‘Excuse me, madam.’ Another person appeared beside my reflection. ‘Is that young man over there’ – she gestured backwards – ‘with you?’
It was obviously important that I brazen this one out. ‘He is,’ I confirmed, sotto voce. ‘He’s just amusing himself while I finish my shopping. He’s not bothering anyone, is he? He’ll be done soon.’
‘Um,’ the shop assistant said. And would doubtless have said more. Except Miller, red in the face, had scrambled to his feet, and now did his T-Rex impression for her. Then, having roared at her, he bolted from the store.
I passed her the jeans. ‘See?’ I said. ‘Sorry. I have to go.’
***
Perhaps oddly, I felt calm. And, to some extent, pleased. Finally, out in the world, we were getting somewhere. At least in as much as I was now able to start building a picture, and interacting with him in a way that might help open him up; help the precious process of my getting to understand him better.
Given what I already knew about him, I wasn’t worried about him disappearing on me. Not least because there’s a big difference between twelve and, say, seven. But mostly because it was something he’d never before done. Coming back was his thing, every time. So it needed no play-acting to emerge slowly and nonchalantly from the shop, and cast around as if I didn’t much care either way. And there he was, across the street, leaning, apparently indifferently, against a bin. But I wasn’t fooled. He’d had his eyes trained on the shop front since he’d left it; I knew because, by virtue of my (lack of) height and the throng of people all around me, I’d spotted him before he’d spotted me.
He straightened up, yanked the hoodie down again and glowered across the road at me. ‘Ha!’ he shouted. ‘You’re an idiot! Get me a game or I’m not coming back in the car!’
I crossed the road, but as I did so he sprinted a few yards down the street.
‘New game or I’m gone,’ he said.
I walked towards him. Again, he sprinted off a few yards.
I carried on walking. ‘We didn’t say anything about buying a game, Miller,’ I told him. ‘And do you really think that this kind of behaviour will get you anything?’
‘Well, I’ll stop if you say you’ll get me one.’
‘That’s not how it works, Miller. You’ve made sure that I can’t do what I needed to do now, so, I’m sorry, love, but that means no trip to the game shop today. And no game either – you’re going to have to make up for this behaviour before I consider buying you a treat now.’
‘Bitch,’ came the response, as he ran further up the street.
‘And all the while you keep doing this, you’re just making it worse,’ I called out.
‘Don’t care!’ he yelled back. And off he went again.
And again. And again. And again. And mindful of whichever American politician coined the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule, I stopped following Miller down the high street, got my phone out and called Mike. ‘What kept you?’ he asked, chuckling, when he answered the phone. ‘You need me to come get him for you?’
Yes, indeed I did. But since it was going to be at least a fifteen- or twenty-minute wait, I followed my hunch that Miller (unsure how to play it now, clearly) would go precisely nowhere, and popped into the big bookshop outside which I’d told Mike to meet me.
And I’d been right. When I emerged with a couple of greetings cards ten minutes later, he was exactly where I’d left him, leaning disconsolately against the chemist’s window and, though he was quick to turn away when he noticed I’d spotted him, he had clearly been waiting for me to come out.
I experienced a moment of clarity. And sadness. How did it feel to be twelve, and so alone in the world that you were reduced to spending your Saturday afternoon playing ‘catch me if you can’ with a middle-aged virtual stranger? Because that was what was happening, wasn’t it? That was what this amounted to. He was like a stuck record, going round and round and round, and heading nowhere. I was just the latest in a long line of well-meaning strangers into whose lives – and I’m sure he’d have put it this way – he’d been unceremoniously dumped. I smiled. ‘Coming home?’ I called.
‘Fuck off!’
Which, give or take the odd expletive, was exactly what I did, as soon as Mike pulled up and told me he’d take over. ‘Go and do your shopping, love,’ he said. ‘Just head back when you’re ready. I’ll round up me laddo, and we’ll see you at home.’
But I didn’t shop, not in the end. I tried for a bit, but my heart was no longer in it. For all that Mike was confident he’d be able to coax Miller back eventually, it was hard to concentrate on summer tops when I knew what was happening. After all, a little voice told me as I renegotiated the road works, there was always a first time, for everything. He might well have run off. He might have refused to get in Mike’s car. And I didn’t know, because Mike had insisted I leave him to it – one less person to provide an audience for his current game. So instead, I went home, to find neither of them there. So what merry dance was he now leading Mike?
But there was no point in phoning him, because he’d probably be driving, so I made myself a coffee, and took a sandwich up to Tyler, then, having regaled him with the shenanigans I’d ‘enjoyed’ on our little outing, left him to it, and went back downstairs to wait for them both.
And wait … It was more than an hour and a half later before Mike arrived home. But without Miller. By which time, having gone through a range of emotions, I’d already had a serious crisis of professional confidence. And this confirmed it. I’d called it all wrong.
‘Oh, lord – where is he?’ I said, contemplating the call to the emergency duty team, and the inevitable debacle that would follow. ‘Don’t tell me you lost him?’
‘I bloody wish!’ he growled.
He shut the front door, and went into the living room, where he threw his car keys down onto the coffee table. Then he went across to the window and looked out.
The penny dropped. ‘So he is here?’ I felt a stab of relief.
‘Oh, he’s somewhere out there, certainly. And I’ve a good mind to leave him out there, as well! And hope for rain. Wipe the smile off his bloody face. Can you imagine what it’s like? I must have looked like a kerb crawler or something.’
‘You mean he’s walked all the way home from town?’
Apparently so. Because there hadn’t been a great deal Mike could do. Miller wouldn’t get in the car, and Mike couldn’t – wouldn’t – make him. And I sympathised; a man bundling a screeching, kicking twelve-year-old into a vehicle, in the middle of the town centre? It didn’t take much of a leap of imagination to work out how that might pan out.
But there was no way Miller could walk home on his own, and he knew it. Bright though he was, he’d never even spent time in our part of the county. He’d never have found his way home on his own. Which left Mike with one option. To play leapfrog with Miller. Driving ahead of him, then waiting for him to saunter past him, then, when faced with a junction, driving ahead once again, so Miller knew the way and could follow him. Then a saunter past, and a drive, and a stop at another junction, while waiting for him to catch up again.
‘I must have asked him twenty times to get in, but he wouldn’t, of course. Just kept sticking two fingers up at me and laughing. ‘So he can stay out there for a bit. No way am I going out to beg him to come in. And I don’t think you should either.’
I could understand how angry Mike was, and I agreed that perhaps we should wait and see how this played out for a bit. Would Miller come in under his own steam or wouldn’t he? Just how long was he prepared to keep this up?
We agreed half an hour, and were just contemplating