Just in Case (11 page)

‘I have to go, but make yourself at home.’ Agnes sighed. ‘There’s tea and coffee in the kitchen.’

While his mother hovered uncertainly, Charlie toddled over to the sofa where Justin lay sleeping, steadied himself against the edge, and leant in close. Justin opened his eyes to find his brother’s face just inches away from his own.

‘Charlie?’

What’s happened to you? Charlie asked.

Justin propped himself up on one arm. His eyes burned. ‘I was right,’ he said, in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘A plane tried to land on me. Nobody believes me but I
was right.
And Boy’s missing.’ His voice broke. ‘I think he’s dead.’

Charlie watched his brother’s hands, fluttering and nervy, the fingers raw and bitten to the quick.

‘David?’

Justin sat up as his mother kissed him awkwardly.

‘How was Wales, darling?’

Whales? What whales? Wails?

‘How was the weather? Were the tents waterproof? Was the scenery nice? What about the food?’

He closed his eyes.

‘There was a terrible plane crash while you were away.’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing’s safe these days.’

He didn’t respond and she accepted his silence, having lost her parental bearings so completely that she no longer knew what sort of behaviour to expect from him.

‘Perhaps you should come home, darling. You don’t look terribly well.’

Now there’s a coincidence, he thought.

His mother turned away, face creased with worry. She found it difficult to accept that his behaviour fitted within the acceptable boundaries of teenage anxiety. But what could she do? She couldn’t exactly order him to come home. His friend seemed nice enough, but was it right for a fifteen-year-old boy to be living with an older girl?

‘Would you like some breakfast?’

He nodded, and she hurried off to the kitchen, relieved to postpone further conversation. In the kitchen she poured cereal and milk into a bowl, wondering when things had started to unravel. Perhaps she’d taken her eye off the ball when Charlie was born. Perhaps he was acting out of jealousy. She knew what the books had to say about sibling rivalry, but had hoped that David, at nearly sixteen, would be less susceptible.

How could she possibly know what was normal? Perhaps David was one of those boys who found adolescence uncomfortable, perhaps he was merely going through a stage – a jabbering, incoherent, haunted, insomniac stage from which he would emerge calm and self-possessed, pass
his GCSEs, get a job, meet a nice girl, buy a house, raise children, retire, have a heart attack, enjoy a good turnout at his funeral.

She placed the bowl of cereal by the sofa and took his hands in hers. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come home, David?’

Justin stood up and left the room.

On the other hand, perhaps he could stay here, just for now. Perhaps he needs time away, a change of scene.
Or perhaps he’s in love with Agnes.
Suddenly it all made sense: the eccentric behaviour, the mood swings, the nerves. First love, of course! Well. She certainly wasn’t going to be one of those obstructive mothers, the ones who preached morality and abstinence at every turn. Let him have his love affair. She’d help him pick up the pieces when it ended.

Charlie gazed at his mother, unable to make sense of her expression. He padded around the flat after his brother, trying to get him to talk. But Justin looked past him, and eventually retreated to the bathroom, where he locked the door. Charlie leant against it, defeated.

His mother tapped softly, but receiving no answer, called goodbye, reminded him to eat, and then – humming a little – packed Charlie into his pushchair and left.

32

Justin stayed on at Agnes’s flat.

It was not so much a moving-in as a not-moving-out, and it wasn’t at all what she’d had in mind. But he was only fifteen. He wasn’t well. She felt guilty.

Justin didn’t question his exile from Agnes’s bed, but spent most of his time hunched on the sofa watching her, his eyes tragic and dilated with love.

After living with his middle-of-the-night wanderings and insomnia, Agnes now had to check morning and evening that he hadn’t fallen into a coma. He slept almost constantly and showed no real interest in food, though would eat dutifully, like a child, any meal she put in front of him.

But she was not a cruel person (she told herself) and she wasn’t about to throw him out on the street. So it was with a large measure of resignation that she left for her studio each morning, leaving Justin fast asleep on the sofa.

After two or three days, she arrived home to find him staring gloomily at
MasterChef
on TV. And she had an idea.

