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40. SUMMER 2013

I know all about what’s going on at home: she’s moved out and he’s on his own with dad, who’s not himself, poor man. My little delivery of books to her office seems to have unsettled things too. She is off sick, they told me when I phoned. They had no idea when she would be back. Hope it’s nothing serious, I said before I hung up.

My heart has become as hard as my toenails. There was a time when I might have felt something for that boy. Once I might have tried to help him. It’s touching how he’s opened up to me. My teaching days taught me to spot them a mile off: the boys with the black hole at their centre. They tried swaggering nonchalance to cover it up, pretending they didn’t care about anything, least of all the consequences of giving up on themselves. But I’m talking about adolescents. He’s not a boy, he’s twenty-five years old and however much he “bigs” himself up to my nineteen-year-old self with his dismal little fantasies of travelling round America and whatnot, he can’t hide his shivering, shrinking soul from a man with my experience.

He is desperate. Desperate to talk late into the night. He has other friends of course, but they’re as lost as he is. I’ve read their inane banter. And they don’t know him like I do. When I go offline, off he goes to meet them in the real world, his druggy little friends, and then back he comes the following night, tongue hanging out, slathering with anticipation of my arrival, waiting to impress me with his pathetic narcotic adventures. I think it’s time I started making him wait for me now — just ten minutes or so, keep him keen.

It didn’t take long for him to respond to my initial request — it was the photograph of his mother which got his attention. I told him I’d found it hidden in my house. Told him it had her name on the back. Told him I’d tracked him down and I think he liked that. I think it tickled him, the idea that someone had made the effort to seek him out. It was an innocent enough photo, his mother alone on a beach, but it’s given him food for thought. Let him ponder for a while whether we might be related. Did his mother have an affair? Did she have another child? Does he have a little half brother? Could it be me? And there are more pictures to come of course, but he’s not yet ready for those — they will need a health warning. Not that he gave me one when he sent me that filth. Still, I managed to fake my boy’s appreciation well and Jonathan is such an innocent it wasn’t hard to pretend he had never seen anything like that before.

He thinks I hang on his every word, and I do in a way. Poor sod — dribbling out his sorry tales to a boy six years his junior who has been dead for nearly twenty years. He may have opened his heart to Jonathan, but it is me who has marched in: me with Nancy’s voice ringing in my ears, her book of words whispering to me, the source material. And with her at my side, it won’t take much to nudge this feeble specimen to the brink. All I need do is feed his darkness and lead him to a point of no return then leave him there, teetering on the edge.