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‘If you think this is—’
‘One,’ Joseph says.
‘I’ve already told you I’m—’
‘Two.’
Max drops his gaze to the phone.
Joseph wonders if he’ll try to snatch it, thinks he probably won’t. ‘Three,’ he says.
‘Please, Dad, you’re—’
‘Four.’
A nerve twitches in Max’s cheek. ‘There’s no—’
‘Five,’ Joseph says.
He picks up the phone and dials 999, and as his finger descends on the call button, Max says, ‘I hit someone.’
FOUR
Joseph puts down the phone.
‘You hit someone?’ he asks. ‘In a fight?’
Max rubs his hands together, as if he’s washing them beneath a tap. There’s no damage to his knuckles, no scuffing of the skin. His fists can’t be responsible for the spilled blood.
Joseph touches his abdomen. He recalls the knife blade flashing in the dark. And suddenly he’s very frightened indeed.
The face opposite seems to cycle through different identities: Max the child; Max the teenager; a person who’s barely Max at all. ‘Not a fight,’ says one of them.
Joseph runs his tongue around his mouth, tries to work up some moisture. ‘What, then?’
Max holds his father’s gaze a while longer. Then he hangs his head. When he speaks next, his voice cracks with emotion. ‘Once I say, everything changes. And I’m not ready. Because afterwards we can never go back.’
Joseph reaches across the table, takes Max’s hands, squeezes them. ‘Between you and me,’ he says, ‘nothing changes. Nothing ever changes. I’m your dad. That’s for ever. Whatever this is, let me help you.’
Max lifts his chin. He looks past Joseph to the wall clock as if he, too, has started to sense time running inexorably down. Again, his head drops.
‘I was driving,’ the boy whispers – because eighteen years old or not, to Joseph he’s still very much a boy. ‘Next thing I know, someone’s in the road. There was …’ He shudders. ‘There was nothing I could do.’
In the ensuing silence, the refrigerator’s soft buzzing is the only sound. Joseph cannot breathe, cannot speak. He gets up from the table, shakes his head – as if by dislodging his son’s words he can cancel their meaning. ‘Nothing you could do to avoid them?’
When Max lifts his gaze to his father, his eyes are wet with tears. ‘Nothing I could do to save them.’
The overhead LEDs brighten. The refrigerator’s buzzing increases in pitch. It’s as if a power surge has just hit the house, but Joseph suspects it’s a dump of adrenalin sharpening his senses. ‘You’re saying you … that they’redead?’
Max wipes his eyes, nods.
‘No. That can’t be. Maybe that’s what it looked like. You knocked them unconscious, or—’
‘Dad,’ he says. ‘I’m telling you.’
Joseph crosses the kitchen, comes back, sits down again. He can’t make sense of what he’s hearing. Its sheer enormity. ‘You called the police?’ he asks, knowing the futility of the question, knowing that Max wouldn’t be here, in this kitchen, if he had.
‘I was going too fast. Uninsured, in a car that isn’t road legal. That probably means prison time. It definitely means a record.’