“And how likely is that?”
“I can’t possibly comment at this early stage, Mr. Jensen—but Luca was fit prior to the collision, and more importantly, is physically mature. Even a child as old as twelve would have been killed.”
Mr. Jensen’s nod was the jerkiest, shortest one Tav had ever seen. He looked like he was going to cry, or punch the wall. Or both. Tav, for his part, simply felt numb. Luca didn’t look like Luca. His face was completely smashed up, he looked smaller than Tav could ever remember seeing him, and he was so…so still. Even asleep, Luca was squirmy. Tav had learned to cling to him if they shared a bed, or he’d get elbowed in the gut at least three times a night.
There was a scratchy lump in his throat, and Tav swallowed very hard to keep tears at bay.
“Boys,” Mr. Jensen said quietly. “Paolo, I want you to go to Antonio’s for the night. Angelo, Tomas, you will stay with Laura Pretty and―”
“We’re staying together,” Antonio said roughly. “Either we stay together at home, or we all stay with the Prettys. Whichever Mrs. Pretty prefers.”
“Mam won’t mind,” Tav whispered.
Mamma Alessandra made a choked noise and spread her arms to gather her four remaining sons into a hard hug. It was impossible she could hug all of them at once, and yet they crowded in and made it possible.
“We’re going to stay with Luca tonight, boys,” she crooned, patting their shoulders and hair as though checking them over. She still looked tearful, but dignified again. “Just in case.”
“But you’ll call,” Antonio said roughly. “If anything happens, you’ll call.”
“Of course,” she said, and took each of their faces in turn to kiss them on the cheeks. Tav took the opportunity to edge around the little bundle and slide up to the side of the bed. He didn’t dare touch, not the way Luca looked and not after the dire warning the doctor had offered, but…but…
He bent low over the bed, and whispered into Luca’s ear. “Get better, yeah?” No response, and Tav swallowed. “Just…get better.”
He wanted to say—God, he didn’t even know, a million things, a hundred million—anything. But he didn’t, not with Luca’s whole family and the doctor right behind, and he straightened instead, scrubbing the heel of his hand over his eyes and taking a deep breath.
“I’ll get Mam,” he mumbled, and made his escape.
Tactfully, when he found her again, she said nothing about the tears on his face.
* * * *
It was past noon when Tav woke up, and only then because Tomas was snoring.
They’d squashed all of Luca’s brothers into their house, and nobody had gone to bed until nearly three. Becky had moved into Amy’s room to let Angelo take her bed, and Tomas had been set up on the campbed on Tav’s floor. Antonio and Paolo had been left in the living room, and Luca’s parents…well, Luca’s parents hadn’t come home at all.
Tav slid out of bed and retreated from the wintry sun by stepping over Tomas and heading downstairs. He could smell food, and hear quiet voices in the living room when he passed it.
But Mam was alone in the kitchen.
“Oh, Tav,” she murmured, softer than she’d spoken to him for years, and Tav clung to the offered hug like…well, he hadn’t done for years either. Not until last night, anyway. He buried his face in her shoulder and inhaled deeply, grounding himself. Fuck being too old for this. Suddenly—fiercely, childishly, and undeniably—he just wanted a hug from his mam. “Tav? He’s going to be alright.”
“Have they called?”
“Yes.”
Tav pulled back, startled. “But you said—if they called―”
“They called at nine o’clock,” she said quietly, “to tell me that they kept watch all night, and Luca didn’t so much as twitch. He’s going into surgery again this afternoon, and we can go back up to the hospital at five o’clock to see him if we want to. His parents are staying with Paul’s brother in Hillsborough to get some rest―”
“Why haven’t they come back?”
Mam paused, then sighed. “I don’t think Alessandra can quite face the house with one of her boys not in it,” she admitted quietly, and Tav’s gut twisted. Mam sighed and stroked his hair. “He’s going to be alright, Tav. He’s a fighter, your Luca. He’s in good health―”
“He was before Jack shoved him under a taxi.”
“―which means he stands a good chance,” Mam continued bullishly.
