‘It’s not been easy,’ said Robert, giving Miss Hodgson one of his rueful smiles. White teeth. ‘As you can see.’
They showed Mum and Robert the CCTV footage. Sam wouldn’t look at it again. He spotted a Rubik’s Cube on Miss Hodgson’s desk—she’d probably confiscated it from some poor sod—and had an all-consuming urge to fiddle with it. Mum’s mouth fell open as she watched her criminal son rampaging around the coat pegs. She kept chewing her knuckles and gasping, ‘Sam, Sam—dear Lord, Sam, why?’
He couldn’t say he’d done it because Jake was pissed off with him. That would have sounded lame. So he mumbled, ‘Dunno.’ Miss Hodgson said dunno wasn’t good enough. Sam added, ‘Because I hate school’—which didn’t seem to go down very well either.
Robert seized his chance. At the time, Sam thought he was just being bossy and a know-all, but in the years since he’s had a lot of time to think about Robert’s way of operating. He had an agenda. He was a master of the art of control.
‘Look, Stephanie,’ he said. ‘I think of this young man as my son. We’re very close. But perhaps I can be that bit more objective than a mother can ever be—especially this particular mother?’
He reached across to Mum and took her hand. His fist imprisoned hers. ‘Harriet’s not made of iron, emotionally. I think she’ll acknowledge that. Hm, Harriet?’ He smiled at her, affectionate and anxious. It was the perfect imitation of a caring man. ‘Since Angus died she’s tried to compensate for the loss of his father by giving Sam every bit of herself. She’s ignored his challenging behaviour. In fact … well, in fact she’s rewarded it. Frankly …’ He made a ducking movement, a soldier dodging a missile. ‘Better get my tin hat on! Sorry, Harriet, but maybe it’s time to be honest—frankly, she enables him.’
‘So all of this is my fault?’ asked Mum.
‘Darling, it’s not a question of blame.’
‘I don’t enable him.’
Robert was gazing earnestly at Miss Hodgson now, as though he and she were the only adults in the room.
‘I haven’t wanted to say this, but I think I must. I’m sure Sam has ADHD. Denying the problem isn’t doing him any favours.’
The talk went on and on, but Sam stopped listening. He was doing the Rubik’s Cube in his head. Eventually Miss Hodgson glanced at her watch and said she’d be meeting with the disciplinary committee, but for now Sam was suspended. She said she’d consult with the dean and his teachers about making a referral for assessment. She seemed to want to get the family out of her office. She stood up, shook hands, saw them to the door.
Three minutes later Sam was in the back of the car and in disgrace. Robert insisted on driving, as always. You’re not in any fit state, Harriet, you’re a cat on a hot tin roof. At first they sat in silence. Sam kept tugging on his seatbelt because it dug into his chest. He wished he had wings so he could fly out of the car window and never come back.
‘What’s up with you?’ Robert was looking at Mum. His voice was deeper than the engine note. ‘You’re stewing on something.’
‘I don’t know, I just …’
‘Spit it out.’
She pushed her hair back from her face. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that about me. That I’m weak, I reward bad behaviour. That I enable him. It was embarrassing.’
‘Jesus Christ, not this again.’
‘And the ADHD thing. We’ve talked about that! You know I don’t want him labelled or medicated. He’s functioning, isn’t he?’
Robert laughed sarcastically. ‘You call his performance in that locker room functioning?’
‘Okay, but that discussion was one for you to have with me, not with Stephanie Hodgson about me. I felt about five inches tall.’
She hadn’t finished speaking before he was erupting like a volcano.
‘What are you talking about? What are you …? Jesus Christ! I can’t say anything at all, can I? I have to watch every word. You take everything the wrong way.’
‘That’s just not fair.’
‘You’re creating a monster out of that child!’ he snarled. ‘He plays you like a bloody violin. Listen to me, Harriet—are you listening? It is not normal. People are always telling me so, people who care about you.’
‘Who said that?’
Robert was gritting his teeth as he hunched over the wheel. There wasn’t a trace of the calm, caring husband who’d sucked up to Miss Hodgson twenty minutes earlier.
