world we don’t understand. The worst that we did at their age was gather in the park with a packet of Marlboro Lights. It all seems so much more dangerous now. And you don’t want Phoebe being dragged into it.’ Her tone suggested that I was ridiculously naïve.
All the while she was talking, I had to suppress the urge to shout, ‘Take your blinkers off, look around you and ask yourself whether it’s possible that your perfect daughter has decided to use a few of her brain cells up on cannabis that she has sourced herself? Maybe she’s decided not to be a robot marching relentlessly towards Oxford so you can sit twitching on the edge of your seat in anticipation of someone asking where Georgia’s gone to university.’
But I didn’t say any of that. I nodded in the right places, despite it being on the tip of my tongue to wipe the smug look off her face by telling her what I’d found in Georgia’s skirt.
Phoebe got out of the car, slamming the door. ‘Mum! I need to get some work done!’
‘I’d better go.’
Faye rolled her eyes. ‘Thanks for having her again. Sorry it was all a bit wild.’
‘No worries at all. Glad you had a good time.’
I waved cheerily as though her jumping to the conclusion that the boy living with us was likely to have issues with drugs was something every good friend did now and again.
‘I’ll probably see you at the match later. Bit weird being a rugby mum after all these years of watching netball,’ I said.
‘I might duck out and let Lee go on his own.’
‘Oh, okay. Let’s catch up for coffee, then, soon.’
She nodded but didn’t suggest a day and I walked back to the car, hating myself for the note of feeble begging that had threaded through that conversation: the apologetic ‘Don’t hate me. Don’t think badly of me’ even though Faye was the one out of order.
All the way home, Faye’s words played on a loop, her warnings about who might start coming to the house. If the flashes of anger and the low moods were anything to go by, Victor was a long way from ‘getting over’ his mum’s death. But, honestly, what eighteen-year-old lost a parent and carried on as though nothing had happened within a few months? It didn’t mean he was going to rush off to buy a stash of mind-altering substances at the first opportunity. But maybe I was so small-town Sussex that I didn’t have the imagination to see the bigger picture. There had been such an insistent tone to Faye’s words that she was making me doubt my own judgement.
I grumped in through the front door to hear Patrick and Victor watching some sports programme together, commenting and laughing. Nothing about Victor sitting there in the yellow and black jumper Ginny had said made him look like a bumblebee screamed ‘boy likely to go and score drugs at the local nightclub’ to me.
I pretended to myself that I had no idea why I didn’t stand up for him, loudly and vociferously, instead of defending him with all the force of a damp firework left in the shed since last year. But deep down I knew why – I didn’t want to risk falling out with Faye.
I followed Phoebe into the kitchen, where she was busy making a huge mug of hot chocolate and showing no hurry to get on with the pressing homework of twenty minutes ago.
I dug deep for my cheery, non-threatening, let’s have a lovely heart-to-heart face.
‘Are you all right, love?’
‘Yep.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Was it just drink that made Georgia ill?’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Yeah, too much voddy. Can’t hold the booze like me.’ She was aiming for jovial, but I could hear that false note, the tone that was throwing lies over the truth.
I turned my back on her to make tea. ‘You don’t think she’d been smoking something, do you?’ I asked, as if it was such a remote possibility it was hardly worth mentioning.
‘Doubt it.’
I was going to have to be more direct. ‘The thing is, when I picked up her skirt, a bag of something that looked like drugs fell out.’
I heard Phoebe slump behind me.
‘It was probably only a bit of weed.’
The casual way she said ‘only a bit of weed’ confirmed it.
‘So she had been smoking dope?’
‘Dope? Christ, you sound like something out of the 1950s. Stop making it sound like she OD’d on heroin