‘I don’t know where I’m going,’ I wailed as I drove towards a massive roundabout.
‘Hold on!’ Dad said. He lifted his head just enough to see over the dashboard and knew instantly where we were. ‘Over to the right, Ju.’
I tried to pull across.
‘Right, RIGGGHT,’ Dad shouted.
I pulled the car across three lanes of traffic and prayed for the best.
‘Left,’ Dad said with a puff of exertion and pain.
We made it to the carriage office, but I was in a daze by the time I walked in for my appearance. I must have reeled off my runs like a robot, because the man in a suit looked a bit dazed himself when I’d finally finished.
I looked up at him and waited to find out when he’d want to see me next.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘You’re out.’
I stared at him. I’d done it? I’d got the Knowledge?
I could hardly believe it was all finally over as I walked outside to the car. I’d left Dad in his seat, but as I got into the car I saw a livid red burn mark on his chest. He’d dropped his cigarette while I was away and hadn’t been able to pick it up with his crippled hands. He’d had to lie all alone while it burned a hole in him.
‘Oh, Dad!’ I said, as tears rushed into my eyes.
‘All right Ju?’ he replied and smiled.
‘Your chest, Dad. Are you OK?’
‘Don’t worry about it, love. It don’t hurt.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Forget that and tell me how you got on.’
As I looked at him lying there, I felt so full of love for him. ‘I did it, Dad, I did it.’
A huge smile stretched over his face. ‘I knew you would,’ he said.
With a sigh, Dad lent his head down against the seat. ‘Now let’s get back to the hospital. Those nurses are gonna have my guts for garters.’
Now I wish this was one of those really happy stories where I became a taxi driver, gave a lift to a movie star and ran away with him into the sunset. But real life’s not usually like that, is it? At least mine’s not, and what actually happened two months after passing the Knowledge was that my life changed in a way that made me think I’d never be happy again.
George was the only thing that got me out of bed when Dad died, because losing him felt like the end of the world. We gave Dad the send-off he deserved – his coffin lying in a glass-sided carriage drawn by a horse wearing black feather plumes and led by a man wearing a top hat and tails, with friends and family following behind in a long line of taxis – but it felt unreal. How do you say goodbye to the person who ties you to the earth and stops you flying away with his jokes, kind words and quiet love? It wasn’t just me who was lost – Mum and Dad had been together since they were teenagers. We all dealt with his death the best way we knew how: by staying close as we started learning how to cope without him.
Dad was buried in the local cemetery and I hated leaving him there, cold in the ground, so I visited him as often as I could and would sit with him as George and Lewis ran around together.
‘Can we fill in the hole, Ju?’ Lewis asked me one day when they found a fresh pile of dirt beside a newly dug grave that was waiting to be filled.
‘Just a bit,’ I said.
A few handfuls of earth wouldn’t matter, I thought to myself as I watched Lewis laughing while he played. He wheezed at the same time because laughing took all his breath and sounded like an 80-year-old man who’d smoked a pack a day all his life. George silently watched Lewis as he roared, as if he was trying to work out what the strange sound was. Then when Lewis started coughing with the effort of laughing, George bent him over before patting him on the back until he got his breath back. Sometime later I knew George would suddenly stop playing, stand to attention in the silence like a rabbit hearing a fox and listen to the sound of a train that no one else could yet hear until it rumbled past on the railway line running beside the cemetery. George was so sensitive to noise that when we were out for a walk he’d scream each time a car went by, as if a juggernaut was rushing by instead of a Ford Fiesta.
A few months passed like that – George and I going up to the cemetery, sometimes with Lewis, sometimes just the two of us, while I sat and wondered what the future held for us now my dream of being a taxi driver had come to nothing. After doing the Knowledge, I’d just needed to pass a driving test in central London to get my full licence, but I’d failed twice while Dad was still alive and I could not face taking it again after he died. He’d always encouraged me to keep going, but I could hear him laughing and see his face every time I got into a cab. It was too much, so I’d given up on all that hard work. I felt like a complete failure. I was no good as a mum and now I was a quitter too.
So time went on, as it does, the earth settled on Dad’s grave and when a huge dip appeared, I almost got arrested after deciding to lay some turf on it as the sun went down one day. Within a few minutes, a couple of coppers had arrived – black helmets on their heads and radios crackling – and it had taken some convincing to make them realise that I wasn’t up to no good. But apart being suspected of grave robbing, I liked going to the cemetery because it was somewhere peaceful to go and think.
However much I did, though, I still felt as though I was stuck in treacle. As George played, the thoughts would tumble through my head. The life I was giving George was a world away from the one that Dad and Mum had given Boy, Nob, Tor and me as children. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to make things better. I had been taught to earn my way in life and even had with my own small florist’s shop, where I’d worked seven days a week before George was born, but I’d given it up when I became a mum. Now the Knowledge had come to nothing, I didn’t know what to do. It all made me feel so useless and as the months passed without Dad, I’d sit and wonder whether I was ever going to be able to change things for George and me.
But the more I thought about it, the more I knew one thing: I couldn’t let my unhappiness get the better of me. It was time for a fresh start.
George was four when he began school in September 2000 and it was one of those days when I looked at him and wondered what I was making such a fuss about. With his big blue eyes and blond hair, he looked perfect as I dressed him in a bright red sweatshirt and black trousers. I felt sure that school was just what he needed now we’d moved on to a new estate, which seemed so much nicer than our last. It was a new beginning for both of us.
As I say, I’m a dreamer. It took only a few weeks for me to be called in to talk to the teachers.
‘We think George might have hearing problems,’ one said.
‘He doesn’t respond when we call his name,’ another told me.
‘He can’t seem to understand commands,’ someone else piped up. ‘If we tell the children we’re going to sit down in a few minutes George does it immediately, and when we get them into a circle for story time, he crawls backwards and lies under a bench with his hands over his ears.’
In a way I was almost relieved to hear what the teachers had to say, because they were the first professionals to spend any proper time with George and they could see there was a problem, which was what I’d been trying to tell people for years. But I also felt scared, because however much you can cope with things when they’re hidden at the back of the cupboard, they