Joy tugged the window closed and secured the latch, shutting the colourful foil spinner out of the five-year-old’s reach.
Radia, standing on the bed with her face squished forlornly against the glass, peered down at the four-foot drop. She’d have landed on lush springy turf if she had taken a tumble. ‘I never fall!’ she reminded her mum, sulkily.
‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Joy warned, bringing her breathing under control after the adrenalin spike of seeing Radia leaning out into the air. ‘Right, let’s see your backpack.’
Radia huffily surrendered her bag, its contents already tipped out onto the single bed: lidless felt pens, hopelessly dry; a curlyBeano, very well-thumbed; two Sherbet Dip Dab wrappers; umpteen notebooks full of drawings and the alphabet she never tired of practising. Topping it all was her toy fox who, since his hasty procurement in the Charing Cross Hospital gift shop almost six whole years ago, had borne the name Charley.
Radia’s father had named him. It had been his first and only gift for the daughter he was, apparently, satisfied to peer at only once before vanishing from their lives forever, much to Joy’s numb astonishment.
Radia was too young to know the half of it. Sean’s abandonment – he didn’t even stick around to ask his child’s name – had happened so suddenly it left the new mum winded. His disappearance had come at the end of fourteen months of increasingly suffocating control, by which time Joy didn’t even have access to her own door keys. His sudden surrender of power had been so uncharacteristic and unexplained, Joy still refused to believe it wasn’t all another mind game and he wasn’t about to reappear at any moment, laying claim to her and their child. It was like living permanently in a movie thriller where her every move was accompanied by suspenseful violin chords.
Things had been this way for so long now that Joy was used to feeling on edge. She was in very real danger of forgetting the goal she’d set for herself back in that maternity ward: a life of unguarded peace for her and her baby.
Nowadays, all she focused on was making sure Sean never found them. Fortunately, her job helped in that regard, pin-balling them all over the globe, never staying still for more than a few weeks at most. It was what ‘normal’ looked like for them, and it had been working out well, so far.
‘Take you for an ice cream once I’ve fixed this, OK? We can see what Clove Lore’s like,’ Joy told her, eyeing Radia with a fearful softness she sometimes worried she couldn’t hide, before getting stuck into repairing the zipper on the fuzzy backpack.
‘And Mum?’ said Radia.
After yanking the zip back into place, Joy replaced the pliers in the tool bag that travelled everywhere with them; tools that symbolised independence more than even the well-worn wheels on her suitcase. Her dad had gifted them to her when she first moved away to uni. She’d quickly sussed there was nothing you couldn’t fix with the right YouTube tutorial. Nowadays, her tools meant she never had to ask for help from anyone.
‘And Mum?’ Radia tried again, breaking Joy’s focus.
This was how she started most sentences recently; as though she’d already made her point and wanted to add more. She’d also recently dropped ‘mummy’ from her vocabulary, and the first time she’d used the grown-up-sounding substitution, Joy had looked so thunderstruck she’d decided to keep it up, even if it did actually make her feel a bit funny inside when she said it. ‘We’ll paddle in the sea and get fish ’n’ chips, yeah?’
Joy couldn’t help repeating, ‘Fish’n’chips?’, with a broadening smile.
‘That’s how it’s written on the signs we saw,’ Radia stated blankly, making her mum weaken even more and fold onto the bed beside her, reaching her arm around her daughter’s small frame, all wile and wire.
‘Well, I suppose it is.’ She pulled Radia closer. Every cuddle felt like being plugged back into the grid that kept Joy’s heart beating. ‘Because they go together. Like us. Mummy’n’Rads.’
But Radia’s mind was already down on the shore. ‘Maybe there’ll be some other children to play with. Someschoolchildren,’ she said in her best making-a-point voice, which had a curiously rootless transatlantic twang, nothing like her mum’s estuary English accent.
‘Let’s go find out,’ said Joy, standing and giving her glasses a shove back onto her nose. ‘Put your jellies on.’
She hoped the challenge of buckling the pink glittery plastic shoes by herself would be enough to throw Radia off her favourite topic: school, or rather the absence of it.
Joy knew only tears and frustration accompanied these discussions, and she deflected them as best she could, usually saying things like, ‘We do all right, don’t we? You’ve got reading pretty much sussed and you can write the alphabet and spell all your tricky words, and this year we’ll do more sums and computers, just you wait!’
It had worked, until recently. Until Radia figured out from watching CBeebies that kids far younger than her had been in pre-school for years, some of them since they were actual babies, and loads of other nearly-six-year-olds were in Big School. Most of them, in fact.
She’d been outraged at the discovery, and after watching every episode ofMallory TowersandThe Worst Witchon iPlayer (shows she wasn’t really old enough for but she’d insisted she was), she’d developed a deeply romantic notion of what school would be like if only they stayed somewhere long enough for her to actually go.
At school there were smart grey pinafore dresses for winter and floaty checks in the summer, a packed lunch in a cartoon character lunch box, and a whole day spent away from hotel rooms and B&Bs with hastily arranged, annoying childminders. If she was allowed to go to school there’d be far less hanging around in empty business premises playing Roblox on a phone screen while her mum fiddled with networks and servers, or whatever it was she was up to that day.
‘And Mum?Isthere a school here?’
‘I don’t know. Clove Lore’s a small place, so maybe not.’ Joy tucked her long darkest-brown bob neatly behind the arms of her specs while Radia blinked up at her. It was getting harder to lie undetected these days.
Joy had spotted the ‘Slow: Children Crossing’ sign, back up near the entrance to the visitor centre car park where the taxi dropped them with their luggage this morning, and she’d caught a glimpse of the schoolyard railings painted in primary colours when they passed the newbuilds out on the promontory above Clove Lore. Definitely a junior school. She’d never hear the end of it if Radia got wind about the place, and she couldn’t blame her daughter. As usual, she blamed herself.
Itinerancy. Restlessness. The endless need to be always moving on, always expected somewhere else. This had been their life for years. The contracts kept coming, thank goodness, and yet it meant Radia had a lot to put up with, and no amount of well-organised home-schooling squeezed into the evenings, weekends and long-haul flights could make up for Radia’s fantasy of kindly, adoring teachers and longed-for school pals.
‘Ta-dah!’ Radia presented her feet in the buckled-up jelly sandals, her toes wriggling. ‘Let’s go!’ Charley was now tucked under her arm, where he always clung on trips out.
Joy was saved from mentally beating herself up about all those emails she’d received recently from the local authority back in London. Unbeknown to Radia, they still held a school place for her, deferred from last September, at the big redbrick primary at the end of the road where Joy’s old flat stood empty.
Joy shook the keys in agreement and they passed through the jumble of book cartons and bare shelves on the shop floor. ‘But only for an hour, OK? I have to work.’
