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But this older Matt and I were practically strangers. Those innocent teenage boys had grown up and grown apart. Nostalgia played tricks on my mind. And I was dog-tired—we both were.
Matt’s breathing slowed to a regular huffing sigh. His fingers loosened in mine. I sucked in a lungful of air, trying to dislodge the steady ache that had been building in my chest from the moment he’d joined me in the sitting room. Leaning down, I swept his hair from his brow, then placed the softest of kisses to his cool, damp skin.
“If I could turn the clock back, my love, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
I experienced the best night sleep I’d had in months. I dreamed too—jumbled dreams, but not restless and unpleasant like the nightmares I’d suffered after Samantha had left. Rugby featured, Ryan featured, and even adult Matt featured somewhere, stroking my hair and pressing his bruised lips against my cheek.
Next morning, as I peeped in on him before leaving for work, I discovered the guest room empty. My pyjamas and sweater lay neatly folded on the armchair. He’d even stripped the bed. The window had been propped open, letting in the gentle sea breeze, so not even the scent of him lingered. As if he’d never been there at all.
Looking back, his night-time flit was inevitable. Matt Leeson was good at disappearing. I should have expected it. I shouldn’t have slept so heavily. I should have made a bed on the sofa outside his room, on guard. Barricaded him in.
He hadn’t left a note or an explanation, of course. Not his style, I knew that now. I told myself the hollow numbness lodged behind my rib cage was an overreaction. As I drove into work, keeping an eye out for him, I tried to convince myself the despairing melancholy would pass. I mourned the loss of the boy. That was all. Exactly as I had all those years ago, when my wild, ebony-haired almost-lover had vanished from the face of the earth. Christ, we’d never even spent a night in the same bed! It couldn’t be the man he’d become I grieved for. Not that spiky, crotchety grump, whose ripe mouth had complained about all my pitiful attempts to help and told me to fuck off, while his dark, haunted eyes had pleaded for me to stay.
Boy Matt used to rearrange my underwear drawer, disrupt my meticulous filing system, and leave obscene messages between the pages of my notebooks. Adult Matt, as I discovered on Sunday morning while getting ready for rugby practice, had tied the laces of my rugby boots together. There couldn’t be another explanation—it was an intricate knot. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Ryan, scoffing a bacon sandwich while getting his own rugby kit organised, I’d have sunk to the floor and wept.
THIS IS HOW IT FEELS
(INSPIRAL CARPETS)
The next six weeks passed no differently to the previous six months. I treated myself to a new hedge trimmer and made short work of the overgrown shrubbery on the front lawn. I decided against replacing the old patio with decking, and instead, copied a YouTube video on how to repoint tired slabs. That mindless activity filled a couple of weekends. Life pottered on. Hospital, rugby coaching, telly, a round of golf. Petty text exchanges with Samantha, vindictive digs from Mike. The French had a neat phrase for it: métro,boulot,dodo—commute, job, sleep; a wonderfully succinct précis of the unchanging daily grind.
Ryan had shared the presence of my unusual houseguest with his mother, who delegated berating me to her new husband. Mike collared me in the theatre changing rooms after work one evening, naked apart from a pair of navy Marks & Spencer boxer shorts, identical to the pairs Samantha used to buy for me. Even his socks, plain grey ribbed and sagging at his ankles, could have been duplicates from my own laundry pile.
“That tramp, whose face Alistair operated on—the one who’d been beaten up. Ryan said you took him home with you! He said you knew him! What the hell, Alex? Your son slept under the same roof! Samantha isn’t very happy, to say the least.”
“He’s not a tramp,” I pulled on my trousers and concentrated on buttoning up the fly and fastening my belt until my temper calmed. I didn’t know whether Matt was homeless or not, although in the days after he left it had occurred to me that he could be. Christ, I hoped not. Picturing him struggling out on the streets, battered and bruised, made my blood run cold. Mike didn’t need to know I’d driven aimlessly around town every Sunday since, slowing to a crawl past locations where the homeless tended to congregate.
“I’ve known him since we were boys,” I added frostily. “I didn’t recognise him until the end of the operation. He needed someone to keep an eye on him post-operatively, and I was an obvious choice. I’d do the same for any of my friends.”
Mike scratched his balls, in no hurry to get dressed. According to Ryan, he paraded around the house in his boxers all the time—not a particularly edifying image.
