Four
‘Marry a man, not a job.’ The carer, an amiable Jamaican woman of fifty, took the towels from Laura as they met in the corridor. ‘I’ll get these down to the laundry.’
‘Thanks, Lou. While it’s quiet, I’ll check if Jay’s ready for bed.’
The woman’s face became serious. ‘I’m not joking, Laura. You should get some love in your life – I’m talking about man love, not a love affair with this place – otherwise you’ll end up haunting the Lodge when you’re in your box.’
Laura smiled. ‘I wish I had the time.’
‘Make time, honey. Or you’ll wind up like me. Fifty. Two failed marriages. A face like an old prune.’
‘You’re here because you’re an angel. We couldn’t manage without you.’
‘Yes, you could – one day you will. Laura, girl. Don’t get left on the shelf, pretty young woman like you. Catch yourself a man.’ She sighed. ‘Lord, isn’t it ever going to stop raining? We’ve got a lake for a playground.’
‘I’ll think about what you said. About man love.’
‘Plenty of man love. Make it soon, or I’ll put a spell on you that’ll make you fall for the first man you meet.’
‘Best do that, Lou. It’s going to be the only way I’ll find romance.’
‘You asked for it, honey. I’m going to put your photo in a bag full of rabbit bones tonight.’
Laura shot Lou a startled look.
Lou chuckled. ‘I can’t even cook Jamaican food never mind put a love spell on you. Go put an ad in the paper. “Lovely blonde, thirty, seeks handsome man. GSOH.” Now, I’ll drop this off, then my time to watch some television in bed. See, told you I’m a lonely shrivelled old prune!’ With a hearty laugh she sailed away down the corridor.
Laura checked her watch. Other members of staff would be switching off dormitory lights in the wing that accommodated the younger children. After a fraught day a silence had finally crept over the building. Good silence? Or a bad silence? Only time would tell. Sometimes when it got quiet like this in Badsworth Lodge it was like sitting on a time bomb. At least she had good news for Jay.
She found him sitting on the bed in his pyjamas. Rain clicked at the windows. A brittle sound that tugged your nerve endings until you wanted to shout, ‘Stop that!’ Jay stared at the picture of a ship in a comic. Maybe he’s beginning to remember?
‘Jay,’ she sat beside him. ‘Good news. I’ve just had confirmation from my boss: the trip to the island is back on. We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon.’ She refrained from adding ‘after Maureen’s funeral’. ‘You must be pleased about that.’
He stared at the picture. A red ship sliding across the ocean.
Gently, Laura added, ‘I haven’t been there, but I’ve heard it’s a nice place. It’s an island in a river, not the sea. We can have barbecues. They tell me there are otters, deer and even wild mink.’
Without letting his eyes wander from the ship picture he asked, ‘Will I meet new people?’
‘Some.’
‘That’s frightening.’ A simple, matter-of-fact statement.
‘You’re going to be frightened of people on the island. Why?’
‘No . . . I’m frightened of what I’ll do to them.’
‘Jay.’ She put her arm round his shoulders. ‘That’s nonsense. You’re the kindest, most considerate boy I’ve ever met.’
‘Nobody says Maureen’s name in front of me. They know I killed her.’
Laura had overheard what the children were saying to each other. Jay’s done it again . . . the little witch made the bus crush Maureen . . . She leaned forward so he could see the smile she now wore. ‘You mustn’t say that. It was an accident. What happened was tragic, and it makes us all hurt inside because we loved Maureen, and we miss her.’ Laura made a point of talking about feelings to the children. They were accustomed to suppressing grief until it festered dangerously inside of them. ‘Do you want to talk about Maureen?’ she asked.
‘Do you think she ever went on a boat like this?’
‘I guess so. What made you ask that?’ Maybe he’s having flashbacks of when he was on the ship. With that thought came memories of seven years ago when the news was dominated by the sinking of the N’Taal, taking hundreds of refugees with it. Just one four-year-old boy had been picked up from an inflatable raft.
