Crossing the Line (5 page)

I liked Aidan's mum, and I felt sorry for her, sorry that she had to put up with Allie's nonsense, but I could hardly say so.

It wasn't as if Allie was discreet. One day the poor woman had come upon my sister in the park, sitting on a bench hugging her knees and talking to thin air. Allie hadn't even had the decency to lie about her invisible friend's identity. The invisible friend's mother had fled home in silent tears.

‘Hello, Nick.' Sunk in the armchair, Aidan's mum gave me her bright and fragile smile. She always tried hard to be civil and friendly to me and I appreciated that.

‘Hello,' I said, and then, ‘Is it Allie?'

‘Nick,' said Mum, perfectly illustrating the expression ‘covered in embarrassment'. Mum may be chock-full of words of wisdom, but God, she's sometimes stuck for them.

‘I know Allie's a bit old for this,' Mum managed at last. ‘I know that, we know that. She should have outgrown it by now.'

Aidan's mum looked at the floor, at the incredibly clean bit of carpet where Lola Nan had been doing the hoovering. ‘Well, we understood, you see. We understood at the
beginning. It's her way of coping, isn't it?'

But she wouldn't be here if they still understood. She wouldn't be here if it was still OK.

‘I wish I could talk to her.' Mum rubbed her temples manically.

‘I can see it's hard,' said Aidan's mum.

‘She's had counselling. The psychologist, he said it was best not to rush it, not to force her. He's not seen this before. He thinks maybe … the shock. You know?'

‘I know,' said Aidan's mum.

That encouraged Mum. ‘He doesn't think she's
pretending
. He says maybe she made herself believe it. That he's really there. And eventually she'll … she'll just accept he isn't. You see? Her mind's created Aidan and it'll … you know … uncreate him.'

I looked at Aidan's mum. I was thinking, Someone already uncreated him. I bet she was thinking that too, but she didn't say it.

‘It's … we mustn't try to … rush it,' Mum finished lamely.

Aidan's mum stared at the wall. ‘It's a bit out of hand,' she blurted. ‘That's all. It's been a year now and she isn't even … she isn't …'

‘Family,' I suggested.

She swallowed, so embarrassed and shamefaced that I wanted to pat her shoulder and tell her it wasn't her fault. I think Aidan's mum spent half her life trying to make other people feel less awkward about what had happened,
trying to put them at their ease.

At last she cleared her throat and said, ‘You see, it's upsetting Orla.'

It was upsetting Orla.

‘I'll talk to Allie,' I said.

Mum looked at me like I was Sir Gawain of the Round Table or something. The saintly one. Him. ‘Really, Nick? But are you sure it's a good –'

‘It's upsetting Orla,' I said. I looked at the wall too. I could see why Aidan's mum found it so fascinating. ‘I mean, I'll just talk to her. See what she says. Y'know.' I was embarrassed now. ‘Not promising anything. You know how she is.'

‘I'd appreciate it, Nick.' Aidan's mum –
Orla's
mum – smiled at me and I thought, Yup. This was a good move. Then I felt really rubbish for thinking that.

‘That's kind of you,' she went on. ‘I know it's difficult.'

‘Um, yeah,' I said. ‘OK.'

I don't know why I said I'd do it. Well, I do know: it was to get me brownie points with Orla, to shorten somewhat the odds against getting her naked underneath me, so it was hardly altruistic. But given that those odds were so ridiculously long, it was as heroic a gesture as I could manage. Heroic and futile and self-sacrificing, I told myself as I climbed the stairs with a heavy heart. I'd do it for Orla.

Self-sacrificing, my backside. Self-
obsessed.
And it was nothing to do with my backside; it was my groin, which
just ached with frustrated love, and I had to do something to take my mind off it. Or rather – since my mind had little to do with it – something to advance my cause, if only by the tiniest margin.

I hesitated outside Allie's open bedroom door. She was hunched over her computer, her intent face lit by a bluish glow. I didn't think it was a good idea, letting her have a computer in her bedroom with an internet connection and everything, but the trouble with Mum was that she hated falling out with anyone, and the trouble with Allie was that no one liked to upset her.

Allie knew both these vital facts.

