“I’m just a little rusty today,” said Danny in a tone that failed to convince even himself.
“Rusty? Danny, watching you is giving me tetanus. Some of our regulars move better than you and they’ve had multiple hip replacements. You do realize the competition’s in five days, don’t you? Five days, Danny, so why the fuck are you dancing like you’ve got another five months? Seriously, if this is all you’re going to give, then you may as well just go ahead and break your own legs now, spoil the fun for your landlord at least. I’ll give you a hand if you want.”
“Look, you’re right, and I’m sorry. It’s just… Will started talking again after all this time, and things have been going really well, but this morning we had this fight and—”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Danny, but I don’t give a shit about whatever domestic bollocks you’ve got going on right now. Not during the hours we’re in this room together. And you shouldn’t either. All you should care about is winning this fucking competition. You’ll have plenty of time to worry about all that other stuff later, but for now, chuck it in the backseat, give it an iPad and a Capri Sun, and focus on the road in front of you. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“Great. Now, get in position and dance like your life literally depends on it, and if you step on my feet just one more time, I swear to God I’ll stick one of them so far up your arse that you’ll be able to tell me what my nail polish tastes like.”
* * *
Danny kicked off his sodden shoes and flicked on the kettle before hanging his coat on the chair to dry. He was soaked right through to his underpants, but in a weird kind of way he was glad—not so much for the soggy bottom but for the downpour itself, which had started sometime around midday and hadn’t let up since. Instead of going to the park after his session with Krystal ended, which he wasn’t in the mood to do, and instead of going straight home, which he also didn’t want to do because he knew he’d waste the afternoon moping about the fact that he and Will were back to square one, Danny had taken the rain as a sign from the Big Man that he should stay at Fanny’s and keep practicing, so that’s what he’d done. Only later, when he’d emerged from the club in the late afternoon to find a monsoon where the downpour had been, did he realize that shitty weather and celestial signals were not necessarily the same things.
Will’s bedroom door was closed, slammed shut with such force that the nameplate had fallen off and now lay facedown on the carpet. Danny knocked so gently that it almost defied the purpose of knocking.
“Will? You there, mate?”
He placed his ear to the door and thought he heard something, a faint and almost imperceptible sound like the slightest contraction of a bedspring or a sleeve-smothered yawn, but it was hard to determine if the sound came from Will or from the rain on the windows or the kettle in the kitchen. He briefly considered entering uninvited, justifying his intrusion by imagining that Will wasn’t in fact ignoring him but simply unable to hear him through the headphones he often wore when playing on his iPad. Then again, it was just as likely that his son was currently burning two holes in the door with the same angry eyes that had burned into him that morning, hearing everything but saying nothing in the way at which he’d become so wearyingly adept. Reluctant to take the gamble, Danny let go of the handle and backed away from the door, telling himself, despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, that Will would talk when he felt like it.
It was only when he returned with dinner a few hours later that he started to panic a little. His plan had been to lure Will out with his favorite pizza, even placing the box on the floor and fanning the smell beneath the door, but Will still hadn’t taken the bait, so Danny decided to bring the bait to him.
“Will, I’m just going to open your door a little bit and leave the pizza inside, okay?” he said, his voice slow and clear like that of a hostage negotiator. “I promise I won’t come in. I’d try to slide it underneath, but I asked them to double up on everything so I don’t think it’ll fit. Is that okay with you? Tell me if it’s not okay.”
Will didn’t respond, so Danny opened the door and pushed the deep-pan Hawaiian inside, nudging it with his fingertips like a novice zookeeper feeding a tiger. He peered into the room, readying himself to slink away at the first sign of a death stare, but what he saw instead unnerved him far more than any hateful expression that his son was capable of mustering, and the boy had quite the repertoire.
Will’s bedroom was clean. Not spotless. Not even close to spotless. More dirty than clean actually, but still cleaner than it should have been at that time of day. Will had a tradition that Liz had dubbed “the cleansing ritual,” which Danny always found to be a rather philosophical interpretation of their son’s habit of scattering his uniform around his bedroom the moment he arrived home from school every day, but there was no limp tie draped over the lamp and no sock perched on the door handle. His schoolbag was also nowhere to be seen.
“Will?” said Danny as he stepped through the door, but even before he opened his mouth he knew he was speaking to an empty room. Will wasn’t on his bed. Nor was he at his desk, or under it, or behind the door, or anywhere else for that matter. The only proof that Danny could see that Will had even been home was the nameplate on the floor, and that could have fallen off that morning, for all he knew.
Returning to the living room, he grabbed his phone and checked for any missed calls or messages. Finding none, he dialed Will’s number, but the call went straight to voice mail. He tried several more times, each time with the same result.
Guessing he was probably with Mo, Danny called the boy’s dad, Yasir, an estate agent with a permanent smile and glasses even thicker than his son’s, but the man said Mo was at home watching Animal Planet and hadn’t seen Will since school.
“Everything okay?” said Yasir. Lions could be heard devouring something in the background.
Reassuring Yasir that everything was fine and trying to sound confident about it, Danny thanked him and hung up.
“Don’t panic,” he said to himself, repeating the words like a mantra in the hope that hearing them spoken aloud might help to slow his quickening pulse, but hearing the word panic over and over only made matters worse.
He took a deep breath and urged himself to stay calm and think logically. It was barely eight o’clock and it was still light outside, two facts he took comfort in. He also told himself that even though this was massively out of character for Will, his son had left the house that morning angrier than Danny had ever seen him, which meant that he was almost certainly still angry now, which meant he probably didn’t want to see the person who had made him angry to begin with, which most likely explained why he hadn’t come home yet. Danny couldn’t overlook the countless occasions he himself had gone AWOL when he was young—even younger than Will—often as a result of quarrels with his parents, or quarrels between his parents. Nothing bad had ever happened to him during those times of self-imposed exile, and he always came home eventually, usually when he was tired, or hungry, or when the fire that burned in his belly was no longer warm enough to keep the chill from his bones.