Chapter Twenty-Two
Elle felt as if she’d spent the last years encrusted in concrete. But last night had blasted it to smithereens. She’d made an honest attempt to explain what else had happened with Ricky and Lucas had stated that he didn’t need to know. Apart from having her fidelity questioned, which she was trying hard to make allowances for, uncomfortably aware of her secrets, she could float as high as the Maltese sky.
Her euphoria wasn’t even dimmed by the kind of morning at Nicholas Centre that would usually have made her doubt her suitability for volunteering.
The two ‘children’ in question, both bigger than Elle, were the swearing duo from the previous day. Elle understood that their behaviour probably cloaked self-esteem issues or fear and that the troubled and vulnerable used challenging behaviour to disguise their real feelings. But it still wasn’t fun to be shouted at and a perfectly good keyboard slammed to the table over and over as anger blazed in the bigger lad’s eyes.
The trigger was that Elle had addressed him in English.
It was only a friendly, ‘So, tell me what you’re doing?’ designed to encourage the boys to interact with her rather than disrupt the whole room. But it was met with a hail of Maltese and only a few words intelligible to her — several swear words, which she’d picked up pretty quickly over the last weeks — and ‘English!’ accompanied by emphatic spitting on the floor.
Turning to three other lads who were huddled blamelessly around another computer, she repeated her casual enquiry and was relieved to receive a more courteous response. ‘We’re playing a sim, Football Manager .’
Her ‘That’s great, can I watch for a while?’ was almost drowned out by fists hammering on desks and heels drumming on the floor from the other end of the island layout. Not a promising situation, considering she was soon supposed to begin a workshop on designing posters and flyers.
‘Can we keep the noise down a bit?’ and ‘Is there something I can help you with?’ seemed only to increase the ferocity of the drumming. Elle felt the first stirrings of alarm. When the noise brought Joseph upstairs, she even found herself glad to see Oscar strolling up behind him.
However, in the genial way that somehow produced co-operation, Joseph simply asked the two boys to come back tomorrow. With one last bang of keyboard on desk they were gone, clattering down the stairs, shouting something that Elle didn’t mind not being able to understand.
Oscar went to chat reassuringly to the boys playing on the football sim. Joseph caught Elle’s eye and she joined him at the machine the boys had been using.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll just take a look at what they’ve been doing.’ The screen displayed a networking site she wasn’t familiar with but she didn’t like what she saw. She put the site name into a search engine. ‘Great,’ she groaned as she signed in as an admin. ‘Looks as if this site has recently been involved in cyberbullying. I’ll add it to the blocked list.’
‘Good catch,’ said Joseph, making Elle feel better about not making headway with the rowdiness of the boys. He lowered his voice. ‘No recurrence of the undesirable images being downloaded?’
She shook her head. ‘Not so far. I’ve been keeping an eye out for it.’
She searched the browsing history and blocked another site she didn’t like the look of and Joseph and Oscar drifted back to whatever they’d been doing before the ruckus.
Elle prepared to begin her intended workshop, feeling slightly shaken. Because of the disruption, she ‘stepped back from her expectations’, as Joseph would put it, and the session ended up being more about creating random clashing nonsense images than planning posters. At least it gave the participants plenty of practice at using the various tools, and the half-dozen kids who turned up seemed to enjoy it.
The session ended at noon but Elle had stowed a sandwich lunch in the kitchen fridge. She was due to sit in on the Bubblemaker discussion at two-thirty but, more importantly, she hadn’t seen Carmelo since Saturday and hoped that he’d put in an appearance if she hung around. Yesterday, she’d only been able to hang on for ten minutes before she’d had to leave to get to Seadancer . It wasn’t quite enough time for Carmelo to make it from school to the centre — supposing he’d been to school.
Today, her patience was rewarded. Carmelo panted into the room at twenty past twelve. His face lit up when he saw Elle and he arrived at her side with a bounce. ‘Finished!’ he announced, dramatically. ‘School is finished. I am in holidays now.’
‘Fantastic!’ Elle was delighted to see him so happy. Actually, just delighted to see him. ‘School’s great, but we probably learn better when we’ve had a break from it.’
Carmelo didn’t argue with her optimism, he just perched his skinny frame on the chair next to hers. ‘I will look at YouTube today.’
‘OK, you’d better use earphones. The room’s filling up and if you all begin to watch YouTube or play games it’ll be too noisy.’ At peak times, the computer room could be like a teenage party on a sugar rush.
Instantly, Carmelo changed tack. ‘I look at cars.’ It was obvious that he didn’t want the earphones to interfere with a chance to talk to Elle. He began happily to browse through the Top Gear site, lingering over the sleekest, brightest and most expensive miracles of automotive design, chattering constantly about what he saw. She felt a tug at her heartstrings as he ogled Ferraris and Lamborghinis that seemed cruelly out of his grasp.
She moved around the room, checking out activity, offering help, showing interest without interfering. Most of the kids were happy to share what they were doing on Instagram or Pinterest, or what video they were giggling at on YouTube.
