Читать книгу A Boy Without Hope: Part 2 of 3 - Casey Watson, Casey Watson - Страница 8

What’s that story about the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dam? Knowing that if he pulls it out there will be a torrent and then a flood? I don’t know what had happened, exactly – was it the action of leaving the house? Or getting in the car? I had no idea which, but one thing was clear. It was almost as if a switch had flipped inside Miller, and turned him into a completely different child.

‘Do you think Donald Trump is a good president, Casey? Do they have a phone shop in your town? And have they got a game shop? Or are we just going to do boring things when we get there? I hate shopping. I like phone shopping and game shopping, but I hate shopping-­shopping. Just so you know.’

This just in the few seconds it took to reverse off the drive. More words that I’d heard him say at one time in a long while. And on it went. Was there a climbing wall, like in the last place he’d gone to? How long would the journey take? Would he be allowed any sweets? ‘And, as well,’ he continued, ‘do you know what horse power this engine has? It’s important, for, like, when you are loading it up with passengers and suitcases and everything. And, as well, did you know that the size of your feet when you’re a baby determines how tall you’re going to be as an adult? Casey? Answer me. Did you? Did you know that?’

It was such a torrent of words that I even checked the rear-view mirror, just in case Miller had run off and persuaded a completely different child to take his place.

I managed to meet his eye, even if only briefly. ‘Goodness me,’ I said. ‘One question at a time, please, Miller. And maybe it should wait till we get into town, eh? There are lots of new road works and I don’t want to end up in the wrong lane or something. Okay? And could you stop yanking my seat back while you’re talking, please?’

‘Okay,’ he said. But it did nothing to stem the astonishing tide. This was more unsolicited conversation than I’d heard from him since he’d been with us, in fact, and I was truly stumped by what had brought it about. ‘What do you think about that North Korean leader?’ he asked brightly. ‘I reckon Trump will off him. His followers all have the same haircuts, you know. Shall I tell you the history of the Korean divide? Casey, do they have a game shop in town? I bet they do. Towns always do. I bet they have lots of phone shops as well. Which do you think is best, the Galaxy or the iPhone?’

By the time I’d wound my tortuous way through the road works and into the town-centre car park, I felt almost like my head was exploding. And before long, with no sign of his non-stop chatter abating, I began to wonder if there wasn’t more to this uncharacteristic animation than I’d first supposed. Yes, it was great that he was chatting to me, but was that all there was to it? He seemed to leap from one bizarre train of thought to another, and though my professional head wondered if this, too, was a sign of autism, my instinct, increasingly, was that I was being wound up. That he was babbling on at me with the express intention of irritating me. To the point, given I was trying to negotiate Saturday afternoon town-centre traffic, that I would tell him to shut up?

It was an effort of will (why did this kid keep bringing out the worst in me?) to stick to the former. ‘Right!’ I said cheerfully, once we were safely in our parking space and I’d opened the door to let him out. ‘Shoot. Ask me anything you want.’

Miller yanked his hoodie down over his skinny hips. He seemed all out of questions. ‘Donald Trump, was it?’ I prompted, as I shut and locked the car.

Silence. I pointed towards the pedestrian exit and he stomped along beside me. ‘Are we going to the phone shop first?’ he finally asked.

‘The phone shop? No, love. We’re not. I don’t need to go to the phone shop.’

‘The game shop, then? The game shop and then the phone shop.’

I stopped by the fire door. ‘Miller, I’ve come into town to pick up a few bits that I need. Then maybe to get a coffee – and you can have an ice cream, if you like – and only then, if there’s time, we might go in the game shop. Whether that happens or not will very much depend on you.’

He stood and pouted, his gaze darting around me rather than at me. ‘Not going, then. Not till you promise about the game shop.’

‘That’s not a promise I’m prepared to make, Miller. That’s not how it works. You asked to come, and I’ve brought you, but I’m here to do my shopping. So your choice is to accompany me without moaning and groaning, in which case, there will definitely be an ice cream in the mix, and, if there’s time, we will go to the game shop. Alternatively’ – at this point I pulled my phone out of my handbag – ‘I can ring Mike and have him come and pick you up now instead. Your call, love. I’m easy. But I have been cooped up for days now, and I am doing my shopping. Whether you stay with me or get taken home is entirely up to you.’

‘Fine!’ he huffed, pushing open the door to the stairwell. ‘I’ll do all the boring stuff. But it best not take all day!’

Had I levelled up Miller’s imaginary scorecard? I hoped so. Though it nagged at me anyway, that sense of not quite being in control; of having to pit my wits against him to try and ‘win battles’. We were not supposed to be point scoring, like kids in a playground. I was his carer, and he was supposed to be earning points. Or would be, had we been able to sit down and create the chart to put them on together. Still, early days, I decided, as we emerged into the shopping mall. This was new territory – we were out, and that was something in itself. And in this new landscape – both in terms of the physical and the mental – all I could really do was go with the flow.

