Chapter 7
7
ISAAC
Nerves kick in bright and early the next morning, and my hands shake while attempting to tame Lenny’s hair after we both wake in a house full of boarding students. Ruth must notice. She isn’t only a teacher, she’s a houseparent who magics up a box of supplies along with an offer before breakfast. “Let me?” She then makes short work of neatening his wildness.
It’s weird to see someone else take care of him. I have to shove my hands in my pockets. That’s a reminder of Joe, only I don’t do it to hide scars like he does. I’m having to work hard to stop myself from taking over, and I would if Lenny didn’t close his eyes when Ruth smooths baby hairs the same way Mum would. He soaks up this contact, this touch, leaning into her the same way he did last night when she offered to read his bedtime story.
I should be grateful for both reprieves from a role I never asked for.
I’m staticky instead. Twitchy with nerves about telling a second story, and so desperate for a happy ending that I can’t force a single word out.
Maybe she notices that too. Ruth makes conversation that doesn’t require my contribution. “I’ve been a houseparent here since we married.” She tilts her head at a framed photo of a man holding a baby. “Four years later, who knows how many students, and a little boy of my own, and there’s no bedhead I can’t wrangle.” She answers an unasked question. “He’s away with some of the other teachers on an outreach teaching project for migrants. Luke’s partner is out there with him. They’ll be back from France in a month or so.” She rubs her belly. “Can’t come soon enough.”
I find my voice then. “Can I help?”
Keeping busy is so much better. She finds jobs for me when it’s time for her to teach, and the morning passes faster than if I had time to overthink which story to run with later. I save that overthinking for what happened under a weeping willow.
With Joe.
I can’t help touching my lips each time I rewind and replay him rasping a question in its shadows.
“You sure?”
I was sure he was the bad guy in a horror story I told myself over and over. So sure. Now, I’m not sure of anything apart from Joe being on my mind between teaching sessions. My ears prick each time I hear footsteps outside the classroom, and I can’t help checking the car park each time I pass a window. That’s a reminder of when he used to check in on Lenny, and of how I used to watch out for him as if I were the reason for his visits.
I put him in an impossible situation.
Ruth regains my attention. “That was a good morning. Now we’ll work outside. We do that as often as we can here. There’s nothing like fresh air and mixed age groups.” She crouches beside a table to answer a question. “Yes, Maisie. Teo and Noah will be our helpers.” She accepts my help to get up, which is another Mum blast from the past. So is Ruth loading me up with things to carry when we raid a supply cupboard in another classroom.
“The little ones love it when the older ones help. They learn by example. Get to see what will be possible if they keep trying. The older ones get to feel looked up to and successful. Lots and lots of lovely chances to scaffold learning and grow resilience. You watch, you’ll see.”
She waves at her own son on the way out of the supply cupboard. A whole class of preschoolers wave back, including their teacher—Rowan, I remember from my first time here. He plays a penny whistle tune for us to march those craft supplies across his classroom, to skip in time with, to tiptoe, and then to stamp and twirl, and it isn’t hard to join in with this dance party.
Ruth still spins as I follow her back to that courtyard where she swaps places with another teacher. Lenny hasn’t even noticed I was missing, too busy colouring with a trio of chatty boys who don’t seem to care that he only listens.
Ruth directs me to leave these craft supplies next to another stack of envelopes. “I’ll keep him good and busy with some more time capsule work while you’re interviewing. Until then, can you be an extra pair of eyes for me? The theme today is moving on, and that isn’t easy for everybody.” She scans the courtyard, gaze landing on an older student who could give Hayden a run for his giant money. “Teo will lend me a hand when you’re gone. He’s getting some teaching experience ahead of deciding on his final pathway, and he’s from London too, like Noah. Speaking of, where is he?” She squints. “Ah. There.”
This final student helper is a redhead who hangs back, watchful instead of participating.
She lowers her voice. “I don’t really need his help. We’re all keeping an eye on him.” She sighs quietly. “He was settling in so well. Starting to thaw, you know, but lately?” Her headshake is subtle. “He’s involved in a nasty court case. I think the date must be close. Sword hanging over his head, poor lamb.”
I know that helpless feeling. That dread.
Ruth labels my own emotions.
“He’s frozen because he’s powerless. Scared about a process he has no control over. We’re also observing him for potential additional support reasons, but I’m sure that’s what this stony face is down to. Fear.”
“Additional support?”
“Possibly. He’s extremely academically able. Less so socially. It’s a shame he’s isolating himself again after doing so well. All we can do is keep being open with him. Keep letting him know that we’ll listen, although the end of the spectrum he might be part of often comes with shutting down in high-stress situations. That’s called overwhelm. If you notice him seeming too overwhelmed to get involved today, remind me to mention it to the padre.”