‘Who said that about me?’ asked Mum again.
He muttered, ‘Fuck this,’ changed down a gear, revved the engine and pulled out to overtake a long line of cars. The poor engine was screaming its head off.
‘Please pull back in,’ Mum said. And then, a few seconds later, ‘You can’t see round that corner.’ And then, ‘Get back in, get back in, please get back in!’
They were hurtling towards the corner when a van appeared right in front of them. Mum screamed, ‘Oh my God!’ as Robert slammed on the brakes and swerved to the left. Someone honked—baaam!—Robert stuck up his middle finger, the van flashed its lights, Sam’s seatbelt jerked against his chest and he bellowed, ‘Ow!’
Robert kept driving. There was one of those terrible silences when you can hear people wanting to scream at one another and you feel crushed by all the anger. It lasted until Robert raised both his hands and smashed them back down onto the wheel.
‘And here we go, yet again. Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t take much more!’
‘You might have killed us,’ said Mum. ‘You almost did.’
‘I could see perfectly well. I could see perfectly well! Okay? It was a safe manoeuvre until you started squawking like a fucking banshee. You’re nuts, Harriet, you’re fucking nuts! I can’t go on like this; it’s like walking across a minefield every single minute of every day.’
Sam had never heard anyone shout so loud. They were turning into a lane near the farm now, the one with the high hedges. Driving along here always reminded him of the night they followed the ambulance with Dad in it.
‘Who says I’m not normal?’ asked Mum for the third time.
‘Never mind. Forget it, for God’s sake.’
‘I do mind.’
‘Please, please, give me a break. No more drama. You’re tearing us apart.’
‘But who says it?’
Robert looked at Sam in the driver’s mirror. Their eyes met for several seconds, and Sam was sure he saw Robert smile at him. Then he came out with it: the nastiest, most poisonous lie of all time.
‘Okay, if you must know, it was Angus who said that about you.’
‘Angus?’
‘Among others.’
‘Angus would never have said that.’
‘I’m afraid he did. He used to phone me and pour out his troubles. He was worried sick about the way you encourage Sam’s behaviour. Letting him get up all hours of the night, letting him run riot, taking his side no matter what he—’
‘That’s a lie,’ cried Sam from the back seat. ‘Dad never said any of that to you.’
Robert swung around the corner into the yard, bouncing over potholes. He pulled on the handbrake even before the car had properly stopped. Sam’s seatbelt jerked again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it’s true. I hoped never to have to tell you this. Angus wasn’t sure how much longer he could stick around.’
•
Mum waited until Robert had gone back to work before locking herself in the bathroom and phoning Granny. Sam heard, Hello, Patricia? He loitered close to the bathroom door but couldn’t catch much of the conversation: just the murmur of talking, listening, talking again. The gist of it seemed to be that Mum was telling Granny he’d trashed the changing room and been suspended from school. His ears burned with shame.
But then he heard Robert’s name, and that word again—enable. He felt more hopeful. He knew Granny would take his side.
Mum’s voice grew suddenly louder: This isn’t about Robert! And a few seconds later: I should have known you’d turn this i
nto a Robert-hating fest. Finally, a curt: Okay. Bye.
There was a long, long silence before Sam heard a high-pitched moan, as though poor Mum had an awful stomach ache. He expected her to unlock the door, and was poised to dart off into his room, but she didn’t. The basin taps were turned on, and off.
Then she was speaking again. Sam was determined to hear this time, so he jammed his ear hard up against the door. Her voice was lifeless.
Hello, it’s me. Hi. Look, um, I’m just so sorry. I think I must be losing my mind.
She was talking to him. She’d rolled over. She was giving him everything he wanted. Total capitulation.
I know. I’m so sorry. I can’t express how sorry. Yes, I promise. Yes, I do promise.
Sam wasn’t savvy about the ways of the world, but the sound of his mother grovelling to that man was one of the most terrifying things he had ever heard. It made a shiver go up his spine, quite literally. The devil puppet had hold of all their strings, and was making them dance.
•
‘He’s still pulling my strings,’ Sam says now. ‘He’s dead on that floor, but I’m still dancing.’
