“Of course not.” She walked into the sitting room.
“Is any of your family at home? I’d like to include them if possible.
The more rounded the picture the better.”
Ma gave it some thought.
“Mike!” she yelled suddenly.
“Get yourself down. There’s a lady wants to talk to you. Nipper! In ‘ere.”
Roz, who was only interested in talking to Gary, saw fifty pound notes flying out the window by the bucket- load. She smiled with resignation as two skinny young men joined their mother on the sofa.
“Hi,” she said brightly, ‘my name’s Rosalind Leigh and I represent a television company which is putting together a programme on social deprivation…”
“I told them,” said Ma, cutting her short.
“No need for the sales pitch. Fifty quid per ‘cad. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“As long as I get my money’s worth. I’ll need another good hour of chat and I’m only really prepared to pay fifty apiece if I can talk to your eldest son, Peter, and your youngest son, Gary.
That way I get the broadest viewpoint possible. I want to know what difference it made to your older children being fostered out.”
“Well, you’ve got Gary,” said Ma, prodding the unprepossessing figure on her left, ‘young Nipper ‘ere. Pete’s in the nick so you’ll ‘ave to make do with Mike.
“E’s number three and spent as much time being fostered as Pete did.”
“Right, let’s get on then.” She unfolded her list of carefully prepared questions and switched on her tape- recorder. The two ‘boys’, she noticed, had perfectly proportioned ears.
She spent the first half-hour talking to Mike, encouraging him to reminisce about his childhood in foster homes, his education (or, more accurately, lack of it through persistent truanting) and his early troubles with the police. He was a taciturn man, lacking even elementary social skills, who found it hard to articulate his thoughts.
He made a poor impression and Roz, containing her impatience behind a forced smile, wondered if he could possibly have turned out any worse if Social Services had left him in the care of his mother. Somehow she doubted it. Ma, for all her sins and his, loved him, and to be loved was the cornerstone of confidence.
She turned with some relief to Gary, who had been listening to the conversation with a lively interest.
“I gather you didn’t leave home till you were twelve,” she said, consulting her notes, ‘when you were sent to a boarding school. Why was that?”
He grinned.
“Truanting, nicking, same as my brothers, only Parkway said I was worse and got me sent off to Chapman “Ouse. It was OK. I learnt a bit. Got two CSEs before I jacked it in.”
She thought the truth was probably the exact opposite, and that Parkway had said he was a cut above his brothers and worth putting some extra effort into.
“That’s good. Did the CSEs make it easier to find a job?”
She might have been talking about a trip to the moon for the relevance a job seemed to have in his life.
“Inever tried.
We were doing all right.”
She remembered something Hal had said.
“They simply don’t subscribe to the same values that the rest of us hold.”
“You didn’t want a job?” she asked curiously.
He shook his head.
“Did you, when you left school?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised by the question.
“I couldn’t wait to leave home.”
He shrugged, as perplexed by her ambition as she was perplexed by his lack of it.
“We’ve always stuck together,” he said.
“The dole goes a lot further if it’s pooled. You didn’t get on with your parents then?”
“Not enough to want to live with them.”
“Ah, well,” he said sympathetically, ‘that would explain it then.”
Absurdly, Roz found herself envying him.
“Your mother told me you worked as a motorbike courier at one point.
Did you enjoy that?”
“So-so. It was all right at the beginning but there’s no fun driving a bike in town and it was all town work. It wouldn’t ‘ave been so bad if the bastard who ran it ‘ad paid us enough to cover the cost of the bikes.” He shook his head.