It’s nice that she thinks I’ll still be here by the end of the day and not on my way back to London. For now, I get busy working my way around tables to hear children’s stories, and despite my nerves, time flies all over again as they empty their envelopes to share the contents with me.
If I don’t get a job here, I’ll remember this session of getting to see kids look forward, even if my gaze keeps getting drawn to the two people in this courtyard who can’t do that yet.
Lenny sits close to Tor at the same table where an auburn head bends over an envelope. I don’t get a chance to ask Noah what is inside his. He hurries off as soon as I approach, then posts it into the time capsule tote box.
No.
He drops it as if it’s too hot to hold onto, then backs off in a hurry.
That’s a reminder of me backing through a willow curtain. The big difference is that it sounds as if Noah doesn’t have anyone to follow him or to trust with the worries Ruth described.
I had Joe to lean on.
Anger should flood me next. That’s all I had left after Lenny sank into silence. Finally getting that kiss has clarified it was me who got that ball rolling.
Joe had no choice.
What was black is now white, and I’m still conflicted when a ringing school bell means it’s time to tell my story.
Part of me wants to let my brother know that his version of a hero will be there to listen. The rest of me pictures Lenny doing the same as Noah, and I can’t risk him withdrawing even more when Joe leaves straight after.
It’s a no-win situation.
I’m gruff when I let Lenny know where I’ll be for the next hour. “Draw something for me while I’m busy. Go ahead. Pick something to show me later. I’ll be back when the next bell rings.”
He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. His doe eyes say plenty.
I crouch beside his bench so I have to look up to him for once. It’s only fair—he looks up to me so often. “Do you want to leave something behind here?”
He nods.
I take a guess. “Wintergreen?”
He nods again, and out of nowhere, his eyes well. I scoop him into my lap, close enough that I hear his hitching whisper. “Not Mum.”
This is the sort of confession that usually chokes me. After yesterday, I try to channel someone who was there for me when I needed. Joe always looked for other options for us. It’s gutting to realise it was me who cut off that lifeline.Me who cost us the one and only person who helped us to tread water.
I can’t un-see that truth, so I settle Lenny back at the bench, aware that Noah hasn’t only returned. He listens to me suggest something else Lenny could leave behind for good, I hope. “How about the cockroaches in our last place in Wintergreen?”
That gets Noah’s attention. “Wintergreen?”
“You know it?” Ice-chip eyes meet mine, but he nods, so I open up like Ruth said might help him. “I’m doing my best to get my brother out of there for good.” I draw a black insect. “You could draw some of these, Len. Fill up a whole page of them to leave behind. Or draw something else. It’s all good.”
Lenny grabs a silver Sharpie, and I fully expect a repeat hero to fill his sheet of paper. The knife he sketches instead? It slides between my ribs. “Yeah. You can leave knives behind here.” He looks up again, solemn and silent as I tell him, “I’m sorry that man scared you.”
Noah meets my eyes as soon as Lenny is absorbed again in drawing, his own gaze a touch less frosty, so I keep being as open with him as Joe was with me under that tree. “He saw a knife fight. If I get a job here, he won’t have to see another. Just need to convince the headmaster.”
Noah makes a surprising offer. “Want me to tell him what it’s really like there?”
I catch a glance of Ruth making a keep going gesture.
“You could definitely sit in, if you wanted.”
That’s how I end up outside the library with a student and with the only other story I have left to tell here, despite owning a van full of other titles. Even if this scrapbook isn’t full of Lenny’s scribbles like Joe suggested, it is full of everything asked for by Luke Lawson, who is surprised to see Noah.
He’s pleased too. So is the padre.
“Noah! You want to be involved? Good man.”
It’s a great start. I still feel as weak as a fucking kitten until I remember what Joe told me.
Strong men have always done it for me.
And that’s who I see when I make it over the threshold—a man strong enough to walk away when that wasn’t what he wanted. Now he’s here for me all over again, sitting with his back to the window.
So Lenny can’t see him.
Noah can. He stops in his tracks until I make introductions. “Joe was Lenny’s first school welfare officer.”
This fires out bullet-fast. “He’s police.”
“Not me.” Joe holding both hands up spells, Don’t shoot . “I do work alongside courts, but today, I’m here for Isaac.” He meets my eyes, and I’ve spent so long telling myself he’s the last man on the planet that I’d trust. Now it’s Joe I approach. Joe I set the scrapbook in front of, and my nerves almost overwhelm me.
