I was walking past the living room when I heard the sound – a muffled cough, or perhaps an exclamation. I stopped, retraced my steps and stood in the doorway. I pushed gently at the door. On the living-room floor, the sofa cushions arranged into a sort of haphazard bed, lay my parents, under the guest quilt, their heads level with the gas fire. We stared at each other for a moment in the half-light, my glass motionless in my hand.
‘What – what are you doing there?’
My mother pushed herself up on to her elbow. ‘Ssh. Don’t raise your voice. We …’ she looked at my father. ‘We fancied a change.’
‘What?’
‘We fancied a change.’ My mother glanced at my father for backup.
‘We’ve given Treena our bed,’ Dad said. He was wearing an old blue T-shirt with a rip in the shoulder, and his hair stuck up on one side. ‘She and Thomas, they weren’t getting on too well in the box room. We said they could have ours.’
‘But you can’t sleep down here! You can’t be comfortable like this.’
‘We’re fine, love,’ Dad said. ‘Really.’
And then, as I stood, dumbly struggling to comprehend, he added, ‘It’s only at weekends. And you can’t sleep in that box room. You need your sleep, what with … ’ He swallowed. ‘What with you being the only one of us at work and all.’
My father, the great lump, couldn’t meet my eye.
‘Go on back to bed now, Lou. Go on. We’re fine.’ Mum practically shooed me away.
I walked back up the stairs, my bare feet silent on the carpet, dimly aware of the brief murmured conversation below.
I hesitated outside Mum and Dad’s room, now hearing what I had not heard before – Thomas’s muffled snoring within. Then I walked slowly back across the landing to my own room, and I closed the door carefully behind me. I lay in my oversized bed and stared out of the window at the sodium lights of the street, until dawn – finally, thankfully – brought me a few precious hours of sleep.
There were seventy-nine days left on my calendar. I started to feel anxious again.
And I wasn’t alone.
Mrs Traynor had waited until Nathan was taking care of Will one lunchtime, then asked me to accompany her to the big house. She sat me down in the living room and asked me how I thought things were.
‘Well, we’re going out a lot more,’ I said.
She nodded, as if in agreement.
‘He talks more than he did.’
‘To you, perhaps.’ She gave a half-laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. ‘Have you mentioned going abroad to him?’
‘Not yet. I will. It’s just … you know what he’s like.’
‘I really don’t mind,’ she said, ‘if you want to go somewhere. I know we probably weren’t the most enthusiastic advocates of your idea, but we’ve been talking a lot, and we both agree …’
We sat there in silence. She had made me coffee in a cup and saucer. I took a sip of it. It always made me feel about sixty, having a saucer balanced on my lap.
‘So – Will tells me he went to your house.’
‘Yes, it was my birthday. My parents were doing a special dinner.’
‘How was he?’
‘Good. Really good. He was really sweet with my mum.’ I couldn’t help but smile when I thought back to it. ‘I mean, she’s a bit sad because my sister and her son moved out. Mum misses them. I think he … he just wanted to take her mind off it.’
Mrs Traynor looked surprised. ‘That was … thoughtful of him.’
‘My mum thought so.’
She stirred at her coffee. ‘I can’t remember the last time Will agreed to have supper with us.’
She probed a little more. Never asking a direct question, of course – that wasn’t her way. But I couldn’t give her the answers she wanted. Some days I thought Will was happier – he went out with me without a fuss, he teased me, prodded me mentally, seemed a little more engaged with the world outside the annexe – but what did I really know? With Will I sensed a vast internal hinterland, a world he wouldn’t give me even a glimpse of. These last couple of weeks I’d had the uncomfortable feeling that hinterland was growing.
‘He seems a little happier,’ she said. It sounded almost as if she were trying to reassure herself.
‘I think so.’
‘It has been very –’ her gaze flickered towards me ‘– rewarding, to see him a little more like his old self. I am very well aware that all these improvements are due to you.’
‘Not all of them.’
‘I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t get anywhere near him.’ She placed her cup and saucer on her knee. ‘He’s a singular person, Will. From the time he hit adolescence, I always had to fight the feeling that in his eyes I had somehow done something wrong. I’ve never been quite sure what it was.’ She tried to laugh, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all, glancing briefly at me and then looking away.
I pretended to sip my coffee, even though there was nothing in my cup.
‘Do you get on well with your mother, Louisa?’
‘Yes,’ I said, then added, ‘it’s my sister who drives me nuts.’
Mrs Traynor gazed out of the windows, to where her precious garden had begun to bloom, its blossoms a pale and tasteful melding of pinks, mauves and blues.
‘We have just two and a half months.’ She spoke without turning her head.
I put my coffee cup on the table. I did it carefully, so that it didn’t clatter. ‘I’m doing my best, Mrs Traynor.’
‘I know, Louisa.’ She nodded.
I let myself out.
Leo McInerney died on 22 May, in the anonymous room of a flat in Switzerland, wearing his favourite football shirt, with both his parents at his side. His younger brother refused to come, but issued a statement saying that no one could have been more loved, or more supported than his brother. Leo drank the milky solution of lethal barbiturate at 3.47pm and his parents said that within minutes he was in what appeared to be a deep sleep. He was pronounced dead at a little after four o’clock that afternoon by an observer who had witnessed the whole thing, alongside a video camera there to forestall any suggestion of wrongdoing.
‘He looked at peace,’ his mother was quoted as saying. ‘It’s the only thing I can hold on to.’
She and Leo’s father had been interviewed three times by police and faced the threat of prosecution. Hate mail had been posted to their house. She looked almost twenty years older than her given age. And yet, there was something else in her expression when she spoke; something that, alongside the grief and the anger and the anxiety and exhaustion, told of a deep, deep relief.