Well, she’d known Freddie would find someone else eventually. She intended to do the same herself. She just hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly. Now she wondered if the truth was that she just hadn’t thought it would happen at all.
She eased her car through the gates of Margaret Fox School. She’d not been here before, but Niamh had told her where Tim would be waiting. There was a supervised holding area near the administration building, Tim’s mother had said. Manette’s name would be on a list matching to Tim’s name. She was to take her identification with her. A passport was best if she had one. There would be no quibbling over that.
She found Tim easily enough since the lane into the school led directly to the administration building, with the classrooms and dormitories forming a quadrangle behind it. Her cousin’s son was hunched on a bench with a rucksack at his feet. He was doing what, in Manette’s experience, most teenagers did with their free time these days. He was texting someone.
She pulled up to the kerb, but he didn’t look up, so intent was he upon what he was doing. This gave her the chance to observe him and she did so, reflecting not for the first time upon the extremes to which Tim went in order to hide his resemblance to his father. Like Ian, he’d been late to puberty, and he still hadn’t gone through a growth spurt. So he was small for his age, and out of his school uniform, he would look even smaller. For then he donned clothes so baggy that they draped upon him, and even the baseball caps he favoured were too large. They covered his hair, which he’d not cut in ages and which he allowed to hang in his eyes. He would want, of course, to hide those eyes most of all. For like his father’s, they were large and brown and limpid and they served perfectly well as those metaphorical windows to the soul.
Manette could see he was scowling. Something wasn’t right with whoever was texting in reply to Tim. As she watched, he lifted his hand and tore at his fingers. He bit down so hard that she winced at the sight. She got out of the car quickly and called his name. He looked up. For a moment his face showed surprise — Manette wanted to call it delighted surprise, but she didn’t dare go that far — but then his features settled into the scowl again. He didn’t move from the bench.
She said, “Hey, Buster, come on. I’m your lift today. I need help with something and you’re my man.”
He said sullenly, “I got somewhere to go,” and went back to texting, or perhaps pretending to.
She replied, “Well, I don’t know how else you’re going to get there ’cause I’m the only one with wheels that you’re going to see.”
“Where’s bloody Kaveh, then?”
“What’s Kaveh got to do with it?”
Tim looked up from his mobile. Manette saw him huff. It was a derisive exhalation of breath intended to convey his judgement of her. It said
“Come on, Tim,” she said. “Let’s go. The school’s not about to let anyone else fetch you today now your mum’s rung them.”
He would know the drill. Further recalcitrance was pointless. He muttered, shoved himself to his feet, and slouched over to the car, dragging his rucksack behind him. He threw himself into the passenger seat with enough force to rock the car on its wheels. She said, “Steady on,” and then, “Seat belt please,” and she waited for him to cooperate.
She felt for Tim. He’d taken too many punches. He’d been the worst possible age for his father to have walked out on the family for any reason. To have had his father walk out on the family for another man had thrown his entire world off its axis. What was he meant to do and how was he meant to understand his own dawning sexuality in such a situation? It was no wonder to Manette that Tim’s behaviour had altered on the edge of a knife, propelling him from his comprehensive into the cloistered safety of a school for the disturbed. He
She made a careful turn into the road outside the school gates, and she said to Tim, “CDs in the glove box. Why don’t you find us something?”
“Won’t have anything I like.” He turned a shoulder to her and stared out of the window.
“Bet I do. Have a look, Buster.”
“I got to meet someone,” he told her. “I said.”
“Who?”
“Someone.”
“Your mum know about this?”
That derisive huff of breath again. He muttered something and when she asked him to repeat it, he said, “Nothing. Forget it,” and he watched the scenery.
There was little enough of it and certainly nothing to fascinate in this part of the county. For outside of Ulverston and heading south to Great Urswick the land was open and rolling, farmland separated from the road by hedges and limestone walls, pastures in which the ubiquitous sheep grazed, and the occasional woodland of alders and paper birches.
It wasn’t a long drive. Manette’s home in Great Urswick was closer to Margaret Fox School than the homes of any of Tim’s other relatives. It was, she thought not for the first time, the most logical place for Tim to reside during the school terms, and she’d mentioned this to both Ian and Niamh shortly after they’d enrolled the boy there. But Niamh wouldn’t hear of it. There was Gracie to consider. It would devastate her to be without her brother in the after-school hours. Manette had reckoned that there was more to the matter than Gracie’s devastation, but she had not pressed it. She would, she’d decided, see the boy when she could.
Great Urswick wasn’t much of a village, one of those collections of cottages that had grown round the intersection of several country lanes, a distance inland from Bardsea and Morecambe Bay. It possessed a pub, a post office, a restaurant, two churches, and a primary school, but it had the added feature of sitting on the edge of a somewhat large pond. The posh district — as Manette and Freddie liked to call it — consisted of the houses built along the banks of this pond. They were situated near to the road but their large back gardens comprised lawns giving onto the pond itself. Reeds formed occasional barriers between the gardens and the water, and where there were no reeds, miniature jetties allowed residents access to rowingboats or places to sit and watch the ducks and the two resident swans who lived there throughout the year.
Manette and Freddie’s house was one of these. Manette pulled up to it — leaving the garage for Freddie’s use — and she said to Tim, “Come and look. Here’s where I need your help. Back here.”
“Why isn’t Freddie helping you?” Tim asked abruptly. He didn’t move to unhook his seat belt.
“Freddie?” She laughed. “Impossible. He’d have to read instructions and there’s no way he’s about to do that. The way I reckon it, I read and you build. And afterwards we cook burgers and chips.”
“Build? What? I can’t build nothing.”
“Oh yes you can. Wait and see,” she said. “It’s round the back. Come on.” She set off towards the corner of the house, without waiting to see if he would follow.
The project was a tent. Of course she could have put it up herself, with or without help from anyone. But this was not the point. The point was doing something to engage Tim and to get him talking or at least to get him relaxing enough that he might allow her a modest inroad into his suffering.
She unpacked the tent and laid it out on the lawn. It was a large affair, more suitable for a family of four than for what she had in mind, but as it wasn’t the season for tent buying, she’d had to make do with what was on offer. She was sorting through various stakes and cords when she heard Tim finally come round the side of the house. She said, “Good. There you are. Need a snack before we begin?”
He shook his head. He looked from the sprawl of canvas to her to the water. He said, “What’re you setting this up here for, then?”
“Oh, this is just practice for you and me,” she told him. “When we know what we’re doing, we’ll take it up Scout Scar.”
“What for?”
“For camping out, silly. What else would we use it for? Your mum told me you’re walking on the fells now and as I’m walking on the fells as well, we c’n do it together, soon’s you’re ready.”
“You don’t walk on the fells.”
“A lot you know. I take all kinds of exercise. Besides, Freddie doesn’t like me running along the roads any longer. He thinks I’ll be hit by a car. Come on, then. What’re you waiting for? Sure you don’t want a snack? Custard cream? Jaffa cake? Banana? Marmite toast?”
