Life Begins Read online

  Having briefly rented a flat in Trinity Road as a bachelor, and with his brother based just off Garratt Lane, Dominic had alighted on Wandsworth. It was as good a place as any from which to make a fresh start. St Leonard’s had come up on a Google search, meeting the criteria for being small, co-ed and near an attractive, affordable residential patch. Not long after he had found it, good reports of the school had ricocheted in from several unexpected quarters, including an old friend of Maggie’s, a second cousin and the girl in the Farnham salon who cut Rose’s hair, whose uncle had been a teacher there for twenty years.

  Connections were so comforting, Dominic reflected, standing up and then sitting down again on the lip of his slippery seat as Miss Brigstock reappeared. A slim fair-haired woman bearing a tray of tea things followed, then Rose herself, her socks bulging round her thin ankles, her sharp blue eyes darting anxiously.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’ She had come to stand next to him, close but not touching. Rose nodded, tugged up her socks, then picked at the chewed strips of skin round her nails.

  ‘We need two more chairs, I think,’ commanded the head. ‘Gillian, would you see to it?’

  The younger woman hurried off, returning a couple of moments later with two plastic chairs which she set down opposite the sofa.

  ‘Rose, dear, would you like some juice?’

  Rose shook her head, perched next to her father, then wriggled backwards on to the deep seat, her bare skin squeaking against the leather.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Porter. How fortunate that you were at home – house-hunting, I believe? I hope it’s going well.’

  ‘Very, thank you.’

  She held out a cup of tea, which Dominic accepted gratefully. He was nervous now because Rose was; he could feel it coming off her in waves.

  ‘As I said on the phone,’ Miss Brigstock continued, ‘Rose is in no trouble – no trouble at all.’ She beamed at Rose, who had folded her arms and bowed her head, as if she wanted to sink from view between the sofa’s black jaws. ‘But there has been an unhappy incident and I’m a great believer in nipping things in the bud so I am going to ask you now, Rose, to tell us in your own words exactly what happened.’

  A few doors down the corridor Charlotte, breathless, hot, worried, car keys still in hand, was being shown into a small side room that contained Sam, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and a young man with unkempt dark hair, who was crouching in front of him. The man straightened the moment Charlotte appeared and smiled broadly, offering his hand. ‘Mrs Turner? Philip Dawson, school counsellor.’

  ‘Counsellor?’ Charlotte looked from the man, about whose arrival on the staff she dimly remembered from a school letter, to Sam who, instead of greeting her, had turned his face to the wall. ‘Darling?’ She dropped to her knees beside him, the anxiety still rampant but fused now with a certain relief. He was mercifully undamaged. And however horrible the ‘incident’, as the head, with typical euphemistic PC tact, had described it, at least, with things now out in the open, there was hope of a proper solution. To have the counsellor on board so soon clearly meant the school thought so too. ‘Poor darling. Are you all right? Tell me what happened… Tell Mum.’ She hugged his hunched shoulders.

  ‘Sam?’ prompted the counsellor gently. ‘It’s probably best to explain.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Sam shouted, spitting the last word with such venom that Charlotte rocked off balance.

  ‘Shall I tell Mum, then?’

  Sam shrugged, not looking at either of them.

  ‘Yes, please do,’ Charlotte murmured, getting to her feet, dimly aware that the situation was not going to be quite as straightforward as she had assumed.

  The counsellor cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid Sam has not been very nice to a girl in his class, a girl called Rose who –’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Charlotte interrupted steadily, reaching down to touch the springy top of Sam’s head. The hair felt soft and cool, the scalp burning. ‘You don’t understand. It’s been the other way round for weeks. I don’t know if it was the Rose girl or…’

  Philip Dawson shook his head, offering a regretful smile. ‘During lunch break today –’ He broke off, turning back to Sam. ‘Hey, mate, this would really be better coming from you.’ When Sam remained motionless, his head still twisted in its uncomfortable effort at invisibility, he sighed and continued, ‘During lunch break today Sam pulled Rose Porter’s hair and kicked her.’

  Charlotte released a breathy laugh of disbelief. ‘She must have said something truly horrible.’

