“Stop.” I pulled on flannel pajama pants and a sweatshirt, cold all over despite the bath. “It’s a lie.”
Penelope stuck her head into the room, mouth foaming with toothpaste, pinning me with a look. A minute later she was back. “Mostly,” she said, “I feel sorry for the poor soldier in Vietnam. Shouldn’t he be the one we’re thinking about tonight?”
“Ohmygod!” I said. “Why are you so quick to believe Adrian of all people, before even listening to me?”
Kirsten stood in the doorway.
“What was your rule again?” said Pen. “Concerning other people’s brothers?”
Kirsten ignored her.
“Kirsten! I swear! I did not get off with Luke!”
Kirsten ignored me too.
I already had one fake boyfriend. Now there were two. Luke’s secret … was his. I’d just pretend not to know. Even Penelope and Oona couldn’t stir up a romance between us. But Matt was something else. I had to fix this. What if I said that Matt had realized his tour of duty was too long for me to wait, or maybe that he’d met someone else? Easier to lie than be straight, at this point. I’d tell one more and start fresh.
I got out a minute early from History the next morning, saying I needed the loo. I went straight to the sheet where the letters and parcels were listed. Today’s letter would be the one. I’d have red eyes and not want to talk about it for a day.
I made a pencil stroke next to my name, thinking how the real me wanted to keep writing to Matt, how I’d have to figure out how to mail stuff without anyone knowing. He needed my letters, I knew he did. And if he wrote another one? If only.
“Do you have post?” Penelope stood next to me, Esther peering over her shoulder at the list.
“Yes,” I said. “One.”
Penelope was looking at my pencil.
“So.” Luke was suddenly behind me at the tea urn after lunch. “You went for a walk down the woods by yourself.”
It seemed as if the entire dining hall hushed as tea trickled into my mug. As if we’d stepped onstage.
“Yes. I did.”
“And now there’s this rumour going around.”
“Yeah, crazy, right?” I stirred in sugar from the tin, slowly, slowly.
“I hope you don’t …” He was whispering, no doubt feeling every eyeball and earhole in the room pulsing and stretching in our direction. “This has been a messed-up week,” he said. “A kid I know got hurt because of a rumour. It’s … I swear, I didn’t say anything, you know, to make them think … Where did you go walking …?”
His eyelashes were thick and dark, his eyes trying to pierce me. My chest was warm, like when Mom rubbed on Vicks for a cough.
Was he asking, Had I seen him?
“Rumors are dumb,” I said.
He stuck out his lower lip and blew upward, fluttering his hair.
“No offence,” he said. “You’re really nice and everything. Especially after … that other time, when I was … But you’re, you know, a friend of my sister … older …”
I leaned in and put my hand on his arm, ever so softly, not wanting to scare him away.
“Plus,” I said, “I’m a girl.”
He winced, but I held on. He didn’t know enough to realize that most of what I said was not necessarily reliable. But I wanted my hand to explain that he could be with anyone he wanted, that I wouldn’t tell. Not telling the truth was my specialty.
“Excuse me, lovebirds. Some of us need access to the tea urn.” Adrian waved his mug in our faces. Luke jerked back, banging his hip against the table, setting off a massive wobble. Managing not to slosh my tea, I retreated right out of the dining hall, down the corridor to the Girls’ Changing Room. I balanced my mug on the back of the sink and looked in the mirror, trying to see a person who could be trusted with a giant, dangerous secret.
I knew someone would show up at the Swamp before afternoon lessons. A feeble sun brightened what had started as a regular gray English day. I rubbed my eyes, jamming my fingernails into the corners, drumming up a sting.
“Hallo.” Percy dropped down next to me on the edge of the fountain. “You look completely forlorn.”
Kirsten sat on my other side. She’d forgiven me? She believed me about Luke? All the more reason to go ahead. I hugged my notebook, corner of envelope peeking out.
“I’ve heard from Matt.”
“She heard from Matt,” Kirsten announced. Penelope and Adrian passed a cigarette back and forth. “But what’s wrong?”
“He … he broke up with me.”
