Trish put down the letter, wondering what on earth to do about Jay. She still admired his courage, and his brains, and she wanted to help. But if he was going to make David miserable and screw up his time at school, she’d have to separate them. If Jeremy Black was right and the pressure on David did escalate …
‘Shit!’ she said aloud, trying to block out pictures of all sorts of horrors that might never happen.
‘Really, Trish.’ Robert’s voice came from just outside the door. He pushed it open and she saw he was already kitted out in overcoat and scarf, with his briefcase in his
hand. ‘Aren’t you too grand now to use language like that?’
‘Sod off,’ she said lightly and was relieved to hear him laugh. ‘Have a good weekend. See you Monday.’
‘Sure. Same to you.’
Hearing him run down the stone stairs and bang the front door behind him, she cleared her desk completely, locking up every scrap of paper. If Greg Waverly and FADE were as devious as she was beginning to believe, she didn’t want to take any risks with her confidential documents.
As she walked home, she tried to put him and the case right out of her mind so she could concentrate on David.
Somehow she’d have to protect him from his own generous impulse to include Jay in everything he had and did. She owed George time, too. They’d had no more than a few minutes’ sleepy chat for days, and he’d been carrying the whole domestic load for her.
Better eat first, she decided. I can talk to David after supper, see him safely in bed and reading, and then focus on George.
That would be easier if there weren’t still a residue of the constraint she’d noticed on the evening he’d cut his toenails in her bedroom. He hadn’t volunteered an explanation of what had been bothering him, and she hadn’t had time to winkle it out of him.
Once again the iron staircase felt like Everest and she wished she could be somewhere else, anywhere, even arguing with Robert about the best way of dealing with CWWM’s difficulties.
‘Stop it,’ she muttered, shoving her key into the front-door lock.
The door seemed extra stiff, as though the wood had swollen in all the rain that had emptied itself from the
clouds in the last few days. She put her shoulder to it and pushed hard, only to feel it yield so fast she was propelled into the room by her own force.
‘How very flattering!’ George said, looking up from the newspaper. ‘I knew you missed us, but not that much.’
‘Hi,’ she said, leaning over his shoulder and bending her head so she could kiss him under the chin, just where his skin was most sensitive. ‘Good day?’
‘Not bad.’ He moved a little, like a cat stroking itself against a friendly body. Maybe she’d imagined the constraint. ‘You?’
‘We’re making progress with the case, but I can’t quite see my way through to a win or even satisfactorily limited damages.’ She sighed in frustration. ‘Still, it’s the weekend now, and I’m not going to think about any of it tonight. What are your plans?’
‘We’re going to train in the pool tomorrow morning,’ David said from the other sofa. ‘Me and George. d’you want to come?’
‘I’d only feel inadequate as I flap about like a water-boatman on the surface and you two do your otter thing slicing through the water. My time would be better used cooking some delicious kind of lunch so it’s hot and ready when you get back.’
‘Great,’ David said with a smile that looked forced to her oversensitive eye. He lowered his lids, looking away. ‘Can we have that chicken thing with the ciabatta and Parmesan crust top?’
She had to smile at his tact. He’d just picked the easiest of all the dishes George had taught her.
‘Sure. d’you think Jay will like it?’
David dropped his book.
‘I doubt if he’ll be here this weekend,’ George said, with a warning expression on his face. ‘I’ll get supper on the table now. Can you manage without a shower tonight? It’s a bit late already.’
‘I’ll just wash my hands,’ she said, letting her eyes put the question she couldn’t ask aloud.
George very slightly shook his head and looked upwards. Long experience told her this meant the news would be better kept until they were upstairs in bed and out of David’s earshot. A little reassured, because it was clear George already knew something, Trish asked David if she could use his bathroom to wash and so save time going upstairs.
‘After all, mustn’t keep George’s food waiting,’ she said, grinning.
David’s answering smile was only the palest version of his usual one. She abandoned the attempt to get through to him and went to clean the London smuts off her hands.