  ‘She says she didn’t. She also says that there was another occasion, before after-school club last week, when Sam held her arm behind her back and –’

  ‘I do not believe this.’ Tears were close, but Charlotte knew she had to stay focused and brave. ‘Sam is the one who has been having a hard time, needing help, not this girl. I even spoke to his teacher about it because I knew something wasn’t right.’

  ‘Absolutely. Something is not right and we’re going to help Sam to overcome –’

  ‘Where is Miss Brigstock? I wish to see her now.’

  ‘I’m about to take you to her, Mrs Turner. At the moment she is with Rose and her father. We’re going to sort this out together. Please try to remain calm,’ he added, glancing at Sam.

  Charlotte, taking a deep breath, felt a huge swell of longing for Martin. She couldn’t handle this sort of thing alone, she just couldn’t. He would be firm without getting hysterical. He would know what to do, how to handle this scruffy young man with his soft Irish voice, too-long hair and winning smile. Stick to your guns, she told herself. Stick to the truth. ‘Sam would never deliberately hurt another –’

  ‘There are several children who will vouch for what Rose has told us, Mrs Turner,’ he interrupted gently. He paused for Charlotte to take this in, then added, in a tone infused with enough compassion to suggest that, armed as he was with the sword of truth, part of him had no wish to deliver the final blow, ‘And we have CCTV footage of the incident last week –’

  ‘CCTV footage?’

  ‘All schools have cameras, these days, for security purposes. We have checked them. I’m sorry, what Rose has told us appears to be true.’

  Charlotte turned away to compose herself, pressing her face into her palms. The counsellor dropped to his knees next to Sam. ‘We’ll sort this out, mate, okay? The first step is you owning up to it. Then, of course, you must say sorry to Rose, promise to be her friend – which you can do right now – and then you can put it behind you. And once a week, or more if you like, you and I are going to meet for a chat about how it’s going and how you’re feeling. It’s tough, I know. All you kids have a lot on your plate, don’t you?’

  During the course of this speech Sam had slowly swivelled his head to meet the counsellor’s gaze. Charlotte, peering over her fingertips, saw both the good, kind body language of the man and the capitulating shame in her son’s response to it. So he had done these terrible things. So he wasn’t the bullied but the bully. And that was unacceptable and she would make sure Sam knew it. And yet for those few moments all Charlotte wanted to do was barge the counsellor out of the way, grab Sam’s hand and run – back down the corridor of brown lino, past the classrooms, the framed pieces of creative excellence and notices about fire drills to a seclusion that would keep them safe from pain, anger, fear and all the other myriad stumbling blocks to the seemingly impossible business of being happy.

  Charlotte had certain tricks for getting to sleep, honed over years of battling an inclination towards insomnia. Counting helped, not sheep, but days – until Christmas, Sam’s birthday, her birthday, her next period and the one after that, assuming that the cycle was twenty-eight days and not twenty-seven, or –six, as was sometimes the case. If she was lucky, oblivion kicked in before she could work it out. Then there were the little white tablets, secured on a desperate visit to her GP during the final harrowing phase with Martin, when she had we
pt and gabbled embarrassingly about her husband seeing another woman. The doctor, her least favourite in the practice, with a nasal voice and a habit of tapping his pen against the edge of his desk, had suggested she contact Relate and printed out a prescription for temazepam, which he and his colleagues had renewed during several subsequent visits.

  The efficacy of the tablets, the joy of knowing that relief was at hand, had been, for Charlotte, nothing short of a revelation: one swallow and the ghastly nocturnal arguing or, just as bad, the thick silence of not arguing, the invisible impenetrable wall of not touching, was gone. Except that waking each time to the groggy recollection of reality had been somehow harder, like stepping into precisely the sort of nightmare from which daylight was supposed to offer rescue.

