The Other Family Part 23

Later, on the train, speeding home through Byker and Walker and Wallsend, Margaret thought about the episode with the flute, and how Scott would have told her that, even if she was the generation she was and proud to be a plain-speaking Northerner, she shouldn't have interfered. And thinking of Scott made her think, in turn, of the piano, and then the piano led to thoughts of the family who had had the piano and how they must be feeling, and of the girl in that family, that foreign London family, who played the flute and who had said to Scott boldly, in Margaret's view that one day she would like to hear him play. That girl, that Amy, would be grade seven or eight by now, eight if she'd inherited anything of Richie's apt.i.tude, she'd be playing the Bach Sonatas, and Vivaldi, she wouldn't be whining on about wanting a flute the colour of candyfloss. And yet it was good that Lorraine was playing anything at all, even if it was only because her mother made her, just as Margaret's mother, hardened by never knowing any indulgence in her own childhood, had made Margaret and her sister learn the survival skills that would mean they would never be doomed for lack of a basic competence. Margaret hadn't filleted a fish in years, but she could still do it, in her sleep.

At Tynemouth metro station, Margaret helped a girl, struggling with a baby in a buggy, out of the train. The girl was luscious, with long blonde hair pinned carelessly up and a T-shirt which read, 'Your boyfriend wants me.' The baby was neatly dressed and was clutching a plastic Spiderman and a packet of crisps.

'Ta,' the girl said. She slid a hand inside the neck of her T-shirt to adjust a bra strap, and Margaret, recalling the little episode by the case of flutes, refrained from saying that she'd have been happier to see the baby with a banana. When she was that girl's age, she thought, she and Richie were going to the Rex Cinema together, where what went on in the back row wasn't something you'd have told your mother about, but equally wasn't what would have resulted in a baby.

'You take care,' Margaret said.

The girl laughed. She had wonderful teeth too, as well as the skin and the hair. She couldn't have been much more than eighteen. She gestured at the baby.

'Bit late for that!'

At Porter's Coffee House at the back of the station, Margaret bought a cup of coffee, and took it to a table by the wall, below a poster advertising the Greek G.o.d Cabaret Show, '29 a head, girls' night out, to include hunky male hen party attendant and the country's most exciting drag queens'. She felt no disapproval. In North Shields, when she was growing up, there'd been ninety-six pubs within a single mile, and for every miner killed in the local coal mines, four fisher men were lost at sea. 'These a has no conscience,' people used to say, in that world of her childhood when it seemed impossible that the seas would ever run out of fish and that women like Margaret's mother would look to a life other than that spent stooped on the windswept quays, gutting and salting the herrings and packing them into the wooden casks that Margaret still saw now, occasionally, in people's front gardens, planted up with lobelias. There was a statue of a fishwife in North Shields, outside the library, but Margaret didn't like it. It seemed to her folksy and patronizing. Her mother, she was sure, would have wanted to take an axe to it.

She finished her coffee and stood up. She was lucky to have Glenda in the office, she was lucky to have someone so reliable and conscientious who was not averse to detail and repet.i.tion. All the same she knew that, when she was out of the office, Glenda was waiting for her in a way she never felt that Dawson troubled to at home, and the knowledge chafed at her very slightly and drove her to linger on her way back in a manner her rational self could neither admire nor condone. If only, she thought suddenly and urgently, if only I had something new to go back to, something energetic, something that gave me a bit of a lift, if only Scott would do something like like, find a girl and have a baby.

In the office, Glenda was standing by the open metal filing cabinet where the clients' contracts were kept, rifling through files.

'I was beginning to worry,' Glenda said. 'You said you'd be back by eleven-fifteen and it's after twelve.'

'I stopped for coffee,' Margaret said.

'I'd have made you coffee-'

Margaret took no notice. She moved behind her desk to look at her computer screen.

'Any calls? '

Glenda said nonchalantly, 'Mr Harrison came.'

'Did he now.'

'To see me.'

'Has he offered you a job?' Margaret said, still looking at her screen.

Glenda allowed a small offended silence to settle between them.

'Or did he,' Margaret said, 'encourage you to work on changing my mind?'

Glenda slammed the filing drawer shut.

'It's a good offer.'

Margaret looked up. She watched Glenda walk back to her desk, and sit down, and open the folder she had taken from the filing cabinet. Then she said, 'Do you want me to take it?'

Glenda said crossly, 'It's not up to me and well you know it.'

Margaret moved out from behind her desk and came to stand in the line of Glenda's vision.

'What is it, dear?'

Glenda shook her head and made an angry, incoherent little sound.

'What?' Margaret said.

Glenda said, still crossly, 'He unsettled me-'

'In what way?'

'Well,' Glenda said, 'while he was here, I just thought what cheek, coming here when he knew you were out, and chatting me up, telling me what I could have if we worked with him, the money and the chances and things, and then after he'd gone I just felt flat, I just felt he'd taken something away with him and I could have cried, really I could. The thing is-' She stopped.

'The thing is?'

'I don't want to moan,' Glenda said, 'you know I don't. You know how I feel about my family. The children are lovely. And Barry ... well, Barry does his best, I don't know how I'd be, stuck in a wheelchair all my life. But after Mr Harrison had gone, I felt something had gone with him. I can't explain it, I just felt I'd let a chance go, and I wouldn't get it back again.'

Margaret waited a few seconds, and then she said, 'What chance?'

Glenda looked at the contract file on her desk.