‘So what’s been happening?’ she asked when she and George were alone. ‘I had a letter from Jeremy Black, telling me David’s given Jay his best trainers and asking me to intervene, but I’d better have the full story before I try.’
‘You know most of it then, and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything you could do. Apparently Jay’s wanted those trainers ever since he first saw them. At that stage David refused to hand them over. He changed his mind only after he beat Jay up the other day.’
Trish made an inarticulate protest. Before she could organise her ideas, George said:
‘Didn’t you hear about that? Jay’s split lip and all the blood? David told me he’d confessed.’
‘He did talk a bit about the fight, but he didn’t say a word
about feeling he had to give Jay a lavish present as a penance.’
‘He was afraid you’d tell him to ask for them back and he wants me to make sure you don’t.’
‘I suppose I might have, although it’s a bit unlikely. Why didn’t he tell me himself?’
‘What he said to me,’ George said in a deliberately casual voice that worried her all over again, ‘is that he didn’t want to bother you when you’re so fraught.’
You never have time, she quoted to herself in silence.
‘Apparently when he apologised for losing his temper and drawing blood,’ George went on, ‘Jay just looked at him in a “yeah, yeah” kind of way that made it clear he didn’t believe a word of it. David said he had to do something to
show
he wished he hadn’t hit him. Hence the trainers.’
‘Oh, bugger it all!’ Trish said, sighing. ‘For some idiotically naive reason, I thought we’d be able to help Jay without it costing anything but money. d’you think we ought to try to cool the friendship now?’
‘David’s tougher than you think,’ George said, settling his wide shoulders against the pillows. ‘And it’s no bad thing for him to have to deal with rage and guilt and a bit of anxiety about someone else. Only children can get very self-absorbed, you know.’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, quick amusement lightening her voice.
George patted her thigh. ‘I didn’t mean you.’
‘I bet you did really.’ She kissed him. ‘So maybe I should ask the question that’s been nagging at me for days: what is it about Jay that makes you talk as though we all owe him something?’
‘He needs help,’ he said quickly, as though he wanted to
stop her asking anything else. ‘David had a rough enough start, but his day-to-day life was nothing to what Jay has to put up with all the time. If we can do something to mitigate it, I think we should. That’s all.’
‘How do you know what Jay goes through? Does he tell you? He’s never given me any details.’
‘It doesn’t take much imagination to fill in the gaps,’ George said.
Yellow light from the streetlamps leaked in at the edges of the blinds and lit up the few grey strands in the thick tufts of his brown hair. There was a strange half smile on his lips, which didn’t look happy, or even familiar.
‘And I admire the way he comes out fighting, instead of pretending everything’s fine and fantasising about violence in silence as … as lots of people would.’
Trish opened her mouth to ask for more and he propped himself up on one elbow so he could trace her lips with the other hand, saying: ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
Next morning, Trish made herself lie in bed after George and David had left for the pool. Long experience had taught her that, although work was the only sure way of fighting off worry, there were also times when she had to slow herself down and make the effort to clear her mind of everything. Otherwise contradictory ideas could generate so much stress they acted on her brain like dirt in an engine’s carburettor, making it cough and slow and eventually stop altogether.
George and David had already done the supermarket run on Friday evening, so the ingredients she would need for lunch were in the fridge. She had no need to hurry. Eventually, she put the newspaper on the floor and slid out
of bed, to give herself the luxury of an extra-long, very hot shower.
All week she’d had tight knots in all the connections between her arms and shoulders, legs and groin, neck and trunk. As the hot water powered down on her, needling and soothing at the same time, they began to loosen and at last to untie.
Flexible again, and feeling as though her mind was more or less free of everything except trivialities, she turned off the water and wrapped a huge scarlet towel around her body. The towel was old, with much less pile than it had once had and edges already shredded. She ought to buy more and wondered whether she had grown out of the need for scarlet. Running through the more grown-up possibilities of colours like beige and mushroom, she decided she was still some way off that stage.
