‘Has she still not come home?’ Fran asked more slowly. ‘My dad says, have you seen her today?’
‘I haven’t seen her at all. Since yesterday.’
‘My dad says…’ Vicki’s voice faded away.
‘Tell your dad to come round here. Have you had your tea yet?’
Vicki blinked.
‘Have you had anything to eat since you’ve been back from school?’
She shook her head.
Fran shoved her hand back into the sink. ‘Get yourself back home, get your dad to feed you, then tell him to come here himself, and we’ll see about your mam. I’m sure she’ll be back by the time you’ve had your tea.’
She turned on the tap again. Vicki refused to budge.
‘All right, pet?’
At last the words appeared to reach her, and Vicki nodded quickly, turned, and ran out of the garden. Fran swore as her thumb began to hurt, a long throbbing pain. They’re having oven chips, she decided. Bugger the taties.
Vince slung his jacket across the white wooden floor. He was pleased with the effect of the purple on white.
Stretching out on the mattress, he reacquainted himself with his ceiling. Moving the bed about in the empty room threw the ceiling into different shapes, a fresh angle each day. It gave him the feeling of rotating very, very slowly. Vince didn’t like people who moved too fast and he hated people who didn’t move at all.
At the back of his mind was the impulse to think over the scenes in the staff room. He ought to be teasing out implications, rationalising, making plans. But it was too awful. He hated doing those things at the best of times. He supposed he would just muddle through. Fucking muddle. All he ever did. And improvise when it came to the point, when a crisis loomed or somebody said something. So of course there was no game plan, he would be reliant simply upon the force of his own personality. I always find myself living on my nerves like this, be thought. It isn’t very professional.
And then he wondered if he would be forced to punch the PE teacher.
He laughed at himself. What with being jumped on in the street last night and the hassle at school today, he felt he was in a documentary about something.
Oh, but I’m too arch, he thought. I wish I could get properly worked up and earnest about something. But he had got worked up in the staff room. He had very nearly flown off the handle. He had always assumed that the moment he lost control, that was the moment that would work like a charm and make him, like Pinocchio, into a real boy. A real boy like Andy.
One hand connected with something alien to his bed. It was a poster tube.
There was a brisk knock and then his dad was bringing in one of his mugs of sugary tea. Weeks ago Vince had asked him to wait longer before barging in, that he could be doing anything, but his father always forgot. It was as if they lived in a garage or a workshop.
‘Oh, I got you something today. A present to cheer your room up.’ Vivid in his scarlet waistcoat, his father was frowning at the bare walls.
‘What is it?’ Vince wasn’t used to getting things. He unsheathed and unrolled the poster. Looking down at it, he couldn’t think what to say. It was tasteful. A black and white photograph, quite unlike his dad’s taste, which tended towards things that looked like Warhol or Jeff Koons, though he’d never have known who they were. What was more unlike his dad’s taste was that it was a picture of a nearly naked man, shielding his face and standing by a bath. An Athena poster. He must have been out of town to get it. Vince stared at the grainy silvery grey flesh of the solid thighs. There was a peekaboo tuft of pubic hair over his towel and the weighty impression of a partial erection under it.
‘What’s this for?’
‘I thought you’d like it.’ His father wouldn’t look at it.
Vince was appalled. ‘I don’t like posters,’ was all he could say. He kept thinking. What’s he playing at?
‘It’s what you like, though, isn’t it? That sort of thing?’
Vince glanced up sharply to read his expression, but his father was looking away through the window.
‘Men with all their bits on display? Is that what you’re saying?’
His father’s averted gaze flinched slightly.
Vince threw the tube after his jacket. ‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’
It wasn’t meant to be like this. No disappointed, vengeful father ever did things like this. When he found Vince, at the age of eleven, smoking by the garages, he gave him a packet of twenty and tried to sicken him by making him smoke one after another until they were all gone. Vince had thanked him and done just that. He’d had a headache afterwards and a craving in the morning.
This could be the same shock tactic. But the poster was too… well, tasteful, although tacky in the way that tasteful things from Athena are, and his father’s whole manner was cowed, submissive.
‘I’ve been reading some of the books you’ve read.’
‘You’ve been going through my things?’
‘The books you’ve left lying about downstairs…’
‘And?’
‘Well, that Maurice bloke, and…’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I know, son. I know what you’re going through.’
‘Been through, Dad. You missed it.’
His father looked at him, pained. ‘I’m trying. Bloody hard.’
‘Pictures of this feller getting into a bath aren’t going to make it any easier. What’s the matter with you?’
His father fiddled anxiously with his string tie, jamming the metal wings right under his thick chin.
Vince stood up and kicked the mattress into a new position. ‘You’re supposed to be furious.’ He looked at him. You’re supposed to threaten me with death, chuck me out, he thought, finally break down and tell me about
