‘Nick shouldn’t have bothered you,’ Tim said stiffly, annoyance warring with affection in his tone.
‘Nick wants to spend Christmas with his family. Now, as far as I can see, that consists of you, me on a good day, Professor Gosswin – not that she’s coming, of course – and Michael, when he turns up. Unless you’ve got a better offer, I’d really appreciate it if you could come along. I can’t promise excitement but my sister’s doing half the cooking so you won’t get poisoned and Nick’ll be good company. You don’t seem to mind me turning up practically every other day, so I figure—’
‘Well, are you coming?’ Nick asked, leaning in the doorway.
Looking down into his hopeful, upturned face, Tim smiled. He gave Bill a small nod. ‘Yeah. Thanks, Bill. That would be great.’
‘Does it ever snow? If it snows can we get a sledge? There’s that big hill behind your house, that would be awesome—’
‘Let’s not pin too many hopes on the British weather, Nick,’ said Bill. ‘Why don’t we cut up the cheesecake and see if we get tempted?’
As Tim passed to fetch the plates, he met Bill’s eyes with a shy smile and inclined his head very slightly.
Bill smiled back. ‘So what’s on the box?’
‘Not TV,’ Nick groaned. ‘Trivial Pursuit?’
‘If we have to,’ Tim said. ‘Lead on—’
‘You know the line’s actually “lay on”, right, in Macbeth?’
‘Can you at least wait till we start playing for the torrent of useless facts?’
‘They’re not useless. They’re perfect for driving you up the wall.’
‘Maybe I’ll just umpire,’ groaned Bill, sinking into an armchair. ‘Have you thought about trying out for University Challenge next year, Nick?’
Nick stared at him. ‘No. But I am now.’ He fixed his eyes on Tim.
‘No,’ Tim said.
‘How about a bet?’ Nick asked, grinning. ‘Unless you beat me at least twenty-five per cent of the time, you have to try out too.’
‘No,’ said Tim.
‘Ange’ll make you,’ said Nick.
The game – and rematch and re-rematch – passed the time. Neither Tim nor Bill commented on the fact that Nick’s eyes kept drifting to the clock, or the way he looked almost relieved when the minute hand crept up to ten.
‘Hope you don’t mind if I go to bed a bit early,’ Nick said rather too brightly.
Bill sighed as Nick carried his uneaten cake into the kitchen, clingfilmed the plate and slid it into the fridge, then hurried upstairs with a soft ‘Night’ tossed over his shoulder.
Tim watched Bill head up after him, looking older and wearier than he’d ever seen him. He listened to them moving about, waited for the click of Bill’s door, waited a further ten minutes, then crept upstairs to sit at the bottom of the steps to Nick’s level. Five minutes later, a soft glow illuminated the staircase from above.
Nick started when Tim padded into his room. In a moment his face went from strained and hollow-eyed to blank. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, filling the words with icy politeness.
Tim shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d come and sit with you for a while, since you’re still awake.’ He leaned forward and clicked off the bedside light. ‘Stop reading for a bit, Nick. I know Gosswin’s book is your favourite, but you’ve read it a million times. Just take a minute and look at the sky. You’ve got such a great view from here. Pity to ignore it.’
He fixed his eyes on stars and waited as Nick’s glare practically wrote the words ‘Go away’ in the air between them.
Finally Nick turned his own gaze to the window with a soft sigh. ‘What do you do, Tim, on the anniversary of your parents’ … on the anniversary?’
He sounded young, Tim thought. Young and unwilling, or unable, to stop himself from asking. Tim sighed. ‘The first year was the worst. My sister had a scholarship to Yale, so we sold the house and then she went off to America and I came here.’ He tried not to think about that last night, curled up together in sleeping bags on the living-room floor, the remains of their previous life boxed up around them. ‘She dropped me at College and went straight to the airport, while I went and bought myself a bottle of something cheap and nasty and gave myself the worst hangover of my life.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid, isn’t it, how one day’s so important? They’re not any less dead every other day of the year.’
‘But you don’t let yourself think about them the other days,’ Nick said.
