The fire was soon blazing again and he crouched in front
of it. So far he hadn’t met her gaze once. And he didn’t put down the trainers.
‘Cooking anything will take too long,’ she said. ‘Is bread and cheese and a mug of tea all right?’
‘Yeah. Great.’ He half turned his head, as though he wanted to look at her, then went back to staring at the flames. ‘Thanks.’
Wow, she thought, recognising the first expression of gratitude she’d ever heard from him. Now what do I do? If he admits he did kick his mother into a coma I’ll have to hand him over. But if he denies it, do I hide him, turn him in, find him a criminal lawyer or what?
The kettle was still hot so it took no time to make the tea and load a tray with a full mug, as well as bread, butter, cheese and chutney. An afterthought made her stop and go back to add sugar bowl and teaspoons. She carried the tray round the central block that held the fireplace and laid it on the floor beside Jay.
‘Help yourself,’ she said, waiting for the moment when he would put down the shoes.
He tucked them under his left arm and used his right hand to add three heaped teaspoons of sugar to the mug and stir so roughly that tea slopped over the edge. Then he hacked off a chunk of cheddar, not bothering with bread or butter, and crammed it in his mouth.
‘Chew it slowly,’ Trish said. ‘Or you’ll give yourself indigestion. When did you last have anything to eat?’
‘Pizza Express,’ he said through the mouthful of cheese. ‘With George ’n’ David.’
‘That’s twenty-four hours ago. Where did you sleep last night?’
He looked over his shoulder. His eyebrows were so low over his eyes she couldn’t see into them.
‘Out,’ he said and picked up the mug of tea.
He must have burned his mouth because he nearly dropped the mug. She waited while he downed another lump of cheese. It would have weighed nearly a hundred grams, she thought.
‘Trish?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why were the police at my flat?’
She waited again, knowing that what she said now, and how she said it, could change their relationship for ever, and David’s too.
‘Your mother’s in hospital.’
‘What?’ He looked astonished.
‘She was attacked, kicked.’ Trish watched him carefully, trying to find something that would tell her whether he was faking. ‘A passer-by found her lying unconscious and called the police. They got an ambulance, which took her to Dowting’s Hospital. She’s alive and doing OK, but it’ll be a while before she’s able to come home.’
‘Was she pissed?’
‘I think so.’
‘Who done it?’ He glanced at her for a second, but only out of the corner of his eyes, so she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He definitely looked shifty.
‘They don’t know.’ Trish paused, then added slowly: ‘They’re trying to talk to every member of your family and everyone in the estate who might have seen something. They will need to talk to you as well.’
He was very still. She hoped it was the fire’s heat and the
burning mouthful of tea that had stopped his shivering, not extra unbearable fear.
‘Shall I cut you some bread?’
There was a long pause before he said: ‘’f you want.’
She sliced it thickly and added butter. ‘D’you like chutney?’
Another long pause gave her the time to understand George’s determination to feed her in moments of stress.
‘I dunno.’
‘OK. I’ll just put the cheese on.’ That, too, she sliced thickly and laid it out, cutting the slice in two before retreating to her sofa.
The camomile tea was no better for being cool, but she drank it anyway.
‘They’ll want to know when you last saw her, I expect,’ she said casually, as though it didn’t matter. ‘And what kind of state she was in then.’
He hadn’t touched the bread, but he did drink some more tea.
‘In the morning before school. She was sober then and angry,’ he said, staring into the fire and sounding tired and surprisingly adult. ‘And stinking too. Like she always is before she gets her benefit, when she can’t buy no more White Star. Darren was shouting at her to bring the money straight home and she was shouting back and Kimberley was hiding in her room.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Went to school.’ He picked up the bread and took a bite. When he’d finished chewing, he went on: ‘Then I tried to come back here with David to work, but he said we couldn’t without you or George, so we went to George’s office; then we went to Pizza Express.’ He stalled.
