‘Shush,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing, go back to sleep.’
Lee turned the other way and half-folded the pillow over his head. Jean felt for the light switch in the hall, found the banister with her left hand. These instincts, once more, were more or less automatic, hard-wired by years of maternal nightshifts. Sally with her nightmares about being buried alive; James, fretting over not being able to sleep. What a fine state of affairs, as they used to say, when Alan was still … With her free hand she picked up the trailing edge of her nightie, a recent purchase. Jean had picked it because, although practical, it would also be reasonably stylish if worn in front of strangers in an emergency, like a fire alarm at a hotel. This had happened years ago to Jean on a weekend break in Glasgow, and it continued to affect her nightwear choices.
The phone was on its table by the front door, in almost exactly the same spot Jean’s parents had had the phone in their own house. In the final few seconds before she reached the bottom stair, Jean had a momentary flashback to her father bemoaning its installation. What’s it going to be next? A brass band in the front room? He’d refused ever to use it; if the house was burning down, Jean’s mum used to joke, he’d probably write the fire brigade a letter. Imagine if he’d lived to see this world, where everyone carried a phone in their pocket, or bag. Well. Almost everyone. Not Jean. She was her father’s daughter, still.
‘Hello?’
‘Mum? I’m sorry to wake you up.’
So it was Sally. It wasn’t a policeman or someone from a hospital, as it had been on the awful night when Jean’s sister, Pam, had died – suddenly, incomprehensibly, even though she was still describing her leukaemia as a ‘nuisance’ and had bought them concert tickets for the next week. It was Sally, in Melbourne. And so perhaps after all this was going to be good news. Perhaps … Jean had almost stopped hoping for it. But women did wait a lot longer these days, didn’t they: they had careers first. Which Jean had mixed feelings about, but, well, the world changed, didn’t it?
‘There’s a situation with James,’ Sally was saying, and Jean’s daydream evaporated.
‘What do you mean, a “situation”?’ Sally talked so much like a businesswoman, these days. Was a businesswoman, of course. You just never got used to it, with your own kids: having them speak to you like bank managers discussing your overdraft. Not that Jean had ever been near going into her overdraft.
‘I’ve had a message from James.’
‘What sort of a message?’
‘A text, Mum.’ Sal’s voice crackled with impatience and Jean had the feeling, more and more familiar these days, that she was the junior one. ‘He’s made a threat – and it could be some sort of joke, or … but he’s talking about …’
Even when Sally had explained it, Jean couldn’t understand it, not really. Even when Sally had hung up, promising that she’d find a way to get hold of James, telling her things were going to be all right and that she’d call back as soon as it was sorted.
Jean stared numbly at the phone numbers of her children, the strange long numbers they had these days – especially Sally’s, with the international code, the foreign-looking ‘0061’ at the start. They were written in biro on a strip of paper which never left the phone table, was held down with a kangaroo paperweight Sally had bought her. There was no point in trying James if Sally was doing it. Jean didn’t want to tie up the line, or whatever the phrase was. She would only get in the way. And yet, not to call him. Her son. James. Not to call him, if he was in danger.
She had sat down on the stairs while Sally was talking, but now she stood up again, and her fingers went shakily over the buttons. Nine-nine-seven. Her fingers left a clammy film across the handset and she looked at the phone cord quivering gently as she extended the receiver. No dial tone. ‘The person you are trying to call is not available.’
Jean put the receiver back into its cradle and took a deep, uneven breath. All right. She was going to get dressed. She would get dressed and put the kettle on. There was no point in trying to address this, this baffling emergency, without at least making things as normal as they could be. She would get dressed without waking Lee – not that he wouldn’t be sympathetic, but she needed to wrap her head around this alone. And by the time she had done all this, Sally would surely be on the line again, to say it was all fixed.
But it didn’t feel as if she could go back upstairs, somehow – not straight away. Jean’s heart was beating at a speed which she couldn’t remember it reaching for many years. These had been fairly quiet years, after all. An even keel. Some fresh air would be good, she thought, and went to the front door. The lock, the bolt, all the things you continued to do every night in case of some intruder, some wolf at the door. And yet now the wolf was here, had come in down the telephone line.
She peered across at the Bradshaws’ nice new drive. The silver cars all slumbering as you looked down the hill, ahead of the supermarket trips or drives to country pubs which would make up their Saturday duties. The neat shuttered houses, green and brown bins outside; the absolute normality of it all. No reason, when she and Lee had gone to bed last night, to imagine anything outside that normality could jump on her like this. Of course not. Lee had watched a documentary about Pink Floyd, whose songs went on a bit, if you asked her, but he was happy. Jean had read a bit of her novel, which – like almost all the books chosen by her book group – was about a missing child. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? the blurb had asked, and Jean had thought how distant, how far from one’s real experience, the question seemed. How far-fetched these books always seemed.
And now this.
But the danger here was not of a kind that you could call someone to come and stamp out; it wasn’t in a shape which she could hold in her hands. Jean felt the swirling of her stomach again. Talking about ending his life. Why? He must be depressed, Sally had said. Or in ‘some sort of trouble’. And Jean had felt it like a slap, heard an accusation. She was always there for James to talk to. But how long, in fact, had it been? He wasn’t chatty on the phone. He wasn’t someone you could call for a weekly bulletin in the way she did with Sally.
Depressed about what? In what sort of ‘trouble’? It was appalling that she didn’t know, couldn’t even guess. Well. She could guess. Perhaps he still wasn’t over the mixed-race girl, if you were still allowed to say that; lots of things you weren’t allowed to say, nowadays, according to the younger members of the book group. Perhaps it was the job, money. She gathered that he wasn’t working for the taxi company any more, and even that job had been a bit of a comedown because the business went wrong, or he fell out with Michaela, or whatever exactly had happened there. But she could have given him money. She could have come up with job ideas for him, he could move back to Bristol, there were people hiring at the gym where Jean did Pilates, and at Boots, and that was just off the top of her head. Or perhaps it was his weight that was getting him down – but if that was the problem, there were so many diet plans.
It hadn’t been easy to tell, at Christmas, what sort of shape James was in. To her concerned eye he had looked a little overweight and dishevelled, and he’d been evasive when she’d asked about his love life (while trying to avoid that phrase) and what avenues he might explore work-wise (while feeling she was twenty years too old for that phrase). Evasive, but not unhelpful. He’d got involved basting the turkey, chopping vegetables with so much force you’d think, as Lee said, that they’d done something terrible to him. When the Bradshaws had come round on Boxing Day with, as always, a new-smelling and complicated general knowledge board game, James had done his usual trick of getting the first five questions right and then deliberately playing less well when Mr Bradshaw began to get grumpy and swig the port like regular wine. She had glanced across, proud, wondering wherever he got all these facts from. But prouder still that he knew when not to use them. When James had left for London on the 29th, she’d taken both his hands in hers, her boy, and said, as always: look after yourself.
How empty that sounded in her head, now. And how negligent it felt, that she hadn’t seen James since Christmas.