‘Your grandmother couldn’t help?’ asks Mutesi.
‘She tried her best. He stopped her coming over, but she used to sneak in at break times to see me at school, just to make sure I was all right. When I was about fourteen, she went on some kind of yoga retreat in India. She was only meant to be away three months but she died there. The letter we got said it was a very aggressive virus. A broken heart, I think.’
Mutesi seems to listen to Sam with all her own heart, as though she’s in her kitchen with a troubled grandson yabbering on. He can’t decide whether she’s forgiven him for aiming a shotgun at her this morning, or whether she’s just clever at pretending. Meanwhile Abi kneels straight-backed like Buddha, perched on the vinyl seat. There’s something hypnotic about her green cat’s eyes. Sometimes a vertical furrow appears between them.
Neil has lowered himself awkwardly down onto the floor near to Abi with his left hand resting on Buddy’s head. He says he’s used to sitting on the ground, but Sam is pretty sure his knee is aching, or maybe his hip, or maybe both. Neil has one of those faces that betray everything he’s thinking or feeling. He’d be rubbish at poker—no wonder he’s such a loser when it comes to gambling. Some parts of Sam’s story have his mouth twitching, some almost make him cry. He’s a softie. No wonder he just about had a breakdown when he was teaching. The kids at Sam’s school would have made mincemeat out of him.
The bit about Sam vandalising the changing room has him chuckling.
‘Did you flood the place?’ he asks.
‘No, ’cos the water went down the overflow. I was lucky.’
‘Didn’t you know they had CCTV?’
‘I forgot.’
‘Oops.’
‘Yeah. Oops. I ended up being assessed by a shrink. Robert insisted on coming along, of course, got in his side of the story. The next thing I know I’m taking Ritalin.’
Neil seems interested. He must have come across plenty of toe-rags in his classroom.
‘Oh yes? Did Ritalin help you?’
‘Put it this way: the stuff didn’t transform my life like it does for some people. I could concentrate better maybe, but it gave me stomach aches, made me feel like an engine over-revving. I stopped taking it regularly as soon as I got out from under Robert’s thumb.’
‘But you’re taking it today?’
‘I use it every now and again, when I really need my wits about me.’ Sam pulls the packet from his pocket. Only a couple of pills left. ‘Like now.’
‘So what happened after you were suspended from school?’ asks Abi.
‘After that … years and years of him.’ Sam turns to look towards Robert. His stepdad’s presence is all-pervasive. ‘He got away with murder.’
Abi’s frowning. It deepens the crease on her forehead. ‘Just to be clear: are you suggesting he literally got away with murder? D’you believe Robert killed your father before marrying your mother?’
‘Hamlet,’ murmurs Neil. He leans down to pull something out of Buddy’s fur.
He turned me into dust, insisted Dad in Sam’s dreams. They were just dreams, of course, but they were so very vivid. They still haunt him. As for Mum, Robert certainly did destroy her. He turned her into grey dust before Sam’s very eyes.
‘Depends what you mean by murder,’ he says.
‘Come on!’ Abi smacks her hand onto the table. ‘I mean deliberate and unlawful killing.’
She wants concrete answers and she wants them right now. She’s a bit like Miss Hodgson. It’s not that easy, though. How can he describe such a slow, creeping kind of destruction? How can he make them understand? Years of drip-drip-drip, thousands of poison-tipped darts. Things said to Mum, things said about her, jokes which made all their friends laugh at her. Humiliating little digs, while he stroked her neck and smiled into her eyes like a snake, gently hissing, Shhh, my love, you’re making a fool of yourself. Love and gifts one day, contempt and boredom the next. Sometimes he’d make a casual reference to her age: she was five years older and he never let her forget it. Or it might be a flick of his gaze up and down the outfit she’d carefully chosen. Oh dear, my darling, what’s happened there? And most common of all: It was a joke, Harriet! What’s happened to your sense of humour?