At one o’clock Aileen arrived and Elle went down to the kitchen for lunch. Carmelo followed, taking the seat beside her and swinging his legs as he told her about the visiting priest who had said end-of-term mass at his school that morning. If Carmelo was dissatisfied at making a meal out of tap water, it didn’t show, though several other children and Axel shared the big table with them and all ate or drank something more sustaining.
Maria was in the room, too, with fizzy drinks, fruit, crisps, cereal bars and fruit on sale.
Sandwich eaten, Elle bought a pomegranate and a large lush orange with telltale red blotches on the skin. She began to peel it, but then halted. ‘What on earth is this?’
‘ Larin?a tad-demm ,’ said Carmelo, helpfully.
‘It’s red.’ Using a piece of kitchen towel from the middle of the table, she pulled aside the segments distrustfully. ‘Oranges are supposed to be orange.’
Carmelo looked at her in puzzlement. ‘ Larin?a tad-demm is a bit red. It’s good.’
Maria glanced over. ‘Blood orange,’ she translated. ‘They’re grown here in Malta.’
Cautiously, Elle bit the end off a segment. Lovely. But she manufactured a grimace. ‘Hmm.’ And put the orange down on the kitchen paper.
‘You don’t like it?’ Carmelo sat upright in indignation.
Elle shook her head apologetically. ‘I’m probably being too English but it’s odd for something red to taste like an orange. If you like it, will you eat it for me? I’ll move on to the pomegranate.’ She jumped up to borrow a small knife from Maria so that she could cut the pomegranate in half, and a teaspoon with which to ease out its jewel-like seeds. Returning to the table, she gave an inner cheer to see Carmelo tucking into the blood orange, juice pink on his chin.
Mindful not to be judgemental, she acknowledged inwardly that he could have lunch awaiting him and had chosen to come to the centre rather than go home to eat it. But if he had, then an orange was unlikely to spoil his appetite.
Nor would half a pomegranate, should she find herself unable to eat a whole one.
At two-thirty, Elle presented herself in Joseph’s office.
Lucas was already seated on one of the eclectic collection of chairs: grey, with a ladder in the fabric on the arm like a run in a woolly sock. A white T-shirt made his hair and eyes look particularly dark. He greeted her casually but she found herself blushing as she took her seat, glad that Joseph was scrabbling through his paper-heaped desk for a pad and pen.
‘So,’ Joseph began, settling his glasses. ‘Elle tells me that you would like to discuss doing something for the children?’
Lucas crossed his ankle over the other knee and ran briefly through the details of his job and where he worked. ‘I’ve spoken to Vern, the owner of Dive Meddi, and we wonder if you’d like us to put on a Bubblemaker Session? A Bubblemaker session’s for under-twelves and it gives them a taste of using scuba equipment in an enclosed, safe environment. It’s all about fun and enjoyment but, of course, safety is paramount.’
He spent some time describing the facilities at Dive Meddi and what the ratios would need to be of child to instructor in the water. ‘The first step would be for Vern and I to visit the centre with a fun presentation on diving, including slides showing the equipment and some of the aquatic life that inhabits the waters around Malta.’
As Lucas and Joseph discussed parental consent necessary for children to take part in the pool session, transport, on-shore supervision, equipment, insurance and Joseph visiting the dive school and meeting Vern, Elle watched Lucas’s lips, enjoying his quick intelligence as he poured out information in a way that was interesting, comprehensive and comprehensible. Her eyes dropped to his hands as he borrowed Joseph’s pad to augment an explanation with a sketch.
Presently, it was agreed that Joseph would check out Dive Meddi late that afternoon, when the diving groups were back, with a view to the presentation happening late Friday afternoon.
Joseph asked Elle to devise and print posters for the noticeboard in the lounge and for the doors in the activity rooms.
‘Fine,’ she agreed, promptly. ‘Lucas, do you have time to run up to the computer room with me to help me get the blurb right?’
‘I’m happy to be in your hands,’ he said easily, making Elle blush again.
They left Joseph to whichever of the million-and-one admin tasks had risen to the top of his ‘to do’ list and stepped out into the hall. At the foot of the stairs they had to pause to let Oscar come cantering down.
He pulled up with a broad grin and a loud and over-effusive greeting. Then he checked the corridor in both directions and lowered his voice. ‘So, boyfriend-not boyfriend-boyfriend. Maybe it’s with you she had the big sexual night, yes? She told me about it.’
Horror shot through Elle’s chest. ‘Oscar!’ she hissed, her cheeks on fire. ‘That is so not appropriate.’
Oscar laughed. ‘Then you should not tell me.’
She turned to Lucas. ‘I was trying to stop him h-hitting on me. I didn’t go in to detail—’
But Lucas was grinning. ‘You went public that we spent the night together?’ he drawled. ‘That’s the best news I’ve had all day.’
‘Oh!’ Elle laughed, reluctantly. ‘Yes, I suppose I can see how that would work for you.’ Relieved that Oscar’s poison dart had turned out to be so easily deflected, she couldn’t resist sending the Dutchman a triumphant smile. It got her a glower in return.