THAT DAY, BILLY FINALLY DROPPED the crazy act out of hunger. He knew enough to apologise first, and only then ask for food, but when they said, ‘What was all that about?’ he repeated, like an angelic automaton, ‘I might be coming down with something.’
Liam shook his head, walked away into Bigger Things to Deal With.
Iris fixed Billy a snack. She made a coffee she didn’t really want, and sat beside him. She sipped, watched and held back, but then, as she gazed at his picture-of-innocence profile, after weeks of carefulness, she dashed at the subject, as if Billy’s fit were infectious. ‘Was it to do with Jase? Do you want to talk about it? We can talk about it, you know. Any time.’
Billy plunged his face into his cup. When he looked up, milky-brown moustachioed, he was wary. ‘Okay,’ he said.
Long silence. Billy seemed to be staring deep into the well of hot chocolate, divining some secret there. Then she gathered from the way he fluttered his lashes that actually he was eyeballing his own reflection.
‘Now?’ Iris prodded.
‘No fanks,’ Billy said, false-cute, before ducking back into his drink again.
Kids. They pushed the boundaries but wouldn’t be pushed. Often conversation with Billy was like … like trying to scoop up a beetle that paddled and battled and scuttled, Dr Seuss-wise; then vanished, down some thin crevice in the floorboards.
‘Billy Bug?’ she said. ‘I know things are weird at the moment, with me and Dad talking house palaver, and moving and things. There have been so many hard changes lately. But I promise things will settle down.’ She really truly crossed the fingers of one hand hidden inside the other. And Billy abandoned the milk, shuffled himself onto her knee like a much younger child, pressing his head against her chest. He was far too heavy and awkward for this; but she let him stay there for a moment.
‘Mum?’ he said. She waited, ready for one of the hard questions: where do we all go when we die, why do we have to die, what does it feel like, can Jase read my mind now like a kind of god?
‘Yes, sweetheart?’
‘Can I have a trapdoor in my new bedroom when we move?’
Should she be comforted or dumbfounded? She lowered her face to his hair, took in a deep breath of boy-scalp before forcing him off her knee. The familiar, sweet, musky-coconut scent was soothing, so she went for the easy-way-out answer: ‘We’ll see.’ He was momentarily mollified, so she added: ‘It’s the kind of thing we could think about if you show us a sensible attitude. No more crazy scenes like today, eh?’
Which didn’t seem to sink in, exactly. For a week later, off he went, making another to-do.
