Boys Don't Knit (10 page)

I think I might be making some progress with Mrs Frensham. We actually had a conversation today. She brought me out my tea and stood around for a while, watching me sip it intently, as though she'd put cyanide in it and wanted to make sure I drank it all down like a good boy. She didn't say anything, just stood there, holding her own cup but not drinking from it.

‘Were you born in Hampton?' I asked, feeling I needed to break the ice.

‘Portsmouth,' she said.

‘Do you have family here?' I asked, after a pause while I sipped from the chipped Eeyore mug she'd brought me.

‘Family,' she spat, in a tone that suggested her family had already been given their mugs of cyanide tea.

‘Do you not get on?' I asked, trying to look sympathetic.

‘Who wants to know?' she said.

I shrugged. ‘Sometimes it helps to talk.'

‘People do too much talking,' she said. ‘Why do people always dig up things best left buried?'

‘Dunno,' I said. ‘Ask Tony Robinson.'

She didn't make any move to go back inside though, and after a while, she said, ‘I don't like them. My family.'

‘Fair enough,' I said, wishing she'd put my mind at rest by drinking her own tea.

‘My niece is OK,' she went on. ‘She keeps me up-to-date with what's going on.'

‘But you don't talk to anyone else?'

‘No,' she said, then finally she sipped her tea. I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘There was a to-do over my mum's wedding ring when she died.'

‘When was that?'

‘1969.'

I spat tea.

‘1969? How old were you?'

‘Old enough to know my sister was trying to steal from me,' she said. ‘It all went downhill from there.'

‘Good that you have your niece, though,' I said.

‘She's an odd one,' Mrs Frensham said after a pause. ‘She's called her baby Spector.'

‘For real?'

‘For real. Stupid name.'

‘I suppose we'll all have stupid names in the future,' I said.

That was about it. A bizarre sort of conversation. I think she'd be more suited to Freddie's brand of chat really. Maybe I should introduce them.

I'll phone Ms Gunter about it tomorrow and let her know how I'm getting on. Speaking of phones, I looked for Megan at school today but she's off sick. She still hasn't accepted my friend request. I did see Jasmine though, and I know she's friends with Megan. Jasmine was wearing a scarf, which suggested to me Joz wasn't the only one with a hickey.

‘Hi, Jasmine,' I said casually.

‘Hi, Ben,' she replied warily.

‘Do you have Megan's number?'

‘Yes.'

‘Could I have it?'

‘Why do you want Megan's number?'

‘I was going to send her a text, to say thanks for Saturday night  … '

‘Why, what happened on Saturday night?'

I paused, surprised. ‘She didn't  …  say anything?'

‘About what?'

Why are girls so protective of each other in these situations? It's like they think us men are sharks, circling a huddled group of shipwrecked sailors. Jasmine should be facilitating. She should be bringing me and Megan together. She shouldn't be putting up barriers, or firing spear-guns into my eyes.

‘About me,' I said.

‘No,' Jasmine said. ‘She definitely didn't say anything about you. She was totally drunk and doesn't remember anything about that party.'

Jasmine stood up and walked off, giving me a contemptuous look, as though I'd just made her an indecent proposal.

‘Nice hickey,' I said as she stropped off.

Could Jasmine be believed? Megan had already looked a bit bleary when she'd found me, and then she had another couple of drinks. A bladdered Megan would certainly explain why she'd been so willing to get off with me. But what did that mean? That she didn't actually like me? Was it just the alcohol speaking? Or had the Rossopple merely stripped away the inhibitions, revealing her true, yearning desires?

Cripes, I think I've been reading too much
Fifty Shades of Graham
. Speaking of which, Joz gave me six or seven more pages I must get on and edit. It's getting marginally better. Things have moved on and Graham and Daisy have plunged into the world of big business, with all its attending temptations and moral dilemmas. The pages are in the Box of Shame under my bed, along with the clay, three back copies of
Knit!
, my actual knitting and some racy mags down the bottom that quite frankly don't get much of a look-in these days.

Finally caught up with Megan at school today; she was walking around with Freya Porter. I stalked her for a bit, waiting for my opportunity, keeping well out of sight. I thought it had come when Freya went into the loos and it looked like Megan was going to wait outside. But then Freya said something to Megan, apparently convincing her she needed to go as well and they popped in together. Girls do like company when they're on the loo. What do they do in there together? Is it like midwives? Do they offer each other encouragement, hold hands? Coax it out?

