What We Hide (22 page)

Roughly sixty-six hours from now.

Lessons, chess club, meals, sleep.

Percy has seen his father’s films, of course. Five so far, at least twice each. (In forty years, when he owns a box set of Mick’s life’s work on DVD, Percy will know the films frame by frame, but at sixteen he relies on a version of passion to imprint them on his brain.)

The first time, and ever after, he’d gone to the cinema
alone, without telling his mother, using every bit of his pocket money for bus fare and ticket. He was overcome, there in the dark, with all the feelings he could never, not ever admit to anyone. The film itself,
Left Behind
, was scary, all right. That image of the kid’s face at the window, when the audience knows that no one is coming back for him? Percy wept, gripping the flocked velveteen arms of his seat till the shuddering stopped. But even beyond that, he realized, last to stumble out of the cinema, he’d been hoping for … what if there’d been … a dedication, like there always was in a book? What if giant words had filled the screen for all the world to read:
For my son
.

At 12:37 p.m., Percy is hiding in the doorway of the Religious Studies classroom when his father climbs out of the passenger side of a van. So, someone else is driving. But the driver stays put and Percy can’t see through the tinted windows. His father stretches, swinging arms above his head with fingers laced and palms flipped over to face the sky.

Oh god. Please don’t anyone else be watching this. Please let him seem like a grown man. Percy is prepared to forgive almost anything, any film-world idiosyncrasies, but hope is dim that anyone else will be so kind.

Percy knows what Mick Malloy looks like. He has spent many hours of his life poring through newspapers and tabloids and film magazines on a hunt for one thing: photos or mentions of his father. He has seen him interviewed on the telly, so he’s ready for the stammer and the eyebrow-raising-for-emphasis thing. Percy yearns to see the smile that Mick gave the interviewer Nicola Pettle when she
asked him, “Any regrets?” and he’d answered, “I’d have liked to spend more time with my son,” as if his son were a four-year-old waiting in the hotel nursery, instead of long-forgotten Percy, stashed in a boarding school.

Apart from the colour of their skins, and the hair—Mick’s grows straight up, like a fine shag carpet, Percy’s dangles in knotted dreads—Percy and his father look pretty much the same. Mick is pale and bony, Percy is dark and bony, both kind of short, though Percy hopes he’s not done growing yet. He’d love to wake up one morning taller than Adrian, with genuine stubble on his chin and fists like a farmer’s. “Get your vast stinking arse out of my road,” he’d say to Adrian. “Or tell my knuckles why not.… ”

Percy’s brain zooms through all this while he watches Mick stretch. One of the worries in the last sixty-six hours has been what his father might wear. Percy’s Mick file holds pictures of him in a velvet tuxedo, patched bell-bottoms, a kilt, a toga, a pink rabbit-skin coat, a sequined blazer, and a linen djellaba.

Today he seems to be in disguise, what he imagines a normal father might wear.
Thank you, God, if you exist and this might be proof
. Jeans instead of his favourite green suede trousers with suspenders. A T-shirt displaying neither curse words nor a tie-dye rainbow. A leather jacket with moderate fringe. Cowboy boots.

While Percy finishes up his prayer, his father clasps the
side mirror of the van, grabs one foot with the other hand, and bends a leg up behind him like a flamingo at rest. As he switches legs one minute later, Percy peels himself out of the doorway and dashes forward to prevent any further public body twisting.

Percy nearly chokes when he sees his father’s eyes widen and brighten.

“Percy, m-m-mate, lovely to see you.”

Back clap, back clap, sideways not-exactly-a-hug. Percy’s heart thuds. He smells clove oil and sweat before his father pulls back.

“What a time we had getting to wherever the hell we are! This place is
bleeeak
! What a rat-shittle-ittle town! But
this
!” He glances around the courtyard. “
This
is perfect!” He looks up at the towers, his hands clasped, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. “Here we are, eh? And here
you
are, and just
look
at you! Chip off the old block, eh? And by chip, I m-m-mean
chip
, no fish included, blimey, you’re as skinny as a noodle. The food is absolute shite, am I right? Well? Aren’t you going to say hallo to dear old M-M-Mick?”

“Hallo,” says Percy, mouth dry as crumbs.

It’s a special year, won’t happen again. Mick is exactly twice Percy’s age. And Percy is the same age now—sixteen—that Mick was when Percy was born. Has Mick realized that?

