“Of course,” Noah said. “Good luck in your new town. I hope you don’t get sucked into an urban vortex of heroin and violent street crime.”
“Thanks, Noah.”
Noah stood at the urinals peeing, checking his watch because he was late to meet Harry and he wanted to get over and see Gran while visiting time was still on. On the plus side, at least most of the other students should have left by now, meaning the chances of any more trouble today would be slim. It was only as he zipped up and turned that he realized he wasn’t alone.
One of the cubicles was occupied, and the person inside was very quietly sobbing. Noah tiptoed to the furthest edge of the room and ducked down to see through the gap at the bottom of the door. He could only see the occupant’s rucksack, but it was the same rucksack that Harry had. And the person inside was wearing the same shoes that Harry wore.
Chances were, it was probably Harry inside. Noah hesitated and stared in the direction of the cubicle, listening to the quiet, muffled gulps and sobs. He felt terrible. He should help him.
But…
What should he say? What should he do? This was uncharted territory.
Noah felt awful. And Harry clearly felt awful. This whole gay thing was making them both feel awful.
He wished it had never happened.
“Haz?” he whispered, outside the locked door. “Haz? It’s me. Your friend Noah Grimes. You OK?”
There was a silence, then, “Yeah … yeah, I’m fine, Noah. Look, you’re right, maybe it’s best if you walk home alone today.”
Clearly, it wasn’t fine. Noah tapped on the cubicle door. “Can I come in?”
Harry sighed from inside. “Seriously, just go away.”
“Are you engaged in legitimate lavatorial business?”
Harry slammed the lock across and flung the door open. “No, I’m not ‘engaged in legitimate lavatorial business’! What’s wrong with you? Can’t you just leave me alone?”
Noah stared at him. Harry had red eyes and tear tracks down his cheeks. He looked wrecked. “What’s happened?” Noah said, desperately wanting to reach out and touch him.
Harry took a few unsteady breaths. “Nothing’s happened… I guess … it’s all just got to me a bit. I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine tomorrow. Just being stupid.” He nodded, looking like he was trying to convince himself. “You OK?”
Noah shrugged. “Suppose.”
Harry nodded again and wiped his eyes with his palms. “Get off home. Let’s just lie low and let things cool off for a bit.”
What the hell had happened? Something had, that was for sure. Something to make Harry change his mind. “How bad is it?” Noah asked.
Harry took a deep breath, then looked directly at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shut the door in Noah’s face.
“Haz!”
And slid the bolt.
Noah sighed. This was all too much. This was all one stupid, crazy mess. He needed to talk to someone about this. He needed Gran. He shook his head and walked off, slipping silently out into the corridor.
“All right, Noah?” said a voice from behind him.
Startled, Noah whipped round and saw Eric Smith staring at him, greasy hair stuck to his sweaty-looking face. “All right?” Noah replied, immediately sensing that Eric was up to something illicit and shady.
Eric stared at him for what seemed like for ever, with an entirely expressionless face. “You’re here late,” he said eventually.
“So are you.”
And Eric nodded and smiled. “See ya, then.”
“Yeah. Bye,” Noah said, unable to walk away fast enough. God, that boy creeped him out.
“George! At last!” his gran said, turning the volume down on “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi as Noah poked his nose into her room.
“It’s Noah, Gran.”
“Where’s George? What have you done with him?”
“We cremated him two years ago, Gran.”
“You’ve BURNT him? BURNT him alive?! He wasn’t Joan of friggin’ Arc, you nonce!”
Noah didn’t have the energy to argue, so he muttered a quiet “sorry” and sat on the edge of the bed, loosening his tie because it was so insanely hot in there. Gran closed the door and shut the curtains. In the half-light provided by the miserable energy-saving light bulb, she pulled a rolled-up sheet of paper from her underwear drawer, sat next to Noah and unfurled it.
“What’s this, Gran?” he asked.
“Look carefully.”
