Falling (9 page)

Angus stares at me for a moment. “Okay,” he says, nodding far too enthusiastically.

“Bring the portable TV if you like. You’re not spending the evening reading porn in my kitchen,” I add wryly, my confidence growing with Angus’s eagerness.

When he smiles, it is luminous. It lights me up brighter than ever. I’m not even sure what my motives are anymore.

T
HE
NEXT
day I take the afternoon off work and we go and see Eleanor. I wondered if Soren would be okay about my taking the time off even though it’s short notice—but he didn’t bat a beautiful eyelash. He just filled out my holiday form. I think he’s starting to understand that Eleanor is like family to me. Every time I see him, Soren acts more and more like a friend. I guess I should probably think of him as one.

The hospital is nothing like the one I was in. This place is all on one level. It’s not a maze—it’s all open and spread out with windows along every wall that look over the extensive gardens. The winter sun is shining low and bright, and the whole place feels very calm. There is no frenetic atmosphere, no scent of desperation. No darkness here.

Eleanor has a room to herself just off one of the main communal areas. I gesture to Angus that he go in, saying I need to go ask one of the nurses something. I don’t. I just think he needs to have a bit of time alone with his mum. Instead I stand by one of the windows staring out at the strange shadows the bare trees cast on the lawn, hoping our decision was the right one and trying not to let the past replay itself in my head.

After half an hour, I go and get three hot chocolates out of the vending machine in the visitors’ waiting room. I’ve no idea what Eleanor and Angus have been talking about, but they shut up and look vaguely guilty when I walk in.

“Josh.” Eleanor holds her arms open for me. I put the hot chocolates down on the cabinet beside her so I can hug her tight.

“Are you all right?” I whisper. She looks all right at least. More relaxed. Sitting in an armchair in this neat little room all laid out like a little living room, with a bed in the corner.

“Angus, can you go and ask one of the nurses for another jug of water, please?” Eleanor asks.

Angus rolls his eyes. “If you want me to disappear for a minute so you can talk to Josh, just say so.”

There’s more affection than annoyance in his tone.

Eleanor hugs me until he’s gone, and only then does she pull away. Now she looks shaky again, her gaze darting to the door as if to make sure Angus has really gone.

“Josh, listen to me. I know I shouldn’t ask you to do this, but I need you to watch over Angus. You all think I’m so confused and anxious.” Eleanor makes a pained sound and starts wringing her hands together over and over. “And I know things have got mixed up, but I’ve seen them watching in the dark outside the flat, and I know they’re waiting. I know they’re going to come back. I can’t stand the thought of Angus all alone in there. You can’t let anything happen to him, Josh.
Please
,” she begs me.

I’ve never seen her look quite this desperate, and the past few days I’ve seen a lot of how desperate she can get. The movement of her hands is making
me
feel anxious. I’m not sure whether it’s best to let her carry on doing it or not. Sometimes people have actions that calm them, and I don’t know if this is one of them, but like the other night when she was cleaning over and over, she doesn’t seem to be getting any calmer doing it.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to him,” I promise her, taking her hands in mine. At first she resists, but then she grips my hands tightly in return.

“You do care about him, don’t you? I need someone to look out for him, someone who cares about him.”

“Yes,” I say honestly. “I promise I won’t let anyone hurt him.”

Those damn near overwhelming protective urges fill every space inside me, and I realize with dreadful clarity that I would rather die than let anyone hurt Angus.

Crap
, I think.

Something makes me turn, and I see Angus’s face pressed against the glass. He yawns and holds up a jug of water. I glance at Eleanor to make sure she’s finished what she wanted to talk to me about and beckon him back inside.

Angus puts the jug of water on the table and brushes his hair out of his eyes, tucking long strands of it behind his ears. Briefly he glances between us as if he’s trying to figure out what we were talking about. From the meaningful look he gives me, I know he’s noticed Eleanor’s increased anxiety. Somehow we make an unspoken agreement to spend the rest of the hour trying to distract her and make her laugh in any way possible. I’ve never had that weird sort of connection with anyone before, where you look at them and sort of know what they’re thinking. It’s puzzling and exhilarating at the same time.

