The Boy in the Smoke Read Free Page B

only make it worse. He looked to her, and it felt like the earth was ripping open between them. Why did Gina look like she’d won? What was wrong with
all of them
?
    He went to the car.
    Gina never came home. She moved in with some friends in a flat in Shoreditch. Later, she would tell Stephen that their parents sent her a small sum every month just to ensure that she would stay away, enough for a flatshare and some groceries. She would phone, but the calls were erratically timed—weeks of silence followed by a two a.m. call. There were lots of largely incomprehensible texts. The house was filled with pictures of Stephen in his Eton uniform, and all those of Gina were removed. In the autumn, Stephen was shipped off to start his new life.
    At the time, he believed things had gotten as bad as they ever could. He was wrong.

II

THE BREAK IN THE CHAIN
    Most of Stephen’s life at Eton was spent running, often physically. The days started with a 7:30 breakfast, then chapel, then a sequence of divs—the Eton way of saying classes—then lunch, then sport, then more divs, then study. Very little time was provided to get from place to place, and the school sprawled for two miles, so he ran. Everyone ran. It was like a constant relay. You left your books between railings in town, in pigeonholes, on steps, and as you raced past, you picked up one set and dropped another. The entire town was littered with stacks of them. Maths to Latin to German to Divinity to Geography to French to History  … 
    If you were late (and you couldn’t help but be late sometimes), there was always a price to pay. The beaks always had something ready to go. Maybe a hundred lines of Milton to copy. Maybe a problem set or a translation. There was a brutal heartbeat about the place, a constant sense of movement and pressure. There was a reason the exams were called trials.
    One Thursday in March, Stephen was moving swiftly between Latin and Geography divs when a prefect caught up with him and told him to go back to his house, immediately. He’d never been called back to his house before, and such a callback never meant anything good. It meant you’d done something seriously wrong, or something seriously wrong had happened somewhere in the world outside and the news would be dropped on you from a great height. Stephen had done nothing seriously wrong that he could think of, so something had to have happened. He went through every possibility he could think of as he ran.
    The news could never have been predicted, and yet, somewhere in his mind he already knew it had to do with her. The universe would never be so kind as to spare her, the only one of them that was worth anything.
    The Master was nice enough. Stephen was taken into the family living room and sat on the floral sofa, and the news was said gently, but with an unequivocal tone—“
your sister  …  overdose, it seems  …  nothing could be done
 … ”
    Overdose, it seems.
    For the first minute, those words echoed in his head. What killed Gina? Overdose, it seems. It
seems
that way, as if it might have been something else, like malaria or bad vapours or dragons, but it was an overdose, it seems. There was a roaring in his ears that obliterated all other noise. He spoke to his parents briefly on the phone, right there, in the sitting room. His mother sounded like she was crying. His father did not. If anything, he sounded angry. Stephen was given the option of going home for a bit, which he decided not to take. There was no point in going home now. After that, he was permitted to return to his room or speak to someone at the San. He went outside instead and walked up and down the high street. He had no thoughts—nothing he could remember later. His mind was a void. All he could do was walk. One of the prefects came to find him and bring him back.
    Life continued, which was strange. Aside from the funeral, which took a half-day, Stephen didn’t leave Eton. His parents must have been