I put Lola Nan out of my mind. She was already out of her own; what could it hurt her to be put away like old china too fragile to be used any more? Best thing for her. Best thing for everyone. I put her out of my mind.
She barged back in at the worst of moments and the worst of places. I’d just come out of the sixth-year common room, fresh from a free period spent hiding W. H. Auden behind V for Vendetta, and I was on my way to Biology. I wasn’t even thinking about Lola Nan, but about university and applications and whether the sciences were even my thing. I had enough qualifications for my second choice already and I wouldn’t have stayed on for a sixth year if I hadn’t wanted to keep an extra year’s eye on Allie. And because I was afraid that as soon as I went away to university Lola Nan would take her sneaky opportunity and die on me …
I stopped dead. Somebody swore, having nearly tripped over me, and I got a deliberate whack from a swinging arm as he shoved past with the rest of the crowds.
‘Feck’s sake, move,’ grumbled another voice behind me.
Ordinarily I’d have turned and given them my full Robert De Niro. You talkin’ to me? You talkin’a ME? But I was frozen, my whole chest had seized up. Panicking, I looked from side to side.
McCluskey’s office. How did I always end up here? The great Waiting Room of my life. I just knew that when I died and went to check in with the heavenly bureaucrats, I’d find myself standing outside McCluskey’s office.
Nah. When people died they died. They turned into rot and putrefaction, and then they turned to dust. Then nothing. Not even a mind or a memory was left, and maybe that had been gone even while your lungs still breathed and your heart beat and your blood throbbed determinedly, pointlessly, round and round in your veins.
Nope. I definitely wasn’t cut out for science, I thought, as I rapped violently on McCluskey’s door and walked in without an invitation, then slammed the door and tried not to lean on it.
McCluskey looked up, and so did the second year he was berating. In the silence I stared at the open window behind McCluskey’s right ear.
McCluskey stood up, reached past me to yank the door open once more and jerked his head at the shivering kid. ‘Never do it again or you’re dead.’ He shut the door on him and sat back down at his desk. ‘Right, Geddes, what is it?’
I squinted at the window. The sunlight was diffused through the branches of a weedy abused beech tree, but at this time of the afternoon the light was still strong enough for McCluskey to have half closed the vertical blinds. It striped McCluskey’s desk with murky gold light. He reached up with his left hand and closed the blinds a little further, angling the light on to the council-issue calendar. September, Loch Lomond, The Bonny Banks Of.
‘I have a problem, sir.’
‘As do I, and its name is Geddes. What’s yours?’
‘I’m not immortal.’ I stared at Loch Lomond.
‘Aye. I’m waiting for the newsflash.’ He jerked his thumb in what might have been an invitation. I sat down heavily in a hard little mustard-coloured armchair.
‘They put her in a home,’ I said.
He twirled his pen in his fingers, made marks on the paper. ‘This is your grandmother.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘That’s a shame. How’s your sister?’ he asked. Sketch, scribble.
‘Mad,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s a little awkward for everyone, isn’t it?’
‘You’re telling me.’ I scowled at the Bonny Banks.
‘Your parents,’ he said. ‘They must be under a lot of pressure.’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said bitterly. ‘Oh yeah.’
‘You too, of course.’
There was something in my throat, something sharp and obstructive that stopped me swallowing. I thought about Lola Nan. Before and after.
‘I just,’ I said. ‘I just sort of. I just sort of don’t want to see her again.’
Scribble, scribble, sketch. He turned slightly, raised one eyebrow.
‘Your grandmother, I take it. Not your sister.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I glowered.
‘Joke, Geddes.’
‘I don’t want to go and see her,’ I said, biting my lip. ‘Maybe I think. Maybe I think she’s better to just die now.’
‘Uh-huh. That’s understandable.’
‘Are you taking the piss …Are you taking the mickey, sir?’
‘No. Do try and realise you’re not God, Geddes.’
‘I thought that was your delusion, sir.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘I’m not trying to play God,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to put a pillow over her face or anything.’ I blushed, seeing as it had fleetingly occurred to me.
‘I never said you were. Stuff happens, Geddes. You can’t stop it. It’s not your fault.’ His pen hovered in mid-air, and he growled, ‘Not always your fault.’
‘Oh, aye?’
‘Oh, aye.’ His turn to mimic me. It made my eyes burn.
‘Know what? Everyone’s breakable. Everyone’s so fecking breakable.’
And then I burst into tears. Well, it wasn’t that dramatic. I just felt my eyes fill, and when the lids couldn’t hold any more the tears slid down my skin. I was horrified, mortified, but I couldn’t stop them.
McCluskey let me cry for quite a long time, while he sat at his desk scribbling on his loose-leaf pad. When I blinked, rubbing my eyes with the flat of both hands until the paper swam in my vision, I noticed he was drawing clever little cartoon animals.
‘OK, Geddes.’ He set down his pen at last, closed the pad and stood up to pull on his jacket. Patting his pocket, he frowned and looked around his desk, till his eyes lit on a packet of mints. He stuffed them in his pocket. Still trying to quit, then. ‘Miss your last class.’ He glanced at his wall planner: council issue, teachers, for the use of. ‘Biology, is it? I’ll give Mrs Monaghan an excuse for you.’
