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‘No!’ he choked, rearing out of the water, grating noises coming from his throat as he struggled to breathe. Sudsy water streamed down his face, down his neck and over his body. Coughs, hacking and painful racked his chest until he thought he was going to be sick and he hugged his legs to his body rocking backwards and forwards. Maybe he didn’t want to die. He sat still, his heart rate subsiding as he considered the situation. Yes, it seemed likely he wanted to live. Besides, even if he didn’t want to follow his mother, killing himself in George’s home was no way to repay kindness.
He clung to his shins, wondering if this was the moment he would cry? Nothing happened.
Later,in George’s bedroom, Owen stretched out on the put-you-up, his feet dangling off the end, and stared into the darkness, wondering if he was ever going to feel normal again. But there
‘You all right?’ George asked from across the room.
Owen closed his eyes. It felt like he was floating and whirling around the ceiling. The result of emptying the cooking brandy bottle, he supposed. He wasn’t all right. But there was nothing George could do if he said so. No point in talking then.
He shifted on the creaking fold-up-bed, wondering if the flimsy thing was going to hold his weight. George had told him it hadn’t been used for several years. Not since the last family camping holiday at Dymchurch. Owen didn’t think he’d been there. He’d never had what one might call a conventional family holiday, camping or otherwise.
His thoughts drifted away from holidays and back to the problem of crying or not crying. His mother was dead, so he knew he should cry. That’s what one was supposed to do when you lost a parent. So what was wrong with him?
He’d cried when his dad was killed in Bosnia. Then he’d locked himself in his bedroom, thrown stuff around in a rage of grief and screamed into his pillow, biting at it, forcing the linen into his mouth to muffle the noise as sorrow tumbled out of him like white water over boulders. The shame of that came back to him. His father would have been appalled at such an abandoned display of emotion.
Again, a few months later, when his grandfather died, the tears had been unstoppable. He remembered being outside the farm in Wales. The fire engines, flashing blue lights, the wrapped body of grandpa leaving the burnt-out cottage, while he’d stamped off into the darkness to yell obscenities at the sky and let his guilt-ridden tears flow. Was that self-indulgence? His father would probably have said so.
Owen shifted again on the bed and tried to remember his reaction to his little sister’s death, but it was too far back. All he could recall was fear and guilt. A belief which seemed entirely rational to him, then and now. It was his fault she was dead. But this time, with his mum’s death, he was feeling nothing, and he truly believed it wasn’t his fault.
Nothing much happenedin the Halcyon house on the next few days except George kept asking, ‘You all right?’ ‘Do you feel like talking?’ ‘You fancy going out?’
Owen kept saying, ‘No.’
George’s father Charles, ‘Call me Chas’ Halcyon, tried to engage Owen in conversation; slapping him heavily on the back and asking if had he any family. Owen had answered honestly. He had no living relatives.
George’s mother, the glamorous Sally, watched him with worried eyes, and tried to feed him, but was more successful with the booze.
He seemed to be in a perpetual state of semi-drunkenness, which didn’t seem a bad way to exist. Owen wasn’t sure where she stashed all the alcohol, but she always had a half-empty bottle of some strong spirit secreted in the kitchen. If not brandy, then rum, whisky, vodka, or gin.
The surprising benefit of being almost permanently partially pickled was he suffered no hangover. He was pondering this peculiarity when George said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
