Truestory Read online

  If they’d been doing anything else – anything useful or sensible or not plain stupid – I’d have taken them a cup of tea in the can with some cake or something. But they weren’t doing anything useful or sensible, they were doing something ridiculous, so they could forget it. I sat tight.

  From the washroom I watched them pace out the plot and whack posts in with the sledgehammer. I spotted Sam skulking round the orchard. He looked like he was concentrating hard on the ground. As I watched he headed off towards Larry’s caravan. No, it wasn’t Larry’s caravan. It was not. I mustn’t think of it as Larry’s caravan – I wanted him out of there and back on the road as soon as possible.

  An hour later they’d gone quiet. I strained to hear but the banging and the shouting seemed to have stopped. I went back to the washroom to unload the machine and through the window I could see them, hands on hips, puzzling over something. Good, I hoped they’d bought a load of old junk that didn’t fit together. That would really make my day. I dragged the washing out of the machine and dumped it in the plastic basket.

  Going out the back door, I saw Sam beside Larry’s caravan. What was he up to? I threw the basket down beside the line and started to shake the washing out, making big slapping sounds. Larry and Duncan looked up.

  ‘Can’t get the hoops straight.’ Duncan shouted.

  I ignored him, keeping a poker face. Absolutely great. I hoped they’d never get them straight.

  I saw Sam again coming out from behind the caravan still gazing at the ground. He was carrying lengths of what looked like thick wire, as though he was dousing for water.

  Duncan and Larry saw him too.

  ‘Come here and hold this post,’ shouted Duncan. Sam kept walking, head down.

  ‘I said come here!’ Duncan raised his voice and there was an edge to it. ‘We need some help.’

  Sam jolted to a stop and looked up. He hesitated, looking towards his dad, then towards the wire things.

  ‘Come here!’

  Carefully Sam laid the wire things on the ground and walked towards his dad. ‘Hold that post,’ Duncan said. ‘We need to get the thing square.’

  Sam held the post and looked at the plot.

  ‘You need Pythagoras’s Theorem,’ he said.

  Duncan and Larry strode away from the post in different directions.

  ‘You need Pythagoras’s Theorem,’ said Sam again.

  Duncan hesitated. ‘Eh?’

  Sam pointed at the plot. ‘To get it straight you need four right-angled triangles. X squared,’ he pointed to the length of the plot, ‘plus Y squared,’ he pointed to the width of the plot ‘equals Z squared.’

  He looked at Duncan as though that explained everything about erecting a polytunnel. ‘Z,’ said Sam, ‘is the hypotenuse.’ And he pointed again towards the plot.

  I shook a pillow case, making a satisfying slap, and then I did it again – to remind Duncan that I was watching him being humiliated by his eleven-year-old son. I squinted at the three of them gathered round the post. Duncan was rubbing the back of his neck. Any second now he’d lose his temper. Larry was gazing steadily at Sam.

  ‘You need to make sure the diagonals are exactly the same length,’ said Sam. ‘Take the dimensions of the construction and calculate the hypotenuse using Pythagoras’s Theorem.’ Sam was now gazing back at where he’d left the wire things. ‘Although in fact it was not Pythagoras who devised the theorem,’ he said, ‘it was one of his followers.’

  ‘For fuck’s . . .’ Duncan was cut off by Larry.

  ‘That sounds like a great plan, son. Why do you no’ work it out for us?’

  Sam looked at Larry.

  ‘What are the dimensions?’ he asked.

  ‘Supposed to be 24 foot by 14 foot.’

  ‘You need to convert it to metric measurements. Applying Pythagoras’s Theorem to imperial measurements is an unnecessarily complex procedure.’

  Duncan and Larry looked at each other.

  ‘Well. I dunno – ’

  ‘If it is 24 feet by 14 feet then it is 7.31 metres by 4.26 metres,’ said Sam.

  Larry lifted his eyebrows.

  ‘Which means your diagonal must be the square root of 7.31 squared plus 4.26 squared.’ Sam let go of the post. ‘It will be necessary for you to use the Pythagorean Theorem Calculator,’ he said.

