Dad’s flat in Salford Quays only had two bedrooms, but the sofa in the living room was a fold-out futon for guests, and my dad had very pointedly rolled it out and made it up for Shafeen.
My dad was cool about us, but not that cool. When Shafeen was in the toilet I stood in the doorway with my dad, his arm round my shoulder, looking at the arrangement of pillows and duvet. As ever with my dad, I fell into playing our movie game. This time I was looking for a film where a dad was trying to frustrate his daughter and her boyfriend sharing a room. ‘Meet the Parents?’
He did a terrible Robert De Niro impression. ‘You talkin’ to me?’
‘Your house, your rules, huh?’
‘Yup,’ he said, smiling.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I’m an eighteen-year-old.’
‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘But you’re my eighteen-year-old. So if there’s going to be any funny business, you can at least have the decency to sneak around behind your old dad’s back, like we did in my day.’
I hugged him and kissed the side of his beardy face. He was pretty cool after all.
Shafeen did, indeed, pay me a midnight visit in my bedroom. We kissed for a bit, and things were getting pretty hot and heavy when I saw my old soft toy Tigger. I’d got him for my fourth birthday, when I’d decided, with the certainty of a toddler, that he was the only character in the Hundred Acre Wood worth knowing. He looked pretty sad now, the black and orange of his stripes more grey and marmalade, but I’d loved him for fourteen years – longer than I’d loved anyone, except my dad.
As well as Tigger, there was a picture of my mum and my jewellery box with the ballerina inside it, waiting to revolve to ice-cream-van music when you lifted the lid. I might’ve been eighteen, but this was a child’s bedroom. I gently pushed Shafeen away. ‘Not here,’ I said, through the hot jumble of lips and hair and teeth.
He rolled off me, lay on his back and sighed heavily. ‘Not here,’ he sing-songed. ‘Not at Longcross. Not at Cumberland Place. Someday, somewhere, Greer, we’ll find the right bed.’
I hoiked myself up on my elbow and put my chin in my hand, looking down at him. ‘Wow, Shafeen, I really didn’t think you were that kind of guy.’
‘What kind of guy?
‘The sort to pressure a girl into something she’s not ready for. Not very gentlemanly, is it?’
That struck home. He backed off straight away, actually getting up off the bed as if it had burned him and apologising profusely, and then of course I felt terrible. I tried to explain. ‘I mean, of course I’m ready, but I don’t know why it doesn’t ever seem to be the right place.’
‘I’m just not sure it’s geography that’s stopping you.’
‘What else would it be?’
‘Who else, you mean?’
He sat on the edge of the bed, continents away from me now. ‘It was hard enough to battle him when he was dead. If you really think he’s alive, that’s another matter.’
‘Why? Last time he was alive I still chose you.’ I didn’t stop to think about the lunacy of this sentence.
‘Did you, Greer? We only started going out once we thought he was dead.’
There was really no arguing with that piece of chronology.
‘And even then,’ Shafeen went on sadly, ‘he was still getting between us.’
And I understood, then, just how much he’d had to put up with. Really, he did deserve some sort of an explanation. We were both eighteen. We’d been going out for a year. It was fair enough for him to expect that we would take things to the next level. But he was perfectly right. There was something holding me back. And it was time to give it a name.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I have been holding out on you. And it is because of Henry.’ I took Shafeen’s hand in mine as I tried to explain. ‘We started going out in the wake of his death. And I felt guilty, and sad, and a whole mess of emotions. I think that did stop me getting … close … to you. I was grieving, yes, but I was also dealing with the fact that I’d effectively ended someone’s life.’ He looked so forlorn I put my hand to his cheek. ‘But it wasn’t because I had feelings for him. I mean, I had feelings about him, but I hated him.’ If I said it, it had to be true, right?
Shafeen looked at me intently. It was hard to hide from those dark searching eyes. ‘That may have been true … then,’ he said, echoing my own word. ‘But it’s different now. You are more … sympathetic towards him.’
He was right again. It was all because of the ‘fox in a box’ story. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘even if you think Henry in the cupboard with Reynard was a dream, I still think Henry had a pretty difficult childhood.’
Shafeen’s answer was surprising. ‘Oprah Winfrey,’ he said.
I thought I’d misheard him. ‘What?’
‘Oprah Winfrey,’ he repeated. ‘She had a terrible childhood and suffered dreadful abuse. Now she’s one of the richest and most successful women in the world, and, more importantly, she’s a noted humanitarian, doing tons of charitable work and loads of good deeds.’ He shifted his weight a little on my duvet. ‘What I am saying is, even if Hitler was smacked as a child, it was still his fault he turned out to be Hitler. He was solely responsible for all the horrors he perpetrated. There’s such a thing as personal responsibility, Greer. It is possible to escape your upbringing.’
I sat up against the pillows and thought about what Shafeen had just said. He was right, but I realised it was only fair to tell him what I’d been thinking ever since the Red Mass. No – before that. Since The Isle of Dogs, and the incantation of the Grand Stag – the same incantation which, maybe, had brought Henry back to life, Practical Magic style. It was time. I took his hand again. ‘In the play – The Isle of Dogs, I mean – the enchantress warned Queen Cynthia that if she brought a loved one back from the dead, it might not be in a form she recognised – or even desired. That the Earl of Greenwich might be horribly changed. And in fact, he was.’
‘OK,’ said Shafeen. ‘So?’
‘So,’ I said slowly, piecing together my thoughts as I went, ‘that was what happened when a good man was raised up. He became this evil entity, the Grand Stag.’
‘With you so far.’
‘All right, but what if a bad man was raised up? What if this Henry is good? He is the one who took me to the Red Mass. He revealed the whole plot to me. What if Henry has changed for the better?’
Shafeen’s expression was unreadable. Disbelief, disappoint-ment, concern – none of those seemed to cover it. He got up and straightened the duvet in the spot he’d vacated as carefully as a chambermaid. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ And he vanished, as cleanly and quietly as a ghost.