Blood Family

by Anne Fine

  We’d been there over two hours.

  Alice flung her arms round my mum and hugged her. Smacking a giant kiss onto her cheek, she told her cheerily, ‘Bye, Lucy! See you soon.’

  I copied her. ‘Bye, Mum.’

  Mum squeezed my hand. I think she might not have remembered my name because there was a sort of choking gap after the word ‘goodbye’. But in a moment we were out of there, and Alice was bouncing down the gravel path towards the car. ‘That was good fun.’

  Nicholas slid his arm round her shoulders, maybe to calm her down, and maybe to make her listen when he said, ‘I’m really glad that you came with us, Alice. You were brilliant.’

  I felt there was a moment, just before we reached the car, when it was my turn to say something grateful. But I couldn’t think of what to say. How do you thank a person for teaching you that your own mother can be hugged?

  Alice just grinned and took the front seat without asking, knowing full well she’d earned it. Nicholas gave her a moment more to settle down, and then he said again, ‘Alice, my lovely, you were such a hit in there. All of them loved you.’

  He’d given me my chance. ‘Especially my mum. You even made her laugh.’

  ‘Your mum’s dead easy,’ Alice said.

  And, after that day, suddenly she was.

  Nicholas

  I’m going to be honest. I would have loved some children of my own. I’d have had cotfuls. When we found out Natasha was infertile, I was so deeply shocked and disappointed that I dared not show it.

  She too had always thought in terms of having a big family. That weird upbringing of hers had made her envy all the friends who’d grown up carelessly sprawling across their kitchen tables, and arguing back when someone told them off for leaving clutter about or playing music too loud.

  Not that Natasha ever wanted to run a household like that. No, what she wanted was the warmth – the sheer normality – of having children about. She cried for days after we got the news.

  But she is not the sort to crumble under any blow. She’s a go-getter. And as months passed, the notion of giving someone else’s child a proper home appealed more and more. Alice, of course, as good as fell into our lap. Natasha knew her mother from visits to the clinic. (Natasha was given bad news but, as she was only too well aware, Tamara was given worse.) Alice began to spend more and more time at our house. We passed the social workers’ tests. She was adopted legally. So we were three.

  Before we took on Alice, I don’t believe Natasha had the faintest idea how much sheer time and effort is involved in raising a child. And she was happy at work. We asked for a second adoption mostly because of Alice. (You don’t say that to social workers, of course. In fact, there’s scarcely anything that you can say to them that passes muster. In my more irritated moments, I’ve thought that they’re hair-triggered to be suspicious of any normal reason for wanting a child.)

  Rob came round several times before we took on Eddie. (I still think of that pale, unconfident child who first moved in with us as ‘Eddie’.) Rob warned us that there could – no, that there probably would – be troubles ahead. ‘He seems to have come out of things almost too well. There may be repercussions.’ He said, so far as they could tell, Eddie’s first years must have been fairly stable. His personality was strong, and he could form attachments. But childhood’s not a cakewalk, and all these kids face added stress by virtue of the things that they’ve been through. ‘So we can never be sure what’s going to happen.’

  That’s true of any child. Nobody can foretell the future. Natasha felt as I did, that Eddie would have his best chance in our house. With us.

  Alice was keen. It worked out better than expected. And every time I saw his hopeless mother in that ghastly place of hers, I blessed the day Rob Reed phoned up and said, ‘Is there a time this week I could come round to talk to you and your wife? You see, something’s come up.’

  Why did we call him Edward? Well, to be frank, it was because Natasha can’t stand shortened names. You’ll notice that she calls me Nicholas. (So do the children.) She won’t admit that, since it sounds like snobbery, so she pretends she had a horrid boyfriend once, called Eddie. Everyone understands that sort of thing can put you off a name.

  He grew in confidence as well as height. Gradually he stopped tensing up so horribly each time he heard a key scrape in a lock, or a bolt shoot across. That made him easier to love, of course – that vulnerability, that sense of his grim past still hovering over him.

  That is the problem with these kids, of course. Whatever pain or loss it was that made them come to you, that never goes. It’s always there. Always. There in the background like a lurking enemy, waiting to trip them up.

  Or worse, waiting for them to trip themselves.

  Eddie

  My school might not have been as classy as the one Alice was sent to, but it was good at trips. It seemed to me that every other week a gang of us would pile into a minibus. Off we’d go, mucking about till one of the teachers stood up to tell us to behave ourselves. At last we’d settle down – until we reached wherever it was. A railway museum. An art gallery. A country meadow where no one had ever used a single chemical, crazy with flowers. Once we went off to see some iron bridge famous for something I’ve forgotten. Longest this. Highest that. Whatever. All I remember is how black and sturdy the thing looked, towering above us, and how annoyed we were when we were told that we’d be staying underneath.

  As we got older, most of the trips became more dull, almost as if the teachers who arranged them were trying to warn us where we might end up if we didn’t knuckle down. We went to some enormous book storage hangar where giant robot arms picked out dull, tightly wrapped packages, and men and women in overalls scuttled along the stacks, sorting out what they called ‘glitches’. I missed the trip to the cosmetics factory. (Alice was livid with me since she’d known I had copped out that morning, pretending to feel sicker than I was, and everyone came home with buckets of free stuff for mums and sisters.)

