I looked up the same piece at the library. I had begun to read newspapers. I had worked out which of their arguments tended to go deeper – that information wasn’t always at its most useful boiled down to stark, skeletal facts.
The football player’s parents had been savaged by the tabloid newspapers. How Could They Let Him Die? screamed the headlines. I couldn’t help but feel the same way. Leo McInerney was twenty-four. He had lived with his injury for almost three years, so not much longer than Will. Surely he was too young to decide that there was nothing left to live for? And then I read what Will had read – not an opinion piece, but a carefully researched feature about what had actually taken place in this young man’s life. The writer seemed to have had access to his parents.
Leo, they said, had played football since he was three years old. His whole life was football. He had been injured in what they termed a ‘million to one’ accident when a tackle went wrong. They had tried everything to encourage him, to give him a sense that his life would still hold value. But he had retreated into depression. He was an athlete not just without athleticism, but without even the ability to move or, on occasion, breathe without assistance. He gleaned no pleasure from anything. His life was painful, disrupted by infection, and dependent on the constant ministrations of others. He missed his friends, but refused to see them. He told his girlfriend he wouldn’t see her. He told his parents daily that he didn’t want to live. He told them that watching other people live even half the life he had planned for himself was unbearable, a kind of torture.
He had tried to commit suicide twice by starving himself until hospitalized, and when returned home had begged his parents to smother him in his sleep. When I read that, I sat in the library and stuck the balls of my hands in my eyes until I could breathe without sobbing.
Dad lost his job. He was pretty brave about it. He came home that afternoon, got changed into a shirt and tie and headed back into town on the next bus, to register at the Job Centre.
He had already decided, he told Mum, that he would apply for anything, despite being a skilled craftsman with years of experience. ‘I don’t think we can afford to be picky at the moment,’ he said, ignoring Mum’s protestations.
But if I had found it hard to get employment, prospects for a 55-year-old man who had only ever held one job were harder. He couldn’t even get a job as a warehouseman or a security guard, he said, despairingly, as he returned home from another round of interviews. They would take some unreliable snot-nosed seventeen-year-old because the government would make up their wages, but they wouldn’t take a mature man with a proven work record. After a fortnight of rejections, he and Mum admitted they would have to apply for benefits, just to tide them over, and spent their evenings poring over incomprehensible, fifty-page forms which asked how many people used their washing machine, and when was the last time they had left the country (Dad thought it might have been 1988). I put Will’s birthday money into the cash tin in the kitchen cupboard. I thought it might make them feel better to know they had a little security.
When I woke up in the morning, it had been pushed back under my door in an envelope.
The tourists came, and the town began to fill. Mr Traynor was around less and less now; his hours lengthened as the visitor numbers to the castle grew. I saw him in town one Thursday afternoon, when I walked home via the dry cleaner’s. That wouldn’t have been unusual in itself, except for the fact he had his arm around a red-haired woman who clearly wasn’t Mrs Traynor. When he saw me he dropped her like a hot potato.
I turned away, pretending to peer into a shop window, unsure if I wanted him to know that I had seen them, and tried very hard not to think about it again.
On the Friday after my dad lost his job, Will received an invitation – a wedding invitation from Alicia and Rupert. Well, strictly speaking, the invitation came from Colonel and Mrs Timothy Dewar, Alicia’s parents, inviting Will to celebrate their daughter’s marriage to Rupert Freshwell. It arrived in a heavy parchment envelope with a schedule of celebrations, and a fat, folded list of things that people could buy them from stores I had never even heard of.
‘She’s got some nerve,’ I observed, studying the gilt lettering, the gold-edged piece of thick card. ‘Want me to throw it?’
‘Whatever you want.’ Will’s whole body was a study in determined indifference.
I stared at the list. ‘What the hell is a couscoussier anyway?’
Perhaps it was something to do with the speed with which he turned away and began busying himself with his computer keyboard. Perhaps it was his tone of voice. But for some reason I didn’t throw it away. I put it carefully into his folder in the kitchen.
Will gave me another book of short stories, one that he’d ordered from Amazon, and a copy of The Red Queen. I knew it wasn’t going to be my sort of book at all. ‘It hasn’t even got a story,’ I said, after studying the back cover.
‘So?’ Will replied. ‘Challenge yourself a bit.’
I tried – not because I really had an appetite for genetics – but because I couldn’t bear the thought that Will would go on and on at me if I didn’t. He was like that now. He was actually a bit of a bully. And, really annoyingly, he would quiz me on how much I had read of something, just to make sure I really had.
‘You’re not my teacher,’ I would grumble.
‘Thank God,’ he would reply, with feeling.
This book – which was actually surprisingly readable – was all about a kind of battle for survival. It claimed that women didn’t pick men because they loved them at all. It said that the female of the species would always go for the strongest male, in order to give her offspring the best chance. She couldn’t help herself. It was just the way nature was.
I didn’t agree with this. And I didn’t like the argument. There was an uncomfortable undercurrent to what he was trying to persuade me of. Will was physically weak, damaged, in this author’s eyes. That made him a biological irrelevance. It would have made his life worthless.
He had been going on and on about this for the best part of an afternoon when I butted in. ‘There’s one thing this Matt Ridley bloke hasn’t factored in,’ I said.
Will looked up from his computer screen. ‘Oh yes?’
‘What if the genetically superior male is actually a bit of a dickhead?’
On the third Saturday of May, Treena and Thomas came home. My mother was out of the door and up the garden path before they had made it halfway down the street. Thomas, she swore, clutching him to her, had grown several inches in the time they had been away. He had changed, was so grown-up, looked so much the little man. Treena had cut off her hair and looked oddly sophisticated. She was wearing a jacket I hadn’t seen before, and strappy sandals. I found myself wondering, meanly, where she had found the money.