I listened for an hour as he explained how he’d struggled academically at school after his mum died, going in during the holidays for extra help with his coursework and scraping five low-grade GCSEs. He told me how his dad had said he’d never amount to anything and his best bet was to join him in the family’s building-supplies firm so he could learn about running a business. His dad had laughed when he’d told him he didn’t want to do that – he wanted to be a policeman – and had called him a grass. Two of Mark’s uncles were in prison, one for aggravated assault and one for fraud, and he knew his own dad wasn’t beyond taking a few backhanders and passing on stolen goods.
‘I wanted to better myself,’ Mark told me. ‘Everyone on our estate thinks my family is dodgy. People cross the street when they see me out with my uncle Simon. The family thinks it’s respect but it’s not, it’s fear, and I don’t want that kind of life for me and my kids. Because I want kids, you know, Claire. I want a family.’
Kids. His eyes shone as he said the word, just as they had when he’d talked to me about joining the police.
‘I want to be respected. I want people to look up to me because I’ve achieved something.’
And then he told me about what he called the ‘boxes’ in his head. It was his way of compartmentalizing his life. He couldn’t get in touch with me after he’d been rejected by the police because he was trapped in that box in his head. He had to process what had happened, then shut the box and get back on with his life. If he’d rung me he’d have taken a lot of his anger and resentment out on me and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want me to see him at his lowest.
‘If you’d seen me like that you’d have lost all respect for me. I’d have lost you.’
‘Maybe you already have?’
He hung his head then, chin tucked into his chest, as he swirled a small puddle of lager around the base of his glass. I said nothing.
‘Fuck it!’ He gripped his hair with his fingers and covered his face with the palms of his hands. ‘I’ve screwed everything up, haven’t I?’
There are some decisions that alter the course of your future; pivotal moments in life where you find yourself standing at a crossroads. Go left and you’re off down that path and there’s no turning back. Same if you go right.
‘Bollocks.’ The wooden picnic table shook as Mark got to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Claire, you’re better off without me.’
He strode across the patio with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched forward.
‘Mark!’ My throat was too tight and his name came out as a whisper. ‘Mark!’
I had no choice but to go after him.
‘Mark!’ I grabbed hold of his arm. ‘Don’t you dare walk away from me. Don’t you dare!’
He stopped walking but said nothing.
‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘You tell me you had a shit childhood, then you walk away? You’re not the only one who had a rough time, you know, but you don’t see me feeling sorry for myself and—’
He grabbed me around the waist and pressed his lips so hard against mine that our teeth clashed and my neck cricked as he leaned his weight into me.
‘Give me another chance,’ he breathed as he pulled away. ‘Give me another chance and I swear I’ll never let you down again, Claire. I love you. I don’t want to lose you.’
I didn’t have to think twice. I was eighteen years old. I was in love.
Now the back door clicks open and I catch the briefest glimpse of a baseball cap before it ducks back outside and the door slams shut.
‘Wait!’ I jump up from my chair and sprint across the kitchen. ‘Come back!’
‘Jake! Wait! We need to talk.’
My eldest son ignores me. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a key. He stoops to place it into the lock, wincing as he shifts his weight onto his bad foot, then turns the handle and yanks the garage door open.
He hobbles inside, swears at the pool of oil puddled around Mark’s lawnmower, then fiddles with the dusty stereo on the shelf at the back of the garage. Pounding rock music fills the room as he straddles the weights bench and shuffles onto his back. His fingers wrap around the silver bar and his biceps tense as he lifts the dumbbell off the bar.
‘Jake! Are you ignoring me?’
He doesn’t reply. Instead he grunts as he dips the bar down to his chest and then presses it into the air.
His interest in lifting weights began about six weeks after Billy disappeared. I welcomed it initially – Jake lifting weights was preferable to Jake spending every waking moment in the pub – but he became obsessed. An hour after work in the early evening became two hours and then he added another two hours in the morning. The bleep, bleep, bleep of his alarm at 5 a.m. drove Mark to distraction. Jake began spending less and less time with Kira and the family and more and more time in the garage. If he did deign to join us in the living room he’d be lost in the pages of Lifting or Power Grunt or whatever magazine he couldn’t get his nose out of. Kira would sit beside him, tap-tap-tapping into her phone, nodding politely as he’d explain how he was going to increase his deltoids by doing a certain combination of lifts.
Kira’s always been a quiet girl but she shrank into herself during the height of Jake’s obsession. The bigger he grew the smaller and more silent she became. Shortly after she first came to live with us she told me how our home was like a breath of fresh air. We weren’t the perfect family by any means but I could see why our living situation was preferable to the one she’d escaped. But then Billy disappeared and everything fell apart. We fell apart. Poor Kira. She’d swapped one screwed-up, dysfunctional family for another.
‘Jake.’ I take a step towards him. ‘You need to tell me what’s going on.’
‘I’d have thought –’ his face contorts as he presses the bar into the air – ‘that was obvious.’
I stride across the room and switch off the stereo.
A muscle twitches in my son’s cheek as he stares up at the corrugated roof. The barbell wobbles above him and for one horrible moment I imagine it slipping from his hands and pinning him to the bench but then he grunts and lowers it onto the rest.
‘Sorry.’ He sits up and runs a hand over his face.
‘You need to talk to me,’ I say softly as I crouch on the edge of the bench.
He reaches for the sports bottle on the floor and takes a swig, grimacing as he swallows. Jake is almost the spitting image of his dad. Whilst Billy inherited my dark hair, Jake is fair like Mark with the same small eyes, prominent nose and thin lips. His is a masculine face; strong and angular with a wide expanse of forehead. Billy’s features are more refined. He has my large brown eyes, a smaller nose and fuller lips. Dad always used to go on about what a pretty boy he was when he was little. ‘Angelic,’ Mum called him. I’ve always been careful never to comment on the way my boys look – they’re both beautiful in my eyes – but the world isn’t so circumspect. I lost track of the number of times old ladies would nod at Jake, then gaze at Billy in the buggy and announce, ‘He’s going to be a right heartbreaker that one.’ The comparison wasn’t lost on Jake. ‘Why don’t me and Billy look the same?’ he’d ask when he was nine and Billy was five. ‘Arrogant bastard,’ he growled when Billy was twelve and the letterbox rattled with cards for Valentine’s Day; only one of them was for Jake (and that was from me).
Jake replaces the sports