The Things I Know(57)
‘You kidding me?’ His mum leaned on the back of a dining chair. ‘You’re taking the side of this little madam you’ve known five minutes? Who turns up on my doorstep in the dead of night and thinks nothing of sinning under my own roof!’
‘Since when did you care about sin?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you cheek me!’ Her face was puce and her mouth quivered, Thomasina suspected, with equal measures of fear and all the poisonous retorts she still had left to fly.
‘Come on, Thomasina.’ Grayson took her hand and led her back to the bedroom, where he picked up his satchel and watched as she pulled on a boot, lacing it over her foot, which still carried the residual ache of yesterday.
Back in the living room, Thomasina couldn’t help but raise her hand in a small wave, thinking it would be impolite to leave without any gesture, but Grayson closed the front door behind them without saying goodbye to his mum.
Thomasina walked ahead, scanning the concrete walkway, looking for junkie shit or needles.
‘I bet you wish you’d never come down here.’
‘No, Grayson, the very opposite. I wish I had come sooner.’ She drew a breath. ‘I don’t like how you live. I don’t like how your mum treats you, and I know it’s not my place to say, but that’s how I feel.’
‘I don’t like it either.’ He kicked at the floor and tucked his fringe behind his ear.
‘So . . .’ she began. ‘So why don’t you do something about it? Change it?’
He held her gaze and spoke with the glint of tears in his eyes. ‘Because I promised.’ He bit his lip. ‘I promised my dad. And I don’t know what she’d do.’
‘But you know, Grayson . . .’ She framed her thoughts carefully. ‘Your dad was wrong to hand that burden to you. You were just a little boy! He couldn’t hack it, he did a runner, no matter how calmly, and yet he expected you to pick up the slack, and that’s very selfish. Plus, he might have just said it like a casual goodbye or to give you something to focus on after he’d gone, but I’m sure he didn’t mean for you to be holed up here, trapped, looking after her instead of living your own life.’
‘That’s more or less what Liz said.’
‘Well, for what it’s worth, I think Liz is right. I also think that your mum needs help, but it’s not help that you can give her, necessarily. She needs to see someone who understands about her illness.’
He laughed. ‘That’s the trouble. You heard her – she can’t admit that she drinks’ – he gestured towards the flat – ‘let alone understand that she has an illness.’
‘I’ll help you, Grayson, if you want me to. There must be information available. You can’t be the first person in this situation. Plus, I can be the person you talk to. I don’t know if I’ll always say the right thing, but just talking things through can make it feel better sometimes.’ She thought about her own situation and resolved to try harder to find a solution to all the things that bothered her about life on the farm. Maybe she should talk to Emery directly, have it out? And as for selling Waycott, she decided to get more involved, either to help ease the process for everyone or at the very least so she fully understood the situation. Knowledge, she decided, was how she would best find the answers to everything that irked her. She figured it would be the same for Grayson and his ghastly mother.
‘Yes, please.’ He took her hand in his and kissed her knuckles.
She walked down the stairs full of hope, with a new lightness to her spirits and clarity to her thoughts. With Grayson by her side, she hardly noticed the smell of urine, the piles of takeaway wrappers littering the steps or the new graffiti across the wooden door at the bottom of the stairwell – a spray-painted image of a smoking gun.
‘Oh no!’ She felt his hand stiffen.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s Mr Waleed, by the bins!’
She looked over at the little bull of a man lobbing full, knotted black bin bags into the dark abyss. He lifted them with ease, this man who used to be a wrestler. Grayson waved to him in greeting.
‘Your mother!’ he shouted, by way of response. ‘She laugh so loudly, Grayson, she shout, she stamp her feet! What in the name of God is she doing up there! Is she dancing? Because I have to tell you that I don’t feel like dancing, not with her up above me, bang, bang, bang! My kids moan, my wife moans – and now my mother-in-law, she is learning English so she can moan at me in three different languages!’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Waleed.’
‘It’s not you, Grayson. You’re good man. But your mother?’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe you take after your father.’
Despite the fraught exchange, Thomasina saw the small creep of a happy smile on Grayson’s face, as if this were the first time it might have occurred to him: the idea that he not only carried some of his father with him, but also that he was not like his shouting mother, who liked to stamp her feet.
‘Yes, I think I might.’
‘Well, I go talk to her again! Have a nice day!’ Mr Waleed raised his hand in a wave as they crossed the main road.
Thomasina blinked. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused trouble for you with your mum.’
‘You haven’t. The trouble has been there for a while, probably forever, and don’t apologise about coming to find me. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’