Ethan rolls his eyes. ‘Mum, if cottage pie were as nice as Singapore noodles, there would be takeaway cottage pie shops all over, wouldn’t there?’
‘You’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you?’
‘Not really. I get a bit lost on the existential questions. Some imponderables leave me stumped. I mean, are eyebrows facial hair? What do people who are born deaf hear when they think? Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle? Why can’t we get mouse-flavoured cat food …?’
‘Smart arse. What am I going to eat now?’
‘You could try the sweet and sour chicken with egg fried rice. It’s staying warm in the oven on a low heat. My treat.’
Annabeth pulls a face, a lovely golden warmth spreading through her. He’s a good boy, is Ethan. Straight A student. No bother. Nice group of friends and not so much as a police caution between them. He’s not great at keeping his room tidy and he has a tendency to forget things, but she’s proud of him, and proud of herself for providing an environment in which he has been able to become more than the sum of his parts.
‘You can come eat it with me, if you like. Sit on the bed. Grab a controller. We can play an ultimate fighting game. I’ll create a character for you. You can be The Governess. Nineteen stone of pure muscle. Street fighter. Tattoos on your teeth. Finishing move is a headbutt to the groin.’
‘Not much of a change from work, really,’ muses Annabeth. She steps over a mound of discarded clothes and bends down to hug him. He doesn’t smell like her little boy any more. His hair needs a wash and there’s a little bit of musty sweat covered with body spray adhering to his clothes. Even so, she fills herself up with it. Her boy. Her young man. Her delight.
‘Knock anybody out today?’ he asks, turning back to his game. Annabeth follows his gaze and tries to make sense of the complex patterns scrolling down the different screens. She knows that he is renting ‘server space’ from another teen, but she isn’t really sure what that means. She wants to ask him but doesn’t like the idea of seeming so horribly old and ill-informed. Instead she gives vague parental lectures about the importance of not mistaking a fifty-year-old truck driver from Texas for a sweet sixteen from down the road.
‘Bloke on his way to Seg tried to raze up Mr McDermid. Two blades in a toothbrush. Ended up just putting a hole in his fleece. Paid for it when the lads arrived. Left cheek looks like he’s sucking an apple.’
Ethan pulls a face. He’s at a funny age. Part of him still thinks it’s kind of cool that his mum does a job that seems positively macho, but she knows he worries about her. There’s always been just the two of them. She had to promise him when she first applied for the position that she wouldn’t ever put herself in unnecessary danger. Even so, he likes to hear stories from work. Likes to tell his mates that his mum spent her shift trying to stop one inmate from opening another’s throat with a shank they’d secreted somewhere horribly personal.
‘Did anybody throw poop at anybody else?’ he asks, and Annabeth notices how strange the childish phrase sounds in his recently deepened voice.
‘We found a poop-and-pee canister in his cell. Shampoo bottle full of both, waiting to give whoever opened the hatch an eyeful.’
‘Cool,’ grins Ethan. ‘Van Morrison would approve.’
‘Sorry?’ she asks, not getting it.
‘You know – turning those blue eyes, brown.’
Annabeth can’t help herself. She starts to laugh: a pleasing sound that adds light to her eyes despite the tiredness. He’s always been able to make her laugh. Even in those early days, when they were moving between squats and bedsits, the two of them wrapped up in each other, waiting for the call from the Housing Association to tell them they had finally got a place of their own; even then he had been funny. He was quite the little actor: melodramatic to the extreme. At two years old he could turn the slightest disappointment into a catastrophe, flopping to the ground as if his strings had been cut and declaring that life was ‘too much, too much’. The fact that the source of his dismay was the absence of Digestives in the biscuit tin, only served to make her laugh all the more. She owes Ethan everything, she knows that. She’s been clean for fifteen years. No smack. No drink. No bad decisions, save for the occasional disastrous romantic entanglement. She’s done OK, has Annabeth. Better than she ever thought she would. She owns this house, not far from the water’s edge in the remote fishing village of Paull. Has nearly paid off the sofa, the bed and the giant plasma TV. Has bought all of Ethan’s gadgets outright and her VW Golf has its MOT, insurance and road tax, which is far more than any of her colleagues can claim. She’s got a degree in Criminology. It’s from the Open University and she completed it while working full time for a charity specializing in helping ex-prisoners get back on their feet. They like her at work. She’s got a future, according to her boss. Could be a boss within five years if she doesn’t join the throng of new recruits packing it in and running to the papers carping about intolerable working conditions.
‘You’ve had an email from the bloke you keep reading,’ says Ethan, glancing at his screen.
‘Ethan!’ She shakes her head. ‘Will you please stop hacking my email?’
‘I’m keeping you safe,’ he protests. ‘You can’t just keep adding a new digit to the end of your password. Some hackers can count your keystrokes and it doesn’t take a genius to
