Will shrugged and stared at his shoes.
“You fancy me?” said Mark. “Is that it?”
Will shook his head.
“So you’re saying I’m ugly?”
Another shake of the head.
“So you fancy me, then?” said Mark.
“Leave him alone,” said Mo.
“Shut it, Mo-by dick-head,” said Mark.
“Moby dickhead,” said Tony, the taller of Mark’s two goons. “Good one.”
“I don’t get it,” said Gavin, who had so many zits that his head contained more pus than brains.
“Moby Dick,” said Tony. “You know, like the book. With the whale and the one-legged Arab and whatever.”
“Arab?” said Gavin. “Like Mo?”
“It’s Ahab,” said Mo. “Captain Ahab. And I’m not Arab, I’m Punjabi.”
“Same thing,” said Gavin.
“Teri maa ka lora,” muttered Mo.
“How’s your arm?” said Mark, pointing at Will’s bicep.
Will shrugged with as much false bravado as he could muster under the circumstances, which wasn’t very much at all.
“Won’t mind if I deck you again, then, will you?” said Mark. He feigned a punch, and Will’s hand instinctively moved to shield his arm. Mark grinned. “Thought as much,” he said. The school bell rang and they turned to leave. “See you at lunch, losers.”
Mo rubbed his neck and quietly cussed them again in Punjabi. Will nodded, sure that whatever Mo had said was bad.
They joined the other students who were filtering into the building and made their way to class. Taking a seat at his desk beside Will’s, Mo nudged his friend and pointed at the thin-haired, Brillo-bearded man in glasses who was standing with his back to the whiteboard. He looked like he’d dressed in the dark and he wore an expression like he didn’t particularly care.
“Where did this guy escape from?” said Mo. Will shrugged.
“Okay, everybody, settle down,” said the man, his voice imbued with the weariness of someone who spent his entire life being ignored. “You’re probably wondering who I am and why I’m here. And, to be honest with you, I sometimes ask myself those same questions, as will each and every one of you in this room one day when you realize that life is nothing but one long series of disappointments. But just to clarify, my name is Mr. Coleman and I am your substitute teacher.”
He scribbled his name across the whiteboard and underlined it.
“Not Cullman. Not Collman. Not Cool Man, although feel free to call me that. Otherwise it’s Mr. Coleman. Got that?”
A murmur of acknowledgment rose from the class.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Now, before any of you make the grave mistake of thinking I’m an easy target because I’m new, think again. I have seen and heard just about everything that can be seen and heard in a classroom, so whatever you did to scare off Mr. Hale, rest assured that it won’t work with me. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”
Mr. Coleman eyeballed the class, extinguishing every smile he came across.
“Great. Now, let’s start with the attendance, shall we? It’s a simple enough process. I call your name and you shout, ‘Present.’ ”
Mr. Coleman opened the register and briefly flicked through the pages.
“Atkins?” he said, his pen hovering above the page.
“Present,” said a girl with braces who sat in front of Will.
“Well done, Sandra,” said Mr. Coleman as he dashed off a tick beside the girl’s name. “You’ve clearly done this before. Cartwright?”
“Here,” said a boy with a squiffy tie who sat at the back of the class.
“Unlike Cartwright, it seems,” said Mr. Coleman. Everybody laughed but Cartwright. “Jindal?”
“Present,” said Jindal.
“Take note, Cartwright,” said Mr. Coleman.
“Present,” said Cartwright to the sound of more laughter.
“No, Cartwright, I’ve already… forget it. Kabiga?”
“Present,” said Kabiga.
“Malooley?”
Silence.
“Malooley?”
A few sniggers punctuated the quiet as Mr. Coleman scanned the room. All the desks were occupied. Will sat with his hand in the air. Mr. Coleman frowned.
“Yes?” he said.
“He’s Malooley, sir,” said Mo.
“Is he?” said Mr. Coleman. He looked at Will. “Then why didn’t you say ‘Present’?”
