Most of all he hated them for hating him, for the way they had all closed ranks against him as if he had pushed Ara into the river and then slung her ghost like an albatross around his neck. He needed to be alone.
‘Get lost,’ he said to Juno.
She looked stung for just a moment but then stood up. ‘Whatever.’ She pushed her chair back under the desk. ‘You think you have it so much harder than everyone else, don’t you?’
‘You don’t have to apologize for being here,’ he shouted.
‘Neither do you.’ She headed for the door and before she slammed it behind her she said, ‘And – when you’re not feeling so damned sorry for yourself – I’m glad you are here.’
AS SOON AS JESSE was feeling better, he headed down to the games room and spent the rest of the evening using the flight simulator. Harry was already at the ninth level, and his high score glittered on the screen every time Jesse loaded the programme.
Jesse started well, making it easily through the first and second levels, then, with less ease, to the fifth. By the time he reached level six his ship had sustained too much damage to hold up against the high temperatures, and when he tried to land in the thick Venusian atmosphere, sulphuric acid clouds flayed the already battered hull. He never made it down to the troposphere, and every member of his crew died.
After a while, the sound of feet and the low rumble of voices on the floors above faded. He checked the numbers on his watch and guessed that most of the crew would be asleep. He headed back to the boys’ cabin but found that Harry was still awake, lamplit at the desk, watching something on his laptop. It was a boat race. Jesse was unsurprised to see the interlocking Olympic rings in the corner of the screen. Jesse guessed it was the coxless fours, as there were four men in lime-yellow boats, oars cutting the water in unison as they lanced down the wide lake.
The voice of the commentator was barely audible over the crackly cheering of the crowd coming through the laptop speaker… ‘Can the British team retain this rhythm and concentration? Their training up in the Alps, is it going to pay off for them? They’ve had so much disruption this year, when they were beaten in Munich by the Australians… and here come the Australians now…’
Harry’s eyes were unblinking and filled with light. He had been watching the television recordings every night since the games began, on longer and longer delays.
‘They’re upping it now…’
He was actually holding his breath.
Jesse already knew that the UK had won. His father had sent him the results a week ago, but Harry had wanted to watch all the games and tally them up himself.
Jesse had always enjoyed watching the Olympics at home, everything from fencing to synchronized swimming. But he’d never understood rowing the way that Harry did. He’d been told that when you got it right it felt like flying. It never did for Jesse, who had been drafted into the rowing class at Dalton for all of one term. Every Wednesday afternoon he’d have to take the train down to the boathouse with the laughing boys who never spoke to him. It wasn’t for him, hoisting the jauntily named boats out onto the brown water. The miserable weather. The cold. When he’d complained about the sub-zero temperatures, the others had whispered that of course ‘black men don’t row’ – a sentiment that had made him all the more determined to stick it out for the term. He stayed behind in the tank just to practise again and again on the stagnant water, in the rotting boat that was nailed to the floor. It wasn’t until he’d burned calluses into the palms of his hand – and scraped the sculls over his knuckles so often that he’d ripped the delicate skin clean off – that he got the rhythm right. And, even then, he never flew. One day it was so cold that he lost sensation in his fingers for hours, and he realized that he hated every boy in his boat. He’d been in too much pain to help haul it back out of the water and the coach had rolled his eyes. It had rained, foul-smelling Thames water had flooded over the gunwales and Jesse discovered a hole in his boot. He never came back after that. He switched to running, the only one in his class, around and around their school’s grassy track. Somehow that had still been less lonely.
‘…towards the finishing line. It looks as though they’re gonna do it! It is gold for Great Britain!’ Harry let out a breath he’d been holding in… Silver, Australia, and bronze United States of America….
It was a sunlit day on the screen and a blond rower in the Team GB boat was blowing kisses at the crowd.
‘This is a truly magnificent moment…’
Jesse wondered if Harry was imagining how it felt. He had always wondered why Harry had chosen space over some sunlit river in early summer, slicing through the water on a boat while his round-bellied relatives raised glasses of Dom Pérignon. Perhaps Harry wanted something different from his older brothers, twins who had won silver for rowing in the Beijing Olympics and were competing again that year in London. Perhaps Harry had lurked in their shadow his entire life, in silent wait for the day the entire world would cheer for him as he ascended the sky on a jet of flames.
Chapter 28
JUNO
19.09.12
THE SUMMER JUNO AND her sister turned fifteen, their uncle had died. Juno remembered waking up to her mother’s wailing, the unnatural quiet of the funeral home, poking her finger at the coffin lining. It was softer than her own bed. Her mother’s mascara left gritty charcoal tracks down her cheeks.
She hadn’t grasped the reality of their uncle’s absence until the next week, when she noticed that no one had taken out the rubbish bags. He usually did the job, hauling them out into the front garden on Wednesday nights, but the black sacks were still out in the garden, baking in the sun. She’d tiptoed out in her socks and picked up two of the heavier ones, carrying them through the kitchen and then out the front. She was halfway across the tiled floor when she’d noticed a grain of rice on her hand, on the boneless stretch of skin between her finger and thumb. But, just before she could flick it off, it had moved, shrunk and then engorged, slithered on her wrist. She’d gasped and dropped the bags to flick the maggot off her hand. As she did so one of the slimy rubbish bags had burst open, spilling thousands of maggots everywhere. They’d surged across the tiles in a seething wave. It was something about the way they’d moved their fat white bodies, the horrific stench, the surprise of suddenly being surrounded by living wriggling things, that had made her scream.
Astrid had heard her and run downstairs. ‘What is it?’ she’d asked, but Juno had looked down at the tiles just in time to watch the maggots writhe into the shadows under the dining table. They’d slipped into the dusty slits of darkness under the fridge and the dishwasher, they’d slid into the unreachable warmth behind the radiator. Before she could squish even one of them, they had all vanished. Juno kept rubbing the skin on her arms to check that nothing was nibbling at them. She’d asked her mother to check her hair for bugs. No matter how much she scrubbed that evening, she could not feel clean. She’d never walked barefoot in the kitchen again.
That was the first day that she really missed him, her uncle. The man who performed a thankless task with faithful regularity. She had relied on him and she didn’t know it. Without her uncle this might have happened earlier – the bags rotting in the sun – but every week he’d kept her safe from it. And it was strange, his absence came only then as a sickening surprise to her, like finding maggots twitching on the tiles, like sunlight pouring on the unmade bed that still smelt of him.