“Oh no!” Kirsten and Percy lunged to embrace me, arms banging across my back.
“Lucky day for Lukey.” Adrian dropped the cigarette and did a little butt-crushing dance.
“Shut it, Adrian,” said Percy.
“Or Percy here.” Adrian kicked Percy’s boot. “He’s having wet dreams about you every night.”
“Shut it, Adrian,” said Kirsten. “What did he say, Jenny? What’s his reason?”
My eyes watered, she was being so sweet.
“When did you hear this news?” Penelope took another cigarette from behind her ear.
“My letter today.”
“Really?” she said. “That’s odd. Because when I asked Hairy Mary if I could take your post, she said your name must have got a tick by mistake, that you didn’t have a letter after all.”
Now I cried. Burning-hot angry tears poured out. I couldn’t stop, and no one except Penelope knew why I was crying.
“Anyone got a packet of matches?” she said.
percy
The letter comes on a Wednesday by second post. A tick beside Percy Graham on the list in the hallway is so rare that he leans in till his nose nearly touches the page, making sure the mark is not misplaced from Luke Flanders above or Ben Hawthorne below.
Percy does not recognize the handwriting. But the stamp is a little Queen’s head in cream on mulberry, announcing that the sender is in England. Inside, the letter had been written on a typewriter and signed with a scrawling Mick above more typed words in parentheses: (Michael Malloy, your father).
Percy stuffs the letter into his jeans pocket without reading it, and sits down right there on the stairs outside Matron’s office, where the post is distributed. His chest is suddenly tight, and he wonders where he left his inhaler. He’d better be able to breathe before he reads a letter from the dad not seen for nine years.
“Christ,” says Adrian, purposely tripping over him. “Could you pick a worse spot, Chicken Boner?”
Percy Graham does not have his father’s name, because, as his mother frequently reminds him, he does not have a father. She doesn’t say it spitefully, nor exactly sadly, but rather the logical explanation of a fact.
She doesn’t stint on facts. There was someone who had helped her make Percy. His name was Mick Malloy. He was that white-skinned fellow who came to Percy’s sixth birthday party and held a camera the whole time. Maybe someday Percy would meet him again. He now worked as a film director and she’d even heard that he was quite a success. He sent money. But a father he was not.
The letter tells Percy—when he finally reads it down at the Swamp before tea—that he is about to see his father. This very weekend. Mick Malloy is coming to visit, Saturday at noon.
Roughly sixty-six hours from now.
Lessons, chess club, meals, sleep.
Percy has seen his father’s films, of course. Five so far, at least twice each. (In forty years, when he owns a box set of Mick’s life’s work on DVD, Percy will know the films frame by frame, but at sixteen he relies on a version of passion to imprint them on his brain.)
The first time, and ever after, he’d gone to the cinema alone, without telling his mother, using every bit of his pocket money for bus fare and ticket. He was overcome, there in the dark, with all the feelings he could never, not ever admit to anyone. The film itself, Left Behind, was scary, all right. That image of the kid’s face at the window, when the audience knows that no one i
s coming back for him? Percy wept, gripping the flocked velveteen arms of his seat till the shuddering stopped. But even beyond that, he realized, last to stumble out of the cinema, he’d been hoping for … what if there’d been … a dedication, like there always was in a book? What if giant words had filled the screen for all the world to read: For my son.
At 12:37 p.m., Percy is hiding in the doorway of the Religious Studies classroom when his father climbs out of the passenger side of a van. So, someone else is driving. But the driver stays put and Percy can’t see through the tinted windows. His father stretches, swinging arms above his head with fingers laced and palms flipped over to face the sky.
Oh god. Please don’t anyone else be watching this. Please let him seem like a grown man. Percy is prepared to forgive almost anything, any film-world idiosyncrasies, but hope is dim that anyone else will be so kind.
Percy knows what Mick Malloy looks like. He has spent many hours of his life poring through newspapers and tabloids and film magazines on a hunt for one thing: photos or mentions of his father. He has seen him interviewed on the telly, so he’s ready for the stammer and the eyebrow-raising-for-emphasis thing. Percy yearns to see the smile that Mick gave the interviewer Nicola Pettle when she asked him, “Any regrets?” and he’d answered, “I’d have liked to spend more time with my son,” as if his son were a four-year-old waiting in the hotel nursery, instead of long-forgotten Percy, stashed in a boarding school.