Turning, he looked for a moment as if he’d like to put an avuncular hand on my shoulder. But he also looked as if he knew how much I’d hate that.
‘You all right, Nick?’
I’d stopped crying by now. I stared at the ladder of sunlight across the window. ‘Yes. Fine.’
‘Well, you look like hell. Stay here till everyone’s gone. Go out like that, you’ll be dead in thirty seconds.’
‘Thanks, Mr McCluskey.’
‘OK. This too will pass, Geddes.’
He left me on my own then. After a few minutes my body unfroze and my eyesight cleared a bit more. I noticed his unwashed mug, stained with a ring of half-dried coffee at the bottom, and realised he wasn’t that much of a control freak.
I really liked McCluskey a lot. For a bloody despot.
Every night for the rest of that week I left it till I knew Mum and Dad would be in bed, if not asleep – how could they sleep? – before going home. Mum would worry but I wanted her to worry. I called Orla, but I didn’t get a chance to see her. Her mum had been frantic that night she came home so late – aye, that night she nearly drowned me – so Orla didn’t like to go out again before she was due at her dad’s. She was going to his place again this weekend, and I tried not to show my disappointment. She was going two weeks in a row because after that he was away for a month. Maybe I’d see plenty of her then. Meantime she went straight home from school and stayed in with her mum and her homework and some mutually agreeable DVDs.
When I closed the door on Friday night and stood in the hall, exhausted by late nights and walking, empty of anger, empty of everything but misery, the phone rang so abruptly and unexpectedly I couldn’t for a moment think what the noise was.
Then I realised. I snatched up the handset before either parent could have reached the one in their bedroom.
‘Nick? Is that you, Nick?’
I’d known before I picked up, because who else would phone at this hour? But this was unexpected. She recognised me. She remembered me. The pain of my betrayal of her took my breath away.
‘Nick?’ she said again, and she sounded less certain of herself.
‘Lola Nan,’ I said. ‘Yes. It’s me.’
‘I don’t know where the fridge is!’
‘Lola Nan, it’s the middle of the night. Are you in trouble? Are you sick?’
‘No.’ Hesitation. ‘I don’t think I’m in trouble. Am I in trouble?’
‘Lola Nan, listen. You have to call a …’ Call a what? A nurse, a carer, a warden? What did they even call these people? I’d never asked. ‘Call somebody. Is there an alarm?’
‘A what? Where am I?’
‘A cord or something. A button? Beside your bed. Please, Lola Nan …’
‘I don’t need a button! Why would I need a button?’ Her voice grew sharper, with an undercurrent of whine. ‘Boy! Is that you? Will you come and see me? I don’t know what I’m doing here! I’m all alone! I haven’t got anyone to talk to!’
‘What about … what about Geoffrey, Lola Nan?’ I bit my lip and shut my eyes tight, feeling cruel.
‘Geoffrey’s dead.’ There were tears in her voice now. ‘Geoffrey’s dead.’
Oh, hell. So she hadn’t been talking to Granda, only to herself. No imaginary friend for poor Lola Nan.
‘I had someone to talk to at home. That nice boy. He doesn’t come here, he doesn’t come any more. Perhaps he can’t find the way.’
‘I’ll come. Honest I will, I promise. Just go to sleep, Lola Nan. Go to sleep or call somebody.’
‘What if he just can’t find the way?’
I bit my lip harder. ‘Please, Lola Nan. Go to bed. Go to sleep. I promise I’ll come.’
There was a long silence that made my heart slow to a painful aching throb.
‘All right. All right, boy. All right.’
My head swam with relief. Then I glanced up and saw with a sickening jolt that Dad was standing halfway down the stairs, staring at me. He was barefoot and he wore a pair of baggies and a thin misshapen Stone Roses T-shirt. His faded hair hung loose.
Swiftly I said, ‘Bye now,’ and hung up.
‘Who was that?’
‘Nobody,’ I said. He must have appeared in the last few seconds. All the same, I don’t know why I was lying.
He took a breath, angry red dots blossoming on his cheekbones, but I knew he was trying to be civil. His lips, pressed together, had dark wine stains in the creases. When he opened them I saw his tongue, dark red too with a stain his toothbrush hadn’t shifted. ‘Nick …’
‘It was nobody,’ I said again. ‘Nobody you know.’
Frowning slightly, Dad shifted his eyes to my left, but I willed him to look at me and he did. There was bemusement as well as annoyance in his expression.
‘Nick,’ he said. ‘Nick, your mother says I didn’t listen to you the other night and I don’t suppose I did and I wonder if we could …’
A phone interrupted him. For a horrible instant I thought it was Lola Nan calling back, and I knew I couldn’t bear to talk to her in front of Dad. In fact I just couldn’t bear to talk to her, not again. Luckily, it took only a fraction of a second to recognise my own ringtone.
It could only be one person. Tugging out my Sellotaped phone, I turned my back on Dad, facing the front door and the world beyond.
‘Yeah, Orla,’ I said.
After a little while I heard the stairs creak. Gazing into the pane of glass on the door, I saw his distorted reflection climbing slowly back up to his room. He didn’t look back, and when he turned the corner at the landing I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool glass, giving myself an instant headache.
‘Orla,’ I said. ‘I really need to see you.’