Free Lullaby by Bernard Beckett Page B

didn’t want to.’
    ‘I did want to.’
    She gave me that look, then. The look that people who’ve never been a teenage boy
give to those who are.
    ‘So what do you think you broke?’
    I tried to find the right word. Fun, trust, hope, family…
    ‘Dunno.’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘I still saw the others and said hello, but everybody understood we were drifting
apart. I made friends in my class. Not good friends, I knew they wouldn’t outlast
the seating plan, but it was the end of pretending. Harriet went into a transition
project, and started training to cut hair. A year later I heard where she was working,
but I never called in. I think I knew that if I saw her standing over a stranger,
washing their hair, I’d fall out of love with her.’
    I’ve always done that, slipped too easily into nostalgia, one small step from bad
poetry. But if you can’t be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just
down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?
    I wondered how much of the time Maggie charged for consisted of waiting in silence.
    ‘How am I doing?’ I asked her.
    ‘You haven’t answered the question,’ she said.
    ‘What question?’
    ‘How does a top science student end up in drama school?’
    One step left. One small step. My problem was I wanted Maggie to like me and I needed
her to hear the story. I couldn’t have both.
    ‘After the group broke up, Theo started to come apart too. There was a thing with
a break in, and then a stolen car and a joy ride through the school. He came within
a governor’s blink of being sent to an industrial training centre, but somehow he
came out of the interview with an eleventh second chance. I say somehow: it was the
smile, the handshake, his way of making people believe he was sincere, by believing
it himself. I shouldn’t have been surprised when he came home one day and announced
he had the lead role in the school drama production.
    ‘From the very first rehearsal, he changed. Changed back, I mean. The joker again,
maker of plans, boy with a future. As if the awkward years had simply been deleted.
Mrs Struthers reverse-aged in front of our eyes. The wrinkles I’d thought were age
turned out to be ground-in worry, and her arthritis began responding to treatment.
I remember one afternoon walking in on her and Theo practising a dance from the show.
I watched them moving together around the room, and for a moment I could imagine
what she was like when she was young. It was possible to believe she had once laughed
and danced and felt beautiful. I wondered then what had happened to her, how she’d
ended up with us. I didn’t ask.
    ‘Acting provided what athletics hadn’t. It made Theo whole again, by making him better
than everybody else in the room. Somewhere in the past, Mum and Dad had managed to
convince us we were special. I suppose they were trying to establish our confidence.
They didn’t guess they were feeding us a belief that would become our addiction.
    ‘The show was about a boy who’d created an imaginary friend. That was Theo, co-starring
with a hologram of himself. That’s probably how he got the part. Mr Watts was the
sort of drama teacher who had all the theory but no feel for the actual art of it.
He could produce quotes out of the air from plays no one else had heard of, but when
it came down to watching an actor on stage, and telling them what to change, he had
no flair. So the possibility of working with an actor with an identical twin (he
preferred to say doppelganger) was very attractive. Theo wouldn’t need to be directed,
he could simply live out a version of his own experience on stage. Except that was
all bullshit. What Theo brought was charisma, and the ability to imagine a character
into existence. He’d been preparing for the role all his life.
    ‘It was Theo’s idea to include me in the show. There was a problem with the ending.
It was a big musical number, designed to rise above all that had gone before and
bring the audience