‘Don’t let myself wallow and be pathetically sorry for myself, you mean?’ The words came out sharper than he’d intended: full of self-loathing. ‘Anyway, now I spend the day with Ange, then have a few drinks once I’m alone. I love Ange but she always tries to get me to talk and I just want …’ He broke off with a sigh.
‘Someone to watch the sky with,’ Nick finished for him. ‘What day is it? Your anniversary?’
Tim felt his hands curling into fists at his sides. He had to grit his teeth not to snap that just because he was trying to offer a little sympathy, it didn’t mean he wanted Nick intruding on the very worst day in his year.
‘Fifteenth of August,’ he heard himself say, hoping his tone made it quite clear that the last thing he would want on that day was Nick’s company.
‘OK,’ said Nick. ‘Maybe if it’s warm we can sit in the garden.’
As the moon emerged into a clear patch of sky, Tim could make out a smile on Nick’s face before the room faded into darkness again.
And he thought of Ange and what she’d said about love being a two-way street. Maybe it would be OK if Nick kept him company on the fifteenth after all.
‘Did you like living with your mum?’ Tim asked before the moment could pass.
A rustle in the darkness as Nick shifted. ‘I wanted to. At the beginning. I didn’t really know my dad. I mean, he’s always been like this: working like there’s no tomorrow.’
‘It must have been weird going to the wedding when she remarried,’ Tim said clumsily. ‘You never mention him – your stepfather. What was he like?’ It felt like a mistake, the moment he heard the words in the air. He found his fingers crossing reflexively by his leg, as if hoping against hope that he hadn’t just ruined the chance that Nick would talk to him. And all because he’d decided that he could do a better job than Bill: get further before Nick shut him out. ‘Hey, you still awake?’
‘He hated me.’ Nick’s eyes glittered fitfully in the darkness as the light brightened, dimmed, brightened.
‘It must have been tough with your mum being ill, but I’m sure he didn’t hate you, Nick.’
Nick made an indecipherable noise.
‘Your mum can’t have thought that.’
‘My mother didn’t want to think,’ Nick bit out. ‘Not about things that didn’t suit her. And of course no one was allowed to do anything to upset her,’ he said, the words coming out fast and loud. ‘It was pathetic really, he only—’ He cut himself off with a hiss of breath, crossing his arms over his chest. Tim felt as much as saw him shake his head. ‘I’m not having this conversation. It’s none of your business anyway.’
Tim let his head drop back against the wall as Nick pushed himself up from the bed and hurried across the room only to stop, outlined at the top of the stairwell.
‘What the fuck are you doing there?’
‘I heard a noise,’ came Bill’s voice from below.
‘So you decided to come and eavesdrop? I bet it was your idea in the first place for Tim to come and talk to me. My dad’s palmed enough trouble off on him already—’
‘Hey, I’m no one’s errand boy,’ protested Tim, standing up. ‘I was worried about you.’
‘Of course you were,’ Nick sneered.
‘That’s uncalled for,’ Bill said firmly, coming up the steps so that Nick had to back away across the room. ‘Now let’s just take a deep breath and we can talk—’
‘I don’t want to hear it, Bill!’ Nick turned away from the stairs, slapping the flat of his h
and once, hard, against the slope of the ceiling, then letting it rest there, his forehead braced against his wrist. ‘I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say. I just want you both to leave me alone.’
‘Nick, you know that you and Roger not getting along is not what made your mother ill, don’t you?’ Bill asked, coming up the last few steps into the room.
‘Just go away!’ Nick shouted, stalking into the corner, his back to them. ‘Just leave me alone! Today’s bad enough without you trying to … to …’
‘We need to finish that conversation we had in the car, Nick. You can’t grieve in silence.’
‘Because I’m bound to feel so much better if I tell you how awful it was not to get to say goodbye?’ Nick’s tone was hard, mocking.
‘Wasn’t it, Nick? Wasn’t it awful and unfair and unnecessary?’
Nick shrugged carelessly. ‘And the way she treated me for the rest of her life wasn’t? At least now there’s a good reason I don’t get to see or talk to her, right? At least now she’s not choosing to have nothing to do with me.’
‘Nick—’
‘“It is what it is”: isn’t that what they say?’
