Free Ollie Always by John Wiltshire Page A

being offered.
    §§§
    They stepped out into the intense Queenstown sunlight and both donned sunglasses at the same moment, still smiling. Ollie felt physically lighter, as if he’d not only not eaten a large slice of cake, but as if he’d actually shed pounds of some kind of burden and left them behind him in that little café.
    As if by mutual agreement, although they didn’t speak, they wandered down to the lakeshore, and Skint—or Tom—began to skim pebbles. Ollie bent down and picked one up himself, running his fingers over it thoughtlessly.
    “It’s an impossible situation.” He glanced across and knew that Tom was listening intently, giving him the space to talk by keeping busy with the pebbles. “If he were a brother, a twin, he would be real. So even if he was better than me at everything, he’d have some tiny chink in his armour I could use to tell myself at least I’m not like that …But he’s not real. He can be anything she makes him. I get an A; he’s too bright to be graded. I swim for my house. He’s scouted for the Commonwealth Games. I go to Cambridge. He gets a double first. He’s brilliant at everything. If he goes abroad, he speaks the language fluently in a couple of weeks. He’s always tanned, summer or winter. He eats like a pig, does drugs, drinks to excess every night, but his skin is always flawless, his hair shines like fucking silk on every single page, he…”
    “Why do you read them?”
    “What?”
    Tom turned and came over to Ollie, handing him a skimming stone, which was warm from his hand. “Why do you read them? I’m not sure I would. Do you know what Elvis Presley used to do all day before he died?”
    “Eat deep-fried Mars Bars?”
    Tom smiled sadly. “That too. No, he used to sit and watch his old films. How pathetic is that? I sometimes wonder whether we are the generation that will suffer from being in the digital age. My dad only had one picture of himself as a lad, which Gran took of him when he passed out of his training depot. Now, we all have thousands of pictures of ourselves doing everything and anything. What will it be like when we’re old and decrepit to look back and see a whole life gone? We could simply not look at them, of course, and live in the now. Maybe you could do that with him.”
    Ollie tipped his head to one side, thinking about this. It frightened him, made his heart beat a little more rapidly and noticeably in his chest.
    Tom suddenly laughed, a quiet, soft sound that made Ollie quirk his lip in response and ask, “What?”
    Tom sat down on the gritty shore and patted the space next to him. Ollie complied but repeated his question.
    “I’m a fitness instructor, Ollie, but physical strength and stamina start in the mind. It’s a mental challenge, and it’s tied up with all sorts of addictions that have to be overcome—food, alcohol, cigarettes, fear of failure, self-doubt. When I said give Oliver up, you looked exactly like a soldier who’s been told he can’t smoke—a tiny eye flick, an immediate calculation of how he can cheat and sneak one in. I’ll come home and find you reading secretly under the covers one day.”
    Ollie thought this was an extraordinary thing to say, but whether it was the strange conjuring of a life where Tom Collins came home to him, or whether it was because he’d just been called an Oliver Fitzroy addict he wasn’t sure. He was already feeling a little shaky, so he knew he would make a fool of himself if he even joked about the first. He picked up on the second, instead. “So, how did you help them?”
    Tom began to juggle his two little pieces of shingle. “It’s a journey. Like any journey, it starts with a single step.”
    Ollie picked up another pebble to join the two he already had and began to flip them, far more competently than the other man could. Tom frowned, watching him. Ollie shrugged, stole one of Tom’s stones and juggled four. Tom nudged him hard in the ribs, and they all tumbled