The Safest Place (20 page)

‘Well it’s somewhere for them to go,’ Melanie said, clearly amused.

And Max lolled against my kitchen cabinets, grinning at me. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said.

David came up on Sunday. He walked into the ongoing after-party lull, a cold judge of a man. I’d more or less finished clearing up by then, though the smell of booze hung
heavily on the air still, clinging to the furniture and the carpet. The empty bottles and cans were stacked outside the front in the box for recycling and I’d stripped the sheets off the
beds, though we, Sam and I, were still horribly tired.

‘You’ve had a party,’ David said, a faint note of reproach in the observation. And I wished then that it had been my own party; that I’d found myself a hundred local
friends suddenly and that we’d had a wild, debauched time of it, drinking, dancing, and whatever else, but without him.

‘Sam had a party,’ I said.

‘Sam?’ He looked around him, bemused. ‘But there are loads of beer cans out the front. And bottles.’

‘I know.’ I’d got myself a cup of tea, and I sat at the kitchen table, drinking it. The kids were both in their rooms. Neither of them had come charging to the door to greet
him on his arrival. They used to do that quite often when he lived with us, back in London; here too, at first. Now, when he came, they slunk away like cats. They pined for him in the week, but
come Sunday they’d have to be coaxed out of their rooms. They wanted to see him and then they didn’t, for the simple reason that each visit would end with him leaving again. It would,
always, end in tears.

Was David aware of this? Of course he was. It was there in the shadows around his eyes, and in the nervous, apologetic way that he moved within the familiar unfamiliarity of his own home.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ I said. ‘Isn’t she feeding you properly?’ The sarcasm in my voice hit the walls and bounced back at me, sharp in my ears.

David ignored it. He just said, ‘How many of them were here?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t take numbers.’

‘But you let them drink.’

‘David, they’re fifteen. Some of them are nearly sixteen.’

‘Was Ella here?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, wearily. ‘She stayed at her friend’s.’

I’d finished my tea now. I just wanted to go and lie down. I looked at David, standing there so out of place in my kitchen, his face tight with disapproval, and annoyance flicked its way
up my spine. Who was he to walk in and take the moral high ground, now?

‘Was Sam drinking?’ he asked.

And I just said, ‘I really don’t know, David. Why don’t you go and ask him yourself?’

Over the summer, barely a weekend went by without at least some of Sam’s friends turning up, for either the Friday or the Saturday night. Sometimes it was just Max, or
Max and Tommy, or Max and Tommy and Will. Other times there were more of them, holed up out there in the den, having themselves a little party. Usually they’d stay over, piling onto the sofa
bed, or crashing out in sleeping bags on the floor. I bought them beer. After all, as Melanie said, it was better that they should drink in my den than out in a field somewhere. When she said that
I was shocked, not so much by her words as by the ease with which she said them, her acceptance that that was just what boys did. As if at least at my house they’d have a roof over their
heads, they’d be out of the rain. The thought of my Sam ever lying drunk in an open field horrified me. It wouldn’t happen. It musn’t happen. But if he was out with his friends,
how would I know where he was? How would I know what he would have to do, to go along with the crowd? And how would I ever find him, if they left him out there somewhere, alone? Horror at the sheer
endlessness of the night around here flashed through my head, the remoteness, the darkness, going on and on, blanketing the land.

So I bought the beer, in an attempt to feel control where I had none. And I heated them up pizza, and took it into the den on big plates. If they were watching a film I’d perch myself on
the arm of the sofa and stay there a while, joining in. I might have a drink with them. They were nice to me, those kids. ‘Oh thanks, Jane,’ they’d say when I came in with a tray
piled with snacks, or fetched them some cans. And to Sam, ‘Your mum’s so cool.’

I’d always wanted Sam to be popular, to be part of a group. I wanted my son to be the sort of teenager who had friends forever in and out of the house, not the sort that
cut himself off and lived in gloomy isolation. And it seemed more important than ever now.

But Sam would never arrange anything without prompting from me. Round at Melanie’s after school I’d say, ‘So, are you guys coming round our house at the weekend?’
I’d throw it out as a general enquiry, looking from Max to Sam and back to Max as I said it, but we all knew that the question was directed at Max. We all knew it would be up to him to tell
the others, and to get them to come.

