Golden Boy: A Novel Read online

  For my parents

  GOLDEN BOY

  Abigail Tarttelin

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part One

  Daniel

  Karen

  Max

  Daniel

  Sylvie

  Karen

  Max

  Sylvie

  Archie

  Max

  Archie

  Daniel

  Max

  Karen

  Archie

  Karen

  Archie

  Daniel

  Sylvie

  Max

  Karen

  Max

  Daniel

  Archie

  Max

  Daniel

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Daniel

  Max

  Karen

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Karen

  Part Two

  Karen

  Archie

  Max

  Archie

  Karen

  Daniel

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Daniel

  Archie

  Max

  Karen

  Max

  Archie

  Max

  Karen

  Max

  Karen

  Sylvie

  Max

  Karen

  Daniel

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Sylvie

  Daniel

  Max

  Daniel

  Part Three

  Karen

  Max

  Karen

  Max

  Karen

  Max

  Steve

  Max

  Steve

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Sylvie

  Max

  Daniel

  Max

  Steve

  Sylvie

  Archie

  Max

  Daniel

  Steve

  Daniel

  Max

  Acknowledgements

  More on W&N

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Daniel

  My brother gets all As at school, and is generally always nice to everybody. He is on the county football team that trains and plays at his high school, and they rotate captain between the three best players, which is him and his best friends, so for one month out of every three, he is captain of the team. People like him because he is fair and always calls out the names of the other players to support them and claps when they win, plus if they won because of someone else’s goal, he will always make sure that that person holds the trophy in the picture for the paper.

  He is like the perfect one of the two of us. Whenever my family is in the paper, they show pictures of my brother. Mostly they cut me out. My brother is much taller than me, and he also has lighter hair and straighter hair than me, and mine is quite curly and a darker yellow that some people say is ginger, which I have been teased about at school. Mum says he looks like an angel and I look like a little imp, but I don’t think she was trying to be insulting because she was smiling like I’d be pleased when she said it. My brother has proper muscles and can run really fast and wins all the races at school sports days. He is also doing an entrance exam for the big school that goes after secondary school so Mum and Dad don’t have to pay any money for him to go, and he is probably going to get that, Mum says, because he works very hard and is naturally bright.

  His friends Marc and Carl are funny. They are humorous-funny, but also strange-funny. When they are at our house sometimes they all go quiet when I walk in a room, and I say, ‘Hey! You were talking about me!’

  And they say, ‘We weren’t.’

  And I say, ‘What were you talking about then?’

  And sometimes they make silly excuses but sometimes one of them will say, ‘We were talking about girls.’

  And then I say, ‘No you weren’t! You were talking about me!’

  And my brother will say, ‘No, really, Daniel, I promise we were talking about girls.’

  And then I believe them because my brother would never, ever lie to me, because we are brothers and we have a blood pact never to lie to one another. A blood pact means you would die before you lied to each other.

  My brother is also really popular with girls. Carl told me so and so did Marc, and so did Mum. I also deduced this fact because a few times we have picked him up from school in the car and he has been talking to a girl and holding hands and then once . . . once he was kissing a girl and I was shocked and horrified and Mum laughed at my mouth, which was wide open, and beeped the horn and waved at him and my brother smiled and went red and got in the car and when he got in the car I said, ‘Why are you so red?’

  And he said, ‘Shuddurrrp, Daniel.’

  And Mum laughed again, even harder.

  The best thing about my brother is that he is the most amazing player of World of War ever. He doesn’t even play it that often! He only plays it with me. He plays more on the Xbox with Marc and Carl usually, and we play on the Wii downstairs with Mum and Dad sometimes and he also occasionally plays on the Sega, but really he doesn’t play many games because he is out playing football. But he does play World of War with me most nights and we play until eight or eight-thirty and then I have to either have a bath and go to bed or just go to bed, but usually have a bath and go to bed. Then I will read to Mum before bed, or sometimes I will read to Dad, but usually Dad is not home yet. Sometimes my brother comes in and we have our talks, which are very interesting conversations about life. My brother says I am very wise and he is right. I always have advice for him.

  We are very different people. Some different things about the two of us are good, though, like he is best at English and Geography and History, and he doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but I am a very advanced robot designer for my age and I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up: a robotic engineer. I will do all the designs on the robots and I will oversee the construction of the prototype and then I will make an entire robot race, or I will use my robot powers to add robotic extensions to normal human beings, so they can be whatever they want to be. Like if you couldn’t see but wanted to be a fighter pilot then I could add robot eyes, which could give you 20:20 vision, or even better 40:40 vision and night vision, with the ability to detect both infra-red and ultra-violet light. You would have a dial on your head and you could turn it to see which one you wanted to see. People would come into my workshop and I would look at them, and I would improve them until they were absolutely perfect and couldn’t be improved further. I would work on my brother and make him really big and muscly and fast as a cheetah, and I would give him a really deep voice and a buzz cut and a gun that formed from his left arm when his heightened senses told him we were in danger.

