Читать книгу Persons Unknown - Susie Steiner - Страница 9

As they turn out the light and close Solly’s door, Manon whispers to Fly, ‘You’re so good with him.’

She can hear her neediness, as well as the distant sound of Sol singing to himself; he will sleep on his front, bottom in the air like the ruck in a blanket.

They stomp downstairs, Manon with one hand on Fly’s shoulder. ‘Hungry?’ she says.

He doesn’t reply and she’s used to this. She’ll often have to say things five or six times before he responds. This is not particular to Fly – she’s heard of parents hauling their children for hearing tests, the doctor saying witheringly, ‘There’s a difference between not being able to hear and not listening.’

‘I’ll need your help when this one comes,’ she says, her other hand on her bump, and even as she says it she thinks, leave the poor boy alone, remembers some parent or other at school saying, ‘Never plead with children’ and the way she nodded, thinking, I’m always pleading with children. It’s my base position.

Lighten up, she tells herself. He’s all right.

And yet he isn’t.

Five days ago, the school office called at 9 a.m. to say Fly hadn’t arrived at school.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Manon said. ‘He left half an hour ago in his uniform. Where is he?’

‘I was hoping you’d know the answer to that.’

‘Leave it with me,’ she said.

First thing she did was run out of the house, jogging the route of his walk to school, all the while on her mobile phone, checking admissions at the hospital, calling Fly’s mobile over and over.

She drove around Huntingdon, paced the high street, barging in and out of cafés. She wondered whether to call it in, really scare him with a police search but she had a gut feeling he’d come in for tea. He wasn’t a baby, wasn’t her baby. He had lived without any assistance from her for ten of his twelve years.

Other thoughts tugged at her: he’s been mugged, he’s in some trouble he can’t get out of, he had his buds in his ears as a car mowed him down. She checked the hospital again.

He came in carrying his schoolbag, at a calculated 3.45 p.m. – trying to pass it off. Bag by the banister, shoes off, uniform dishevelled.

‘Don’t give me that,’ she said, her body shaking, wanting to hit him.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Look at your phone.’

He looked at it. ‘Twenty-eight missed calls.’

‘So what was that performance all about? I’ve been worried sick.’

He sniffed. Shrugged.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Home,’ he said.

It was like a sinkhole opening up beneath her.

He has gone to watch TV while she puts the pasta on. Endless pasta, endless cooking it, throwing it in the bin, cooking it again, emptying the dishwasher, loading the dishwasher.

He calls her ‘Mum’ only sporadically – consciously, to please her or as a deliberate expression of connection. When he is unthinking, she is ‘Manon’. They are mother and son by degrees, not innately and not to their core.

‘How was school?’ she asks, serving his spaghetti.

No response.

‘Fly, how was your day?’

‘Shit, as usual.’

The truancy took her into the head’s office – a discussion about how to help Fly settle, in-school strategies (greater teacher focus), support at home (in this she read criticism). Fly promised not to do it again, said he understood it was about his own safety. To be fair, he looked shaken by the adult response. Perhaps he’d never been under such intense adult scrutiny before and he found it unexpected. The trouble with this sort of thing, she thinks now, lying in bed with a book flattened onto her chest, is she can’t solve it. She can’t solve Fly, can’t make him better overnight. She must let his feelings granulate over time and often she finds it impossible to summon the patience to back off. She wants to work on him like a case. She should have more faith.

She’s roused from dozing by the sound of Ellie coming in and by a reawakening anger (she is angry so much of the time and it is exhausting). She must have words. Ellie cannot leave Sol alone with Fly whenever she wants; Fly who is after all only 12, much as he seems older, and not old enough to bear responsibility for a 2-year-old, certainly not when there is the possibility of the Internet within a thousand-mile radius.