Blood Family

by Anne Fine

  ‘Nothing’s been happening!’

  ‘Come off it, Eddie! Anyone in the world could look at you and know you’re taking something!’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘That’s almost proof.’ Her voice brimmed with pure scorn. ‘All druggies lie through their teeth.’

  ‘I’m not a druggie!’

  Alice raised her palms. ‘OK, OK! You’re not a druggie. I believe you. Honestly I do.’

  It was the sheer contempt with which she said it that made me spring across to tug her hair so hard I pulled her off the table. She stumbled to her feet, then turned, eyes glittering with tears of pain.

  ‘Oh, right!’ she said. ‘Who did you learn that nasty trick from, Eddie? Could it have been your very own real dad, Bryce Harris?’

  She told, of course. Oh, not about the hair-pulling or what she thought was going on with drugs. She doubled back from school the very next morning, missing her favourite lessons, in order to tell Nicholas about my visit to the university, and what I’d said about the face on the computer. ‘That’s why he’s like he is. He thinks that he’ll turn into Harris.’

  Nicholas reported all this back to me, along with a stern lecture about the fact that I was not to pick on Alice for breaking a confidence. She’d done what she thought best, and he would hope that if my sister ever found herself in the same state, I’d do the same for her.

  I knew exactly what he meant. I also knew I would. If Alice had been halfway as messed up and miserable as I was, I would have rushed to get his help.

  But somehow I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t say a single thing that was normal or sensible. All I could do was snarl, ‘I am not “in a state”. I just want to be left alone.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Edward. That man has spoiled enough of other people’s lives. And more than enough of yours. Here you were, doing beautifully. Everyone said so. Everyone was astonished at how well you’ve been managing over the years. This is a setback, I admit. We’ll have to face it.’ He sank down on my bed. ‘First, of course, we will need the facts.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I said sarcastically. ‘Track Harris down and ask him if he’d mind taking a DNA test?’

  Nicholas seemed surprised I’d thought even this far along the path. How could he know that every living minute of mine had been chewed up with thoughts of how I could find out the truth. Was Harris my father? Or was he merely an uncle or a cousin of some sort? Maybe it was pure coincidence that we looked alike. After all, everyone in the world has types they fancy. Perhaps my mother had always been attracted to men with Harris’s build and facial features?

  Maybe I was the child of one of them, not him.

  Nicholas ran his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘Natasha and I are going to have to think about all this. And maybe talk to Rob.’

  ‘Throw them all in,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Don’t forget that policewoman Sue, and Eleanor Holdenbach. And maybe that nurse who cut my toenails at the hospital. And of course Linda and Alan.’

  ‘All people who care about you! And it’s quite a list!’

  I should have felt ashamed. I think I did. But not enough to draw back and apologize. I was in pain. I didn’t know what to do or what to say, and all the time my brain was spinning with the misery of having even the shadow of bloody Harris looming over me.

  Perhaps for ever.

  I got so near to begging Nicholas to send me back to Eleanor Holdenbach. She would have understood. But then I suddenly remembered all the questions – how they had driven me so close to crazy, on and on and on. First Rob, then Sue, then Eleanor. Questions and questions and questions. Over and over and over.

  I couldn’t bear to think of going through all that again.

  Nicholas was clearly waiting for me to say something. But I stared at the floor. I couldn’t think of anything that might help him feel better. I couldn’t think of anything to help myself.

  In the end, sighing, Nicholas pushed his hands down on his knees to lever himself up from the bed. ‘I see we’re going to get nowhere tonight. Let’s leave it, Edward. We will have time to think about what’s best for you, and you’ll have time to think about what you want too.’

  His hand came down on my shoulder. ‘I am so sorry that this happened. It was such bad luck. If they had only chosen someone else to photograph!’