Someone cleared their throat, and Tav broke away from her entirely. Paolo was hovering in the doorway, curls ruffled and eyes bleary. “Sorry,” he rasped, his voice oddly deep. Like Tav, he appeared to have only just got up. “Could I get some water or something?”
“Oh, don’t be daft, help yourself,” Mam said. “There’s plenty of juice in the fridge.”
Paolo flashed her a smile reminiscent of Luca’s, and Tav’s gut twisted again, and more violently than before. “Alright?”
“No,” Tav admitted. “You?”
Paolo shrugged.
“I’ve just been telling Tav that your mother called at nine to say there was no change. She and your father are staying with your uncle…oh, what was it…Dan?”
“Stan,” Paolo corrected, and nodded. “Thanks. I’ll…I’ll tell the others in a minute.”
Mam squeezed his shoulder, but said nothing, and once he’d filled two glasses with orange juice, Paolo shuffled back out to the living room.
“What if he’s crippled, Mam?”
“Then he’s crippled,” Mam said flatly, “and he will adapt, and learn to cope, and all of his family and you will help him.”
“But what if he’s―”
“Tav. Sit down, have a drink, have some breakfast. You’re off school today, obviously, but you’re not going to sit around fussing and worrying. You can help me—all of you can, now I have five men in the house who can help me get that shed cleared that Ian keeps refusing to set foot in…”
Tav managed to cough a dry laugh from somewhere, and let her give him a (mild) bollocking. Grudgingly, he had to admit she was right. There wasn’t any point in worrying, because he didn’t know. And frankly…honestly, Tav would take crippled. Luca wouldn’t, but Tav would. Crippled wasn’t dead. He’d still be here. He’d still be Tav’s, no matter what. He’d still come home, and be Luca, even if he’d forgotten how to speak English and they had to cut his mangled legs off. Tav would just learn Italian, easy. And you could get prosthetic legs these days.
“I’m going up to hospital later with them,” he said quietly. “M’gonna go every day until he wakes up. And then…still every day.”
She brushed a hand over his hair and stooped to kiss his forehead. “He’ll be alright, Tav,” she said quietly. “Now you just need to be there for him when he needs you—but right now, he is blissfully ignorant of everything, and he’s safe. Alright? Now. Toast or shall we keep it quiet from Ian and have a cheeky fry-up without him?”
Tav cracked a faint smile, and opted—despite the snakes in his stomach and the pain in his gut—for the fry-up.
Chapter 24: “Jack shoved him, and Luca went right over that taxi.”
Tav was allowed just that one day off school. He went back to the hospital in the evening to see Luca—who was exactly the same, but with the sheets pulled down over his legs and his hair washed—and Mam had even allowed him to get KFC on the way home. But after that, apparently, his recovery period was over, and he was rudely awoken the next morning for school.
“I already spoke to Alessandra this morning,” Mam snapped, standing over his bed with her arms folded and wearing the definite do not fuck with me, young man face. “He’s stable. He’s not going to die. He’s out of the woods.”
“He’s in a coma!”
“Because the doctor has put him there to recover,” Mam retorted. “He’s not going to die, Tav, and you can’t afford to fall any further behind in your schoolwork than you already have. I don’t want a son who fails all his A-levels because he can’t
be bothered!”
“What does it matter?” Tav yelled back. “I don’t care about A-levels, I care about Luca!”
“And Luca is going to recover, so you are going to school if I have to drive you there myself and call every one of your teachers today to check you’re attending classes! And I will!”
Tav swallowed, and sat back against his pillows, jaw working furiously. He didn’t want to go. He violently didn’t want to go. “If I see Collins, I’m going to rip his face off.”
“I very much doubt he’ll be at school either,” Mam said quietly. “Not after all of this, and what you told the police last time.”
“They won’t have nicked him.”
“They’ll have talked to him, though. And if he did push Luca, then he’ll know you’re going to—what did you say?—rip his face off, won’t he?”
Tav shrugged.
“Tav, love.” Mam sat on the edge of his bed and ruffled his hair. He scowled at her, but she merely gave him a sad smile. Her face was open and calm, for once, and it soothed a little of Tav’s temper. “I promise I will give you a ring on your mobile if anything changes. I’m off work today and I’ll keep an eye and ear on their house, okay? If anything happens, I will come and pick you up and drive you to the hospital myself. I promise. Alright?”
