I nodded.
‘Her driving was fine then, honestly, she wasn’t speeding. If only I’d . . . Oh, I don’t know.’ She blinked fast.
What could she have done? Flagged them over? She’d had no reason to.
‘I do hope she’s all right,’ Monica said. ‘You’ll let me know – and Alex wants to see her as soon as . . .’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ The words about Naomi maybe drinking before they drove home were in my mouth, lodged there. I should mention it, I knew I should, but I said nothing. I prayed Suzanne was wrong, that Naomi had switched from wine to soft drinks not long after we left the barbecue and her greatest sin was not watching her speed.
Phil stayed quiet, saying nothing either.
‘There’ll be an investigation,’ Monica said. ‘The police are going to talk to Alex tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’ My mouth was dry.
‘I’ll give you my mobile number,’ Monica said.
I took her number and we said our goodbyes, and still I kept silent. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her; I couldn’t face her reaction.
And it was only Suzanne’s word after all, wasn’t it?
Evie and I spoke before I went to bed. I shared everything with her. And she listened. She didn’t make excuses for Naomi, or dodge the sheer ugliness of what I was telling her, and this time, thank God, she didn’t tell me it was all going to be all right. I think I’d have hung up if she had come out with any stupid platitudes like that. Because whatever happened, there was no gain saying that this was a tragedy, maybe plain and simple, maybe complicated, but an awful, awful tragedy. At the heart of it a nine-year-old, mown down on a Sunday evening as she cycled along the side of the road. Mown down by my daughter
I am used to other people’s crises. It’s what I do, how I earn my living. Social worker – emergency duty team. When someone’s life is turned upside down and it’s an emergency and out of hours (evenings, nights, weekends, bank holidays), the phone rings in my office. I do a rotating pattern of night shifts and back shifts (afternoon till midnight), and get one weekend off in four. I am the person who sorts things out: the admission to a mental health unit, the emergency accommodation, the removal to a place of safety. I act as an appropriate adult when a teenager is arrested in town, and am there for all the victims of fire or flood or explosion who find themselves suddenly homeless. I’m the person who can bridge the gap, hold your hand and list the steps that need to be taken the following morning or at the start of the week when normal service is resumed. I don’t panic or freeze or lose my temper. My training has equipped me with all I need to support you through the calamity in a calm and professional manner. I am objective, detached. If something about your particular case upsets or enrages me, you won’t have a clue. I will save it for my report and assessment, for my recommendations, which feed into a cycle of monitoring and improvements.
The bulk of my work, the real routine, is child protection. An unending catalogue of cruelty, neglect and misery. From the child with the mark of a hot iron branded into his back to the six-year-old turning up at school on a weekend in an attempt to escape her stepfather’s sexual abuse.
Of course there are some situations that stick with me, stark memories most of them of the cruel and desperate straits that people find themselves in. Like the little boy who survived the wholesale slaughter of his family by his father, or the elderly woman found wandering on the main London to Manchester railway line, abandoned by her son and his wife, or the young Somali woman who one evening escaped from the shed where her owners kept her as a domestic slave, running barefoot in a city thick with snow. But other memorable encounters are funny or heart-warming, because of the people, their tenacity and courage, and the kindness of strangers. Humanity in all its messy, mucky, glorious, beautiful colours. Like the young mother of a foundling baby boy who was traced and who went on, with support from her stepdad, to make a loving home for herself and her son. Or the retired head teacher who opened his house to a recovering drug addict and ended up adopting her. Or the lad poised to jump from his gran’s roof because his medication sent him loopy. He teaches boxing now, mentors others.
Some events are overwhelming – we’re on call for major incidents as well, and I was there in the aftermath of the Manchester bomb. That’s with you for ever, too.
So, no foreigner to emergencies, the tears that appear without warning in the fabric of life, the cracks in the road, and the way we act to try and cope with sudden trauma. But it is a completely different thing to be on the receiving end. No doubt some of my experience and expertise kicked in, but I was powerless to act, powerless to influence. I had no role. Naomi’s health was in the hands of doctors and nurses. They were the experts. There was nothing for me to arrange or fix up, no calls to make, no referrals to agree upon. I was a bystander; I was ‘the family’.
