only gaze at him in curious detachment as he crumbled before her eyes. She didn’t even try to comfort him but spent her time instead just staring at her little boy as he lay sleeping in a hospital bed with metal bars at the sides. It reminded her of seeing him in his cot as a baby.
When John left, Grace spent the long watches of the night alone in the side ward with her boy, listening to the faint hum of the hospital incinerator somewhere in the distance. The night nurse popped in from time to time to check his temperature and 27
make sure no infection was taking hold. Adam had needed eight internal stitches and three around the opening to his anus to repair the damage there. The doctors had warned Grace that they’d need to be very careful about what he ate in the next few weeks while the stitches healed, as going to the toilet was going to be exceptionally painful although he would be given medication for that. His penis had been badly bruised and was painfully swollen. There was no tearing to the skin, but puncture holes had been made in it deliberately, though hopefully surgery had corrected these.
John had finally gone home around 2 a.m. to relieve Lizzie Foster who had been looking after baby Luke. Lizzie was Paul Foster’s mother, a tough old bird with a tight perm and flinty eyes. In their panic to find a sitter for Luke when the call came that Adam had been found, Grace and John had forgotten that Lizzie, as Chantal’s step-grand
-
mother, would be at the funeral the following day and would probably want to rest up beforehand. It was only after Adam came out of surgery and was left sedated and in a sound sleep that the thought occurred to them.
John didn’t want to leave Grace and Adam, but she was insistent. ‘No, you go, see to the baby. I’m all right.’ She was too, or so it seemed to John who had to suppress a flicker of anger at his wife for staying so composed – not thinking for a moment that what she 28
was displaying was not composure at all but the numbness that comes by way of grace when feelings would be too hard to bear.
29
Chapter Three
The Fosters lived in a spacious Guinness Trust Housing Association flat at the eastern, residential end of Columbia Road. Its red-brick foundations and façades were dotted with the white freshly painted windowframes of the sixty or so flats it contained.
Michelle and Paul had slowly moved up the housing list during their first five years together with Michelle’s two daughters by her first marriage to Darren Robinson. When their own daughter Trinity was born it tipped the scales that had moved them from a damp, cramped, noisy flat above a green -
grocer’s on Brick Lane to the relative luxury of this newly refurbished Guinness Trust block.
Tower Hamlets Council had referred them to the housing trust and they were rewarded with three bed -
rooms, a kitchen/dinette, and a twelve-foot lounge –
unimaginable luxury after years of living on top of each other. The flats housed mainly young families like themselves and Paul and Michelle quickly established firm friendships with their neigh bours, doing favours, lending and borrowing tools, food and clothing, and of course minding each other’s kids. Everyone was part of the community here, from 30
the small post office to the reproduction furniture factory outlets. Everybody knew every body, and
until a week ago none of them had any reason to think that their children were anything but safe. They might come in late for their tea; they might come back with rips or stains in their clothing, or even cuts and bruises from boisterous play, but they came back in one piece. Children here used to be seen pushing open a letter box and pulling the door key through from inside where it dangled on a piece of string.
They’d let themselves in and wait alone for their mothers to get back from work. Now, though, hardly anyone went unsupervised, the younger children only rode their bikes in twos, and there was
When John left, Grace spent the long watches of the night alone in the side ward with her boy, listening to the faint hum of the hospital incinerator somewhere in the distance. The night nurse popped in from time to time to check his temperature and 27
make sure no infection was taking hold. Adam had needed eight internal stitches and three around the opening to his anus to repair the damage there. The doctors had warned Grace that they’d need to be very careful about what he ate in the next few weeks while the stitches healed, as going to the toilet was going to be exceptionally painful although he would be given medication for that. His penis had been badly bruised and was painfully swollen. There was no tearing to the skin, but puncture holes had been made in it deliberately, though hopefully surgery had corrected these.
John had finally gone home around 2 a.m. to relieve Lizzie Foster who had been looking after baby Luke. Lizzie was Paul Foster’s mother, a tough old bird with a tight perm and flinty eyes. In their panic to find a sitter for Luke when the call came that Adam had been found, Grace and John had forgotten that Lizzie, as Chantal’s step-grand
-
mother, would be at the funeral the following day and would probably want to rest up beforehand. It was only after Adam came out of surgery and was left sedated and in a sound sleep that the thought occurred to them.
John didn’t want to leave Grace and Adam, but she was insistent. ‘No, you go, see to the baby. I’m all right.’ She was too, or so it seemed to John who had to suppress a flicker of anger at his wife for staying so composed – not thinking for a moment that what she 28
was displaying was not composure at all but the numbness that comes by way of grace when feelings would be too hard to bear.
29
Chapter Three
The Fosters lived in a spacious Guinness Trust Housing Association flat at the eastern, residential end of Columbia Road. Its red-brick foundations and façades were dotted with the white freshly painted windowframes of the sixty or so flats it contained.
Michelle and Paul had slowly moved up the housing list during their first five years together with Michelle’s two daughters by her first marriage to Darren Robinson. When their own daughter Trinity was born it tipped the scales that had moved them from a damp, cramped, noisy flat above a green -
grocer’s on Brick Lane to the relative luxury of this newly refurbished Guinness Trust block.
Tower Hamlets Council had referred them to the housing trust and they were rewarded with three bed -
rooms, a kitchen/dinette, and a twelve-foot lounge –
unimaginable luxury after years of living on top of each other. The flats housed mainly young families like themselves and Paul and Michelle quickly established firm friendships with their neigh bours, doing favours, lending and borrowing tools, food and clothing, and of course minding each other’s kids. Everyone was part of the community here, from 30
the small post office to the reproduction furniture factory outlets. Everybody knew every body, and
until a week ago none of them had any reason to think that their children were anything but safe. They might come in late for their tea; they might come back with rips or stains in their clothing, or even cuts and bruises from boisterous play, but they came back in one piece. Children here used to be seen pushing open a letter box and pulling the door key through from inside where it dangled on a piece of string.
They’d let themselves in and wait alone for their mothers to get back from work. Now, though, hardly anyone went unsupervised, the younger children only rode their bikes in twos, and there was
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