Tav ground the heel of his hand against his eye, dropping his gaze to the bedsheets pooled around his waist. He didn’t want to go. He hated the idea of going—it felt wrong, when Luca was comatose in a hospital bed on his own, for Tav to be going to fucking school, and who cared about classes when Luca was on so many drugs he was officially in a not-quite-dead-but-nearly sleep, but…
“I think it’ll do you and your mates a bit of good to see each other, eh?” Mam prompted, and Tav caved in.
“Okay,” he said, and finally got out of bed.
Loathe as he was to admit it, Mam had a bit of a point. Tav didn’t even know yet who’d been with Luca at the time, where he’d been going, whether anyone had flat-out seen what Tav suspected had happened. Luca wasn’t a retard; Tav knew he wouldn’t have slipped off the pavement. Who even did that? But if nobody had outright seen Jack do it, the police weren’t going to do shit, no matter what Tav had told them. So if nothing else, he had to find out the details—the proper details—from whoever knew them who wasn’t Jack Collins.
And then rip Jack’s face off.
* * * *
Luca’d died.
He was sure he’d died. Everything was warm and soft. His brain felt wrapped in cotton wool, and someone was stroking his hair and singing to him. It sounded a bit like Mamma, only Mamma wasn’t dead, so obviously it couldn’t be her. Maybe it was Nonna Antonelli. He barely remembered Nonna, but he could remember she smelled of flowers and she used to brush all their hair every morning when they went to Italy to visit, and sing hymns while she did it. Proper old hymns, in Latin they’d still spoken in churches when Nonna had been a girl. It had sounded beautiful, he could remember.
Yes, it must be Nonna.
But Luca didn’t have the energy or inclination to open his eyes. He didn’t particularly want to be dead, and he hadn’t really been missing Nonna. He didn’t remember enough to miss her, and so her voice gave him no urgency. He was perfectly relaxed right at that moment, content in this heavy mist, and he tried to slip back under the heavy veil of sleep and chase whatever dreams he’d been having.
Still…it would be mean to pretend he hadn’t heard her. She’d been the nice one in Italy, really. Granddad had been horrible, and none of Mamma’s brothers would ever come and see them. It had only ever been Nonna they went to see, so he tried as hard as possible to move. A quick hello would do, then he could sleep again, surely?
Only his body felt like lead beyond the cotton-wool-wrapping of his brain, and he barely moved his face a fraction into the brush after even a monumental effort. It felt pathetic and faintly disturbing, but the singing paused, and Nonna pressed a kiss to his forehead.
“Ssh, Luca,” she murmured. “You sleep and get better, eh? Ssh.”
He would have laughed, if he hadn’t been so tired. Daft Nonna. Heaven hadn’t improved her general battiness and tendency to say odd things. Get better, really. How were you supposed to get better when you were dead, eh?
* * * *
Word had spread during Tav’s day off. The minute he walked through the school gates, people were stopping and staring at him. The whispers followed him like ghosts, but he didn’t care. Fuck ‘em. Fuck them all, and fuck all their whispering, too—he had to find Aaron, or David, or whoever would have been with Luca. It would have been one of them; if Luca wasn’t with his family or Tav, he was with Aaron or David. He didn’t do solitude like Tav did. He would have been with someone, especially Aaron. Aaron had been as angry as Tav about Luca blowing off Jack’s threats. Aaron would have been with Luca, surely?
Tav went to their tutor group’s classroom first, but it was too early, so he retreated to the lockers. David was nowhere to be found, because David always arrived barely-in-time, but Aaron’s fair hair was half-hidden in his locker, and Tav hauled him out by the shoulder without so much as a greeting.
“What happened?”
“How is he?”
They spoke at the same time, and Tav scowled. “Not dead,” he reported. “What happened?”
“What’d he say happened?”
“Hasn’t said anything, he’s drugged up to his eyeballs and in some shitty medical coma crap,” Tav hissed. He felt angry and agitated, clenching his fists against his sides. It wasn’t even Aaron’s fault, but God, Tav wanted to hit him.