I’m not good at making people laugh, but Angus is sweet and funny when he’s not feeling self-conscious. He tells stories about when he was a little kid. Just stupid stuff like how he never had any willpower to stop himself eating the biscuits and cakes Eleanor used to bake straight from the oven, and how it used to drive Eleanor crazy, thinking she’d made more than she had. Angus would hotfoot it upstairs, burning his hands and mouth to eat whatever he had taken, and when Eleanor pulled the baking tray out from the oven, looking perplexed, he would feel so guilty, he’d just blurt out that he’d eaten them. If there was any chocolate in the house, he’d do the same thing, knowing it was wrong but unable to help himself. And he’d always admit it.

“It was stupid,” he says, grinning. “If I didn’t have an inbuilt guilt switch, I could have gotten away with loads.”

I don’t think it sounds stupid at all, just sort of endearing. It makes me wonder what happened to make their family fall so completely apart. Though I know from experience, sometimes these things just happen.

“You can probably guess I was a chubby kid.”

Eleanor shakes her head. “It was just puppy fat,” she says, looking more relaxed than I’ve seen her in a long time.

“It’s why I started running. So I could eat what I wanted without all the jokes about my size. What I didn’t realize was that when you start running or exercising, you don’t want to eat unhealthy crap all the time. Probably worked out for the best, though.”

I just smile at him, thinking I could listen to him talk all night and sort of wishing I didn’t feel that way. I’m almost certain that I’d still find him beautiful whatever size he was. He shines so bright. His lean body turns me on, but only because it is his. I try and push all the conflict I feel deep down inside myself. Eleanor is the one who needs cheering up. Eleanor is the one who needs us.

At the end of the hour, I think Angus has probably made me smile even more than he made Eleanor smile. He looks strangely pleased with himself.

A
FTER
THE
nurse comes to tell us visiting time is over, I make my way outside to the car while Angus says good-bye. Eleanor didn’t want us to go, and I didn’t want to have to leave her, but I know she needs a moment alone with her son.

I watch the sky grow navy dark. I watch how it swallows the ribbons of pale cloud, the dark enveloping everything. The streetlights ping on, one by one, all around the car park. And the car park empties until there’s just me and a few staff cars.

Half an hour later, Angus walks dejectedly to the car, opens the passenger door, and slumps inside.

I put my arm around his shoulders, and he closes his eyes and curls against me the best he can, given there is a gear stick and a hand brake in the way. I stroke my fingers through his hair and try not to think about anything at all.

We don’t talk the whole drive home, but as soon as we’ve pulled over, I reach into the glove compartment and, with an air of determination, hand him the leaflets I picked up from the local college on my way home. Angus stares at them, then at me.

“What are these for?”

“You said the other day you didn’t finish your A levels. But you can still get onto a college course if you take a test.”

I just want to take his mind off Eleanor, give him something else to focus on.

“It’s nearly December. I’d be too far behind if I went back now.”

“You could catch up. You can call them, explain the situation with your dad. They might make an exception.”

“Even if I did, I can’t afford it, Josh. I’ve got to get a job to pay the rent. Mum won’t get housing benefit while she’s in hospital. I’ve checked up on stuff,” Angus says quietly and gets out of the car. He leaves the leaflets on the seat behind him and walks up the path toward the house.

“Wait,” I call after him.

I pick the leaflets up, lock the car, then run after him. “Look, Eleanor made me promise to look out for you. She left some money with me to pay for stuff like this.” This has got to be the weakest lie I have
ever
told. There are so many ways he could find out it’s not true.

Angus eyes me dubiously. I can see the war inside him. He really wants to go to college, but because of his dad, he’s afraid of it being on someone else’s terms. He’s afraid it sounds too good to be true, too easy.

But it
should
be easy for him.

