Ms. Naseby was in a hurry to get back home. She gave the Reeds two telephone numbers—her own mobile and a general help line—and left as soon as she could. She had come by taxi from the station and had asked the driver to wait outside. She ate two sandwiches, drank half a cup of tea and left, the Reeds noticed, without saying good-bye to Craig.
The Reeds may have been old and old-fashioned, but they were not stupid people. They hadn’t expected things to be easy and nor had they fooled themselves that Craig would accept them as his new foster parents just like that. But they were both pleasantly surprised by the way things went in the following weeks. Craig appeared to like his new room with its view over the sand dunes. He had never actually been to the seaside and soon his room was full of shells and oddly shaped pieces of shingle that he had found on the beach. He was introduced to a new school in nearby Barnstaple, and although the teachers reported that he was way behind with his studies, they had every expectation that he would catch up. He enjoyed Elizabeth’s cooking—she had, after all, spent years working in a bakery—and to begin with he even helped wash up.
Arthur Reed watched the new arrival warily. In fact, for the first time in their marriage there was a certain tension between him and Elizabeth. But it was a tension they both shared, a bit like sailors sensing a coming storm. The sun might still be shining, but they both knew that what had begun as a pleasant cruise might at any time become a howling nightmare with both of them forced to abandon ship.
Things went wrong one step at a time. It was as if Craig had been testing the ground, checking out the opposition before he showed himself in his true colors. And once he had the measure of the Reeds, the school, the neighborhood . . . then it could begin.
He stopped making his bed. That was the first thing. Elizabeth had asked him to make his bed because she had a bad back and found it difficult to lift the mattress. But after two weeks, the bed remained unmade, the sheets crumpled, the pillows on the floor. Indeed, the whole room became increasingly untidy, with a strange sour smell and clothes everywhere. Soon it no longer seemed to belong to the rest of the house.
Arthur and Elizabeth said nothing. After all, Craig was a teenager and all teenage bedrooms are a mess. Arthur had borrowed a copy of Proper Parenting from the library, and the author advised him not to make an issue of it. “Young people need their own space,” the book explained. “If they wish to live in conditions close to squalor, then they must be allowed to make that choice.”
Then it was a question of food. Meals became increasingly difficult as there were all sorts of things that Craig suddenly refused to eat—mainly vegetables and fruit. Elizabeth had thought he liked her home cooking, but at dinnertime he would push his plate away and slouch with his elbows on the table and a sullen look on his face. As a result, he began to lose weight. He didn’t get thin. He just looked sick and lopsided, and once again Arthur sought advice in Proper Parenting. “Many teenagers shy away from fresh food,” it explained. “And the more you try to force it on them, the more they will resist. In extreme cases, it may be necessary to seek medical advice.”
But this wasn’t needed in Craig’s case because quite soon he began putting on weight again. Even a place like Barnstaple had fast-food restaurants and he had taken to visiting them after school, stocking up on fish-and-chips and kebabs, burgers and takeout Chinese. The house was soon strewn with wrappers from chocolate cookies, chips and ice cream.
And how had he gotten the money to pay for them? That was another worry. Arthur had given Craig a small allowance from the day he had arrived, but one Friday afternoon, he and Elizabeth were shocked to get a telephone call from the principal at St. Edmund’s in Barnstaple. It seemed that Craig had been bullying several of the smaller children, forcing them to give him their loose change or, even worse, to steal money from their parents and bring it to him at school.
That weekend, Arthur and Elizabeth sat Craig down in the living room and talked to him seriously about their life in Instow and how they had hoped he would make the effort to fit in. It was a mistake. For that was the weekend that war was declared.
“I know life hasn’t been easy for you,” Arthur was saying. “But your aunt and I were really hoping that this would be a new start—”
“I hate it here!” Craig cut in, and the awful emphasis that he put on the word hate, the way he almost spat it out, shattered any remaining illusions the elderly couple might have had. “This is a poxy little house in a poxy little place and I wish I was back in Manchester.”
