Rich Promise (22 page)

I thank him but shake my head, quite certain of my ground now. I turn, walk back across the tarmac to the main entrance, alone this time but perfectly at ease.

“We’ll be here, love. Waiting for you. Take your time.” Dan’s low, sexy voice drawls across the car park.

I wave to him as I slip back through the prison door.

Also available from Totally Bound Publishing:

What’s her Secret?: The Three Rs

Ashe Barker

Excerpt

Chapter One

It looks official.

White envelope. It’s made of heavy paper, expensive looking. My name and address on the front, and some other words in large, bold letters. I recognize some of the letters. A word starting with ‘P’ and with a ‘v’ in it. Probably ‘Private’. Not so sure about the other word, that’s just a jumble. As if someone simply grabbed a handful of the alphabet and dropped it onto the paper.

But the letter is definitely for me. I do recognize my name, my address. Maybe I should open it, try to decipher whatever’s inside.

I put the envelope, still unopened, back on my table. It leans against the cereal packet as I take a sip of my coffee and contemplate it grumpily. It’s been two days since the imposing looking white envelope plopped onto my doormat, and I’m no closer now to knowing what the contents might mean than I was when it first arrived. It could just be junk mail. Some organizations deliberately make their rubbish letters look real and important just to trap unwary or gullible people. I like to think I’m neither of those things, but the fact remains I have a letter propped against my cornflakes box which may or may not be important—it certainly looks the part—and it’s spent the last two days occupying pride of place on my fireplace taking the piss out of me. It’s likely to continue taking the piss for another week, until my friend Wendy who lives upstairs comes back from visiting her sister in the Cotswolds. Wendy does my reading for me when it can’t be avoided. Because I can’t.

Can’t read, don’t read. Never really learnt. And now it’s too late. Probably.

Childhood leukemia effectively wiped out the first two years of my schooling. I was nearly eight before a bone marrow transplant finally did the trick and I was eventually pronounced cancer free, but by then the other children in my year were miles ahead of me. They all seemed to be able to read, and I still couldn’t. My school did try. They sent work home for me, and a teacher came to see me quite regularly. I was often too ill to listen to her though, and I didn’t feel like concentrating. In that cunning, manipulative way that children have sometimes, I soon realized that all I had to do was lie back and close my eyes, look a bit helpless, feeble, pained, and they’d back off immediately.

“Oh, she’s tired. Let her rest.” My mother was sick with worry about me, and fiercely protective. I milked that relentlessly, idle little slug that I was. Being ill was crap most of the time, but it had its up-side. No one hassled me, and if I didn’t want to bother with school stuff, no one would make me. My health was the only thing that mattered—I just had to concentrate on getting better.

And when I was better, school tried again. I had a special reading recovery tutor, they put me on accelerated reading programs, spent a fortune no doubt on my remedial education, but none of it made much impression. I learnt the alphabet, learnt to recognize my own name then to write it. I can string together short words, simple words, and I’m sort of okay at guessing how to fill in the gaps. I’ve had a lot of practice at that over the years. But it’s an unreliable system, I make a lot of mistakes and I completely miss the meaning of most things. I never read newspapers, not even the red tops which I understand are written for people with a reading age of about seven. They’re too hard for me. I struggle to understand cooking instructions on food packets, but these days most are done with symbols so that’s easier. I can recognize a picture of a microwave, and single numbers are okay. Even double numbers at a pinch, but beyond that I get hopelessly lost. So I’m pretty much unable to read or write anything. Functionally illiterate, is the label they give to people like me, or so I understand.

I’m perhaps slightly better with numbers. I can add up in my head. Adding, subtracting, multiplication—I’m very good at all that mental arithmetic. It’s just that I struggle to untangle the lines of numbers when they’re written down.

My mother was just so relieved that I was alive, she was prepared to overlook my slow learning. Did I say slow? Of course, I mean I went at the speed of a dead snail. My mother insisted I’d catch up, but she thought I was delicate, and they needed to make allowances. It’s true that I had to continue to go back to the hospital on a regular basis for years after I was pronounced clear, for blood tests to make sure there was no recurrence. There never was, and in truth I felt fine.

School wasn’t all bad. I loved sports despite my mother’s anxiety that I might get over-tired, and I played in the netball team. I was the goal-shooter and pretty good. Nothing wrong with my hand-eye co-ordination. I could draw too, really well, actually. I quite enjoyed the practical aspects of art lessons. I did some nice work, but my art folder was a mess. I recall a lot of red pen in it—the teacher’s attempts to set me on the right path, obviously wasted on me.

Overall, my education was limited almost to the point of non-existence. And my initial disadvantages of poor health and laziness turned into embarrassment. The years went by and I made no progress—at least none that I could see—and others in my class moved on to read more and more adventurous books. I saw the
Narnia
films on the television or at the cinema, I loved
Harry Potter
and later
Twilight
, but while everyone else could read the books I could only enjoy the films. While others could use the Internet to find out the information they needed to do their homework, my homework just didn’t get done. I was moved into ‘special’ learning groups, and my school continued to make an effort. But it was half-hearted—I was a hopeless case. I certainly thought so, and I suppose that just clinched it. The best school in the land can’t do much with a student who doesn’t believe they can learn. By the time I was fourteen or so, they’d given up and so had I. I marked time with netball and art when I could dodge the zeal of the art teacher. She never quite relinquished the task. I left school at sixteen, with no qualifications and all the job prospects of a lettuce.

So now here I am—a twenty-two-year-old cleaner. Ironically, the place I now work, the only place I could manage to get a job at all, is my old primary school. I heard they were looking for temporary cleaners and it seemed better than staying on the dole, so I called in. Luckily the caretaker, Mr Cartwright, remembered me from when I was a gangly ten-year-old with a mop of ginger hair, and was prepared to give me a chance. I daresay all the staff and pupils at my primary school still remember me—I was ‘the poorly kid’, the one they had to be careful around, the one they had to avoid infecting with any nasty germs. Especially chickenpox.