  Turning on her side that Thursday night, Charlotte opened her bedside drawer and pulled out the little brown medicine bottle for the first time in ten months. It still wasn’t too late to blank out the grim images of the afternoon – more vivid in recollection than they had been in the dazed state through which she had experienced them: Sam meekly, miserably, shaking the girl’s limp hand with the adults watching, as awkwardly stage-managed as her own handshake with the father, all carried out against a murmuring backdrop of platitudes and civility. And why these two? Charlotte had despaired then and many times since. The man with the dead wife who had hated her house, and the gawky daughter, with her fragile, stick-thin freckled arms and legs. Why couldn’t Sam have attacked a creature less pathetic, some gum-chewing fat kid with sticking-out ears and piggy eyes?

  Reconciliations done, assurances made – that Sam, too, needed support and would receive it – Charlotte had been unable to shake off the sense that her son’s failure to behave decently was her failure too. If unhappiness was the root cause, this too had to be her fault. No one said as much, but she could feel them thinking it. Steering Sam out past the smiles and nodding heads, mustering a show of dignity she could not feel, Charlotte decided she would prefer to face a firing squad than go through anything similar again.

  Once home, she had let Sam, ashen, exhausted, beyond talking, eat tea in front of the television before going to bed. ‘She didn’t like me,’ had been his only offering of explanation during the course of these rituals. ‘No one likes me.’ He had fallen asleep in instants, plucking a grubby white seal from the array of soft toys on the shelf above his bed and tucking it under his chin.

  Tiptoeing downstairs, Charlotte had called Martin, only to hear Cindy’s singsong voice reporting that neither of them could come to the phone right now, and then Tim, to cancel the date. She gave the reason briefly, baldly, too wrung out herself to care how any of it sounded. After that she had made herself some baked beans on toast and had the first forkful raised to her mouth when Martin returned her call.

  ‘Did you see this footage?’ he snarled. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t even ask,’ Charlotte had stammered. ‘I… Sam… Sam did these things, Martin. He’s owned up, said sorry. He did these things.’

  She could hear him drawing breath, faint but distinct, the pull-back before the release.

  ‘Just tell me how,’ he exploded, ‘how you could have misread the situation so catastrophically? Thinking that someone was mistreating Sam when –’ Charlotte had switched off then, in self-defence, stepping away from his voice and the plate of cold baked beans to a tight tiny place inside her head.

  How indeed? Charlotte’s arm felt heavy as she shook the little plastic bottle and put it down again. They had propped her up during her lowest ebb. To resort to them again would be tantamount to an admission that she had sunk as low again, that even without an icy, hostile, deceiving husband to blame, she was still incapable of finding peace, still ballsing everything up.

  The night, without sleep, had its phases. The hum of cars grew more intermittent. Two cats performed a duet of high-pitched yowls. A rowdy group of youths shouted, laughed and kicked cans. The darkness thickened, then thinned to a speckled grey as the moon played cat-and-mouse with clouds. With exhaustion came a sort of manic lucidity. So she had been wrong, thought the best of her child instead of the worst, seen echoes of her own deepest fears rather than his. So what? That just meant she was human. And the school was accountable too – the form teacher with her candy-floss hair and saccharine smile, not to mention Martin…

  Charlotte sat up and switched on the light. Squinting in its glare, she fumbled for the bedside phone and called Martin’s mobile. It was unsociably early but he always switched off his phone overnight anyway and all she wanted to do was unburden herself in a message, to fight back as she had failed to earlier, explain what shouldn’t need explaining, that Sam’s behaviour meant he was indeed unhappy, as she had suspected, that not feeling loved made people do all sorts of things and it was up to them, as parents, to help him through.

  She had said it all, speaking with a clipped lucidity usually beyond her in conversation, when the phone rang back at her and Cindy’s voice, soft and wary, was on the line. ‘Charlotte?’

  ‘Cindy, I’m sorry, I… just left Martin a message. I…’ Charlotte looked at her clock. It was half past five. In the charcoal dark outside, birdsong had started.

  ‘About Sam?’

  ‘Of course, yes – I’m so sorry to have woken you. I thought his phone would be off.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I was awake already.’

  ‘Oh?’ Charlotte waited, expecting anger.

  ‘Terrible about Sam. Unbelievable. He’s such a sweetie.’

  ‘Yes, yes, he is.’

  ‘Shall I ask Martin to call you, then?’

