Eighteen
Jacqui Cutler knocked on the door of her son’s bedroom and waited. When you’d brought up two boys, you learned it was a good idea to wait, knowing all too well that if you didn’t, you could walk in on all sorts.
‘I’m busy.’
‘I made you some tea, love.’
‘Yeah … OK.’
She entered the room and carried the tea across to Justin’s desk.
Trying not to appear overly nosy, she snatched a quick glance at his computer screen while she searched for a coaster.
It was all maps and coloured graphs which she couldn’t have made head or tail of if she’d stared at them for an hour.
Justin sipped his tea, said, ‘Ta,’ then looked at his mother as if he was waiting for her to leave.
‘What you working on?’ Seemingly keen to hang around for a bit, she leaned against the desk and nodded towards the screen. ‘Looks complicated.’
‘Same thing I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks,’ Justin said. ‘And yeah, it is.’
‘Like, an essay or something, is it? For your course?’
‘An extended essay.’
‘Oh, like a long one?’
‘It’s part of a piece of self-directed research.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘You don’t have to pretend to be interested, Mum.’
‘I am interested, honest.’
‘Fine.’ He sighed, like the effort it would take to answer her was superhuman. ‘It’s called “Human Agents of Environmental Change In Selected Urban Settings”.’
Jacqui grimaced theatrically. ‘Sounds like a barrel of laughs.’
‘I knew I shouldn’t have bothered.’
‘I’m kidding, love. Tell me what it’s about.’
‘It’s about the way people can mess places up, basically. The effect they can have on the world around them.’
‘Which people?’
Justin leaned towards the screen and casually typed a few words. ‘People like you, Mum.’
Jacqui stood up. ‘Oh, come on, that’s not fair, love. I’m dead switched-on when it comes to the environment, the dying polar bears and whatnot. I’m forever tossing all sorts into that re--cycling bin and I buy them long-lasting light bulbs—’
‘It’s not about that,’ Justin said. ‘I’m talking about the negative impact crime has on towns like this one. Drugs, Mum.’
‘Right, yeah, I see.’ She leaned in to peer at the screen again. ‘Well, as long as you’re not mentioning my name.’
‘I’m not daft.’
‘Oh, I know you’re not daft, Justin.’ Jacqui moved away and sat down on her son’s bed.
She stared at the expensive computer set-up she’d paid for when he’d started this whole university business, and the enormous speakers which had cost an arm and a leg the Christmas before that.
At the fifty-inch wall-mounted TV and the bespoke mahogany wardrobe doors, behind which hung way more designer-label clothes than the cocky little bugger would ever be able to wear. ‘Just ungrateful.’
Justin turned round to glare at his mother. ‘What?’
‘Well, let’s be honest, crime hasn’t had much of a negative impact on you, has it?’
‘Hasn’t it?’
She shook her head. ‘Everything we did for you …’
‘Yeah, exactly. You just don’t get it.’ He sighed, seeing Jacqui dig a tissue from her pocket and start dabbing at her eyes.
‘Please, Just,’ she said. ‘Let’s not fall out again.’
‘So don’t say stupid stuff like that, then.’
‘I won’t, I promise.’ She blew her nose loudly. ‘I actually came up to say sorry.’
He looked at her. ‘Sorry for what?’
‘For the bust-up we had yesterday, after I’d been to see Ezra Simmons’s mother. Look … I don’t want to keep rowing with you, love.’
Justin moved to sit on the bed next to her. ‘I don’t want to row either.’
‘We need to stick together.’ Jacqui reached for her son’s hand and squeezed. ‘Your brother’s dead, your sister’s a waste of space and your old man isn’t coming back any time soon.’ Saying it out loud made her want to punch the air. ‘It’s just you and me now.’
‘I know, Mum, and I’m here.’
‘Oh, that’s good to hear, because I want us to be friends. After your brother died I thought we’d end up being closer than ever, but it never happened, because you seemed to be drawn to your dad more.’
‘He needed me, that’s all. He wanted me to step up and help him run the business.’ He shook his head. ‘And I thought that’s what I wanted back then.’
‘It’s OK, love. Losing someone makes us all do funny things.’
They sat together saying nothing, until the silence was broken by an alert on Jacqui’s phone.
She took it from her pocket and looked down to see that she was the winning bidder in a fiercely contested auction on eBay.
The pair of large ceramic leopards she’d been coveting for weeks would soon be taking up their positions, on either side of the living-room fireplace.
Snarling, magnificent, classy.
‘You might have heard stories,’ she said. ‘About me having something to do with your dad being sent down.’
‘I heard a couple of things, yeah.’
‘Course you did. There’s always scumbags who want to stir the pot and cause trouble for people. It’s sickening.’
‘Is it true?’
She looked at him hard, suppressing a smile as she thought about her leopards again. The seller wasn’t that far away. She’d dispatch Google to collect them. ‘Would it matter if it was?’
‘Dad did a lot of bad things to people,’ Justin said. ‘It was bound to catch up with him eventually.’
‘It’s amazing he got away with it all as long as he did.’
‘I know he did some bad things to you, too.’
‘I’m a big girl, love.’ Jacqui nodded sadly. ‘I knew what I was getting into. But even so … there’s some things you can never prepare yourself for.’
Justin sucked his teeth and swallowed, a fist clenched around the edge of the duvet. ‘Did he raise his hand to you, Mum? I swear I never knew, because if I had—’
‘He chucked a Creme Egg at me, Justin.’ She paused to let the full horror of what she was telling him sink in. ‘A Creme Egg …’
‘What? He … ?’ Justin was struggling to find the right words but in the end he appeared to decide that there simply weren’t any. There was nothing to do but open his arms and gently draw his mother towards him, stroking her miraculously dark hair as she nuzzled against his neck.
‘I still have nightmares,’ she said.