Just Like the Other Girls - Claire Douglas Page 0,81

slung over his face, the boys buried beneath their duvets, like little moles. She wonders if she could persuade the three of them to leave Bristol, to make a fresh start somewhere else. She’s always fancied going somewhere up north. Yorkshire, maybe, or the Lake District. Somewhere rural, tranquil, far away, but even as she thinks it she knows she can never do it, despite the bad things she’s done. She can’t leave Elspeth: the Viola-clones will only let her down in the end.

She creeps upstairs and pokes her nose around her bedroom door. Sure enough, Ed is fast asleep, in exactly the pose she’d imagined. And then she tiptoes along to her children’s rooms. Harry is asleep, the duvet pulled over his head. And Jacob is … She walks further into his room. Jacob’s bed is empty, his covers thrown back as though he left in a hurry. Perhaps he’s in the bathroom. Panic swells in her chest. He’ll be in another part of the house, she thinks, as she searches each room. But he’s nowhere to be seen.

She shakes her husband awake. ‘Ed. Jacob’s missing!’

Ed’s eyes bolt open and he sits up so suddenly he nearly head-butts her. ‘W-what?’

‘He’s gone, Ed.’ She tries to keep her voice low so as not to alarm Harry. It isn’t the first time Jacob’s done this. Oh, God, it’s her fault, all her fault …

Ed jumps out of bed, pulling on yesterday’s clothes from where he’d flung them last night on the armchair. She follows him into Jacob’s room. It’s how she’d left it yesterday: his desk with his revision books piled high, his headphones in the corner, his guitar that he stopped playing years ago propped up against the far wall gathering dust.

‘Did you check on him last night before you went to bed?’ She rounds on Ed, trying to keep the accusation out of her voice.

‘Yes, of course,’ he says, looking about him frantically as though he’s expecting Jacob to pop up from behind the door with a ‘Boo!’ like he did when he was little. Ed looks flummoxed. Even more so than usual, with his jumper on back to front.

‘Do …’ She tries to quell the panic. ‘Do you think he left in the middle of the night? What if he’s run away?’ She pulls open his wardrobe but his clothes are still there, hanging tidily, neatly ironed as she’d left them.

Ed puts his big red hands to his face. ‘He can’t keep doing this.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s just a kid.’

Ed sounds like he’s on the point of hysteria. She can’t have that. He needs to be his usual dependable, slightly dull, but reliable self. That was why she’d married him. He provided the stability, the calm she’s always needed but never had. He can’t fall apart.

‘He’s got his GCSEs coming up. He’s going to ruin his life.’ He straightens, as if remembering the role he needs to play in their relationship. ‘You stay here with Harry. I’ll go and search the estates, like before …’

Her heart falls. In the last six months, apart from the odd blip, he’d seemed to settle down. No running away to join those – those yobs to get drunk and, later, stoned. He’d been shocked into sobering up, to getting himself sorted. To knuckling down and revising. She and Ed no longer had to drive the streets looking for their fifteen-year-old son. He’ll be sixteen next month. She’d hoped it would be the new beginning he needed.

It had started a year ago. First he’d pilfered from the drinks cabinet, topping up the booze with water. They’d only noticed it when they’d had Ed’s work colleagues around one evening and Ed had nearly spat out the gin when he’d realized it was mostly water. When it kept happening they were forced to lock the cabinet and hide the key. And then the wandering began. Coming home past his curfew, sneaking out in the middle of the night. Making friends with older boys from an estate in Shirehampton. Once, they didn’t find him for two nights while he kipped on a ‘friend’s’ floor. When Kathryn found him he’d been drinking, and was surrounded by empty cider bottles. Then she began to suspect drugs. He’d come home smelling of pot, or with enlarged pupils and a manic smile. She’d threatened him with the police, but as quickly as it had started, it stopped. He’d promised her he’d learnt his lesson and would never do it again. That was