  I told my brother what I wanted to be, and he said that it was cool but unfortunately he wouldn’t let me add extensions to him, because he wanted to be who he was and see how that played out. I said that was stupid. Who wouldn’t want to be perfect? Or a robot?

  And this is why I have chosen to write my class essay about my brother.

  Sincerely,

  Daniel Alexander Walker, age nine and four-fifths.

  Karen

  My parents were each other’s antithesis. My mother was a beautiful, sad woman; dark, small and quick to anger. She would mutter about sacrifice and every
thing she had given up for us. She died when I was sixteen and now I wish I had known her better. My father was tall, with golden hair swept from a side-parting, and had a gentle, mild temperament. Dad used to practise law, and would leave for York very early in the morning, every day, to go to his office. Later, he became a politician. He saw enough of the world to have dreams for us, and when I could go – when it was still free to go study for a degree – he sent me to Oxford University.

  I was three years older than my sister Cheryl, and I didn’t want to go alone, so my friend Leah applied to train as a nurse in Oxford and followed me there. Two years after we moved to Oxford she met Edward, a philosophy student, while out rowing on the river. I was surprised she liked him so much, because Leah was so down to earth, and Edward was prone to arrogance. He felt too cold for warm Leah. Six months later, he took her for a picnic on that same river and proposed in front of all his friends. They married and moved to Hemingway for Edward’s work. The houses were better value and roomier, and the town was quiet and safe. A few years after that, they found out they were going to have a baby – a boy.

  Leah had moved to the suburbs, but I loved Oxford. The city was where I became a lawyer, where I met my husband, where we bought our first flat, where the buzz of energy took on a unique momentum and propelled even the most mundane start to an evening forward into something new, something different and unexpected. My boyfriend, Steve, was two years ahead of me in law school. After he graduated we would meet at the pub around six most nights, then either stay there until late, drinking and talking, or walk home together. He was from London, tall, leanly muscular, earnest, blithely good-looking and deliciously self-righteous. He was passionate. We argued a lot but had the same values. We both strove for independence and control, but somehow imagined success was already waiting for us. We were healthy and young and full of promise. We had no problems and no doubts.

  We got married in Oxford a few weeks after I graduated. Afterwards we went for a meal at an Indian restaurant we both loved.

  We found out I was pregnant just before we exchanged on the flat in Oxford, and we moved to Hemingway a few months after the birth of our first child. Steve was twenty-eight and I was twenty-six. The move was unexpected, but suddenly Oxford was too claustrophic. Our friends would drop by at all times, without calling ahead, and above all we wanted privacy.

  We took a long time, a few weeks, to decide on a name for the baby. Steve kept suggesting ones I hated: Jamie, Taylor, Rowan. In the end he grew impatient with me, and starting calling the baby ‘Max’. After a while, it stuck.

  Later, when we had Daniel, our second child, my sister moved to Hemingway to be closer to me. Cheryl’s life is very different from mine. She travelled instead of going to university. Cheryl has had several long-term boyfriends but only got married last year, at 38, to Charlie, who has a wide, boyish grin and wild, curly hair.

  I know it sounds irrational, but sometimes I feel jealous of all the freedom and solitude she has experienced. As a barrister for the court and a mother of two, my own free time is precious. I spend it with my family, and when I get the chance I see Cheryl or Leah, but even these occasions seem to be few and far between. I call them both regularly but we only manage perhaps one lunch or dinner a month.

  Perhaps because we made similar choices in life, Leah and I are closer than my sister and I. I know if anything happened to me, Leah would be there for my children, and if anything happened to Leah, I would be there for her son, Hunter, who, like many children without siblings, can be moody and controlling. I don’t share that thought with Leah, obviously, because we all like to believe that our children are perfect, and personally, I wouldn’t want to be disabused of that notion.

  Despite Hunter’s bossiness, Max and he have been best friends since they were little, and Leah and I have always been glad of this because on shared holidays they are good at entertaining themselves. They are both resourceful, playing football together, exploring, swimming, surfing, fighting and making up without our input. Max is always the first, and sometimes the only one, to forgive, ever the peacemaker.

  Leah was the first person I confided in about Max’s condition, and Hunter has known since he was four. He was young when he found out, sharing a bath with Max before bedtime, but he seemed to understand as much as a child could. We just told him Max is different. Max is special.

  Max

  It is eleven-ten on a Sunday night in late September and I am meant to be asleep, but I’m not. My parents are having a dinner party. It is obvious, by the sounds of the dizzy, hysterical laughter that you start to exhale when you’re an adult and you have very few friends and only rarely have fun, that they are caught in a bubble of their own awesomeness, and won’t be leaving the living room any time soon.