‘Justin, I’m working so hard, and I haven’t had a decent
meal in days. What if I leave you some cash and a cookbook and you see what you can do?’

He looked shocked. What
can
I do? I can panic at the possibility of having to venture out of the flat. Or having to cook. Why doesn’t she ask a question I know the answer to, like, would you like to have sex with me again?

But then he realized that this was something he could do for her that would make her life easier, a way to thank her for being kind to him. A way to win back her love. Yes, it would require getting dressed, going out, making choices, calculating change, following directions. But he owed her so much. It would be a start.

He told her he would try.

The next day, a Saturday, she left some money on the kitchen table with a copy of
Cooking World,
and went off to the studio.

He made it as far as the butcher’s on the corner. It was an old-fashioned family butcher’s, one of the few left in town, and there was a semi-skinned rabbit hanging upside down in the window. Justin caught its eye and it winked at him. He recoiled in horror.

And then he heard the horrible whispery voice, only this time it was singing in a high-pitched, squeaky tone, like a rabbit’s. When he dared look again, he saw that it was the rabbit singing, its dead mouth opening and closing with the words:

Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.

Where was his greyhound, now, when he needed him? He tried ignoring the horrible figment of his imagination, hoping it would go away, but the rabbit continued to sing.

Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.

Justin forced himself to walk to the meat counter where the butcher stood chatting casually with a woman and her daughter, a soft-featured, sturdy girl with thick brown hair and clear, fearless eyes. All three seemed strangely impervious to the singing rabbit, but when Justin approached, they turned to look at him.

He was a peculiar sight. Tears rolling down his face, shouting to drown out the sound of the singing rabbit; he said he needed help, pointed to a chicken, handed over some money, grabbed his parcel and bolted out the door in a panic.

Boys, thought the butcher.

Drugs, thought the woman.

Justin Case, thought Dorothea. So we meet again.

He heard the terrifying voice of the rabbit shouting after him.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Goes the farmer’s gun
.

So RUN rabbit, RUN rabbit, run, run, RUN!

He ran, shaking with fear. He couldn’t look at the chicken, its loose yellowy flesh reminded him too much of his own. It looked pathetic, naked and dead. He couldn’t bear to touch it, began to cry when he thought how vulnerable chickens were, how misused, how short and tragic their lives.

He missed his brother. His dog. His former self.

When Agnes returned home, she found Justin curled up asleep in the foetal position and the chicken, still wrapped in paper, leaking blood on to the hob of her cooker.

Well, she thought, I wouldn’t call the experiment an unqualified success.

She cleaned up the mess, rubbed the bird with salt and oil, stuffed it with a lemon and placed it in a hot oven, along with some ancient potatoes and beans from the bottom of the fridge.

An hour later the smell woke Justin, who, for a brief ecstatic moment, thought he’d managed to cook a meal by himself. Agnes would be impressed and grateful; she would invite him across the flat once more and into her bed. The reality disappointed but did not surprise him.

That night they ate together.

He didn’t tell her about the singing rabbit, just sat and listened as she talked about her day, the photographs, her plan for a show. As the narrative unfurled he stopped hearing her words and listened instead to the delicious cadence of her speech. The sound of her voice soothed him, he drew it around his shoulders like fleece.

I will feed Agnes, he thought, and in exchange she will take me back.

And so he set about channelling every ounce of fear, anxiety, nervous energy and love – especially love – into food.

On Monday morning he found a recipe for meatballs, uncrumpled the money left over from Saturday’s chicken, shoved it into his pocket and ventured out. The brightness of the day hurt his eyes, but the world felt cold and pleasant against his skin. He approached the butcher’s window cautiously. The rabbit was gone. Perhaps he had imagined it.

He entered, asked the butcher for 500 grams of minced beef, handed him the money, accepted his package and his change, and left.

As he passed the window again, he felt cautiously triumphant. He risked a tiny sideways glance. Still no rabbit. Excellent.

The way another person might have pursued the meaning of life, Justin made meatballs, shaping each ball into a sphere so laboured and perfect, it caused his eyes to fill with tears for the flesh of the noble cow, for the perfection of three-dimensional geometric forms in nature, for the relentless universality of dinner time.

