‘I’ll go and see him,’ offers Fiona.
‘You? Why?’
‘Well, first because, like you, I am curious but, unlike you, I’m not furious.’
‘Hey, that rhymes. You are a poet and you don’t know it.’ Mark treats Fiona to a tired grin. It strikes her that hard-won smiles have their charm.
‘I can report back. We can’t risk you going over there and losing it but maybe we do need to know more about him. I said before, one or other of you is a suspect.’
‘Well, I haven’t hurt her.’
‘I know that, silly.’
It was an uncompromisingly childish word, designed to beguile and pacify. Mark used it on the children when they were much younger. Still, he appreciates it. Some part of him wants to be infantilised. It is too much. Too tragic.
‘How will you make contact?’
‘I’ll call on him, tell him the truth, I’m a friend of Leigh’s and I want …’
‘Want what?’
‘I want to get to know Kai.’
22
Oli
Oli sits at the top of the stairs in the dark and listens to his dad and Fiona talk in the kitchen. He often does this, listen in on adults. It’s not because he’s sneaky. It’s because they are. Normally, there is not much to hear. Normally, his parents talk about what to watch on TV or whether there is enough milk for breakfast. Tonight, obviously there is a lot more being said. There was on Sunday too. His parents really went at it. He was surprised at the time and also he wasn’t. Not really. His dad really downplayed the scale of the row to the police. You can’t blame him for that, though. He’d be mad to admit to what was really said. Considering everything.
He is glad she has gone. Bye bye, skank. Who needs a fucking mother, anyway? He’s nearly sixteen, he’s three inches taller than her already.
What a day! Fuck. He is buzzing. There is a weird energy running through him. Like he’s nervous, anxious but also like he’s just won a match or something, scored a hat-trick. He can’t believe his life at the moment. For ages he’s been just the same as everyone else really; thinking about exams, his hair, football, his mates, who he should ask to the prom – all that normal stuff, and that was OK, but now this! He can’t get his head around it. The police are investigating his mother’s disappearance. Bad. No matter how chill he wants to appear about it, he knows that is very bad. But then GCSEs have been cancelled! Good, no matter how shit he is feeling about everything else. That is a result! It looks like they are going to work out grades on coursework or something, which is pretty neat for him because his mum – he catches himself – Leigh helped him on quite a bit of that.
Oli has lots of friends and is popular at school, with everyone except the teachers, that is, who think he’s lazy, disorganised and not trying hard enough. This might all be true, he doesn’t know. He just thinks exams suck, he’s crap at them. He had started to think they were probably right, the teachers. Most likely he would struggle to get to a good sixth form and eventually a good university, or even a shit one, come to that. So why bother?
He remembers saying that to Leigh, quite often. She actually never calls him lazy, or disorganised. She just says things like, ‘There’s a knack to exams, we just have to work on developing that.’ She made it sound easy, and as though they were in it together. When he was getting into knots with some impossible homework and close to losing it, she’d say, ‘Maybe we should find a different way of looking at this problem?’ She’d let him dictate his thoughts into his phone and then help him write up what he’d recorded as a structured essay. It sort of worked with the way he thought about stuff.
Thinking about her being this thoughtful and patient, makes his stomach spasm.
So yeah, his coursework was OK. He might get some seven and eight grades now. Even in the non-science subjects. Leigh always said he was a seven and eight sort of kid. She didn’t agree with the teachers. She said he’d find his own success, his own way. It was a pretty good thing to hear.
Until, that is, you know she’s a liar. Then it doesn’t really matter what she said, ever.
If the exams hadn’t been cancelled, Oli would have had to spend the next few months revising. Even the thought of cramming the facts into his head, being sure as he pushed one in another one fell out, scares him, but now he doesn’t have to worry about any of that. It’s the biggest break ever! He would have spent nights lying awake thinking about that airless school gym, him sweating, his head fuzzy with facts that swam around, weak and vague. He would never have been able to remember the difference between attrition and abrasion when it came to the erosion of coastlines, and all the different French verb endings. It made his scalp itch to think about it, his palms clammy, throat dry. But all that was gone now. Thank fuck.
Still, he must remember not to look too pleased about it in front of his dad because his dad is behaving like a mental case right now. Yeah, OK, his wife going missing is clearly a blow, but Oli thinks his dad should have some pride. Considering everything they’ve discovered. Oli would never let a girl get to him so much. And even if she had, he would never let anyone know. He’d just get his revenge on her. He wouldn’t be left looking like a total