Sam hated me doing this. He thought I was interfering. He’d scowl at me, say, ‘Mum,’ in a shut up hiss.

But I’d laugh it off. I’d say, ‘Come on, Sam. Max doesn’t mind me asking, do you, Max?’

And Max, who was always entertained by Sam’s awkwardness, would laugh too.

Whatever I did, I did it for Sam. I knew that he still struggled to fit in. I only had to see him with those other boys who’d all known each other all their lives to see
that he was never really at ease. I’m not so stupid as to think that Sam was the big attraction when they came to our house. I knew that they were there at least partly for the beer, and the
convenience of the den. But if they came here, it meant Sam was included. There was always the fear that if they went somewhere else they might leave him out. That was my fear at least, and I
assumed it was Sam’s too.

Having those kids here at the weekend was good for me too. They brought laughter into my house, and noise; I found their presence strangely comforting. They alleviated my loneliness, for a
little while.

Because believe me I was lonely. A couple of times on a Saturday night I’d left both my kids at home and driven over to Melanie’s and gone to the pub with her, but I’d hated
every minute of it. I didn’t know anyone there, apart from Melanie, and I felt as if everyone was looking at me. In truth, I felt they thought I was on the pick-up. Available again. This
wasn’t helped by the fact that Melanie had started seeing some guy and flirted with him all night. Not Colin, someone else. It seemed that Colin was fine with this, that they were all friends
together. Yet I couldn’t help feeling the intention was for me to pair up with someone too. ‘Relax,’ Melanie said. ‘Go on, live a bit.’ I’d avoided going to that
pub with David, because I knew he would have hated it. Yet there I was without him, hating it even more. And I still had the dreaded drive home.

If Sam’s friends were all coming to my house, it gave me an excuse to stay in. I don’t think Melanie cared. I think she was too busy, by then, with her new man. In truth it probably
suited her to have Max so much at our house, out of the way. Most weekends I’d have Abbie staying, too. That summer, her children practically lived with us.

Sometimes, when David turned up on a Sunday, a couple of boys might still be here from the night before. Max would often be here, loafing about the place as if he owned it. It
amused me that Max could wander into the kitchen right in front of David, and casually help himself to food from the fridge, as relaxed as anything while David, in contrast, was totally
un
relaxed. David arrived like an awkward visitor, unsure of his welcome. There was no welcome. There couldn’t be.

If Max was here, Sam would barely acknowledge his dad. In fact David’s arrival made him uncomfortable. How could he perform for his friend in the required manner, and simultaneously
perform for his father? He couldn’t. The two objectives were incompatible for a self-conscious 15-year-old. And it was Max that Sam needed to get along with, day in, day out.

And Ella took the lead from her brother. If he was cool towards David, then she was too. If Sam acknowledged David with just a bored, no-eye-contact hello, she’d do the same. If he
answered, ‘Fine,’ when his dad asked him how he was, so would she. A shrug of the shoulder; an end to the conversation before it had even begun. Poor David. That left him with me.

‘How are things?’ he’d say, as if he really cared, but I didn’t want his charity, his blood-money concern. ‘Is there anything I can do while I’m here?’
he’d ask, looking out at the garden, at the overgrown lawn. He’d look at the state of the house, full stop. He’d register how much things had changed. The towels left hanging over
the banister, the shoes and school bags and God knows whatever else left cluttering up the hall. The plates piling up in the kitchen, the wine bottles stacked around the sink, and yes, the beer
cans left lying around in the den.

‘We’re fine,’ I’d say, though clearly he thought that we weren’t.

Perhaps, in some perverse way, I got pleasure from seeing the discomfort on his face as he sat there on his sofa, in his house that was no longer his home. If things were acceptable now that
weren’t acceptable before, what right had he to complain?

‘I don’t think Sam should be drinking,’ he said to me one Sunday when he was here.

I didn’t care what he thought. In fact, whatever he thought, I would automatically think the opposite. I took up my new stance, easy come, easy go.

I laughed at him. ‘Don’t you?’ I said.

