Misspent Youth

  “Why did you screw up, Dad? You keep saying how much I meant to you. How much you love me. Why? If all that’s true, why did you do it?”

  “Because I’m stupid. Because I made a mistake. Because my dick was doing all my thinking just like when I married Tracy. I knew all along I shouldn’t be doing it. I just couldn’t stop. Tim, I don’t know how old I am. You just can’t know what that’s like. I’ve got this mind that maps out everything sensible and rational, while my body is saying to hell with it; do what you want to and do it now because that’s what you are, and you’ll never get another chance. Except this is my second chance. Jesus, everything is so fucked up.”

  “If you put it like that, maybe a shrink’s not such a bad idea after all.”

  Jeff grinned bleakly. “I hate those bastards. They’re so smug.”

  “I didn’t really want to go to one.”

  They looked at each other. Before today, Jeff knew, they would have shared an identical smile. Now Tim was just studying him, looking for any glimpse of the man from before the rejuvenation treatment. The decent man, who really wouldn’t have done this to his son.

  “Is she…” Tim turned away, looking out across the water. “Is she at the manor?”

  “Annabelle has moved in with me, yes.”

  “Thought so. Do you love her?”

  “Yes, Tim.”

  “Yeah. You’d have to, really. It would have been easy for you to leave her with all this going on.”

  “Well, I haven’t.” Jeff almost put his hand out to touch Tim reassuringly, the boy suddenly seemed so lonely. Physical contact would probably have been a mistake at this point. One stage at a time. “I’m not going to leave you, either.”

  “Right.”

  “I know your mother’s been and straightened out the whole bungalow for you, but is there anything else you need?”

  “Oh.” Tim glanced around the patio, almost as if he was confused by the question. “No, don’t think so.”

  “Well, if you do think of anything, just call me. I’ll bring it straight over.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Jeff stood up. Don’t ask, tell, don’t give him a chance to refuse. “I’ll be back to see you again tomorrow anyway.” He held his breath to see if Tim would object, or just tell him to his face not to come. But there was no response. “I love you, son.” He certainly didn’t expect a reply to that. Not for a long, long time. But if you love someone enough it’s hard for them not to love you back. That was the hope he clung to as he left.

  JEFF DID GO BACK THE NEXT DAY, and the day after, and the day after that. He sat with Tim on the patio. Wondering how in hell to keep the conversation going was exhausting, emotionally draining work. But trying to regain the boy’s trust after such a monstrous violation was never going to be quick and easy. Jeff knew that, but was determined to put in the time. Decades, if necessary.

  “Ten out of ten for effort,” Sue said dryly during one of her calls.

  “Has he said anything to you?”

  “Just that you keep visiting. I’m impressed.”

  “This isn’t a game,” he told her crossly. “He’s my son.”

  “Yes, really yours; I know that better than anyone else on this planet. You know this is so ironic.”

  “How?”

  “Before the treatment, you were the one he loved the most. I was just an ogre. Now, Tim and I are a lot closer. While you two…”

  “Yeah, it’s a real hoot.”

  “When are you coming down to London?”

  “Day after tomorrow. Don’t worry, we’re staying at the conference center. We don’t need the flat.”

  “I think I’ve found a house. I should be out of here in a couple of weeks.”

  “That’s good. Somewhere nice?”

  “Just off Holland Park.”

  His expression grew phlegmatic. “Sounds expensive.”

  “When was I ever anything else?”

  “Do you want to meet up for lunch while I’m in town? Just the two of us.” He knew there was no way she would ever sit at the same table as Annabelle without spending the whole time sniping.

  “Sure.” A troubled frown touched her forehead for an instant. “Jeff, you will be careful while you’re down here, won’t you?”

  “I wasn’t planning on anything too wild. Why?”

  “There are a lot of protestors here to picket your summit. My taxi driver had to take a big detour to avoid a march yesterday, and the silly thing doesn’t even start for a couple of days.”

  “Don’t worry. Our hotel is part of the center itself. We’re inside the security zone. Krober was quite insistent about that. It’ll be perfectly safe.”

  ON SATURDAY MORNING at breakfast Jeff called Alison’s house as usual to check that she and Tim were up before he went over. It was Alison who answered. “Looks like you’ve got the weekend off,” she told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he was out of here first thing this morning. For someone who’s been moping about all thanks to you, he made a remarkable recovery yesterday afternoon once you’d left.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “Nottingham, apparently. Some friend lives in a village just outside.”

  “What friend?”

  “Someone called Vanessa. You know her?”

  “Tim’s gone to stay with Vanessa?”

  Across the kitchen table, Annabelle shot him a surprised look. Her lips parted in a sunlight smile, and she gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Yes,” Alison drawled. “He said it was just for the weekend.”

  “I don’t care if it’s only for an hour. That’s fantastic news, Alison.”

  “Happy to oblige. Now, you two relax for a couple of days before the summit.”

  “Will do.”

