Golden Boy: A Novel

by Abigail Tarttelin

  I scratch my hair and yawn. Lots of late nights recently. Lawrence and Debbie have been coming for an hour or two after Max goes to sleep, just to talk everything through. Lawrence knows I’m withdrawing my candidacy. I’m having Debbie sort out everything we’ve worked on before we tell her. Don’t want to make her feel terrible or take away her pay right before Christmas. I’ll keep her on as an assistant until she finds a new placement. After they leave every evening, I have the strangest feeling: like I’m shaking with energy and sadness. I sit up late into the night, sipping on a malt.

  Tonight I put the stockings on the mantel and got all the church candles out of storage. I lit everything downstairs, to see how it looked. I fixed the fairy lights, put them on. It was all lit up like Santa’s Grotto. I thought I’d go upstairs, wake Daniel up, give him a treat. But at the top of the stairs I found I really wanted to see Max. See him having fun again. See him smiling.

  So I tap on the door softly with my knuckle.

  ‘Max?’

  I knock again, then enter. At first I think he’s wide awake, but the way he’s propped up against the wall is wrong.

  ‘What’s wrong with Max?’

  I turn around. Daniel’s standing in the doorway in his blue pyjamas, looking at Max.

  ‘Daniel, go to your room.’

  ‘I’m worried.’

  ‘Go to your room.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Go to your room, now!’

  I hear Daniel scramble away, and I stride towards Max. He’s cuddled into the wall with his hoodie over his hair, his arms curled up, his chin resting on his hands. His skin is pale and looks moist. I take one arm and shake him urgently. The hoodie is soft and warm, but when I take his hand it’s cold.

  ‘Dad?’

  Daniel is behind me, the phone outstretched in his hand.

  ‘I called nine-nine-nine.’

  THREE WEEKS, THREE DAYS LATER

  Sylvie

  Now we’re doing our mock exams we’re granted town privileges. So the usual group wanders into town to buy strawberry laces and I trail after them, bored out of my mind, composing lines of poetry I scribble on my year planner, wishing I had a best friend who got me.

  Emma et al have forgotten about the whole me threatening to tell everyone Emma had anal sex because she was spreading that rumour about Max thing, in the hope that I’ll talk to them at some point about what happened. I just wander a little behind them, writing. I walk about more on my own now. I don’t mind being alone. I used to be scared, but now I guess I’m growing up. I realise that there isn’t any use for fear. If you panic, it doesn’t get you anywhere. You just lose people and opportunities and the chance to get what you want.

  I’ve been bunking off a little bit recently, but only when I have lessons where I won’t learn anything. That’s proving to be about fifty per cent of school hours, so I’ve made it my new mission to study the history of poetry, all the good, old poets, from the Greeks right through to the contemporary spoken word artists. My favourite so far is Edna St Vincent Millay.

  I’m developing my style in my poetry. I’m not a rap person. I love it, but that’s just not what I do. I was trying to steer my style towards rapped spoken word but I decided, in the end, to just listen to what came out of my head. That ended up being a lot of lyrics. Song-style lyrics. Maybe I’ll become a singer like Debbie Harry from Blondie. I love that band.

  The lyrics have a lot of emphasis on rhythm, and are kind of obvious in some ways, but it’s instinctual. I just write the way I talk, and it seems to come out like that. I got a new desktop Apple Mac for Christmas, so I’ve started to sing my poems into GarageBand as I write them as well. It’s been helping. I can type almost as quick as I can think, so I can listen to the words in my head while I write them, and concentrate on getting the exact structure down, just as it came from my brain.

  It’s funny, too, how the very best poems I’ve written seem to already exist in the air around me. I don’t have to try to write, or think about what’s going on in my life. I just have to listen, and if I listen carefully enough, I’ll hear a poem that already exists, and my body will act as a channel for it, from my ears to my brain, through my fingers, to the page.

