shoulders sagged when he learned that Tarants lived with his sister. I looked away. We all knew that our SD1 postcode – stabbings, domestics, heroin overdoses – was the one that the emergency services tried to pass like a forfeit at a party. SD2, a weird oasis of grand Victorian houses bordering our area of flat-roofed sixties flats and terraced stone-clad boxes, was the black fruit gum that everyone wanted – stranded Persian cats, heart attacks, fingers lopped off by pruning secateurs.
When Simon had finished, he smiled round at me, too young for a man who had all of us staring as though he was about to walk on water. Harley didn’t seem to suffer from that best-pants-for-the-doctor deference, though. ‘Cor. How do you know what to do? Have you seen someone die? Will he die? I want to be a doctor like you.’
‘I have seen someone die. Sometimes it happens even when we try our very best. But Tarants is going to be okay. There’s nothing stopping you becoming a doctor. You just have to work hard at school – and have a stomach for blood, which you obviously have.’ He said it like he really believed Harley could do it. And that made me want to smother him with big fat grateful kisses.
Just as I was noticing that he did have quite nice lips, I heard, ‘Hey, Bronte. What you doing here? I thought you was late home from school. I came out to see where you’d got to.’ I turned to see Colin standing behind us, hands on hips. When he came out to see where his little princess was, he was just being a good dad. I, on the other hand, was ‘blinking neurotic’.
‘Bleeding hell, Maia, I thought you’d be home by four. I didn’t realise you was going to get the kids. You’re not going to have time to cook tea before you get off to work.’
I didn’t want to confirm Simon’s SD1 expectations by launching into a slanging match in the street. Colin glanced down at Tarants but apparently the thought of his own hand-to-metal contact with a tin opener was a far greater tragedy than leaving your brains splattered on the road.
I tried to pacify him. ‘I went out to put a notice up in the post office and as it was home time, I thought I’d meet the kids, and then—’
Simon looked up, right into Colin’s paint-spattered sweatshirt. ‘Your wife saw this young man had hurt himself, so she very kindly called the emergency services and was good enough to stay here to make sure he was okay. He should be fine but I’ve got an ambulance coming to take him to the hospital so he can be checked over,’ he said, as though Colin had been falling over himself to make Tarants’ welfare his top concern rather than his ever-rumbling belly.
‘Mai, you’ve done your Good Samaritan bit, so stop bloody standing there and get your arse into gear.’ Colin ignored Simon as though he was just supermarket music.
Simon was obviously a stranger to SD1 customs. He looked over to me and nodded towards Colin. ‘Don’t you mind him talking to you like that?’
For a paramedic with all those qualifications, he wasn’t very bright. I shrugged, knowing that getting my arse into gear had rocketed up from an order to an urgent necessity. I started grabbing the school bags, hustling Harley and Bronte on their way as the first darts of panic shot through me.
Colin stood there, arms folded, jaw bull-dogging like a bouncer from a two-bit nightclub.
‘Come on, let’s go.’ I grabbed hold of Colin’s sleeve.
‘Hang on a minute. You got something to say, mate? Maia here’s got work to do. She needs to be at home sorting out her own family, not sticking her beak into other people’s business and looking for trouble when we got enough of our own. Why don’t you get on with saving the world and leave how I talk to the missus to me?’
I wasn’t so much grabbing as hanging on now.
‘Sorry,’ Simon said. ‘I wasn’t having a go. I think your wife did a kind thing for Tarants here and it seems disrespectful to speak to her like that. You should be proud of her. You’re a lucky man.’
I tried to make out the look on Simon’s face. Not confrontational, just matter-of-fact. Politely surprised even that Colin had spoken to me like that rather than licking the ground clean in front of me. I willed him to shut up before he became his own customer.
‘Since when have you been the expert on me missus?’ But I felt the tension in his forearm sag. Colin always loved having something someone else admired: the red Kawasaki when I first knew him; Bronte as a toddler, with her brown ringlets and eyes like little walnuts; that bloody phone that had nearly landed him in prison for handling stolen goods. Simon didn’t respond, just carried on packing up, arranging rolls of gauze in his bag and checking the bandage around Tarants’ head. Colin was used to men who either quaked in their boots or charged in, arms and legs flying like a Tom and Jerry scuffle. Indifference seemed to floor him.
I called Bronte over. ‘Start walking with Dad, I won’t be a minute.’
Bronte put her hand into Colin’s. ‘Fuckwit,’ Colin said over his shoulder, and walked off, all big man swagger. I breathed out.
Harley hung back with me. I said a quiet goodbye to Tarants but he didn’t answer. The girl mumbled, ‘Cheers’, and gave me a wave, which round here was almost a handwritten thank you note. There was no shock, no soft sympathy in her face. I braced myself for the pity on Simon’s, but instead he thanked me and turned his attention to the ambulance that had just raced round the corner.
‘Twenty-four thousand pounds a year, until the children are eighteen?’ I said. Twenty-four thousand pounds was so many hours of cleaning that I thought I might start laughing and never stop.
The professor’s solicitor, Mr Harrison, nodded and shuffled his papers. ‘Yes, she left enough money so that both children can stay at Stirling Hall School until they finish their A-levels, should they wish to do so.’
‘Why would she do that?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking that she might’ve left me something little, y’know, like her reading lamp or some of her books. I mean, not that I would rather have had that, I’m really grateful, but I was just the cleaner.’ I fidgeted on his very upright chair. I wasn’t used to wearing a skirt and I felt as though I had been rootling through my mum’s dressing up box. Trousers hadn’t seemed right though, and I didn’t want this guy in his pinstriped waistcoat to think I wasn’t paying proper respect to the prof.
Mr Harrison put the lid on his pen. He had that look about him. Teachers have it on parents’ evening, that blank face that doesn’t give anything away. ‘She’s written you a letter. Would you like to go into the waiting room to read it? I’ve got some phone calls to make, so don’t rush.’
I went and sat in a bright little room next to piles of Country Life magazines. My eyes pricked when I saw Professor Stainton’s careful writing. She’d addressed the letter to Amaia Etxeleku, which almost made me smile. No one called me Amaia, but Professor Stainton thought nicknames were laziness, ‘especially if one has a name to reflect one’s heritage’. The fact that my mother came from a little village in the Basque country fascinated the professor. I hadn’t been there since I was a teenager. Mum and I had always planned to go back together but she’d died before there’d ever been enough cash for jaunts abroad. The Basque thing probably wouldn’t have meant anything to me at all except it was obvious I wasn’t English. I often got mistaken for an Italian with my long dark hair and big cow eyes, just nowhere near as stylish.
