“A new start,” she called it, without asking me if I even wanted one, because it was obvious I didn’t, and I said, “Haven’t we had our share of those?” One for every Mark that turned out not to be God’s gift after all. Such an over-investor. She might as well have invented the concept of eggs in one basket. Eight full new starts, and three or four half-hearted versions, where I didn’t have to move schools at least, just took way longer to get there and was always late for everything, always left behind. It was always like that, since my dad, I guess, who was the first but who came and went just like the others. A link in a chain, and a stranger now. If I saw him in the street I wouldn’t know him. Sad but true. I’ve made my peace with that.
This time, phase-one Mum was really shaking things up. Maybe I should have been more positive. She was doing it by herself, after all. Declaring independence. But at the time, she knew how I felt about it. I reminded her it had taken work to make even the few friends I had. I said we both knew there was no way I’d be able to keep them, not at that distance. I wanted that to count for something. I was looking for mercy, but that well was dry.
“You’ll get new friends,” she said, like I could just pick some out in a gift shop, like that was how easy it was, and it stunned me, the ignorance, the carelessness of that.
“Ouch,” I said. “Blunt.”
“What?” she said. “You’re good at it.”
“Yeah? Because I’ve had to be.”
“Well, life teaches us the skills we need,” she said, trying to make a virtue out of throwing me in at the social deep end every time a new Prince Charming withered on the vine.
When I was eight and we were moving for the third time in a year (a real bad patch—Jim, I think, then Danny, then Joe), I tried to stop the move from happening by tying everything in my room down with string. I got a ball of it and I cat’s-cradled the hell out of my bed and my radiator and my toy cupboard and my bookshelf and then I waited like Charlotte in the middle of her web to see what I’d spelled. Mum used to tell that story to people like it was funny. I’ve heard it a hundred times over the years, and I’ve smiled and nodded and put up with being laughed at. She even laughed at me when it happened. She opened the door and she opened her mouth and threw her head back and I could see the undersides of her teeth, the biting edges, and I remember thinking, How could she? because it was the opposite of funny, to me. I was dead scared of losing something. I didn’t want things to change. Not again. But they did, and they do, and I guess I started learning way back then that you can’t stop your world from turning, however tight you tie it down, however hard you try.
So. Here we were again. Move number thirteen. Mum was on her own, not counting me. She was acting out and we were packing up and I was all set to repeat, all set to be brand-new in another place. I could feel it coming—the unknown, the sudden onset of lonely. First-world problems, sure, but still. Problems all the same.
THREE
The estate agents and lawyers weren’t above making the prospect of this Henry Lake’s death a kind of sweetener on the deal. Our sitting tenant was old, apparently, and not in great shape, and I heard one of them tell Mum on the phone that she wouldn’t have too long to wait to get the whole house to herself. A euphemism if ever I heard one. “Health problems,” he said, the same way he probably said “detached garage” and “en suite bathroom.” I listened and I sat on my hands and tried to laugh, which is the only way to deal with outrage sometimes, the only safe way to breathe out and be gentle and just watch it pass.
When she hung up I said, “Isn’t it a hundred different kinds of not right that a real-life, living person would make a place worth less money instead of more? Don’t you think?” but Mum was still in high-drama, post-breakup crisis mode. She said, “I’ve got other things to think about, Jude, more immediate and pressing things, like finding a real place to live.” And I suppose I’ve got more immediate and pressing things to say now, and that’s part of the trouble, and why the value of a human life ends up having to wait for later.
Last Supper time in the flat, she pushed spaghetti hoops around on her plate instead of eating them, one of those new role-reversal moments that made me want to tell her to sit up properly and stop playing with her food.
“Don’t worry,” she said without commitment, kind of absent behind the eyes, like she had been for a while. “Everything’s going to be fine. Mr. Lake is a nice man on a nice street.”
“Yeah. So was Ted Bundy,” I said, and for a second I thought she might crack a smile, but she didn’t, just scowled, like I was trying to trick her into it.
She stood up to scrape the rest of her spaghetti hoops into the trash, the back of her head more expressive of her feelings than you’d think possible. Just a nudge and the whole lot slid off the plate in one slimy clump, a colony of something, half-reluctant, half-alive, which put me right off finishing mine. I watched her grip on the fork, waited for her knuckles to go from bone-light back to skin, and then I asked her again why a house was worth less money with another human being inside it, how that could ever be allowed to happen. On a good day, that might have been the start of a proper conversation about plutocracies and trickle-down economics and the politics of homeownership and the poverty gap, and I would have learned something. But we weren’t back to good days yet. No such luck.
“Oh, you know,” she said without turning round. “It’s the way of the world. People don’t like to share,” like that nailed it, like it was all that needed to be said.
“Is that it?” I said, and she said, “Pick your side, Jude. Is he a human being or an unhinged killer?”
“Or both,” I said, and she glared at me and the angry pulse in her jaw ticked.
“This is the last time, Mum. I’m not doing this with you again, I swear.”
“Fine with me,” she said on her way out of the room, but neither of us meant it, not really, and that was another one of our new-style low-quality splinter-family mealtimes over and done with.
FOUR
On the drive down, I’d had less than two hours of sleep, and no breakfast. The air-conditioning in the car had been broken since forever and the stereo was playing up. Mum said, “If it rains, we’re screwed,” because the windshield wipers were worn out and basically useless. She wasn’t even sure if the car was going to start, or keep it together long enough to get us there, so on top of not wanting to go, there was the stress of not knowing if we’d actually arrive.
“Yay,” I said. “Road trip.”
I can’t read in a moving car because it makes me want to throw up. In fact, it’s just about the only place on the planet where a good book does nothing for me, my own special version of hell. I’d dropped my phone the week before, third time in as many months, and it was properly smashed, no real hope of repair, tiny hidden cogs and chips exposed like so much guts, close to useless in terms of in-car entertainment. I’d tried wrapping it up with tape to hold all its innards together, and the camera still worked, on and off, but it was like looking at everything through a shattered glass eye and half the time it just froze and stared me out like it was annoyed with me, which it probably was. Mum said she wasn’t paying for another one because I was (quote) pathologically incapable of looking after it, and she was twenty-four hours a day losing her shit about money anyway, so, job done.