Page 28 of Second Story

He’s pleased too. So is the padre.

“Noah! You want to be involved? Good man.”

It’s a great start. I still feel as weak as a fucking kitten until I remember what Joe told me.

Strong men have always done it for me.

And that’s who I see when I make it over the threshold—a man strong enough to walk away when that wasn’t what he wanted. Now he’s here for me all over again, sitting with his back to the window.

So Lenny can’t see him.

Noah can. He stops in his tracks until I make introductions. “Joe was Lenny’s first school welfare officer.”

This fires out bullet-fast. “He’s police.”

“Not me.” Joe holding both hands up spells,Don’t shoot. “I do work alongside courts, but today, I’m here for Isaac.” He meets my eyes, and I’ve spent so long telling myself he’s the last man on the planet that I’d trust. Now it’s Joe I approach. Joe I set the scrapbook in front of, and my nerves almost overwhelm me.

This story is far from fiction. It’s mine and Lenny’s, and there’s so much riding on it.

“No hurry,” he says as if we’re all alone here. This warmth is familiar, a bittersweet reminder of so many times he listened in on stories, which he brings up as if they stuck with him too. “I used to time my home visits so I’d get to hear you tell Lenny bedtime stories.”

I can start then, and I never thought I’d spin a story around a too-long separation from someone special. Maybe I can do it because I tell it to someone else I couldn’t let myself miss.

I clear my throat and get going.

“Once upon a time, a queen was captured.”

Not only Joe listens. I’m aware that Luke Lawson leans closer. So does the padre, and a teacher who arrives late and then sits with a sketch pad. He fades, as does Noah, when I turn the first page.

I’m at a table full of people who will judge my performance, but Joe might as well be my sole audience listening to a story written in his absence. I page through a journey where Lenny is a prince on a quest, and like I always do with little children, I add movement that my peripheral vision tells me my wider audience watches closely. Luke Lawson smiles at me wielding an imaginary broadsword to cut through thorns, and Noah even laughs when I do the robot to match one of Lenny’s drawings.

Joe doesn’t laugh at the body popping that usually dissolves Lenny into giggles.

He scans evidence of months in the life of a kid he told me he’d wondered about often. That’s who is on each sheet of scrapbook paper, in every crayoned love heart, and in every single brushstroke of paintings titledMy Mum, where Joe’s eyes linger.

Noah’s do too when I pass this scrapbook around the table. He traces the black bars Lenny painted to cage her, then he goes still after lifting a flap detailing dates and times of prison visits. “Wait. This is a true story?” His gaze rises. So do angry blotches. “This is your mum, and she’s been locked up all this time? There hasn’t been a trial yet?”

“Trial?” Luke Lawson comes back into sudden and sharp focus, leaning over to flip more pages. He stops. Flips back, any hint of a smile gone.

“Are you certain you want to share this, Isaac?”

I nod. “I listened to what you said. You wanted proof I understand childhood trauma.” I flash a glance directly at Joe, which means I see that it isn’t me he watches. His gaze stays on Noah, but it’s Joe I speak to. “This story has all the trauma I didn’t know what to do with on my own after Mum was arrested.” I tell the real truth. “Couldn’t have got through those first few months without Joe.”

Noah pales, flush long gone and freckles stark as he unfolds a map I made for my brother. “Wintergreen, yeah?” He keeps unfolding to show a route out of knife crime central. His fingertip touches the name of part of London that Mum said used to be decent. Now gangs rule it, a stain that won’t quit spreading.

“Yes.” I touch that rats’ nest of high-density housing. “This is where our story started.”

Noah’s own fingertip lands on the far side of thousands of high-rise homes, so I guess that’s where his own did.

I trace a route I inked onto this paper. “Whenever we got visiting orders to the first prison Mum was held in, this is the way we went. I had to add more paper to make the map bigger when they moved her further away from us. That was over a month ago. We haven’t had a visiting order yet. And they won’t seem to accept my phone number for calls like the last prison used to.”

“Lenny hasn’t seen or heard her voice since she was moved?” Joe runs a fingertip over the coloured Tube lines I added. That scarred finger stops on photos I stuck along a second bus route, then along the roads I’d take if I drove there. “That’s a long time and a much longer journey.”

“For Lenny, yeah. I’m assuming we’ll get a visit soon.” I touch a photo, our fingers momentarily brushing. “These are landmarks he could look out for on the way there.” I wonder if Joe remembers making this suggestion. “You said making the journey a game could help normalise visits for him.”

Noah leans closer, his and Joe’s heads almost touching as I add detail that Joe knows already.

“He only recently had his seventh birthday. She’s missed two in a row. That’s a long time for a little kid, so like Joe said, I made it an adventure.” At least I tried to. “See those numbers?”

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