  Annabelle’s smile had become impish. “Well, when did that start?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Jeff shivered as he rubbed his hands against his upper arms, feeling the goose bumps under his fingers. “Can we turn the air conditioning down? It’s freezing in here.”

  “Sure.” She thumbed the remote. “I suppose they’ll go down to London together.”

  He gave her a perplexed glance. It was as though he’d missed a chunk of conversation somewhere. “Why are they going down to London?”

  “To join the antitechnocrat Million Citizen Voices. We all agreed to do it months ago.”

  “You’re kidding! You mean Tim is going to be outside the summit protesting with all the other hippies while I’m inside presenting a paper?”

  Annabelle examined her toast. “Yes.”

  “Well, thanks, everyone, for telling me. Jesus wept!”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “No. I did not bloody know. Goddamn it, how is this going to help? We’re going to be right back on opposite sides again. All that bloody effort I’ve made…”

  “No.” She reached out and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Children always have different politics from their parents.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Mostly. And anyway, Tim’s known you’ve been going to the summit ever since Lucy Duke fixed it up. That was weeks ago. If he was resentful about that, he would have said. I don’t think it’s an issue, I really don’t.”

  Jeff could feel a headache starting behind his temples. He rubbed his palm irritably along his forehead. “Maybe. I don’t know. I ought to check with Alison, see if he said anything to her.” He picked up his PCglasses. Annabelle held his wrist.

  “No,” she said. “Let it happen. Don’t make an issue out of this.”

  He hesitated for a long moment. “Okay. All right. But if there’s any trouble down there, I want him safe back here in Rutland.”

  THE START OF TIM’S BREAK found him more relaxed than he’d ever been while staying with Alison. He was looking forward to seeing Vanessa—for several reasons—and the last of his artificial skin had been taken off, leaving only mild tingles where his injuries used to be.

/>   Vanessa was waiting for him when he got off the train at Nottingham’s elaborate brick-built station, and drove him out to the village where her family lived. She’d borrowed her mother’s Ford ZA-7, a twenty-year-old, two-seater urban car powered by polymer batteries. “It looks like a plastic rickshaw,” Tim exclaimed delightedly as he walked a circle around the well-maintained antique.

  “Shut up or I’ll make you walk alongside.”

  “Are you sure you could keep up?”

  Her home was a lovely old rectory house, with stone walls besieged by climbing roses and evergreen clematis creepers. There was no air conditioning like Tim was accustomed to; the thickness of the stone, over a meter, helped keep it cool inside throughout the long hot summer months. She showed him his room. “Right next to mine,” she said, pointing at the next door along the landing. They looked at each other for a moment before smiling. Nothing was said, but Tim’s ill-defined hopes suddenly skyrocketed. This was nothing like the usual frantic game of chase they’d all played together for the last three or four years at school. What the two of them had begun now was a lot more casual and cool than that. He liked it. There was no pressure.

  A large garden at the back of the rectory was bounded by a three-meter-high stone wall, whose individual blocks were slowly being consumed by moss and lichens. They protected a traditionalist layout of flower borders and a small lavender bed. Hordes of butterflies danced erratically through the air between the purple flower stems, hounded by Vanessa’s two young sisters. Both of them waved and said a cheery hello to Tim.

  “Nobody’s going to see in through these,” Vanessa said as they walked around the walls.

  “You wouldn’t believe what the reporters did in Manton,” Tim told her. “They were tramping through crop fields and everything to try and get a view of Alison’s bungalow. Someone said a couple with ultrazoom lenses were set up at Hambleton. That’s kilometers away.”

  “I hate the media. They debase everybody.”

  A tall GM evergreen beech hedge marked the end of the broad lawn. Vanessa led Tim through the wrought iron gates in the middle. A broad orchard lay beyond it, also enclosed by the beech hedge. To one side of the gate was a small outdoor swimming pool, with a tiny whitewashed Spanish-style building behind it for changing and showering. Opposite that was a line of wooden stables running out from the end of a big old stone barn.

  “Do you ride?” she asked.

  “Haven’t for ages.”

  “We can try going for a hack tomorrow if you like.”

  “Yeah, why not.” Tim was looking longingly at the pool. He hadn’t realized how much he missed swimming.

  “There’s trunks inside,” she told him sympathetically.

  He tried not to make his stare too blatant as they splashed about together. That was probably the most difficult part of the day; in her chrome-yellow bikini Vanessa was quite something. It was hard not to leave eye tracks all over her.

  “Like old times,” she said eventually. After a while they’d stopped swimming, and now just lay about on big inflatable chairs, drifting randomly around the pool as the mild late-afternoon breeze pushed them along.

  “Yeah,” Tim agreed. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses, so she couldn’t see him looking at her now.

  “Do you still miss her?”

  “I don’t really think about her, to be honest.”

  “Good.” Vanessa was at the far end of the pool, her head tipped back with her eyes closed as the big chair started to twirl round. “Boys always think they like bad girls best. You think they’re more exciting. And she was bad; the rest of us all knew it.”