“Why don’t I give you the money Eleanor gave me, and you decide what to do with it?”

Why on earth do I want to trust him so fucking much? Mentally I calculate how much I can realistically give him. I’ve got a few hundred in a savings account, nothing else now I’ve given Oskar my contingency fund.

But I really want him to go back to college. I really think he should have this chance.

I hand him the leaflets again. “Just think about it,” I say.

T
HE
NEXT
few days pass quickly. We see Eleanor after I finish work every evening, and every evening she pleads with me to take care of him, tells me they’re watching, they’re coming, that it’s not safe. One day I’m sure Angus overhears, but he doesn’t say anything.

He calls the college the day after I give him the leaflets. They interview him and tell him he needs to come in and take a test in a few weeks to see if he knows enough to begin the course in January. I think he’ll be fine, but Angus insists on using some of the money I told him Eleanor left him to buy some course books. He spends every day studying, working so hard to catch up, it breaks my heart. He must have been utterly crushed when his dad took away his chance at this.

We develop a regular little routine, with Angus spending a large portion of every evening after we’ve been to see Eleanor, upstairs with me. I cook for him, and we watch TV or he studies, and sometimes we just talk.

O
N
T
HURSDAY
evening Angus’s phone goes off every couple of minutes with a text message while we’re eating. I can’t help noticing the way he smiles every time he replies.

He catches me staring.

“Oskar,” he says, blushing. “He came to see me the day he left. I gave him my number. He’s got a phone now.”

I take a deep breath and roll my shoulders back, trying to dispel the sudden tightness I feel in my chest. Angus doesn’t need to explain himself, especially not to me. I take our empty plates out to the kitchen.

Standing in front of the sink, I close my eyes.
Oskar.
They’re pretty much the same age. It makes sense for them to get on well, to like each other. So why does it feel like the worst thing that could possibly happen?

“Are you okay?”

Swallowing, I turn and see Angus looking at me worriedly from the doorway. I guess I’ve been stood out here for a while.

I force a smile onto my face and nod.

“I wash up. That’s the deal, isn’t it?” Angus says softly, moving closer. “You cook, and I clean it all away.”

I could teach you to cook
, I think, watching the way the light catches his hair, highlighting the dark brown with strands of gold. But then, I’ve no idea whether Angus would want me to. He’d probably prefer to be out with Oskar having fun—whatever that would entail. He’s young. He needs a life beyond my flat, his flat, his mum.

“You only like washing up so you can read the walls.” I’ve no idea why I say that. It’s as though my mouth has become disengaged from my brain.

“I don’t need to read the walls—my imagination is pretty good. Though I have read most of them.” He smiles at his feet and shoves his hands deep in his pockets.

Sometimes I wish he’d do something that’d make me like him less, like be moody or selfish or annoying. But he doesn’t. Instead everything he does makes me like him more and more. It’s fucking terrifying—it’s as though I have this thing I don’t want growing inside me.

Or perhaps what’s terrifying is the knowledge that if someone cut it out, it’d fucking kill me.

It makes me feel so weak.

“Don’t ever change,” I say softly.

I
am
so weak.

“What?” He looks up, right at me. He has such beautiful eyes. He searches my face, trying to understand me, maybe.

“Nothing.” I shake my head.

I wonder if I’m losing it. I wonder if what’s really terrifying me is that this situation is what’s going to change and I can do nothing to stop it. Sometimes it feels like life is a train crash, and as I career off the rails, all I can do is lock the door to my carriage and curl up with my head between my knees.

“Can I ask you something?” Angus looks around the room as if his question is written somewhere on the walls.

The weaker part of me wants to say
anything
, yet the sensible part of me wants to say
no
. I restrain myself from muttering any response and just sort of nod.

“Did you write some of these?”

I turn away and twist the tap on so hard, the water splashes all over the sink, my jumper, even the floor. I lean my whole weight against the sink. I let the sink hold me up. For a moment I close my eyes, listening to the rush of water.