“But if you were in Manchester, you’d be in an orphanage,” Elizabeth faltered.
“At least I wouldn’t be living with two wrinklies. There’s nobody here my age. There’s nobody to hang out with or have fun.”
This wasn’t actually true. There were plenty of teenagers in Instow, which, apart from anything else, had a fine sailing club. But by now they had decided to give Craig a wide berth.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Elizabeth explained.
“I don’t like you,” Craig replied. “And you smell.”
“I really don’t think you should talk to your aunt like that,” Arthur muttered. Two pinpricks of deep red had appeared in his cheeks.
“I’ll talk to her any way I like. What are you going to do about it?”
What Arthur Reed did was to call Ms. Naseby that same afternoon. And again the following Monday. In fact he called her, and her help line, several times before his call was finally answered. He was then passed from department to department, from social worker to social worker, but it seemed the bottom line was this. He and his wife had agreed to take Craig. It had been made perfectly clear to them that the child might take a while to adapt. But so far he hadn’t set fire to the house or committed any serious criminal act. So like it or not, they were stuck with him. The council had taken Craig off their books and they didn’t want him back.
Arthur and Elizabeth had been happily married for more than thirty years. But now, for the first time, they found themselves torn apart.
Elizabeth felt dreadfully guilty. It was she who had opened their door to Craig Carter. She was the one who was related to him. And so all this worry and unhappiness had to be her fault. When Craig was arrested and cautioned for shoplifting, she blamed herself. When he was faced with expulsion from St. Edmund’s for threatening a teacher, she actually fell ill. She hadn’t been exactly young when Craig arrived, but soon she was looking positively old. One night she slipped on a sneaker that Craig had left on the stairs, fell down and fractured her hip. The neighbors wondered if she would even survive.
Meanwhile, Arthur Reed retreated into himself. Once or twice he tried to have it out with his adopted nephew, but Craig simply sneered at him and walked out of the room without speaking. Arthur had noticed that a great many of his personal possessions had begun to vanish. In particular there was a handsome pair of silver cuff links that Elizabeth had bought him for his fortieth birthday. One day, walking in Barnstaple, he noticed them in the window of a secondhand jewelry shop. A few days before, Craig had bought himself a new leather jacket. It didn’t take very much to put two and two together. But there was nothing very much Arthur could do. A week later, thirty dollars disappeared from his wallet. Then his wallet went too. By this time, Craig had taken up smoking, and the smell of burning tobacco wafted down from his bedroom, filling the entire house.
Not many people came to visit Arthur and Elizabeth anymore. Once, they had been surrounded by friends, often giving lunches and tea parties. But there had been several incidents. The sandwiches that had been found to contain a whole bottle of diarrhea tablets. The dog poo in the pockets of coats left hanging in the hall. The cars with nails resting against their front tires. The lady who had brought her pet poodle and had gone into the kitchen only to find it shaved bald.
What were the Reeds to do?
They couldn’t get rid of Craig. The authorities didn’t want to know. Nor could they reason with him, for any attempt at discussion now
ended with a barrage of foul language. Elizabeth was back from the hospital, but her limp was worse than ever and Arthur could only sit in pained silence, angry with himself, angry that he had so little control over his own life.
So they tried a new tactic. They couldn’t fight with Craig, but perhaps they could win him over. If they tried to understand him, if they gave him what he wanted, he might even now turn a corner and accept his place as part of their family.
For his fourteenth birthday, they bought him designer jeans, a skateboard, an iPod and two new games for his laptop computer. In fact, they got him everything he had asked for, and for just a couple of days he seemed genuinely happy. But that all ended when Elizabeth made the mistake of serving cauliflower cheese for dinner. Craig hated cauliflower cheese and by the end of the evening he was back to the scowling, swearing, bullying hulk that they had so unfortunately inherited.