It worked. As the years passed, Mum stopped being Mum. She wasn’t curvy and fun with crazy curls, she didn’t loaf around in her gardening jeans. She didn’t sing in the shower or thunder around the house, and if she laughed it could only be at one of Robert’s jokes. She turned into a tiptoeing wisp of a woman with short hair and expensive clothes that she wore uncertainly, as though she’d stolen them from someone else’s wardrobe. She even spoke carefully, testing the effect on Robert of each word. If he didn’t seem happy she would immediately shut up. He suffocated her life force, drained away all her colour until there was just this obedient, anxious, Mum-shaped shadow left. By the time the cancer came there was nothing left for her to cling to.
As she diminished, Sam began to grow up. He finally got a growth spurt. His voice dropped almost overnight, which was a hell of a shock. He gave away all his puppets except Robert-devil-Santa, which he burned in the Rayburn. At the age of fourteen he was expelled from the church youth group after Donna Davies and he were caught half-dressed in a barn at the annual picnic. He changed mentally too. The darkness and loneliness never quite left him, but he gave up on trying to save Mum. He could see that was hopeless. Instead, he began to obsess about how soon he could leave home.
After turning fifteen he joined the local clay bird club, retrieved Dad’s twelve-bore from Mr Appleton’s safe, and applied for his own shotgun licence. He knew he was a good shot. He was just seven when Dad let him have a go with his own old .410. First time out, Sam hit all the tin cans they’d lined up along the fence. Dad whistled in amazement.
‘You’ve got the knack, son! Your grandpa would be proud.’
Each week they moved a few paces further away from the cans. One morning Sam graduated to clays—smooth flying saucers that shattered in mid-air if you got it right. That was wonderful, but Sam’s favourite bit of the day was cleaning their guns afterwards, sitting side by side at the table in the laundry. Father and son talked as they took them apart, then oiled and cleaned and reassembled them. Sam used to make the job last as long as possible. He revelled in the mingled smells of gun oil, Dad’s instant coffee, the clean starchiness of clothes hanging on the airer.
‘Was Grandpa a nice man?’ he asked.
‘Very.’ Dad was rubbing walnut oil into the stock of his twelve-bore. The wood seemed to come alive under his fingers. Sam loved the intricate metalwork, the oval plate engraved with Grandpa’s initials: JHB. ‘He and I used to sit at this same table to clean these same guns. We used this cleaning rod, these brushes, the same type of oil. If he was here now he’d be telling all manner of tall tales.’
Sam took gre
at pride in his cleaning. When he’d finished, Dad would hold the .410 up to the window, squint down the barrel and say, ‘Look at that—beautiful job. Not a speck.’ He’d slide both guns into their canvas cases and lock them in the metal gun safe. Then he would hide the key, even from Sam.
So when Sam reclaimed the twelve-bore from Mr Appleton, it felt like being reunited with an old friend. He sensed his father’s and grandfather’s touch on the smooth metal and wood; rested his own fingers in the grooves worn by theirs. Both those men had cleaned it at the same table, kept it in the same case and the same safe. As he carried out those rituals he felt a connection with them.
One morning he woke up to hear a flaming row going on downstairs. Mum and Robert. It sounded as though she was standing up for herself for once, and that Sam had to hear. He was well into his teens now, taller and lankier, so it was trickier to be invisible. He rolled out of bed and sneaked as far as the top stair. Robert was employing his usual tactic: attack as a form of defence.
‘I can’t believe you’d invade my privacy! Reading my texts? Scrolling through my—Jesus Christ, you must have used my password! How could you, Harriet? I don’t know what’s going on with you.’
She sounded timid but desperate, like a mouse trying to stand up to a cat.
‘But who are they from?’
‘How the bloody hell should I know? I get texts from customers, from staff, from suppliers, from all kinds of random people. That phone is a tool of my trade.’
‘What about this one? Thanks for last night. You are a magician. And there’s a winky face. What does that mean?’
Robert swore again. There was a pause, maybe while he looked at the screen. When he spoke again, he sounded much calmer.
‘Okay.’ He even chuckled. ‘Okay, okay. Yup. I can see how that could be taken the wrong way, if you’re a bit paranoid. I’d guess this message came from an octogenarian called Joan.’
The Secrets of Strangers Page 22
