know what affected me because whatever it was actually affected all three of us. Lola is always level-headed. In her case at least the cycle of family wrongness has been broken. And even her concern about Jack’s oddness wasn’t as deep as mine. ‘Sure, he’s kind of a weird kid. But not as weird as some, believe me. He’ll grow out of the bird thing, and the not talking. Probably when he gets a girlfriend.’
‘I’d just like him to have some friends, let alone a girl.’
‘Mum, he’s okay.’
She picked up her denim jacket now, with its badges and graffiti, and stitched-on bits of ribbon and braid. She was eager to get on her way. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ So I didn’t share everything with her.
Lola whirled out of the house. I went upstairs, knocked softly on Jack’s door and, when there was no answer, turned the knob. Sometimes he bolted it but tonight it opened. The light was out and I could hear his breathing, although something told me he wasn’t asleep. ‘Jack?’
There was no answer.
Cassie’s room had been sweet with the innocence and trustingness of babyhood, but in here all I could pick up was the darkness of rejection.
‘Goodnight,’ I whispered.
He walked off up the road, very slowly, his bag slouched across his back and the soles of his trainers barely lifting off the pavement. At the corner he paused and looked right and left, but he never glanced over his shoulder to see if I was still standing in the doorway of the house. I watched until he turned left, in the direction of school, and plodded out of my sight. Only then did I go back inside and begin to put together my things for work.
I was shaking with the tension of the morning. It was the third day of the summer term and every morning so far Jack had refused to get out of bed. Then, when I finally hauled him out from under the covers, he refused to get dressed. He didn’t speak, let alone argue; once movement became unavoidable he just did everything very, very slowly.
‘Jack, you have to go to school. Everybody does. It’s a fact of life.’
He shrugged and turned away. While I stood over him, he had got as far as putting on his school shirt and it hung loose over his pyjama bottoms. I could see faint blue veins under the white skin of his chest and his vulnerability made me want to hold him, but I knew if I tried to touch him he would pull away.
‘Jack, we have to talk about this.’
‘Talk,’ he muttered finally, as if the mere suggestion exasperated him.
‘Yes, talk.’ I struggled to be patient and moderate. You could ache for him, for what he was going through, and at the same time irritation made you long to slap him. Hard.
‘Mum.’
‘Yes?’ I said eagerly.
‘Go away if you want me to get dressed.’
‘I’ll make you some toast. Would you like an egg?’
‘No.’
‘Downstairs in five minutes, please.’
Five minutes turned into fifteen. He ate his toast very slowly while I sat waiting.
‘You’re going to be late.’
‘Oh no.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped, ‘what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with school? If you won’t talk to me or anyone else how can we help you? What’s wrong?’
Jack fumbled with a knife, then dropped it with a clatter. He looked around the kitchen as if surveying his life, and then said out of a pinched mouth, ‘Everything.’
The bleakness of this was unbearable.
I remembered how it felt to be his age, at the mercy of the world and powerless to change anything. I tried to touch his hand but he pulled away as if my fingertips might burn him.
I took a breath. ‘Jack, listen. It just seems like everything, you know. It isn’t so bad. There are lots of things you enjoy and look forward to.’ Although if he had pressed me to name them, I couldn’t have got much beyond seagulls. ‘And you’ve got us, Lola and me, and your dad as well. If we try and work out what’s most wrong, I can help you.’ This sounded feeble, even to my own ears.
There was a small silence. Then he said flatly, ‘You?’
I understood that everything mostly meant his life in this house, with me and without his father.
It wasn’t that he didn’t see Tony: the three and a half weeks since Ted’s death had spanned the school Easter holidays and the two of them had been away together for three days’ fishing in Devon. Lola could have gone too, but she had preferred to stay in London. Once or twice a month Jack went over to Twickenham to spend a night with Tony and his second family, and there were weekday evenings too when he and Lola went out for pizza or a film with him. But that wasn’t the same as having a father who lived in the same house and didn’t have to portion out his time with such meticulous care.
Everything wasn’t school and friends or the lack of them, although I wanted to believe that it was. The trouble was home, and home was mostly me. In the last few weeks and months Jack had gradually stopped communicating, had withdrawn himself from our already dislocated family, but he had never let me hear the roots of his unhappiness as clearly as in that one word, you?
I wished just as much as he did that he had a live-in father. I wished he didn’t have to live with just two women, or that he and Lola were closer in age, or that he had been born one of those children who found it easy to make friends. And I wished that I had been able to break the cycle that began with Ted and me, and rolled on with me and Jack, in the way I had apparently been able to break it for Lola.
The silence extended itself. The need to cry burned behind my eyes, the pressure of years of denied weeping swelling inside my skull, but I didn’t cry and my inability to do so only increased my sense of impotence. Unwitting Jack, my unlucky child, was the focus of this mighty powerlessness. I couldn’t make the world right for him, I couldn’t even make the dealings between us right. Sympathy for him was squeezing my heart so I could barely speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.
He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Going to school,’ was his only response.
I went with him to the door and watched him until he was out of sight. I longed to run after him, to go with him and shield him through the day, to turn his everything into nothing that mattered and let us both start again, but I couldn’t. It was hard to accept that after all the promises I had made to myself when they were small, about always being close to my children and never letting them down, there was still a breach between Jack and me. Ted was dead and gone but somehow his damned legacy was right here in our house with us.
I was angry as well as impotent. I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, so hard that the pain jarred
