Chapters (46)
But her memories of James were grainier. When she used to knock on the bedroom door and come in with sandwiches, he and his friends would be huddled over the black keyboard of the little computer, mysterious lines of symbols on the screen. Once or twice he showed her something he’d made on there, asked her to press a button: ‘A to deliberately run the other car off the road, B to try and take a different route’. She never really knew what to say to these things, beyond ‘well done!’ or ‘this is very clever!’, which always seemed to disappoint James somehow. Alan had seemed to have more of a knack for it, and as James got older – sixth form, the computing college, pottering around doing this and that – it hadn’t troubled her that they seemed to share more. The trips to Edinburgh, the walks they sometimes went on. A boy needed his dad, didn’t he, even when he was a man himself.
Jean made herself responsible for Sally, Alan for James. They were a team. It was all she’d wanted, for them to be a good team. And they were. They had been.
Jean looked at her watch. A quarter to four. Even that was probably old-fashioned, wasn’t it, relying on your watch. She had a painful memory of that final trip to Edinburgh, that horrible day. Sally’s phone lighting up, a smirk on her face, a glance across at James. Another phone-chirp a couple of moments later. Jean realizing: they are sending each other messages. They don’t want me involved. More accurately – she couldn’t be involved. Because she didn’t have a phone, did she? When Sally and James had fallen out over the wedding, she had felt at a similarly helpless distance from it, and for the same reason. The argument wasn’t like one in the old days, where she could step between them in the bedroom and say: all right, enough of this. It was being fought on terrain she didn’t know. Life, relationships, everything moved quickly these days, and even thinking that made her a fuddy-duddy, and thinking the word fuddy-duddy made her even more of one, she supposed, but what were you meant to do?
She sat and waited for Lee to get back, even though she’d deliberately sent him away. She composed, in her head, the message she wanted to send her son, even though she didn’t know where he was, whether it was too late, too late now to reach him when she had wasted so much time.