assist in another classroom, so it was going to be a case of crisis containment, i.e. minimising his effect on the group as a whole. But it was proving difficult.
We were kicking off with life-space interviews that afternoon, and, Imogen’s being necessarily fairly short, she’d already been ‘done’ and dispatched to the quiet corner. I was now trying to chat to Shona, but it was proving rather challenging. Despite regular quiet reminders that ‘work quietly’ meant just that, it seemed Gavin just couldn’t help himself. ‘Miss!’ called Molly for the fifth time in as many minutes. ‘Gavin’s kicking my chair again.’
‘And he’s stolen my pencil sharpener as well, Miss!’ Henry huffed. ‘Gavin, you spaz, give it back!’
‘Miss, Henry said spastic!’ piped up Ben. ‘Tell him off, Miss!’
‘No I didn’t, you liar!’ Henry shouted. ‘I said spaz!’
‘It’s the same, isn’t it, Miss? Spaz means the same as spastic, doesn’t it?’
‘Boys!’ I said sharply. ‘Enough of this childish bickering! I don’t want to hear either word said in this class. And Gavin, will you please stop kicking Molly’s chair, now. And if you have borrowed Henry’
s pencil sharpener, will you please give it back.’
Naturally, Gavin, Ritalin-free, couldn’t simply return it. No, he lobbed it at Henry, whereupon it bounced off his head.
‘Oi, you retard!’ said Henry. ‘Miss, did you see that? He threw it at me!’
‘Miss,’ piped up Ben, ‘Henry called Gavin a retard!’
And off we all went once again.
Exchanging a look of exasperation with poor bemused Shona, I left her at my desk and went over to sort things out. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘Molly, I suggest you go and sit in Shona’s seat, out of kicking distance, and Ben and Henry, will you please just concentrate on your own work and stop this endless bickering. You’re not in flipping primary school! And as for you, Gavin, I would like you to get your reading book out, and –’
‘I forgot it, Miss,’ he said, drumming two pencils on the desk.
I placed a hand on top of them. ‘In which case,’ I said, ‘I would like you to go to the book corner and choose a different one. And once you’ve chosen – and don’t bother Imogen while you’re in there – bring it over to me, quietly, along with a chair. Then, once I’ve finished what I’m doing with Shona, you and I will read it together.’
Gavin got up, scraped his chair back, and hoicked up his trousers.
‘Is he getting told off, Miss?’ he said, pointing an accusing finger at Henry. ‘Cos he’s called me a spaz and a retard now.’
I pointed a finger of my own. ‘Gavin, book corner. Now, please,’ I told him. And in a tone that left no room for debate, so he didn’t offer any. Instead, glaring at Henry, he stomped off.
But if I thought that would contain things, albeit temporarily, I was wrong. Within seconds of my returning to my desk and chat with Shona, the air was rent by a loud and piercing scream.
And, surprise, surprise, it was coming from the book corner.
