Free Blood Family by Anne Fine Page A

still clumsy at that, he’d had so little practice on different cars.) We drove down the narrow nursing-home drive, and waited for the barrier to lift. Eddie said nothing, just stared out of the window for a while. And then he broke the silence. ‘Rob, why did that woman call my mum “Lucy” all the time?’
    My heart sank. I could feel it plummeting. I was too down at heart even to pick my way around what I guessed must be coming. Simply to get it over with, I asked the question outright. ‘Because you thought her name was—?’
    ‘Mum. And Harris always called her Bitch.’
Alan Radlett, Foster Parent
    It worked out well, in a way. Because Rob took that painful little anecdote, along with one or two more, back to the panel, and they agreed that Eddie needed more time in a domestic setting, developing his social awareness and skills, before he could be thrown into the bear garden of primary school.
    I didn’t mind, and Linda was delighted. She had been making such good progress with his reading and arithmetic, explaining things, taking him places. She knew he would find school a massive strain, and everymonth we kept him home with us would pay off handsomely.
    In any case, I liked his company. Usually I am quite glad, at half past eight each morning, to see the back of the kids we have and know that, unless they bunk off school and are delivered back to us, we’re free till half past three. We’re not spring chickens any more. I need the break. But Eddie was so easy to have around. (In that way, he was like Orlando.) He wasn’t challenging. He didn’t keep tiresomely pushing his luck, or testing the boundaries, like so many of them do. He was a bit like some well-meaning stray who’d had a rotten deal in life, knew it, and had the sense to recognize when he had landed on his feet.
    Oh, he was strange. (I know, I know, they all are.) And yet the strangeness didn’t seem to run right through his personality like letters stamped in red through seaside rock. It just burst out now and again. Sometimes it was almost amusing, like on that blazing hot day I sprawled on the sofa watching Wimbledon for hour after hour. On the last supermarket shop, we’d bought a case of ginger beer, and I must just have taken to the stuff because I sat there in that dripping heat, sipping all day.
    (Amazing I didn’t explode.)
    Anyhow, Linda wandered in some time before supper. Hearing the ‘phut!’ as I prised up the tab of yet another can, she said to me, ‘Blimey, Alan. How many’s that ?’
    And then, from underneath my arm, we heard this clear little voice. ‘Seven.’
    ‘Never!’ I told him. ‘Never in your life.’
    Linda went off to count up how many cans were left. ‘He’s right,’ she reported back. ‘You must already have finished seven.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have taught the little beggar how to count.’
    ‘He could count anyway,’ she reminded me. ‘It was the taking away and stuff he’d never learned to do.’
    I squeezed him. ‘Is that right?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said proudly. ‘I could count by myself even before I came.’ And neither Linda nor I knew any way of telling him it was an odd habit for a little boy, to keep such close track of the number of times in a day he’d heard a man open a drink can.
    Sometimes it wasn’t funny at all. Take that time in the shed. He’d been in with me for an hour or so. ‘Helping,’ we called it. Our damn electric bill had shot up yet again, so I’d been fitting insulation sheets on all four sides, hoping to save myself from having to use the heater for so many months of the year. I’d fixed all the facing panels up again, and I was hammering back the nails on which I hung my tools.
    Getting the last one in where I needed it was proving awkward. Maybe there was a wood knot in the upright behind. The first two nails bent and I threw them in the rubbish pot, and tried another. Same again. And then afourth. I will admit that I was getting testy. I rather pride