“Matthew. You swore on Callum’s angel. Nothing is more sacred than that. Now. Get. In. The. Car.”
The meowing was getting closer. I looked around and saw Nigel sauntering along, looking for something to brush against. He stopped for a moment, his eyes fixed on me.
“Matthew. NOW!”
I flinched as Mum shouted, jumped off the step, slammed the front door behind me, and got in the car.
So there we were: at a standstill in a traffic jam on High Street.
“Oh look, that’s your friend Tom, isn’t it? Shall I give him a beep? He’d be so glad to see you out and about!”
Mum waved madly through the windshield at a group of kids in white shirts and blue ties. Fortunately they didn’t notice.
“Mum! Stop it!”
I slid down in my seat as Mum sat back and huffed.
Standing a few meters from my window and sipping from a can of Coke was my best friend, Tom. My old best friend. He was with a boy from school called Simon, and they were both laughing and swaying as though they’d lost the ability to stand upright.
“Simon Duke?” I said under my breath. “What’s he hanging around with him for?”
Simon Duke was a bit of an idiot who made stuff up. For example, he once said that his dad was a top agent with the FBI. Apparently they were only living in England temporarily and at any moment they could get a call telling them to jump on a plane to wherever the next assignment took them.
“If I don’t come to school one day, you’ll know we’ve gotten the call and I’m outta here,” he announced to our math class last year, slipping into a dreadful American accent as he tapped the side of his nose.
Simon’s downfall came about when someone spotted Mr. Duke in a hardware store wearing an orange apron and helping a customer lift a new toilet into a shopping cart. He got a lot of grief after that.
“Simon, we thought your dad worked for the FBI, not in DIY!”
“What happens when he needs to arrest someone? Does he ask them to ‘stick ’em up’ and shoot them with a glue gun?”
Amazingly, Simon managed to shrug the comments off:
“Dad’s got to keep up an appearance of normality, doesn’t he?”
And now, even more amazingly, Tom had decided to hang around with him.
We edged along the line of traffic and I watched them in the side mirror.
“You can ask your friends over any time, you know, Matthew,” said Mum. “You don’t want to lose contact with them.”
I ignored her and watched Tom and Simon shrink in the mirror as we moved onward.
The urge to wash my hands was intensifying, and I was so hot that my eyelids were sweating. I closed them and tried to calm my breathing as Mum continued with a running commentary about her clients at work, the neighbors, anything she could think of to fill the silence.
“… the girl, Casey, is only six and little Teddy is fifteen months, so he’ll have diapers to deal with! Can you imagine an old man coping with that? He’ll be exhausted.”
I listened to her chattering, trying to swallow the sick feeling I had in my stomach, and then finally the car engine slowed as we pulled into the doctor’s parking lot. I opened my eyes and blinked at the bright sunlight.
“I’m very proud of you, Matthew. I’m sorry I shouted earlier about you getting in the car, but I just want you to … be … to have a normal life. That’s all. I’m just thinking of you.”
I nodded, unable to speak. After a deep breath, I opened the door.
The waiting room was quiet and I sat in the front row of seats, which were all empty. Mum stood at the reception desk waiting to check us in. An aqua-blue fish tank bubbled away in the corner, a toy shark on the other side of the glass, its mouth opening and closing with a three-second delay. I spotted a thumbtack in the crease between the carpet and the baseboard, the sharp end pointing upward. Directly above it, on the wall, was a laminated sign stating that in the month of June there had been 24 missed appointments. June and the number 24 were written in black felt pen, which the reception staff must rub out and change each month. The bottom left-hand corner of the poster was not pinned down and gaped away from the wall slightly. I very much wanted to pick the pin up and put it back where it belonged. If the pin was back in its place, then everything would be all right. I would be all right. I looked over at Mum, who was heading toward me, but she changed direction when she spotted someone she knew at the back of the room.
“Hello, Claudia! Isn’t it hot? I love it though, don’t you?”
I kept my eyes on the thumbtack. I was not looking at anyone around me, not listening to a man with a hacking cough or feeling the infested chair beneath my legs. Just concentrate on the pin. Take deep breaths and count to three. One … two … thr—
“What you in here for then?”
I caught my breath. Someone had sat next to me. Close. I could see a blue school cardigan out of the corner of my eye.
“Is it a skin condition? Is that why you’ve got those gloves on?”
I turned to face Melody Bird, the girl from my class who lived across the street. The one who visited the graveyard a lot. Claudia was her mum, who my mum was now talking to. The hairs on my arm bristled. Melody made me nervous. Apart from her unnatural interest in the cemetery, she lived next door to Penny and Gordon at number one, and her house was number three; and those two numbers next to each other were bad news. “Tenplusthree” was becoming an issue for me, and I was trying to avoid it as much as I could. I’d found out that in some cities around the world, there were skyscrapers that didn’t have a “tenplusthree” floor and they just called it 12A or something, or else skipped right from 12 to 14. People wouldn’t do something like that unless there was a good reason.
Fortunately Chestnut Close stops at Mr. Charles’s house, number eleven. We’d once had a Christmas card delivered that was addressed to Mr. P. James, tenplusthree Chestnut Close. That unopened card sat on the windowsill next to our front door long into the summer because Mum couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, even though the house, and possibly Mr. P. James, didn’t exist. I was thinking about all of this while Melody talked. I didn’t really hear what she was saying, but I noticed she was sitting really close.
“Can you move back a bit?” I said.
Her large brown eyes squinted at me as she shuffled back a little in her chair.
“Why? Are you contagious or something?”
“No.”
She scratched her nose with a chewed fingernail and I turned away, focusing again on the thumbtack. A bead of sweat trickled slowly down my spine. A fan on the reception desk blew a blast of warm air every four seconds around the waiting room.
“So, can’t you tell me what’s wrong with you then?”
“No.”
She was quiet for a minute, and then I felt the heat from her arm as she edged toward me again.
“Can’t or won’t?”
I turned and faced her, leaning back slightly as if she had bad breath.
“Won’t.”
Tucking a long strand of brown hair behind one ear, she held my gaze for a moment and then shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
I looked at the thumbtack and pictured myself picking it up and pressing it into the corner of the poster on the wall. Everything where it belonged, then all would be okay. I took some notes in my mind:
Wednesday, July 23rd. 10:45 a.m. Doctor’s waiting room.
Number of people in waiting room = 9
Number of reception staff = 4
Number of fish in tank = 12
Number of thumbtacks on poster on wall = 3
Number of thumbtacks on floor = 1
“Verrucas.”
I shut my eyes for a second before turning to Melody again.
“Sorry?”
“That’s why I’m here. I’ve got a cluster of them on my big toe. They hurt like crazy. Got to have them all burnt off, I guess. You had a verruca before?”
“Nope.”
“They’re really painful.”
She whipped her head around to take a look at our mums.
“Your mum’s really pretty, isn’t she?”
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I kept quiet.
“Hey, I hear your neighbor has his grandchildren staying with him. That’ll be good, won’t it? Having some new faces around?”