16

‘Remember me talking about going to Lochwinnoch? My uncle taking me to the bird-watching?’ Paul waited for my response. I could only nod. ‘That’s not all my uncle did.’ He left that hanging.

‘What the fuck?’ I was on my feet.

‘Please … sit down,’ he said, waving his outstretched hand. ‘This is difficult enough.’

I sat. ‘Sorry.’ Part of my mind was watching, assessing, while the bigger part was demanding, What the hell has this got to do with me? A sense of what he was trying to say crowded me, but I pushed at it. I squared my jaw and fought it down. I wasn’t going there.

And I was there in that moment again. A boy with a stick in his hand. Fury, a constant simmer in my mind. There had been a trigger. But what? My anger had boiled over and I had to lash out. Couldn’t contain it.

I struggled to quell the questions and forced myself out of my own head, refocussing on my friend.

‘I won’t go into detail.’ He swallowed. ‘But Mum just told me the uncle who took me … birdwatching was the father of the boy who disappeared.’

‘Fuck.’ The implications of this hit me. ‘So you think this boy … Robert … ran away to get away from his dad?’

‘I wanted to run away. I wanted to die. So many times.’ He bit at his bottom lip, then breathed out. His exhalation heavy with a suppressed sob. ‘I’m sure my cousin Robert went through what I did.’ He held his hands out, an eloquent movement that said it all.

‘Your mum knew?’

‘She does now. She says she sensed something was off at the time.’ His smile was weak and worn through with apology. For whom I wasn’t sure. He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t tell anyone. He said no one would believe me. That I would be carted away to a remand home for lying little bastards. That I would ruin my parents’ lives for nothing. It was only after I married that…’

‘How did I not know any of this?’ I felt like such a bad friend. I moved my eyes from his, shifted in my seat. The pressure in the centre of my forehead was building again.

‘I thought silence was helping. If I didn’t say anything it hadn’t really happened.’

‘I feel awful,’ I said. ‘I should have picked up on something.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Paul smiled. ‘You were just a kid yourself.’ He paused. ‘With his own issues.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘There was a spell when you were angry, like, all the time, mate.’

‘I was?’

‘Talking about my stuff helped me. I just want to put it out there that anytime you want to talk…’

‘Jesus, you think I was abused as well?’

‘I’m sorry, John.’ His face coloured and he looked like he was admonishing himself for misreading the situation. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say.’

‘Because I was angry all the time, that means I was abused? Fucksake, mate. Yeah, I was angry, but if you’d had my dad, you’d have been angry too.’

‘You weren’t—?’

‘Fuck no.’ I recalled David Collins’ explanation of Thomas’s behaviour before he vanished, and recognised the truth of it in me. ‘Having a cop as your dad in a small town like ours was a nightmare. I acted out to show I was tough. That I was one of the boys.’ I stuffed my hands into my pockets, feeling shame now at the way I had overreacted. What was wrong with me? First I messed things up with Angela. Now I was messing them up with Paul.

‘Sorry,’ he said. He looked exhausted. ‘I’m an idiot. I projected my stuff onto you. Sorry.’

I leaned into his space, my mind full of the agonies he must have experienced, and put a hand on his knee. I needed to be a better friend to him. ‘Jesus, mate. What happened to you … Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

He looked off into space as if trying to find the right words, as if that’s what he’d been doing most of his life, and for most of his life he’d struggled.

‘You pray a miracle will come along. Time will march backwards and undo everything. Then you can stop pretending, cos it never really happened after all.’