“Fuck.”
“Police said he fell off the fucking pavement.”
Aaron snorted. “Didn’t fall.” His voice was short and sharp, nothing like the genial, laid-back guy that Luca had hung around with since primary school. If anything, he sounded more like Tav, and it was unsettling. Aaron didn’t do mad. He didn’t even do irritable; Aaron was everyone’s mate, the perpetually popular kid no matter what.
But right now, his jaw was clenched and a muscle was twitching under his cheekbone. Tav slammed one of his clenched fists into a random locker door, never turning away from—or taking his eyes off—Aaron’s oddly furious face.
“It was Collins,” Tav said.
He knew. He just knew. He’d known in the hospital, and he knew now, looking at Aaron’s tense, grim face.
“It was Collins,” he repeated. “You told the police, right? They’ve talked to you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you said―”
“I told them the truth,” Aaron said sharply. “Jack shoved him, and Luca went right over that taxi.”
A red haze tinged the edge of Tav’s vision, and he felt his own hands trembling. He knew it. He knew it—and fuck the police, fuck his mam, fuck Aaron, fuck the Jensens, fuck Luca especially. Because Tav was going to kill Jack Collins.
“What happened, Aaron?”
Aaron snorted. “Fucking Collins happened. Middle of Eccy Road—we were heading into town, you know? You and Luca had, uh, your row or whatever it was and he was pretty pissed off so we canned my house and decided to go to Ponds Forge, do some widths. Me, David and Luc. And then Collins comes out of nowhere, shouting his mouth off about how the police were at his door the other morning asking about him and his aunt or whoever thinks he’s getting into criminal shit―”
“He fucking well is!”
“Yeah, well, now his aunt thinks he is, and he was crazy with it, Tav, it was mental. Only Luca wasn’t in the best mood, so he started sounding off in return, saying shit like how Jack was afraid ‘cause he thought gays touch people up―”
“What?”
Aaron shook his head. “Luca’s said to me he reckons Jack’s been touched up by some old perv and he’s taking it out on gays, and that’s what he threw at Jack. And Jack lost his shit and they fought. He were fighting anyone, even hit a couple of randomers in the street, proper lost it, all these peopl
e watching, and me and David were trying to break it up…”
“And then Jack pushed him.”
“Yeah,” Aaron agreed. “Just…shoved him in the chest, shoved him into the road.”
Tav punched the locker again.
“I don’t—fuck, mate, I don’t know if he saw the cab or what, I dunno that he meant for Luca to go in front of the car, but he shoved him proper hard, right off the pavement. And then the taxi—it was, like, ten feet from him, the guy couldn’t do anything, and―”
Aaron stopped abruptly, and slammed his locker. He was sheet-white, aside from two high spots of pink in his cheeks. He looked torn between upset and angry, his eyes too wide for fury but his jaw too tight for sorrow.
“Then he just…he just went right over it like a fucking busted up doll and people started screaming. The windscreen had this huge crack in it, and it was bloody. And he just…lay there. Me and David, we were fucking freaking, how do you do first aid to your best mate when a taxi’s just chucked him fifteen feet down a road? We didn’t dare move him, and…fuck, Tav, I thought he was dead. I…I honestly thought he was fucking dead.”
“He’s not.”
Aaron’s anger had calmed Tav’s. The wide, lost look in his eyes was one Tav knew he’d had himself only yesterday, and he gripped Aaron’s elbow hard in one hand.
“He’s not,” he repeated. “They said he’s gonna be fine. He’s talked to his mam, between the drugs, and he can move his feet apparently. He’s not gonna die.”
“If he’d died, you’d never have got to Jack before I did,” Aaron muttered darkly, and Tav laughed hoarsely.
“Shall we split him between us?”
“Yeah. I’ll kick his arse, then you can make his worst nightmares come true and fuck it.”
“Oh, fuck off, Kowalski, I don’t deserve that.”
They were both laughing in hoarse, high tones then, a little too shaky to be real, but then Aaron clenched his jaw and shook his head.
“I told the police everything. Everything I knew.”
The Italian Word for Kisses Page 22