Thicker Than Water читать онлайн

‘Mark wrote this?’ I asked.

Jean nodded. ‘Or copied it from somewhere. And he gave it to Billy as a present. Because he thought Billy would get what he was going on about, Billy being such a bright little lad. So after that—’

‘I put my foot down,’ Tom said. ‘I told him to have nothing to do with Mark. Not even to talk to him. I said if he did, I’d stop his pocket money and pull him out of the school football team.’

Jean took the sheet of paper out of my hands and folded it up again, as though its dangerous doggerel had to be silenced.

‘He’s a good boy,’ she assured me. ‘So that was that, we thought. And then in the summer - I suppose that would be a year ago, wouldn’t it, so you’re right, Tom, it must be longer since she went - in the summer Mark jumped off the walkway out there and killed himself. And it came out at the inquest that he’d been cutting himself. For years. Which was what he was telling us, if we’d only cared enough to listen.’ She waved the sheet of paper like a tiny white flag of surrender. ‘What can you say, Mister Castor?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘What kind of love did he get at home, if his mother ups and leaves him for a brickie with a fancy hairdo, and his father is an animal who just hits out all the time at everyone around him? It was for me to say something, and I only thought about Billy. About my own.’

She relapsed into dismal silence. Tom seemed thrown by the sudden detour into moral philosophy, but he struggled on manfully.

‘We didn’t discuss it with Billy,’ he said. ‘John knew all about it, of course, because they were talking about it up and down the estate, but Billy mostly stays at home and does his own thing, like. He’s got his Playstation and his books. Or he goes off wandering, sometimes, with his mates. There’s half a dozen of them - no harm in any of them, not like the bloody teenagers we’ve got round here."

"‘But as Jeanie says, Billy’s not stupid. He knew Mark had gone, and I imagine there was talk at school about what had happened.

Must have been, mustn’t there? Anyway, he started brooding about it. Next thing we knew, he’s cutting stuff [ cut h out of the newspapers and taping bits off the TV news. I suppose it hit him hard, this lad living right next door to him and being sort of his friend and everything.’

‘His best friend,’ Jean said softly.

Tom looked at her and shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There was five years between them.