by Sanjida Kay
One of the boys laughed. A single bark. Laura’s head snapped up. The group were starting to slouch back towards Briar Lane.
‘Did you do this?’ she shouted at Levi. To her shame, her voice quavered.
He turned towards her, his mouth twisted in a half smile. ‘Wass it look like?’
Laura swallowed. Levi took a step backwards.
‘Why?’ said Laura. ‘Why would you destroy her pictures? Why are you doing this to her?’
‘Because,’ he said, still walking backwards, his hands in his pockets, ‘she’s a stuck-up bitch, innit.’ Behind him, his cadre of mates laughed and he smiled. ‘Thinks she can draw. This is rubbish. Waste of paint.’ He jerked his chin towards the fragments of paper.
‘How dare you?’ she shouted. ‘How dare you do this to her? She’s done nothing to you.’
Levi shrugged and turned away. He started to whistle. Laura was trembling with anger at his callousness, his insouciance. She ran towards the boy and grabbed his jacket, yanking him around to face her.
‘Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you,’ she said. It sounded more like a plea than a statement or a threat.
She wanted him to acknowledge her, to show some contrition. He shrugged her off easily. She stood in front of him, panting. Part of her registered how tall he was – about five foot four, the same height as her. He was on a slight rise in the hill and he looked down at her steadfastly, his eyes large and lighter than she remembered, tawny, with murky-green streaks.
He still had his hands in his pockets but he leant towards her and said quietly, ‘Don’t never touch me.’
He was so close his breath grazed her lips. He smelt of fried oil and tomato crisps. She recoiled, stumbling back. Behind her she was aware of Autumn, shivering, small, vulnerable. Behind Levi stood the six older boys, lined up, watching her.
‘Don’t you ever go near my daughter again,’ she said. She was shaking.
‘Or what? ’ Levi asked, glancing at his audience.
He laughed and the boys, closing in alongside him, inched nearer to her and Autumn.
‘There is nothing,’ she shouted, ‘nothing I would not do to protect my daughter.’
She reeled, surprised at herself, at her bravery. It was such a strong, firm statement, ringing with conviction. Surely that would be enough? He would know she meant it. He must back down now.
Levi made a face at her. ‘You one stupid bitch,’ he said, and took his hands out of his pockets.
He took a step towards her. She could have reached out and touched his face. The boys behind Levi jostled and pushed against each other, like dogs straining at a lead.
‘She is worthless. She is a piece of shit,’ he whispered.
The boy did not look frightened. He squared his shoulders like a boxer. He was slight, slim-hipped, athletic-looking. The muscles around his neck tensed and his hands flexed into fists. Then he reached into the pocket of his blazer and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He smoothed it open, just enough for her to see what it was. It was Autumn’s favourite picture: a line of those same tall, thin, spiky people she drew over and over, something Giacomettian about them. They were all grinning, bearing pineapples on sticks, waving them like banners; in spite of its childishness, the painting was suffused with joy.
Levi tore it in half, and half again, and then screwed up the pieces. He held his hand in the air and opened it. He laughed wildly, loudly. The fragments spiralled into the wind and landed, floating momentarily over the path, before drowning in the mud. Then he smiled at her.
Something inside her snapped. She wanted to kill him. He was so close to her that it only took a shift in her weight, a slight movement forwards and she was right there, her hands on his chest, and then she pushed, as hard as she could. She saw his eyes widen in surprise as he staggered backwards. It might have been okay – he was loose-limbed and agile – but as he started to right himself, his foot slipped in the mud. Too late, Laura reached out a hand towards him. He fell away from her, half twisting, landing hard. And even then, it might not have been too awful, his fall might have been broken by the damp earth, the grassy incline – but his head snapped back and he hit a rock, breaking like a blunt molar from the ground. Laura felt the dull crack in her own jaw. For a moment he lay still, half on his side, his fingers digging into the soil. Behind him, seemingly in slow motion, the six lads opened their mouths and she saw shock and dismay spread across their faces.
