enough to get a sparrow off the ground.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I should think she got it so she could show off to all her friends, but I doubt it would have much effect.’
‘What do you know about weed?’
‘Well, I did go to university.’ Patrick lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. ‘We can’t do anything about it now. Talk to them in the morning.’
I tried to follow his lead, but my mind was scratching round and round, wandering from whether Phoebe was taking drugs too, to what the hell I was going to say to Faye. For some reason, I thought about when Georgia had been round here with a couple of other girls when they were about twelve or thirteen. Phoebe had been a late developer and they’d teased her about looking like a boy until she cried. When I’d mentioned it to Faye, she’d frowned and said, ‘Phoebe’s always found it hard to take a joke.’ I could quite imagine that she would come up with some excuse about Georgia not realising what it was or keeping it safe for someone else, unable to accept that on this occasion her destined-for-Oxford daughter had, just this once, behaved slightly worse than Phoebe.
And with that thought stuck on repeat in my mind, I tossed and turned until dawn, veering from phoning Faye first thing and prefacing the conversation with ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ to deciding that any messenger not carrying good news wouldn’t be welcome and should therefore save himself – or in this case, herself – the aggro.
Chapter Six
The next morning, I felt like I’d been on the wrong end of a spliff myself, whereas the three kids were downstairs, shouting and hooting away about some poor boy thinking his ship had come in because he’d ‘got with’ one of the sporty girls, not realising she’d done it for a bet.
Just listening to them made me wonder how anyone made it through their teenage years with the tiniest scrap of self-esteem intact. They all went quiet as soon as I walked in. Georgia avoided making eye contact with me, but I wasn’t letting her off that easily.
‘How’s the head this morning?’ I laughed, to show Phoebe that I was so cool, that I could handle a teenage crisis without making a big deal of it. She didn’t acknowledge my attempt to join in, hunched over a bowl with a microscopic amount of yoghurt, while Victor ate a tower of toast.
Georgia said, ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ which was either designed to make me jealous that two glasses of wine left me jaded the next day or she was putting on a brave face.
I busied about making myself tea, but I was obviously the unwanted guest at their debrief party and they soon melted away, leaving crusts and smears of jam in their wake.
I dithered over whether to confront Phoebe and Georgia about the weed. I couldn’t decide whether I was more likely to get the truth from Phoebe without the added barricade of her needing to appear cool in front of her friend.
As I poured my muesli into a bowl, Phoebe appeared at the kitchen door. ‘Can you drop Georgia off now?’
‘I haven’t had a shower or any breakfast yet. Half an hour?’
‘I’ve got loads of homework to do and she’s got to do extra essays for Oxbridge. Faye said she needed to be home by 10.30.’
Honestly, an Uber driver got more respect than me.
She did, however, creep round and give me a hug. ‘Thank you for not making a big fuss about last night.’ My heart did a little swell of happiness that I’d won a bit of praise from her. I nurtured the hope that this might be a building block in establishing trust between us, pushing back the treacherous expectation that the hug was a precursor to a want, a need, an ask of some sort.
Surprisingly, none was forthcoming and I told myself off for my suspicious mind.
As we left the house, I handed Georgia her bag of sicky clothes. ‘These might need a bit of a soak.’
Georgia took it from me without saying a word and I drove to her home, with both of them on their phones all the way, while I wondered whether to address the little bag of weed that was now sitting on my chest of drawers. Every time I formulated the question, my nerve deserted me and suddenly I was pulling up outside Georgia’s house without having found a