Kind of Cruel (22 page)

A quiet, relatively polite row ensues between the two grandmothers. Pam is normally quiet and compliant, and Hilary is put out. Life is hard enough, she argues, for everybody. Why make it harder by letting a child go hungry? Kirsty, unused to seeing her mother angry, starts to make distressed noises and sway from side to side. Five-year-old William is upset by the noise and runs away from it. Amber goes after him. She catches up with him in the garden. He tells her he is frightened of Kirsty, whom he describes as being like ‘a big monster’. Amber doesn’t know what to say to this, and asks if William has ever told his parents about his fear of Kirsty. Yes, he says, and Mummy said he mustn’t be scared of her. She’s his aunt, she’s family. She loves him and he must love her, even though she’s different. It’s not her fault. William asks Amber not to tell Jo what he said, or that he ran away from Kirsty.

This makes Amber angry. Jo shouldn’t tell William how he ought to feel; she should understand that a five-year-old is obviously going to be alarmed by someone like Kirsty, who is clearly an adult and yet doesn’t behave like one. How dare Jo make William feel he has to keep his fear secret? To cheer him up, Amber suggests they play a game, a sort of hide-and-seek: hunting for the key to Little Orchard’s locked study. William is hugely excited by this idea, and so they begin their search, speculating as they go about what might be inside the forbidden room. No one asks what they’re doing as they wander all over the house, in and out of bedrooms. By the time dinner is served, they’ve searched everywhere apart from the kitchen, the utility room, and Jo and Neil’s bedroom and en-suite bathroom, which they can’t get in to because Neil is first napping and then showering and getting ready for Christmas dinner.

After the meal, Luke’s quiz is the next thing on the agenda. Amber and William do not take part. They continue with their secret game, telling everyone they hope to have a surprise to present later in the day. Is Amber aware that she wants her own secret, since Jo has one she’s not sharing? Does she have moral scruples about violating the privacy of Little Orchard’s owners, should she be lucky and find the key? No and no would be my guess. Consciously, Amber is worried only about
not
finding the key, wondering if she was crazy to embark on this hunt that’s surely doomed to failure. What if she never finds it? William will be desperately disappointed.

No need to panic: close examination of the kitchen reveals a key on a long string, hanging from a nail sticking out of the back of a pine dresser. That must be it, Amber tells William as soon as she spots it dangling in the gap between the dresser and the wall. Why else would anyone keep a key in such an inaccessible place? Amber hurts her back as she struggles to shift the dresser so that she can reach the key. It’s too heavy for her to lift alone, strictly speaking, but she perseveres because – like Jo earlier, and in the same room, the kitchen – she doesn’t want help. She wants to prove she can do everything herself.

William, overcome by excitement, runs to the lounge and interrupts Luke’s quiz with his triumphant announcement: he and Amber have found the key to the locked room. Amber declares her intention to use it, and have a nosey around – who wants to come too? A deliberately provocative invitation: daring the others to stop her. If Amber wasn’t so resentful of the silence surrounding Jo and Neil’s disappearance, would she have behaved differently? I think so. I think it’s no coincidence that she created an opportunity to stage a protest against metaphorical if not actual ‘no entry’ signs and things being kept from her.

Jo is furious. She demands Amber hand over the key to her immediately. She’s responsible for the house, she is quick to point out. She and Neil were the ones who rented it from the owners and are therefore its trusted guardians. Amber tells her to lighten up. It’s not as if they’re going to do any damage to the study. They’re just going to have a look and see what’s in there. It’s the harmless conclusion to the harmless game Amber and William have been playing. Luke, Ritchie and Sabina are tempted, infected by Amber’s enthusiasm, and William’s. They all agree that it can’t do any harm; jokes are made – cryptically, to protect William – about sex toys and cannabis plants. Quentin doesn’t care. He is only interested in his own concerns, and the contents of Little Orchard’s locked room can’t possibly affect him. Pam thinks they should put the key back and says so, as firmly as she said before that Barney shouldn’t be given the formula milk; this prompts Hilary, immediately, to say that a quick peek won’t hurt, just to make William happy.