The next day was a Sunday. As usual, Arthur and Elizabeth went to church and then, because the weather was nice, for a walk along the beach. As they approached the house, they were surprised to see Craig sitting on a sand dune. His fingers were very stained and they could smell the smoke on his breath, so they guessed that he must have just stubbed out a cigarette. Even so, it was rare to find him out in the fresh air.
“Is everything all right?” Elizabeth asked. Whenever she spoke to Craig, she flinched, wondering what the answer would be.
“I want one of those,” Craig replied.
Elizabeth turned and saw what he was looking at. There was a man in his early twenties out on the sand with a power kite. The kite itself was huge, a brightly colored curving strip of silk or nylon, like a parachute cut in half, connected to two handles by a series of cables. The man wasn’t just flying the kite. The kite was flying him. He was running across the beach and leaping into the air, rising ten or twenty yards above the sand like a superhero. Elizabeth could see the muscles on his bare arms bulging as he fought to keep the kite under control. One moment he would be on the sand, the next his legs would be pedaling high above. When he came back down, he had to dig his heels in to stop himself from being pulled away. He was fighting with the wind. His hair was streaming around him. He reminded Elizabeth of a cowboy trying to bring a rearing horse under control.
“It looks fun,” Craig said.
“It certainly looks exciting,” Elizabeth agreed. “But you’ve just had your birthday, Craig. And we got you everything you asked for.”
“But I want a power kite,” Craig whined.
“When I was a boy, ‘I want’ never got anything,” Arthur remarked.
“When you were a boy, there were still dinosaurs,” Craig responded. He looked at Elizabeth and there was a gleam of menace in his eyes, and not for the first time Elizabeth thought about the death of her sister and began to understand perhaps why she had thrown herself off a bridge. “I want a kite,” Craig said. “And if you don’t get me one, you’ll be sorry.”
Elizabeth ignored the threat. She had been to the local toy shop and had discovered that even a small power kite would cost more than a hundred dollars. More to the point, she had no doubt that even if she went out and bought the wretched kite, Craig would fly it a couple of times and then lose interest. After all, he hadn’t even unwrapped the skateboard they had given him, even though he had nagged them just as much to buy one.
So she was very surprised when, lying next to her in bed that evening, Arthur disagreed with her.
“I think, all in all, it’s a good idea,” he said.
For a moment, Elizabeth didn’t reply. Arthur didn’t speak much these days. Since Craig had arrived he seemed to have shrunk into himself to the extent that often she had no idea what he was thinking.
“The boy wants a kite. Let’s get him one.”
“But the money . . . ,” Elizabeth muttered.
“It might be worth it. Get him out in the fresh air.”
“It seems very wrong,” Elizabeth countered. “We bought him all those presents for his birthday and he didn’t so much as even thank us.”
“We have to do the best we can for him,” Arthur said. “After all, we said we’d look after him. I’ll look into it tomorrow.”
Elizabeth looked at her husband, lying in his pajamas with his soft blue-gray eyes and his white hair. There were hollows in his cheeks that she hadn’t noticed before and she realized that it had been a long time since she had seen him smile. She thought he was wrong about the power kite but decided not to argue. After all, power was what this was all about. Craig had been living with them for only nine months, but he had usurped all the power in the house. He was the one in control. Somehow, Arthur had been knocked off his perch. Arguing with him now would only make him feel all the worse.
Sadly, the decision to buy a kite only led to further argument. Craig had already found a website that sold boards, kites and all sorts of accessories. It was as if he had known that Arthur and Elizabeth would cave in. But, as they soon discovered, power kites came in many shapes and sizes with prices that rose steeply to many hundreds of dollars. Craig had settled on a brand called Laserblade. But the question was whether to go for the Laserblade 1.8 (“an ideal moderate to strong wind buggy kite, perfect for those new to the sport”) or the Laserblade 6.0 (“awesome power and brilliant rate of turn . . . for experienced kite flyers only”).
