The Girl Below(28)

“Your grandma lived upstairs from us when I was a kid. So did your mum. She used to babysit me sometimes.”

“But you’re old,” he said.

“And your mum is even older. When she was the same age as you, I was four.”

He laughed. “I bet she was a loser.”

“Not at all. She was very cool, a New Romantic.”

He curled up his nose in disgust. “What a sap.”

“Actually, it was very cutting edge. She had spiky black hair and wore lots of eyeliner. So did all the boys.”

“What?” he said, incredulous. “That sounds like bollocks.” He said the word clumsily, as though trying it out for the first time.

“Google it when you get home if you don’t believe me.”

He shot me a withering look, but when I pushed the brownie over to his side of the table, he accidentally said, “Thanks,” like a little boy drilled to have good manners. The brownie didn’t last long, but he savored every sip of his coffee as though it were a rare Cuban cigar. Looking at his pupils, I saw that he was miles away, staring at a faraway tree. I remembered feeling like that at his age, so absorbed by my own mood that other humans were invisible.

My ploughman’s was taking forever, and I considered dabbing up the brownie crumbs from Caleb’s plate before realizing how gross that was. “When did you turn sixteen?” I said.

“A few weeks ago.”

“Did you have a party?”

“No.” He rolled his eyes. “Parties are for dicks.”

“And what do cool people do instead?”

“They definitely don’t say ‘cool.’ ”

I’d encountered surly teenagers before, but he was taking things to a whole new level. “Look, I know your mum thinks I’m going to give you all this great advice, but I don’t have any, so we may as well just skip the lecture and have something nice to eat.”

Caleb had been picking at the Formica table with his thumbnail, and where he’d been working, there was now a hole. “Suits me,” he said, with a shrug.

I rummaged in my bag for a book. A few days earlier, on the bookshelf in Willesden Green, next to a hopeless selection of microwave cookbooks and empty CD cases, I’d found a dog-eared copy of Lolita. I’d read it before, but years ago, and had forgotten how funny it was. Even better, I couldn’t remember what happened at the end.

After blurring through half a dozen pages—reading hungover was like driving through heavy rain—I became dimly aware that Caleb had been twisting his head to see the book’s cover, but every time I looked up, he turned away and pretended to be draining the dregs of his already empty cup. I held up the book so he could take a proper look. “Have you read it?”

“I’ve heard of it. Isn’t it about a perv?”

“You mean a pedophile?”

“I don’t know. He’s like a creep or something.”

“Would you like to borrow it? Then you can find out.”

“No.” His answer was too quick, too emphatic.

“Well, you can’t anyway,” I said, determined to make the situation as difficult for him as he was making it for me. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

I resumed reading. When my ploughman’s arrived, it was predictably weedy and didn’t go far in soaking up either stomach acid or my revolting mood. I put down the novel while I ate and sensed Caleb’s continuing interest in it, as well as the pride or stubbornness that prevented him from admitting it. He eyed my food too, but when I asked him if he wanted any, he said he wasn’t hungry. I didn’t see how that was possible—seeing as his hips were so thin they barely held up his pants.

We sat like that, in unhappy companionship, for another half hour or so, long enough for me to pseudo-read ten pages, and spend Pippa’s change on a gluten-free rubber ball masquerading as a muffin, washed down with a second coffee. Caleb ate nothing, did nothing except destroy the tabletop, and mostly, I ignored him. But toward the end of the hour I remembered Pippa’s anxious tone on the phone, and felt guilty for spending her money and not at least trying to help her son. “So what do you do when you bunk off school?”

Caleb looked surprised that I’d spoken. “Nothing much.”

“In my day, the cool kids used to hang out on some church steps near the school, smoking. They always went to the same place, and always came back to school chewing gum to hide the smell. About once a week, they got caught.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Well, nothing, because you’re obviously not that stupid.”

His mouth rippled with a smile before he remembered to scowl.