“He doesn’t speak, sir,” said Mo.
“He… doesn’t speak?”
“No, sir.”
“And you’re, like… what? His representative?”
“More like his spokesperson, sir,” said Mo. A ripple of laughter passed through the class.
“Right,” said Mr. Coleman. He dropped his eyes to the register and drew a tick beside Will’s name. “I take it back. Now I’ve seen everything.”
* * *
Will spent the first part of his lunch break in the caretaker’s cupboard. He often spent some part of his school day in there, not because he enjoyed the smell of industrial cleaning products or the sensation of sitting in a darkened room for prolonged periods of time, but because Mark and his gang had once again locked him in there after ambushing him on his way to the cafeteria. This had been happening since the day they’d discovered, while up to no good, that the inside handle of the cupboard door was loose and could be removed with very little effort, thereby creating a makeshift holding cell for their hapless victims that could only be opened from the outside. Will had the inauspicious honor of being their very first inmate. He was also the longest-serving, having once been trapped in there for two whole periods, although given that those periods were maths and science, he didn’t exactly go to great efforts to liberate himself.
He actually quite enjoyed the silence and the solitude of the cupboard these days. He didn’t even put up a fight when they locked him in there anymore (which ruined their fun slightly, but not enough to stop them from doing it). Nobody could laugh at him or mock him or insult him in there. Nobody could call him an attention-seeker (something that Will found particularly annoying given how much effort he put into not being noticed), and nobody could beat him up because the people who usually did the beating were the same people who had locked him in the cupboard to begin with. Also, nobody was pretending to know how he felt. Nobody was comparing his situation to their own because they’d once had a sore throat or lost their voice for a week. Everybody just left him alone. The only downside to the arrangement was that he got hungry, so when Mo texted to find out where he was, Will was about to text back when he heard Mrs. Thorpe’s voice in the hallway.
“Oh, hi, Dave.”
Sue Thorpe was the head teacher. Unlike many heads of school, however, slate-faced disciplinarians with nose hair longer than their tempers and an inability to look at a ruler without wanting to whack somebody with it, regardless of whether they were a student or not, Mrs. Thorpe was funny, personable, and generally well-liked by the students, even if she had to sometimes suppress the urge to assault them with stationery.
“Sue, good to see you.” It took Will a second to recognize Mr. Coleman’s voice.
“How was it this morning?” she said.
He heard Mr. Coleman sigh. “Well, you know that feeling when you look around the classroom and everybody is listening to what you’re saying and you can almost see them getting smarter, and you stand there and think to yourself: This is why I became a teacher. This is what it’s all about?”
Mrs. Thorpe paused for a moment. “Not really,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said. Will smiled.
“Business as usual, then?”
“Business as usual,” said Mr. Coleman. “Actually, no, that’s a lie.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“What do you know about a boy called Malooley?”
“Will?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Coleman. “The quiet one.”
&
nbsp; Will shuffled over to the door and pressed his ear against it.
“He’s a nice kid. Good student. Why do you ask?”
“Can he really not talk? Or is this just part of my new teacher initiation ceremony?”
“He can talk,” said Mrs. Thorpe. “He just, well, doesn’t want to. Selective mutism, they call it.”
“Wow. I wish my kids had some of that.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Has he always been like that?” said Mr. Coleman. Will was painfully aware of what Mrs. Thorpe was going to say next.
“His mum died about a year ago. Car crash. She hit an icy corner and went straight into a tree. Will was in the car at the time, poor kid. He hasn’t spoken since.”
Mr. Coleman muttered something that Will didn’t catch but presumed to be an expletive. Whatever it was, Mrs. Thorpe agreed.
“He gets a bit bullied about it by the older boys, so keep an eye out. I’ve had a few words with them, but you know what teenagers are like.”
“Sadly.”
Their voices grew fainter as they walked off together down the corridor.