“I talked to Alia,” says Mick, quite still for a moment, feet flat on the ground.

“She knows?” says Percy. “That you’re here?”

Mick sighs, as if revealing a hidden landscape beyond the means of language. Or is that only what Percy wants to think? Maybe it’s just a sigh.

“Of course,” says Mick. “She knows. She said to be sure you haven’t outgrown your runners.” He looks at Percy’s feet and laughs. “You want to go shoe shopping?”

Percy shakes his head. He wants to throw up. He wants to sit someplace with his dad and tell him all the stuff he has imagined telling him for all these years. He wants to get through these five minutes and then this hour and then this day without looking like an idiot. He wants the kids in his dorm to see his famous father and go,
Whoa, dude, you weren’t lying!
He wants no one at all to notice that this moment is a big fat hairy deal.… Is he really shaking all over, or is that just his heart slamming through his chest bone like a miner’s pick?

“Who”—Mick stares across the courtyard while he rubs his fingers back and forth on the top of his head—“is that heaven-sent creature?”

Percy sees only the old bag who works in the kitchen.

“Where?” he says. “Who?”

“Her.” Mick points. “The loveliest apparition that ever hobbled across a set. I need her. On film.
Need
.”

“You mean the cook? Vera?”

“That’s her name? Vera?”

Percy wonders, is he watching genius at work? Is Mick as brilliant as the critics say? Or the most deranged tool to crawl out of the sand?

“Vera Diarrhea,” says Percy. He knows it sounds bad.
But it’s the only name he has for her. Mick’s rubbing hand pauses as if it has encountered a thistle on his scalp.

“Percy,” he says. “I’ve got pretty strong feelings about derision.”

“Well, yeah.” Percy shrinks a little. Crap. Foot wrong already.

“But it’s likely bloody apt, right? She’s the
cook
?”

Vera crosses from the storage shed to the kitchen door, banging a heavy bucket against her leg.

“I kind of love it.” Mick looks at Percy. “What do they call you?” he says. “These teen gods of instantaneous pigeonholing and life wreckage? They’ve got some tag for you, don’t they? Makes you squirm in the dark?”

Percy glances up at the windows of the Kipling dorm.

“Chinnbnrr,” he mumbles.

“Eh?”

Percy can feel his shoulders hunching over, the Dormitory Defence System kicking into place.

“Dad,” he says, trying it out.

His father glances toward the van. “M-M-Mick.”

“Yeah, sorry, Mick.”

Why didn’t he just change his name, Percy wonders. Like, before he got famous? To something that didn’t stop his tongue every single time?

“Look at this place!” Mick tips his head back. “What are those? Turrets? And all these m-m-massive filthy lead-paned windows! It’s brilliant, Percy!”

Percy nods.

“The lane up from the York Road must be a mile long, with this grand old house perched at the end like a hallucination.… 
Charlie!” he calls out. Someone emerges from the van, grinning and chewing gum at the same time. Charlie is female, it turns out, wearing a baseball cap over pigtails.

“Charlie, meet Percy. Percy, this is Charlie.”

“Hey.” Percy wonders, should he shake? But she’s flashing a peace sign with the hand not gripping a clipboard. He tries a smile, but the combination of blue eyes and white teeth is making him dizzy. Is this Mick’s girlfriend? His wife? Maybe Charlie is Percy’s stepmother!

Mick hasn’t paused. “See, Charlie? Do you believe what you’re seeing, m-m-m-darlin’? Did you catch a gander at that old bird? Is this not everything we hoped for?”

Hoped for?

Percy wonders, in the second before she opens her mouth, what Charlie’s voice will be like. Squeaky? Soft? But it’s so husky you’d think she was horribly sick, except that she glowed with health, flipping a pigtail over her shoulder and gazing up at the windows in the tower above the music room.

“A tower! You couldn’t have built better if you’d spent a million dollars.” Husky, and American.

Suddenly, there are people in the courtyard. Dinner must be over—has
so
much time gone by already? It moved so slowly while he waited for the van, but now it gallops. Kids appear in droves, heading from the dining hall in the main building to all the ordinary Saturday-afternoon activities that do not include a father-son reunion or chatting with a beach bunny from California.

“Oh, oh, oh! I love it!” Mick actually spins, watching the
space around him go from empty to bustling in a matter of a single minute.

“Far out,” says Charlie.