Mr Cartwright’s leap of faith was four years ago, and I’ve worked hard ever since. I mopped and scrubbed and polished like a maniac, and when my temporary contract was up Mr Cartwright—Dave—was sufficiently impressed to keep me on permanently. So I have regular work, if low paid. And it’s enough—just about—to keep me in a small flat as long as I don’t eat too much or insist on having the place too warm in the winter.

It’s just me these days. For all her frantic worrying about me, my mother herself succumbed to cancer when I was nineteen. It was a shock, she was just fifty years old. I was stunned, I couldn’t believe what had happened. And so quickly. It seemed that one day she was fine, just had a bit of a cough. A persistent cough. She went to see her GP and was referred to a consultant. Within days she had a diagnosis of throat cancer, and it advanced so quickly, neither one of us had any chance to adjust. To come to terms. Not that we could have achieved that, no matter how long her illness had dragged on for. Looking back, perhaps, things were mercifully swift, though it didn’t feel like that at the time. It just felt horrendous. A mad, headlong dash toward the inevitable end. My mother was admitted to the intensive care oncology ward, and she died within six weeks of being diagnosed.

I got over it. Eventually. Or so I like to tell myself. In reality I had no choice. The Council wanted their three bedroomed family house back—can’t really blame them—but they offered me a one bedroom flat on the seventh floor in a tower block. It’s not bad, I have brilliant views over the rooftops of north Bradford and on a clear day I can just make out York Minster. Well, I think it’s York Minster—Wendy says it is.

So life is relatively untroubled, to the point of boring probably. But I’m safe, secure. I get by.

Then that bloody letter arrives to rock my calm little boat.

And instinctively I know, in my gut I know, that my boat is about to be seriously rocked. What I don’t know is how, why and by how much. I can’t wait for Wendy—I need to find out. Now. Today. I shove the envelope into my bag to take to work with me later. I’m quite good friends with Sally—Miss Moore to her year five charges. Sally’s a classroom assistant these days, but she was in my form at secondary school and also played netball. We got on okay. She knows I can’t read and has offered on many occasions to spend some time with me to help with that. She might even be able to do it—she’s done extra training as a literacy specialist and works with other children who struggle like I did. Sally’s lovely, and if she’d been there to help when I was at primary school, well, who knows? But like I said, it’s too late now.

But Sally
will
be able to read my letter and at least then I’ll know if it’s junk or not.

* * * *

Sally’s busy stacking books and sorting crayons as I tap on the open classroom door. The children have just left, and she usually hangs around to tidy up ready for the next day. Gina Simmonds, the Year five teacher, is also there, at her desk, plowing her way through a pile of exercise books. Both heads turn as I hover in the doorway.

“Do you need us out of here?” Gina makes to pick up her stack of blue exercise books, no doubt intending to decamp and head for the staff room to make way for the serious business of wiping down windowsills.

I shake my head and gesture for her to stay. “No, really, I don’t want to disturb you. I’ll be back later to mop. I just wanted a quick word with Sally. If that’s all right.” I turn to my friend. “Do you have a minute? Not now, I can see you’re busy, but later? Before you get off?”

She smiles at me before turning her attention back to the crayons. “Sure. I’ll be about ten minutes. I’ll come and find you.”

“Cheers. I’ll be in the hall probably.”

She nods and waves. I smile apologetically at Gina as I back out of the room and close the door behind me. I can’t help thinking as I make my way to the school hall, dragging my mop and bucket with me, that Gina, Sally and me have a lot in common. We’re around the same age, give or take five years, and we all work together in a manner of speaking, and we’re all in the business of helping to educate the next generation. But even so, we’re a world apart. This is one of those moments when I bitterly regret my lost opportunities. Maybe I should give some serious thought to Sally’s offer.

The lady in question appears as I’m about a quarter of the way through mopping the floor in the school hall. I need to get it ready for tomorrow’s influx of little feet, all considerately wearing their regulation indoor black pumps, but nevertheless managing to leave an intricate pattern of scuff and skid marks all over the polished wood.

“Right, what’s this about then that you couldn’t say in front of Gina?” She settles herself at the end of the hall I haven’t got to yet, dumping her bag on the floor before sitting, her back propped against the wall and her long legs stretched out in front of her.

Sally has the longest legs I think I’ve ever seen. She was always about a foot taller than me, which was useful in netball. I could still out-shoot her though, on a good day. I grab my own battered holdall from one of the benches at the edge of the hall then go to join her. I settle myself alongside her before reaching to rummage in my bag. I pull out the envelope—now slightly less pristine after it’s been bumped around in my bag all afternoon—and pass it to her.

She frowns at me, puzzled, turning it in her hands. “You haven’t even opened it.”

I shrug. “No point.” Then, in a sudden and unexpected rush of self-awareness and honesty, I tell her the truth, “And I was scared.”

Sally chuckles. “Scared? Why? What have you been up to? In any case, it doesn’t look like a summons to me. I take it you want me to open it now?”

I nod. “Yes, please. Put me out of my misery.”

Her expression is scornful, but still friendly as she shoves the end of her right index finger under the flap and tears it along the top of the envelope. I wince, it seems somehow like an act of vandalism to ruin that white perfection, and I kept it so safe for two whole days. But the damage is done now, and Sally is extracting the contents. I see two sheets of paper, also expensive looking, and catch sight of a flowing signature on one of the sheets. The writer clearly intended to make an impression—the ink is bright and blue and contrasts sharply with the neat black typed writing covering both pages. She flattens the sheets and starts reading.