It appeared to be a ground plan of the Willows, complete with dimensions, elevations and a series of dotted red lines.
“Oh! It’s—”
“Don’t say!” she interrupted. “They bug the rooms! They’re listening!” she whispered. “I KNOW YOU’RE LISTENING!” she suddenly shouted into the room.
“What are you doing with this, Gran?”
“Dickie stole it from the admin office. Our codebreakers have had no luck trying to crack the combination for the main door. And that’s even with Vera, who worked at Bletchley Park in the bloody war! This was a woman who helped crack the Enigma machine, for pity’s sake. I said to her, I said, ‘It’s four sodding numbers, how hard can it be?!’ She can’t even do the Sun sudoku now, poor cow. Anyhow, we’re having to look at other options. The main door is a no-go, but the emergency trouser presses are not! As you can see from this plan, those trouser presses are located here, here and here,” she said, pointing to sections of the map where fire escape doors were.
“Gran, what are you planning? Some sort of jailbreak?” he asked.
“Sssh! No! We don’t say that word. What we are doing,” she whispered, “is taking some laundry to the launderette.”
“OK. And when are you going to the launderette?”
“The best time is in the early hours of the morning. That’s when they have only a skeleton staff on. Vera has agreed to pull her emergency cord at zero three hundred hours, and in the ensuing mayhem me and Dickie will take our laundry to the launderette using the closest trouser press at the end of this corridor.”
She seemed pleased with what she obviously considered to be a foolproof plan, but Noah had his doubts. The emergency fire escapes may not be locked, but they would almost certainly be alarmed. And what were she and Dickie planning on doing once outside? Would they be scaling the fence like ninjas, with her replacement hip and his pacemaker?
But Gran clearly felt she had it all sorted out. “From there,” she continued, “a waiting ice-cream van will take us down to Dover, where we shall board a ferry and set sail … for Barbados!”
“You’re going to Barbados on a ferry? Really?”
Gran tutted. “Oh ye of little faith!” She rolled the map back up and handed it to Noah. “Put it in the top drawer,” she instructed him, “good and hidden.”
He did as he was told, then sat back down and gave her a gentle smile. The details of her plan, taken in isolation, were funny. The reason for them most certainly was not. He didn’t want to have to humour Gran about her crazy escape plot. He didn’t want her to come up with the ideas in the first place. He wanted her like she was before – when she was together and conversations made sense. When she remembered stuff. When she was his gran and she looked out for him. But maybe, just maybe, she still could. “Everyone’s saying stuff about me and Harry,” he said.
“Why’s that?” she sniffed.
“’Cause they saw us… He was holding my hand. No, not holding it exactly, more just touching it.”
Gran raised an eyebrow. “Go on—”
“I mean, it was totally innocent. Totally. A misunderstanding, really.”
“I wouldn’t call a handsome young man like Harry holding your hand a ‘misunderstanding’. I’d call it a bloody result!”
Noah chuckled. Classic Gran. “OK, it wasn’t a misunderstanding. But it was a surprise.”
“Oooh!” Her eyes lit up. “Tell me everything!”
He dropped his eyes to the floor. “T
here’s not much to tell, really. We were at a party and we held hands … and he kissed me, but that bit’s totally secret ’cause no one knows about it and it doesn’t mean I’m gay.”
“Uh-huh.” Gran grinned.
“But you know that, right? It doesn’t mean I’m gay.”
“Gay, straight, it’s all the same. Kiss who you want, I say. You can’t help whom you love. I had a dalliance once with a girl called Meredith Southgate.”
“What? Really?” said Noah, not really wanting to know, but at the same time, really wanting to know.
“Don’t you be wrinkling your nose like that!” she scolded him. “You should be a bit more open-minded. I used to be your age, you know. And one day you’ll be mine, and then you can reassure your grandchildren that all the nonsense they’ve got up to is nothing new and you’ve already been there, done that, got the tea cosy.”
“T-shirt.”