  I think of it as listening to my inner voice. Maybe it’s the me that’s deep inside me; maybe it’s outside me in my emotions and relationships and interaction with the world. It could be both. It could be neither. What matters is that I get some sort of truth out of it. Out of the whispering, beating and pulsing come little poems that fly onto the screen and spit out of my printer.

  I think that was the problem with Max, now I’ve fit some pieces of the puzzle together.

  Max didn’t listen to his inner voice. I think there were too many voices telling him what to do, if you ask me. If I got pregnant now, would I keep it? Maybe, because I love kids, but maybe not, because I could have them any time, because I’d want to be able to support kids financially before I had them, because I’d want to be with the father. But if I was Max? If I couldn’t just have a kid at any time? If this could be my only chance, because I was into girls, but had the reproductive system of a girl too? If I could never be with the father anyway, if all I wanted to do was be a good person?

  We’re sixteen. I don’t want to know that there are choices that are that tough to make in the world, and I bet Max didn’t either. One good thing about being sixteen is that you’re supposed to come down on the side of optimism, of naivety and hope, and for Max, that’s not a reality anymore.

  We talked at his brother’s birthday about kids. Just a bit. Max said more than anything he wanted to be a hero, for his little brother, for if he ever had kids, if he adopted. It seemed funny to me at the time, that he mentioned adopting. It’s not something you think about. But I guess he didn’t think he could ever have kids biologically then. He said he wanted to be a good person and do right by people, and that he didn’t really care what he did for a career as long as he could play football, run around outside, and be around kids. Daniel came up to him then. Max said he was his best bud. They high-fived. Max laughed.

  Yeah. He didn’t know then.

  So maybe he would have had it, if he could have chosen. But you make your choices, whether they’re your own or made because other people pushed you to. Reasons are reasons. They’re not excuses.

  Everyone has heard, one way or another, about the Walkers. Not about the baby, or the fact that Max is intersex, but about what he did. I don’t know who found out first. The papers reported it, and said their source was from inside the hospital. People are vultures. They’ll find a way to get secrets out. It’s probably just a matter of time before everyone finds out the rest.

  Everyone keeps looking at me like I know something. I haven’t said anything about why he did it. Emma and the others are waiting for me to spill, but I won’t.

  Max’s mum came round to my house and I told her I knew about the baby. She didn’t know Max had told me. Mrs Walker said she remembered me from the Halloween party, and that Max had really liked me. She wanted me to know that she was certain he really liked me, and she said he wouldn’t have meant to be mean to me and that he didn’t want to break up with me. Max’s mum said she didn’t want me to think of him as a mean person, that Max wouldn’t want that. She came round because she wanted me to know that. She said I had been with him the night before the operation. She also said that I was the last person to talk to him on the night he did it, apart from his brother. That’s not totally true. I don’t think she knows that he talked to Hunter, or that Max never really spoke to me.

  Her coming round was a bit insensitive to Max, I guess, but really I don’t know what I’d do if I was a mum in that situation. I understand she didn’t want me to hate him.

  I wonder if he hated her. If he hated everybody when he did it. When he took all those painkillers. I wonder how she feels.

  I wonder if he was scared. Not scared to die, but scared to live. I wonder if he thought no one would
ever love him. He thought the idea of him being intersex put me off. I tried to tell him I couldn’t care less, but I guess I didn’t try hard enough. I wonder if he was scared of it getting out, of people knowing.

  The only other person who knows everything right now is Hunter.

  Hunter came up to me about a week ago. He spotted me across the town centre on a lunch break. I saw him coming. I was sat on a bench, alone, reading a book.

  He came up to me in the periphery of my vision, a dark shape moving towards me steadily. He asked me about Max. I said I didn’t have anything to say to him.

  ‘I don’t have anything to say to you. Go away.’

  He sat down next to me, grinning at me. I wanted to smack him.

  ‘Weren’t you Max’s girlfriend?’