Apart from the colour of their skins, and the hair—Mick’s grows straight up, like a fine shag carpet, Percy’s dangles in knotted dreads—Percy and his father look pretty much the same. Mick is pale and bony, Percy is dark and bony, both kind of short, though Percy hopes he’s not done growing yet. He’d love to wake up one morning taller than Adrian, with genuine stubble on his chin and fists like a farmer’s. “Get your vast stinking arse out of my road,” he’d say to Adrian. “Or tell my knuckles why not.… ”
Percy’s brain zooms through all this while he watches Mick stretch. One of the worries in the last sixty-six hours has been what his father might wear. Percy’s Mick file holds pictures of him in a velvet tuxedo, patched bell-bottoms, a kilt, a toga, a pink rabbit-skin coat, a sequined blazer, and a linen djellaba.
Today he seems to be in disguise, what he imagines a normal father might wear. Thank you, God, if you exist and this might be proof. Jeans instead of his favourite green suede trousers with suspenders. A T-shirt displaying neither curse words nor a tie-dye rainbow. A leather jacket with moderate fringe. Cowboy boots.
While Percy finishes up his prayer, his father clasps the side mirror of the van, grabs one foot with the other hand, and bends a leg up behind him like a flamingo at rest. As he switches legs one minute later, Percy peels himself out of the doorway and dashes forward to prevent any further public body twisting.
Percy nearly chokes when he sees his father’s eyes widen and brighten.
“Percy, m-m-mate, lovely to see you.”
Back clap, back clap, sideways not-exactly-a-hug. Percy’s heart thuds. He smells clove oil and sweat before his father pulls back.
“What a time we had getting to wherever the hell we are! This place is bleeeak! What a rat-shittle-ittle town! But this!” He glances around the courtyard. “This is perfect!” He looks up at the towers, his hands clasped, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. “Here we are, eh? And here you are, and just look at you! Chip off the old block, eh? And by chip, I m-m-mean chip, no fish included, blimey, you’re as skinny as a noodle. The food is absolute shite, am I right? Well? Aren’t you going to say hallo to dear old M-M-Mick?”
“Hallo,” says Percy, mouth dry as crumbs.
It’s a special year, won’t happen again. Mick is exactly twice Percy’s age. And Percy is the same age now—sixteen—that Mick was when Percy was born. Has Mick realized that?
“I talked to Alia,” says Mick, quite still for a moment, feet flat on the ground.
“She knows?” says Percy. “That you’re here?”
Mick sighs, as if revealing a hidden landscape beyond the means of language. Or is that only what Percy wants to think? Maybe it’s just a sigh.
“Of course,” says Mick. “She knows. She said to be sure you haven’t outgrown your runners.” He looks at Percy’s feet and laughs. “You want to go shoe shopping?”
Percy shakes his head. He wants to throw up. He wants to sit someplace with his dad and tell him all the stuff he has imagined telling him for all these years. He wants to get through these five minutes and then this hour and then this day without looking like an idiot. He wants the kids in his dorm to see his famous father and go, Whoa, dude, you weren’t lying! He wants no one at all to notice that this moment is a big fat hairy deal.… Is he really shaking all over, or is that just his heart slamming through his chest bone like a miner’s pick?
“Who”—Mick stares across the courtyard while he rubs his fingers back and forth on the top of his head—“is that heaven-sent creature?”
Percy sees only the old bag who works in the kitchen.
“Where?” he says. “Who?”
“Her.” Mick points. “The loveliest apparition that ever hobbled across a set. I need her. On film. Need.”
“You mean the cook? Vera?”
“That’s her name? Vera?”
Percy wonders, is he watching genius at work? Is Mick as brilliant as the critics say? Or the most deranged tool to crawl out of the sand?
“Vera Diarrhea,” says Percy. He knows it sounds bad. But it’s the only name he has for her. Mick’s rubbing hand pauses as if it has encountered a thistle on his scalp.
