‘Yeah, I know,’ she said and teased me about bumsters.
Then you came into the kitchen, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ loudly and out of key. Really loudly. And Adam laughed. You said we’d do something special that evening.
His voice was quiet. ‘I hate going to school on my birthday.’
‘But your friends will be there,’ you said. ‘And it’s sports day, isn’t it? So not all work today.’
‘I’d rather have work.’
A flash of annoyance on your face – or was it sadness – covered because it was his birthday. You turned to Jenny.
‘Don’t kill anyone, Nurse Jen,’ you said.
‘Being school nurse is a serious thing, not something to joke about,’ I said, snappish.
‘It’s just for the afternoon, Mum.’
But what if there’s a head injury? I’d thought. And she doesn’t know to watch out for sleepiness and sickness when a child has an internal bleed in the brain. Aloud, I said, ‘Seventeen is just too young to have that much responsibility.’
‘It’s a primary school sports day, Mum, not a motorway crash.’
She was teasing me, but I didn’t catch the ball she threw me.
‘Children can be severely injured if they fall wrong. All sorts of unforeseen accidents can happen.’
‘Then I’ll dial 999 and call in the pros, OK?’
I didn’t argue with her any more. There was no point. Because I’d be there at sports day, with the watertight alibi of cheering Adam on, to keep an eye on things – any signs of sleepiness in injured children and I’d be on it.
She doled out the pain au chocolat hot from the oven, bought from Waitrose two weeks ago and waiting in the freezer for this morning.
‘I have done a St John Ambulance training, Mum,’ she said to me. ‘I’m not
A rise at the end of her sentence, like all teenage girls, as if life is one long question.
You took a hot pain au chocolat, juggling it from hand to hand to cool it, going to the door.
‘Run super-fast,’ you said to Adam. ‘And I’ll see you tonight.’ Turning to me: ‘Bye. Have fun.’
I don’t think we kissed goodbye. Not in a pointed way, but in a kiss-taken-as-read way. We thought we had a never-ending supply of kisses and had become careless with the ones we didn’t use.
‘And did your mum make you a cake?’ DI Baker asks Adam.
Silence.
‘Adam?’
But he doesn’t move or speak.
‘It was a brilliant cake,’ Jenny says to me. She puts her arm around me. ‘They’ll find out it’s a mistake.’
I remember Jenny and Adam searching the house for Adam’s tiny Lego skeleton man to put on the cake’s noman’s-land and me saying I thought this was going a little far, but secretly being glad that he was doing something boyish.
I remember counting out eight blue candles (three would go into the artillery guns) and thinking it hadn’t felt long since I’d had to take just two candles out of the full packet, and it had felt extravagant and touching. How could he need a
‘Right, let’s move on then,’ DI Baker says to Adam. ‘Did you take your cake to school?’
Adam doesn’t reply. Can’t reply.
‘I spoke to your form teacher, Miss Madden,’ DI Baker says, and it seems strange that he’s talked to the insipid and mean Miss Madden.
‘She told me that children are always allowed to bring a cake in on their birthdays?’
I remember putting the cake tin into the jute bag with the square base, which is perfect for cake tins as they don’t fall on their sides. And then-
‘Oh God.’
‘Mum?’ Jenny asks but DI Baker is talking again.
‘She told me that parents supply the candles and also the matches.’
A slight stress on ‘matches’ but Sarah reacts as if scalded.
‘Your headmistress has corroborated this,’ DI Baker continues.
I plead with Sarah to stop this Sherman tank of an interview before it reaches its destination. But she can’t hear me.
‘Miss Madden told us that she keeps the cake, with the candles and matches, in a cupboard next to her desk. Usually she would get it out at the end of the day, just before the children go home. But yesterday was sports day, wasn’t it?’
Adam is silent and still.
‘She said that if it’s sports day, the birthday child can take it out to the playing field to have at the end?’
Adam is motionless.
I remember how anxious he’d been that his birthday cake would be forgotten and he’d miss that once-a-year singing to him; all the children clustering around him.
‘She told us that you went to get your cake from your classroom?’
He dashed up to me, his face one big smile. He was going to get his cake
‘So you went to your classroom, which was empty?’ DI Baker asks, not waiting for a reply any more. ‘And then did you take the matches to the Art room?’
Adam is mute.
‘Did you use your birthday cake matches to start a fire, Adam?’
The silence in the room is so loud that I think my eardrums will burst with the force of it.
‘You just have to say yes or no, lad.’
But he’s stock still; frozen.
He’s standing by the statue of the bronze child, watching me running into the burning school, smoke pouring out and I’m shouting and screaming for Jenny.
‘We don’t think you
But how can Addie speak with the noise of sirens and shouting and his own screams? How can he make himself heard above that din?
‘How about if you just nod or shake your head?’
He doesn’t hear Adam screaming. Just as he can’t hear me as I yell at him to leave my child alone.
‘Adam?’
But Addie is staring at the school, waiting for me and Jenny. The smoke and the sirens and the waiting. A child turned to stone.
‘I am giving you a caution, Adam,’ he says to him. ‘Which is a serious thing. If you ever do anything like this again we will not be so lenient. Do you understand?’
But Adam is watching us being carried out by firefighters. He thinks we are dead. He sees Jenny’s charred hair, her sandals. He sees a firefighter shaking.
Sarah’s arms are locked around Addie.
‘That’s the evidence? That he brought in matches? And that someone saw him?’
‘Sarah-’
She interrupts him, coldly furious. ‘Someone’s made him the perfect patsy.’