“It’s not unreasonable for Samantha to concern herself with the company you’re keeping.” His tone was sneery. “She’s only got Ryan’s welfare at heart. We both have.”
Pompous arse. Most of the time, I endeavoured to shield Ryan from my venomous feelings towards Mike. After all, he half lived with him and holidayed with him. I wasn’t convinced Mike shared the same mindset. Imagining him drip-feeding my son with all sorts of sly comments about his father was far too easy.
“Matt is not a thief, homeless, or a pervert. My son was quite safe under the same roof as him. Anyhow, it’s old news. He’s gone now.”
I was down in the mouth for a whole month before the sadness clouding my brain was displaced by a simmering sense of exasperation. How dare Matt leave me again, without explanation? Where had he gone? Did he have a home here in Bournemouth, or had he only been passing through? Had he attended his outpatient appointments? Could he look after himself?
As the list of unanswered questions grew longer, my patience thinned. Even Ryan picked up on my short fuse as I barked at him to not leave his shoes where I could trip over them. Calmly, he pointed out that he’d been leaving them there for the best part of twelve years, ever since he’d been able to kick them off himself. So why such a big deal now? And if him and his shoes were such an inconvenience, then he’d be more than happy to decamp back to his mother’s, becauseMikedidn’t care where he left them.
The girlfriend, Chloe, came over one afternoon after school and dragged Ryan up to his room before even offering me the courtesy of a hello. I caught an eyeful of swishy blonde hair, sculpted blunt eyebrows, and purple fingernails so long I wanted to ask her how she managed to dress herself in the mornings. Ryan eyed me nervously, half expecting me to put up some sort of resistance, but to be honest, it happened so fast I’d not had time to formulate a polite alternative suggestion before the slam of his bedroom door.
A cursory text exchange with Samantha ensued, the upshot being that we both agreed he was too young to take girls up to his room. At least without some boundaries being established with both sets of parents first. Oh, and by the way, I should have a father-son chat with him sooner rather than later, as Samantha had zero desire to be a grandmother. According to her, as a doctor I should be good at that stuff. As if discussions about safe sex were a routine part of my pre-operative consultation when Brenda from Boscombe turned up for her hip replacement.
All things considered; it had been a shitty six weeks.
I counted a total of eighty-two Matt, or Matthew, or Matty Leesons listed on Facebook. Scattered all across the globe. Regrettably few pasted helpful photographs of themselves next to their names, and more than half had private accounts. None were listed as living in Bournemouth or Stourbridge. So that was no help whatsoever. I drew a blank on Twitter, too, and gave up trying to navigate Instagram. Which left me with nothing, aside from a nagging feeling I tried to ignore, that perhaps Matt didn’t want to be found.
I’d been a doctor for long enough to know that looking up confidential patient information for one’s private use was strictly verboten. The General Medical Council, an august body regulating doctors’ conduct for the safety of patients, had clear and strict guidance on the matter. Thus, as tempted as I was to key Matt’s name and date of birth into our hospital medical records database and locate his address, I resisted. Even though the chances of anyone ever finding out were remote. It would be the work of seconds—literally a couple of clicks of my keyboard.
Stolid, dull, unadventurous Dr Alex Valentine had never so much as parked on double-yellow lines, or stuck a postage stamp upside down, let alone contemplated breaking one of the GMC’s codes of conduct. Samantha would have used these character traits as yet more black marks against me—too risk-averse, too lacking in spontaneity, too strait-laced. “For Christ’s sake, Alex, just live a little!” she used to moan with frustration as I drove at a safe and economical sixty-five miles per hour down the motorway. “Put your clog down! It’s a fucking Audi, not a bloody Robin Reliant!”
It was only a matter of time until I bumped into Alistair, the maxillofacial surgeon. Our last encounter across Matt’s hospital bed had been awkward, and I’d never offered him an explanation of my involvement. Not that I felt obliged to discuss how I’d come to take a recalcitrant, slightly dubious patient home with me. I found him in the operating theatre coffee room, doing the middle-aged and laborious two-finger typing thing, hunched over his laptop. Raising a hand in greeting, I held up a mug. “Tea?”
He nodded. “One sugar, ta.”
I settled next to him as he sipped his drink and pulled a face as the first mouthful hit his tastebuds. Hospital tea and coffee were dire; something about the water supply gave tea a metallic taste and made the jar of soil masquerading as instant coffee, virtually undrinkable. Needs must, however.
