He didn’t understand, you see. He hadn’t worked it out yet. That Will would try again. That our lives would have to be spent in a state of constant vigilance, waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he would inflict upon himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes – the potential poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the potential for that one act. And he had the advantage – he had nothing else to think about, you see?
Two weeks later, I told Will, ‘Yes.’
Of course I did.
What else could I have done?
9
I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake in the little box room, gazing up at the ceiling and carefully reconstructing the last two months based on what I now knew. It was as if everything had shifted, fragmented and settled in some other place, into a pattern I barely recognized.
I felt duped, the dim-witted accessory who hadn’t known what was going on. I felt they must have laughed privately at my attempts to feed Will vegetables, or cut his hair – little things to make him feel better. What had been the point, after all?
I ran over and over the conversation I had heard, trying to interpret it in some alternative way, trying to convince myself that I had misunderstood what they had said. But Dignitas wasn’t exactly somewhere you went for a mini-break. I couldn’t believe Camilla Traynor could contemplate doing that to her son. Yes, I had thought her cold, and yes, awkward around him. It was hard to imagine her cuddling him, as my mother had cuddled us – fiercely, joyously – until we wriggled away, begging to be let go. If I’m honest, I just thought it was how the upper classes were with their children. I had just read Will’s copy of Love in a Cold Climate, after all. But to actively, to voluntarily play a part in her own son’s death?
With hindsight her behaviour seemed even colder, her actions imbued with some sinister intent. I was angry with her and angry with Will. Angry with them for letting me engage in a facade. I was angry for all the times I had sat and thought about how to make things better for him, how to make him comfortable, or happy. When I was not angry, I was sad. I would recall the slight break in her voice as she tried to comfort Georgina, and feel a great sadness for her. She was, I knew, in an impossible position.
But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How could it be that, with everyone’s consent, in six months’ time that same skin would be decaying under the ground?
I couldn’t tell anyone. That was almost the worst bit. I was now complicit in the Traynors’ secret. Sick and listless, I rang Patrick to say I wasn’t feeling well and was going to stay home. No problem, he was doing a 10k, he said. He probably wouldn’t be through at the athletics club until after nine anyway. I’d see him on Saturday. He sounded distracted, as if his mind were already elsewhere, further along some mythical track.
I refused supper. I lay in bed until my thoughts darkened and solidified to the point where I couldn’t bear the weight of them, and at eight thirty I came back downstairs and sat silently watching television, perched on the other side of Granddad, who was the only person in our family guaranteed not to ask me a question. He sat in his favourite armchair and stared at the screen with glassy-eyed intensity. I was never sure whether he was watching, or whether his mind was somewhere else entirely.
‘Are you sure I can’t get you something, love?’ Mum appeared at my side with a cup of tea. There was nothing in our family that couldn’t be improved by a cup of tea, allegedly.
‘No. Not hungry, thanks.’
I saw the way she glanced at Dad. I knew that later on there would be private mutterings that the Traynors were working me too hard, that the strain of looking after such an invalid was proving too much. I knew they would blame themselves for encouraging me to take the job.
I would have to let them think they were right.
Paradoxically, the following day Will was on good form – unusually talkative, opinionated, belligerent. He talked, possibly more than he had talked on any previous day. It was as if he wanted to spar with me, and was disappointed when I wouldn’t play.
‘So when are you going to finish this hatchet job, then?’
I had been tidying the living room. I looked up from plumping the sofa cushions. ‘What?’
‘My hair. I’m only half done. I look like one of those Victorian orphans. Or some Hoxton eejit.’ He turned his head so that I could better see my handiwork. ‘Unless this is one of your alternative style statements.’
‘You want me to keep cutting?’
‘Well, it seemed to keep you happy. And it would be nice not to look like I belong in an asylum.’
I fetched a towel and scissors in silence.
‘Nathan is definitely happier now I apparently look like a bloke,’ he said. ‘Although he did point out that, having restored my face to its former state, I will now need shaving every day.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘You don’t mind, do you? Weekends I’ll just have to put up with designer stubble.’
I couldn’t talk to him. I found it difficult even to meet his eye. It was like finding out your boyfriend had been unfaithful. I felt, weirdly, as if he had betrayed me.
‘Clark?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You’re having another unnervingly quiet day. What happened to “chatty to the point of vaguely irritating?”’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Running Man again? What’s he done now? He hasn’t gone and run off, has he?’
‘No.’ I took a soft slice of Will’s hair between my index and middle fingers and lifted the blades of the scissors to trim what lay exposed above them. They stilled in my hand. How would they do it? Would they give him an injection? Was it medicine? Or did they just leave you in a room with a load of razors?
‘You look tired. I wasn’t going to say anything when you came in, but – hell – you look terrible.’
‘Oh.’