That night I dreamt vividly. We were running, Phil and me and the kids. Naomi and Suzanne were still children. We were running and the wave of water was behind us, enormous, slate blue and foaming, howling at our heels. We had to reach higher ground; none of us could swim. I was yelling, screaming at the girls to run faster, tugging their hands. The wave rose above us, high as a house, a wall of water suspended for a moment before it came crashing down, wrenching our hands apart. I was tumbling over and over under the weight of it. When I surfaced, the water was littered with debris: metal and wood, tree branches. I couldn’t see the others. Phil called my name. He was up on the bank. On the turf, above the raw clay that had been eroded by the sea. The girls beside him. I waded to the edge, cold and breathless, hauled myself up and on to dry land. Suzanne, now an adult, stared at me, horrified. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘where’s Ollie? You’ve left Ollie!’
And the fear flooded through me like acid.
T
hank God Phil was there, going through it all with me. I don’t know how I would have borne it without him. We’d been together thirty-one years by then. God – thirty-one years! Phil was playing support at the PSV Club in Hulme when I first saw him with his band, the Blaggards. They were punk pirates, all black leather and zips and red stripes. A skull and crossbones on the drum kit.
I was revising for finals at the time and trying to get my dissertation written: ‘Unmarried Mothers – Slatterns and Scapegoats’. Renting a room in a shared house in Fallowfield that was permanently damp and cold.
My housemates Karen and Gillian and I had hooked up with other friends and gone en masse to the gig.
The club was called the PSV because it was owned by a load of bus drivers and a PSV was the type of licence required to drive a bus. It was south of the city centre and meant we could walk home, unless someone felt flush enough to pay for a taxi. The door prices were reasonable, the toilets were a disgrace. Hold-your-breath-and-straddle-the-bowl kind of thing.
It wasn’t a massive club, small enough to spot people you knew in the crowd. The stage was raised; the dance floor was ringed with a scattering of tables and chairs at the fringes, some of them dropping to bits.
I remember dancing as soon as they started playing, pogo-ing up and down to keep warm more than anything. They were loud and strident; I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics that Ged, the front man, was snarling. I was single at the time. Gasping for breath in between numbers, I’d already scanned the crowd and worked out that the only good-looking blokes were already taken. So I turned my attention to the band. The bassist was a woman, Lorraine. Ged didn’t do anything for me. The drummer was a possible: nice face, but the Mohican hair dyed lurid orange and spikes pushed through his ears suggested he might be too outgoing for me. I wasn’t after a clown. Phil I thought was shy; he spent most of the set looking down, not connecting with the audience. He was skinny, bony, his shoulders sharply defined under a torn black T-shirt, tight black pants with zips, black Doc Marten boots on his feet. He had been at the hair gel, or sugar and water or beer or something, to stiffen his choppy black hair into a spiky fringe.
I watched him play, moved to the left through the crowd so he might notice me when he looked up. But he never did. He didn’t seem interested. Maybe he was gay? I went home unattached and drunk.
It must have been a month or so later, at another club-cum-boozer called the Cyprus Tavern, on Princess Street, not far from the BBC buildings, when I saw him again, drinking with Ged and a couple of other lads. The shyness was gone. We must have spent an hour doing the glance dance, matching gazes then looking away, over and away.
‘Go and ask him out,’ Karen told me. ‘Put him out of his misery.’
‘No!’ I objected. If I was going to risk making a fool of myself, risk rejection, I wasn’t going to do it in front of an audience.
Time went on, Karen started talking about going for the bus, but I didn’t want to leave while he was still there. While there was still a chance.
Then his group got up, all of them, and pulled on jackets and coats. His was an ancient black leather bomber jacket. I swore, lit a cigarette, nervous, knowing they would pass us on their way to the door.
He was last in line. Karen nudged me with her knee as they got closer. I nudged her back, hissed, ‘Leave it!’
