Freddie had got back from school an hour ago to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table, her hair pushed back into a bunch, wearing a hoodie and pyjama bottoms, knitting the never-ending baby blanket.
‘Why aren’t you wearing proper clothes?’ he’d asked.
‘I’ve been in bed all day,’ she’d said, putting the knitting down on the table and yawning. ‘I just got up.’
‘What’s the matter? Are you sick?’
‘Yes,’ she’d said, staring wanly at him. ‘I think I have the flu.’
He’d looked at her. ‘Does Dad know?’
She shook her head. ‘No. It came on after he left.’
‘Do you want some pills?’
‘I’ve taken some.’
Freddie had felt irrationally cross. His mum did not have flu. She was lying. It was impossible to concentrate on something like knitting when you had the flu. Freddie had had flu when he was eleven and he hadn’t even been able to sit up, let alone knit. She just wanted a proper reason to stay at home all day being miserable and weird. She wanted everyone to feel sorry for her. Which was stupid because he’d feel much sorrier for her if she told him the truth about the marks on her neck. He took a pile of buttered crumpets and a mug of camomile tea to his room and closed the door behind him.
Now, changed down to his underwear and wearing a fleecy dressing gown he’d been given by his grandmother for Christmas, he ate his crumpets and drank his tea while flicking through pictures of Romola on his phone.
Behind him, his new suit hung from the top of his wardrobe, still in its plastic packaging. His mum had got it for him at the weekend from Debenhams. Beneath it sat a pair of shiny black shoes, also from Debenhams, the arrangement looking somewhat like a hanging man. He hadn’t asked Romola to be his date yet. He kept getting close to it each time he followed behind her, then losing his nerve at the very last moment and slowing down, cursing to himself under his breath. The ball was two days away. It was now or never.
He went to his window and focused his binoculars on to Jenna Tripp’s road. She would know, he thought. Jenna Tripp would know how he should ask a girl to a ball. She must get asked to balls literally all the time. He decided that the next morning he would ensure that his path crossed with hers on the walk to school and he would ask Jenna Tripp what to do.
As he thought this, his eye was taken by two women talking animatedly at the bus stop. One was Jenna Tripp’s mum. She was wearing an oversized parka with a purple fur trim and smoking an e-cigarette. He could see the huge cloud of vapour clearly from here. And when the cloud cleared he zoomed in on to the face of the woman talking to her. Youngish. Brown hair. A big black coat. A bit fat. He saw her take a piece of paper from her coat pocket and he saw her writing things down on it, things that Jenna’s mum seemed to be telling her to write down. Then they said goodbye, Jenna’s mum turning towards her road, the fat lady turning in the other direction. Freddie instinctively snapped a photo of the encounter and for a moment he thought of logging it in The Melville Papers.
But then he thought, No, I am no longer interested in what the boring old people in this village are doing. I am only interested in Romola Brook.
