Daylight Saving Read Free Page B

concerned about the nosebleed that had forced me to come home from school.
    For the next few days, I was rigid with fear. We were sitting there, in the living room, watching TV, and over the top of the moving pictures, I could see the scorched image of my mum and Dr. Greggs kissing. Nobody else seemed to notice. I suppose you had to be looking for it in the first place, but it was clear to me. I could see the shadow of their kiss over
Match of the Day,
over the six o’clock news, over kissing couples in the films my mum watched. It was driving me mad.
    Eventually, at about three o’clock one morning — when any old thing seems like a good idea — I woke up, got dressed, unplugged the TV, and walked out of the house with it. It was frosty and calm on the street. I was going to throw it in the brook and fake a break-in. I thought everything would be OK; I thought I was going to get away with it. But Mum had heard me close the door, and she opened the upstairs window. “Daniel?” she called down.
    “Yes, Mum,” I said.
    “Are you awake?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, resting the TV on my thigh.
    “Come on back in the house, love,” she said.
    I shook my head. Mum leaned back inside the curtains, and I could hear her coming down. I could still see the picture branded on the TV screen, her shape the color of milky coffee, with a dark orange outline. Him, too. Greggs. Greggs, who had rubbed my neck in a circular motion when I had a suspected throat infection. Greggs, with his warm hands. Mum arrived at the door, smiling, in her dressing gown. “Come on, love,” she said.
    I walked back toward the house and dropped the television, screen first, onto the little wall of our front garden, denting and crumpling the screen. I made it look like an accident.
    For a while, my parents were so distracted by my behavior that they didn’t have time to think about anything else. They whispered about what might be wrong with me and sent me to the doctor (not Greggs) to talk about sleeping patterns and the need for exercise and fresh air. They sent me to a school counselor, who asked me about friendship groups and the pressure of schoolwork and issues of sexuality. It was easy to pretend that I was upset about such things.
    Dad picked me up from school one day and pulled over on the way home. I was expecting more of the same questions. Perhaps a talk about how it was perfectly OK to get pleasure from my own body, or that people were often a little plump during their teens.
    “Did you see your mother with another man?” he asked.
    He looked at me when he said it. I could feel him reading my features. And I knew they were telling him a story. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t even say anything, but my face told him everything he needed to know. I hated him for looking at me like that. Hated myself for not being able to control how I looked. Hated how easy it was. Mum was gone by the next day.
    But you could start that story earlier. You could start it from my nosebleed in history class, which meant I had to go home. Or you could start with the boys reading back the letter I sent to Lauren Harket over the summer holidays, which caused me to give myself the nosebleed. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that, either. I’d worked out that if I used a nasal spray for hay fever at five times the recommended dose, a crust formed in my nostril, and when I picked that crust —
bang
— there’s your bloody nose and a free pass to get out of school. So you might start the story from there.
    Then again, why would anyone spend months preparing their nose so they can make it bleed whenever they want to? I certainly didn’t have hay fever in September. Maybe it was because the boys who had read the Lauren Harket letter in high-pitched voices had also, a few months before, used Photoshop to put my head on the body of a toddler from a nappy advert, and a naked model from a website called BigBeautifulWomen.com. And maybe they had done