30
Oli
Saturday 21st March
Oli picks up his skateboard. “Are you going out?” his dad asks.
“Might as well, nothing else to do.” Oli sounds bored by the fact because appearing bored is habitual. Showing enthusiasm or having something particular to do, admitting that anything amuses or interests him, is not dope. Oli is not bored. How could he be bored right now? But he has worked out that it is best if he acts bored in front of his dad, because that is what’s expected of him. And any emotion bigger than boredom might trigger his dad. His dad is acting crazy. Storming about in and out of the house, so moody. He’s like a faulty firework—you just don’t know when he is going to catch or where he is going to blast and burn. Like when Oli showed him that meme and he went off it. He was only trying to lighten the mood. Okay, in retrospect, suggesting they watch Baptiste was a bit off, but all his mates had seen it, and he didn’t know it was a spin-off from a show The Missing.
Or maybe he did know. But what the hell.
When Oli made the mistake of saying he was pleased that exams have been canceled, his dad yelled, “How can you be thinking about that right now?” Pretending to be bored is safe. He just wants to help keep things calm, on track. Oli is worried about his dad. He’s worried about everything.
“Where are you going?” his dad demands now.
“The skate park.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?” Oli doesn’t know why he said that. He should just tell his dad he is going to Regent’s Park. He isn’t, but that’s not the point. It’s not a good idea to rock the boat and draw attention to himself. All his dad wants is an answer. It’s stupid not to give him one—it will just lead to a scene. But sometimes Oli does stupid things. Like preening too much before a house party, or saying stuff about a girl that he doesn’t mean, or not saying stuff he does, other things. His head decides one thing, but he goes and does something completely different anyway. Leigh would usually excuse it. “He’s just a kid, he’s just finding himself.” She was generally the easygoing parent, the good cop, so to speak.
Until she wasn’t. Bitch.
The pain of the betrayal sears through his body again. Scalds him from the inside. That has happened a few times this week. He is ashamed that he feels this way. That he misses her. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t miss her, not really. How could she? How could she? His own mother. What a total bitch.
“Wear your helmet,” says his dad but he doesn’t push for the answer to his question about where Oli is planning on skating. It’s not usual. Nothing is usual.
Just as he is about to leave, the house phone rings. His dad leaps up out of his chair like he is some villain in the Bond car, ejected from the passenger seat. Oli waits to see if it is the police with news.
He hears his dad say, “Oh, hi, Fiona.” Oli decides to linger a little longer. Fiona left their house only about half an hour ago; he can’t think what she’s calling about already but he is okay with the fact that she is always calling or hanging around. She seems to cheer up his dad and Dad deserves that, yeah? After everything. Because it has turned out to be worse than he could have imagined. Not an affair. A whole other world. He hears his dad tell Fiona that Seb is upstairs in his room and Oli is going skateboarding. His dad calls to him, “Fiona says if you are going on the tube take some hand sanitizer.”
Oli shrugs. “We don’t have any.”
“He says we don’t have any,” his father repeats into the phone. He sounds exhausted. He nods and then looks up at Oli. “She says she bought some yesterday—it’s near the bowl on the table where I put my car keys.” Oli isn’t going to use it. But it is sort of cool of Fiona to look out for him. At least she is keeping her shit together, so he goes into the kitchen, finds the sanitizer and puts it in his pocket. His fingers graze the card the policewoman left him, the corner accidently scrapes underneath his nail. He flinches like he does when he is woken by an alarm. She gave it to him in case he ever wanted to talk to her. “If you think of anything, anything at all that might be relevant. Anything that might give us an insight into your mum’s state of mind.”
He hasn’t called, even though the cop had said “anything” three times. Probably because of that. That desperate urgency she was trying to convey felt like a lot.
He has been wearing the same cargo pants for days now. No one nags him to put clothes in the wash basket. Leigh made a big deal about that. She was pretty chill most of the time, but washing was the thing that she could go a bit obsessive about. Nothing would be washed unless it was in the basket. She would basically conduct a stand-off until he complied. She’d watch him go around the room picking up T-shirts and stuff, like some sort of washing Nazi. Fiona cooked an awesome burger and chips supper the other night so it’s not as though he’s being neglected—he’s just not nagged. Fiona says she likes to keep busy and to have something to do. She put a wash on. He noticed because not only did she pick up his clothes from off the floor, but she changed his sheets too. Bit weird that, TBH. Leigh left him to strip his own bed because it’s a privacy thing, sheets and stuff. But Fiona means well. Probably Leigh just didn’t care so much and what looked like consideration at the time was in fact disinterest. Right?
He doesn’t know—it’s possible.
He doesn’t know Leigh. None of them do.
His head aches with thinking about it. He has to get out of the house.
He walks out of the front door, letting it slam loudly behind him. He doesn’t want to turn around or glance up as he expects his brother’s face will be stuck to his bedroom window, like it has been since Thursday morning. Eyes alert, scanning the street—left, right, as though he’s watching a pro-level tennis match—looking for his mother. Sad. Hopeless. His brother is taking this pretty badly. The front door slams again, which makes Oli turn around. Seb is not in his room—he is standing awkwardly on the step.
“You’re not coming with me,” Oli says, automatically.
“I didn’t ask to.”
“No, but you were going to.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“What have you got in your backpack?”
“Nothing.”
“Clearly you have something.” Seb is wearing his school backpack. It looks almost as bulky as when he is going to school and it’s full of a day’s textbooks.
“I’m going to my friend’s for a sleepover.”
“Which friend?”
Seb hesitates. He is not used to lying to his older brother. He is quite a straightforward kid but he clearly is about to lie because he has a tell—he juts out his chin when he’s being dishonest. Leigh identified it years ago, when he wasn’t much more than a baby. Everyone in the family knows when Seb is lying. “I’m going to Theo’s.” He sounds like he’s trying the name out. Asking Oli a question. Sort of, “Might I be going to my friend Theo’s house? Does it sound feasible?” Oli wonders if he’s running away. Off to try to find Leigh. It’s the kind of thing Oli himself might have thought about doing if he was twelve and none the wiser.