He tried explaining this to Agnes and she laughed, but stopped when she caught sight of the expression on his face. He turned away before she could see the tears fall.

Oh lord, she thought. Woods. Not out of yet.

She had hoped the cooking would bring him out of himself, lead him back into the real world. But it didn’t. In the kitchen he was like the sorcerer’s apprentice: he couldn’t stop. The orderly rhythm of recipes calmed his jangled nerves, there was no need for value judgements and approximations. He disliked pinches and handfuls, hungered after precise measures and medium (not small, not large) eggs. It calmed him to choose ingredients, to prepare each according to its true inner nature. The feel of raw materials and the sound of sizzling comforted him.

It comforted him most of all to feed Agnes.

‘It’s good, Justin, you’re a natural,’ Agnes said, helping herself to another meatball.

Yes, he was a natural. A natural lunatic. But he enjoyed putting his mind to simple tasks, enjoyed her approval, enjoyed her pleasure at eating something other than sandwiches. It made him feel closer to the person he had lost track of, the person he had been not so long ago, before his brain got all tied up in catastrophe.

And he felt closer, if only by teaspoons, to his heart’s desire.

33

Justin had planned a special meal to celebrate two weeks of living with Agnes. As he adjusted the heat under the lamb chops, he heard a knock on the door.

Wrapped in a thick winter coat, Peter Prince looked gawky and unfazed as ever, like a relic from a life Justin had almost forgotten. Beside him stood his sister.

‘Do you remember Dorothea?’ Peter asked.

‘Hello,’ she said, noting the dark circles under his eyes.

Though her face looked familiar, Justin could not recall having met her before.

The three stood in awkward silence. Justin wished they would go away. He squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them again, brother and sister were still there.

Peter smiled his awkward smile. ‘Your mother said you were living here now.’

‘Yes.’

‘Something smells good.’

‘Lamb.’

During this exchange, Dorothea observed Justin calmly. Justin, who had often marvelled at Peter’s ability to sustain an uncomfortably long silence, now wondered if the talent were genetic.

He sighed at last, defeated. ‘Won’t you come in?’

Peter brightened. ‘Thanks. That would be nice.’ He stepped in before Justin could change his mind and once inside, looked carefully around the little flat. He noted the crumpled duvet on the sofa, the breakfast dishes still on the table, the sink full of water and unwashed mugs. ‘You don’t come to school any more,’ he said.

Justin nodded.

‘Or cross-country. Coach was asking what happened to you.’

‘Worried, was he?’

‘I wouldn’t say worried exactly. Hacked off, more like. I think your lamb is burning.’

Justin dashed to the hob, grabbed the frying pan and hurled it on to the kitchen table. Having seared his palm on the handle, he reached over to turn the heat off with his good hand, plunging the other into the sinkful of dirty, cold water. Smoke continued to billow from the burning frying pan. He stared at the charred meat as the smoke alarm began to shrill.

Peter grabbed a tea towel and fanned it violently under the alarm, while an unruffled Dorothea walked over to the window and opened it. Eventually the noise stopped and the smoke cleared.

‘I saw a picture of the airport disaster,’ Peter said, in the dramatic quiet left by the shrieking alarm. ‘And…’ He hesitated. ‘I thought I saw you.’

Justin stared.

‘My god, you are one lucky guy.’

‘
Lucky?’
Justin pronounced the word with exaggerated care, his teeth clenched, his entire body rigid with disbelief. Dorothea removed his burnt hand from the dirty sinkwater and examined it.

Peter Prince hesitated. ‘Uh… well, yes, lucky. The way I figure it, you must be just about the luckiest guy on earth.’

Justin exploded. ‘Are you
totally, utterly insane?
I’ve nearly been blown to smithereens in a freak airport accident, just about had a plane land in my lap. It’s the first time in history anything bad has ever happened at Luton Airport and I just
happened
to be
inches
from the
epicentre.
The fact that I’m here today is thanks only to the bizarre coincidence of Agnes arriving five minutes this side of apocalypse, thus saving me from spending the rest of my days as a teaspoonful
of vapour.’