'You'll think me silly-'

'I won't-'

'You-'

'What chance, Glenda?'

Glenda didn't raise her eyes. She said quietly, 'The chance for something to happen.'

Margaret said nothing. Then she came round Glenda's desk, and touched her shoulder briefly.

'Me too,' Margaret said.

Scott had started to ask people from work back to his flat, to hear him play the piano. Once a week or so, he'd say casually to Henry or Adrian, 'Fancy a singsong at mine Friday?' and the word would get round, and eight or ten people would gather in his flat and order in pizzas, and sometimes they'd sing Henry did a brilliant version of Noel Coward and sometimes Scott would play something cla.s.sical, and they'd pile on the sofa or lie about on the floor and just listen, and after they'd gone, Scott would be conscious of having made a brief connection, through the music, which left him feeling curiously isolated and empty when it was over. And it was in one of those post-playing moods, closing the piano lid, picking up the pizza boxes, carrying the ashtrays disdainfully to the bin, that an impulse to ring Amy came upon him.

It was not a new impulse. He had, when the piano first arrived, thought he might ring to say that it was safely in Newcastle. Then he had thought that texting would be better polite, but more casual. So he had composed a text, and deleted it, and then a second, less brief one, and deleted that, and realized that he would rather like to hear her vocal response to his description of where the piano now was. But his nerve had failed him. There was no real reason, if he was honest, to ring her unless, of course, he admitted to the real reason, which was that he didn't want the piano's arrival in Newcastle to mean that there was no further excuse for them to be in touch with one another. She was only his half-sister, after all, and there wasn't any comfortable shared history between them, but even the sc.r.a.ppy communications that they'd had had given him a sense of how much better furnished he felt to know that there was a sister there even, potentially, three sisters and how very much he did not want to return to the state of being the only son of a single mother; he did not, emphatically, want his human landscape to shrink again.

He dialled Amy's number with quick, jabbing movements, not stopping to think what he was going to say. She didn't answer, and he listened to her rapid, awkward little message and then he said, with a flash of inspiration, 'Hi, it's Scott, just ringing to wish you luck,' and, as an afterthought, before this burst of courage failed him, 'Ring me.' Then he put his phone on the piano, and sat down on the stool and began to play the theme from The Lion King, which someone had asked for earlier that evening, and which was running in his head with an insistence that was, he knew, the mark of a successful show tune.

His phone rang. Amy.

'Amy,' he said.

'Hi.'

'Sorry to ring so late-'

'I wasn't asleep,' she said. 'I was doing stuff.'

'I'm sitting at the piano,' Scott said.

'Are you? '

He shifted the phone to his left ear and hunched his shoulder to hold it in place.

'Playing this.' He played a few bars. 'Recognize it?'

'The Lion King,' Amy said.

Scott was smiling. 'Yes. The Lion King. I rang to wish you luck.'

'What for?'

'Your exams. Aren't you about to start your exams?'

'No,' Amy said.

'Oh, I thought-'

'The exams are starting,' Amy said, 'but I'm not doing them.'

Scott waited. He took his right hand off the keyboard and retrieved his phone. Then he cleared his throat.

'Come again?'

'A levels start this week,' Amy said. 'Spanish literature and music theory. But I shan't be doing them.'

'Why not?'

There was a silence.

'Why not?' Scott said again.

'Because,' Amy said, 'I need to get a job.'

'Do you?'

'Yes,' she said. 'I've got to stop being a kid, a schoolgirl, I've got to get out there and do something and earn some money, because-' She stopped.

'Because?'

'Doesn't matter.'

'Maybe I can guess-'

'Because,' Amy said angrily, 'it's all in meltdown here, and I can't go on pretending anything is how it was and that I can be sort of protected from it. I've got to do something.'

'Like not sit your exams.'

'Yes.'

'Have you told your teachers?'

'I haven't told anyone,' Amy said, 'I just won't turn up. I'll pretend I'm going to school, but I won't. I'll be finding a job instead.'

'What kind of job?'

'Anything,' Amy said. 'Waiting tables, putting leaflets through letterboxes, I don't care.'

Scott stood up. He walked to the window and looked at his dark and glittering view.

'Amy? '

'Yes.'

'Are you listening to me?'

'Yes-'

'Do not,' Scott said, 'be so b.l.o.o.d.y stupid.'

'I didn't ask for your opinion-'

'This isn't an opinion,' Scott said. He found he had straightened his shoulders. 'This is an order. I am telling you not to be such a complete and utter idiot. I am telling you to get into that school and do those exams to the best of your ability and to do yourself and all of us proud. I am telling you.'

There was a pause, and then Amy said, 'Oh.'

'Did you hear me? Did you actually hear what I said?'

Amy made a small unintelligible noise.

'You're a clever girl,' Scott said. 'You're a talented girl. You are eighteen years old with your life before you, and you may not give up just because there are some short-term problems you don't like the look of. I won't have it. I won't have you throwing your chances away, wasting your opportunities. Is that clear?'

Amy said faintly, 'You've no right-'

'I have!' Scott shouted. 'I have! I'm your brother! I'm your older brother.'

'Wow,' Amy said. There was a hint of admiration in her voice.

'Any more of this,' Scott said, slightly more calmly, 'and I shall come down to London and frogmarch you into that school personally.'

'I haven't done enough revision-'

'n.o.body's ever done enough revision.'

Amy sounded imminently tearful. She said, 'I can't change now, I've made up my mind, I can't-'

'Don't snivel,' Scott said. 'You can. You will.'