‘Then why do you talk about this fish tank instead of her?’
Nick stiffened, turning away again, his back rigid.
‘Why that, out of everything?’
Nick pressed his fingers into his eyes, then smoothed his hands down his cheeks. ‘I don’t know why I dream about the fish instead of her. I didn’t even like the fish.’ He made a noise like a laugh, heard it turn into something else. ‘It’s just … small enough to think about. It’s the only part of it that is. But that makes it all sound like some big mystery and the only reason it’s important is that it was the last time I saw her.’ He looked away to the window, took an uneven breath. ‘Roger and I were fighting. We were fighting and Mum came in and …’ He closed his eyes, stuttered in a breath. ‘It was an accident when he hit her. It was just an accident. He didn’t even realise she was there. I grabbed for her arm, only I caught the lamp and it fell and the fish tank broke and she started screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming—’
He stopped, bracing a shaking hand against the low slanting ceiling.
‘It was pathetic really,’ he spat, voice low and vicious, before Tim or Bill could step forward. ‘It was all just an accident. She wasn’t hurt and the fish … they were just fish. But she kept screaming. She screamed and screamed and screamed until he managed to get some of her pills down her throat. Then he took her straight to the hospital and I … I cleared up the fish. I cleared up the fish and it never even occurred to me that that was it. That was the last thing between us. And I was so angry with her. So angry with her for only being upset when it affected her. I’d wished for there to be a row. A great big row so she’d have to do something. Have to see that I …’ He stopped on a gasp, trying to swallow down the sob in his voice.
Bill stepped forwards to curl his fingers gently about Nick’s arm, trying to turn him away from the wall. ‘Nick, when you said that Roger hated you—’
‘I didn’t care about that,’ Nick near-shouted, pushing Bill’s hand off his arm. ‘Why would I care about that? I hated him back. He wasn’t anything to me and I wasn’t anything to him. He wished I’d never been born and I wished she’d never met him. But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter that he hated me. It mattered that my mum didn’t care that he did. It mattered that she didn’t care about me at all.’ His voice broke on the words.
He wrenched away from Bill’s hands when he reached out again.
‘No, don’t touch me!’ he shouted, raising an arm to ward him off. ‘You shouldn’t touch me,’ he gasped, voice hoarse with fury. ‘You don’t understand. I wanted them to fight. I wanted her to be upset. When he hit her, part of me was glad!’ The shout dissolved into an ugly gulp. ‘You see? That’s why Roger hated me. He knew what I was inside, what an awful person I was …’ He hissed out a breath, sobbed in another. ‘But at least he hated me for it.’
His eyes were liquid with tears when he looked up. ‘You know when they say that the opposite of love is indifference, not hate … well, they’re right. She didn’t even care enough to hate me. But I hate her. And you can’t grieve someone you hate, Bill. Even if you should,’ he whispered. ‘So I don’t need to talk. I don’t need to come to terms with it. I just need it to be different.’ He closed his eyes, letting the tears standing in them spill over. ‘And I know that’s stupid and pointless because no one can turn back time or change the past. I know it. But I can’t seem to feel it because I need it to be different. I need her to have been different.’
For a moment they stood silently in the darkness, then Bill sighed. ‘I know it sometimes doesn’t seem like it, Nick, but Mike does care about you. He just doesn’t know what to do.’
‘And you do? Tim does?’ Nick asked, gesturing roughly at Tim, standing silent in the corner. ‘You still try. You still do something. You’re here, Bill. You’re here,’ he said softly, as much wonder as pain in his voice. ‘You don’t have to be, but you are and … I want that to be enough,’ his voice quavered on the word, ‘but I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know how being a family works.’
‘Ah, Nick.’ Bill drew him gently into his arms, smiled wanly over his head as Tim stepped forward to put a hand on Nick’s back.
Chapter 31
(Long Vacation [≈ first week of August])
‘What are you doing here?’ Ange asked, when Nick opened the front door. ‘And don’t say you live here. I thought today was your dad’s big day and you had that fancy do at his law firm in London to go to? Or is it tomorrow?’