‘And George took you back to the estate in a taxi, didn’t he?’ Trish offered, knowing she was leading her witness in a way that would never be allowed in court.
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Then what?’
‘I went home. I was walking up the stairs when I heard things.’
‘What things?’ Trish asked when the silence had gone on too long.
‘People talking. I could tell they was police. So I went round the other end of the block and looked along the balcony and saw them. All clustered round the door of my flat, talking to Darren. So I legged it.’
‘Why, Jay?’
‘Only sense, innit? They ask you things about people. And whatever you say they don’t believe you and they twist it. ’s better not to let them ask you anything.’
‘I don’t understand. What kind of things do they ask? And about which people. Your mother?’
You’re not in court, Trish, she reminded herself. This boy is not a witness.
He was blushing, which troubled her, and peering all around the room, his eyes moving so fast in their sockets he looked panicky.
‘Jay?’ she said as gently as she could. ‘What things?’
He stared at the floor and hugged the trainers more tightly.
‘How did you manage to rescue the trainers?’ she asked lightly when it was clear he wasn’t going to answer. ‘You can’t have had them with you in Pizza Express. And where’s your school bag?’
He hunched his shoulders and gave all his attention to
the bread and cheese. Trish watched his back and waited.
‘Jay?’ she said again, trying not to sound aggressive but determined to get at the answers somehow.
‘I waited,’ he said. His voice was tight with strain. ‘Till I saw Darren taking Kimberley to school ’smorning. There was no one else about, so I let myself in to the flat and took my trainers and legged it again.’
‘But why?’
He looked at her as though she was mad. “Cos they’re the ones David give me. I couldn’t leave them for fucking Darren.’
‘Right. I see,’ she said, remembering why she so often liked him so much. ‘And the schoolbag?’
‘It’s by your bins, under the iron staircase. I hid it there last night after I run.’
‘I’d better rescue it,’ she said. ‘The binmen come tomorrow and we don’t want them taking it by mistake.’
‘C’n I go to the toilet?’
‘Of course. I should have said. And have a hot shower, if you like. Use my bathroom, but be as quiet as you can because George is asleep. Go up the spiral stairs and it’s the first door on the left. There are lots of clean towels in the airing cupboard.’
She was as quiet as she could be on the stairs outside the flat and took enough time at street level to stand under a streetlamp and peer at the bag. There were no signs of blood that she could see. But a CSI or a lab technician would undoubtedly do better if they ever got hold of it.
When she took it back into the flat, Jay was crouching beside the fire again, drinking his tea. The trainers were neatly lined up by his side. He heard her and tensed, then
picked them up again and tucked them under his arm. She carefully double locked the door.
‘C’n I stay here then?’
‘Tonight? Yes, of course. We will have to talk about what’s best to do next, but you should get some proper rest now. I haven’t got a spare room so d’you think you’ll be OK on one of the sofas if I get some rugs and a pair of David’s pyjamas?’
He turned then and looked fully at her. She saw his face and hair were still wet, as though he hadn’t dared take time to dry before he put his clothes back on.
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure, Jay.’
He glared at her, as though daring her to retract, then nodded. She’d passed a test. He carried the trainers to the end of the sofa, then went back for his mug.
‘I’ll get some more rugs,’ Trish said, not knowing whether she’d done the right thing but certain she’d taken the only possible course. No one with any humanity could have sent this vulnerable boy back into the physical cold of the streets, or to the worse cold of a police station cell.
When she came back with the rugs, he was huddled in his underclothes, clutching a cushion and looking even more defenceless. He gabbled something so fast it took her a full minute to disentangle the sounds and work out what he’d said:
‘I thought the police was going to ask me about George.’
‘George?’ she repeated. ‘Why would they want to talk to you about him?’
‘Because Darren’s always going, you know, George is a kiddy-fiddler and that’s why he keeps bringing me in the car.’
Trish felt like someone clinging to a frail tree in a hurricane as the full force of rage hit her.
