Free Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift

owed them to Tom. And the fact that he himself had missed out when he was smaller only meant that during those weeks Jack was, most of the time, perfectly ready to regress. It wasn’t, in fact, so difficult. It was as though an unspoken agreement operated between him and Tom that while Tom should try to act as if he were thirteen, Jack should try toact as if he were five or six. Then, between them, they might be like two boys of nine.
    Yet in practice it was Tom who led the way in being just a kid—who was better and quicker and more naturally equipped to excel even at that. It was Tom who found the secret route, like a tunnel, through the hedge to the clifftops, and then that other path, not the one everyone used, down through the tumbled, broken bit of cliff to the beach. It was Tom who made better sand-castles.
    Why had he never minded? Even then. In the evenings, it was true, back at the caravan, it could all turn round. Something quite new could happen to Jack. It could seem that he might be twice thirteen. It could seem that he and Mum were a couple and this was their little home and, for this one week at least, he might be Tom’s dad. That was how it could seem.
    And if ever he’d had the chance to learn from his mum how to crack eggs into a pan and how to put together a breakfast, that was it. But he hadn’t, and the fact was it was Tom, just a little kid, who picked up before Jack ever did on things that weren’t just for little kids. It was Tom who asked him, years later, if he’d ever noticed that each of those caravans had been named after a Hollywood film actress. There was a Betty, a Lauren, a Rita. Jack had spent a week each year, two years running, inside Marilyn Monroe, and never even known it.
    Mum must have had that tough conversation with Dad, must have argued and insisted. Those two boys. And Dad must have yielded. Acted the martyr, no doubt, but finally reached in his pocket. ‘Your doing, Vee, not mine.’It was mid-July, after the hay was in, when work on the farm was lightish. On the other hand, it was peak-rate time for renting a caravan.
    And the situation for Dad while they were away was that he’d have to ‘fend for himself’. Jack could remember his mother using that phrase with a sort of edge to it, as if when they returned they should expect to find Michael looking half-starved and the farm gone to pot—which had mostly come true later when Mum was permanently absent. But this was just a week in July, although the days were long and, to Jack at least, they weren’t like ordinary, unnoticed days—they were fantastic. Yet when they returned, both times, Dad had said, in his slow, dry way, ‘Back already? Hardly seems you’ve gone.’ Or some such words. Mum had taken a careful look around while Michael had looked patient. Then he’d said, or just meant it with his eyes, ‘See, not gone to rack and ruin yet.’ And his face had finally cracked with pleasure to have them back again.
    So they’d always have it to remember. Well, if that’s how she’d put it, Jack had never forgotten.
    Ellie had surely picked her moment. The hot afternoon, the cool of the farmhouse, its timbers creaking, breezes wafting about it. And before that, he came to realise, she must have done her homework. Talked to those lawyers, talked to all the right people, checked it through, checked to see if it was real and not some leg-pull. She’d even made a trip out here on the sly, so it emerged, to see for herself, to see the lie of the land. But she’d saved it all up for the right moment. To drop that word first into theair, she’d known how it would chime for him. Then show him the letter.
    And all, Jesus Christ, in the very bed where his own mother had breathed her last. And consummated her marriage to Michael Luxton, and even once, in the small hours of a September night, given challenging birth to a son called Jack.
    Ellie had whisked him up there pretty smartly, and could he say he’d even feebly