Slowly, he shook his head. ‘Grown-ups won’t talk about Maureen in front of me, just like they don’t talk about Tod Langdon.’ He turned those large brown eyes to her. ‘Tell me what really happened to him.’
‘Well . . .’
‘You can tell me a made-up story; that’s OK if it makes you sad to tell the truth.’
Her mind whirled back six months. Just hours after Jay arrived at Badsworth Lodge she had found him in the kitchen. The eleven-year-old sat on his floor with his back to the fridge door. Emotionally withdrawn, face clammy enough to shine beneath the fluorescent lights, he could have been a mannequin sitting there. A fragile one with jet-black hair, and large – strangely large – eyes that were dark as a shadow. And then Jay began to speak from the depths of his trance. She had to crouch down to hear properly. ‘Tod . . . Tod Langdon. Tod Langdon. Walk . . . going for a walk.’ The syllables pulsed with their own unsettling rhythm. At first she thought Tod had bullied the younger boy. But no. Not Tod. He obsessively cut pictures of animals from old magazines. Many children here related better to animals than people. These pictures he carefully filed away in an old filing cabinet in the cellar. Love was too tame a description for his interest in wildlife. So there was no obvious reason why Jay should repeat the teenager’s name. ‘Tod Langdon . . . Tod . . . Tod . . .’ And that peculiar comment: ‘Walk, go walk, walk him.’ A mantra? A spell? Or a curse?
Laura picked up the story of what happened all those months ago (without mentioning she’d found Jay in the kitchen, almost comatose, and uttering Tod’s name). ‘Tod Langdon had reached an age when he felt he was growing into a man. We should have realized that he’d outgrown Badsworth Lodge. One day he ran away. I think he wanted to prove that he was independent. That he could find a job.’
‘Animals. He loved animals.’
‘That’s right. I’m sure his plan was to go to a zoo and ask for work there, so he’d be close to them. Only he met some people . . . unpleasant people . . . who wanted to use him. They tricked him into stealing things from shops. From what I hear they secretly put drugs into his food so it would stop him realizing what he was doing was wrong.’ Jay appeared to be digesting what she told him so she continued. ‘Only there was a lot of anger in Tod. He kept it stored away in the back of his mind for years. You know, like something nasty pushed into a drawer, where you hope you’ll forget it, but never do. Anyway, the drugs let it out.’
‘They say he went crazy.’
‘It wasn’t madness. It was all those memories of bad things that had happened to him. He got so angry because it seemed to him everyone in the world had ignored the cruel things his father did to him, so he took his anger out on the world that was around him at that moment. Tod smashed windows in shops, which was very frightening for him and the people near him at the time. Then he hurt himself badly with pieces of glass.’
‘You’ve told the truth.’
She realized he wasn’t asking a question. ‘How did you know?’
‘Tod told me.’
‘He can’t. Tod’s . . .’
‘He’s not dead.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s a place like this. Only there are bars on the windows. They don’t let him outside. Mostly he’s very tired because of the medicine they give him. The walls are painted green because the doctors say that colour helps keep the patients calm.’
‘Jay, has one of the children told you about Tod?’
‘I’m right, aren’t I, Laura?’
She nodded, mystified. ‘But how do you know?’
‘I’ve said already. Tod told me.’ He closed the comic. ‘Sometimes I take Tod for a little walk.’
She tried to quell the shiver, but there was nothing she could do to suppress its creep up her spine. ‘I liked Tod. He didn’t deserve that.’ A more recent memory brought yet another shiver. ‘Yesterday. When we were talking about Maureen. You told me you took her for a little walk. What do you mean by that?’
He said nothing. Exhaustion had drained the poor kid. Shame on me. I shouldn’t be interrogating him. He’s been through hell, too.
‘OK, young man,’ she said brightly. ‘Time for bed.’
His face darkened as a troubling thought struck him. ‘When we go to the island, will we have to cross the water by boat?’