Jay was looking terrified, so she smiled and watched his expression ease. She was so touched by his battle to protect George that she wanted to take him in her arms and hug him as he’d never been hugged in his life. She couldn’t, of course, so instead she unfolded the rugs and spread them over him, tucking the top one securely under the sofa’s solid cushions.
‘You shouldn’t have put yourself at so much risk,’ she said, tidying his strange fringe. ‘George is big enough and old enough to protect himself against silly allegations like that. He’d hate to think of you spending all night in the cold so you didn’t have to answer questions about him.’
‘You’re wrong, Trish.’ Not even the most passionate defence counsel could have sounded more serious. ‘You don’t know what the cops are like. They can do you even if you haven’t done it. The more you say you never, the more they say you have. That’s why I won’t talk to them, why I run away.’
‘It was very generous of you, but next time you mustn’t. You must phone one of us instead and we’ll help. Don’t worry about it now. Good night. Sleep well.’
‘Night.’
Upstairs, with George asleep beside her, she realised that Jay’s explanation of his flight had completely distracted her from the questions about his mother. He’d never answered any of them.
What if, running from Darren, he’d passed his mother and seen how drunk she was just when he needed her to protect him? Who could blame him if he’d hit out?
Trish must have slept eventually because she woke to the smell of grilling bacon and the sound of running water. Why hadn’t George woken her? On cue, her alarm clock beeped at her and the news came on.
‘Hi,’ he said, returning with his towel in its usual toga style. ‘You must have been very quiet with your midnight feasts. I had no idea we had an extra inhabitant this morning until I smelled the bacon David was cooking him.’
‘When was that?’
‘About half an hour ago. I thought I’d leave you to get whatever sleep you could. What time did he get here?’
‘Two-ish, I think.’
‘So you must be knackered. Will you be all right in court this morning?’
‘I’ll have to be.’ She rubbed her sticky eyes and tried to make her brain work. ‘I’ll feel better when I’ve had a shower. I was thinking last night, George: do Pizza Express bills have the time on them, as well as the date? A lot of places do.’
‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘but I think I threw it out.’
‘You? You never throw away receipts. You’re an even more obsessive checker of your credit card statements than I am.’
‘I paid in cash.’
‘I bet you stuffed the receipt into your pocket. Even if you didn’t, we could presumably get it from the restaurant. They must keep records longer than this.’
George unwound his towel and rubbed the remaining water from his legs.
‘Trouble is, Trish, that would be fine if the times mean Jay couldn’t have attacked his mother.’
She reached out a hand to him, glad he’d known instantly what she was thinking.
‘But if they show he could’ve had time to do it,’ he went on, ‘he’ll be stuffed. If the police want to check with Pizza Express, that’s their business. I wouldn’t even try to stop them. But I won’t do it for them.’
She swung her legs out from under the duvet and sat on the edge of the bed.
‘He told me why he ran away.’
George came towards her and laid one damp finger between her eyebrows.
‘Don’t frown, darling. What did he say?’
She told him and watched the expressions fly across his face like scudding clouds. There was a rage as deep as her own, there was compassion, and there was a terrible sadness. Then the sadness was overtaken by decision.
‘I can rejig things at work this morning so I can sort this out,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the boys to school, talk to the head for Jay, and then go with him to the police. If they still think he could have had anything to do with the attack on his mother, I’ll make sure they provide him with a decent legal aid solicitor, who’ll stop him incriminating himself.’
She let the frown ease and briefly held his hand to her cheek.
‘But we can’t condone—’
‘We’re not condoning anything.’ George smiled. ‘But we don’t have to deliver him up to trouble. Think, Trish. We both know what he’s had to put up with from that woman. If he did it –
if –
it was only after years of provocation, and the most desperate kind of unassuaged need.’
‘We don’t, in fact, know anything about her at all.’
‘She’s a drunk.’ George had rarely sounded so unforgiving.
‘Whether it’s a disease or a matter of choice, her fault or not, it’s buggered up her children’s lives.’