‘’Fraid so,’ he said.
The driver shook his head.
‘It’s none of my business, but I’d be careful who your mates are,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you’re in Chigwell.’
Chigwell, thought Jake. Essex. On the outskirts of north-east London.
‘OK,’ said Jake. Quickly, he considered his options. He could get an underground train from Chigwell, but it could take time. He could ask the taxi to take him back into central London, but the streets would be gridlocked with traffic, even in the bus and taxi lanes; they always were. He’d be going nowhere. And then it suddenly hit him where he wanted to go. A place he hadn’t been for a long time. Too long.
‘D’you know the River Lea at Lea Bridge Road?’ he asked.
The driver looked almost offended.
‘I ought to, I was born near there,’ he said. ‘Right by Hackney Marshes. I played football on the marshes every Sunday.’
‘That’s where I want to go,’ said Jake.
As the driver looked again at Jake’s battered and crumpled state, his suspicious expression returned. ‘You got money to pay for it?’ he asked warily.
‘Yes,’ said Jake, and he took out his wallet and showed the driver the notes inside. The driver grinned.
‘Jump in,’ he said.
The taxi made its way through the maze that was the estate, and finally joined the main road back towards London. As they headed down the wide road, they saw police cars and an ambulance by the side of the road on the other side. The crashed car was still there, half off the road, its front buried among bushes and trees.
‘Hello, an accident!’ said the cab driver.
‘Yes,’ said Jake.
The driver shook his head.
‘Too many mad people on the road,’ he said. ‘Give someone a driving licence and it’s like giving them a gun. Half of them don’t know how to drive a car properly, or think they know everything. And show them a bit of open road and they think they’re at Brands Hatch!’ He shook his head. ‘Speeding, I bet! Then they lose control.’ He sighed. ‘People like that shouldn’t be allowed behind a wheel!’
Chapter 26
Jake sat on a tree stump on the towpath by the side of the River Lea looking at the houseboats moored along the bank. He remembered when he used to come here as a boy on Sunday mornings with John Danvers, while Mary Danvers prepared the Sunday roast. Just like the sort of family you saw on TV or read about in magazines. Jake had never known a family like that before. All the families he had encountered as a child were dysfunctional; the foster parents he was sent to live with, the families of the other kids at the different schools he went to. When he’d first gone to live with the Danvers, he was suspicious of them. No one could be that nice, not in his experience. But they were.
John Danvers was a car mechanic. Mary Danvers was a teaching assistant at a primary school. They lived in a neat two-bedroomed terraced house in Leyton. Jake was eleven years old when he went to live with them, and he spent the first three months just watching and waiting for some sort of nastiness to show beneath the surface. But there had been no nastiness; and Jake realised that with John and Mary Danvers it was a case of ‘what you see is what you get’. They were a kind, loving couple who wanted to give a home to a child to make their family complete.
Jake remembered how he and John had walked along this towpath, pointing out the differences between the houseboats. ‘Me and Mary often thought of living on a boat,’ John told him. ‘It’s so quiet and peaceful here, on the water. Away from the noise and dirt of the streets and the roads.’
And it was still, Jake reflected.
He’d come here because he needed this time to sit and recover himself; and this was his special place. His sanctuary.
Not that he’d thought of it that way before. When Mary had discovered that she had cancer, everything had been thrown into turmoil. By then, Jake had been living with them for just over a year. Three months after Mary was diagnosed, she was dead.
Her death had destroyed John. Jake had done his best to help him, insisting that they went for their regular walk along this towpath, looking at the boats, and listening to John talking about Mary.
And then John had fallen ill, and also been diagnosed with cancer.
The childcare authorities had moved in, and before Jake had time to realise what was happening, John was in hospital, and Jake was back in the children’s home.
Jake asked to go and visit John in hospital, but the authorities decided it wouldn’t be right for Jake to visit John in his condition; that it would be too distressing for him. So Jake had run away and tried to get into the hospital to see John, but he’d been caught and returned to the children’s home.