“Percy,” he says. “I’ve got pretty strong feelings about derision.”
“Well, yeah.” Percy shrinks a little. Crap. Foot wrong already.
“But it’s likely bloody apt, right? She’s the cook?”
Vera crosses from the storage shed to the kitchen door, banging a heavy bucket against her leg.
“I kind of love it.” Mick looks at Percy. “What do they call you?” he says. “These teen gods of instantaneous pigeonholing and life wreckage? They’ve got some tag for you, don’t they? Makes you squirm in the dark?”
Percy glances up at the windows of the Kipling dorm.
“Chinnbnrr,” he mumbles.
“Eh?”
Percy can feel his shoulders hunching over, the Dormitory Defence System kicking into place.
“Dad,” he says, trying it out.
His father glances toward the van. “M-M-Mick.”
“Yeah, sorry, Mick.”
Why didn’t he just change his name, Percy wonders. Like, before he got famous? To something that didn’t stop his tongue every single time?
“Look at this place!” Mick tips his head back. “What are those? Turrets? And all these m-m-massive filthy lead-paned windows! It’s brilliant, Percy!”
Percy nods.
“The lane up from the York Road must be a mile long, with this grand old house perched at the end like a hallucination.… Charlie!” he calls out. Someone emerges from the van, grinning and chewing gum at the same time. Charlie is female, it turns out, wearing a baseball cap over pigtails.
“Charlie, meet Percy. Percy, this is Charlie.”
“Hey.” Percy wonders, should he shake? But she’s flashing a peace sign with the hand not gripping a clipboard. He tries a smile, but the combination of blue eyes and white teeth is making him dizzy. Is this Mick’s girlfriend? His wife? Maybe Charlie is Percy’s stepmother!
Mick hasn’t paused. “See, Charlie? Do you believe what you’re seeing, m-m-m-darlin’? Did you catch a gander at that old bird? Is this not everything we hoped for?”
Hoped for?
Percy wonders, in the second before she opens her mouth, what Charlie’s voice will be like. Squeaky? Soft? But it’s so husky you’d think she was horribly sick, except that she glowed with health, flipping a pigtail over her shoulder and gazing up at the windows in the tower above the music room.
“A tower! You couldn’t have built better if you’d spent a million dollars.” Husky, and American.
Suddenly, there are people in the courtyard. Dinner must be over—has so much time gone by already? It moved so slowly while he waited for the van, but now it gallops. Kids appear in droves, heading from the dining hall in the main building to all the ordinary Saturday-afternoon activities that do not include a father-son reunion or chatting with a beach bunny from California.
“Oh, oh, oh! I love it!” Mick actually spins, watching the space around him go from empty to bustling in a matter of a single minute.
“Far out,” says Charlie.
But then Nico and Adrian are standing right in front of Percy, like eager children.
“Hey, man,” says Nico. He beams as though Percy is his son and has just won a prize at the science fair.
Nico, who knows how to conduct himself with grown-ups, extends a hand to Percy’s father.
“Nico Nevos,” he says. “I’m in Percy’s dorm. And this is Adrian.”
Adrian has a look of stupefaction, the direct cause of Percy becoming miraculously taller, his shoulders broader, his dreads thicker.
Mick lifts his eyebrows.
“We’re mates of Percy’s,” says Nico. His eyes flick over to Charlie, widening in appreciation of a goddess standing in the Illington courtyard. “And you’re Percy’s …” Not a drop of brown blood between them, not to mention that Charlie is probably twenty-three and Mick looks barely older than that. Not evident parent material. “You’re … with Percy?”
“Obviously, dude,” says Adrian. “Since they’re standing next to him, having a natter.”
Charlie chuckles, throaty and dutiful.
Percy decides not to ridicule Adrian, just because it would be so simple.
“This is Mick,” he says. “And Charlie.” He loves how casual he sounds, as if he’s been introducing them all his life, at film openings, tennis matches, art gallery exhibitions. As if they’re his. As if he hadn’t got up at dawn to change his jersey nine times and sniff his pits and wash his feet just in case.
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