When he started to sit up, his head strangely loose on his neck, his cheek was a dark purple. The sharp edge of the stone had split the skin beneath his eye. The gash was bloodless for a second, and then the red welled out of it.
A high-pitched screaming was coming from somewhere. It rang in her ears. Slowly Levi started to rise from the ground. The screams were Autumn’s. Laura ran to her child, pulling her towards her.
Oh my God, she thought, oh my God. What have I done?
‘Mummy,’ said Autumn quietly now. ‘Mum.’
The anger that had filled her so quickly drained away. Laura seized Autumn’s satchel and put it over her own shoulder. She grabbed her child’s cold hand and ran, dragging her daughter with her, across the meadow. Behind her there was an ominous silence. She didn’t dare look. Her heart was stammering. Would the pack of older boys retaliate?
Suppose they follow us?
At the edge of the wood she glanced back, half expecting to see the gang coming for them.
What if they wait until we are in the wood? No one will hear us.
The two of them slid down the path through the trees.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked when they reached the allotments, turning to check if anyone was following them.
Autumn only nodded. They walked back home in silence through the rain. Once inside, she ran Autumn a bath and stripped off her wet, muddy clothes. Autumn, her skin red and blotched, shivered and winced as she climbed into the hot water and hugged her knees to her chest.
Downstairs, the front door clicked and Vanessa called out, ‘Hello?’
Laura opened the bathroom door fractionally and shouted, ‘Autumn’s having a bath. Be right with you. Go ahead and have a shower downstairs, there’s plenty of hot water.’
She closed the door behind her and leant against it. She didn’t feel able to speak to her mother just yet. The tips of her fingers trembled, the muscles in her thighs twitched.
‘I’m so sorry about your pictures, Autumn,’ she said. ‘They were beautiful.’
Autumn said nothing. She gradually uncurled and slid into the water. Laura wanted to take her in her arms and hold her tightly. She thought of those moments when Autumn was a baby, sitting on her knee as she dried her after a bath, kicking Laura’s legs with her fat little feet, holding her fingers with chubby hands, delicious rolls of fat around her legs. Those moments, unbearably precious now, as Autumn no longer wanted to be held and cuddled like an infant.
‘What’s going to happen?’ said Autumn in a small voice, surfacing and pushing her hair out of her face.
Laura thought about standing in the rain in front of Levi, rage, like a drug, pumping through her veins. Pushing him with all her might, with all her strength. She shuddered. What had she been thinking? Levi was a child. Ten, eleven at the most.
‘What I did was wrong,’ she said, feeling wretched.
‘Will you get into trouble?’
‘I’ll talk to his parents on Monday and apologize. I’ll tell them what he’s been doing to you. They’ll make him say sorry too.’
Autumn didn’t look at her. She poured some shower gel onto her face cloth.
‘I meant what I said,’ said Laura. ‘I shouldn’t have pushed him. But I was furious with him. There is nothing I would not do to protect you.’
She felt ill as she remembered facing those overgrown school children. Had they even looked that threatening? She
couldn’t claim she had acted in self-defence. They’d done nothing to her. Even if she could justify pushing him – those older kids encircling them, Levi’s bullying, his abusive tone – she had made him fall. She thought of the bruised gash on the boy’s beautiful face.
‘Will you take me out of school?’ asked Autumn.
‘Let’s talk about it later.’
Autumn looked away and then said quietly, ‘I’d like to get washed by myself now.’
Laura tried to hide her hurt expression. She left Autumn on her own. Downstairs in the kitchen, she opened a bottle of red wine. As she was pouring herself a glass, her mother walked in and frowned. Laura held up the bottle to see if Vanessa wanted one too.
