47

Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.

I sit in the corner, still toying with my shoes, not thinking about the pain or the metal in my legs but thinking of going to meet Lou. For weeks Mal’s interview had been all that had occupied the muddled space in my thoughts but now she pulled my eyes elsewhere.

There had been three thousand or more media requests before. Every day they would clog the answering machine, hair in a drain. Over the years they had become more frequent, swelling in direct proportion to Mal’s epidermis. Television companies from across Europe and America would lavish us with praise and gifts to try and secure exclusive rights to his story. The wolf-eyed representatives of tabloid newspapers would arrive with suitcases full of money in return for Mal’s words but Dad would turn them down with the shake of a finger and a closing of the trailer door. In response they would scattergun that cash, buying rumours and lazy old lies from those that professed to know us. On a regular basis, the day after their rejection would come front-page splashes of salacious old nonsense, all of it a variation on something printed in the same newspaper a few weeks before.

Someone once told us that when a story about Mal was splurged across the front of a magazine it sold a third more copies. I obviously had nothing at all in common with the vast majority of the general public. Second cousins we’d never met would appear on daytime chat shows or trashy magazines, talking of how Mal would seem whenever they came to visit. Liars. Weeks later they would be spotted parking a brand-new car in the centre of town, their infant children in dirty shirts, sucking on hyperactive fluorescent lollipops.

Still, in the house we felt safe. Closed off.

Not today though, Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall. Today was special, because Mal had agreed after all these years to allow a news crew into the house.

Mum pulls the fresh sheets of the bed up over Mal’s body, stopping short of the final tug above the face that denotes a passing. The medics are gone, the psychiatrists too. The room is tidy, the bed made. Mum is in her best dress (a pink number she’s had for more than fifteen years, with padding in the shoulders and oversized pretend flowers soiling the front) and Mal is tingling with the prickly heat of nerves. I look out of the window and see how unsuitably calm the weather is. The sun is shining outside. It doesn’t feel like the day of a grand denouement. Those days are windswept and plagued by rain. This isn’t the weather for something incredible.

After an hour of waiting, there is an unfamiliar knock on the door. I get up to answer it. I slowly pull the handle back to be met with the older, ever-more-orange face of Ray Darling. He looks like he’s been painted with the sealant used to protect wooden fence posts from the elements. With him are a cameraman and a sound technician, the same two from all those years before. He waltzes straight past me towards Mum, who stands at the end of the hall outside the bedroom that grows inside the house like a baby in the womb. He clasps her small, blue-veined hands in his monstrously hairy fingers and kisses her on the cheek. The sound of his lips meeting her face feels like a chop to my windpipe. A large blue badge on the lapel of his blazer catches on Mum’s cheap embroidery and brings them together with a not-unfunny awkwardness. His badge says ‘Ray Darling!’. It has an exclamation mark on it.

‘Please, go through,’ she says, gesturing towards the door after detaching herself with a blush. So begins an event.

As Ray Darling and his team set up the equipment around Mal, making the bedroom into a black operating theatre, they make pleasantries. Mum makes tea and Mal makes no effort whatsoever. Edged out of the room, I take the keys to the trailer from Mum’s handbag and slip quietly through the front door, where the atmosphere is high. People have been gathering for hours but not one of them notices me emerge.

There are maybe a hundred people standing and waiting. Today could be the day they’d find out if they were right or wrong. When the bookies who have revelled in Mal’s cause célèbre will make or lose their money. When a hero’s status is confirmed or when a disappointment is unleashed that will rival ten thousand badly-planned New Year’s Eve parties.

I walk the short distance up the shaky metal steps into the trailer and close the door, locking it behind me. From out of the crowd, suddenly I am totally alone.

I switch on the television. Ray Darling’s fluorescent face flickers and then shines.