Josh’s room was still and dark as if holding itself in. Gabby switched on the bedside lamp that he had made at school. The bulb was low and cast a small pool of yellow light into the room. Silver riding cups and coloured rosettes lay in a thin layer of dust on his chest of drawers. His small possessions lay around the room, waiting to be picked up and replaced affectionately when he returned.
A cricket bat, metalwork and pottery objects, driftwood, a surfboard, school photos on the walls. Lucian Freud, Elan, his own A-level paintings. A photo of a once-loved ginger tomcat stuck into the side of his mirror, curling at the edges.
Gabby examined his bookshelf. VS Naipaul, John Keegan, Garcia Marquez, and E Annie Proulx. Max Hastings sat next to Wilbur Smith and Bernard Cornwell. TS Eliot and Rupert Brooke sat next to Hornby and Amis. There was a technical shelf of modern warfare and art books. Keeping Bantams; Keeping Goldfish; Keeping Guinea Pigs.
Outside the window the night was still and thick with silence. Gabby lay on Josh’s bed, under the old dusky-pink eiderdown that was once Nell’s. The BBC World Service was on low and Gabby was alert to every news bulletin. She willed Josh to feel her sitting there awake and know he was not alone. The silence pressed down, crushing her into the room so full of his life.
Horror crept towards her. Josh could be hunted, frightened, or lying beaten-up in some hellhole, terrified, wondering if he would ever make it home. Her ears picked up Iraq and she turned the small radio up. A journalist was telling a colleague what might happen if any British officers were captured on Iraqi soil.
He described the kind of humiliation and torture meted out to captured pilots during the Gulf war and listed the various atrocities of Saddam’s Special Guard. He then went on to list in detail the particular dangers any captured servicemen could be facing or enduring.
Gabby snapped the radio off angrily. Didn’t they realize families would be listening? The sheer crass sensationalism and irresponsibility infuriated her. She got off the bed and went over to Josh’s small chest of drawers, which had once been hers. She stroked the soft wood, curled her hands around the carved handles. She let her fingers wander over the worn indentations as she had done as a child. She opened the drawers and began to tidy each one. She matched socks, folded shirts and placed them in neat little rows one on top of the other. Then she moved to his sweaters, making a little pile of those that looked as if they needed washing. She would wash them in the morning, then she would clean his room out and polish the chest and chair and bedside table so that all was ready for when he returned.
She touched his riding rosettes, trying to smooth them straight. Josh on his first pony in tiny riding jacket, hat, whip, small legs akimbo on the plump little mare. Over the jumps they had gone, that fat little pony and the small eager child, and Charlie had tried not to look as if he was bursting with pride as the small crowd smiled and clapped.
She looked down at the yellowing cricket sweater she was going to wash, remembering long summer evenings taking him to cricket practice at school or on the village green. She used to sit with the other mothers drinking tea from a flask, occasionally Pimms. School plays, sports days, detention.
Josh. A whole childhood and growing-up with Josh that she had never taken for granted, painfully aware, even while she was living them, the days were precious and finite. She had wanted to be there for all the big and important events in his life because she knew what it felt like not to have anyone care enough to chart the course of your childhood.
There had been no danger of Josh’s landmarks slipping by, for as well as Gabby there had always been Charlie, Nell and Elan, as well as the older farm-workers all rooting for him.
Josh had always seemed to sail through life. The good die young, suddenly shot into Gabby’s brain and she shook it away with a small moan and got back into Josh’s bed and turned the lamp off. Her eyelids were heavy and dry with tiredness.
She thought of Clara. Clara is Josh’s grandmother. Was she still alive? Would she read and connect Josh to Gabby? Would she even remember the name Ellis?
Of course not. Why was she even thinking about it? Clara would either be in a home or dead by now. Gabby had hardened her heart long ago. It had been impossible to explain, even to Nell, who had insisted Clara had a right to know when Josh was born. Clara had never acknowledged Nell’s card. Gabby knew she wouldn’t and it was the last time Nell had ever interfered.
It had been the hardest lesson of her childhood to finally understand that a drunk had to really want to stop drinking. And if she couldn’t, she found others like her, until suddenly one day you could not remember anything nice about her, only the smell of gin and a house full of drunks and a life you didn’t understand which had become dangerous. You had no chance of looking out for the mother you loved, despite everything, because you were too busy looking out for yourself.
Clara had had one sister, Bella. Bella was nice and fat and jolly. Gabby had liked her more than anyone and she would often get a bus to the other side of Bristol after school. Then, Bella left England for a new life with a new man in America. She had offered to take Gabby with her, but Clara would have none of it, and Gabby had never understood why.
Bella had said before she left, ‘I’ll write, kiddo, as soon as I have an address. Now, you are to write and tell me if things get worse. I’ll come back and get you.’
‘Won’t Chuck mind?’
‘No, he won’t. He says your mum’s got a screw loose …’
Bella had said she hated leaving her but she had gone all the same.
‘Don’t believe all your mother says, kiddo. She knows exactly who your father was. All I know is that she met him on holiday in Plymouth and got her heart broken. She was always an odd little girl …’
She bent to Gabby. ‘I told you our mother died when we were tots. I was older and I coped better than Clara. Dad was an odd one, too …’
She stopped abruptly. ‘You’re fourteen and bright. Get out as soon as you can, kiddo … Please don’t cry. I am only a plane ride away, I’m not forsaking you.’
But she had. No word came, although Gabby had waited and waited. No letter with an address ever came. Clara had said, ‘You silly little honey-bun. Did you really think Auntie Bell loved you more than I do?’
Gabby, lying in the dark, heard Elton John start up his crowing. Soon Charlie would get up for milking. Gabby had a sudden sense and shape of herself and her life as she lay where Josh had slept. She heard Reverend Mother’s voice: We pay for our sins.
In crisis we regress, Gabby thought. What we scorned in childhood we confront in terror at the first hint of tragedy. My mother. She could have so easily been that child again, believing that if you loved someone as hard as you could they would eventually love you back. She could have turned in the dark and whispered some of these thoughts to Mark, but she must shut her mind to Mark.
I dare not, must not, let him into my thoughts or this house. She bargained with her God. Pleaded. She was sure of only one thing. If anything happened to Josh she did not want to go on living.