I had to wait until the bell was about to ring before the girls could finally bear to be parted from one another and I sprinted around the science block to get ahead of Megan.

‘Oh, hi,' I said, affecting surprise and puffing slightly.

‘Were you just following us?' she asked.

‘What? Following you?'

Megan carried on walking; we had to be in class in a couple of minutes.

‘Me and Freya,' she said. ‘Wherever we looked, you were there. Like Clare Balding.'

‘Just coincidence, I suppose,' I said breezily. ‘It was a good party last Saturday.'

She rolled her eyes. ‘I don't remember. I think I had too much to drink. Are you going this way?'

‘Yes,' I lied. We were, in fact, heading in the opposite direction to where I needed to be. ‘You don't remember anything?'

‘Not really,' she said. ‘I heard about Freddie steaming through the house on his BMX.'

‘Yeah,' I laughed a little too hard, accidentally snorting like a pig. ‘Do you remember anything else?'

‘Freya's dad chasing after Gex with a golf club?'

‘That was hilarious, yes,' I said, impatient now. We were nearly at her classroom. ‘But anything else? Something that happened a bit later?'

She turned to look at me, smiling. Aha. I thought, she's been playing with me. She remembers.

‘No,' she said. ‘Not really.'

She walked off towards her classroom and I watched her go with a heavy heart. How could she not remember?

But then she turned around as if to see whether I was still watching her. She smiled and said, ‘Oh, apart from our kiss, of course.'

Then she was gone, swallowed up by a river of students pouring into the classroom.

I grinned, spun on my heels and raced off to Geography and Mr Grover.

The lift doors closed and we started to go up.

Suddenly, before I knew it, Daisy was clinging on to me and kissing my lips with hers. She was wearing glasses and had her dark hair tied up. She had on a tight, short skirt and a blouse that clung to her heaving bosom beneath. She looked dynamite.

‘What are you doing, Miss Field?' I said. ‘We're on our way to an important meeting that could make us a million pounds!'

‘I don't care about the money,' she said, hitting the red button with a sharp stiletto. The lift juddered to a stop. ‘I just need you desperately.' She began taking off her blouse, revealing the black bra that I had given her for her 21
^st
birthday.

I grinned a wry smile at her.

‘I can see you're not going to take no for an answer. I'm going to have to quench your passion before you'll be able to concentrate on this important business meeting.'

The bra dropped to the lift floor and she came close, breathing softly in my ear.

‘I always think you need to be properly prepped before any meeting,' she said.

‘Take a note, Miss Field,' I said and began unbuckling my belt.

Twenty minutes later, I was pulling my trousers back on and helping Daisy zip up her skirt when I noticed that we had an audience.

‘Hmm,' I said wryly. ‘Maybe we shouldn't have taken the panoramic lift.'

Daisy turned around to look at the dozens of clapping and cheering office workers in the building opposite, who'd just had the show of their lives.

‘I've got nothing to be ashamed of,' she said, waving. Then she turned and grabbed my trouser department.

‘And neither have you  … '

Will Daisy and Graham's passion de-rail their fledgling business venture? Or will their hunger for business success match their hunger for one another? I really can't see where this is heading and I don't much care either.

I presented Dad with the mugs after class tonight. He looked really impressed. I felt quite proud for a while. Before I remembered I hadn't made them and my life is a tissue of lies.

He drank his tea out of one when we got home and kept grinning at me, giving me the thumbs-up.

‘What are you going to make next?' he asked.

‘A flower pot,' I said, once again rejecting the opportunity to come clean.

I'm going to hell.

In Knitting last night Mrs Hooper showed us how to design a pattern and how to write it in such a way that it can be followed by others. It's a little like machine code, a programming language. Mrs Hooper asked us to just write out the pattern for a simple scarf to begin with, but then she showed us how to introduce more complex weaves and wefts. The symbology of casting off and so on. I found it quite fascinating but some of the girls looked a little blank. It's probably not because they're girls, in hindsight, that they didn't find it all quite as engrossing as I did, but more because they're not all a bunch of total spods like I am.

She reminded us that part of our coursework for submission is to come up with an original pattern.

‘It doesn't have to be anything complex,' Mrs Hooper explained. ‘Just a normal jumper will do, but maybe you could add some darts on the cuffs, or flares. Or perhaps you could make it unusually long. Just something that shows you've thought about it and that you understand how to adapt a standard pattern to incorporate a variation.'