  Did he believe I hadn’t thought of that? That I’d not thrashed around in bed, exhausted with the effort of telling myself, ‘That’s all you have to do. Pretend that it was someone else Stefania chose when she picked up the camera. Tina, or Martin, or Justin. Anyone. It didn’t have to be you. So just pretend it wasn’t. Put it out of your mind. Then you can go on just the way you were before. After all, nothing has changed. So what’s the point in letting these weird thoughts chew you up all day, all night? Let them go, Eddie! Let them go! Forget the whole damn thing!’

  On and on. Telling myself all night. Most of the day.

  And always hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. The thing is, I’d begun to see him everywhere. My heart would thump. I would creep up to sneak a look and ask myself afterwards, ‘How could I even have begun to think that could be him?’ I’d realize that it was because the man was wearing the same sort of jacket Harris did, or had his knuckles clenched. Something as simple as that.

  And now I knew that I was going to look like him.

  I had proof too. One dark December evening, Natasha sent me on the bus to pick up something she had left at work. Just papers, but she needed them and Malcolm was working in the office until late.

  Some great fat woman took the seat beside me. There were some places free, but she was probably too heavy on her feet to bother moving further along the bus. She squashed me up against the window frame. I can remember what was in my mind. I sat there wondering if she had children who were dead embarrassed when she came waddling into school. In fact, I can remember feeling lucky my own mum was so hidden away.

  And then this woman shifted in her seat. I had a horror she was going to talk to me, and anyone who got on at the following stops might think we were together. So I turned away.

  Harris was gazing at me.

  I couldn’t budge. I was wedged in. In any case, I realized instantly he wasn’t there – that it was only my own face warped to look strained and old, the way that faces do when they’re reflected in bus windows in the dark and wet.

  Still, it was Harris again.

  Nicholas

  We did our best. And after all, it wasn’t as if we didn’t know what was the matter with him. Alice astonished me by taking charge of one part of the problem. Without a word to me, she engineered things so that Edward left his mother’s room in Ivy House to fetch a cake she claimed was in the car. (He never hurried back from any errand that could get him out of there for a few minutes.)

  The moment Edward shut the door behind him, Alice asked Lucy outright:

  ‘Was Eddie Bryce’s baby?’

  I held my breath, not even picking Alice up on her sheer bluntness. I knew she wasn’t usually that rude. She was just trying to raise the topic as quickly as she could, and make the question as clear as possible to that poor, addled brain.

  Lucy looked so confused. I wasn’t sure if she’d been rattled by Alice’s ruthless tone, or didn’t know the answer. But suddenly I was exasperated with this pathetic woman who had let that great bully ruin my son’s life. So I pitched in as well. ‘Lucy, is Bryce Harris Eddie’s real father? Or was there someone else before him?’

  She lowered her head, trying to duck the question. Her hair fell over her face. But I was fired up enough to say to her sharply, ‘Lucy!’ and it worked a treat. The tears leaked and she panicked, whispering, ‘Bryce said never to tell.’

  I thought, if bullying works . . . ‘Why not?’

  I barely caught a word of what she mumbled next. ‘. . . nobody’s business . . . couldn’t prove it . . . not stop his money when he left . . .’

  (‘When he left’, you will notice. Not even ‘if’.)

&
nbsp; ‘Why? Had that happened to him before with other girlfriends – that people had gone after him for child support?’

  Her head was almost on her chest. I had to lean in even closer to hear. ‘. . . got so angry. . . had to keep moving . . .’

  I left it there, and by the time Eddie came back, Alice had soothed and charmed poor Lucy back to smiles and nods. But when the three of us were on our way back to the car, I drew ahead with Alice. ‘Well done for starting that. At least we know.’

  She turned to check that Edward was still out of earshot. ‘So, will we tell him?’

  ‘Only if he asks.’

  She kicked the gravel up in little sprays. ‘He won’t, though, will he? Poor Eddie’s totally allergic to any questions about himself. Asking or answering.’

  And do you know, till Alice said that, I had never realized.

