I turned then as I sensed my mother’s gaze drift across my shoulder. Birdie was standing in the doorway with the cat in her arms. It was brown and white with a face like an Egyptian queen. Birdie looked at me and said, ‘We shan’t be staying long, little boy. Just until Justin and I have found a place of our own.’
‘My name is Henry,’ I said, hugely taken aback that a grown-up in my own home had just called me ‘little boy’。
‘Henry,’ repeated Birdie, looking at me sharply. ‘Yes, of course.’
My sister was staring greedily at the cat and Birdie said, ‘Would you like to hold her?’
She nodded and the cat was placed into her arms where it immediately twisted itself round 180 degrees like a piece of unfurled elastic and escaped leaving her with a terrible red scratch on the inside of her arm. I saw her eyes fill with tears and her mouth twist into a brave smile.
‘It’s OK,’ she said, as my mother fussed over her, dabbing at her arm with a wet cloth.
‘Henry, fetch some Germolene, will you, from my bathroom cupboard.’
I threw Birdie a look as I passed, wanting her to see that I knew she hadn’t taken enough care passing the cat to my sister. She looked back at me, her eyes so small I could barely make out their colour.
I was a strange boy. I can see that now. I’ve since met boys like me: slow to smile, intense, guarded and watchful. I suspect that Birdie had probably been a very strange little girl. Maybe she recognised herself in me. But I could tell she hated me, even then. It was obvious. And it was very much mutual.
I passed Justin as I crossed the hallway. He was holding a battered box of Black Magic and looking lost. ‘Your parents that way?’ he asked, pointing in the general direction of the kitchen.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In the kitchen. Through that arch.’
‘Merci beaucoup,’ he said, and although I was only ten I was old enough to know that he was being pretentious.
We were sent to bed shortly after that, my sister with a plaster on the inside of her arm, me with the beginnings of an upset stomach. I was one of those children: my emotions made themselves felt in my gut.
I could hear them shuffling about upstairs later that night. I put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep.
The Black Magic sat unopened on the kitchen table the next morning, when I came down extra early. I was tempted to unpeel the cellophane and open them. A small act of rebellion that would have made me feel better in the short term but way, way worse in the long. I felt a movement behind me and saw the cat squeezing through the door behind me. I thought about the scratch on my sister’s arm and remembered Birdie’s impatient tut: ‘It was an accident, she wasn’t holding her properly, Suki would never scratch on purpose.’
A bubble of hot red anger passed right through me at the memory and I hissed loudly at the cat and chased it out of the room.
It was almost a relief to go to school that day, to feel normal for a few hours. I’d just started my last term of primary school. I would turn eleven the following month, one of the youngest boys in my year, and then I would be moved on to a bigger school, closer to home, with no knickerbockers. I was very fixated on it at this point. I had very much outgrown the knickerbocker school and all the children I’d grown up with. I could tell I was different. Completely different. There was no one like me there and I had fantasies about going to the big school and finding myself surrounded by people like me. Everything would be better at the big school. I just had ten weeks to get through, then a long boring summer, and then it would all begin.
I had no idea, none whatsoever, how different the landscape of my life would look by the end of that summer and how all the things I’d been waiting for would soon feel like distant dreams.
10
Libby sits at her kitchen table. Her back door is open on to her courtyard, which is overcast in the late afternoon sun, but still too humid to sit in. She has a Diet Coke poured into a tumbler full of ice to hand and is bare-footed, her sandals cast aside moments after walking into her flat. She flips open the lid of her rose-gold laptop and brings up her Chrome browser. She is almost surprised to see that the last thing she’d browsed, four days ago, before the letter had arrived and upturned everything, was local classes in salsa dancing. She can barely imagine what she’d been thinking. Something to do with meeting men, she supposes.