An hour ago, she’d swung her silver Ford Focus away from the kerb at St Saviour’s like they were Thelma and Louise. They’d started late so Robin could walk Lennie to school on her first day but normal kick-off could be six o’clock, or earlier. ‘Cul-de-sacs at dawn, basically,’ Maggie’d said. ‘Shots of people up bright and early, suited and booted and slinging their briefcase/toolbox in the back of the car/van, delete as applicable, are of the essence.’ She’d indicated right at a Tudorbethan pub strung with banners boasting Sky Sports and Gut Buster Burgers. ‘How did Lennie go off?’
‘Okay. I think. Nervous but putting a brave face on. You know what she’s like.’
After she’d turned the light off last night, she’d listened to her daughter flipping around overhead, the slats of the bunk creaking under her weight like a flight of arthritic stairs. ‘Are you all right up there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Comfortable?’
A pause. ‘It’s kind of weird being this close to the ceiling.’
Two or three minutes had passed, another couple of all-body adjustments. ‘Mum?’ Not much more than a whisper this time. ‘I’m sorry I said that about Ade earlier. Sorry I got Gran on your case, I mean, not that I said it. I didn’t like it when Uncle Luke said that about him.’
Uncle Luke’s a cretin, Len – oh, the temptation. ‘I know,’ she said.
A minute or so; another revolution. ‘Mum?’
‘Hm?’
‘You know when you spoke to Ms Brampton? She said I could go back to RPG, didn’t she, when we move back to London?’
‘As long as they have a free place, she said, it’s yours.’
Another pause. She could almost hear Lennie’s mind whirring in the dark.
‘Do you think it’s going to be really different at St Saviour’s?’
No, no, no, my love, it’ll be just the same, just as cosy and sheltered and academically rigorous, and everyone will want to be friends with you straight away. ‘A bit,’ she said. ‘It’s a comprehensive and the area’s not very well off. There’ll be kids there from some tough backgrounds – and boys, obviously. But you’ll be fine wherever you go.’
‘You think so?’
The neediness, so rare coming from Lennie, had been a dart in her chest. ‘Yes. I do. And like we discussed, it’s not forever.’ Please god, let it not be forever.
Next to her now, Maggie snapped to attention. ‘Look lively,’ she murmured as a trolley loaded with sacks of cement nosed through the shop’s automatic doors, pushed by a man currently suing his employers for a work-related back injury. When he wasn’t doing hard physical labour, Robin thought, he must be spending most of his sick leave on the bench press: encased in sportswear, his upper arms looked like Christmas hams. Amazing how bloody stupid people could be.
Maggie waited until she had a straight shot of his face and then, under the guise of texting, took a volley of photographs. ‘We’ll get some of him loading the van,’ she muttered, ‘and Bob’s your uncle. Like shooting fish in a barrel, this one. Here, take this.’ She passed Robin the phone then sat forward to turn on the engine. ‘I’ll go round behind him on the way out so you get a clear view. Then we’ll wait a few minutes and drive over to the site.’
‘Iced buns,’ Maggie said as she dropped her outside Greggs. ‘Get a whole pack. And here,’ she pulled a twenty from her purse, ‘get some sausage rolls as well, or whatever you fancy for lunch. We might not have a chance later.’
Robin waved her away. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘Oh, shut up.’ Maggie reached over and stuffed the note into her pocket. Robin tried not to look relieved.
Inside, she joined the queue. It was mid-morning, lunchtime a way off yet, but the place was already busy, two tills going, a steady stream of customers, nasal-musical Brummie accents dipping and rising around her like carousel ponies. She had the accent herself though she’d never given it much thought until Isobel-from-Berkshire laughed at it in her first week at UCL. It was lighter these days, anyway, after a decade and a half away.
Isobel – god, when was the last time she’d thought about her? But the whole morning had been like that, an extended hobble down Memory Lane. Every time they turned a corner there was something else: the community centre where she’d been forced to do ballet; the bus stop for school; the wooden arch to John Morris Jones Walkway down which she and Corinna had disappeared to do their underage smoking. The same but different. The little precinct at the roundabout but the shops had changed. Gardens had been overhauled, extensions added. Instantly recognized, deeply known, but foreign. Even the general look of the place, the style – years in London had altered her aesthetic.
The déjà vu had started the moment she’d opened her eyes and seen Lennie’s new school uniform looming on its hanger like the Ghost of Christmas Past. She’d been at Camp Hill, the grammar school herself, but for a couple of months when she was sixteen, after they were introduced by a mutual friend, she’d gone out with the baddest of St Saviour’s bad boys, Sean Harvey. When he asked her, she’d said yes because she knew it would piss Christine off and because, let’s face it, he was fit and she was shallow, but she’d grown quite fond of his rebel heart and precocious sexual talent. He’d dumped her after she got her GCSE results – apparently her A-stars had been an embarrassment to him. Given her current luck, she thought, she’d probably find herself sitting in a cul-de-sac outside his house before too long.
Catching scroungers on the sick in Sparkhill. How the mighty have fallen.
‘The site’ just now had been a semi-detached in Bournville where the Christmas Ham, real name Barry Perkins, was working cash-in-hand on a kitchen extension and where they’d filmed him tossing the sacks of cement out of his van like confetti. The client was Hargreaves & Partners, a local law firm acting for Perkins’ legitimate boss. She had quite a bit with them at the moment, Maggie said, and another bigger firm, too, on top of her long-standing contract with the city for suspect disability and unemployment claims. With Luke’s comments ringing in her ears, Robin had listened to the list and felt her soul wither.
‘Foive pound seventy-foive, bab,’ said the woman behind the counter.
Back in the car, Maggie ate a sausage roll in four bites then pulled off again.
Robin buckled her seatbelt. ‘Where to now?’
Sparkhill, just north of her parents’ in Hall Green, was almost entirely Asian, which was why Luke, the bigot, had reflexively chosen it for his scroungers. The shops and restaurants on Stratford Road were a mix of Balti houses and halal butchers, travel agencies and bakeries, the windows of the clothing stores full of salwar kameez and Pakistani suits in jewel-box colours. Maggie turned off by a Sikh temple Robin didn’t remember having seen before. Three storeys high with reflective windows trimmed with blue, it looked more like a call centre than a place of worship. Its red brick was the only thing it had in common with the rest of the street, a shabby collection of Victorian terraced workers’ cottages.
Stratford Road had been buzzing but just a few hundred yards off the main drag, the pavement was deserted bar a single elderly woman wearing an anorak over her sari. The houses had a dormant air, the only indication that anyone in them was awake – or even alive – the flicker of television through a ground-floor window.
Maggie brushed pastry flakes off her trousers. ‘Right. Time to come clean.’
‘About what?’
She