I decided to play it cool, pretend indifference in some last-ditch attempt at flirting. But I could sense him getting closer with every hair on my body, with each beat of my pulse. As he reached our table, I swung my eyes up, took a drag of my cigarette. Aiming no doubt for some vamp-like appeal. I was wearing a tight-fitting green leopard-print dress, black tights, black Docs, half a wand of mascara, a slash of red lipstick, most of which was now on my fag end. My hair was dyed black with fuchsia-pink tips. All topped off with an acid-green beret. I thought I was drop-dead gorgeous.
He had blue eyes, dark blue with a black rim. Merriment in them as he slid on to the stool opposite us. ‘Got a spare smoke?’ His romantic first words. I pushed the packet over.
‘Thank you.’ He smiled. I laughed. He made me laugh. This popping feeling inside, mirth, excitement. He wasn’t shy at all. I found out later that the reason he appeared like that at the gig was because he was only just learning the chords, was petrified of playing a bum note. Though whether anyone could have told the difference . . .
‘I’m Phil,’ he said as he lit a cigarette. He had a Zippo.
‘Carmel, and this is Karen.’
‘Want to go on somewhere?’ He addressed us both.
My throat grew tight. Karen winked at me. ‘Thing is, Karen needs to get the bus. Said I’d walk her.’
‘I’ll come too,’ he suggested.
We ambled along Princess Street and through to Oxford Road, talking about his band and seeing them at the PSV and where they were playing next. I was coherent and outwardly calm, but inside there was a little kid, arms raised in triumph, jumping up and down on a bed yelling,
I got him! I got him! I got him!
We didn’t touch.
We saw Karen on to the bus. Phil had already suggested we get a late drink, and we walked down to Rusholme, to a little place hidden away off Moss Lane East. A shebeen, I guess. People knew him, let us in. It was smoky, crowded; most of them were West Indian, just a sprinkling of white faces. He nodded greetings and we squeezed through the couples who were dancing up close to rocksteady songs. There were huge towers of speakers with the bass set high, thudding through the floor; the dancers pulsed almost as if the beat itself was physically shifting them.
Phil led me to a table where shots of rum and cans of Red Stripe lager were all that was on offer. I had no money left but he had enough for a lager, which we shared, taking turns sipping from the can.
Someone passed a joint to Phil, who toked on it three times before offering me some. It was pure grass, seeds in it spitting as I took a long draw. I held the smoke in deep and passed the reefer on, resisting the reflex to cough. The buzz overlaid the loose, fuzzy feeling from the drinks and soon we were dancing. Not touching, but dancing. Maybe an hour later, we left. Outside it was dark, not cold. My ears were hissing from the music.
‘I’m not far, just down the road,’ Phil said. ‘Or I could walk you home.’
I didn’t usually go back with men I met on a first encounter. But I trusted Phil. He felt safe.
‘Whereabouts?’ I asked him.
‘Just on Platt Lane.’
We meandered along. I was still walking when he called, ‘Hey, Carmel.’
I swung back; he had halted outside a building.
‘You live in a shop?’
‘Upstairs.’
I read the sign
Rock Records
, saw the display of record sleeves (several I owned: Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Slits, X-Ray Spex) and the top twenty record charts through the grille over the window. There were other notices there:
Musical accessories sold here
and
Blank tapes best prices.
‘Who has downstairs?’
‘Me.’ He smiled; he had a dimple, just one on the left, and a chipped front tooth.
‘No, really?’
‘True.’
I stared at him. It seemed so grown-up.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Brilliant!’ I said.
We had to go through the shop to reach the flat. He was careful about locking up; there were bolts and padlocks all over the place. ‘Got robbed three times last year,’ he said, flipping the lights on.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Four years, started when I left school.’
‘Do you make enough to live on?’
‘Long as I can bum cigs off someone like you,’ he joked.
He did all sorts to get by: sold records and cassette tapes, as well as accessories for guitars and drums and percussion. He had a PA to hire out for small events. And decks, too. Then there were the gigs the Blaggards played, though they probably spent more on drugs and alcohol at those than they ever got paid.
‘This way.’ He took me up the stairs at the back, rickety wooden steps, no carpet. Posters on the walls covering up the mottled paint: Iggy Pop, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Che Guevara,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
.