But then Nico and Adrian are standing right in front of Percy, like eager children.

“Hey, man,” says Nico. He beams as though Percy is
his
son and has just won a prize at the science fair.

Nico, who knows how to conduct himself with grown-ups, extends a hand to Percy’s father.

“Nico Nevos,” he says. “I’m in Percy’s dorm. And this is Adrian.”

Adrian has a look of stupefaction, the direct cause of Percy becoming miraculously taller, his shoulders broader, his dreads thicker.

Mick lifts his eyebrows.

“We’re mates of Percy’s,” says Nico. His eyes flick over to Charlie, widening in appreciation of a goddess standing in the Illington courtyard. “And you’re Percy’s …” Not a drop of brown blood between them, not to mention that Charlie is probably twenty-three and Mick looks barely older than that. Not evident parent material. “You’re … with Percy?”

“Obviously, dude,” says Adrian. “Since they’re standing next to him, having a natter.”

Charlie chuckles, throaty and dutiful.

Percy decides not to ridicule Adrian, just because it would be so simple.

“This is Mick,” he says. “And Charlie.” He loves how casual he sounds, as if he’s been introducing them all his life, at film openings, tennis matches, art gallery exhibitions.
As if they’re his. As if he hadn’t got up at dawn to change his jersey nine times and sniff his pits and wash his feet just in case.

“Shall we go into town?” Percy’s voice seems to have deepened. “We could have a snack at the hotel.” (A
snack
? Has he ever used the word
snack
before?) “It’s the only decent restaurant, really.” (And how the hell does he know
that
?) “Unless you want fish-and-chips.”

Nico and Adrian stare at him.
Who is he?
Percy can see them wondering. His muscles strain inside the sleeves of his jean jacket, his prick maybe doubles in size. He imagines that he has unsheathed a gleaming sword, or walked barefoot across a pit of burning skulls.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Mick. “I’m starving. What’ll it be, Charlie? Chips or champagne?”

Charlie’s hand arrives on Percy’s shoulder, a rare and exotic butterfly never before spotted in Yorkshire. He barely restrains a gasp of astonishment, stays utterly still so as not to frighten her off.

“It’s a party, right, Percy? I’d say champagne, wouldn’t you?”

Percy nods. To speak would be to choke. Adrian’s neck is a gratifying shade of crimson.

“How about you boys?” Mick waves his arms as if to embrace Percy’s whole world. “Want some edible nosh? I’ll bet what you just swallowed was outright spew, am I right?”

Charlie’s fingers twitch and take flight from Percy’s shoulder. He knows that she knows that Mick should not have invited them.

“Wow, man, that’d be so cool,” Adrian says.

But Nico grasps Adrian’s sleeve. “No, sorry, we can’t do that,” he says.

“What? Why not?” Adrian is pissed.

“Because we can’t.” Nico jerks his head toward Percy. “He … you know … doesn’t see his dad too often.”

Percy feels a dangerous sting behind his eyes. He blinks, Nico soaring upward in his estimation.

“Fair enough,” says Mick. “All too true.” He puts an arm across Percy’s back as if it lives there.

Adrian tugs himself free of Nico’s hold. “But, sir?”

Mick laughs. “
Sir
? Try again, lad.”

“I, er, love … well, all your films. I really do. That one,
Lucy’s Secret?
I thought I’d croak when the doll turned out to be real. I love how you scare the shit out of us and then we think it’s finally all over—
pow!
—you tighten the screws again! And then, in the final frame! The little shoe, next to the doll’s smashed foot? Man!”

Mick nods. “You spotted that, eh?”

How many thousand times, Percy wonders, has Mick pretended that a fan was clever to notice some detail that he’d planted for the very purpose of making fans feel clever?

“Are you working on the next one?”

“That’s what I’m doing here,” says Mick. “Scouting locations. I’ve got another script ready to go. Ghosts in a girls’ school.”

“Awesome!” Adrian slaps his thighs in excitement.

That’s what I’m doing here
.

Percy wills himself not to flinch.

“Mick Malloy,” says Charlie. “I’m hungry.”

“Right, vanward ho!” says Mick. “Good to m-m-meet you, boys. Good to know Percy’s got m-m-mates.”

Percy sees Adrian’s lips silently repeating
m-m-m
, as if learning a new trick. He wants to thank Nico for keeping Adrian on a leash. He wants, actually, to hug Nico, but settles for a peace sign.