“Just chill out about it, Peanut. You’re probably making it a hundred times worse for yourself by worrying. If you don’t care, no one else will either – react and you play straight into their hands.”
Maybe she was right. Old people usually were. People could probably see it was stressing him out, so they were just winding him up even more.
“You know what I did when they found out about me and Meredith?” she said. “I embraced it. I didn’t deny it. Although I didn’t confirm it either. I was aloof about the whole thing. Maintained an air of dignified silence and mystery. And you know what happened?”
“What?”
“I had young men flocking to me! People love someone who is a bit exotic. They are drawn to them. Especially if they handle their exotic-ness well.”
“How do you handle it well, though?”
“You must be bold, Noah. You must be bold and brave. Be dignified in your silence and watch them fall into your lap.”
Even placed in the context of her dementia, it did seem like it might work. If he didn’t give them bait, they would stop biting.
When he was with Gran, everything seemed to make sense. Massive problems didn’t seem so massive once Gran had dealt with them. He got up and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks, Gran.”
“Young Harry’s a nice lad.”
“Yeah. He is. He is nice,” Noah said, sadly. The nicest person he knew. He didn’t want not to be best friends.
“Maybe you’ll think about it,” his gran said. “Nice people are hard to find. You should hang on to them.”
“We’re still mates. It’s just…” Complicated now?
“You know what I would do? What I did? Don’t try to label it. Don’t even think about what it is. Just enjoy the moment. And remember that no moment is for ever. And other moments come along. And sometimes they’re even better. Sometimes they’re worse. But don’t fret about it. People always like to talk, but ask yourself: in the grand scheme of things, in the total insignificance of our tiny lives in this massive universe, who gives a shit?”
Noah smiled. He felt a bit better. Surely he could cope with a bit of ribbing, and they would get bored once they weren’t getting a reaction from him, and it would all die down.
“In other news,” Noah said, “Mum has clearly given up all hope of Dad coming back, thinks he’s dead and is actively dating.”
Noah watched as Gran tried to piece together what he’d just said. “Who’s dead?” she said, finally.
“No, he’s not dead. At least, I don’t think he is. But that’s what Mum thinks. Probably.” He screwed his face up, acutely aware he was not making this any clearer. He tried again. “My dad. Your son—”
“Yes…”
“Is missing. Hasn’t been here for years.”
“Well, where is he? Little toerag; when I get my hands on him—”
Noah breathed in for five, held for three, out for five. “I know, you’ll kill him,” Noah said. “In the meantime, as far as Mum is concerned, he’s already dead, because even though she’s still married, she is dating a new man.”
“I never liked your mother. I told Brian not to marry her. ‘She’s trouble,’ I said to him. ‘She’s fickle!’ He wouldn’t listen. Never listens. And now she’s killed him!”
“No, Gran, that’s not exactly what I—”
“Who is it? Who’s this new man?”
Noah shrugged. “She won’t tell me.”
Gran sat up, clearly intrigued. “She’s trying to keep him secret, eh? He’s probably in on the whole thing – keeping me locked up here so I don’t cause any trouble too! Got suspects?”
“Affirmative. One at present.”
“Evidence?”
“Nothing that would stand up in court. Yet.”
“Keep a low profile. People slip up eventually. A word here, a look there. You’ll spot the clue you need. How do you feel about it, anyway?”
“Pretty grossed out,” Noah said. “I mean, she’s forty; surely celibacy would be the best thing now?”
Gran stifled a grin. “You don’t think people over forty should have sex?”
“Well…”
“Because I can tell you, since Dickie got his new pacemaker, and a job lot of Viagra, things have certainly been more interesting around here.”
Noah froze and stared at her with horrified eyes.
Gran gave a heavy sigh and shook her head. “You really need to lighten up, mister.”
He felt his cheeks glowing. “What? No, that’s great… I mean, it’s really cool. I love the idea of old people having sex. No, wait, that came out wrong. I mean…” He floundered to a halt. It wasn’t just the image that was now burnt into his brain. It was the fact that literally everyone else was doing it. Except him. And he was the teenager. It should be him having all the sex. It said so in books and TV programmes. It was all wrong. He was being left behind by the rest of the entire world.