Well, so far as I knew she wasn't getting into trouble: not on the internet, anyway. I came into the room and stood behind her, watching the screen, but right now all she was reading was a rugby website.

Rugby, of course, was Aidan's big thing.

My heart hurt my ribs, it was beating so furiously. I was going to have to say something or explode. Orla, I thought. It's all for Orla.

‘He's not here, Allie,' I said.

‘What?' She didn't turn.

‘He's not here. Aidan. He isn't here, OK? Stop it.'

She gave a patient sigh. ‘Of course he isn't.'

I was silent for a few seconds. ‘He isn't?'

‘No. He's downstairs. He wanted to see his mum.'

I should have known better than to hope. I sat on her bed and put my head in my hands, rubbing my scalp
ferociously. I wanted to cry and I wanted to laugh. Mostly I wanted to cry. ‘Please stop this,' I said again. ‘Please.'

‘It's not up to me,' said Allie. Her pale face glowed blue and eerie, dark eyes steadily reflecting the screen. I couldn't even see her blink.

‘How do you think his mother feels?'

Her white knuckles tensed on the mouse, but calmly she said, ‘I don't think. I know.'

It scared me, the way Allie never lost her temper. ‘It hurts her, you pretending he's still there.'

‘I'm not pretending.'

I ignored that. ‘She's really upset. So's Orla.'

‘Oh,' said Allie. ‘Orla. So that's it.'

I could have hit her, then, for the smug little smile on the side of her face. Curling my fingers into tight fists, I snapped, ‘It's a hideous thing to do. You're hurting everybody else to make yourself feel better. You're only thinking about yourself and it's bloody selfish.'

The desktop went over to screensaver, a bleak desertscape, so she couldn't have moved the mouse for a while. In the window behind her desk I could see her face reflected, lit by the screen, her mouth sulky, eyes gleaming with the tears that spilled down her face.

‘I know you miss him,' I said.

‘I don't miss him.' Her voice was perfectly steady. ‘He's still here.'

I got up and stormed out then, I couldn't help it. I stood outside her room fuming and trying not to worry, which
is quite a hard combination, but I couldn't face going downstairs yet. I wanted Aidan's mother to leave first so I wouldn't have to admit I'd failed.

Mind you, I don't know what I was supposed to achieve when the professionals had been dismal failures. Allie told them what they wanted to hear – something she was good at – and went home from every appointment still attached to Aidan's invisible hip. I was sick of not challenging her. Angry, too. I suppose I thought one day I'd just say ‘Stop it' and because she was my little sister and I loved her, she would stop it, just for me.

It hadn't happened yet. Much as I loved her, that did make me wonder if she loved me back. If she still loved me, I thought sometimes, aching with self-pity and righteous indignation, she'd give up Aidan – who didn't after all exist – so that I could have Orla, who did.

I don't know how the mothers were managing the awkward pause till I reappeared. They'd never been particular friends and Mrs Mahon was here only to try to sort out Allie. Maybe she was desperately killing time till she finished her tea and her half-melted biscuit. I got the feeling that's what she did with a lot of her time. Tried desperately to kill it.

I toed open the door of Lola Nan's bedroom. She was perched on the edge of her bed, tensed like a rabbit in headlights, staring at the wall. ‘She won't be long, Lola Nan,' I said. ‘I think Mrs Mahon's going soon. You can go back down in a minute.'

She was doing that thing again, patting the air. Crouching, I caught her hand. I smiled at her, even though her fingers tightened reflexively around mine and she was just about breaking the bones. Tears glittering in her washed-out eyes, she opened her mouth and made sucking sounds, as if she was experimenting with saying something. Then her eyes swam into focus, her brows dipped together and she hollered at me.

‘We were talking! Private! Go away!'

Then she screamed, incoherently, screamed till her eye sockets darkened and her papery skin rippled and her electric-shock hair quivered with the effort.

I sighed and stood up, prising off her hand. Who was she talking to? Bloody Granda? Hell, I thought, if Allie can have an imaginary friend, why not Lola Nan? She was probably more in need of one, and Lola Nan wasn't breaking anybody's heart. There was no point taking offence. After all, an illness wasn't a personal insult. Sometimes I was afraid a small real Lola Nan was inside that head, battering her fists against her cage. I could imagine her ricocheting around inside her empty skull, bouncing off the bone walls like a crazy pinball lost in the machine, howling in frustration, and that was why she sometimes yelled and howled at me.

