A Boy Without Hope: Part 2 of 3. Casey Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ less person to provide an audience for his current game. So instead, I went home, to find neither of them there. So what merry dance was he now leading Mike?

      But there was no point in phoning him, because he’d probably be driving, so I made myself a coffee, and took a sandwich up to Tyler, then, having regaled him with the shenanigans I’d ‘enjoyed’ on our little outing, left him to it, and went back downstairs to wait for them both.

      And wait … It was more than an hour and a half later before Mike arrived home. But without Miller. By which time, having gone through a range of emotions, I’d already had a serious crisis of professional confidence. And this confirmed it. I’d called it all wrong.

      ‘Oh, lord – where is he?’ I said, contemplating the call to the emergency duty team, and the inevitable debacle that would follow. ‘Don’t tell me you lost him?’

      ‘I bloody wish!’ he growled.

      He shut the front door, and went into the living room, where he threw his car keys down onto the coffee table. Then he went across to the window and looked out.

      The penny dropped. ‘So he is here?’ I felt a stab of relief.

      ‘Oh, he’s somewhere out there, certainly. And I’ve a good mind to leave him out there, as well! And hope for rain. Wipe the smile off his bloody face. Can you imagine what it’s like? I must have looked like a kerb crawler or something.’

      ‘You mean he’s walked all the way home from town?’

      Apparently so. Because there hadn’t been a great deal Mike could do. Miller wouldn’t get in the car, and Mike couldn’t – wouldn’t – make him. And I sympathised; a man bundling a screeching, kicking twelve-year-old into a vehicle, in the middle of the town centre? It didn’t take much of a leap of imagination to work out how that might pan out.

      But there was no way Miller could walk home on his own, and he knew it. Bright though he was, he’d never even spent time in our part of the county. He’d never have found his way home on his own. Which left Mike with one option. To play leapfrog with Miller. Driving ahead of him, then waiting for him to saunter past him, then, when faced with a junction, driving ahead once again, so Miller knew the way and could follow him. Then a saunter past, and a drive, and a stop at another junction, while waiting for him to catch up again.

      ‘I must have asked him twenty times to get in, but he wouldn’t, of course. Just kept sticking two fingers up at me and laughing. ‘So he can stay out there for a bit. No way am I going out to beg him to come in. And I don’t think you should either.’

      I could understand how angry Mike was, and I agreed that perhaps we should wait and see how this played out for a bit. Would Miller come in under his own steam or wouldn’t he? Just how long was he prepared to keep this up?

      We agreed half an hour, and were just contemplating our next move in the kitchen when we heard a loud shout from above. Tyler was up in his bedroom, still engrossed in revision. Well, had been. Because it was his voice we could hear, booming out across the front lawn.

      ‘You’ve got two minutes to get in before I come down there!’

      We both went to the window, to see Miller transfixed on the pavement. And it hit me that there was one person he couldn’t manipulate. Couldn’t push to the brink, because he wasn’t hidebound by all the rules. A peer. And an older one. A bigger, and possibly badder, one. Someone who was genuinely scary.

      ‘I mean it!’ Tyler barked. ‘If I have to come down there …’

      Upon which, as if electrified, or jerked by an invisible string, Miller scuttled up the path and exploded into the hall, then thundered up the stairs to his room before we could get to him.

      I went to follow but Mike placed a hand on my arm. ‘Leave it be,’ he said. ‘I reckon Tyler’s got this one, don’t you?’

      Upon which, the hero of the moment came ambling down the stairs. ‘No need to thank me,’ he said, grinning.

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