“I’m pulling your leg.”
“Oh.”
“It was a joke.”
“Oh. Ha ha. Yeah. Good one, Gran.”
Gran nodded. “Get off home. And if you see George, tell him I’ll find him just as soon as we’ve made the escape. There’s a tea shop on the promenade in Broadstairs. Tell him I’ll meet him there.”
Noah sighed and stood up. “Righto.”
“Who are you again?”
“Noah, Gran! I’m Noah.”
His mum was out of the house. He was alone. And hungry. He was on his knees, rifling through the detritus that was stacked up at the bottom of his mum’s wardrobe. All manner of garbage was here – from Christmas decorations to boxes of old photographs and even some old exercise books from when his mum was at school. There were her algebra assignments, which he had pleasure in noticing were covered in red crosses and had been graded “D” – which was probably the teacher just trying to be encouraging, because as far as he could see she hadn’t got a single sum correct.
Somewhere in here she must have hidden the special biscuits she brought out yesterday for Harry’s visit. And he would find those biscuits. They were his destiny, his birthright. The wardrobe was the only place left; he’d already searched the whole house, even sifting through his mother’s knicker drawer with a pair of barbecue tongs, carefully lifting each thong like it was radioactive waste. But there had been no delicious biccies anywhere.
Exploring deeper into this pound-shop version of Narnia now, he came across a metal biscuit tin. Ha! Now he could have all the Jammie Dodgers he wanted. He prised the lid off and raised an eyebrow.
What the hell was this? A wad of ten-pound notes, maybe a hundred quid’s worth? They were skint! They never had enough money for anything nice and only just about got by paying the nasty red bills in the nick of time. A hundred quid was a lot of money. To him, anyway.
The tin also contained a small bundle of envelopes. Addressed to his mother. Letters. Presumably these were from his mother’s distant past, written by horse-riding suitors, perhaps, asking for her hand in marriage once the war was over … and other stuff that used to happen in t
he nineties. To his surprise, however, the first letter was dated just a year ago.
Under the light of his torch he read down, his throat tightening on every word, his breath quickening and his heart pounding.
“No one has heard from him for six years,” his mother had said. “He’s assumed dead, Noah. We just have to move on.”
The letter was from his dad.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Calle Santa Maria 21 – 3a
28012 – Madrid
Spain
Lisa!
How’s tricks? You good? I’m great! Life here continues to be a picnic… sun, sea, sand … but nothing else beginning with “s” – I’m behaving myself, sort of! Ha ha!
How’s Noah? Say hi from me and give him some fatherly advice – stick a rubber on it! Wish someone had told me that all those years ago! Ha ha!
I’m still at the same address if you want to contact me, but I’ve changed my name! Who wants to be boring old Brian Grimes when I can be Jon Mortimer. Sounds pretty good, eh? Great name for a top businessman! Ha!
Filthy lucre enclosed.
Peace out,
J. xx
He had to read it five times before it sank in.
His dad wasn’t dead.
He was alive.
Alive, living in Spain and sending money to support them.
He grabbed another letter from the tin and opened it with trembling hands:
Hola from España!
How you doing, Lisa? Things are good here. Had to get rid of a business partner this week – he wanted the spoils but didn’t have enough skin in the game, you get me? No sweat though, bagged myself five new investors since then. Means we can start the build next month and then BOOM! That’s a cool million in pure profit. Just gotta keep the bank sweet for a few weeks – wanna come over and do a little show to distract them?! Ha ha!
I’m between addresses at the moment, so I’ll write when the new one is sorted out.
Bit of dosh enclosed. Sorry it’s not the normal amount. Am selling the car so I’ll make it up next time. I’m doing my best, Lisa. I’m trying, babe. Give me a chance, yeah?
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