AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was a good question. Possibly I always acted that way around my family. “Maybe if we’re quiet, she’ll go away again.”
This was a lie; my mother never went away again.
“Is it possible,” asked Leo, “she’s worried about you?”
I rubbed a hand across my eyes. “Edwin was supposed to let her know I was fine.”
“Edwin?”
“Never mind.”
Leo had already pulled on trousers and a hoodie. “Is theresomething you’re not telling me about your family, Marius? Some reason why you don’t want to see your mother?”
No, I was just being a dick. “No,” I said aloud.
I dressed more slowly—and given my foot, more awkwardly—than Leo. And by the time I hobbled out, my parents were already coming aboard, my mother backwards, looking everywhere at once, because she had no sense of personal safety.
“Oh, this is lovely,” she was saying. “Why doesn’t she have a name?”
Leo, meanwhile, was being steered through the kitchen and into a corner. “She does have a name—but winter came on, and I haven’t had time to paint it yet.”
“What’s she called?” I asked, drawing myself heroically to my mother’s attention.
“Um. Demoiselle.” Leo had gone bright red. “After—”
“A young lady?” Apparently my gambit had failed. And Mum was more concerned with discovering if Leo was gay, and therefore potential boyfriend material, than she was about my well-being.
“After the damselfly,” Leo corrected quickly.29
“How interesting.” Mum was probably the only person in the world who said “how interesting” and didn’t mean it sarcastically. “Are you an entomologist?”
“I just think they’re beautiful.” Leo’s eyes slid to mine, and I found his gaze almost impossible to hold. “Nothing but beautiful.”
Mum’s whole expression practically became a cartoon heart. “Thank you so much,” she said, dumping what looked like six separate carrier bags onto the floor and descending lovingly upon Leo, “for looking after Marius.”
“It’s”—Leo’s back was to the wall now—“it’s not a problem.”
“I’m Clementine, Marius’s mother. And this is Krzysztof, his father.”
My dad stepped forward to shake Leo’s hand.
And I got that slightly dizzy feeling that came from seeing people you knew well in a fresh context. Almost as strangers. My mum, with the candy-pink streaks in her grey hair, wearing an ankle-length puffer coat of such extreme puffiness that she looked like she was strapped into a sleeping bag. And my dad with the quiet air of a serial killer and the suit of a middle-grade accountant when he was, thankfully, neither. I’d somehow got to be a teenager before understanding that he was a fairly prestigious figure within the university. Mostly, though, they looked like the sort of parents who would come out on a freezing cold Boxing Day, carrying what looked like the entire contents of their fridge, in search of an undisclosed narrowboat, all because their son was an ungrateful shithead who had left them an ambiguous message regarding his whereabouts.
Mum had now sniper-sighted onto me. She stomped down the boat, hands on hips. “And as for you, paczek. What have you done to yourself this time?”
“Don’t call me that. And I’m fine. I hurt my ankle. There was no need for”—I flailed a hand—“any of this.”
“Sorry but…” Leo glanced between us. Something heart-sinkingly protective in it. My fault. For giving him the impression I needed that. And also for giving him the impression my parents were monsters who verbally abused me. “What’s a pooncheck?”
“A kind of doughnut,” Dad explained. “She’s always called him that. Though if she wanted to call him something else right now on account of the worry he’s caused her, I wouldn’t object.”
I hopped over to the sofa and sat down on it. “Neither would I. I’m not a fucking child.”
“We’re aware.” My dad had never been the type to raise his voice. Maybe because he didn’t need to. After years of wrangling governments, students, research councils, and other academics, he knew how to be listened to. “But storming out in the middle of Wigilia and not telling us where you were is hardly the action of an adult, is it?”
Once again Leo bristled misplacedly on my behalf. “He texted.”
There was a long silence. That grew longer and longer as my parents demonstrated—as they had spent their life demonstrating—that no matter how badly I behaved, they would never not stand by me.
