Thicker Than Water

’

‘He gave Billy the poem,’ Jean said, talking to me more than to her husband. ‘That had to have meant something. I told you he had no friends his own age, Mister Castor. I think he thought Billy understood him. I think it must have hit him very hard when Billy stopped talking to him.’

She trailed off into silence.

There was an elephant in the living room with us, and I felt that it was time to try wrangling it a little. ‘When did Billy’s hands start to bleed?’ I asked.

Tom blanched at this blunt wording, but Jean took it squarely on the chin.

‘That was later,’ she said, her voice almost level. ‘The dreams came first.’

‘He dreamed about Mark?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really. At least, he didn’t see Mark in his dreams. He dreamed about a place. It was really dark there - so dark you couldn’t see anything, not even yourself. And he’d stumble around for a while, trying to find a way out. But he never could, so in the end he’d just sit down on the ground and wait.

‘The ground . . .’ She hesitated, as if she really didn’t know how to say this.

‘He said it was warm. Like skin. But not soft like skin: it was all ridged and rough and shiny. He said it was like lava after a volcano. When it’s cooled, he said, you get miles and miles of this stuff like the surface of the moon.’ She smiled faintly. ‘He’d just done volcanoes at school.

‘And then he’d start to hear this voice, in the darkness. And he was sure it was Mark’s voice, even though he said it didn’t sound anything like. But there it was, this voice droning on and on.

Not really talking to Billy, so he said. Just talking.’

‘About what?’

She gave me a slightly haunted look. ‘What do you think? About hurting yourself. Cutting yourself open. About the way it feels when you cut into yourself and let the pain out. About how wounds are roses and blood is wine.’

One of those leaden silences fell between us: the kind where everyone is expecting someone else to be the next to speak, and it gets more awkward the longer you leave it.

‘Did the news articles mention that Mark was a self-harmer? ’ I asked.

‘Some of them,’ said Tom. ‘But he could have got most of it from the poem, couldn’t he? It’s all there. We just tried talking him out of it at first, because he’s bright and he’s a good lad, like Jeanie said. We thought it would be a nine days’ wonder, [dayoutlike most things are when you’re that age. We took the tapes and all the bits of paper away and locked them in a cupboard.