‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about … ’ He swallowed.
Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.
‘I just … want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.’
I released the door handle.
‘Sure.’
I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.
My sister and I never really talked about what happened that night at the maze. I’m not entirely sure we had the words. She held me for a bit, then spent some time helping me find my clothes, and then searched in vain in the long grass for my shoes until I told her that it really didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have worn them again, anyway. And then we walked home slowly – me in my bare feet, her with her arm linked through mine, even though we hadn’t walked like that since she was in her first year at school and Mum had insisted I never let her go.
When we got home, we stood on the porch and she wiped at my hair and then at my eyes with a damp tissue, and then we unlocked the front door and walked in as if nothing had happened.
Dad was still up, watching some football match. ‘You girls are a bit late,’ he called out. ‘I know it’s a Friday, but still … ’
‘Okay, Dad,’ we called out, in unison.
Back then, I had the room that is now Granddad’s. I walked swiftly upstairs and, before my sister could say a word, I closed the door behind me.
I chopped all my hair off the following week. I cancelled my plane ticket. I didn’t go out with the girls from my old school again. Mum was too sunk in her own grief to notice, and Dad put any change in mood in our house, and my new habit of locking myself in my bedroom, down to ‘women’s problems’. I had worked out who I was, and it was someone very different from the giggling girl who got drunk with strangers. It was someone who wore nothing that could be construed as suggestive. Clothes that would not appeal to the kind of men who went to the Red Lion, anyway.
Life returned to normal. I took a job at the hairdresser’s, then The Buttered Bun and put it all behind me.
I must have walked past the castle five thousand times since that day.
But I have never been to the maze since.
13
Patrick stood on the edge of the track, jogging on the spot, his new Nike T-shirt and shorts sticking slightly to his damp limbs. I had stopped by to say hello and to tell him that I wouldn’t be at the Triathlon Terrors meeting at the pub that evening. Nathan was off, and I had stepped in to take over the evening routine.
‘That’s three meetings you’ve missed.’
‘Is it?’ I counted back on my fingers. ‘I suppose it is.’
‘You’ll have to come next week. It’s all the travel plans for the Xtreme Viking. And you haven’t told me what you want to do for your birthday.’ He began to do his stretches, lifting his leg high and pressing his chest to his knee. ‘I thought maybe the cinema? I don’t want to do a big meal, not while I’m training.’
‘Ah. Mum and Dad are planning a special dinner.’
He grabbed at his heel, pointing his knee to the ground.
I couldn’t help but notice that his leg was becoming weirdly sinewy.
‘It’s not exactly a night out, is it?’
‘Well, nor is the multiplex. Anyway, I feel like I should, Patrick. Mum’s been a bit down.’
Treena had moved out the previous weekend (minus my lemons washbag – I retrieved that the night before she went). Mum was devastated; it was actually worse than when Treena had gone to university the first time around. She missed Thomas like an amputated limb. His toys, which had littered the living-room floor since babyhood, were boxed up and put away. There were no chocolate fingers or small cartons of drink in the cupboard. She no longer had a reason to walk to the school at 3.15pm, nobody to chat to on the short walk home. It had been the only time Mum ever really spent outside the house. Now she went nowhere at all, apart from the weekly supermarket shop with Dad.
She floated around the house looking a bit lost for three days, then she began spring cleaning with a vigour that frightened even Granddad. He would mouth gummy protests at her as she tried to vacuum under the chair that he was still sitting in, or flick at his shoulders with her duster. Treena had said she wouldn’t come home for the first few weeks, just to give Thomas a chance to settle. When she rang each evening, Mum would speak to them and then cry for a full half-hour in her bedroom afterwards.
‘You’re always working late these days. I feel like I hardly see you.’
‘Well, you’re always training. Anyway, it’s good money, Patrick. I’m hardly going to say no to the overtime.’
He couldn’t argue with that.
I was earning more than I had ever earned in my life. I doubled the amount I gave my parents, put some aside into a savings account every month, and I was still left with more than I could spend. Part of it was, I worked so many hours that I was never away from Granta House when the shops were open. The other was, simply, that I didn’t really have an appetite for spending. The spare hours I did have I had started to spend in the library, looking things up on the internet.
There was a whole world available to me from that PC, layer upon layer of it, and it had begun to exert a siren call.
It had started with the thank-you letter. A couple of days after the concert, I told Will I thought we should write and thank his friend, the violinist.
‘I bought a nice card on the way in,’ I said. ‘You tell me what you want to say, and I’ll write it. I’ve even brought in my good pen.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Will said.
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘You don’t think so? That man gave us front of house seats. You said yourself it was fantastic. The least you could do is thank him.’
Will’s jaw was fixed, immovable.
I put down my pen. ‘Or are you just so used to people giving you stuff that you don’t feel you have to?’
‘You have no idea, Clark, how frustrating it is to rely on someone else to put your words down for you. The phrase “written on behalf of” is … humiliating.’
‘Yeah? Well it’s still better than a great big fat nothing,’ I grumbled. ‘I’m going to thank him, anyway. I won’t mention your name, if you really want to be an arse about it.’