  Clarrie Tennant, Year Group and English Teacher

  We had high hopes of him. He was so bright. When he moved to us from his primary school he was amenable and willing. Studious, even. Like several of the others, Edward used work to hide the fact that he found socializing quite a strain. He was quite often to be found up in the library. And in the lunch hour, he would disappear for half an hour or so to get his homework done somewhere in school.

  He was a pleasure to teach. You had to press him hard to make him speak up willingly in class discussions. But you could rarely fault the stuff he wrote, except in trivial ways. He had a very wide vocabulary for his age. And he was thoughtful.

  Then, that term, he closed down – and it was pretty well overnight. It was the strangest thing. All of them go through changes. From time to time, the girls get in some weird moods. Tearful. Aggressive. Mardy. You have to cut them quite a lot of slack. We are quite used to that.

  The boys change too. It helps to learn to ignore a lot of the sullenness, and not pick up on all the petty rudeness. It’s not an easy time. Some lad who never gave a thought to what he looks like suddenly comes out in spots. His face erupts, and it’s as if his personality implodes to match. He hides his head, won’t raise his hand in class, he misses clubs he’s always liked, and can’t scoot off the premises quickly enough after the buzzer sounds. The ones that haven’t started on their growth spurt become self-conscious as the others tower over them or flaunt themselves in the showers.

  Then there are those who just lose interest in the work. They sprawl across the desks, and you can almost see them counting off the minutes till they can leave and, as they put it, ‘get a proper life’. You have to keep on trying to kick-start them into a bit of effort, and stamp on all the tiresome waves of bad behaviour born of sheer boredom.

  Sometimes you want to shake them all till their teeth rattle.

  All normal. All in a day’s work.

  But that term Edward was quite strange. It was as if his wits had wandered off. He wasn’t rude. He didn’t seem unsettled. How can I put it? More as if he wasn’t there. As if some alien craft had landed overnight to sweep off the real Edward and leave us with this dead facsimile who just went through the motions. If I am honest, he reminded me of my grandmother after Grandpa died. She smiled and nodded and she did her best, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was half-drowned in echoes and reminders: ‘Your grandpa loved that song.’ ‘That would have made my Eric chuckle.’ ‘Oh, how he hated beans.’ Whenever I visited, I felt as if there was another person in the room, far more alive and real than me.

  Edward had gone a bit like that – as if he was beset with shadows.

  We asked his parents in, of course. That’s standard. They’re a perfectly nice and sensible pair. Mrs Stead made a point of reminding us that Edward had a difficult start in life (though she admitted he had seemed to triumph over that). Her husband sat there with a worried look. ‘I’ll try to talk to him,’ he kept on saying. ‘I have tried, but I’ll try again.’

  What can you do? We had to leave it at that.

  Then, pretty well as promptly as it had begun, the phase was over. Edward was himself again.

  Eddie

  I’d had a vile day. Mrs Tennant on at me about not listening in class. Nicholas watching me with that stupid worried look. Natasha nagging me about mess in the kitchen, and Alice screeching on about something I’d said in school that had got back to one of her best friends and caused a row.

  I stomped out of the house, telling them that I needed to fetch some homework that I’d lent to Justin. I wasn’t bothered where I went, but I just had this passing thought that Nicholas might take it in his head to follow me. So I walked down to Justin’s street, and saw that elder brother of his hanging about in front of the line of garage doors on Lenby Lane.

  That’s when I thought of it. It wasn’t before.

  When I told Troy what I wanted, he looked me up and down as if I were some sort of plonker. ‘Blueys? I ain’t had any of them since longer than for ever.’

  My disappointment must have shown. ‘Tell you what, though. I’ve got these.’ He dipped in his pocket. ‘Just as good. Some reckon better. Want a go?’

  ‘How much?’

