‘Right, well, good luck today. I’ll leave you … to it,’ he said, seeming to know she needed space to welcome Fly home without his complicating presence.
Fly focuses his wounded gaze on her once more. ‘Won’t be on your hands much longer,’ he says.
‘I want you on my hands – you’re my son, Fly. I adopted you. You agreed. You adopted me. You can’t back out the minute it gets difficult.’
‘Yeah, well, doesn’t feel like that any more.’
She nods. ‘I’m sorry for everything,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what I can do to make it up to you, except say sorry. I’m sorry for all of it. I’m sorry I brought you here, I’m sorry about this baby. I’m sorry I was so stupid, not to see what I had. I went after this idea of having more children without thinking about the child I already had.’
‘But I’m not yours,’ Fly says, looking very directly at her. ‘I’m not saying that to upset you, or because I’m angry. I’m saying it because it’s true. I’m not yours and you’re not mine. That’s just the truth, no way round it.’
‘But I want … I want to try,’ she says, reaching out her hand. He moves his hand away before she can touch him.
‘I want to be with my own people,’ he says.
‘I am your people,’ she says.
‘Three teas!’ Davy says, coming to the table with his mugs.
Davy has put sugar in, even though they don’t take sugar – it’s something police officers commonly do for traumatised people.
Fly seems to open and relax. Perhaps, she thinks, all he needs is time.
‘I miss Solly,’ he says. ‘Solly made me feel …’
‘Happy?’ she says.
‘He made me forget myself.’
‘Because he was such hard work.’
‘It wasn’t just that he was naughty,’ Fly says. ‘He was himself. I really loved him.’
‘You still love him. He hasn’t died.’
‘Feels like he has. Did she not want Solly near me, like his dad didn’t? Is that why she went abroad?’
‘Oh God, no! Fly, no. Ellie loved your relationship with Sol, just like I did. We both thought you were great together.’
She is angrier with Ellie than she can begin to express, a great turning tornado of fury for hurting this lovely boy’s feelings and not giving it a second thought. She turns to the stove.
She has made him a bolognese sauce, the kind she uses to hide vegetables: mushrooms, courgettes, peppers, celery, sometimes even aubergine if she’s feeling risqué. Blended so the children can’t tell what they’re eating. When she makes it, she feels like a vitamin stealth bomber and this is what Fly needs after all those refined carbs in Arlidge House.
If she’s honest, the sauce is a bit tasteless unless you add copious crystals of salt and a mountain of grated cheese.
‘His name is Adewale,’ Fly says, more expansive with a full stomach. With that name, the boy’s face is lit with hope. She realises that he has spent his time in Arlidge House imbuing the name with meaning. This is the fantasy he’s clung to, when all was lost. His face begs her to believe in his good news – that Adewale will become all the things he needs: a father and a family. ‘All that time I was living in Cricklewood, he was only a few streets away.’
‘It’s a wonder he didn’t find you sooner,’ she says.
‘He’s a doctor, actually. So there’s no need to be like that.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘Not yet. Going to. Paddy’s setting it up.’
‘Right.’
‘Figure if things work out, I can go and live with him. You know, get to know him, live where I used to live, go back to my old school.’
She nods. ‘What’s his full name then? His last name, I mean – Adewale’s?’
‘No you don’t,’ says Fly, leaning back in his chair. ‘You’re not going to ruin this for me. I’m not going to let you start some bogus investigation on him, digging around, finding lies – that’s all you lot do, isn’t it?’
Davy and Manon glance at each other.
‘Delicious!’ Davy says, jabbing his fork at his remaining spaghetti.
Ellie
Wind ruffles the fronds of the palm umbrella, making shadows play over her feet.
Ellie squints out to a blue horizon, sunlight flashing like fireworks on the water. Solomon, wearing his bright orange UV vest, is playing beside her in the sand. Digging sadly with his spade, a rare moment when he’s not crying, demanding ‘home’. She’s been run ragged by his beseeching looks, candlesticks of snot grey with sand on his upper lip; eyes pleading for Manon and Fly. All his conservatism has erupted, here in paradise. It is horrendous, to be alone with Solomon’s heartbreak and to be the cause.
Resting on her brown, freckled knees is a pad and a pen poised. The breeze brings with it the scent of suntan lotion, coconutty, and behind it a delicious smell of fried snacks, chips or churros in a paper cone.
If she can just write this out, then she’ll buy some for herself and Sol. Cheer him with sugar and salt.
But she can’t write it out. Several attempts at a letter she can never send, her sister being not a priest in a confession box, but a police officer. A very angry police officer, one who has never been quick to forgive at the best of times. Impossible, unreachable Manon Bradshaw.
I was going to give you more space anyway. I was going to give you and Mark and the kids a chance to make it work as a proper family.
Christ, she sounds so patronising, trying to frame her abandonment as a gift. She crosses this line out. Looks at the page. Half of it is scored out: black, aggressive running-through.
Each bout of writing is driven by imagining Manon’s recrimination.
Of course I tried to get Stanton to drop the charges against Fly! Ellie answers. I stopped seeing him, I was so horrified at what he was doing. But he was driven by not wanting our affair to come out, especially not the night of Jon-Oliver’s death. He was facing the collapse of his marriage and then, once he started covering up because of that, a gross misconduct notice. So then I went back to him, thinking I could persuade him more … well, persuade him gently rather than bully him. That was the day he died.
She scores through this, also. The attempts to defend herself are so ugly.
You want to know why? she writes.
The pen stops on the page, at the bottom of the question mark’s hook. Pokes into the sheet and bleeds there.
She looks out at the glittering water, the happy shouts of swimmers and windsurfers.
Paradise, she thinks. Paradise is an internal place. It is not this. She dreads Sol bursting into tears again for bringing him here, away from his toy vehicles on the kitchen floor and the people he loves.
From the beginning, perhaps …
Solly has had his third birthday here. It was a bit flat, just the two of us – he misses you and Fly so much.