However, the path to neighborly virtue was paved with stumbling blocks. In this case, they took the form of successive government cuts that had pared public services to the bone. Bounced from extension to extension, it took Wendy most of an hour to get through to Prof’s case worker, who agreed to come straight over—as soon as she’d visited her next two extremely urgent patients and contacted St. Bride’s to confirm that they hadn’t reallocated the mad scientist’s bed. In the event, it took three and a half hours for Mavis from Social Services to get to the condemned house. By which time it was raining steadily, Wendy was out of fucks to give, Professor Skullface had run out of tea—and the Post Office had shut for the day.
While Evelyn Starkey was being subjected to sordid telephone sex by her boss, Del and Imp bickered in the drawing room, and Wendy Deere struggled to sort out a care home bed for a mad scientist, Game Boy and Doc Depression were discussing breaking and entering on the top floor.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Game Boy complained, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It shouldn’t be there!”
“And yet, it is.” Doc leaned against the wall, detachment personified, and watched as Game Boy got more and more excited about a painted-over closet door.
The top floor of the town house had once housed servants beneath the steeply pitched roof. Four bedrooms opened off a central landing at the top of the stairs. Each had a dormer window projecting out through the sloping roof, so that it was possible to stand upright in the middle of the rooms. (The roofline sloped down to eaves only a meter beyond the outer wall of each bedroom, so that there was barely space to sit up in bed if the bed abutted that wall.) Doc and Game Boy had moved into the attic, stripping out the ancient carpets and slapping a coat of landlord magnolia paint over the walls and ceilings in an effort to render them habitable. Doc had claimed one of the rooms as his own, and Game Boy was building a model railway layout in another (though he preferred to sleep downstairs on a roll-up futon beside his gaming rig).
But there was one more door on the landing. It stood opposite the top of the attic staircase. It had been nailed shut and painted over long ago, its keyhole blocked with putty as if some previous occupant had been determined to barricade it against all intruders. And Game Boy had observed that it shouldn’t exist. When he’d brought a tape measure to check, he’d found a gap of only fifteen centimeters between the interior walls of the two back rooms: the thickness of an internal load-bearing wall. The painted-shut door was positioned right between the two bedroom doors, and by rights there should be no room for anything behind it—not even a cupboard.
“I say we open it,” said Game Boy.
Doc yawned. “You can if you want; I’m going to take a nap.”
Game Boy pouted. “No fun!”
“Raid tonight,” Doc reminded him. “Got to get my beauty sleep in first or you’ll have me falling asleep on you.”
“Fuuu…” Game Boy trailed off. “Really?”
“Yeah.” Doc yawned again. “I pushed it too hard this afternoon. Got a headache. Fucking Imp.” He grimaced. “I had to hold five of them down at the same time back there: five. Why did there have to be five?”
“Hey, you’re not the one the guards tried to get physical with!” Game Boy puffed his chest out: “Did you see the way I left them? Did you?”
“Yes, yes I did,” Doc said gravely. Game Boy preened. “You did great back there.” Doc’s shoulders slumped. “Good thing too,” he added faintly. “It could have gone bad so easily.”
“Yeah, Deliverator—” Game Boy’s voice caught, and his fragile bravado turned brittle as he looked at Doc for approval.
“Becca should know better,” Doc agreed. He opened his arms and straightened up. “Hugs?”
“Hugs.” Game Boy leaned his head against Doc’s shoulder and shivered like he was cold. Doc held him tight until the shudders subsided.
“She should know it triggers you by now,” Doc murmured. “I’ll have a word with her.”
“Please don’t, I mean, you don’t have to get involved…”
“She can be an asshole at times. Like, she just doesn’t think. No excuses.”
Doc knew—they all knew—what Game Boy’s parents had put him through before he ran away: the conversion therapy and the pray-away-the-gay sessions intended to turn him into the obedient teenaged daughter they expected. Del—Rebecca—was out and proud, ferociously so: she took no shit from anyone, ever, and couldn’t quite get her head around Game Boy’s lack of resilience. She had no feel for how his marginal identity could be so much more tenuous than her own. He’d had it half beaten out of him by his family with their oppressive conformity and their capital-E Expectations, a background quite unlike her own experience of benign neglect. When Del came out to her mother at sixteen, her mother had said, “That’s nice, dear,” and continued painting her nails. When Game Boy announced he was trans at fourteen, his parents made him undergo compulsory desistence “therapy” at a clinic with a 30 percent suicide rate.
“Doc, she didn’t mean—”
Doc let go of Game Boy. “You’re doing it again? The apologizing thing? Remember what I told you about it last time?”
“Crap. Yes.” Game Boy glanced at him furtively. “I know I shouldn’t, but it just comes out.”
Time to change the subject, Doc decided. “Listen, I’d help you with the cupboard, but like I said, I’ve got a headache and something tells me there’s going to be a lot of hammering.”
“Nope, I’ve got a better idea.” Game Boy’s smile crept out again,