Amber suggests a vote, knowing she will win. Jo puts her foot down. She is furious, nearly crying with anger. She quickly disabuses Amber of the idea that any sort of democratic principle can be applied; she and Neil paid the full cost of the rental, as well as the deposit, which makes them the only two people entitled to a say in the matter. Neil agrees: unlocking the study is out of the question. No one speculates that the key Amber found might belong to a different door; they all assume it’s the right one. Jo tells Amber, in front of all the others, that the whole idea – the hunt-the-key game and involving William in it – was totally, utterly immoral and that she ought to be ashamed of herself.

Amber refuses to feel ashamed. She still believes it would do no harm to have a quick look inside the room – that most people would, if they found themselves in a similar position, just as most people eavesdrop on juicy conversations and look over strangers’ shoulders to read the text messages they’re composing whenever they can. On some level, she argues, the owners of Little Orchard must know this.

Jo says she would never eavesdrop, or try to read somebody’s private correspondence.

Amber says she would never tell anybody when to feel ashamed, or congratulate herself on being a better person than anyone else.

Amber gives the key back to Jo.

5

Wednesday 1 December 2010

‘Seventy-three? Seventy! Seventy-six?’ Nonie fires numbers at me, her voice trembling with anguish.

‘Stop panicking,’ I tell her, wishing she was in the passenger seat next to me and could see my face, knowing she’s wishing the same thing. Nonie is a victim of her own scrupulous fairness policy: when, she, Dinah and I are in the car together, she and Dinah must both sit in the back, even though they would both love to sit in the front. Dinah has suggested they take turns, but Nonie won’t allow it. Since none of us knows how many car journeys there will be in total, in the whole of our life together, we can’t be sure that it won’t be an odd number. Someone might end up having an extra turn.

‘I can’t do it! I don’t understand! Seventy-seven?’

‘No. Sorry,’ I say. Are desperation and panting part of most people’s Maths homework routines? I try to catch Nonie’s eye in the rear-view mirror. I’ve always been able to soothe her with my eyes quicker than with words.

‘Seventy-five!’

I hate Wednesdays. On Wednesday afternoons I’m not free; I am bound by a tradition I would dearly love to put an end to: I pick the girls up from school and we go for supper at the house known by everybody as ‘Jo’s’, though Neil, William, Barney and Quentin live in it too. Also on Wednesdays, Nonie has Maths last thing in the afternoon, the lesson that never fails to convince her that she’s the stupidest person on the planet.

‘There’s no point shouting out random answers, Nones.’ I fiddle with the controls on the dashboard. I was foolish enough to let Luke persuade me to buy a better, newer car than I felt comfortable with, given our precarious finances, and have never understood its various knobs and dials. The complicated multi-arrowed air-current diagrams indicate that it offers a range of heating options, but I’ve never had time to work out what’s what, so I press whichever buttons take my fancy and never remember what sequence of actions led to the desired result, on the rare occasions that I’m lucky enough to get it. Today, I’m unlucky. Instead of warmth evenly distributed throughout the car, I get a suffocating faceful of scorched air. I decide I’d rather freeze. I envy the girls the winter coats I bought them that look like inflatable air-beds with sleeves.

‘Even if you hit on the right answer, you won’t understand why it’s right,’ I tell Nonie. ‘If you’d just calm down and let me explain . . .’

‘What did Mrs Truscott say?’ Dinah asks.

‘Hang on, Dinah, let me finish.’

‘You’ll never finish. Nonie will talk about how she doesn’t understand anything in Maths
forever
.’

‘It’s all right for you! You’re brilliant at Maths. I’m rubbish at it. I’ll always be rubbish.’

‘It’s seventy-four,
obviously
. Sixty-six plus eight: seventy-four. What did Mrs Truscott say, Amber?’

‘Don’t
tell
me!’

‘Dinah,
don’t
—’

‘I already have. What did Mrs Truscott—?’