  He walked off. He went back for his wire things and I watched him circling the orchard for the umpteenth time. He veered towards me at one point and I could hear him murmuring ‘Larry’s map, Larry’s map,’ as he disappeared back up the orchard and behind the caravan.

  I could see Larry trying to calculate the length of his hypotenuse on his smart phone. Reception was crap – even if he knew what he was doing, which I seriously doubted. Duncan meanwhile was pacing to and fro rubbing the back of his neck again which was getting redder and redder. Honestly it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh.

  I decided to follow Sam. He was acting weird and he was making me nervous. I went behind the caravan and found the door swinging open. I peered round it and could see Sam holding the wire things above the table. On the table were saucers full of ciggie butts and plastic lighters and a four pack of Carlsberg Special Brew. I glanced around the rest of the caravan – there was the pile of blankets and a sleeping bag on the bed with a bottle of Glenlivet and a hard-backed book on top.

  ‘What you doing?’ I said.

  Sam had his eyes closed and he said: ‘Don’t think of the thing as lost. Think of it as ready to be found.’

  ‘You what?’ I felt awkward. Larry was an unwelcome guest but the caravan was still his private room and this felt like prying. ‘Come on, you shouldn’t be in here.’

  ‘Take some deep breaths and imagine what does it feel like, what does it smell like? You will begin to resonate with the object and it will be found.’

  ‘What? Sam, for God’s sake, come out.’ I was hissing at him now.

  Sam opened his eyes and stared at the wires for a few seconds.

  ‘I think it’s time to draw a map,’ I said a bit desperately. ‘Come on.’

  Sam came out of the caravan with the wires straight out in front of him, he wandered off towards the back door and I let him go.

  ‘Alice!’ It was Larry. I took a few steps closer. ‘That map of mine. It’s in the Land Rover. Give it tae Sam, would you?’

  I left the map at Sam’s place next to his tuna butty. He was still carrying those wires when he came downstairs and he put them on the table before he spotted the map. He stood stock still and then said to himself ‘They work’. He stretched his hand out and stroked the shiny surface of the map as if he half-expected it to disappear.

  ‘That’s kind of Larry, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You’ll have to say thank you.’

  He unfolded the map, holding it like it was an ancient parchment – delicate and precious and worth its weight in gold – before laying the map open on the square showing Backwoods. He examined it minutely, poring over every detail – although he seemed to be doing it with his eyes half-shut.

  Then he took a pen and wrote ‘The Big Hill’ on the small unnamed hill near the farm.

  ‘Stop writing on Larry’s map,’ I said. But Sam was in a map-induced world of his own. ‘The Wildwood’, he wrote on the trees in Four-acre.

  ‘I said, stop it!’

  I grabbed more laundry from the basket. As I looked up I saw him write HELL FIRE PASS in great big red letters across the lane beside a skull and crossbones he’d drawn. I sighed; I might as well talk to myself.

  He was map-daft. He could spend hours Googling maps. He knew where all the lines of longitude and latitude passed through each continent and the name of every city within a hundred miles of the equator. It wasn’t down to my teaching skills either; it was Sam’s own obsession with the subject. He spent hours examining maps on the internet, as though the rules and the keys and the symbols were a comfort to him. I think he believed if he studied the world long enough it would all fall into plac
e and begin to make sense. Same thing with Maths: he was always searching for patterns that made his world a place of order.

  Last September, when the man from the council came to make sure I was teaching him something and that the ‘home schooling’ really existed, the chap ticked a few boxes on his clipboard but by the time Sam had shown him the proof to Pythagoras’s Theorem and explained why the square root of two was irrational and recited Pi to twenty-five decimal places he’d put his clipboard away.

  Good job he didn’t ask about Sam’s life skills. He might well be able to map the world but he couldn’t find his way to the shops to buy a carton of milk, or visit the doctor’s, or get a haircut at the barbers – all these things were impossible for him. I was the only person who had ever cut his hair. The last time was over two years ago but the horrific screaming drama of it was seared on my memory as if it was yesterday.