The idea of spending the whole day in a dressing gown was tempting, but impractical with everything she’d have to do in the kitchen, so she pulled on her softest, oldest jeans and layered three different tops over them, taking perverse pleasure in the clashing orange, pink and purple. With the central heating turned luxuriously high, she could leave her feet bare and pattered downstairs to make a start on the chopping.
Tears were still pouring down her face, even after the onions were safely in their pan, and she was running her hands and the large chef’s knife under the cold tap in a vain attempt to clear the burning in her eyes. A loud knocking on the front door made her curse in terms that would probably have made Robert blench.
She dropped the huge knife in the sink, turned off the taps and the gas under the pan of sweating onions. Wiping her
eyes on the back of her hand, she opened the door to see Jay Smith, with a baseball cap crammed low over his forehead and his hood up over it, staring at the floor.
‘C’n I talk to Dave?’ he said in a voice so deep and strangulated she could barely decode it.
‘He’s gone swimming. Was he expecting you?’ she said, knowing he hadn’t been.
Jay’s bent head swayed from side to side. A thin trickle of blood oozed out from under his cap and spread down the side of his round face. His skin was the colour of oatmeal, much paler than usual, so his spots stood out even more clearly.
‘You’d better come in. They’ll be back in about half an hour. d’you want some juice? Or a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah. OK. Tea. Three sugars.’ His voice was a little easier to understand as he slowed it down, but nothing like as clear as it could be.
He slopped across the floor and she checked the trainers. These were old and very dirty. There was blood on them too, but darker, older. Only when she’d shut the door securely behind him, did Trish say, ‘I’ll put the kettle on, Jay. But tell me: are you hurt?’
‘Nah.’
‘There’s blood on your face.’
‘Fuckin’ hell,’ he said, wiping the back of his hand against it, then rubbing his hand up and down his jeans.
‘Jay, what’s happened.’
“s nothing.’ He shook his head with such vigour that the blood flow increased. The more he tried to wipe it away, the faster it came. Soon there was blood all over his hand and the hood. He pushed it back. With the shadows gone, she saw the swelling in his lip, where David had hit him.
That didn’t look nearly as bad as she’d feared, and it wasn’t bleeding any longer.
‘Jay, I need to do something about that cut. Will you take off your baseball cap?’
She saw he’d been crying and knew she mustn’t comment. ’Look, I’ve got a first-aid kit here. Let’s go into David’s bathroom and I’ll clean it up for you and put on a plaster. That way you won’t drip blood everywhere.
When he took off his cap, she had to fight hard not to gasp. There was a growing bruise just above his temple and a pattern of dents, along with a slash that had not only broken the skin but gone quite deep. To her unaccustomed eye, it looked as though someone had given him a tremendous, back-handed blow with a hand that wore a heavy ring with several sharp edges. It was far too fresh to have been part of David’s attack.
She pulled down the loo seat and its lid. ‘Why don’t you sit there, in the light, and I’ll have a go. It looks nasty, but I think you’ll be able to manage without a stitch. Look, I’m going to use antiseptic wipes, just to be sure the cuts are properly clean, and they will sting. OK?’
He nodded. The tears had stopped. She hoped she was doing the right thing in not taking him to hospital. As gently as possible, she tipped his head to one side and began to wipe the edges of the wound with the Dettol-soaked tissue.
‘Who did this to you, Jay?’
‘Me fuckin’ bruvver of course.’
‘Does he often hit you?’ She tried to keep all expression out of her voice so that she didn’t rev him up even more.
‘Yeah. They call it “justified chastisement”.’
‘What?’
All her good intentions disappeared in a rush of outrage on his behalf. ‘Who does?’
‘It’s what my social worker said once when she was talking to Darren. He tells me to do stuff, ’n if I don’t he hits me. Not always. But us’y.’
Trish was working out what to say next, how to express her absolute condemnation of Darren’s violence without making life at home even harder for Jay.
‘Today he telled me to watch Kimberley. My sister. ’n I was playing with David’s PSP and I didn’t see when she run off. So Darren hit me.’