How did they assist someone who couldn’t move their own limbs? I found myself gazing down at his wrists, which were always covered by long sleeves. I had assumed for weeks that this was because he felt the cold more than we did. Another lie.
‘Clark?’
‘Yes?’
I was glad I was behind him. I didn’t want him to see my face.
He hesitated. Where the back of his neck had been covered by hair, it was even paler than the rest of his skin. It looked soft and white and oddly vulnerable.
‘Look, I’m sorry about my sister. She was … she was very upset, but it didn’t give her the right to be rude. She’s a bit direct sometimes. Doesn’t know how much she rubs people up the wrong way.’ He paused. ‘It’s why she likes living in Australia, I think.’
‘You mean, they tell each other the truth?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Lift your head up, please.’
I snipped and combed, working my way methodically around his head until every single hair was chopped or trimmed and all that remained was a fine sprinkling around his feet.
It all became clear to me by the end of the day. While Will was watching television with his father, I took a sheet of A4 paper from the printer and a pen from the jar by the kitchen window and wrote down what I wanted to say. I folded the paper, found an envelope, and left it on the kitchen table, addressed to his mother.
When I left for the evening, Will and his father were talking. Actually, Will was laughing. I paused in the hallway, my bag over my shoulder, listening. Why would he laugh? What could possibly provoke mirth given that he had just a matter of weeks before he took his own life?
‘I’m off,’ I called through the doorway, and started walking.
‘Hey, Clark –’ he began, but I had already closed the door behind me.
I spent the short bus ride trying to work out what I was going to tell my parents. They would be furious that I had left what they would see as a perfectly suitable and well-paid job. After her initial shock my mother would look pained and defend me, suggesting that it had all been too much. My father would probably ask why I couldn’t be more like my sister. He often did, even though I was not the one who ruined her life by getting pregnant and having to rely on the rest of the family for financial support and babysitting. You weren’t allowed to say anything like that in our house because, according to my mother, it was like implying that Thomas wasn’t a blessing. And all babies were God’s blessing, even those who said bugger quite a lot, and whose presence meant that half the potential wage earners in our family couldn’t actually go and get a decent job.
I would not be able to tell them the truth. I knew I owed Will and his family nothing, but I wouldn’t inflict the curious gaze of the neighbourhood on him.
All these thoughts tumbled around my head as I got off the bus and walked down the hill. And then I got to the corner of our road and heard the shouting, felt the slight vibration in the air, and it was all briefly forgotten.
A small crowd had gathered around our house. I picked up my pace, afraid that something had happened, but then I saw my parents on the porch, peering up, and realized it wasn’t our house at all. It was just the latest in a long series of small wars that characterized our neighbours’ marriage.
That Richard Grisham was not the most faithful of husbands was hardly news in our street. But judging by the scene in his front garden, it might have been to his wife.
‘You must have thought I was bloody stupid. She was wearing your T-shirt! The one I had made for you for your birthday!’
‘Baby … Dympna … it’s not what you think.’
‘I went in for your bloody Scotch eggs! And there she was, wearing it! Bold as brass! And I don’t even like Scotch eggs!’
I slowed my pace, pushing my way through the small crowd until I was able to get to our gate, watching as Richard ducked to avoid a DVD player. Next came a pair of shoes.
‘How long have they been at it?’
My mother, her apron tucked neatly around her waist, unfolded her arms and glanced down at her watch. ‘It’s a good three-quarters of an hour. Bernard, would you say it’s a good three-quarters of an hour?’
‘Depends if you time it from when she threw the clothes out or when he came back and found them.’
‘I’d say when he came home.’
Dad considered this. ‘Then it’s really closer to half an hour. She got a good lot out of the window in the first fifteen minutes, though.’
‘Your dad says if she really does kick him out this time he’s going to put in a bid for Richard’s Black and Decker.’
The crowd had grown, and Dympna Grisham showed no sign of letting up. If anything, she seemed encouraged by the increasing size of her audience.
‘You can take her your filthy books,’ she yelled, hurling a shower of magazines out of the window.
These prompted a small cheer among the crowd.
‘See if she likes you sitting in the loo with those for half of Sunday afternoon, eh?’ She disappeared inside, and then reappeared at the window, hauling the contents of a laundry basket down on to what remained of the lawn. ‘And your filthy undercrackers. See if she thinks you’re such a – what was it? – hot stud when she’s washing those for you every day!’
Richard was vainly scooping up armfuls of his stuff as it landed on the grass. He was yelling something up at the window, but against the general noise and catcalls it was hard to make it out. As if briefly admitting defeat, he pushed his way through the crowd, unlocked his car, hauled an armful of his belongings on to the rear seat, and shoved the car door shut. Oddly, whereas his CD collection and video games had been quite popular, no one made a move on his dirty laundry.