Will stayed in the cupboard for another few minutes, his appetite suddenly gone, but the room felt darker than it did before, so he texted Mo to come and let him out.
CHAPTER 4
The school bell rang and a flood of children poured from the entrance and across the yard. Danny scanned the sea of red uniforms for Will until he and Mo emerged with Mark and his goons on their heels. Gavin was throwing peanuts at Mo and Tony was repeatedly treading on the back of Will’s shoe, causing him to stumble. Mark walked behind them, proudly grinning at his well-trained underlings until, noticing Danny glaring at them, he grabbed his mates and faded into the crowd.
Will waved good-bye to Mo and slowly crossed the road with his head down and his hands in his pockets.
“Who are they?” asked Danny, nodding towards Mark.
Will shrugged and shook his head.
“I’d sue my parents if I looked like that.”
Will cracked a smile that was more like a prelude to a proper smile that never arrived.
“You’d tell me if they were giving you a hard time, wouldn’t you?”
Will nodded. Danny looked unconvinced.
“Come on,” he said.
* * *
Will stared at the ground while his dad scanned the epitaphs, all of which looked cold and dull beneath the pigeon-wing clouds that had gathered overhead.
Danny knew precisely where they were going, but he still took his time, not because he wanted to be there—he didn’t, and he knew Will didn’t either—but because despite more than a year having passed since the accident, he hadn’t yet processed his grief to the point where he could fully accept that his wife was dead, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. He knew she was gone. That much he understood. What he couldn’t understand was the idea she was gone forever. Instead he imagined her gone in the same way his father was gone: not dead (or so he assumed, although he really had no idea, nor did he care to know), but not present either. It was, in some ways, an even crueler concept of death than death itself, because it did what death could not, which was to give him hope—no matter how small—that he might one day walk around a corner or through a door and find his wife standing on the other side of it. Sometimes he was sure he could smell her perfume in a room he’d just entered, or hear her voice on a crowded street, or feel her hand against his face as he roamed the lonely periphery of sleep. Other times she felt so close to him that all he had to do was turn around, but she’d be gone by the time he looked over his shoulder, her body swallowed by the crowd, her voice carried off by the wind. It was as if she occupied a world that ran parallel to his own, like two strangers living in a high-rise who could hear each other’s movements but never crossed paths, which was why he was always so reluctant to visit the cemetery. Nothing destroyed that illusion more than seeing his wife’s name etched into a cold and lifeless slab of granite.
“Here we are,” said Danny, pausing beside a black headstone with gold lettering. He crouched and placed his hand on the stone while Will hovered nearby.
The grave was a simple arrangement, the small plot a far cry from the elaborate statues and monuments that stood in mournful silence around them. A rectangular border enclosed a layer of shiny green glass chippings that caught the light when the sun was out and sparkled like the surface of a lake. Today, however, they looked as drab as the last bunch of flowers that Danny had brought, their brown stems wilting from the pepper-pot lid of the metal vase.
“Always liked tulips, didn’t she?” he said, dragging the old flowers from the pot and replacing them with new ones. He carefully arranged them and wiped a fleck of imaginary dirt from the headstone. “Think she’ll like the color?” he asked, turning to look at Will. “They didn’t have any yellow ones left.”
Will stared at the grave, his jawbone tight.
“Want to say something to your mum?” said Danny. “For her birthday?”
Will shook his head, his eyes fixed on his mum’s name etched into the stone.
“Go on,” said Danny, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Have a go.”
Will shrugged out from beneath his hand and marched off down the path.
“Will!” shouted Danny before sheepishly apologizing to an old lady who scowled at him from a nearby graveside. He watched Will take a seat on a bench at the far end of the cemetery.
