The mattress rises, levitates just slightly. Mal’s heart goes ba ba ba. He raises a pudgy hand up his chest, as close to the centre of it as it will go, his fat fingers massaging the mottled skin like he might pluck the beating instrument out.
‘I gave Mum twenty years of loving someone. I kept her alive.’
‘And Dad?’ I say.
‘Look at him,’ he says.
I do, turning the cogs of his crane. He is joy. ‘A new photograph.’
‘I gave you Lou,’ he says.
I don’t move.
‘When?’ I say.
‘Now,’ he says.
I close my eyes.
‘You?’ I say.
‘Think what my life would have been. Normal. Now look around you,’ he says. ‘You’re in my picture.’
I feel his pursed lips on my cheek. I wrap an arm around the stump of his neck, lay across his hot flesh, feel the gradual winching upwards of Dad’s invention taking his son from the house. The display on the wall ticks over. Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Four. Outside is pandemonium.
‘I’m scared,’ he says.
‘Don’t be,’ I say, and the strain welds pained wrinkles in his face. ‘You’re an uncle,’ I say.
I kiss him on the wet tip of his nose, step slowly down from the mattress that hovers now two three four feet in the air, and look up at Dad. He is turning the handle of the huge wheel that triggers the complex mechanism that lifts the hundred-stone man up inside such a small space, and he is smiling and he is alive and he is done, he is there to be cared for once more. I think of how well Mum will do it and how happy it will make her. All she ever wanted.
I leave as the bed rises slowly through the roof.
Taking Lou’s hand, I leave through the front door. My legs stop hurting. I don’t see Mal leave the house, and as we walk back to the car together the beeps of the machinery protract to one long one.
84
Me and Lou, we don’t hear Mal’s name so much any more. It is there all of the time but turned down quietly in the background, soft, like the trundle of the trains on the track behind your house.
I meet my son on the beach, where his granddad, Lou’s dad, has him in his arms. I walk with him into the ocean. Neither of us have been into the sea before.
Acknowledgements
I am in scary amounts of debt to the priceless patience, advice and friendship of both my agent, Cathryn Summerhayes, and my editor, Francis Bickmore.
Thank you to Becky Thomas and Eugenie Furniss at WME, Jamie Byng and everyone at Canongate and Paul Whitlatch at Scribner.
Thank you to the clever people from To Hell With Publishing, Laurence Johns, Lucy Owen, Dean Ricketts and Emma Young, and their judges, India Knight, Greg Eden and Kwame Kwei-Armah.
Thank you to my family, Mum, Dad, Alison, Glenn, Darren, Alex and the ones who can’t read yet, William, Oliver, Thomas and Anna.
Thank you to all of my mates.
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