‘Okay. It’ll be over soon, baby.’
Hayley sighed. ‘It’ll never be over.’
Scott laughed. ‘I remember that feeling. It will. I promise. And, believe me, the freedom, once you push back the chair after that last exam, it’s the best. You’re going to have the best summer.’
‘You sound American.’ This was Meredith, teasing. ‘We always say everything is “the best”.’
Scott pushed her arm playfully, and it slipped off the edge of the table. A rogue piece of pancake fell onto the table. Heather frowned. Scott grabbed and ate it. Meredith giggled.
‘It is the best feeling.’
‘Speaking of summer …’ Heather attempted to bring the chaos to order. ‘We’ve had a lovely invitation.’
‘To where?’ both girls asked simultaneously, Hayley sounding sceptical, Meredith excited.
‘To spend some time with Scottie’s family.’
Hayley’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where?’
‘It’s in England. A beautiful country house …’
Hayley pushed her chair back from the table, visibly disgruntled. ‘Ugh. English summer weather.’ Last summer hadn’t covered itself with glory. There’d been so much rain. So much. There had been a lot of black humour about webbed feet and building an ark. When Heather had come home – unironically – with one of those SAD lamps, for people who couldn’t cope without sunlight, and confessed she was pining for the New Jersey shore, Scott had booked a holiday in Turkey. The day they left, a ten-day heatwave started. It had ended the day they flew home.
‘Come on, now …’
‘Like last summer?’
‘It might not be. It isn’t always raining, you know.’ Scott smiled.
Hayley wasn’t convinced. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Well, it means a lot to Scott that we’re there.’ Heather’s tone was decisive.
‘Who else will be going?’
‘Well, it’s Charlie’s birthday. He’ll be eighty.’
‘Great. An octogenarian’s birthday celebration.’ But Hayley’s expression wasn’t quite as truculent as her tone. Scott winked at her.
Heather missed the wink and ploughed on. ‘Laura will be there, and that means Ethan. You remember Ethan, from our wedding? And Nick, with all the children.’
‘Aw. Cute.’ This was Meredith’s first pronouncement.
‘Exactly.’
Hayley persisted: ‘What’ll we do? Apart from babysit?’
‘Who said anything about babysitting?’
‘I really want to babysit. Do you think Nick would let me?’ Meredith directed her question to Scott, since her mother was glaring at her sister.
‘I’m sure he’d love some help with the little ones. There’s a tennis court, and a swimming-pool …’
‘Wetsuits provided?’ But Hayley was almost smiling now.
‘Hayley!’
‘Mum! Scott was just talking about how amazing the summer was going to be. You know those kids from school have invited me to the Reading Festival. And I really, really want to go.’
‘You said. Several times. This isn’t then. This is before that.’ But Hayley was Heather’s daughter, a good negotiator.
‘So can I go?’
And Heather knew blackmail when she heard it.
And Scott could only marvel at the mistresses of negotiation going head to head. No boardroom he’d ever been in stood up to the kitchen table right now.
14
Ethan wished there was someone he could talk to. He didn’t know what to do with all his feelings. His soul or his heart or whatever part of him it was – a part he’d only really been aware of in the last little while – felt like it was too big for his brain, too big for his body. He felt a ball of something pressing on his lungs, his stomach, his mind, like he might burst with it all.
Life was bad enough, hard enough. The exams weighed on him like a heart attack. So many balls in the air: Shakespeare and the periodic table and irregular French verbs and ox-bow lakes and equations. Everyone’s expectations of him were high – Mum and Dad’s, his teachers’ – and it felt suffocating sometimes.
He didn’t sleep a lot. Not when he was supposed to be asleep. He watched one a.m., two a.m., three a.m. on the ceiling, projected there by the clock, his mind and heart racing. At eleven a.m. all he wanted to do was put his head on the desk, like they used to in Kindergarten, and close his eyes.
He was often tearful, and he hadn’t cried since he was a little kid. It made him feel ashamed and furious. He cried in bed at night alone. Snotty, harsh, sobbing tears under the duvet. Hated himself for doing it, for the weakness it showed.
Even if there was someone he could talk to, what the hell would he say? He couldn’t even order the thoughts to himself.
He was angry. Mostly, that was it. Angry and sad. Angry with his mum and dad. Especially Dad. They said kids were the selfish ones. He couldn’t think of anything more selfish than what his father had done. What a fucking awful year to make this particular decision – to blow the family life wide apart. He had exams. He had big decisions to make. Even he knew he needed stability, for Christ’s sake. Stuff happened – he knew that too. A mate of his from football, who was in the year above, had had all this crap going on in his GCSE year because his mum had breast cancer. Someone else’s dad had lost his job, and that had messed everything up – they’d had to move house and stuff. But his dad could have bloody waited.
He told himself it was Mum Dad didn’t want any more. Sometimes he whispered to himself that she’d asked for it – she could be such a grumpy bitch. Then he was horrified at his own disloyalty. And he knew that it was both of them Dad couldn’t be bothered with now. Mum and him. He felt abandoned.
And then flattered. When he did see Dad, he treated him more like a mate, bent all the rules Ethan had known all his life, granted freedoms and liberties. But in darker moments, Ethan knew it to be disinterest, disengagement. Dad couldn’t be bothered to apply all the usual guidelines and consequences. He didn’t want to be his father.
His protectiveness of his mother sat uncomfortably alongside his weird and messed-up feelings about Dad’s new girlfriend. She had small, high tits, and she wore tight jeans with high-heeled boots, and he didn’t know where to look when she was there – aroused and repulsed in equal measure. He was painfully aware that his father was having sex with her, hideously embarrassed because she was too young.
This happened to other people. Loads of them. He had mates it had happened to. Why didn’t they seem so messed up by it? Were they all crying, like babies, in bed, and wanting to punch windows and walls the whole time, or was it just him?
His limbs were too long for his brain to control them adequately. He felt clumsy everywhere. He was still plagued by spots but he had stubble too. He stank if he didn’t shower. His hair wouldn’t lie the way he wanted it to, and he was still wearing the retainer the orthodontist had prescribed once he’d taken off his train-track braces last year.
He couldn’t drink as much as his mates did without puking, and cigarettes made him feel sick, although he refused to let that stop him smoking.