But probably not. She was probably dead already, the Lola Nan who used to take me on her lap and sing and hum like the rails, before she went off them.

I crept on to the landing and bent over the banisters.
The women were in the hallway, and I could hear about half their murmured words. Most were Mum's, and I have to say I was impressed. She comforts for a living, after all; she could comfort for her country, and she was saying the sort of things to Mrs Mahon that I never could. If she was good at nothing else, she was good at sympathising, and I felt a reluctant embarrassed pride.

Then she blew it.

She touched Aidan's mum's upper arm and Aidan's mum tried hard not to flinch, because if she was anything like Orla she didn't like gratuitous touching. (Luckily I hadn't yet made the mistake of trying, but I'd been witness to a nasty incident with Kev Naughton.) Mum must have sensed resistance, because she let go of Mrs Mahon's arm. On an afterthought, she snatched the woman's hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.

‘Remember,' said Mum, ‘God never gives us a burden greater than we can bear.'

It was one of her favourites. I'd heard it before, on Words of Utterly Fatuous Folk-Wisdom, and I'd thought it a clunker even then. Now I shut my eyes and gripped the banister rail, hoping I wasn't going to be tipped over by the dizzying wave of shame.

Sometimes a parent says something so embarrassing you want to die. And sometimes dying just isn't enough: you want to kill the parent too. That was it for me. Mum explaining to a dead boy's mother that her nebulous God didn't actually have it in for her; he was only playing
some cosmic game of Buckaroo. And presumably, when Aidan's devastated dad walked out on what was left of his family, God had been a little careless hooking on the Stetson.

Aidan's mum never let on, though. I suppose she was too polite and she didn't want Mum to feel awkward. I couldn't see her face but I suppose she just smiled at Mum and walked quietly out and closed the door. When her blurred shadow was gone from the patterned glass and her car door had clunked shut and the engine coughed, purred and faded, Mum put her face in her hands and started to cry.

I left her to it.

Kevin Naughton killed him. Kevin Naughton killed my sister's boyfriend with a Valu-Pack Stay-Sharp vegetable knife; he stuck it in the brother of the girl I love and severed his subcostal artery. Kevin Naughton murdered Aidan Mahon.

Kevin Naughton was my friend.

What were you thinking?
Dad would scream at me in the days afterwards.
Why did you get involved with that scum? What the hell were you thinking?

Quite, Dad. What was I thinking? You may well ask.

I like to tell myself that when your mother does the local Whatever-God-You-Fancy slot – and occasionally uses you to illustrate a twee point about her amusing family life – you have to be meaner, tougher and sicker than anyone else, or you're dead. And there's an element of truth in that.

It's complicated, though.

I first laid eyes on Kev Naughton on my first day at Craigmyle High. I knew right away he was as scared as the rest of us newcomers, but what he was most scared of was his big brother. Mickey Naughton was a lot older and he'd left school, but he liked to keep an eye on Kev. He had a job selling bull semen to farmers – the back of his car was full of little tubes of spunk – but he must have picked some irregular hours for impregnating cows, because it left Mickey plenty of time to loiter near the school and monitor Kev's progress.

Maybe it was his intimate involvement with cattle; maybe over-familiarity had bred contempt. Mickey Naughton wanted to stay at the top of the food chain, and he wanted Kev up there with him. Naughton family values were Darwinian, smart and cold. Just like Mickey.

I was dead impressed with Mickey.

Yes, he was a scary bastard. Charming and all, but then I think the charm was part of the fear factor. I couldn't imagine Mickey taking crap from anyone, bureaucrat or traffic warden or snotty neighbour. I bet no kid would ever dare pee in Mickey's garden and run away laughing. Mickey would never quarrel with his boss over something pointless; he wouldn't clamber up on to his dignity and fall off. Mickey did not smell faintly of stale wine, and he did not wear a ponytail or the T-shirts of his lost youth. Mickey was dapper, with a nice line in shirts and jackets. Mickey had a white dazzling smile and no
tattoos. I used to look at Mickey – nervously, out of the corner of my eye – and think, now that's what I call a role model.