everything you’ve told me about your family, sounds like an olive branch.’
‘I don’t know. Even if it is, she’ll want to be raking over the past.’
Around him, row upon row of visitors and prisoners bend towards each other at the blue plastic tables like chess players. The past and poorly thought-out moves are what have got most of them here in the first place, one way or another.
‘What is the worst that can happen?’ he asks.
They pull their hands apart, clasp them together again under the table. She can feel him turning the ring on her finger. He should be out in three months, the church is keeping his job open for him, the flat will be finished. This is what hope feels like, she thinks, and tells him what she’d seen on television, how it reminded her of Mikey sitting on his shoulders in the park last summer.
‘You know I’d do anything for him,’ says Solomon. ‘If anything ever happened to you, I’d be there for him.’
That evening, hands behind his head, lying on his bed in his cell after lockdown, Solomon’s thoughts are a flickering screen obscuring the prayerfulness he sought. He wants her now, not just for the sex, although he wants that too, but he wants her so he can be someone for someone again, a gentleman for Val, a proper father for Mikey. In the photo he keeps, Mikey is running after a football, the little boy’s face screwed up with determination. He scored, but it was as if the kid didn’t know how to celebrate. Out in the fresh air, he didn’t look as geeky as usual, just frizzy hair and stumpy legs and nine years’ worth of wariness.
Turning to his Text for the Day, Solomon tries to focus: ‘They that visited us required of us mirth, saying Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
So Solomon begins to sing quietly to himself. ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’
No, comes the reply from the bottom bunk.
‘Were you there when the stone was rolled away?’ Solomon laughs, but he has the good grace to sing silently, only to himself.
On the bus going home, Valerie texts back: ‘Thx Di, Mikey and I would love to stay the night. X Val.’
Chapter Five
On the morning of the funeral Mikey wakes up with the day lying awkward beside him. He hates the idea that school will go on without him, the lining up, the working out, and, even worse, he already hates two days’ time when everyone will look at him and wonder where he’s been, or everyone won’t look at him, like it hasn’t mattered that he hasn’t been there. His mother says staying at his aunty’s is an opportunity to put things right. What things, he doesn’t know. What he does know is that stuff doesn’t often get put right, not overnight.
Downstairs, the cat is waiting to go out. Having found a packet of crisps in the cupboard and the remote down the back of the sofa, he flicks through the channels: a quiz show, a chat show, a stupid cartoon for little kids, a cooking show, a shopping show. Finally, he finds a nature show all filmed underwater where the fish bulge at the camera, silenced thousands of feet below the surface of the sea. Even the voice of the man explaining the fish sounds as though it belongs in a different world, and Mikey finds himself on the side of the fish. The cat comes back, he finds three more jigsaw pieces of Elvis’s boots, eats another packet of crisps and hides the empty packets, and then it is the nine o’clock news. He watches long enough to see more pictures of buildings being swallowed up by the sea because that is interesting, how an earthquake can make waves which grow bigger and bigger, and he wonders how far things can tip without actually spilling over and whether if the world tilts as it goes round and round and Australia is upside down, why don’t they all fall off the edge? He leaves it all behind and goes upstairs.
‘Mum? We’re going to be late for the funeral.’
‘Put the kettle on, Mikey,’ she calls from the shower.
He brings her mug of tea to the bedroom and sees her straightening her hair which isn’t that colour really and getting a brand-new black dress out of the cupboard and snaking it down over her bra and pants like it is a second skin. So that’s what you wear to funerals, he thinks, sort of the same as what you wear to go clubbing only a bit longer. She has got him a new jacket with a free footballing tie. He doesn’t even like football.
The cemetery building looks like a church, a library and a swimming pool all rolled into one. Mikey feels nervous; in the gents’ there is a large man in black at the other end of the urinals, crying and pissing at the same time. They’re early, but there are already so many cars the parking is full and there is a sign directing people to an overflow.
‘Have they all come for Nanna?’
‘Don’t be daft, they’re for the one before, every twenty-five minutes,’ she explains. ‘There’s thousands buried here.’
Thousands? Thousands dead in the tsunami, that’s what it says on the news, but that’s in another country, not here. Under every one of those stones, a body? When the rabbit Paul got him died, Paul said if he was a normal boy he would cry, but it was an ugly rabbit and he’d never wanted it anyway. Stiff with its eyes open and its head at a funny angle, and how in the nightmares he never tells anyone about, the rabbit turns into his mum. Other dead things, not including the enemy on Lockdown who don’t count: a mouse in a trap; a black-and-white cat, perfect by the side of the road except for a thin line of bright red blood running from its whiskers to the dull leaves in the gutter; and something else, a bird in their old house thudding against the French windows, falling onto the carpet, still alive when he stretched out its wings, still twitching when he pulled its legs. He doesn’t know why he did that, doesn’t want to think about it now.
‘There’s Diana’
Between the pink cherry trees, between the cars parked like toys on either side of the road, a black hearse is rolling towards him. It stops, the coffin is sliding out on a tray and propped up beside it like a doll is a tall woman, also in black, with dark glasses which make her look like a spy.
The sound is turned down, the murmuring around him of the little gangs of grown-ups when they don’t want you to hear, the sudden and unexpected fluttering of a flock of fat pigeons, traffic droning beyond the cemetery walls, and their spiky heels grating on the gravel as they scratch towards each other.
‘Valerie, you haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Nor have you, Di.’
It’s her then. That makes sense. She doesn’t look like she’s part of their family, but she does look rich. Stupid kissing, kiss, kiss. Not him, no way.
‘Lovely flowers, Di!’ says his mum.
The white lilies sprout from the coffin like a tropical jungle.
‘I’d love them to have been Wynhope lilies,’ says his aunt, ‘but I’m afraid Edmund insists on keeping them for our private chapel, so I had to place a special order in London.’
She sounds rich too.
‘And you must be Michael.’
‘Say hello to your aunty, Mikey.’
Paul used to say his mum sounded common, but Mikey thinks she sounds just fine. He kicks the stones and studies the grit and the dirt that lies beneath the pale pebbles.
‘Mikey!’