  He took me for a total ride that first time (though I smartened up and never paid so much again). But that night all that mattered was that I had it in my hand – a passport to what everyone wants. That sense of peace and warmth and calm. (Everyone in the world believes in peace. Believers pray for it. Newsreaders go on about the chance of it in practically every bulletin. I’d even heard Natasha mention it when her phone rang at night. ‘Oh, no! The only thing it seems you can’t have in this world is peace and quiet!’)

  The quiet bit was easy. Nobody, not even Alice, bothered me once I’d announced that I was off to bed. And peace came stealing in almost as soon as I had taken them, those lovely little red pills. I did feel guilty, of course. But I could defend myself. After all, hadn’t Alice pretty well insisted I was a druggie?

  So why not prove her right?

  Those were some special evenings that I had, all by myself, sprawled like a starfish on the floor, safe from all thoughts of Harris. And all the good stuff lasted through the day, because a thin leftover thread of calm did seem to make it easier for me to look as if I might be trying at school. It helped at home as well. Knowing that I could soon be off in my own cradled, timeless universe made it far easier to bat away Natasha’s questions without a loss of temper. ‘Edward, what were you doing in the bathroom for so long last night? I reckon you were there for hours.’

  I wasn’t going to say a raging thirst had sent me for a simple glass of water but, twisting off the tap, I’d seen the first drip gathering, silvered by moonlight, and taking a lifetime to swell in perfect beauty. I’d watched entranced as the slim shining rim of it along the tap edge tirelessly budded till, quivering, it broke away to drop onto the porcelain with such a rich and echoing chime I had to make an effort to remind myself it would not wake them in the other rooms. Regretfully, I’d watched the little tadpole of the drip slip down the plughole. And yet already, on the tap rim, another was gathering – fat, gleaming, mesmerizing.

  Had I stood there all night?

  I loved those pills. Natasha caught me on the landing once, staring down through the banisters at the rug in the hall. She didn’t know that it was swirling in obedient patterns. In my own head, I could make all its colours twist and turn, not clumsily like in a kaleidoscope, but with a buttery smoothness, as if the myriad shades of red and orange and ochre were merely following my will.

  ‘Edward?’ She smiled. ‘What are you up to? You look miles away.’

  ‘Just thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ But even I could tell that sounded wrong. ‘Well, actually, something a little complicated to do with homework.’

  She ran her hand over the top of my head as she went by. ‘I am so pleased with you. And so is Mrs Tennant. I was just coming up to tell you that she rang today to say you’re doing so much better.’

  And I was. Somehow the things my brain and I were doing t
ogether at night made everyone around look different. Once, after I’d ill-advisedly jumped the pill-popping gun, I was called back downstairs because of one of Rob’s rare evening visits. And it was magical. I realized that, under the skin of everyone round me, I could still see the creature they had been in childhood – just as, when I was taking my first bluey, I’d once seen Alice. I knew, just knew, that Nicholas had been unmercifully teased about his hand when he was young. Watching him join us in the living room, I saw how he unthinkingly made for the chair which best hid his bad hand, and I ran through my head the recent times I’d seen him take a seat.

  At the pub picnic table.

  In the dentist’s waiting room.

  Down at the railway station.

  Always the same, I realized. Always the chair that kept his left arm turned away as if it were a horribly scarred secret. Why did he still do that? None of us ever teased. Natasha even shared his bed. Why would it be a habit, if he’d not learned to automatically protect himself so much in childhood? I’d watch Natasha, and see her as the strained and anxious child she must have been when she was sent away at ten years old, so eager to stay friends with everyone in boarding school that she could not relax, no, not even now, all these years later in her own home. I must have been much easier to live with in those months, while I was seeing both of them the way I did, as vulnerable children who had put on some toughened shell of grown-up habits. They were much happier now that I seemed less anxious in their company.

  I even started asking them all sorts of questions.

  ‘Natasha, do you get much time to read at boarding school?’

  I wonder if she thought I wanted to leave home. ‘It isn’t easy, Edward. Everywhere you are, people are always there.’