Until she wasn’t. Bitch.
The pain of the betrayal sears through his body again. Scalds him from the inside. That has happened a few times this week. He is ashamed that he feels this way. That he misses her. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t miss her, not really. How could she? How could she? His own mother. What a total bitch.
‘Wear your helmet,’ says his dad but he doesn’t push for the answer to his question about where Oli is planning on skating. It’s not usual. Nothing is usual.
Just as he is about to leave, the house phone rings. His dad leaps up out of his chair like he is some villain in the Bond car, ejected from the passenger seat. Oli waits to see if it is the police with news.
He hears his dad say, ‘Oh, hi, Fiona,’ Oli decides to linger a little longer. Fiona only left their house about half an hour ago, he can’t think what she’s calling about already but he is OK with the fact that she is always calling or hanging around. She seems to cheer up his dad and Dad deserves that, yeah? After everything. Because it has turned out to be worse than he could have imagined. Not an affair. A whole other world. He hears his dad tell Fiona that Seb is upstairs in his room and Oli is going skateboarding. His dad calls to him, ‘Fiona says if you are going on the tube take some hand sanitiser.’
Oli shrugs. ‘We don’t have any.’
‘He says we don’t have any,’ his father repeats into the phone, he sounds exhausted. He nods and then looks up at Oli. ‘She says she bought some yesterday, it’s near the bowl on the table where I put my car keys.’ Oli isn’t going to use it. But it is sort of cool of Fiona to look out for him. At least she is keeping her shit together, so he goes into the kitchen, finds the sanitiser and puts it in his pocket. His fingers graze the card the policewoman left him, the corner accidently scrapes underneath his nail. He flinches like he does when he is woken by an alarm. She gave it to him in case he ever wanted to talk to her. ‘If you think of anything, anything at all that might be relevant. Anything that might give us an insight into your mum’s state of mind.’
He hasn’t called, even though the cop had said ‘anything’ three times. Probably because of that. That desperate urgency she was trying to convey felt like a lot.
He has been wearing the same cargo pants for days now. No one nags him to put clothes in the wash basket. Leigh made a big deal about that. Pretty chill most of the time, washing was the thing that she could go a bit obsessive about. Nothing would be washed unless it was in the basket. She would basically conduct a stand-off until he complied, she’d watch him go around the room picking up T-shirts and stuff, like some sort of washing Nazi. Fiona cooked an awesome burger and chips supper the other night so it’s not as though he’s being neglected, he’s just not nagged. Fiona says she likes to keep busy and to have something to do. She put a wash on. He noticed because not only did she pick up his clothes from off the floor, but she changed his sheets too. Bit weird that, TBH. Leigh left him to strip his own bed because it’s a privacy thing, sheets and stuff. But Fiona means well. Probably Leigh just didn’t care so much and what looked like consideration at the time was in fact disinterest. Right?
He doesn’t know, it’s possible.
He doesn’t know Leigh. None of them do.
His head aches with thinking about it. He has to get out the house.
He walks out of the front door, letting it slam loudly behind him. He doesn’t want to turn around or glance up as he expects his brother’s face will be stuck to his bedroom window, like it has been since Thursday morning. Eyes alert, scanning the street – left, right, as though he’s watching a pro-level tennis match – looking for his mother. Sad. Hopeless. His brother is taking this pretty badly. The front door slams again, which makes Oli turn around. Seb is not in his room, he is standing awkwardly on the step.
‘You’re not coming with me,’ Oli says automatically.
‘I didn’t ask to.’
‘No, but you were going to.’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘What have you got in your backpack?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Clearly you have something.’ Seb is wearing his school backpack. It looks almost as bulky as when he is going to school and it’s full of a day’s textbooks.
‘I’m going to my friend’s for a sleepover.’
‘Which friend?’
Seb hesitates. He is not used to lying to his older brother. He is quite a straightforward kid but he clearly is about to lie because he has a tell, he juts out his chin when he’s being dishonest. Leigh identified it years ago, when he wasn’t much more than a baby. Everyone in the family knows when Seb is lying. ‘I’m going to Theo’s.’ He sounds like he’s trying the name out. Asking Oli a question. Sort of, ‘Might I be going to
