“I didn’t want to tell you, kid. I didn’t want to think about it. I thought that if I just ignored it, it might just go away. Leave us both alone.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tell me what?”
He told me then, still sobbing, as I wiped my mouth and listened to the idiot birds. For three months he had tried to hide it from me; at a single blow I understood his rages, his renewed drinking, his sullenness, his irrational, homicidal changes of mood. Now he told me everything; still holding his head in his hands, as if it might break open with the effort, and I listened with increasing horror as he staggered through his tale.
Life, it seemed, had been kinder to Sharon Snyde than it had to the rest of the family. She had married young, giving birth to me only a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, and she had been just twenty-five when she left us for good. Like my father, Sharon was fond of clichés, and I gathered that there had been a great deal of hand-wringing psychobabble in her letters; apparently she needed to find out who she was, conceded that there were faults on both sides, that she had been in a bad place emotionally and claimed a number of similar excuses for her desertion.
But she had changed, she said; finally, she had grown up. It made us sound like a toy she had outgrown, a tricycle perhaps, once loved, but now rather ridiculous. I wondered if she still wore Cinnabar, or whether she had grown out of that too.
In any case she had remarried, to a foreign student she had met in a bar in London, and had moved to Paris to be with him. Xavier was a wonderful man, and both of us would really like him. In fact she would love us to meet him; he was an English teacher in a lycée in Marne-la-Vallée; was keen on sports; adored children.
And that brought her to her next point; although she and Xavier had tried and tried, they had never been able to have a child. And although Sharon had not had the courage to write to me herself, she had never forgotten her Munchkin, her sweetheart, or let a single day go by without thinking of me.
Finally, Xavier had been convinced. There was plenty of room in their apartment for three; I was a bright kid and would pick up the language with no difficulty; best of all I would have a family again, a family that cared, and money to make up for everything the years had denied me.
I was appalled. Almost five years had passed; and in that time the desperate longing I had once felt for my mother had moved toward indifference and beyond. The thought of seeing her again—of the reconciliation for which she apparently dreamed—now filled me with a dull and cringing embarrassment. I could see her now, with my altered perspective; Sharon Snyde, now with a new, cheap lacquer coating of sophistication, offering me a new, cheap, ready-made life in exchange for my years of suffering. The only problem was, I no longer wanted it.
“You do, kid,” said my father. His violence had given way to a mawkish self-pity that offended me almost as much. I was not fooled. It was the banal sentimentality of the hooligan with MUM and DAD tattooed across his bleeding knuckles; the thug’s indignation over some child molester in the news; the tears of the tyrant at a run-over dog. “Ah, kid, you do. It’s a chance, see, another chance. Me? I’d take her back tomorrow if I could. I’d take her back today.”
“Well I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’m happy here.”
“Yeah. Happy. When you could have all that—”
“All what?”
“Paris, and that. Money. A life.”
“I’ve got a life,” I said.
“And money.”
“She can keep her money. We’ve got enough.”
“Yeah. All right.”
“I mean it, Dad. Don’t let her win. I want to stay here. You can’t make me—”
“I said all right.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
But I noticed then that he would not meet my eye, and that night when I took out the rubbish I found the kitchen bin filled with scratch card stubs—twenty of them, maybe more; Lotto and Striker and Winner Takes All!—shining like Christmas trimmings among the tea leaves and spent tin cans.
3
The Sharon Snyde problem was the culmination of all the blows that summer had dealt me. From her letters, which my father had kept from me but which I now read with growing horror, her plans were well advanced. In principle Xavier had agreed to an adoption; Sharon had done some research into schools; she had even been in touch with our local social services, who had relayed such information—concerning my school attendance, academic progress, and general attitude to life—as would strengthen her case against my father.
Not that she needed it; after years of struggling, John Snyde had finally given in. He rarely washed; rarely went out except to the chip shop or the Chinese takeaway; spent most of our money on scratch cards and booze; and during the next couple of weeks, became increasingly withdrawn.
At any other time I might have welcomed the freedom his depression gave me. Suddenly I could go out as late as I wanted, and no one questioned where I had been. I could go to the cinema; to the pub. I could take my keys (I’d finally had a set of duplicates made after that last disastrous episode) and roam St. Oswald’s whenever I wanted. Not that I did much of that, however. Without my friend, most of the usual pastimes had lost their appeal, and I rapidly abandoned them in favor of hanging out (if you could call it that) with Leon and Francesca.
Every pair of lovers needs a stooge. Someone to keep watch; a convenient third party; an occasional chaperone. I was sickened, but I was necessary; and I nursed my breaking heart in the knowledge that for once, for however brief a time, Leon needed me.
We had a shack (a “clubhouse,” Leon called it) in the wood beyond St. Oswald’s playing fields. We had built it off the path, on the remains of someone else’s long-abandoned den, and it was a neat little place, well camouflaged, with half-log walls and a roof of thick pine branches. It was there that we went, I keeping watch, smoking and trying not to listen to the sounds that came from the little shack behind me.
At home, Leon played it cool. Every morning I would call for them on my bike, Mrs. Mitchell would pack us a picnic, and we would make for the woods. It looked quite innocent—my presence made it so—and no one guessed at those languid hours under the leaf-canopy, the muted laughter from inside the shack, the glimpses I had of them together, of his naked rye-brown back and sweetly dappled buttocks in the shadows.
Those were the good days; on bad days Leon and Francesca simply slipped away, laughing, into the woods, leaving me feeling stupid and useless as they ran. We were never a threesome. There was Leon-and-Francesca; an exotic hybrid, subject to violent mood swings, to fierce enthusiasms, to astonishing cruelty; and then there was me; the dumb, the adoring, the eternally dependable stooge.
Francesca was never entirely happy at my presence. She was older than I was—maybe fifteen. No virgin, from what I could tell—that’s what Catholic school does to you—and already she was besotted with Leon. He played on that; spoke gently; made her laugh. It was all a pose; she knew nothing about him. She had never seen him throw Peggy Johnsen’s trainers across the telegraph wire, or steal records from the shop in town, or pitch ink-bombs over the playground wall onto some Sunnybanker’s clean shirt. But he told her things he’d never told me; talked about music and Nietzsche and his passion for astronomy, while I walked unseen behind them with the picnic basket, hating them both but unable to leave.