  He was still drawing on Larry’s map – the row of little gravestones now, outside Wayside Cottage. I pretended not to notice. It was easier that way.

  Sam admired his handiwork, and then started to unfold the entire map. He looked scared and for a few minutes clung to the edge of the table and seemed to be counting under his breath. Then he began again, unfolding slowly and carefully and with his eyes open a tiny fraction.

  ‘It’s a good map, eh?’ I said. Hoping to take that slightly mad look off his face, but he didn’t reply.

  I tried again: ‘Nice of Larry to lend it, wasn’t it, Sam?’ But there was no answer – he was in a world of his own and for the time being there was no reaching him.

  By now he’d got the map fully open and he put his finger on our lane and followed it round Big Hill, past The Wildwood, and over the words HELL FIRE PASS and the skull and crossbones. His finger travelled slowly after that and kept stopping, following the wiggles in the B-roads and then the main road until it came to Lancaster, by which time his arm was stretched as far as it would go.

  Then he traced the route all the way back.

  He was following the journey I took every Tuesday on my trip to town. I could see the tears on his face and watched him rest his forehead against his sweatshirt until the sleeve was sodden with tears.

  Chapter 9

  That night I did a double take when Sam arrived back at the kitchen table after supper. He never came back when Duncan was eating; he stayed in his room messing with his computer or drawing maps, or sometimes he went to Jeannie’s. But tonight he peered round the door at Larry and Duncan before sidling across the kitchen and sitting down.

  He had that map under his arm. I felt nervous.

  Sam had always had a hair trigger. When he was a baby, and I’d still been trying to take him out into the world, I’d felt as conspicuous and on edge as if I’d had a DANGER UXB sign strapped to the front of the buggy. I’d dodged and dived along the pavement praying for folk to get out the way and, God forbid, not to try to talk to him because it was people he didn’t like. Me and Duncan and Jeannie were more or less all right, or at least he could tolerate us, but anyone else – or even the off-chance of anyone else – and he’d go mad, screaming and crying and looking as if he was working himself up to a seizure.

  Almost all the time we were out he’d have his eyes shut, usually with his bobble hat pulled down to his chin. He’d worn that original bobble hat come rain or shine until it fell to bits. By that time he hadn’t let anyone touch his hair for years and it had grown so long he hardly needed the hat anyway.

  I’d enrolled him in a playgroup once but it was a disaster. He hated being with other children, refused to take his hat and coat off and spent all his time curled in a ball or with his face flattened against the wall. He refused to talk or eat or drink until I took him away again.

  The staff were glad to see him go – they had plenty of regular kids who were happy to do normal stuff like slurping juice and gumming cookies and singing the necessary nursery rhymes. The last thing they wanted was some weird kid complicating things.

  ‘Is he always like this?’ one nursery nurse asked. ‘Perhaps you should take him to the doctor.’

  Other parents didn’t help either: gathering their kids up as though Sam was contagious; looking relieved he wasn’t theirs; raising their eyebrows in disapproval when he acted different. They tended to give both me and Sam a wide berth and managed to say an awful lot without saying a word. I was constantly on the verge of tears and longed for a smile or a kind word from anyone. No such luck.

  One day I was grabbing stuff in the supermarket as Sam writhed and shrieked in his buggy – he always writhed and shrieked in his buggy – when an old woman told me I wasn’t fit to be a mother. It was like being punched in the stomach. I stood there, not saying a word, as the woman took some biscuits off the shelf, tut-tutted and said: ‘Poor little thing. I’m glad you’re not my mother,’ and walked off.

  I took off after the old woman. For a split second I wanted to squeeze her scrawny neck, smack her skull off the shelves and see the blood vessels burst in her stupid watery eyes. I really think I wanted to kill her. Thank God Sam’s screams stopped me. He’d heard me walking away and was trying to tear himself out of his safety harness, arms and legs flying. I went back to the buggy and clung to the handle. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘It’s all right.’ I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Sam or myself. I set off with the buggy, knuckles white, legs shaking, pretending I was like anybody else out shopping for biscuits.

