‘And you are my child, Edie, though you show me no love at all. You have to decide who you are. You have to decide, Edie. It’s not enough to say we made you this, and we made you that, and expectation took away this and pressure demanded that. Stand up and be counted. And if your love ends the moment you find out your parents are people, then my God, there really is no hope for you.’
‘But he’s fallen so short,’ I say quietly. A damp squib.
‘So have you, Edith.’
We are silent. Mum has dropped onto the sofa. Her eyes are glazed. She stares into the fire and then says, ‘Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds.’ She looks at me. ‘He’s your father and you should stand by us, as we stand by you.’
One Year Later
Wednesday
Manon
‘Fly? Fly! C’mon. Homework.’
He groans from somewhere beyond the hall and she waits, looking at the dappled garden, the sun playing through the fingers of the lime trees. Honeyed patio stones radiate with the heat of the day.
‘Fly! Come on, stop wasting time.’
He joins her at the kitchen table and hauls his school bag onto his knee with am-dram weariness. His white school shirt has a pen leak at the pocket, a blot of black chequering into the cotton. He smells of sweaty boy. She makes a mental note to buy him some shower gel.
‘What treats do your teachers have in store for us this evening?’ she asks.
‘I have to, like, write a persuasive argument for something, like a party political fingy.’
‘Broadcast. Party political broadcast. OK, any ideas?’
‘Like why I should be allowed to watch TV after school like them other kids.’
‘Those other kids, Fly. You’re not going to be very persuasive with grammar like that. Go on, then, write it as if you’re persuading me.’
‘No one can persuade you of nothin’, DS Auntie.’
‘DI Auntie, to you.’
He splays across the table like a broken umbrella, chewing the end of his pen. He whispers to himself when he starts to write. She gets up to stir the lamb stew, which is bubbling on the hob.
‘If you finish that, you can go out for a bit,’ she says, her back to him.
‘Serious?’ he says.
‘Serious.’
It gives her pleasure to surprise him with a loosening of his restrictions, even while she knows that same pleasure will tighten to anxiety as she waits for him to come home. She can hardly refuse him these forays: along Mill Lane to the newsagent where he can buy pick-and-mix; to sit on the swings in Sumatra Road; up to Fortune Green where friends from his school congregate in the park and scale the wire fence into the play centre. He is about to turn twelve, is well over five foot, and now walks to school alone.
‘No hoodie, though,’ she says, thinking of the group of them, how they scare people on the bus. They are so tall and so burgeoning male.
He groans. ‘Why?’
‘One, because you’ll boil in this heat, even if your trousers are right down below your bum, which makes you look completely ridiculous, by the way, but we’ve had that conversation; and two, because I don’t want anyone mistaking you for something you’re not. You are a lovely, gentle, well-mannered boy, Fly. Don’t give anyone any reason to think otherwise.’
‘Why should I be stopped from wearing an item of clothing just ’cos of the colour of my skin?’
‘Maybe that should be the subject of your persuasive argument,’ she says. ‘Oh, and Fly? No smoking in the cemetery. And don’t come the innocent with me – I know you’ve done it.’
‘Whatevs,’ he says in a whisper. His disdain is gossamer light, and she thinks she can detect beneath it his pleasure at the tight boundaries she lays.
‘And I want you back by 6 p.m. sharp for supper. Ellie and Sol are coming.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Can I feed Solly?’
‘I’m sure Ellie would be delighted,’ she says, smiling at him. ‘What d’you reckon – rice or couscous with the stew?
‘What’s couscous?’ he says, his eyes down to his books again.
‘The grainy one, yellow.’
‘Yeah, that one.’
The room is full of pale May light and the smell of cooking meat, and she is struck by how far they’ve come in their journey to being a family of sorts.
She hadn’t thought any of it through. Fly’s mother’s illness had been swift and brutal. Three months after Ian Hind’s arrest and four months after Manon first met Maureen, the stomach cancer killed her, without pause for admission to a hospice. Manon travelled to London without a plan, telling herself whatever happened next would be temporary. She and Fly stayed with Ellie – necessity being the mother of reconciliation – in her little two-bed flat on Fordwych Road, which ran like a vein on the border between Kilburn and West Hampstead. Far from a pink paradise, Ellie had broken up with Solly’s feckless father during pregnancy, and was tearfully battling sleep deprivation without respite.