She gave us ten minutes to work on it and I lost myself in the code for a while. I started thinking of different patterns, mad stuff, like jumpers with three arms and onesies with wings. The original Pattern, or Pattern Mk 1, was quickly superseded. I decided to move on to Pattern Mk 2. Or 2Patz for short.

‘Ben?' someone was saying. ‘Ben?'

It was Natasha.

‘Sorry,' I said.

‘You were miles away,' she said, grinning. ‘Thinking about your girlfriend?'

‘I don't have a girlfriend,' I said.

‘You must have loads of girls hanging around,' she said.

I laughed. ‘Thanks for the ego boost, but no.'

Not officially anyway, I thought to myself, remembering what Megan had said to me at school on Monday. I smiled shyly at Natasha and got back to my pattern.

They're like that at Knitting. So supportive.

I've now got quite a large pile of clay which I've been taking from Miss Swallow bit by bit and which I'm hiding in the Box of Shame under my bed, keeping it wet with damp newspaper. I should really start building the ziggurat before Dad finds it and asks awkward questions.

Anyway, I've done no homework tonight. I've been doodling most of the day, coming up with ideas for my grand pattern. I don't just want to do something boring. I want to come up with something new, something brilliant. Something that I could sell on the internet, maybe.

2Patz promises to be just that.

Dad's bereft about Lance Armstrong turning out to be a drugs cheat.

‘Not him too,' he said. ‘Are there no heroes left?'

‘Frank Lampard?' I said.

‘Boris Johnson?' Mum suggested.

‘Harry Potter?' Molly added.

Dad shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose so,' he said. ‘But sometimes I think it's just a matter of time before even they let us down. Get caught stealing, or cheating, or lying.' Just as he said that last bit he happened to look up at me and my stomach flipped.

Does he know? I hate this. I'll have to tell him.

What a weird conversation I had with Ms Gunter today. I decided to phone, rather than email, because I was confused about something I'd read in my probationary terms which I just happened to be re-reading.

‘Hello, Ms Gunter,' I said. ‘It's Ben Fletcher.'

‘Oh hello, Ben,' she said. She sounded exhausted. ‘I'm glad it's you.'

‘Really?'

‘Really. You don't know the day I've had. So many phone calls, so many breaches. You're not ringing with a problem, are you?' she added guardedly.

‘No, not really,' I replied, looking at the document in my other hand. ‘It's just that it says here we're supposed to have arranged face-to-face interviews during the probation. At least one here at my home. I was just wondering if you were going to be in contact about that.'

She was silent for a while..

‘Yes, Ben, don't worry, I'll get around to that very soon. Do you feel  …  do you think you need to see me urgently? Has something happened?'

‘No, not at all,' I replied.

‘No more sieges outside old ladies' houses?'

‘Not for ages,' I said.

‘Good, I'm really pleased to hear it,' she said. ‘Because you know what, Ben? You're just about the only success story I've got at the moment.'

‘Oh,' I said, not sure what to say. What bizarre universe is this in which I am a success story? ‘Sorry.'

‘They've cut the staffing again,' she said. ‘There are just three case workers here now, handling over two hundred files each.'

‘How's the waffle killer getting on?' I asked.

‘Who? Oh yes, him. He's back in jail, I'm afraid. Breached the terms of his probation.'

‘He didn't eat someone else's kidneys?'

‘No,' she laughed.

‘Liver? spleen?'

‘No, no. If you must know, there was a restraining order stopping him from being within a hundred metres of an ice-cream van.'

‘Let me guess,' I said. ‘He was apprehended whilst in possession of a 99 with a flake.'

‘Worse than that,' she said. ‘He walked into my office with the damn thing.' We laughed then, but I was shocked to hear her laughter suddenly turn to sobs.

‘I'm sorry, Ben,' she said. ‘This is totally unprofessional.'

‘It's OK,' I said, not sure what else to say.

‘It's just so short-sighted,' she went on. ‘They're trying to save money, but cutting the probation service will just mean more crime, more people going back to jail, the costs of that dwarf the salaries of a few case workers.'

‘You should tell them that,' I suggested.

‘I've tried,' she said, sniffing. ‘We all have. I wrote to the Home Office about it just this week, telling them about the good work we've been doing.'

‘Well, that's great,' I said. ‘I'm sure they'll take notice.'

‘Problem is, though,' she said. ‘I'm not really having much luck with anything at the moment.'

‘That's because you're overworked,' I said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘That and the fact that my clients are all criminals and nutters.'

‘Except me,' I pointed out.

‘Yes, Ben,' she said. ‘Except you.'