  So I’m not asleep. I’m doing what I suspect most 15-year-olds do when there’s a guarantee no parent is going to come into the room. I stroke a hand down my thigh, with my eyes closed. I’m thinking about kissing someone. This is all I’ve ever thought about when I’ve done this so far, in case I never get to go further than kissing in real life. I mean, obviously I want to. But, you know . . . I may never. Get laid, I mean. So I don’t want to really think about it.

  Hence the dreaming about kissing. Kissing is good. I can definitely score kissing. I have had some awesome kissing in my time. Thinking about kissing does not come with twinges of ‘but what if I never . . . ?’ attached. I love kissing.

  So in my head my lips touch someone else’s and I lean back onto the grass of the school playing field. My hands travel up my legs and roam around my crotch. I never know what’s going to make me come. Usually it’s really hard to get there, so I just settle for feeling good and a general touch around that area.

  I roll over onto my side and my hair moves silkily across my face, and this is also erotic. I decide to do what I almost never do, and I suck my little finger, then reach down past my stomach.

  It always gets me. Probably because I do it so rarely, and probably also because it’s quite new. It’s like a secret. I grin into my pillow and breathe harder.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shit!’ I look over my shoulder and grab at my duvet.

  ‘Oh fuck!’ The figure silhouetted by the light from the hall stands in my doorway, lets out a low laugh and claps its hand to its mouth.

  It pushes the door closed and walks forward into the light, where the figure becomes Hunter Fulsom, son of my parents’ friends Leah and Edward. Hunter attends the local sixth form college and we used to be on the same football squad, before he dropped out earlier this year. Now he just hangs around the town hall, where everybody underage goes to party, smoking weed and drinking. Leah told my mum that Hunter’s grades have dropped off and he was cautioned by the police for egging someone’s house over the summer.

  I don’t smoke pot. I can’t anyway, even if I wanted to, because of Dad and Mum. They need me to keep out of trouble; to be good. They are lawyers, and they work hard and are in the paper a lot. There’s a certain amount of pressure being in my family. People would write about us if I did something like that. Mum and I call it ‘doing a Prince Harry’.

  ‘Don’t do a Prince Harry on me,’ she says.

  I wouldn’t do it anyway. But it seems Hunter would, and has.

  Hunter’s tall, dark and, I suppose, handsome. His eyes look hooded and in shadow in the relative dark of my bedroom. I see the outline of his features only due to the moonlight outside. Everything about him is either black or grey. He smirks at me.

  ‘Hey you,’ he says.

  Hunter’s mum and my mum have been best friends since they were little kids. This makes Hunter a non-genetic ‘cousin’ and, purely by default, one of my best friends growing up. He knows all my secrets, including the secret, the one only my family knows, which means that, on some level, I always had to be on his good side when we were little. A year older than me, he was the one in charge in our relationship. He was the dark-haired, dark-eyed
one who remained mysterious and guarded, and I was the sunny, blond one who was open and honest, and had inadvertently stumbled into a situation where I had to do Hunter’s bidding in all our childhood games, because he had info on me and I had nothing on him. Despite this, I always thought of Hunter as one of my best friends and, in a way, my hero, because he did the things I wanted to do, but first and way better. It was Hunter that I had wanted on my team when I read Swallows and Amazons. It was Hunter I thought of when I saw the young John Connor in Terminator 2. It was Hunter who hand-carved me a wooden boat to sail on the lakes when we visited the scene of our mums’ childhoods in Yorkshire, and it was Hunter who taught me to play pooh sticks, and held me in bed at night when the howling of the wind sounded like ghosts. He was a big brother for as long as I remained an only child and afterwards, a forever friend, for better, for worse, etc.

  I’m surprised to see him now, though. We haven’t spoken in months, not since a drunken conversation about sex at New Year, when we were staying with our families on a skiing holiday in Switzerland and where, for no obvious reason, Hunter had become angry and subdued and told me to ‘fuck off, pretty-boy’.

  ‘How many people have you slept with?’ was the last thing I remembered saying to him. I was smiling conspiratorially, whispering this in his ear out of necessity – our parents were in the next room.

  ‘People?’ he asked suspiciously, then stood up and lurched for the door of the cabin that led outside. With a husky tone in his throat he had spat the words at me, ‘Fuck off, pretty-boy.’

  It’s been nine months.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to pick up my parents.’ Hunter holds a car key aloft. ‘They’re pretty drunk. So are yours.’

  Hunter walks towards me. The darkness makes his gait appear threatening. He drops his hips in a strange, wolf-like way. He stops about a metre away from me, holding a black rucksack. ‘I said I’d say hi to you before I left. And your parents said it was alright.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Hunter grins. ‘You were—’

  ‘No,’ I say, for no reason at all, because it’s so obvious.