  ‘Fuck off. It’s no business of yours.’

  ‘You’re pretty aggressive. I was just asking. Max’s mum told mine what he did, ’cause they’re best friends, and then I saw it on the news,’ he added quietly. ‘I just wondered if you knew anything.’

  ‘I know everything.’

  ‘Bet you don’t.’

  ‘I know what you did to him and the abortion and him being intersex.’

  He gaped at me.

  We sat in silence for a bit.

  ‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Did Max tell you?’

  ‘He told me most stuff.’

  ‘Did he tell you about us?’

  I put down my book and turned to him. ‘Firstly, he didn’t tell me your name, but I realised when I saw you at the Town Hall together. Secondly, Hunter, there is no “us” in the you and Max sense. He hated you. You forced yourself on him and he was very, very upset. Do you understand?’

  ‘I was just asking if you knew anything else, you don’t have to get—’

  I cut him off. ‘You really think I would share anything with you? You’re not a part of this story, Hunter. You’re not in the loop. Leave it alone.’

  ‘I was in the loop for years before you came along,’ he growled bitterly. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve but I couldn’t see any tears.

  ‘And now you’re not.’

  He seemed to be about to say something, then reconsidered it, stood up slowly and put his hands in his pockets. He started to walk away, then turned back and watched me for a while, waiting for me to look up.

  ‘You think I don’t care,’ he said.

  I kept my eyes studiously on my book and didn’t reply. When I eventually looked up, he was gone.

  Max’s dad was on TV the other day, giving his resignation from his current office and stepping out of the race for Member of Parliament. Obviously he didn’t say the real reason why. He didn’t take any questions. He just said he was needed at home. He looked really nice, and genuine, and sad.

  Max’s mum has moved out. That’s been spread around too. Everybody knows now.

  I try not to think about it, but I guess I do a lot. I miss Max all the time.

  As I walk through the car park behind Waitrose, on the way to the bakery with Emma, Laura and the rest of my halfway friends, I see him alone, leant against the little brick bridge over the dyke. He’s pulling a sandwich apart with equal parts acute concentration and tired misery: the kind where you don’t cry, you just look mean-spirited.

  I watch him drop the packaging into the bin beside him. Then he peels the top piece of bread off the sandwich and puts the rest on the bridge while he tears bits off it and throws them to the ducks. I hear loud quacking.

  Once he’s done with that piece of bread he peels off what looks like ham and cheese from the other piece of bread. The sandwich filling sticks together, held by that disgusting industrial-strength mayonnaise you get in supermarket sandwiches, and we both look at it dubiously before Max drops it into the bin. He turns to the other triangle of sandwich, peels off the top slice of bread, and removes a similarly gross filling. It flies unceremoniously into the bin.

  The girls are walking in two groups, one behind the other. The first must have hit his peripheral vision, because he looks across at them, squinting in the sunlight as if he’s searching for somebody, wiping his hand absent-mindedly on his jacket. Then his head drops and his chick-yellow hair shakes as Maria calls over to him. Then he sort of goes to look up, but decides against it, pretending to ignore her as if he hasn’t heard her, and he turns back towards the bridge. With one hand, pink with cold, he picks up the three slices of buttered bread left and trudges down the bump in the ground the bridge is on and around behind the bridge, to the muddy bank of the dyke, where the ducks are all quacking like an insane choir and we can’t see him anymore.

  I continue tramping after the girls.

  I look over the bridge and see a bit of bread fly in the air then fall to the water, as a roar of arguing quacks peaks and then dies down.

  The thing is, sometimes you have to be brave and say who you are and how you feel. Even if you don’t know how you’re going to do it. You just have to take a deep breath, and decide to start.

  I sigh, steel myself and slyly duck (no pun intended) out of the group.

  ‘Don’t do it, Sylvie!’ Emma calls after me.

  Laura, beside her, murmurs, ‘OMG.’