“He’s getting more like you every day, Liz,” he said. “Seriously, I don’t know what to do with him. I’ve tried everything, but he just won’t talk. He barely even looks at me half the time. I don’t know if he loves me or hates me or what. I keep hoping he’ll grow out of it, like this is just a phase or something, but the longer it goes on, the more it feels like this is forever, whatever this even is.” He sighed and shook his head. “Sometimes it feels like I lost both of you that day.”
The leaves hissed in the branches above him as the trees gently creaked in the wind.
“Sorry, Liz,” said Danny. He blinked a few times and exhaled like he’d just emerged from ice-cold water. “Right life of the party I am. We’re fine. Everything’s fine. Well, not fine, but, you know, we’re getting there. Will’s doing well in school, work is still work, our landlord is still a wanker, and Mrs. Amadi from flat thirty-six still thinks your name is Susan. She also thinks that Will isn’t talking because evil spirits stole his voice, so she kindly gave me the telephone number of a nice man called Alan who performs very reasonably priced exorcisms, apparently. So, yeah, there’s that.”
He laughed, or tried to, but the sound that emerged was as empty as it felt.
“Listen to me,” he said, glancing at the overcast sky. “I’m standing here, talking to a stone, and I know you can’t hear me because you’re not here. You can’t be here because the sun isn’t shining, which means I am literally talking to a rock right now while you’re out celebrating your birthday without me. So I’ll leave you to it, beautiful. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re smiling, and I hope you’re dancing. Just try not to wake me up when you get home, okay?”
Danny touched his lips and placed his fingers on the headstone.
“Love you, Liz. Happy birthday.”
CHAPTER 5
They bought some chips and ate them in the park. Neither of them was hungry and Danny stabbed at his food with disinterest, while Will flicked it from his tray for the pigeons to eat. Several street performers were entertaining people nearby, singing, dancing, and doing whatever else it took to charm bystanders into opening their wallets. One scruffy man with long, matted hair and a tatty panama hat was strumming a guitar. It wasn’t his music that drew the crowds but the portly beige cat in the knitted red sweater that was sitting on the man’s shoulder and meowing at random intervals. Another man in a purple robe and a matching pointy hat was busy performing magic tricks, his face set into a serious frown as he wiggled his fingers at things and
uttered seemingly ancient incantations. A smaller crowd had gathered around somebody dressed as a giant squirrel who was juggling football-size hazelnuts, and another person in a chicken costume was trying and failing to get people’s attention by trying and failing to break-dance.
As Danny watched the various acts he couldn’t help but notice how much money the performers were making. Their upturned hats, felt-lined instrument cases, Tupperware containers, and scuffed tobacco tins were literally overflowing with coins. Even the dancing chicken had somehow persuaded people to cough up their hard-earned cash, and all he was doing was writhing around as if hornets had set up home in his underpants.
Danny skewered a chip with his fork and gently nudged Will with his elbow.
“I think I’m in the wrong job,” he said.
* * *
The sun was setting by the time they got home.
“You got any homework?” said Danny as Will emerged from the bathroom, his wet hair flat against his head and a smear of toothpaste along one cheek.
Will shook his head.
“Want to watch some TV or something?” asked Danny, already knowing the answer.
Will faked a yawn and pointed to his room.
“All right, well, lights out by nine, okay?”
He nodded and opened his door.
“Will,” said Danny. His son paused but didn’t turn around. “I know it’s hard, but it’ll get easier. I promise. It just, you know. It takes time.”
Will looked at Danny, who gave what he hoped was an encouraging smile. Neither of them seemed convinced. He nodded once and closed the door behind him.
Danny turned on the television to commence his nightly ritual of sitting alone in front of the box until the early hours of the morning. His eyes felt heavy and his body felt tired, but he knew that any attempt to sleep would result in a long night of staring at the ceiling or watching the clock as the minutes turned into hours and the hours turned into daylight. Even on the rare occasion that he managed to get a proper night’s rest, Danny often felt worse than if he hadn’t slept at all, because waking up to confront the day meant also having to confront the fact that Liz wasn’t beside him.
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