  Then, one day, we were divided into even smaller groups. It was a visit to the university, and we were dropped off outside different buildings. Department of Engineering. Modern Studies. Fine Art. Mine was the very last group to leave the bus. Our building didn’t even have a name outside, but in the hall there were some animal skeletons in large glass cases, like in a museum.

  The five of us trooped up the stairs behind a girl in a white coat who had the longest ponytail I’d ever seen. Her name, she told us, was Stefania, and though her English sounded perfect to me she had an accent someone whispered was Romanian or Russian. She led us down a drab green corridor into a long laboratory which stank of some strange minty chemical.

  She told us what it was, but I’ve forgotten.

  Then we went through another set of swinging doors. Stefania told us we were now in Palaeoanthropology, and we had such a noisy laugh about that that she spun round and rather fiercely made us chant it about ten times over, till we could say it properly. (I still can.) The people there were working with fragments of bone. Some were spread out in separate rough circles, like jigsaw bits sorted before you start a puzzle. Some were just heaped in trays. At first, Stefania was interesting, talking about the things you could work out from faces. I do remember her telling us Neanderthal man’s great massive brow ridge (she had to explain to Justin which bit of the face she meant) was there to make him look even more threatening when he glared.

  But most of it was way, way duller than that, and I stopped listening and wandered further along the bench.

  Suddenly she broke off. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I see you’re making for our answer to Time Team!’

  I didn’t even know what she was talking about, so I just grinned.

  She herded everyone along and through the next set of doors. ‘This is so clever. You see, we take the final bone structure, so far as we can get the jigsaw right. And then we build up on top – muscles and flesh. And there are often clues to hair and eye colour to do with
different racial characteristics.’

  Justin’s not very bright. He only had to hear the word ‘racial’ to flick at Tyrrell’s dreadlocks. Tyrrell played up, and proudly took a bow while we all cheered and jeered.

  Stefania looked a bit put out. Perhaps they didn’t have our sort of teasing in Romania. But she pressed on. ‘Of course, you can’t get it absolutely right. But you can make a really good attempt at knowing what these people looked like.’

  That’s when I realized some of the bits of bone must have been human.

  ‘But what’s the point?’ Tina asked mardily.

  Stefania was astonished. ‘What’s the point? Well, it’s just finding out! Don’t you want to find out things? Aren’t you interested in things around you?’

  ‘There aren’t any old bones around me,’ smirked Tina.

  You could tell Stefania was irritated. It was as if Tina had said that she was wasting her life, and her enthusiasm for the bones was stupid. She bit her lip and looked back though the glass swing doors into the other laboratory. The two who had been working at the bench when we trooped past had disappeared.

  ‘Right, then,’ she said, as if she’d suddenly made a big decision. ‘I’ll show you one way that this work is useful.’

  She used a key to unlock a small box on the wall. Inside were more keys. Lifting one off its hook, she relocked the box, and led us through another door I hadn’t even noticed. ‘No one’s to touch a thing in here! Not a thing!’

  You could tell she was deadly serious, and we fell silent and watched as she pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer to take out a file. On top, there was a photo of a small boy. It was as if the mere sight of his face made her have second thoughts about sharing what she had planned. At once she shoved the file back in the cabinet, then reached up to a shelf above her head for a large old-fashioned Polaroid camera.

  I was the one she nodded at. ‘Stand still. Don’t smile.’

  I was too startled even to think of smiling. The shutter clattered down. There was a winding sound. ‘Two minutes. Just two minutes.’

  While we were waiting, she opened up some fancy scanner. I drifted off to look at the cartoons someone had pinned on a cork board. Most of them seemed to be about archaeologists and their dug-up bones. I didn’t get some of the jokes.

  When I came back, the others were leaning over a computer, staring at the screen. Even Tina seemed out of her bad mood.

  I started listening to Stefania again.

  ‘. . . because the facial bones grow in proportion, and other features tend to stay the same. So, as with the fragments next door, the programme puts two and two together and does a really good job of working out how any missing child might look as the years pass.’

  ‘Edward’s not missing.’

  ‘No, he’s not. But if he were, and we didn’t find him for ten years, we would still have an excellent idea of what he’d look like.’

  She pressed a few more keys. Tina and Martin moved aside to let me in to look.

  And there, staring out from the computer screen, unsmiling as ever, was Bryce Harris.

  I don’t know how long I was on the floor. I was told after that Stefania thought I’d had a fit. She was just asking everyone if it had happened before, and whether they knew if she should call an ambulance, when I came round.

  I hadn’t even realized then. I mean, the shock of seeing Harris’s face was what had done for me. They helped me back onto my feet.

  Stefania offered a lifeline. ‘Did you miss your breakfast?’

  I nodded, acting gormless, and took the tea and biscuits that she offered me. I was too busy making sure I didn’t mention Harris to let my thoughts drift further, and it was only on the bus, halfway home, that the point really struck me.

