When she’s on nights, she’ll often have Solly all day the next day because she’s trying to save money on the childminder (Ellie’s sense of impoverishment is their microclimate). She’ll doze on the sofa while he plays in front of rolling episodes of Peppa Pig. There has never been a worse time to work for the NHS, Ellie says. The management obsessed with targets and budgets, every shift short-staffed. No love, only constraint and a communal sense of harassment. Yet her sister has also been a master of evasion lately, time thick yet hollow. The stresses and strains mingled with absences unexplained. ‘Shift ran over, sorry.’ Or, ‘Training. Kept me late.’
Manon frowns at the children: ‘He’d also love to bury his face in Haribo; doesn’t mean he can, does it?’ She strides over and lifts the iPad out of Fly’s hands and Solly – predictably – howls, launching himself, starfish-shaped, to the floor. The passion erupting from him, their three-foot Vesuvius. Solomon Bradshaw is either happy or angry. There appears to be nothing in between.
‘See what you did?’ says Fly.
Home three seconds, and already she’s the object of hatred.
‘Where’s Ellie?’ Manon asks, keeping hold of the iPad and wondering where she can hide it this time. Out in the shed? In the freezer? This is the wonder of parenting: behind every new low is a lower low, to which you thought you’d never stoop.
‘Gone out.’
‘Out? Where? Working?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Well, how long did she leave you alone with Solly?’
If she’s on a shift, she should have cleared it, made sure Manon could cover her. Or is she having some fun – heaven forfend! – leaving Manon sore, bicep straining as she holds aloft her measuring jug of what is owed and what’s been taken. A life with children has brought out in Manon her meanest spirit – never a moment when she isn’t keeping a tally.
Fly has got up, lifting Solly’s stiff body off the floor. ‘Not long,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I don’t mind. Come on dude, time for the bath.’
Manon watches them walk out towards the stairs, Solly’s puce face, his breathing juddering with outrage, his little splayed fat hands on Fly’s close-cut hair.
Flumping into an armchair, Manon feels her tiredness mingle with affection for her adopted son; so much older than his years. She’s often washed over with it – pride in his reading, in his gentleness, his soft manners, his decency, his care of Solly.
Solly’s mission statement, bellowed while trying to climb the cupboard shelves towards the biscuit tin, is MY DO DAT! He can turn purple at the prospect of being denied complete autonomy – for example, not being allowed to start the car or push his buggy blindly into oncoming traffic; eat a snail or run off with the back-door key. Hot cheeks, angry square face torn up with his despair; trousers descending below the nappy-line, impossibly short legs. His unreasonableness smiled at (most of the time), especially when, tears spurting, he rubs furiously at his eyes and shouts ‘MY NOT TIRED!’ as if the mere suggestion is a gross slur on his toddler honour.
She could sleep right now.
She could sleep walking up the stairs.
She could sleep stirring a pan at the stove.
The baby squirms, bag of eels.
Yes, it’s laughable that she should consider herself the author of Fly’s best qualities. She’s been his mother for such a short time she can no more claim credit for his good qualities than his bad. His goodness is courtesy of his alcoholic mother, Maureen Dent, slumped with her bottle of Magners in front of Cash in the Attic (no cash in their attic, in fact no attic), and down to his brother Taylor, who loved him, who took care of him, probably in much the same way Fly cares for Solly now she thinks about it – you love in the way you have been loved, after all. Taylor turned tricks on Hampstead Heath and was murdered because of it – the homicide that brought Manon and Fly together. Perhaps his goodness is down to the genes of a Nigerian father Fly has never met. The more Manon lives with children, the more she believes in the determination of genes.
Neither a child nor a teenager, though if she has to pick, Manon would place Fly closer to the adolescent camp. People who meet him think him nearer 15 than 12. She has come to realise adolescence is not switched on at once – it seeps, gradually, during late childhood. There are glimpses from age 10. Some say earlier, though she doesn’t know about that. It’s more like a litmus paper turning blue, as the hormones leach.
Fly can read a room before she can. If there is an accident in his vicinity, he acknowledges vicarious feelings of guilt; can trace the root of awkwardness in a conversation. He once said of a rather sadistic PE teacher, ‘She’s mean to us because she had an injury and now she can’t be an athlete.’ He can identify envy without judging a person for it. All this he does quietly, and though she has always thought of empathy as imbued or developed, with him it seems innate. Its flip side is heightened sensitivity – an aversion to high collars and the congestion of cuffs under his coat, which means he wears only a fraction of his wardrobe: one beloved pair of tracksuit bottoms and one hoodie – with the hood down, Manon is forever insisting, though he takes less and less notice of her. Tall black youth with his hood up? He might as well wear a sign saying ‘Arrest me now.’
Stork-like, he is all limbs. Silent much of the time and unknowable. Fly is unhappy – she knows that much, knows too that she is the cause, and this she can hardly bear. She has uprooted him, unfurled his sensitivities like wounds open to the air. He is not himself. She hopes he’ll settle in.
Even so, he has his playful moments – has begun taking pleasure in irony: putting his arm around her shoulder, towering lankily above her, and saying, ‘I’m just off out,’ and her saying, ‘No you’re not,’ and him saying, ‘That’s right, I’m not, I don’t know where that came from.’ Both of them smiling at each other. They can begin to enjoy a new kind of conversation, with meanings other than what is said.
‘You are so down with the kids,’ he’ll say to her when she puts some kind of easy-listening mum-pop on the iPod.
Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. What is that? Lines from Twelfth Night embedded in her brain. Funny that she’d resented all the drumming and drilling at school, the tittering and yawning in uniforms as lines were delivered by lacklustre boys and girls leaning back in their chairs. The essays on Coriolanus or Much Ado. She hadn’t realised those lines would be the ones to comfort her most in the second half of her life. Perhaps the teachers knew; had thought to themselves, ‘You’ll thank me one day.’
It’s good to have Manon back, he thinks, striding across the police station car park towards the featureless grass expanse of Hinchingbrooke Park. He plans to cut through to the wooded area where the body has been found – quicker than trying to walk the enormous curve of Brampton Road. That road is gridlocked with rush-hour traffic, the headlights of school-run mums and commuters out of Huntingdon. Only around five-ish – an unusual time of day for someone to meet a violent death. And opposite a school, too.
He’s anxious to get there, to be the first. He breaks into a jog. In the distance, he can see blue lights illuminating the trees in a rhythmic sweep, the flash of a couple of fluorescent
