Is that really what you care about?’ She flumped back down on the seat, shaking her head. She was angry. Even a stranger could tell that.
‘I know I don’t talk like that, but you pushed me, Iain.’ She sighed heavily, and her voice cracked a little when she spoke again. ‘I’m just trying to help my son.’
Whatever the caller said didn’t help. In fact, she started to cry softly.
‘Iain, you know where we are. I shouldn’t have changed my number, but you …’ A sob escaped, and her hand flew up to her mouth. ‘You know what you did, Iain. I just can’t spend all summer living like that. He can’t cope and, to be honest, neither can I any more.’
Sam decided he had heard more than enough. Turning to go back into the house, he didn’t see a ceramic blue plant pot there, a topiary tree potted in it, and ended up kicking it with his bare foot.
‘Arggh!’ He tried to trap his pain in his mouth, but it squeaked out. He immediately looked to his right, to see if she had heard. Funny that, how a human’s first reaction after kicking a ceramic pot and being ‘punched’ in the scrotum by a ball-shaped tree is to look around to see if anyone was a witness to their failure. She had heard. She was up out of her seat, looking right at him. The phone was still to her ear, and after a moment of panic crossing her features, she narrowed her eyes and made a shushing sound with her finger.
‘Iain, I have to go, okay? Xander is waking up.’ She flinched, nibbling her bottom lip as though considering something. ‘I’ll ask him to call you, yes. I have to go.’
She ended the call and put her hands on her hips.
‘Earwig much?’
Sam held up his hands in surrender.
‘I’m sorry, I really wasn’t. I just came out here to drink my coffee, and then …’ One look at her and he forgot what he was trying to say. Her robe had come undone a little, showing a white t-shirt and pink shorts underneath. It was distracting, and he wasn’t a great liar in the first place. Lies and secrets were two things he abhorred. He dragged his eyes back up to her face, but not before she noticed what he was looking at, covering herself with her robe. Her cheeks flushed, and Sam was conflicted by the action. He had invaded her privacy and then ogled at her, which was bad. The flush in her cheeks wasn’t though, nor the biting of her bottom lip, which she seemed to use as a comfort motion when stressed. That was good. It lit up her whole face. He couldn’t help but think about how he could make her cheeks flush that way again.
‘And then?’ she prompted, hands firmly back on her hips now, with the added movement of a foot tap. He noticed her feet were bare, pretty polish adorning the toes. Polish that was a little wonky.
She followed his eye line and crossed one foot over the other, hiding one set of toes with its counterpart.
‘Xander did my nails last night. Or did you already know that?’
He pulled an action like she had wounded him, reeling back a little and putting his hand over his chest as though shot through with her words.
‘Guilty as charged. I’m sorry, I am not normally nosy. I honestly just did come out here for coffee. You on holiday then?’
She already knew that he had heard her phone call. That this was more than just a holiday. She took the bait though, smiling a fraction of a second at his attempt to smooth things over.
‘Yes. My Auntie Marlene lives here, she’s always at me to come. She asked me to stay with her, but Xander likes his own space, and her house is a lot to take in.’
Sam nodded. ‘Autism, right?’ He said it easily, as he would any other word. He had seen his fair share of kids with different needs over the years, picked things up. On the job, too.
He felt her scrutinise him, as though she was weighing him up and finding him lacking.
‘Yes, he has autism. It’s not been diagnosed long, but I knew.’
Sam nodded, putting his coffee cup down on the table across the deck. Moving a little closer to her.
‘Mothers always know. He got a good school system set up?’
Her face pinched, and the flush disappeared. He regretted asking, if it took that away from him.
‘Kind of. Not really.’ She shrugged. ‘They put things in place, things work for a while. Till someone says something, or there’s an event.’ She looked down at her polish, her face lighting up as she saw the haphazard blobs of polish on her nails. She loved the bones of the boy, Sam didn’t need to ask a question to know that. ‘July was hard, you know. I just needed to get away.’ He waited for her to elaborate, but she was looking at him now. ‘How did you know?’
‘I’ve been around a lot of kids, on the job. My mum is a foster parent too, so I picked a few things up.’
‘I’m sure you did, but living with it is a little different.’ He wanted to counter that he had lived with it, many times over, but what would the point be? He wasn’t a parent, so he didn’t know what it was like to be raising a child, that much was true. Any further explanation would only bring questions back to him, and he didn’t want to talk about it. So they both stood there a while, looking at the other, wanting to ask, to probe, to enquire, but not wishing to divulge anything themselves.
‘Well, I’d better be off to work. You and Xander have a good day, okay?’
At that minute Xander shouted for her from inside, and she automatically took a step closer to the cottage. Her face was pinched, her shoulders up above her ears with the tension of the stress.
‘Hey, listen,’ Sam said softly. ‘It’s your holiday. Enjoy it.’
She said nothing, just waved her fingers at him and headed inside.
‘You have a good day at work.’ Her foot was on the step, when she turned and looked at him, biting her lip. ‘Be safe.’
Sam nodded. No one but his mother had ever cared about him like that. Here she was, worrying for his wellbeing. He stood there, looking at the space where she had just been standing, and felt the bloom of warmth in his chest. It felt nice, having someone take the time to think about him. He thought of his mother and, going indoors, he opened one of the kitchen drawers and pulled out the letter that she had given to him at the train station. He took a seat at the small kitchen table, stretched his long legs out in front of him and, smiling at the looped handwriting he knew so well, opened the cream envelope. There were two sheets of paper inside, folded in half, and when he opened the sheaf, a photograph fell out, face down. He could make out his mother’s faded writing on the back of it. He picked it up and read the inscription. It read:
Baby Sam, with his rescuers. November 1987, Euston Road Fire Station.
None of the description was anything new to him, the details were imprinted in his brain. His mother had told him all about his rescue, the firemen who had cared for him, and the social worker who had called Sondra that icy late November night, telling her a baby had need of a home. Turning over the photo, he saw the original of the photo that hung on the living room wall of Sondra’s home. It was three firemen standing together, a tiny bundle of red cloth wrapped in the middle man’s arms, all three of them smiling at the camera. In the background, on a table in the fire station, is a box. The box he had arrived in, marked ‘Burgess
