Blood Family by Anne Fine Read Free Book Online Page B

first tape. I know when Harris slammed out, Mum was alittle nervous. There was a tremble in her voice when she said, ‘Never mind! Moving house makes people ratty. When he comes back, he’ll probably be in a better temper.’ She rubbed the red mark round the wrist he’d held too tightly and too long. She told me it was called a Chinese Burn, and that the girls in her class when she was at school gave them to one another. And then she tried to laugh, and said, ‘We’ll make some cocoa, and then see what’s on those old tapes in the corner. Maybe there’s a film.’
    She slid one in the old machine the other people hadn’t bothered to take away with them. (‘Leaving their crap!’ said Harris.) We waited, then the music for the song came on, and Mr Perkins came through the bright red door, took off his jacket and began to sing. And I remember Mum looking at him, then saying, ‘Perfect. All I’m bloody fit for!’ and giving this weird little laugh. And then she squeezed me – almost too tightly, like a giant Chinese Burn, and I was in her lap, all warm and comfy.
    But she hadn’t been like that for ages and ages and ages. So I didn’t want to go and see her. Even if the bruises had gone.
Linda Radlett, Foster Carer
    He picked things up so quickly that it was easy to forget his childhood had been so strange. But every now and again he’d freeze, or look uncertain about the moststraightforward thing, and we’d be reminded that, however sensible and caring his babyhood might have been, everything had been sent off track in recent years.
    Take mirrors. Mirrors fascinated Eddie. He stopped in front of them the way that other children do when they are at a fair, and find themselves facing distorting glass. ‘Look, Mum! I’m fat as a barrel!’ ‘See, Dad! I am the rubber boy!’
    Eddie just stared. Most times, I think, he took himself at first simply for some other child his age passing a window. His double-takes stemmed more from simple spatial puzzlement – how can someone be walking there ? – than recognition of his own reflection. As soon as he had clocked it was himself that he was looking at, he’d stop and stare – gaze at himself in wonder. ‘Is this me?’ Of course we realized at once that, since he was too young to notice, he had never seen himself. Still, Alan and I couldn’t work out quite what it was that so astonished him. Was he surprised he looked so tall? So clean? So grave? Did he not realize children looked like that?
    Because he’d pass for normal almost anywhere. He was what an American I knew used to call ‘biddable’. Lord knows, we have had kids through here who’ve acted out so badly that we’ve recoiled from taking them anywhere in public. We have had children who’ve been, to use the jargon, ‘challenging in the extreme’.
    Eddie was not like that.
    It was as if he knew a lot of all this social stuff already,and simply hadn’t had the chance to practise it. And then we realized who we had to thank for that. Isn’t life strange? A quarter of the way across the world, in Canada, and thirty years ago, some sweet old fellow in a cardigan called Mr Perkins makes a series of telly programmes for children. Someone else bothers to record them, but doesn’t throw them out. And Edward James Taylor is saved for life. If this sort of thing could only happen a good deal more often, I might be able to believe in God.
    Alan and I tried not to ask the boy too many questions. But Rob did. One of the bones I’d pick with Social Services is that they can be too much like our dentist, treating small fry like adults where sometimes I believe it’s best for people like ourselves, who have been parents a long while, to use our intuition about what should be said, or what should happen next.
    Rob came a lot, sometimes just for a chat with Eddie, sometimes with news. ‘Guess what I’ve just found out. It seems you have a great-grandmother.’
    Eddie looked baffled.
    I heard the sofa sigh