of it. If I had been thinking of Ted, it would have been different. But in the last month whenever he had come into my head it was with a numbness that cut me off even from the relief of missing and loving him. I thought with dry precision instead about our life apart.
‘Are you there? Sadie?’
‘Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. I really don’t know what this is all about.’ I could hear Mel at the other end lighting up a Marlboro and exhaling.
‘Your dad died. You’re grieving for him.’
I was going to say, I almost did say, ‘It’s not like that.’
Mel had told me how bereft she felt when her adored father died and that wasn’t how it was with me.
‘Do you want me to come round?’ she asked.
‘No. Yes, I do, but it’s late.’
‘Then let’s have dinner tomorrow.’
‘Lola’s going back to Manchester in the morning. I can’t leave Jack.’ I didn’t want to leave Jack, in any case. He needed me, even if he didn’t want me.
‘I’ll come to you. I’ll cook something for the three of us. Don’t be late home, dear.’
Jack didn’t answer when I knocked on his door. I called goodnight and told him to sleep well.
Lola saw Jack and me off in the morning and said goodbye. She would drive herself north later in the day.
Colin came in twice to the bindery, and on the second visit he was aggrieved to discover that we hadn’t even started work on his box.
‘There are twelve other jobs ahead of yours in the line,’ Penny told him, it being her turn.
‘Why isn’t mine as important as theirs?’
‘It’s not a matter of importance, it’s just that you can’t jump the queue. We’re busy here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ She was brusque, but Colin tended not to notice subtleties like that.
‘Well. I’ve had some more thoughts about how I want it.’
‘Don’t you want to hear our estimate first of what it’s going to cost?’
I was trying to signal to her to go easy, but Colin was grandly insisting that cost didn’t matter to him. His money was as good as anyone else’s. The phone rang and as I was nearest I picked it up. A voice I half recalled asked for Mrs Bailey.
‘Speaking.’ At the same time I was frowning because although Jack and Lola went under Tony’s name, after the divorce I had deliberately reverted to my own. To Ted’s, that is. I had been happy to accept Tony’s when we married, but once I had rejected him I didn’t deserve the shelter of his name, did I? I went back to being just Sadie Thompson again.
‘This is Paul Rainbird, at the school.’
I remembered now that I had spoken to him when I called to say that Jack would be away on the day of the funeral. He was Jack’s head of year.
‘Is something wrong?’ Penny and Colin dwindled, their voices obliterated by the rush of blood in my ears.
‘No, nothing at all. I wanted to ask how Jack is.’
‘Why?’
‘We haven’t seen him for three days. Is he ill?’
‘He’s been at school all week,’ I said stupidly.
‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’
The lack of protest in the mornings, the dirtiness and exhaustion and his appetite in the evenings fell belatedly into place. Wherever he had been going for the last three days, it hadn’t been to school. Dismay at my own obtuseness and sharp anxiety for Jack overtook the usual nagging concern. ‘I’d better come in and see you.’
Mr Rainbird said he would be at school until six that evening. I looked at my watch. Ten to four. Colin was reluctantly shuffling out of the door.
I untied my apron and hung it up, turned off the heating element in the Pragnant and closed the open drawers of type. ‘Jack’s been bunking off,’ I told Penny. ‘I’ve got to go in and see his teacher.’
The school wasn’t far from our house, so it didn’t take me long to drive there. As I parked the car there were streams of children coming out of the gates. I pushed my way in against the current, assaulted by the noise and the display of attitude. Children came in so many shapes, sizes and colours. Some of them stared, most didn’t bother. There were so many different statements being made within the elastic confines of school uniform, so much yelling and kicking and threatening and ganging up. Survival was the prize of the fittest – and you could see which kids were the natural survivors. They were the cool ones and the disciples of the cool ones, and the others who hung around on the fringes and took their cues from them. The rest straggled on in ones and twos, keeping out of the way, trying not to attract too much attention.
Lola had been the coolest of cool. She had achieved this by breaking every school rule and defying me daily about her clothes and her hair, and her attitudes and the hours and the company she kept. But even so, even when she was at her most grungy and rebellious, on some deeper level we had still been allies. When we weren’t fighting, she told me secrets. Not hers, that would have been too incriminating, but her friends’.
‘Isn’t fourteen a bit young?’
‘Mum, you mustn’t breathe a word.’
I took this as her way of alerting me to what she was doing or about to do herself, and no doubt her friends’ mothers did likewise. Lola and I were both women and for all our differences we had the comfort of being the same.
In my mind’s eye now I saw Jack, and he was smaller and paler than all these children, and different. Different even from the wary singles. He was churned around by the alarming tide as it swept him along. I clenched my fists into tight balls in the pockets of my coat, wanting to defend him.
I found my way to the Year Seven office at the end of a green corridor lined with metal lockers.
‘Sit down, Mrs Bailey,’ the teacher said, having stood up to shake my hand. There was just about room in the cubicle for a second chair.
‘Thompson,’ I murmured. ‘I’m divorced from Jack’s father.’
Briefly my eyes met the teacher’s. Mr Rainbird was wearing a blue shirt and slightly shiny black trousers, and his colourless hair was almost long enough to touch his collar. He looked tired. If, without knowing him, I had been forced to guess his occupation I would have said English teacher in a large comprehensive school. We faced each other across the desk piled with exercise books and mark sheets and he nodded, registering my statement, before we both looked away again.
‘Is Jack being bullied?’ I asked.
‘Has he said so?’
‘He hasn’t said anything. I know he’s not happy at school, not the way my daughter Lola was, but I didn’t know it was as bad as this.’
‘I remember Lola.’ Mr Rainbird nodded appreciatively. ‘Although I never taught her. How’s she getting on?’
‘Fine.’
There was some shouting and crashing outside the door, and several sets of feet pelted down the corridor. The teacher seemed not to hear it. I thought he was used to concentrating in the face of many distractions.
‘I don’t think he’s being bullied. Jack doesn’t stand out enough, either in a bad way or a good way. He’s a loner, but that seems to be out of choice. He’s very quiet, very serious. He doesn’t say much in lessons, but he listens. His work is adequate, as you know, although he doesn’t try very hard. He gives the impression of absence. But mostly only mental absence, at least until this week. Has anything changed for him lately, at home?’
‘His grandfather