eyes filled again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Phoebe do an almost imperceptible shake of her head and even Georgia stopped sobbing into Faye’s chest to freeze for the answer. Eventually Helaina answered. ‘We just panicked. We weren’t really thinking straight. The lads that picked us up said we’d better get out of there before the police arrived and we were sort of in shock, so we went with them.’
Rod had gone into lawyer mode. ‘But why? If you hadn’t been drinking, it was just an accident.’
Helaina crumpled in a heap and said, ‘We’d been hotboxing in the car.’
‘Hotboxing?’ I asked, my mind leaping to some horrendous sexual practice that I’d now have to erase from my memory bank of distressing images.
Victor spoke for the first time. ‘Smoking weed with the windows up.’
There was a pause while all the adults absorbed that information. Then Andrea grabbed hold of Helaina, all the ‘bless you, Helly, never mind, it’s just a bit of metal at the end of the day’ right out of the window. ‘You were smoking drugs? Do you know what weed does to the teenage brain? You do that and you can forget about getting into Cambridge.’
Thankfully, Rod told her to quieten down and we all disappeared out of the pub to a pivoting of heads finding our literal and metaphorical car crash temporarily more fascinating than the two for one Saturday night special on onion rings.
My mind was reeling. Drugs. Jesus. I’d been so worried about the possibility of Phoebe encouraging Helaina to drive after a shedload of vodka, the whole drug-driving had slipped under my radar.
Andrea raged on, her face millimetres from Helaina’s. ‘What were you thinking of? You’ve no idea what’s in those drugs. Did you even realise what you were taking?’
If I hadn’t been so worried that it was about to come out that Phoebe was the instigator of this, I would have ridiculed Andrea and her desire to stop any blame drifting towards her family. Though, to be fair, Helaina had always looked as though a lemonade shandy was right out of her comfort zone. I couldn’t imagine her slipping a grubby ten-pound note into a drug dealer’s hand, but someone had got hold of the drugs and there were only four candidates. I didn’t have time to puzzle out who was the likeliest culprit because Rod turned on Victor the second the pub door slammed behind us.
‘You gave her drugs! You scum! You’re lucky you didn’t kill her. You’d have had that on your conscience, but people like you probably don’t even have a conscience.’
Before I could even absorb the implication that he’d decided Victor was to blame, Patrick pushed his way between them. ‘Calm down. You’ve no idea how Helaina got hold of the drugs. Why are you blaming Victor?’
‘Well, who else is going to bring them into school? Never been a problem until he arrived at Edgewater.’
Phoebe crossed her arms. ‘That’s not true. Frankie got expelled last year for doing cocaine in the loo when she should have been in RE. And Victor wasn’t even there then.’
Admiration that Phoebe would stand up to Rod in the face of his fury mingled with the shock that she recounted the story as though cocaine was no big deal, something that happened in every school. Did it? Even in a small town where the deli was crammed at pick-up time with parents bulk-buying garlic-stuffed olives and double-checking that the duck eggs were free-range? Clearly an organic pork pie was no insurance against the kids stuffing white powder up their noses.
Andrea put her hand up as though providing the voice of reason. ‘Let’s all calm down. It’s not really Victor’s fault, it’s just the way he’s been brought up, perhaps his mum wasn’t as strict as we’ve been with our girls.’
Patrick stood shaking his head, while I had the sensation of my brain lagging behind the scene in front of me. Andrea even had the gall to look over to Victor and tell him that it was nothing to do with skin colour. She didn’t even notice skin colour. She wasn’t saying it because he was black.
‘The midwife who delivered Helaina was from St Lucia and black as the ace of spades. She was wonderful!’
There was a look on Victor’s face I hadn’t seen before. Something between anger, disgust and pity. He glanced towards Patrick as though asking for permission to respond. But Patrick got there first. ‘Bullshit. You ignorant, small-minded