In the great scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst character flaw. His mothers had both noticed it seemed not to have the same effect on his friends as it had on them. And they were grateful that the onset of adolescence hadn’t turned their beautiful boy into a surly, monosyllabic hulk. Most of his friends made them shudder these days. Cute, loving boys who had scampered round their house engaged in all sorts of fantasy games had morphed into grunting, smelly creatures who regarded communication with adults as somehow letting the side down. It was, Kathy said, some kind of miracle that Seth had escaped this particular aspect of the rites of passage into manhood.
‘He does have terrible taste in music,’ Julia had pointed out more than once, as if that counterbalanced his better qualities. She had no idea where he’d acquired his taste for early grunge; she was just grateful that so far it hadn’t infected his wardrobe too much.
‘It could be worse,’ Kathy always said. ‘He could be into musicals.’
Seth’s inability to keep anything to himself meant Julia and Kathy were relaxed about his computer use. Not so relaxed that they didn’t have the appropriate parental controls bolted on, with all the extra security that Kathy used to protect the websites she designed. But they didn’t physically look over his shoulder, though Kathy routinely checked his RigMarole page for weirdos and undesirables.
Not that there was much need for that. A lot of Seth’s table talk revolved around Rig - who he was talking to, what they had to say about whatever people were twittering over that week, what fascinating new app he’d heard about.
The trouble with living life in a play-by-play mode is that other people eventually tune out in a kind of self-defence. These days, Julia and Kathy only half-listened to Seth’s news of the world. Much of what he had to say got lost in the slip-stream of words that spilled round the kitchen table. The first time he mentioned a new Rig friend called JJ, Kathy registered the name and checked him out on Seth’s pages. He seemed a regular geeky teenager analysing the lyrics of Pearl Jam and Mudhoney, full of a mixture of pomp and angst. Nothing to worry about there.
And so JJ became part of the background noise, just another set of references they could let wash over them. Naturally, then, when Seth casually mentioned that he was meeting up with JJ so they could go on a rare sounds quest in Bradfield’s second-hand CD stores, no alarm bells rang.
When you’re used to candour, it never occurs to you that what you’re hearing is something less than the truth.
Tony googled the Worcester estate agent’s website then clicked on the ‘New Properties’ button. The woman he’d dealt with at the agency had sounded like one of his bipolar patients in an unmedicated manic phase. She’d assured him two days ago that the photographs would be taken that very afternoon and the details placed on the website ‘within hours’. It had taken him till now to work up the nerve to look at the information about the house he was selling without ever having seen.
Given the price the agent had suggested, he knew it must be a substantial property, but he wasn’t prepared for the ample Edwardian villa that confronted him. It was a double-fronted house in mellow red brick with the deep bay windows and imposing doorway picked out in contrasting pale yellow. Heavy swags of curtains were visible at the margins of the windows, and the garden looked opulently landscaped. ‘Unique opportunity to purchase fine family home overlooking Gheluvelt Park,’ the strapline across the top shouted. ‘Four beds, three recep, three bath. Fully fitted workshop with power.’ Tony’s eyebrows rose and his mouth puckered. It was a hell of a lot of house for a man living alone. Perhaps he liked to entertain. Or maybe he just liked to demonstrate to the world how well he’d done. Edmund Arthur Blythe obviously hadn’t been short of a bob or two.
It occurred to Tony that this sale would mean the same for him. He already had £50,000 from the legacy sitting in his bank account, but that was a fraction of what the house would bring. He’d never imagined having this sort of cash at his disposal, so he’d never speculated about what he would do with it. He had no expensive tastes. He didn’t collect art, drive fast cars or wear expensive suits. He wasn’t good at taking holidays at the best of times, and he had no inclination towards exotic destinations where the weather was too hot, the drains were suspect and you had to have needles stuck into your arms and buttocks before you could board the plane. The things he enjoyed most happened to be what he was paid for - treating patients and profiling off-kilter minds. But soon he was going to be a rich man, whether he liked it or not.
‘I can always give it away,’ he said aloud. There were plenty of charities who would make something worthwhile out of a windfall like that. And yet, it didn’t appeal to him quite as much as he would have expected it to. Apparently Cyndi Lauper was right when she sang that money changes everything. Impatiently, he turned his attention back to the screen.
There were more pictures available at the click of a mouse. Tony’s finger hovered. He wasn’t sure he was ready for this. He’d deliberately chosen not to explore the domain of the man who had contributed half of his genetic material. He didn’t want to discover a happy and fulfilled life, to unearth a popular and well-balanced man, to find out that he’d been ignored by someone who could have transformed his childhood from a wilderness of misery to something approaching normality. Disinterring that truth could lead to nothing but bitter resentment. Being Vanessa’s son had been a direct route to wretchedness. Both his mother and the grandmother who had carried most of the routine burden of raising him had left him in no doubt that he was beyond worthless, that he contained the seeds of iniquity, that he could hope to be nothing more than a pathetic apology for a man. What he had learned as a psychologist was that his childhood experiences were a blue-print for the sort of creature he spent his profiling life tracking. He was more like them than anyone else, even Carol, could have guessed. They hunted victims; he hunted them. They profiled victims; he profiled them. The need was the same, he suspected.
His needs would have been very different if Blythe had been part of his life. And he didn’t want to think about what that would have meant. So he’d made all the arrangements by phone and email, having Blythe’s solicitor send the keys directly to the estate agent. The solicitor had acted as if this had been perfectly normal behaviour, but Tony knew it wasn’t. He understood only too well that he was building walls between himself and the man who hadn’t been willing to be his father. There was no reason why he should put his own fragility at risk for the sake of someone who had only had the courage to acknowledge his son after death.
But still there was a nagging voice at the back of his head, telling him there would come a time when he would regret maintaining this distance. ‘Maybe so,’ he said aloud. ‘But I can’t do this now.’ For a moment, he wondered if he should put the house sale on hold, so Blythe’s home would remain intact, available for his scrutiny when he was ready for it. He dismissed the idea almost before it was fully formed. He might never be ready, and there was something morally wrong about leaving houses empty when people needed homes.
Impatient with his own lack of clarity, he shut down the house details and pulled a patient file towards him. Here was where he could make a difference, intervening in the lives of people whose behaviour had diverged disastrously from what the majority regarded as normal. His own history with his mother had given him an insider’s knowledge of how different the world could look when the view had been dramatically distorted. He knew only too well what not belonging felt like, how terrifying it could be to negotiate a world whose rules and conventions were so at odds with the ones that had made survival possible. Since Tony had taught himself how to pass for human, he reckoned he could help others to overcome their damage. Too many of his patients were beyond repair, but some could be redeemed, rehabilitated and restored to something approaching normal life.