‘It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?’ Vanessa was in her late fifties and looked fantastic for her age. She had olive skin, polished by the sun and wind over the years she’d spent in Africa, and high cheekbones. She had the same thick hair as Autumn but now, with her hair wet from the shower and slick against her skull, her face looked sallow and almost gaunt.
The combination of Vanessa’s silver bob and her pale-grey eyes gave her a misleadingly ethereal quality. She was slim and toned from decades of running and watching what she ate, and she was dressed immaculately. Apart from when she was working in Namibia, Vanessa stuck to a strict regime of taupe, white and grey in summer and navy and white in winter. Even though she’d just returned from a run and had spent the day working in the spare room and then in a local café, she was wearing navy palazzo pants with a cream jumper and a necklace of sea-coloured glass that matched her eyes.
Laura took a deep gulp of wine and said, ‘Autumn is being bullied by a boy at Ashley Grove.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Vanessa.
‘He’s called Levi. He’s in the last year of primary school.’
‘Have you spoken to his parents?’ asked Vanessa sharply, looking over her shoulder at Laura.
‘I don’t know who they are. I talked to Autumn’s class teacher today. She says she’ll have a word with Levi’s teacher but she didn’t really take it seriously.’
Vanessa sat down at the kitchen table and opened Laura’s laptop. She suddenly slapped her hand on the wooden surface. ‘I knew that school was no good,’ she said.
‘It had perfectly good Ofsted grades.’
Vanessa made a series of annoyed groans as the Wi-Fi wavered. ‘It’s the only school she can go to in the area.’
I could have told her that, Laura thought.
‘The other option is to go private,’ said Vanessa. ‘There are plenty of excellent fee-paying schools in Bristol.’
Laura hesitated. ‘It’s a bit soon to be thinking of taking Autumn out of the school,’ she said flatly.
She hated arguing with her mother and she hated the thought of Autumn being teased by this boy, but it seemed an extreme reaction. On the other hand, she knew her mother had always wanted her to have Autumn privately educated. She thought about when she’d spoken to Mrs Sibson – how she hadn’t managed to make her listen. She needed to speak to her again, or go to the head or the boy’s parents.
‘You and Damian went to the best school we could afford,’ said Vanessa.
Because it meant you could travel and continue to work, thought Laura. You don’t get twenty-four-hour childcare at a comprehensive.
Vanessa and Julian, her father, were both social anthropologists at University College London. They studied the Himba tribe who live in the Namib Desert. Among other things, they noted the Himba’s kinship structure – their relationships to one another, who held the power and made the decisions, how they allocated their time, who did which chores, how many children they had, who the children were genetically related to, compared to who raised them, and how many goats they kept. Vanessa also collected data on the local animals; in the early days she’d followed a baboon troop that lived in the same area as the tribe. Now she had a team of PhD students who kept tabs on the primates and others who studied the rest of the desert fauna and flora.
The study had been expanding for almost thirty years and had become famous in academic and political circles. There had even been a BBC documentary about it. The Namibian government, which had relatively recently gained independence, was interested because of the politically sensitive nature of the treatment of indigenous peoples, and international environmental groups had become involved since the Baron-Cohens’ data indicated how the desert ecosystem worked and how humans could live and survive within its harsh strictures without upsetting its fragile water balance.
But while their parents had spent long hours in the desert and been building their academic empire, Laura and her brother, Damian, had been shuttled backwards and forwards between a boarding school in Primrose Hill and an international school in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek.
‘Matt was privately educated too,’ continued Vanessa. ‘Surely you don’t object on ethical grounds?’
‘How Matt was educated has nothing to do with it,’ said Laura, thinking that actually, yes, she did, and the fact that her mother didn’t know that showed how little she really knew her. Laura, who was not particularly interested in politics, thought that all children should have access to a decent education no matter what their parents earned. But she could also admit to herself that, in this case, she was less moved by some high-minded socialist principle, and more by her dislike of the schools she’d attended. Her view of education was tarnished by the bitter knowledge that she had been of less importance than her mother’s career. It didn’t make her feel any better knowing that her mother had done her best, moving them to Namibia because it meant that at least she could see her children every two or three weeks when she and Julian returned to Windhoek for supplies.