  That was my face, grown ten years older.

  I had Harris’s face.

  I must have looked as pale as death when I walked in. Nicholas would have noticed at once, but I was lucky. It was Natasha in the kitchen. I scuttled past her, muttering something about being ‘desperate’, and rushed upstairs to lock myself in the bathroom.

  After a minute or two she was concerned enough to come up after me and tap on the door. ‘Edward? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Sorry about the rush. Out in a moment.’

  I heard her footsteps fade along the landing, and dropped my head between my knees again, the way that I’d been taught. I was so rattled I forgot to pee. And after I’d come down again a few minutes later to say hello properly, I saw Natasha glance at me curiously when, without thinking, I went off to the downstairs loo.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she asked when I came out. ‘You’re looking awfully peaky.’

  ‘I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.’

  Supper was early because Natasha had to supervise some fancy evening event. Nicholas came home shattered from three site visits in a row, and so we were a quiet group around the table that night. Nicholas asked Alice about her awful day. (She hated Wednesdays. All of the things she loathed the most, or couldn’t do, happened on Wednesdays.)

  And then he turned to me. ‘What about you?’

  I couldn’t tell them I’d spent most of the day trying to force Bryce Harris’s face out of my mind. ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Oh, we had a trip to a yarn factory.’

  Even as it popped out, I found myself thinking, Where did that come from? But I remembered at once. It was a visit we had made with Mr Perkins.

  Nicholas made a face. ‘A yarn factory?’

  Was he suspicious? No. Alice was smiling broadly, but whether that was because she thought the idea was amusing, or whether she knew that I was lying, it was impossible to tell.

  ‘What was it like?’ Nicholas asked dutifully.

  And off I went, describing it in just the same way that Mr Perkins had. I talked about the spindles, and the complicated way the yarn was threaded so it didn’t pull so tightly it kept snapping. I talked of where the various yarns came from, and how they were dyed in giant vats and each batch was called a ‘dye lot’ with its own special number because, if you were making something, it was important to make sure all your yarn came from the same dye lot. If not, the shade of colour might be just a tiny bit different.

  I only stopped myself in time from echoing Mr Perkins’s enthusiastic cry of, ‘All the colours of the rainbow – and more!’

  Once I’d begun, I couldn’t rein myself in. I talked about great lorries backing up to the unloading bays, and how crates of the yarn were sent to stockists all over the world.

  My voice trailed off at last. Alice was watching me closely. Natasha’s thoughts were clearly miles away, probably trawling through the complications of her coming evening. And I had bored Nicholas almost to death.

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to backtrack into acting a bit more normal, ‘it was pretty boring really.’

  ‘Still . . .’

  Stifling a yawn, Nicholas rose from the table. ‘Better get on with things.’

  He turned to Natasha. ‘What was it that you said you needed out of the loft?’

  ‘Just the old tripod. Malcolm’s won’t clamp any more, and his new one hasn’t arrived yet.’

  Usually Nicholas managed on his own. This time, perhaps because he was so tired, he asked me, ‘Want to go up?’

  I’d never been up in the loft before, and I was curious. Nicholas held the ladder. It took a bit of time to find the tripod because it was stored away in a red cover no one had thought to mention. I slid it over to the hatch, and just as Nicholas reached up to take it, banged my knee on the corner of a box. ‘Yee-ouch!’

  His head popped through. ‘Hurt yourself?’

  I pointed. ‘What is that? Is it an old TV and video player?’

  I saw him blush. ‘It was for you,’ he said. ‘When you first came, I thought that you might want to play those ancient tapes of yours. That’s why it’s here.’

  Would I have wanted to watch them anywa
y? Or was it just because I’d felt so close to Mr Perkins all through supper?

  ‘So can we get it down?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Why not? I’m up here. You’re down there.’

  Already I was pushing it towards the hatch. I watched him wondering whether or not to argue. Then, with a sigh, he pulled the ladder back to form a better angle and we slid it down.

  ‘It might not work,’ he warned.

  ‘I’ll put it in my room,’ I said. ‘Out of the way.’

  We both knew what that meant: somewhere the sheer boxiness of it would not annoy Natasha.

  On the floor of my cupboard.

  The moment Nicholas had gone after saying goodnight, Alice was in my doorway. ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘You know.’ She shut the door behind her. ‘All of that crap about a yarn factory. Justin told me that your lot went to look at some manky old bones.’

  That startled me. ‘So how come you know Justin?’

  She brushed my question aside. ‘Never mind that. How come you told them all that rubbish at supper?’

  ‘It didn’t matter,’ I said defensively. ‘Neither of them was listening anyway.’

  ‘Who would?’ She snorted with contempt. ‘Spindles and shuttles and twists and vat lots and stuff.’

  ‘Dye lots.’

  ‘Who cares?’ She dropped down on the rug in front of me, and spun the measuring tape that I’d been fiddling with away across the floor, out of my reach. ‘Why were you telling all those stupid lies? Justin says you’ve been acting weird all day. He says you fainted at the university, and didn’t even hear when people got at you on the way home.’