Mum didn’t like to intrude in his life.
One day—at the beginning of all things, a new spring and a new season—when the rain had stopped and the sun was wet through the leaves
He stepped outside his room to find his neighbour also in the corridor, a skinny boy with the same dark hair and drooping shoulders as himself, and the boy said:
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“We must be neighbours.”
“Yes.”
“It’s all a little surreal, isn’t it? Us, here, this place. Fount of learning and all that, passing the port to the left, snuff after dinner.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you doing law?”
“No, maths.”
“Oh, maths! I can’t understand maths at all, can’t get my head around it, just like, hello no! Very impressive, maths, although I suppose at your level it’s less about numbers and more about… ideas, yes?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“No, early days I imagine, early days and… my name’s Theo. Theo Miller.”
“Hello, Theo Miller,” said the boy who would be Theo.
“Are you… have you met anyone yet?”
“No. I don’t know anyone.”
“Me neither! It’s going to be a disaster. Say, shall we be disastrous together?”
Later, a little drunk, which was the obligatory thing to be between the hours of 7 p.m. and midnight:
“Family’s a catastrophe. My family—Christ! So my dad’s one of the biggest rubbish collectors in northern Europe. Don’t laugh, he is, it’s how he made his fortune, but he was also a survivor of the Scottish troubles, said he saw things during the campaigns that were… so he collects art. All these pictures of broken faces and wounded eyes, all these sculptures, bones and flesh in porcelain, things coming out of other things, I grew up with that can you imagine I grew up with—”
“Theo…”
“You don’t even notice these things until someone points them out and then you’re like yes, fuck me, yes, that is a bit fucking off actually, isn’t it? And Mother, well, he never really loved her, I think. I mean, at the beginning, she was something young and beautiful after his first marriage—and then after the divorce he remarried and she was younger but also a good woman, amazing woman just the most—and I love my mother too but other Mum always did her best. I was mostly raised by Aunty—that was what we called my nanny—Aunty—she was the one who was there for me while Mum and Dad went sailing because I wasn’t allowed to go sailing, I got in the way but anyway—”
“Theo, what is claret?”
“Something French. So there they are, sailing around the world and me I’m in boarding school, and with the schemes of course I ended up here and you know they forget my birthday but Aunty remembers, Aunty has always been—”
“I’m not sure I like claret.”
“You won’t last long in Oxford if you can’t drink port or claret, believe me, more that’s just what you need some more of it there you go and anyway what about your family what about—”
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Of course! I’m a drunken ex-boarding-school lawyer-in-the-making! Your secrets are my sacred practice. Or duty. Whatever.”
“My father was the driver for a mob, my mum is kinda mad, and the only reason I’m here is because the biggest petrol smuggler in Kent threatened to kill the dean’s dog unless they let me in. As a favour, you see, for my dad, who’s in prison, cos of the pharmaceutical job.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well that does put Eton rather into perspective.”
The boy who would one day be Theo sat next to the real Theo, the one born to the name, and ate strawberries on the grass and worried about stains on his gown and watched the sparrows fly between the pale brown spires of the college and thought that there was probably something he was missing, something very important which he’d forgotten and if only…
And the real Theo
the one who died, said:
“Oxford is beautiful—of course it’s beautiful! I mean it’s not real, but in a way it’s so real because it’s the old place, the place of facts—it’s shaped the world but all the people dressed as wizards that’s a bit…”
Somewhere out towards the suburbs, a fence is being put up to keep the riff-raff out. It’s not that they’re selling PhDs these days, not at all, candidates for the fast-track PhD programme have to hand in a 2000-word essay and complete an interview before making payment for their certificate. If you pay an extra £40,000 they’ll even hire a couple of MA students to write a full-length dissertation for you. That’s just how things are. They’ve always been that way, money was always what mattered, but the beauty of this system is that we’re honest about it. It’s just good business.
“Dad’s selling the business to the Company, of course. It’s not like they want it or need it, it’s just that it’s making a profit and they’re making a profit so they may as well invest in something which makes more of a profit. He’s going to stay on as a non-exec and I mean that’s the castle in Scotland sorted, surprisingly cheap castles in Scotland if you buy them run-down then a few mil to refurbish that’s what he says and the Company is very interested in…”
It occurs to Theo, later, that this was around the time people started to talk about the Company. Not a company, which owned a company which owned… but the Company. The one that owned it all. It had always been there. It was never a secret. Only now it owns so many things that it might as well own it all.
In a few months’ time the real Theo Miller will be dead, BANG, and the boy who steals his name will slink back to Shawford and there will be a night with Dani Cumali on the beach
“Off to your fancy university your fancy friends…”
“I heard you and Andy, I mean that…”
After.
Dani and the boy who would be Theo lay together on shingle and it was deeply uncomfortable and rather cold but no one wanted to break the spell—not him, not her, so they lay tangled and it was…
The morning after, as Theo walked towards Dani’s flat in the morning, bag on his back, head full of dreams of redemption and hope and the future, he saw Dani coming the other way, Andy slung across her shoulders, his arm across her back, owning her, pushing her down with his weight, pulling her along with his walk, and his eyes met Dani’s and he saw…
All the truth written in them.
She pretended not to know him, as she and her boyfriend swaggered past, and he pretended not to know them either, and got on the first replacement bus service back to Dover Priory and when the train juddered to a halt in Ashford and sat for twenty minutes creaking and broken on the tracks, the boy who would be Theo threw his phone out of the window and never looked back.
Later he realised he was an idiot and that was a perfectly good handset he’d destroyed, he should have just jettisoned the SIM card, but at the time it felt like a gesture that mattered.
Chapter 23
The day after Dani Cumali died
the man called Theo took a USB stick with the details of her murder home with him
put it on the small plywood desk
took out a mobile phone.
The phone was a hefty brick, grey in colour. He’d found it in a privet hedge, thrown from a window.
It still held its charge.
He turned it off.
Turned it on.
Turned it off again.
He sat on the end of his bed while in the room next door Marvin played bad music far too loud.
He went downstairs and made pasta.