Elizabeth remembered the man she had seen on the beach. A less demanding kite made obvious sense. Craig was small for his age . . . the amount of cigarettes he smoked had seen to that. He really had no muscles at all. She could see him being pulled flat on his face by the first strong gust of wind, and after that the kite would be consigned to the garbage bin. Anyway, there was the question of cost. The Laserblade 6.0 came in at an eye-watering $400.
This, of course, was the kite that Craig had set his heart on. And once again Elizabeth was completely astonished by Arthur’s response. The price didn’t seem to bother him at all.
“I’m not sure, Craig,” he muttered, examining the picture on the computer screen. “I do wonder if it might not be a bit too big for you to handle.”
“It’s not too big. It’s perfect.”
“But suppose it pulls you over? You could get hurt.”
Craig scowled. “If the wind is too strong, I’ll let go.” He shook his head as if he was having to explain himself to an idiot. “I’m not stupid, you know,” he said. “I know how to fly these things.”
“Well, you’ll have to promise me you’ll be careful. We don’t want you in bed with a broken leg.”
Craig said nothing and two days later the new kite arrived in the mail. By this time, Elizabeth was a little angry. She didn’t say anything but she hated seeing her husband give in to the spoiled, heartless brat that she now knew her nephew to be. Nor did she think that indulging Craig would help. She could already see that Craig would get as much out of them as he could and would still go on to demand more. She wished now that she had never opened her door to him. She wished the Manchester authorities had never found her.
“We’ll take it up to Millbrook Common,” Arthur said over breakfast. “There’s plenty of room there and we can see if Craig can get it to fly.”
“What about school?” Elizabeth asked.
“I wasn’t at school yesterday or the day before,” Craig reminded her. This was something new. Craig had begun to play truant with increasing frequency. So far, nobody had complained. It was possible that the school simply preferred not having him there.
“There’s a good, stiff breeze today,” Arthur muttered. “Good kite-flying weather . . .”
Millbrook Common was an open space between Instow and Barnstaple with farmland all around. It was certainly a good place to choose for a first flight. There would have been too many people on the beach and anyway, with Craig skipping school, it was probably better to go somewhere more out of sight. The common was also high up, which meant that it was more open to the breeze. Arthur, Elizabeth and Craig took a bus up there after breakfast. Cr
aig was carrying the kite. Elizabeth had the assembly instructions. Arthur sat with one hand in his pocket, lost in his own thoughts.
Eventually they found themselves on the edge of a wide, bumpy field with wild-looking grass that somehow looked hundreds of years old. The sea was far away and below them. Elizabeth drew her coat around her. It was the end of the summer and the leaves were already beginning to turn. She could feel a certain chill in the air and it seemed to her that there was much more of the breeze up here than there had been below.
“I’m not so sure we should fly the kite here,” she said. “Maybe the beach would be better after all.”
“But we’ve come all the way up here now!” Craig complained.
“The boy’s right,” Arthur muttered. “We’re here now, so we might as well give it a try.”
“But Arthur, there’s a lot of wind—”
“Craig has already said. If he feels he’s losing control, all he has to do is let go.” Arthur still had his hand in his pocket. “Come on!” he exclaimed. “Let’s see if we can work out how to put this thing together.”
It took them a long time. There were lots of different cables, struts to fit into place and knots to tie. Eventually, they managed to construct the Laserblade, and Craig and Elizabeth held it down while Arthur unrolled the twenty-five-meter flying line. There were two handles at the end, one for each hand. He knelt down and examined them, running a finger along the tightly woven material (“sleeved Dyneema, specially designed for a better grip”). When he was sure that everything was ready, he looked up.
“All right!” he shouted. He had to raise his voice to make it heard above the wind. “Let’s see if we can get flying.”
Arthur and Craig swapped ends, passing each other in the middle of the field, and for a moment, if anyone had been watching, they could have been duelists, meeting at the appointed time. Craig reached the handles and picked them up, gripping them tightly in the palms of his hands. Elizabeth was trying to keep the kite steady, pressing it against the ground. The Laserblade was a brilliant red, blue and green and it was already trembling like a trapped butterfly. Arthur joined her.