I laughed. “You’ll have to hang around a bit longer, then.” And with every fibre of my body, I wanted him to. “When’s your next day off?”
“In eight days. At which time I demand otters.”
“It’s a date.” I rocked my shoulder gently into his, hoping to placate him.
Petey Boy pretended to be properly sulking, tracing his fingers over the carved woodwork of the desk, right by my thigh. His hand brushed my leg. I rocked into him again.
“This desk is really cool,” he said.
A wave of sadness crashed through my body as a thousand memories of my father flashed in my head. I knocked back my gin. It sucked the air out of my lungs and gave cover to the tears in my eyes.
“You want to know what’sreallycool?” I turned, put my glass down, and crouched low. “Come stand behind me. Watch this.” I gently pushed the small drawer inwards while my other hand fished around under the desktop. Then I gave the drawer a sharp shove, and a hidden panel thrust out from the desk where Petey Boy had been sitting. He shrieked with delight.
“A secret drawer! That’s the coolest thing ever.” There was a look of genuine childlike delight on his face. Sadly, there wasn’t any treasure rattling around. A deck of cards. A dead spider. I wished there’d been something more interesting so Petey Boy could really understand the magic of it.
“When I was a kid, my father and I used to use it to send secret messages to each other. Stupid things, really. I’d pop in a drawing of a horse or something. You know, kid stuff. He’d leave me sweets or five pounds or, when I was much older, maybe a spliff or a mushroom.”
Petey Boy shook his head. “You havegotto be kidding me.”
I laughed, wiping away a silly tear with my forearm. “My parents aren’t—weren’t—like normal parents.” I felt the familiar weight in my chest I always felt talking about my father and tried to swallow it down. “I don’t think I’ve opened the drawer since he died. Sometimes there’d be letters from him telling me how proud he was or how much he loved me. I’ve kept them all somewhere.”
Petey Boy’s face twitched, and too late, I remembered his terrible relationship with his parents.
“Let me show you how the mechanism works,” I said, hoping to distract him—and me too.
I pushed the secret drawer back in until it clicked. Then I grabbed Petey Boy’s hand and fed it under the table, feeling for the button, enjoying the feel of his fingertips weaving through mine. When I found it, I slid his hand onto it. His eyes met mine,and electricity sparked through my chest. I shifted in behind him, grabbing his other hand and placing it on the drawer knob.
“Like this,” I said. “Now press here.” My head rested against his, and Petey Boy leant into it. “Thenshove.” The drawer popped open, and we both looked in total surprise as a joint rolled slowly through the dust towards us.
Petey Boy stared at the spliff, then up at me. “I think your old man wants us to have a smoke.” He picked up the joint. “How long has it been since, um…?”
“Three years.” I shook my head. “There’s no way that’s any good.”
“Still, your old man sounds like the kind of guy who’d want us to give it the old college try, right?”
Chapter 21
Petey
We went upstairs to William’s bedroom in the belvedere so we could open some windows. The belvedere was a bit like a summer house but stuck on top of the tower. It had glass on all sides, giving us an incredible view across the lake, the fields, and the hilltops of the Buckford Estate. William’s temporary bed was a mattress on top of some sort of wooden platform. The place was like a fairy-tale castle. We sat opposite each other, cross-legged on the bed—William in his boxers, me in my robe—coughing our lungs up.
“This is rough,” I said, passing the joint back to William.
“Gordon Ramsay could attack my lungs with a cheese grater and it would feel smoother than this,” he said.
I was getting a very light buzz, but nothing worth losing the lining of my throat over.
William took another small hit and fell about spluttering.
“Now I remember why I haven’t done this in years.”
He passed it across and leant back on his elbows on the bed, getting some air into his lungs. The shadows of the leaded lighting in the windows cast diamonds over his smooth skin, the curves of his arms and pecs, and the small hump of his softeningbelly. The sight was doing more to get me high than the dope. I wanted to get the conversation around to Horatio Blunt. I wanted to know who he was and what he wanted—because William had been furious to see him turn up at the pub, and his face had been practically purple by the time their conversation was over. I felt weirdly protective of this beefy horse-riding himbo, and I needed to know what could upset him like that. But William’s eyes were still watery—and I knew it wasn’t from the gin or the ancient spliff.
“What was he like, your old man?” I asked, giving the geriatric doobie another go.
William sighed and stared out the window while I hacked up the smoke.
“Dad was a hippie. Decades too late to be a real hippie, obviously. He was rebelling, I suppose. Like we all do.”