This story is far from fiction. It’s mine and Lenny’s, and there’s so much riding on it.
“No hurry,” he says as if we’re all alone here. This warmth is familiar, a bittersweet reminder of so many times he listened in on stories, which he brings up as if they stuck with him too. “I used to time my home visits so I’d get to hear you tell Lenny bedtime stories.”
I can start then, and I never thought I’d spin a story around a too-long separation from someone special. Maybe I can do it because I tell it to someone else I couldn’t let myself miss.
I clear my throat and get going.
“Once upon a time, a queen was captured.”
Not only Joe listens. I’m aware that Luke Lawson leans closer. So does the padre, and a teacher who arrives late and then sits with a sketch pad. He fades, as does Noah, when I turn the first page.
I’m at a table full of people who will judge my performance, but Joe might as well be my sole audience listening to a story written in his absence. I page through a journey where Lenny is a prince on a quest, and like I always do with little children, I add movement that my peripheral vision tells me my wider audience watches closely. Luke Lawson smiles at me wielding an imaginary broadsword to cut through thorns, and Noah even laughs when I do the robot to match one of Lenny’s drawings.
Joe doesn’t laugh at the body popping that usually dissolves Lenny into giggles.
He scans evidence of months in the life of a kid he told me he’d wondered about often. That’s who is on each sheet of scrapbook paper, in every crayoned love heart, and in every single brushstroke of paintings titled My Mum , where Joe’s eyes linger.
Noah’s do too when I pass this scrapbook around the table. He traces the black bars Lenny painted to cage her, then he goes still after lifting a flap detailing dates and times of prison visits. “Wait. This is a true story?” His gaze rises. So do angry blotches. “This is your mum, and she’s been locked up all this time? There hasn’t been a trial yet?”
“Trial?” Luke Lawson comes back into sudden and sharp focus, leaning over to flip more pages. He stops. Flips back, any hint of a smile gone.
“Are you certain you want to share this, Isaac?”
I nod. “I listened to what you said. You wanted proof I understand childhood trauma.” I flash a glance directly at Joe, which means I see that it isn’t me he watches. His gaze stays on Noah, but it’s Joe I speak to. “This story has all the trauma I didn’t know what to do with on my own after Mum was arrested.” I tell the real truth. “Couldn’t have got through those first few months without Joe.”
Noah pales, flush long gone and freckles stark as he unfolds a map I made for my brother. “Wintergreen, yeah?” He keeps unfolding to show a route out of knife crime central. His fingertip touches the name of part of London that Mum said used to be decent. Now gangs rule it, a stain that won’t quit spreading.
“Yes.” I touch that rats’ nest of high-density housing. “This is where our story started.”
Noah’s own fingertip lands on the far side of thousands of high-rise homes, so I guess that’s where his own did.
I trace a route I inked onto this paper. “Whenever we got visiting orders to the first prison Mum was held in, this is the way we went. I had to add more paper to make the map bigger when they moved her further away from us. That was over a month ago. We haven’t had a visiting order yet. And they won’t seem to accept my phone number for calls like the last prison used to.”
“Lenny hasn’t seen or heard her voice since she was moved?” Joe runs a fingertip over the coloured Tube lines I added. That scarred finger stops on photos I stuck along a second bus route, then along the roads I’d take if I drove there. “That’s a long time and a much longer journey.”
“For Lenny, yeah. I’m assuming we’ll get a visit soon.” I touch a photo, our fingers momentarily brushing. “These are landmarks he could look out for on the way there.” I wonder if Joe remembers making this suggestion. “You said making the journey a game could help normalise visits for him.”
Noah leans closer, his and Joe’s heads almost touching as I add detail that Joe knows already.
“He only recently had his seventh birthday. She’s missed two in a row. That’s a long time for a little kid, so like Joe said, I made it an adventure.” At least I tried to. “See those numbers?”
Noah touches additions I made to keep a little kid’s interest.
“They relate to pages further on in the scrapbook where I added stories about those locations. I didn’t make all of them up. Tried to make it educational.” I dart a quick look at the headmaster. “That’s the story I’d tell your younger kids. A prince on a quest across London, and the other hero of the story who was beside him every step of the way to make a rescue. See?” I point out my attempt to draw Lenny’s favourite action figure.
Joe asks, “Is that?—”
“A cape? Yeah, it is. I’m no artist, but Lenny was pretty set on what his Silver Man looks like.”
“He’s got scars like mine,” Joe says roughly, and Noah frowns, looking between that image and Joe, so I’m pretty sure he gets what I’ve spent a year denying—Joe wasn’t only Lenny’s hero.
Now he’s gonna hear me admit that he was mine too.