  I’d taken Sam into town less and less after that. Life was easier at Backwoods where we were not judged by anyone else and where Sam knew what to expect from life. Where he could ceaselessly line up his soft toys in exactly the right order, over and over again, all day if he wanted to, and no one would stop him or interfere.

  When I did venture out, Sam’s crying sometimes started as soon as we got in the car, but if not it would definitely start by the time we reached Big Hill. It was a long drive after that, with Sam screaming himself daft in the back. He could not have made it plainer that he wanted to stay at Backwoods, and only Backwoods.

  The health visitor said it was a phase. She said I mustn’t let Sam bully me; I was the adult and I had to act like one. I must be firm. I must put him in the car and take him wherever I needed to go, whenever I needed to do so. It was as simple as that.

  For a long time I struggled into town for health visitor appointments and dental checks and God knows what – until that last time when I finally gave it all up as a bad job.

  We’d been on our way to his five-year check, which was bound to be another pointless box-ticking exercise if ever there was one anyway, when he stopped crying.

  I craned my neck to watch him in the rear-view mirror. It was such a novelty having a quiet child in the back I laughed out loud.

  Then I realised his face was going purple and his eyes were rolling back in his head. I stamped on the brakes and dived out of the car, ripped the back door open and scrabbled at his harness. ‘Breathe!’ Breathe!’ I grabbed him, shook him, banged his back and begged him. ‘Breathe!’

  After several more seconds he gulped for air and looked at me steadily. He didn’t cry or try to talk. He just gazed at me.

  I put him back in his seat and stood by the car for a few minutes staring down the lane – a lane that might as well have had a portcullis clanging shut right across it. I got back in the car, turned it round and drove home.

  I hadn’t tried to talk to Sam about it; there was no point. Sam talked when he wanted, about what he wanted. He’d talk about maps and times tables and dinosaurs and comets and stars but talking about going into town or riding in the car or stopping breathing – forget it.

  I told Duncan I wasn’t taking Sam into town anymore. Instead I’d go on my own for a couple of hours on a Tuesday afternoon. Duncan hadn’t said much. He probably thought it would blow over, that if he kept his head down and got on with his farming everything else would sort itself out. I noticed he didn’t offer to take Sam out on his own, though. He wasn’t that da
ft.

  I’d taken Sam’s name off the school register and told the education people I was going to teach him at home. Then I’d thrown myself into home schooling the way I’d wanted to throw myself into being a normal mum to a normal kid.

  But he’d tripped me up there too. Whenever I got him a new book he either knew everything in it from the internet, or he’d finish it in ten minutes flat and want another. One day I lost patience and shouted: ‘You can’t have read it yet! How does it end?’ Sam had gazed at me, deadpan, and recited the last two pages word for word.

  Pretty quickly my world had shrunk to the same size as Sam’s. I lost touch with friends. It was easier to let go of my old life and to live the kind of life Sam demanded. And really what choice did I have?

  After six years of dealing with all this I was highly tuned to stuff that would throw our world out of kilter.

  Now here was Sam choosing to come downstairs to sit opposite some scruffy bloke that Duncan had dragged home from the pub last night. It was mystifying and disorientating and absolutely bound to end in tears.

  Sam put the map on the table and stared at Larry. I’d told him about staring a million times. Larry did not look bothered and carried on eating his bacon and eggs as if he’d not been fed all day.

  ‘Well, we got the hoops up,’ said Larry to Sam, ‘thanks to Pythagoras’s Theorem.’

  Sam gazed at him. He obviously didn’t want to talk about hoops or Pythagoras’s Theorem. Slowly he put his hand on the map.

  ‘Dunno about any theorem,’ said Duncan. ‘A bit of trial and error, more like.’ He took another slice of bread and smeared it round his plate. ‘Should get the sheeting on tomorrow if the wind stays down.’

  Sam gradually slipped his fingers into the folds of the map and opened it like a concertina, never taking his eyes off Larry.

  ‘You like the map, son?’

  Sam did a single nod of the head.