  ‘Well, I’ve left that message but, yes, thanks.’ Charlotte hesitated, suppressing an absurd impulse to ask Cindy if she was okay. She didn’t sound okay.

  ‘’Bye, then.’

  ‘’Bye, Cindy.’

  Charlotte switched off the light and pulled the duvet back up to her chin. The bed felt huge suddenly. She skated her foot into some of the icy space on what had been Martin’s side, remembering the loveliness of feeling for a warm leg with cold toes. Were Cindy and Martin in trouble? She let the thought float, trying to study it from all sides, testing her emotions. Under pressure Martin could be insufferable. And recently Cindy had been looking drained. Maybe patterns there, too, were repeating. Comforted, Charlotte fell asleep at last, hugging the pillows on the empty side of the bed, warming them with the heat of her chest.

  Upstairs, Sam slept soundly until roused by an ache in his bladder. He took his seal to the bathroom, propping it up on the lavatory and keeping half an eye on its whiskery face while he peed. It felt nice, so nice, that he was careful about the drips for once and even bothered to wash his hands afterwards. He was supposed to feel terrible, he knew, because he had done terrible things. To Rose, stupid Rose, who was so good at being a tree, who looked at him like he wasn’t there. Why? That was all they wanted to know, like there had to be reasons for everything when most stuff wasn’t like that, when most stuff just happened. He hadn’t really hurt her, just a pinch and a twist, to see how she would react more than anything – and, maybe, to sort of show her he was there.

  Sam turned for the door, then remembered the seal. It was staring with its tiny yet eyes, glittery and knowing. He picked it up and ran his nose along the soft fur. It smelt of his bed, of him, probably. It was a nice smell, Sam decided, burrowing his nose deeper and thinking of the weird soapy scent of the sheets at George’s house and of Rose for the few seconds that he had held her pinned to his chest, pepperminty, warm. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He hadn’t. Sam pressed his face into the soft belly of the seal, letting the grubby fur soak up his tears and the dribble of snot from his nose.

  Back in bed, he watched the long metal hands of his new bedroom clock jerk round the dial, wishing there was some way of stopping them, some way of it never being morning and time to go to school. There was, he knew, no question of a reprieve. He had never seen his mother more angry – the chilling silence in t
he car, her mouth a tight line, her eyes ablaze. But far worse had been the look on her face in the head’s study, her eyes glassy and her mouth twitching like his did when he was trying not to cry. Sam had prayed that she wouldn’t. All through the talking and the shaking hands and the saying sorry it was the only thing he could think about. And she hadn’t. The liquid along her eyelids was visible but it never overflowed and when her lips twitched she bit them.

  It seemed only seconds later that the doorbell rang. Sam, alert instantly to the need to curry favour, sprinted down the stairs and scrabbled with the locks, dragging the hall chair across to reach the top bolt.

  ‘For your mum, I should imagine,’ said the delivery man, winking as he handed over a large bunch of yellow roses. ‘Birthday, is it? Let’s hope they’re from your dad, eh?’

  Sam closed the door slowly. It wasn’t his mum’s birthday, was it? He ransacked his brain, producing a recollection not of Charlotte’s date of birth but that the celebrations tended to coincide with summer half-term. And they hadn’t even had Easter yet, so that was okay. He turned for the stairs, carrying the bouquet carefully in both arms, knowing it couldn’t be from his father but rather hoping the estate agent with the beard wasn’t responsible either.

  ‘Sam, who was it?’

  ‘Hang on.’ He took the last few stairs two at a time, spurred on by the realization that flowers, from whatever source, were likely to put her in a good mood.

  At first things looked very promising. On seeing the roses, Charlotte propped herself up in bed with a sort of squeal, then tore at the little envelope as if it was indeed a birthday present – the most exciting one she’d ever had. While reading it, she sniffed dreamily at the flowers, then slumped back against the pillows with a goofy smile on her face. They were from Tim Croft, she confessed, goofier still, although Sam, with application that would have given fresh hope to his English teacher, had already worked that out for himself by reading the note upside-down: With love from Tim. Dinner next Friday? I never give up.