Jenna
stares at the paperwork piled up on the sofa beside her, experiences a sense of oppression just looking at it. She debates the pros and cons of ploughing through more of it now, at almost ten-thirty on a Friday night, or calling it a day and cracking on tomorrow. Not for the first time, she wonders whether her bosses at the council have any conception of how much graft beyond their contracted hours the average social worker devotes to their job each week.
From the flat above begins the repetitive thudding of a bass line. Irritation clenches ’s jaw. It is like clockwork, this nightly invasion from the neighbouring flat, music that often persists until the early hours of the morning. has tried talking to the occupier, asked him to be a little more considerate, but the young man who answered the door – topless, tracksuit bottoms hanging low against his pelvic bones – just curled his top lip at her, told her ‘I’ll do what I want in my own home, alright Granny?’ is only thirty-nine, her son is seventeen; she hopes not to become a grandmother for many years to come.
‘Hey, Mum.’
Turning around, she finds Callum standing behind her, hoodie pulled up high over his head, hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans. There is still, sometimes, a momentary shock when she sees him, her little boy now resembling a grown man: six foot two, broad-shouldered, lean and toned from his athletics training. She realises she is biased but she thinks he is handsome, the kind of capable young person you’d want with you if you were stranded on a desert island: strong, honest, dependable.
‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Course you didn’t with that prick’s music thumping through the ceiling. Do you want me to go and have a word?’
raises her eyebrows. ‘You know full well I don’t. He’s a nasty piece of work – just steer clear of him, okay?’
Callum slouches into the armchair, and resists the urge to tell him to sit up straight.
‘Did you have a good evening?’
‘S’okay.’
‘Only okay?’
Callum shrugs, and is aware of tension puckering in her chest. ‘Was Isla at the party?’
He nods.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Was everything alright?’
Callum shifts awkwardly as though he cannot, all of a sudden, get comfortable.
‘Callum?’
His eyes flicker towards her and then away again, like moths too close to a flame. ‘We had a bit of a row.’
forces herself to pause, not to jump in, feet first. ‘What about?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters.’ She can hear the effort in her voice to remain neutral. ‘I thought everything was okay between you now?’ She thinks about how crushed Callum was when Isla broke up with him last spring, how it has taken over five months for him to find his feet again. How ’s own feelings towards Isla swerved so abruptly from affection to anger when she broke Callum’s heart. How difficult she has found it to fix a polite, magnanimous smile on her face when she has seen Isla at school events since.
‘It is. We’re fine.’ He chews at the corner of his mouth. ‘I’m going to make some toast. Do you want anything?’
shakes her head, and Callum launches himself out of the armchair. As he does so, the hood of his sweatshirt slips back, revealing a scarlet weal across his cheek.
‘How did you get that scrape on your face?’
Callum’s hand shoots up to his cheek. ‘I walked into a door. At the party.’ He does not wait for a response before heading into the small, square kitchen attached to the sitting room.
listens as Callum prepares a snack – the clank of the bread bin, the suction of the fridge door, the clatter of cutlery – aware that her pulse is racing. She thinks about the past three years, about her efforts to extract Callum from his previous school, to distance him from influences intent on destabilising him. She thinks about his stellar GCSE results that won him a sixth-form bursary to the private school he now attends, the school at which he has been flourishing, academically at least, over the last year.
She thinks about the trajectory of Callum’s adolescence, about his involvement in events that could so easily have set his life on a different path, and about her determination that, in changing schools, he should be allowed to begin afresh. About how she thought he was achieving that when he began dating Isla: clever, popular, level-headed Isla. A nice girl, had thought. About how worried she has been since Isla dumped Callum that it may, possibly, derail him.
And then she thinks about the bright red streak on Callum’s face, about his implausible explanation, about his row with Isla, and there is nothing she can do – nothing she can tell herself – to stop a spiral of anxiety weaving between her ribs.