The Last Weekend (4 page)

‘Fucking hell,’ I said, at a temporary traffic light in the middle of nowhere.

‘I know you’re stressed, Ian, but —’

‘Who wouldn’t be stressed?’

‘You’ve a lot on your mind. The tribunal’s soon and —’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I’m not going to talk about it,’ Em said, squeezing my hand, ‘but you could at least be friendly. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said, as the light turned green.

The roads were minor and seemed to meander everywhere but east. Where were we exactly? On the plane home from Lanzarote at Easter, a map of England had been displayed on the overhead TV set, with odd, arbitrary towns picked out: Chatham, Kidderminster, Darlington, Morecambe. The map in my head was similarly bizarre, effacing the principal towns of East Anglia in favour of a single hamlet, Badingley. It was too small to feature in our road atlas. But Ollie had emailed directions, and I’d fantasised about it so often since June I felt I knew it already — the village green, the duck pond, the low-raftered pub, the old forge with cartwheels outside, and then the asphalt drive to Flaxfield Grange, a Palladian mansion set among copper beeches and horse chestnuts.

‘I don’t see it as a Palladian mansion,’ Em said. ‘More a Georgian rectory.’

‘Or a luxury bungalow on stilts above a fishing lake.’

‘Or a Californian eco-house with acres of glass.’

‘With a swimming pool and sauna,’ I said.

‘And a fresh stream running by, and green willows.’

‘And a tennis court.’

‘And red deer roaming the parkland.’

‘Which Rufus can chase.’

I looked at Em’s hands on the wheel. They seemed bigger these days, more knobbly about the knuckles, less tapered
towards the tips. Her mother used to suffer from arthritis. Would Em go the same way?

‘Did I tell you about Magda?’ she said. We were following a slow tractor, easily passable before the next bend, but Em just sat there on its tail.

‘Who’s Magda?’ I said, exasperated.

‘A new case.’

New? Em’s cases were always the same. Misery piled on misery, each indistinguishable from the last. The sixteen-year-old who tried to strangle his mother. The fifteen-year-old addicted to stealing BMWs. The fourteen-year-old who fed her crack habit through prostitution. And those were just the older kids.

‘I lay awake half the night thinking about her,’ she said.

Please spare me the detail, I wanted to say. But the earlier row made me conciliatory.

‘I’m all ears,’ I lied, and tried to pay attention.

Magda was a twenty-year-old from Lithuania, now living in Derby, it seemed. She had turned up at Em’s office with a split lip, bruised cheekbone and black eye. Em’s speciality is kids on probation. But she was duty senior that day and Magda’s appearance was so vulnerable (not just the injuries but the torn jeans, flimsy T-shirt and nylon jacket) that Em — overhearing her broken conversation with the reception clerk — invited her into one of the ‘consulting rooms’ (a windowless cell with bulletproof glass). It was only then that she realised the girl had a baby with her, silent in a pushchair. Em was struck by how well dressed the baby was, unlike its mother. How well cared for, too. What’s she called? Em asked. Anna. How old is she? Seven months. She’s a beautiful baby, Em said. Yes, but I need fossilhelp. Fossilhelp — what do you mean by fossilhelp? To have my baby. To
have
your baby? To take from me. You want someone to take your baby? Yes. You want to place your baby for adoption? I do not understand.

Nor did Em understand, but over the next hour — between tears and cups of tea and nappy changes and mangled syntax – she slowly got there. It was a complex story involving a baby whose arrival made Magda’s boyfriend angry and violent. Distressed, Magda had gone back to Lithuania for a month, but her family didn’t want to know. Reunited with the boyfriend in Derby, she tried to make a go of things but then …

It was hot in the car and to be honest I dozed off, though I did hear the explanation of fossilhelp.

‘Foster care,’ Em said. ‘Someone had told her about it. So I explained about a child being placed in care and how in time it might be returned to its mother, but there was no guarantee, and so the best thing Magda could do was …

The next thing I knew was Em prodding me.

‘Completely unprofessional of me, right? Ian?
Ian?
‘

I sat upright and rubbed my eyes.

‘Like I say,’ she said, ‘I’m in the leaving care team, not the fostering department: I should have referred her and let them deal with it. Instead of which I scrambled together fifty quid of emergency funds, got her a place in a hostel over the weekend, handed her an extra twenty quid out of my own pocket, gave her my mobile number so she could call me any time, and told her to come back and see me on Tuesday.’

Handing out twenty quid was certainly unprofessional – and generosity we couldn’t afford. But this wasn’t the time to say so.

‘You did the right thing,’ I said. ‘You helped her.’

‘I could see she loved the child and shouldn’t be rushed into something she might regret.’

‘Absolutely,’ I said, stroking the back of Em’s left hand as it rested on the gear lever. I was wide awake now and
wondered, since I’d listened nicely, would she let me take over the driving again.

‘And the story of the rape was appalling,’ she said. ‘Her parents accused her of bringing shame on the family but, Christ, it was hardly her fault. You suffer one kind of nightmare and then the bastards put you through another.’

Was the baby the product of a rape, then? I’d been asleep for that bit.

‘You were moved by her story,’ I said. ‘That’s understandable.’

‘I hear terrible stories all the time. Usually I’m detached. Why wasn’t I this time?’

The lanes had narrowed and we were stuck behind a lorry carrying sand. The tailgate was loosely bolted, so that every time the lorry hit a bump the flap tipped open and spat out sand grains.

‘Stop beating yourself up about it.’

‘I asked a question, Ian.’

She kept her eyes on the road rather than look at me. We were passing a tower block of straw bales in an empty field.

‘Because she’s a woman and most of your cases are young men.’

‘That’s not the reason.’