‘Don’t cry, Nones, it doesn’t matter.’ She needs to see me smiling at her. Trying not to think about Ed from my missed DriveTech course and his dead daughter, I take my eyes off the road ahead and turn in my seat so that Nonie can see my face. Hopefully there’s a reassuring expression on it and not one of abject terror. It’s myself I’m telling as much as I’m telling her not to panic and not to cry. I don’t know how to pay enough attention to both girls at the same time; it’s a riddle I can’t solve. I’m sure there must be an answer, one a parent would know instinctively, but I’m not a parent and never will be – not a proper one. I’d like to give each of the girls all my attention all the time, but that’s not possible, and neither one will ever wait. Dinah is too demanding and Nonie too worried.

I hate Maths for what it’s doing to her. I’d like to kick its spiteful teeth in. I always suspected it was a noxious pile of pointlessness, and now I have proof of its vileness in the amount of misery it’s causing this lovely, hard-working child whose happiness is my responsibility. Surely if I can bring about the un-banning of Dinah’s play, I can arrange for Maths to be eliminated from the curriculum for good? Obviously some people need to study it, the ones who are going to go on to be mathematicians and scientists, but there are others – like me, like Nonie – who equally obviously don’t need to bother with it because we’re never going to get very far and we’ll always find it the dullest thing in the world on account of it having no people in it.

Luke has forbidden me to air these philistine views in Nonie’s presence. While I secretly wonder who I might be able to sleep with in order to secure for her the decent Maths GCSE grade she’ll need in order to get into a sixth-form college to study proper subjects like English Lit and History and Psychology, subjects with people in them, Luke continues to believe that one day, with the right help, everything will click into place and Nonie will tap into her innate mathematical abilities, so long dormant. I don’t believe this for a minute, but I’d hate to think that my endless pessimism might limit her life chances, so I lie.

‘There’s no need to be scared of Maths, Nonie.’
Yes, there is. There’s every reason to be scared of a thing you hate and can’t get away from
. ‘I can give you another sum to do – and Dinah, please don’t tell her this time. Let me try to explain the method to her. Nones, once you understand the thought process involved . . .’

‘I’ll never understand it,’ Nonie says quietly. ‘There’s no point. Can we listen to Lady Gaga?’

‘Tell me about Mrs Truscott first,’ Dinah insists.

‘I’ve already told you.’ I reach behind me, give Nonie’s knee a supportive squeeze. I ought not to let Dinah steamroller over her sister, but I sense that Nonie is secretly hoping I won’t object to the change of subject. ‘Your play’s back on.’

‘But what did you say? How did you persuade her?’

‘Can we listen to Lady Gaga, Amber?’

I grit my teeth. We’re not even halfway to Jo’s house yet. There’s a limit to how many loud, pounding songs I can cope with, hot on the heels of a Maths meltdown. My secret rule is no music before we pass the Chinese supermarket on the junction of Valley Road and Hopelea Street. If Dinah and Nonie would only learn to love Dar Williams or Martha Wainwright, I’d happily let them listen all the way from school to Jo’s.

‘Amber? Can we?’

‘Tell me what Mrs Truscott said!’

‘In a minute, Nones.’ I risk taking both hands off the wheel for a second and blow on them in a vain attempt to warm them up. ‘I just . . . I don’t know, Dinah, I don’t remember every word of the conversation. I told her how much the play meant to you . . .’

‘You’re lying. I can always tell when you’re lying.’

‘Even when I’ve got my back to you? That’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’ Nonie asks, alarmed in case an injustice snuck past her and she missed it.

‘Dinah knowing I’m lying.’

‘Why isn’t it fair?’

‘Because I’m a grown-up. I’ve been one for ages. I’ve earned the right to get away with more than I seem to be able to.’ When I’m not lying, I’m being too honest. I know that later I will have to explain to Nonie what I meant by this remark, once I’ve finished explaining the whole of Maths to her.

‘What did you threaten her with?’ says Dinah, who will not be diverted. ‘She wouldn’t have backed down unless you scared her more than she was already scared of the parents who complained.’

‘Is that how you see me, as someone who lies and threatens and intimidates people?’

‘Yes.’ After a pause, Dinah says, ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea for you and Luke to adopt us.’