‘You’re a bad bloody influence on me, Will Traynor,’ I said, opening the car door and lowering the ramp. I couldn’t stop grinning.
‘Show me.’
I glanced down the street, then turned and peeled a little of the dressing down from my hip.
‘It’s great. I like your little bee. Really.’
‘I’m going to have to wear high-waisted trousers around my parents for the rest of my life.’ I helped him steer his chair on to the ramp and raised it. ‘Mind you, if your mum gets to hear you’ve had one too … ’
‘I’m going to tell her the girl from the council estate led me astray.’
‘Okay then, Traynor, you show me yours.’
He gazed at me steadily, half smiling. ‘You’ll have to put a new dressing on it when we get home.’
‘Yeah. Like that never happens. Go on. I’m not driving off until you do.’
‘Lift my shirt, then. To the right. Your right.’
I leant through the front seats, and tugged at his shirt, peeling back the piece of gauze beneath. There, dark against his pale skin was a black and white striped ink rectangle, small enough that I had to look twice before I realized what it said.
Best before: 19 March 2007
I stared at it. I half laughed, and then my eyes filled with tears. ‘Is that the –’
‘Date of my accident. Yes.’ He raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t get maudlin, Clark. It was meant to be funny.’
‘It is funny. In a crappy sort of way.’
‘Nathan will enjoy it. Oh, come on, don’t look like that. It’s not as if I’m ruining my perfect body, is it?’
I pulled Will’s shirt back down and then I turned and fired up the ignition. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what any of this meant. Was this him coming to terms with his state? Or just another way of showing his contempt for his own body?
‘Hey, Clark, do me a favour,’ he said, just as I was about to pull away. ‘Reach into the backpack for me. The zipped pocket.’
I glanced into the rear-view mirror, and put the handbrake on again. I leant through the front seats and put my hand in the bag, rummaging around according to his instructions.
‘You want painkillers?’ I was inches from his face. He had more colour in his skin than at any time since he came back from hospital. ‘I’ve got some in my –’
‘No. Keep looking.’
I pulled out a piece of paper and sat back. It was a folded ten-pound note.
‘There you go. The emergency tenner.’
‘So?’
‘It’s yours.’
‘For what?’
‘That tattoo.’ He grinned at me. ‘Right up until you were in that chair, I didn’t think for a minute you were going to actually do it.’
16
There was no way around it. The sleeping arrangements just weren’t working. Every weekend that Treena came home, the Clark family began a lengthy, nocturnal game of musical beds. After supper on Friday night Mum and Dad would offer up their bedroom, and Treena would accept it, after they had reassured her that no, they were not in the least bit put out, and how much better Thomas was at sleeping in a room he knew. It would mean, they said, that everyone got a good night’s sleep.
But Mum sleeping downstairs also involved her and Dad needing their own quilt, their own pillows and even under-sheet, as Mum couldn’t sleep properly unless her bed was just as she liked it. So after supper she and Treena would strip Mum and Dad’s bed and put on a new set of sheets, together with a mattress protector, just in case Thomas had an accident. Mum and Dad’s bedding, meanwhile, would be folded and placed in the corner of the living room, where Thomas would dive into it and on to it and string the sheet across the dining chairs to turn it into a tent.
Granddad offered his room, but nobody took it. It smelt of yellowing copies of the Racing Post and Old Holborn, and it would have taken all weekend to clear out. I would alternately feel guilty – all this was my fault, after all – while knowing I would not offer to return to the box room. It had become a kind of spectre for me, that airless little room with no windows. The thought of sleeping in there again made my chest feel tight. I was twenty-seven years old. I was the main earner of the family. I could not sleep in what was essentially a cupboard.
One weekend I offered to sleep at Patrick’s, and everyone looked secretly relieved. But then, while I was away, Thomas put sticky fingers all over my new blinds and drew on my new duvet cover in permanent pen, at which point Mum and Dad decided it would be best if they slept in my room, while Treena and Thomas went into theirs, where the odd bit of felt tip apparently didn’t matter.
Once you had accounted for all the extra bed stripping and laundry, me spending Friday and Saturday nights at Pat’s, Mum admitted, wasn’t actually much help at all.
And then there was Patrick. Patrick was now a man obsessed. He ate, drank, lived and breathed the Xtreme Viking. His flat, normally sparsely furnished and immaculate, was strung with training schedules and dietary sheets. He had a new lightweight bike which lived in the hallway and which I wasn’t allowed to touch, in case I interfered with its finely balanced lightweight racing capabilities.
And he was rarely home, even on a Friday or Saturday night. What with his training and my work hours we seemed to have become used to spending less time together. I could follow him down to the track and watch him push himself round and round in circles until he had completed the requisite number of miles, or I could stay home and watch television by myself, curled up in a corner of his vast leather settee. There was no food in the fridge, apart from strips of turkey breast and vile energy drinks the consistency of frogspawn. Treena and I had tried one once and spat it out, gagging theatrically, like children.
The truth of it was I didn’t like Patrick’s flat. He had bought it a year ago, when he finally felt his mother would be okay by herself. His business had done well, and he had told me it was important that one of us get on to the property ladder. I suppose that would have been the cue for us to have a conversation about whether we were going to live together, but somehow it didn’t happen, and neither of us is the type to bring up subjects that make us feel a bit uncomfortable. As a result, there was nothing of me in that flat, despite our years together. I had never quite been able to tell him, but I would rather live in my house, with all its noise and clutter, than in that soulless, featureless bachelor pad, with its allocated parking spaces and executive view of the castle.