  ‘He’s totally gone off the rails,’ Emma tuts condescendingly. ‘Did you hear he practically did it with the new girl behind the town hall?’

  I turn back as I’m walking away and flip her off. Emma shakes her head at me, like how juvenile am I, with a big old crush on Max Walker. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about any of them. I don’t care about any of it – the intersex stuff, the Hunter stuff, the baby stuff. I only care about Max.

  I trudge down the little hill and stand above him, higher up the bank. Max is dropping bread near his feet and watching as the ducks come up to him and snatch it suspiciously. He stays very still, so as not to disturb them. When he hears the squelching of my shoes in the mud, he looks up.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, emboldened by the vision of myself as a shining knight come to save the poor little maiden. But then I think, Oh, shit, what if he still hates me?

  ‘Hi, Sylvie,’ Max says quietly.

  ‘So, how’s it going?’

  I’m trying to be conciliatory but because I’ve drawn in my breath to ‘steel myself’, my speech is coming out in little brusque spurts. Max’s face reacts to this by becoming even more miserably sober and unmoving. He looks at the ducks and sort of gestures with his bread, like, ‘I’m feeding ducks, which is neither really joyous nor terrible’, and he speaks, his mouth barely opening, and shrugs.

  ‘Alright.’

  I walk down until I’m standing beside him, in the soppy mud. It sucks at my shoes and a goose quacks alarmingly at me.

  ‘Hunter came to talk to me the other week.’

  He looks worriedly at me. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He just wanted to know how you were. Don’t worry, I told him it was none of his business.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, turning back to the ducks miserably. ‘Thanks.’

  He thumbs the bread.

  ‘I know he was the one who . . .’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, I guessed you had figured it out.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He doesn’t look at me or say anything further, and I hesitate. I start to walk away, sensing that he wants to be alone, but then, very quietly, so I almost don’t hear at first, he speaks.

  ‘I’m sorry about everything, Sylvie. Like kissing Kerry. It was a huge mistake. And I’m sorry for like . . . stuff I said, and . . . you know what I mean.’

  I nod.

  ‘You can’t keep ignoring me at school,’ I say.

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. I didn’t think you’d want to speak to me.’

  ‘That’s crazy, why wouldn’t I want to speak to you?’

  He shrugs. ‘Didn’t think you’d want to get involved. Everything’s so complicated.’

  There’s a si
lence. Max throws another bit of bread at a mallard.

  ‘I don’t think it’s complicated. It’s pretty simple, really, isn’t it? Hunter’s a bad person who did something horrible to you. You were just trying to make sense of it.’

  Max looks at me out the corner of his eye, like he’s not sure what I’m saying. Then he looks down at the ducks again.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He studies the crust of the bread that he’s holding. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Max . . .’ I falter. ‘Aren’t you going to go to the police?’

  Max shakes his head.

  ‘It would kill my mum and dad,’ Max mumbles. ‘Mum’s not living with us at the moment. They’d have to see it go through the courts. I don’t want people to know. Besides, I’m scared of Hunter. I do anything he says, pretty much. I’m a pushover.’

  ‘You’re not a pushover.’

  ‘Yes I am. I let everyone tell me what to do and I don’t stand up for myself or ever take responsibility. The only reason I took those . . .’

  ‘The pills?’

  ‘Yeah. The only reason was because I just wanted to take back control. I wanted to make a decision, even if it was just for things to stop.’

  ‘You’re not a pushover,’ I whisper sadly. ‘Do you . . . do you still want things to stop?’

  Max looks at me. ‘I was just drunk, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.’

  I nod. ‘Why are you so scared of Hunter?’

  ‘He’s just . . . I don’t know. The way he acts, like he’s in charge, like he owns me. He’s always acted that way and I’ve always just done what he says. I just think . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you can fuck people and overpower them and there’s no chance you’ll end up hurt, then you’re feared, and if you can’t, you’re vulnerable and you have to fear people.’