Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [54]
Manette could see he was scowling. Something wasn’t right with whoever was texting in reply to Tim. As she watched, he lifted his hand and tore at his fingers. He bit down so hard that she winced at the sight. She got out of the car quickly and called his name. He looked up. For a moment his face showed surprise— Manette wanted to call it delighted surprise, but she didn’t dare go that far— but then his features settled into the scowl again. He didn’t move from the bench.
She said, “Hey, Buster, come on. I’m your lift today. I need help with something and you’re my man.”
He said sullenly, “I got somewhere to go,” and went back to texting, or perhaps pretending to.
She replied, “Well, I don’t know how else you’re going to get there ’cause I’m the only one with wheels that you’re going to see.”
“Where’s bloody Kaveh, then?”
“What’s Kaveh got to do with it?”
Tim looked up from his mobile. Manette saw him huff. It was a derisive exhalation of breath intended to convey his judgement of her. It said stupid cow without saying stupid cow. Fourteen-year-old boys were nothing if not transparent.
“Come on, Tim,” she said. “Let’s go. The school’s not about to let anyone else fetch you today now your mum’s rung them.”
He would know the drill. Further recalcitrance was pointless. He muttered, shoved himself to his feet, and slouched over to the car, dragging his rucksack behind him. He threw himself into the passenger seat with enough force to rock the car on its wheels. She said, “Steady on,” and then, “Seat belt please,” and she waited for him to cooperate.
She felt for Tim. He’d taken too many punches. He’d been the worst possible age for his father to have walked out on the family for any reason. To have had his father walk out on the family for another man had thrown his entire world off its axis. What was he meant to do and how was he meant to understand his own dawning sexuality in such a situation? It was no wonder to Manette that Tim’s behaviour had altered on the edge of a knife, propelling him from his comprehensive into the cloistered safety of a school for the disturbed. He was disturbed. In his position who wouldn’t be?
She made a careful turn into the road outside the school gates, and she said to Tim, “CDs in the glove box. Why don’t you find us something?”
“Won’t have anything I like.” He turned a shoulder to her and stared out of the window.
“Bet I do. Have a look, Buster.”
“I got to meet someone,” he told her. “I said.”
“Who?”
“Someone.”
“Your mum know about this?”
That derisive huff of breath again. He muttered something and when she asked him to repeat it, he said, “Nothing. Forget it,” and he watched the scenery.
There was little enough of it and certainly nothing to fascinate in this part of the county. For outside of Ulverston and heading south to Great Urswick the land was open and rolling, farmland separated from the road by hedges and limestone walls, pastures in which the ubiquitous sheep grazed, and the occasional woodland of alders and paper birches.
It wasn’t a long drive. Manette’s home in Great Urswick was closer to Margaret Fox School than the homes of any of Tim’s other relatives. It was, she thought not for the first time, the most logical place for Tim to reside during the school terms, and she’d mentioned this to both Ian and Niamh shortly after they’d enrolled the boy there. But Niamh wouldn’t hear of it. There was Gracie to consider. It would devastate her to be without her brother in the after-school hours. Manette had reckoned that there was more to the matter than Gracie’s devastation, but she had not pressed it. She would, she’d decided, see the boy when she could.
Great Urswick wasn’t much of a village, one of those collections of cottages that had grown round the intersection of several country lanes, a distance inland from Bardsea and Morecambe Bay. It possessed a pub, a post office, a restaurant, two churches, and a primary school,