What must Maddie be going through? Zac jumps out of his chair and finds his phone in his coat pocket, quickly texting: What’s happening? How’s Sophia?
He’s not sure if he’ll get a reply. He fears Maddie may be beginning to see him in a new light. When it’s just the two of them they get on as well as ever, but if the families are together she now prefers to spend time with Georgia and Sophia, even though he can see that the older girls tolerate her rather than enjoy her presence. Whenever he messages her nowadays, she takes longer and longer to respond.
Still, Zac is pretty certain that it is his friendship with Maddie that has stopped him from being branded a total gamer at school. Fairbridge is renowned for its sports program, and many of the boys already have pumped chests and six packs. Zac is just as strong as them but he is wiry with it. A ‘lean bean’, his sister sometimes teases. He doesn’t think he’s bad looking, but his body is pale, and he is alarmed at how hair is growing in patches and in weird places – in circles around his nipples rather than on his chest. His leg hair is so downy that he has copped a few jokes about shaving.
And, worse, he doesn’t spend all his spare time typing sex slang into the internet, or imagining how the girls at school would look naked. He has a mobile phone because his mum insisted, but he doesn’t really like using it. He is as likely to be found riding his bike or playing on the Xbox. When he hangs around with Cooper and the other lads at school he understands the lingo, but words that roll comfortably from their mouths become sticky and alien on his tongue. He is pretty sure they would laugh at him if he tried to join in.
These thoughts are uncomfortable and Zac needs a distraction. He remembers his mother’s request, and tries his dad’s mobile, but it goes straight through to voicemail. He debates calling the rescue station to pass on a message, but imagines his dad stuck on the fells, receiving bad news in the middle of a rescue, and decides it might be better to wait.
He goes and sits in front of his computer again and starts a game of Black Ops, shooting his way absentmindedly through a couple of levels before the splatters of blood and crumpling bodies of those he despatches begin to make him edgy in a way that has never happened before. He switches the screen off and hurries out of his room, along the landing to Georgia’s bedroom, snapping on the light. He wouldn’t dare enter uninvited under normal circumstances – no one in the family would – but he needs to feel closer to her somehow, until he is sure she is okay.
It is fairly tidy in here except for a huge heap of clothes on a chair in the corner. There is a stack of books on her bedside table and he glances at the spines. He hasn’t heard of any of the books, nor has he seen her reading them. He looks at the papers on her desk – a project about Norway. He wonders what else she is studying at school, and realises he isn’t even sure what her favourite subjects are, aside from sport.
He sits on the bed. He might have idly wished he were an only child a few times, on days when Georgia had been particularly moody or condescending, but he has never considered it seriously before. They don’t spend much time together nowadays, but occasionally Georgia will do something totally unexpected to make him laugh – clamping Weetabix to her ears and chasing him round the house as Princess Leia, or making faces behind their parents’ backs as they give debriefings on weekly chores. For a second he imagines drifting around the darkened house with just his mum and dad for company, and the vision is so horrifying that he lies down on her bed and curls up on his side. He presses his thumbs into his eyes hard to stop the tears that are threatening, until he can see bright red swirls behind his eyelids.
He rolls onto his side to get up, and sees there is a book wedged down the side of the bedframe, pinioned between the pinewood and the wall. He pulls it out, and stares at the cover – an old-fashioned black-and-white picture of a couple kissing at a train station, with the year scrawled across the top. It’s a diary. As he leafs through he sees that many of the days are empty, but now and again Georgia has kept a bullet-point record of significant events.
There’s something loose in there too, one white corner jutting out from the inside back cover. He flips the book open to push the item back in place, and finds it’s a photo.
To begin with, the picture doesn’t make sense at all. And then, as the image begins to spin and coalesce in his head, a story forms – one so completely insane that it cannot be true. He jumps up, slams the diary closed and throws it on to the bed, staring at it as though it might bounce up and bite him. But there it lies, innocuously, with its secrets so fiery that he is surprised it isn’t smouldering. He reaches forward and pushes it back into its hiding space, wishing it were so easy to cover up the knowledge that now sits like a brick on his shoulders.
3
ANYA