Though ‘flow’ was a long way from being achieved. ‘What exactly are you going to buy in here?’ he asked, as we went into my favourite clothes shop. ‘Do you know? Because if you know what you want, it won’t take very long, will it. And then we’ll have time for the game shop.’

I almost cracked a smile at the thought that those would be Mike’s thoughts and words exactly – well, if he dared voice them. Which, of course, he wouldn’t. One of the reasons our marriage endured was that, unless it was for some big manly electrical item, Mike didn’t come shopping with me any more. As far as he was concerned shopping was a chore, not a hobby. So I did have a smidge of sympathy for Miller. Or would have, had he not finished with, ‘Well?’

‘Miller, please!’ I said. ‘We had a deal, remember? And if you want me to keep my end of the bargain, then you have to be patient, and not badger me, okay? We will get to the game shop when, and if, we get there.’

I was obviously long used to expecting the unexpected when fostering, but even I was astounded at what Miller did next. Which was to drop to the floor, lie down on his back and start cycling his legs madly, as if an enthusiastic participant at a legs, bums and tums class. Round they went, as if piston-powered, while his arms did their own thing – mostly flapping up and down as if miming a doggy paddle, right in the aisle between the jeans and dresses. Not so much ‘downward-facing dog’ as ‘stricken beetle’.

I wasn’t stunned for long, despite his accompanying shrieking. For this was clearly no tantrum. Just a ploy to deflect me. Designed to ensure maximum embarrassment, and so ensure we beat a hasty retreat.

So, rather than doing so, I ignored him, just as I would with a toddler, and began riffling through a pile of pastel jeans. Then, having selected a pair, I walked around him to a nearby mirror, where I held them against me, deciding whether they’d suit me.

‘Excuse me, madam.’ Another person appeared beside my reflection. ‘Is that young man over there’ – she gestured backwards – ‘with you?’

It was obviously important that I brazen this one out. ‘He is,’ I confirmed, sotto voce. ‘He’s just amusing himself while I finish my shopping. He’s not bothering anyone, is he? He’ll be done soon.’

‘Um,’ the shop assistant said. And would doubtless have said more. Except Miller, red in the face, had scrambled to his feet, and now did his T-Rex impression for her. Then, having roared at her, he bolted from the store.

I passed her the jeans. ‘See?’ I said. ‘Sorry. I have to go.’

***

Perhaps oddly, I felt calm. And, to some extent, pleased. Finally, out in the world, we were getting somewhere. At least in as much as I was now able to start building a picture, and interacting with him in a way that might help open him up; help the precious process of my getting to understand him better.

Given what I already knew about him, I wasn’t worried about him disappearing on me. Not least because there’s a big difference between twelve and, say, seven. But mostly because it was something he’d never before done. Coming back was his thing, every time. So it needed no play-acting to emerge slowly and nonchalantly from the shop, and cast around as if I didn’t much care either way. And there he was, across the street, leaning, apparently indifferently, against a bin. But I wasn’t fooled. He’d had his eyes trained on the shop front since he’d left it; I knew because, by virtue of my (lack of) height and the throng of people all around me, I’d spotted him before he’d spotted me.

He straightened up, yanked the hoodie down again and glowered across the road at me. ‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘You’re an idiot! Get me a game or I’m not coming back in the car!’

I crossed the road, but as I did so he sprinted a few yards down the street.

‘New game or I’m gone,’ he said.

I walked towards him. Again, he sprinted off a few yards.

I carried on walking. ‘We didn’t say anything about buying a game, Miller,’ I told him. ‘And do you really think that this kind of behaviour will get you anything?’

‘Well, I’ll stop if you say you’ll get me one.’

‘That’s not how it works, Miller. You’ve made sure that I can’t do what I needed to do now, so, I’m sorry, love, but that means no trip to the game shop today. And no game either – you’re going to have to make up for this behaviour before I consider buying you a treat now.’

‘Bitch,’ came the response, as he ran further up the street.

‘And all the while you keep doing this, you’re just making it worse,’ I called out.

‘Don’t care!’ he yelled back. And off he went again.

And again. And again. And again. And mindful of whichever American politician coined the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule, I stopped following Miller down the high street, got my phone out and called Mike. ‘What kept you?’ he asked, chuckling, when he answered the phone. ‘You need me to come get him for you?’

Yes, indeed I did. But since it was going to be at least a fifteen- or twenty-minute wait, I followed my hunch that Miller (unsure how to play it now, clearly) would go precisely nowhere, and popped into the big bookshop outside which I’d told Mike to meet me.