‘No. It’s today.’ Nick turned away, leaving her to close the door. ‘I want him to see how it feels when I say I’ll be there but never turn up. Are you going to tell me to rise above?’
‘Hey,’ Ange said, reaching out to catch at his hand, ‘I’m on your side, Nickie. If it’s the right thing for you that’s all I care about.’
‘Oh.’
She smiled, patting his cheek, then cuddled into his side as she tugged him into the sitting room and through to the kitchen, where Tim was putting on the kettle. ‘Good boy,’ she said, leaning over to kiss Tim’s cheek. ‘Or maybe not so much. I see you’ve made lots of lovely washing up for me to do,’ she added as she peered into the sink.
‘Have I ever asked you to do our washing up?’
‘Of course you haven’t asked! But you know I love you both, so naturally I’m going to find it impossible to leave you living in squalor.’ With a sigh she tossed her bag on to a chair and rolled up her sleeves. ‘How old is this sponge? It is unutterably disgusting. Do you want to give yourself botulism poisoning?’
‘I don’t think you get spontaneous botulism,’ Nick said, looking dubiously at the sponge.
‘This is not spontaneous,’ said Ange, brandishing it. ‘This is a work of many weeks of slovenly … slovenliness. You are both revolting. Now find me chocolate. Fetch! Think of it as tribute, laid at the feet of a superior being – no, not literally! Not on this floor!’ she wailed when Tim made to put a packet of chocolate fingers by her toes.
‘She is never to be allowed minions,’ Tim whispered to Nick.
‘And what, exactly, are you?’ Ange asked.
‘Friends?’
Ange opened her mouth, finger upraised, then stopped. ‘Oh. True. Can’t you be both? Sometimes you manage both.’
That’s mostly because you have a tendency to walk all over us, Tim muttered.
‘You’re mumbling!’ shouted Nick above the roar of the kettle as he set out their favourite mugs.
‘It’s practically a rule in this household. I was fine until I met you.’
‘Oh, what an out-and-out fib,’ said Ange. ‘Now— Oh, Nickie, what is it?’ she asked, as Nick turned away from the kettle suddenly, looking pained.
‘I’ve got to go to London.’
Ange beamed and threw her arms around him. ‘Of course
you do. Now where’s your wallet? Is your suit ready?’ She put a finger to his lips before he could speak. ‘Just smile and nod. Well, or shake your head if your shirt isn’t ironed and you need a hand because, trust me, this is a Once in a Lifetime ironing offer.’
Tim groaned. ‘Give me the shirt. You do not want to let her near an iron.’
‘Just because— OK, fair enough. Tim will iron your shirt and I will … Um, Tim can tie your tie and I can …’ She made a complex gesture in the air. The boys stared at her. ‘I’ll just be the cheering section, shall I?’
‘Just go and change, Nick,’ said Tim.
Ten minutes later, Ange was patting down Nick’s pockets, much to his mortification, as she checked to see that he had his phone and wallet and keys.
‘Stop fishing in his pockets like Gollum looking for the One Ring. Ange, he’s not big enough for you to climb on him like that,’ Tim said, tugging her back and wrapping his arms around her.
‘I’m helping!’ she squealed, bouncing on the spot.
Tim pressed his cheek to her hair. ‘You’re endearing in a scary sort of way, but helping … not so much. Say “Happy Making Named Partner Day” to your dad from me,’ he told Nick. ‘I won’t let her go until you’re safely out the door.’
Nick lifted his hand to the latch, then let it drop again. ‘I’m such an idiot. I know it won’t really make that big a difference to him whether or not I go, but I’d rather have what I can get than nothing at all. Change the things you can, right? You probably think that’s stupid but—’
‘No, Nick. We don’t think that’s stupid at all,’ Tim said gently. ‘Go on now. The two of us will feel horribly abandoned, but what can you do when you’re in demand?’
Tim blew out a sigh when the door crunched shut. ‘At least he won’t spend the rest of the evening pacing. Or sighing. I swear, a hundred times this afternoon. God, I hope it was the right thing to do, to encourage him to go.’
Ange turned to frown up at him. ‘Why wouldn’t it be? It’s an important day for Michael. Of course he has to be there.’
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