Wolves Read Free Page A

that Mandy is not actually depressed. She is grumpy. There is a difference, morally.
    ‘Why can’t you use a handkerchief?’ she says.
    It’s after midnight by the time I get home. She’s left everything on, as usual – the television, the fan in the downstairs bathroom. I go around the house, stepping softly, switching off the lights.
    Upstairs, I look in on Mandy. She is already asleep. I pull the covers around her and shut her door.
    On the terrace, I take out my phone. The air is still, and the canal running past the end of the garden might be a mirror; the lights reflected there are still and absolutely solid. If only the water were closer I might be tempted to throw this useless slab in, just to break the tension.
    Dad’s number has been ringing all week, unanswered. Now it comes up unobtainable. I stare at the screen, the number illuminated there, as though it’s the technology that’s betraying me.
    More likely Dad, hearing of the accident, has shaken me off at last. Since I texted him from the hospital, six weeks ago, I have heard nothing from him. My emails bounce. My messages vanish into the aether. I can make any number of excuses for him, and that’s exactly what I have been doing, for months now. For years. Maybe his phone was stolen. Maybe he lost my number. After years of widening separation, maybe he is struggling to contact me, just as much as I have been struggling to contact him.
    The thing is, I can no longer fool myself. I remember this feeling too well, from our last days at the hotel—
    The phone rings. An unfamiliar number. I swipe the call open. ‘Hello.’
    ‘Conrad.’
    I lean back against the wall. ‘Michel.’
    ‘How are you?’
    Still fucked.
    Of course, if he knew my real circumstances, if I told him everything, he would know how impossible it is for me to accept his offer. As it is, he cannot understand my reluctance. ‘A couple of weeks, longer if you like, though it’s very cramped here – you’d probably do your nut.’
    He has his camera turned off this time. I try to picture him from his first phone call. His orange face aglow. The shapes and shadows round him. He might have been sitting in a toolshed.
    ‘That’s very generous.’
    ‘So you’ll come?’
    The company I work for is tiny, vigorous and volatile. I’ve been on compassionate leave since the accident. My job is hanging by a thread. I can’t explain this to Michel now, because I’ve already spun him a line about how free-spirited my life is. I can’t turn down his invitation without seeming unfriendly. Though, of course, I can’t go.
    ‘Hanna would love to meet you,’ he says. ‘Have I told you about Hanna?’
    I make the right noises, letting him talk himself out. Behind the sardonic delivery that is his signature, he sounds the happiest I’ve known him. ‘She has this plan for survival. We’re going to live happily ever after.’
    ‘That’s nice.’
    I should tell him about Mandy. Why don’t I tell him? But after all this time – we left school, what, ten years ago? – it feels wrong to burden him with my present horror. I shared too much with him before: things he should never have had to hear. No wonder we’ve hardly spoken since.
    ‘We have this boat,’ he says.
    A boat. Christ. I had had it in my head, until the accident, that I had done pretty well for myself. A place in a pretty, watery, wedding cake-y part of town. Michel’s woman has a boat ?
    ‘We’re going to sail around the world.’
    That sort of boat. A working boat that you sail. That’s all right, then. I had visions of them sunbathing in public view in exclusive marinas.
    ‘We’d love you to see it,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of a wreck.’
    Which reminds me.
    ‘I’ve not been going out much,’ I say, without thinking. ‘Since the crash.’ I should have said I was back at work. I should have said I was working all hours, trying to catch up on myself.
    Stupid. Stupid. Now how am I going to get out of visiting