Nightingale is doing a one-man sweep of the house. Sensibly, he’s wearing breathing apparatus he got from the fire brigade. I don’t think I’ve got much time before he finishes and happens to me big time, so I get straight to the point.
‘You’ve got to let Simon go,’ I say to his mum.
‘I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of my business,’ she says.
‘I get it, right,’ I say. ‘I really do, because you love him, I get that. But he’s never going to be clever.’
She wants to tell me to shut up and mind my own business. But she knows she owes me and, more importantly, she knows I’m right.
‘He has difficulties,’ she says.
‘That are never going to go away,’ I say, and she rears back as if I’ve slapped her –which I’m totally prepared to do if it comes to that. ‘In your head you keep hoping that if you just keep encouraging him, he’s going to be the boy you dreamed of. But he’s never going to be something he isn’t.’
‘Are we talking about my son?’ she says – spitting out the words. ‘Or your brother?’
And that hurts. I ain’t lying, that hurts – and I feel my face twisting up. But I know that pain she’s feeling. I’ve seen that pain in my mum when she’s tired and sad and wants to know, why her? Why did this shit happen to her? And she gets snappy with me and Dad and says things.
‘Both,’ I say. ‘But the difference is Simon has a future – if you let him have it.’
Simon’s mum has her mask back on, which is good. Because she’s easier to deal with when she’s like this.
‘And how might I do that?’ she asks.
‘You want to send him somewhere where he can be free, where there’s no pressure. I know there’s posh schools that are like that. He likes to run, he likes games and he likes meeting people – he’s good at happy,’ I say. And for some reason I have to stop and not cry. ‘That’s rare, isn’t it? You should love him for that.’
Now she’s not crying too. And we’re both concentrating hard because it’s a contest and whoever cracks first pays a forfeit.
I win – obviously.
‘I’ll take it under advisement,’ she says.
*
I’m so grounded that Nightingale had to come over to my ends and debrief me in the living room. I thought Mum would want to sit in, but she decided that she’d take the opportunity to take Paul out for a walk. Nightingale helped her get Paul down the stairs and settle him into his wheelchair.
By rights, we should have been allocated a ground-floor flat when Paul stopped being able to walk. But we’re still on the waiting list.
Once Mum and Paul are safely gone, Nightingale makes me sit on the sofa and draws up the armchair so he can sit facing me. Nightingale is wearing his own mask. But after dealing with Simon’s mum, I’m feeling kind of invincible.
‘Now,’ says Nightingale. ‘Where do you think you first went wrong?’
‘Wrong like what?’
His question is confusing me. I was expecting a lecture and I’m sure a lecture is coming. But Nightingale is going all humanities teacher on me. This is not what I expect from him.
‘You saw a problem,’ he says. ‘You investigated, but you allowed yourself to be trapped in the house. Worse, you allowed your friend to be trapped with you. Which necessitated a second rescue mission back into the house.’
‘I couldn’t leave him in there,’ I say.
‘Quite so,’ he says, and nods. ‘But, in the first instance, what was your first mistake?’
‘I should have wedged the front door open,’ I say. ‘Or taken it off its hinges.’
‘Before that?’
I sigh, because I know the answer – have known the answer even as I was making that first mistake back when the Feds first showed me the picture.
‘I should have told you,’ I say, and Nightingale’s smile broadens and for a moment he reminds me of Simon.
‘And why should you have told me?’ he asks.
‘Because you’re my teacher?’
‘But I’m not your teacher,’ he said. ‘At least not yet.’
‘Because you’re the Feds,’ I say, and I’m beginning to get vexed. I like to get my lectures over and done with so I can get on with my life.
‘It’s true that the case did fall within the purview of the Folly,’ he says. ‘But that is not the true reason you should have told me.’
‘Then why?’ I ask, because otherwise we might be at this all afternoon.
‘Because you should never enter a potentially dangerous environment without first establishing reliable lines of communication,’ he says. ‘Had you done that, you would have saved me a great deal of time. And your parents a great deal of anxiety.’
Sometimes not saying something clever is the clever thing to do.
‘Roger that,’ I say – thinking fox.
There’s a long pause where we both decide whether it’s worth saying any more on the subject.
‘Have you told Peter?’ I ask.
‘Would you prefer he didn’t know?’
‘Yeah, actually,’ I say. ‘Why? Haven’t you told him?’
‘Peter has quite enough on his plate at the moment,’ says Nightingale. ‘And besides, I thought I might use it as leverage to keep you on the straight and narrow.’
He’s having a laugh, of course. But part of the trick to managing your elders is making them think they’re managing you.
We arrange for him to drop off some books from the Folly library, and he promises to ask my mum if I can go there for lessons. She’s probably going to say yes, because the Folly is close to the hospital, and she’s bound to need some help with Paul sooner or later. After making me promise, again, that I wasn’t going to do anything reckless without telling him first, Nightingale leaves.
I grab a Supermalt from the fridge and sit back down to see what’s on Sky.
‘Well, that could