‘No, I don’t,’ he said, all the more uptight because I wasn’t. ‘He’s only just fifteen. He’s only a child.’ And then, ruining it all for himself,
he said, ‘He’s got GCSEs next year.’

He looked at me, so intent with his righteousness, then, my erstwhile husband, and I looked at him. How familiar were his eyes. I had known him for almost twenty years. I had lived with him,
dreamed with him, borne him his children. When his mother died, he cried in my arms. When his father remarried, the same. When Ella was a baby, he paced the house with her, hour after hour, night
after night, holding her tiny, fretful body clamped tight against his chest.

And here he was now, an alien to his own family, so removed. What right had he to judge me, or Sam, or any of us? None, as far as I was concerned. He’d given up all rights the moment he
betrayed me.

‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘you are such a hypocrite. Would you have Sam being a hypocrite too? Would you? Would you have him out drinking in a field somewhere, miles from home?
Because that’s what they do, you know, boys of that age.’ How easily I quoted Melanie to him, how convincingly. I did it, in part, to distance myself from David, and the soured memory
of our lives together; from all that we’d shared and done and believed in. How could I carry on as before, half of what we’d been? I couldn’t. I had to find myself a new way.

Yet David, for all that he’d left us, was still stuck in the old place.

‘We moved here for the children,’ he said, the sudden bitterness in his voice making him sound petty and mean. ‘We moved here because you wanted better schools and a healthy, a
wholesome environment for our children. We moved here for that. We gave up
everything
. A better life for the children, you said. But, tell me, how is this better?’

‘It isn’t my fault that you left us,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said, frustration tightening his face. ‘I’m not talking about that.’ He paused. He looked around him, casting his eyes about the place
as if in doing so I would know what he was referring to. ‘I’m talking about Sam, about our son,’ he said. ‘Drinking. How come that’s OK with you? And who are these
boys that seem to be forever in the house?’

‘They’re his friends,’ I said. ‘Would you rather he didn’t have any?’

‘I’d rather they weren’t drinking alcohol,’ he said. ‘I’d rather he was working hard at school, playing football, doing normal 15-year-old things.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped. ‘He has a social life. Lucky him.’

David shook his head, as though in disbelief. ‘You used to worry endlessly about the schools in London and the wrong sort of peer pressure,’ he said. ‘Yet here you are,
encouraging Sam to lead exactly the sort of life that you had us leave London to get away from. So what was it all for then, Jane?’

‘I left London to get away from the constant, exhausting competitiveness,’ I said. ‘From all that “my kid’s better than your kid” stuff that got rammed down
my throat everyday.’

‘We left London to get away from that school Sam was in,’ he said, correcting me. ‘But now I don’t see that it would have been any different.’

‘Of course it would have been. Things are so much more relaxed here.’

‘You can say that again.’ We were sitting in the living room, David on the sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped. His left leg was juddering, caught on a
nerve, or in irritation. The force of his resentment took me back somewhat. Wasn’t I was the one who should be angry? Didn’t I have the monopoly on all emotion, now?

‘I want Sam to do well at school,’ he said, stressing the words. ‘Of course I want him to have friends but I don’t want him hanging around drinking, at his age. Just
because I’m not here . . . I still want what’s best for him.’

And there it was; my hook. I caught it. I flung it back at him.

‘Well you weren’t thinking what was best for him when you decided to shack up with your Diana, were you?’ I said.

David left, as ever, on a bad note. I could never let him go with any peace. My pride and my hurt wouldn’t let me. He came, we all suffered, he went away again and we
suffered more.

The irony was that Sam didn’t actually drink very much. He’d have a can to fit in with his friends, but he’d make it last all evening. I think he’d have been happier with
a coke. Maybe they’d all have been happy with cokes, but I bought them beer. I thought I was one step ahead, keeping down with the kids.

My parents came to stay for a few days in the middle of August. So far, I’d managed to avoid telling them about David and me. One advantage of living further away was
that it made it easier to pretend, and I’d dodged their questions on the phone. ‘How is David?’ my mum asked every time I spoke to her, and, more probingly, ‘Is everything
all right?’