And I’d been right. When I emerged with a couple of greetings cards ten minutes later, he was exactly where I’d left him, leaning disconsolately against the chemist’s window and, though he was quick to turn away when he noticed I’d spotted him, he had clearly been waiting for me to come out.

I experienced a moment of clarity. And sadness. How did it feel to be twelve, and so alone in the world that you were reduced to spending your Saturday afternoon playing ‘catch me if you can’ with a middle-aged virtual stranger? Because that was what was happening, wasn’t it? That was what this amounted to. He was like a stuck record, going round and round and round, and heading nowhere. I was just the latest in a long line of well-meaning strangers into whose lives – and I’m sure he’d have put it this way – he’d been unceremoniously dumped. I smiled. ‘Coming home?’ I called.

‘Fuck off!’

Which, give or take the odd expletive, was exactly what I did, as soon as Mike pulled up and told me he’d take over. ‘Go and do your shopping, love,’ he said. ‘Just head back when you’re ready. I’ll round up me laddo, and we’ll see you at home.’

But I didn’t shop, not in the end. I tried for a bit, but my heart was no longer in it. For all that Mike was confident he’d be able to coax Miller back eventually, it was hard to concentrate on summer tops when I knew what was happening. After all, a little voice told me as I renegotiated the road works, there was always a first time, for everything. He might well have run off. He might have refused to get in Mike’s car. And I didn’t know, because Mike had insisted I leave him to it – one less person to provide an audience for his current game. So instead, I went home, to find neither of them there. So what merry dance was he now leading Mike?

But there was no point in phoning him, because he’d probably be driving, so I made myself a coffee, and took a sandwich up to Tyler, then, having regaled him with the shenanigans I’d ‘enjoyed’ on our little outing, left him to it, and went back downstairs to wait for them both.

And wait … It was more than an hour and a half later before Mike arrived home. But without Miller. By which time, having gone through a range of emotions, I’d already had a serious crisis of professional confidence. And this confirmed it. I’d called it all wrong.

‘Oh, lord – where is he?’ I said, contemplating the call to the emergency duty team, and the inevitable debacle that would follow. ‘Don’t tell me you lost him?’

‘I bloody wish!’ he growled.

He shut the front door, and went into the living room, where he threw his car keys down onto the coffee table. Then he went across to the window and looked out.

The penny dropped. ‘So he is here?’ I felt a stab of relief.

‘Oh, he’s somewhere out there, certainly. And I’ve a good mind to leave him out there, as well! And hope for rain. Wipe the smile off his bloody face. Can you imagine what it’s like? I must have looked like a kerb crawler or something.’

‘You mean he’s walked all the way home from town?’

Apparently so. Because there hadn’t been a great deal Mike could do. Miller wouldn’t get in the car, and Mike couldn’t – wouldn’t – make him. And I sympathised; a man bundling a screeching, kicking twelve-year-old into a vehicle, in the middle of the town centre? It didn’t take much of a leap of imagination to work out how that might pan out.

But there was no way Miller could walk home on his own, and he knew it. Bright though he was, he’d never even spent time in our part of the county. He’d never have found his way home on his own. Which left Mike with one option. To play leapfrog with Miller. Driving ahead of him, then waiting for him to saunter past him, then, when faced with a junction, driving ahead once again, so Miller knew the way and could follow him. Then a saunter past, and a drive, and a stop at another junction, while waiting for him to catch up again.

‘I must have asked him twenty times to get in, but he wouldn’t, of course. Just kept sticking two fingers up at me and laughing. ‘So he can stay out there for a bit. No way am I going out to beg him to come in. And I don’t think you should either.’

I could understand how angry Mike was, and I agreed that perhaps we should wait and see how this played out for a bit. Would Miller come in under his own steam or wouldn’t he? Just how long was he prepared to keep this up?

We agreed half an hour, and were just contemplating our next move in the kitchen when we heard a loud shout from above. Tyler was up in his bedroom, still engrossed in revision. Well, had been. Because it was his voice we could hear, booming out across the front lawn.

‘You’ve got two minutes to get in before I come down there!’

We both went to the window, to see Miller transfixed on the pavement. And it hit me that there was one person he couldn’t manipulate. Couldn’t push to the brink, because he wasn’t hidebound by all the rules. A peer. And an older one. A bigger, and possibly badder, one. Someone who was genuinely scary.

‘I mean it!’ Tyler barked. ‘If I have to come down there …’

Upon which, as if electrified, or jerked by an invisible string, Miller scuttled up the path and exploded into the hall, then thundered up the stairs to his room before we could get to him.

I went to follow but Mike placed a hand on my arm. ‘Leave it be,’ he said. ‘I reckon Tyler’s got this one, don’t you?’

Upon which, the hero of the moment came ambling down the stairs. ‘No need to thank me,’ he said, grinning.