The dotted white lines crawled beneath us. Badingley could take hours with the sand lorry in front of us. There was no getting round it.

‘Because of the baby,’ I said.

‘She couldn’t be left there. The boyfriend’s too much of a risk.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Magda needs support, till she sorts herself out. But good short-term carers are hard to find. It made me think.’

‘Think what?’ I said, walking straight into it.

‘That fostering’s an option for us. Or adoption. I’m sure they’d fast-track us. If that’s what we wanted.’

What I wanted was for Em to fast-track us past the sodding sand lorry. But there was a Land Rover with a flashing light ahead of it, and ahead of the Land Rover was a combine harvester — red, rusty, a relic of the agricultural revolution – taking up most of the road.

If I’d been honest, I’d have said it wasn’t Em’s job to take in waifs and strays, let alone the progeny of rapes. That I got enough of kids at school. That I liked the silence of the house, the vacancy of the rooms. That to me silence and vacancy signified potential, not failure.

‘It’s a big step,’ I said.

‘I knew you’d say that.’

‘Well, it is. How could we cope with a baby when we’re both working? We don’t even know this Magda.’

‘You’re missing the point.’

‘How am I?’

‘I’m not suggesting we foster Magda’s baby.’

‘What then?’

‘I was talking about fostering in general. But even the thought of it seems to send you into a panic.’

Had I been so obvious?

‘Having our own kid is different from taking on someone else’s,’ I said.

‘But what if it comes to that?’ she said. ‘If you don’t want children, I ought to know.’

‘Of course I want them, if you want them.’

‘But do you want them for yourself? I sometimes wonder how committed you are. I’d like you to think about that, Ian.’

I stared at the tailgate of the sand lorry, as sand grains fell useless on the road.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll think about it. But this weekend’s meant to be a break. If Ollie and Daisy start asking questions …’

‘I won’t say a thing.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

We squeezed hands, closing the discussion. I’d been let off. This time.

Out in the sticks, with all four windows down, the heat seemed different — syrupy, poppied, medicinal. I turned to stroke Rufus, who was still panting heavily in the back. It was early afternoon now, the sun high in the sky.

‘How far now?’ Em said.

‘Ten miles maybe. Not that we’ll ever get there,’ I said, nodding at the vehicles ahead.

As soon as I said it, though, the combine and Land Rover pulled over into a lay-by and the sand lorry miraculously turned off. 1.27. The first bit of luck all day. With Ollie’s emailed directions to guide us we made good progress — until we reached a pink pub with a thatched roof and (as instructed) turned right, right and right, which brought us to the same pink pub again.

‘One of those rights must be a left,’ Em said, pulling up in the pub car park.

‘Or a straight on,’ I said.

Rufus began to bark, thinking we’d arrived. We got out to stretch our legs and give him some air.

Outside the pub an old man was sitting on a bench, a stick beside him, his face purple as heather, and a handkerchief knotted on his head. When I asked him the way to Badingley he said he’d never heard of it.

Em suggested we enquire at the bar, but I was for pressing on and grabbed the driver’s seat before she could. After a sequence of experiments with lefts, rights and straight-ons we
found ourselves by a peculiar flint house called the Hexagon. If we turned left there – so Ollie’s emailed directions said – we would arrive in Badingley directly.

So it proved. We were at Badingley in no time. And remained in no time till we left.

I met Ollie in my second term at university. At school, French, maths and history had been my A-level subjects, and I would have been happy to take any of them as a degree, but my dad said they wouldn’t ‘lead to anything'. Neither he nor anyone else in the family had been to university (Uncle Jimmy was the nearest, with his Higher Certificate from Salford Tech). But ignorance never stopped my dad from having an opinion. And though I almost talked him round to letting me choose maths – with all his betting, he respected numeracy – in the end I succumbed and applied to do law. ‘It’s a proper career and you’ll earn a good whack,’ he said. ‘I can just see you in a wig,’ my mother added. I was offered a place but from the start I hated law. The courses were mechanical, the lecturers unimaginative, the books indigestible. There’d been a lot to memorise at A level, but French verbs and the dates of battles seemed to sink in, unlike tort law. I tried to change subjects after six weeks but the university discouraged it, telling me I’d have to repeat the first year. My parents were no help, either. ‘You’re a bright lad, just give it time,’ my mother said, while my dad read my unhappiness as slacking. ‘Them that can’t stick owt don’t get nowt,’ he said, with his usual half-baked logic.

Law was not the only reason for being miserable. Eager to make friends, I tried to look cool. But smoking Gauloises and reading French novels had no cachet in the law department. And though there were a couple of girls in my tutorial group, neither seemed to notice me. The one consolation was Ollie.

To begin with, the two of us moved in different circles: I didn’t really have a circle — my circle was me. But I was aware of him sitting in lectures: with that brooding intensity, and those sooty Spanish features, you couldn’t miss him. Not that he was literally dark-skinned, but in the absence of black or Asian students he looked exotic. (In the eighteenth century, he once told me, the Moore family had been involved in the slave trade: ‘I’m probably descended from a half-breed.') He stood out for another reason — wearing sports jackets, cord trousers and collared shirts while the rest of us had jeans and T-shirts. When he wasn’t carrying a briefcase, you’d see him with some boot, ball, club or racket bag, the different shapes of which suggested an awesome range of sporting activities. I knew from school that the old cliché about boffins versus jocks is rubbish: the boffins
are
the jocks, and the ones who get the girls too. Ollie proved the point. He was smart, sporty, funny, handsome and popular — the antithesis of me.

It was sport, ironically enough, that broke the ice between us. One February night in the foyer of the library, he hauled himself across to me on crutches and we got talking, not least about the plaster cast on his left leg, which was there because he’d snapped his Achilles tendon.