‘Well, it’s not throbbing now,’ said Achilles. ‘And look, his eyes have gone all black. Fuck me, we’ve killed the tortoise.’
The Cleverleys stood up and gathered around, staring down at the non-responsive vertebrate in Achilles’ hands.
‘Well, now,’ said George after a suitable pause. ‘That’s that, then. What do we do now, throw him in the bin?’
‘He won’t flush down the toilet, that’s for sure,’ said Elizabeth.
‘We could just chuck him in the bushes and let the foxes carry him off,’ suggested Achilles.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Beverley, who, to her family’s surprise, had started weeping. ‘I’ll put him back in his box and sort him out tomorrow. He was happy there.’
‘How can you tell?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘A mother knows.’
‘But you weren’t his mother.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she snapped. ‘He was a lovely tortoise and should be treated with respect at this tragic moment.’
‘He was,’ agreed George, seeing how upset his wife was and not wishing to cause her any further pain.
‘The best of us all,’ said Beverley.
‘Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far.’
‘He was 115 years old, wasn’t he?’ asked Achilles, falling to his knees and raising his hands to the heavens, replicating the image on the poster for Platoon. ‘Why are the good ones always taken so young? Why? Oh, sweet Jesus, WHY?’
‘Shut up, Achilles,’ said George. ‘You’re an idiot.’
‘I’d started to grow very fond of that tortoise,’ said Beverley. ‘There was something dignified about him, I thought. He reminded me of Ted Heath in his last years in the Commons. Just sitting there, observing, keeping his own counsel. Occasionally going to the bathroom in an inappropriate place. Achilles, clean this floor up. I’m going to bed.’
And with that, she took hold of the dead reptile, placed him carefully back into his shoe box, before covering it with a lid and going upstairs, where she fell quickly asleep.
Part 5
* * *
27 September 2016
For several years, the Cleverleys would joke that Achilles had damaged his tendon when he stumbled into the door drunk but, in reality, it was three toes that he broke on his left foot as he stumbled down the corridor and slipped on one of the hallway mats. The fact that he was inebriated at only twelve years old shocked both George and Beverley and, after putting him to bed and leaving a basin on his bedroom floor in case he needed to throw up, they gathered in the kitchen with the seventeen-year-old Nelson and the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth, demanding explanations.
‘What is going on in this family anyway?’ asked George, looking at his wife and elder children in turn. ‘Did anyone know that Achilles was drinking?’
‘Not a clue,’ replied Nelson and Elizabeth in unison.
‘I certainly didn’t,’ added Beverley.
‘He’s just a child!’ continued George. ‘Not even a teenager yet. Who are his friends? Who does he play with?’
‘Play with?’ asked Elizabeth, smirking. ‘He doesn’t “play with” anyone. Other than himself.’
‘Don’t be vulgar,’ said Beverley.
‘Who gave him the alcohol, then?’ asked George. ‘One of you must know.’
‘Why should we know?’ asked Nelson, who was annoyed to be drawn into this interrogation when he’d been busy watching a television documentary about Mykonos and was thinking it might be a nice place to visit one day.
‘Because you’re his brother and sister!’
‘And you’re his father,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And you’re his mother,’ she added, turning to Beverley.
‘We can’t be expected to know everything that goes on in our children’s lives,’ replied Beverley. ‘We’re busy people. With busy lives.’
‘Some might say that your children should come first.’
‘Are any of those people in this room?’ asked George, before calming down a little and dismissing them both. He poured two glasses of wine from the fridge and sat down at the island. ‘She has a point, you know,’ he said quietly.
‘I know she does,’ admitted Beverley.
‘Are we a bit … distant, do you think?’
‘We are a bit preoccupied at times,’ she admitted. ‘Me with my books. You with your television show.’
‘It’s not just that, though, is it?’ asked George.
‘What is it, then?’ asked Beverley, looking up from her phone.
George raised an eyebrow and nodded at what she was holding in her hand.
‘Oh, please,’ she said, laughing. ‘You think our phones are to blame for this?’
‘I don’t think they help,’ he replied. ‘We’re on them all the time, aren’t we? And not just us, Nelson and Elizabeth too. And we gave Achilles one for his birthday. It’s possible that he’s met some … undesirables … through the various …’ He waved a hand in the air, uncertain of the correct terminology. ‘Applications.’
Beverley shook her head. ‘Phones have existed since the dawn of time.’
‘Well, they haven’t, actually.’
‘For a century anyway.’
‘Landlines. But no one ever came in and stood in their hallway and stared at their landline, did they?’
‘When they became push button, that was quite exciting.’
‘I wonder if …’
‘If what?’
‘If we should take them off the children. Until they’re eighteen. Or twenty-one.’
Beverley laughed. ‘Good luck with that,’ she said.
‘I mean it. What I worry about is that we all get so addicted to them that—’
Before he could say anything more, the door to the kitchen opened and a scrawny little boy in a pair of bright pink underpants stood before them, looking deeply sorry for himself. Beverley placed her phone on the island and turned to him.
‘Darling,’ she said. ‘You look awful!’
Achilles opened his mouth to answer but, before he could say a word, he lurched forward and a stream of vomit poured from his mouth, covering his mother’s brand-new iPhone.
And at that precise moment, in Beijing, a man named Zhang Yiming turned to his high-school girlfriend and said, ‘I think I’ll call it TikTok.’
Friday
HE/HIM
George was sitting in the kitchen, drinking his morning cup of coffee, staring at the sealed box containing the dead body of Ustym Karmaliuk. For some inexplicable reason, Beverley had elevated it to the top of a pile of six thick hardback books, the uppermost one being the eight-hundred-page biography that George had bought on Monday and still hadn’t opened. It gave the sarcophagus a faintly deified air.
‘He’s still here, then,’ he muttered, looking across at Elizabeth, who glanced up from her phone for a moment. She didn’t like being distracted from her Twitter arguments.