‘Your child’s welfare and education is the chief consideration,’ said Vanessa.
‘I’m a gardener! I’m trying to launch my own company with Jacob, the guy I met at college, and I’m paying pretty steep tuition fees for my degree! Do you have any idea how much private schools cost these days? How many gardeners do you know who can afford to privately educate their kids?’
Vanessa gave her a steely look. Laura knew what she really wanted to say was that she should get a proper job, give up the idea of having her own business and stop wasting money studying horticulture when she had a perfectly good degree in English already. Instead she turned back to the laptop and threw up her hands. ‘Completely lost the signal again and now the whole thing has crashed. This contraption is a wreck.’
‘I’ve arranged for someone to have a look at it tonight,’ Laura said, trying not to sound defensive.
‘Don’t you think Matt would pay? Before your machine died, I saw there’s a wonderful girls’ school nearby,’ said Vanessa.
Laura sighed. The last thing she wanted was to feel indebted to Matt in any way. He’d objected to her moving to Bristol – taking Autumn away from him, as he’d put it – and he’d already been more than generous, allowing her to take three-quarters of the profit from selling their house in London. Money that Laura felt acutely she hadn’t actually earned.
After Autumn started school when she was five, Laura had planned to return to her job as a researcher on an arts programme with the BBC, but during those few years spent looking after Autumn, she’d lost her ambition, her confidence, the skills required for that kind of job, plus any flexibility about working hours.
She remembered the first job interview she’d had once Autumn had started nursery. Every time she thought of that interview, she felt a surge of shame. Her prospective boss, the series producer, had sat with her back to Laura after she’d been ushered into her office and continued to work. Several minutes later, she swung around on her chair and said acidly, What makes you think you can tell a story?
The series producer had done her best to undermine Laura. She pointed out that, while Laura had been at home looking aft
er Autumn, her peers had all moved up the career ladder and were assistant producers or even producers. As someone who would only be able to work from 9.30 until 3, and not on school holidays, her options were extremely limited. She wouldn’t be able to go on film trips or do anything that demanded long hours and a quick turnaround – including the series she had been so rash to apply to work on. The technology had changed too – everyone was shooting and editing themselves, the woman added.
How much experience do you have as a self-shooting producer-director? she’d asked, and Laura, feeling flustered by the thought of even the simplest recording and editing devices, had to admit she had none.
She had come away utterly humiliated. The job had gone to a young, ambitious and childless man.
Without a job, she’d been lonely. Getting an allotment had given her something fulfilling to do and she’d met an odd assortment of people who tended the allotments near hers. It was an elderly man who had leant on his spade, admiring her chaotic profusion of flowers and vegetables, and said, You should do this for a living, that had prompted her to sign up for the horticulture degree course in London. When they moved to Bristol she’d transferred to the University of the West of England, where she studied for a day a week; the rest of the time she worked at Bronze Beech. And any spare time she had, of which there was precious little, she spent on the garden-design business she was hoping to launch with Jacob. There was no doubt her mother was as irritated as Matt had been that Laura no longer had what they’d both considered a successful career. It was true she’d made sacrifices in order to be there for Autumn, but that would have to change because now she was the sole parent and breadwinner. She had to make it work: she was all Autumn had.
She looked up and saw her daughter in the doorway. The child’s expression cut her to the core. She didn’t look angry, only sad, almost resigned; as if she were thinking, I am on my own.
She must have heard them talking about private schools. Autumn rushed over to Vanessa and hugged her, but didn’t look at her mother. She had dried and brushed her hair and it gleamed as it hung long and loose over her shoulders. She was wearing a burgundy cord pinafore with a pink bird on the bib. It made her look even more child-like than she was.