  “You never said.”

  “Would you have listened, or even believed?”

  “No. Probably not.”

  “She was always going to wind up on the tabloid streams. If it hadn’t been with your father, she’d have gone back to a football team’s hotel to be their training bunny. That’s what she is.”

  “Simon said as much,” Tim admitted.

  “He was right. She’s very insecure, that makes her needy. It’s not a good thing to be when you’re that beautiful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope she didn’t hurt you too much.”

  “It doesn’t get much worse, though it wasn’t just her.”

  “I know. I’d just die if my dad ever hit on one of my friends, never mind the pair of them actually going to bed. Urrgh! That is so much the worst thing in the world.”

  Tim grinned, amazed at how easy it was to talk about what had happened—he never could with Alison. One hand trailed lightly in the water, a tiny push for the inflatable chair, moving the two of them closer. “I’m really glad you asked me here. It feels good to be away from Dad. He’s so desperate to try to make up. Every day I have to listen to him going on about regrets and how being young again makes things difficult for him, that he hasn’t got a perspective back on his life and who he should be. It almost makes me feel guilty for getting pissed off with him for what he did.”

  “So how do you feel about that?”

  “Now? Not much, I suppose. It was a real bastard when it happened. I hated them so bad I could have killed them. And I still resent the hell out of the pair of them for screwing up my life like this. But…everyone was right—which I really hate, too. If Annabelle could do that to me, then she wasn’t worth getting worked up over in the first place.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got perfectly healthy reactions if you ask me.”

  “I’ve just calmed down, I guess. Time always quiets emotions. That doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven him, though. And I’m still angry he got to meet Sir Mitch. I so much wanted to do that.”

  “Will you ever forgive him?”

  “I don’t know. It would be kind of weird. Besides, that would be like admitting they were in the right to do it. I can never do that.”

  “Then why are you talking to him?”

  Tim shrugged, which just produced a squeaking sound between his skin and the plastic chair. “I don’t know. He’s my dad. Can you ever really hate your parents?”

  Her chair touched his. She smiled and put a hand out across his backrest, holding them together. “Any other good reasons for coming here?”

  “Maybe a few.” He leaned over. She giggled as the chairs started to dip down in unison. Then they were kissing, and the angle was increasing rapidly. They fell into the pool together, both of them laughing as they surfaced. He put his arms around her for a more insistent kiss. Vanessa clung to him, he felt one leg curling around the small of his back as she climbed up against him. Thankfully they were in the shallow end, so he could keep his feet on the bottom.

  “Vanessa!”

  They broke apart to see Margret, her youngest sister, shouting at them from the edge of the pool. “Vanessa, there’s a fight in London, a big one. It’s on all the news streams.”

  “A fight?”

  “One of the marches. People are throwing things and everything. It’s horrible.”

  They made their way back to the house and occupied the big old leather chesterfield sofa in the lounge. The screen on the wall was showing one of the preprotest marches. Over two thousand people were moving along Whitehall with the intention of handing in a petition to Downing Street calling for the Euro Socio-Industrial summit to be canceled. But the police weren’t letting anyone near the solid metal security gates sealing off the prime minister’s residence. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, cans and plastic cartons were landing on the police. Several fistfights had broken out.

  “That was stupid of the cops,” Tim said. “If they’d just let them hand in the petition there wouldn’t have been any trouble.”

  “What are they all doing?” Margret asked.

  “They don’t like the summit,” Tim explained gently. “A lot of people believe it’s an attempt by Brussels at social engineering. They want to either stop it or have their say.”

  “Why?”

  “They feel excluded. It’s like at
school when the teacher just tells you what to do for no good reason you can see.”

  “But fighting’s silly,” the young girl exclaimed. “We don’t do that at school.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. But there are so many people protesting that you’re bound to get some silly ones in there.”

  Vanessa frowned, searching the faces of the crowd. The news stream was showing images from cameras within the main body of the march. There was a great deal of anger and frustration building up. “I’m not so sure. They look like they’re out for trouble no matter what.”

  “You still want to go down on Monday?”

  “Yes. Brussels won’t listen to us otherwise, we have to show them just how strongly we feel about them. This is our only option.”

  They carried on watching the news all afternoon, seeing the police block off Parliament Square with big metal and concrete barricades. The marchers began to spill back into Trafalgar Square. Shop windows were broken. Police vehicles raced in from side streets.

  IN THE EVENING, Vanessa put some frozen pizzas in the microwave. They sat around on the old chesterfield, eating slices and swigging beer straight from the bottle as the news continued relentlessly. Sometime after ten o’clock an overturned police Land Rover was burning furiously outside the National Gallery. Vanessa had curled up against Tim, with his arms holding her protectively. She stirred, finally repelled by the images on the screen, and turned to kiss him. They made their way upstairs.

  In bed, together, it was more for comfort’s sake than for passion, a physical action whose excitement and pleasure managed to obscure the grim outside world with all its pain and tragedy. For a while, at least.