AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season Read Online Free PDF

pointing out a sports car and saying it was his Christmas present to himself. But his dad was dismissive of him, condescending. When they walked away his father said that the man had been in the year below him here and once got an inadvertent erection in the showers after rugby. He snickered about it, said they never let him forget it. He was called Stander forever after. Thomas laughed about it because his father said “erection,” and it seemed funny, but when he thought about it afterwards, really considered it, the story scared him. It wasn’t the suggestion of being a homo that frightened him, no one really cared about that, it was the vulnerability, being so raw in front of everyone, a private thing made public. Now he tried to avoid games when he couldn’t have a wank just before it, didn’t want to get that sort of name for himself.
    Squeak took another smoke out of his tin and lit it, a cigarette this time, drawing hard, pulling his cheeks in, opening his mouth and letting the smoke curl into a fist outside his mouth before sucking it back in again.
    “That’s how you get cancer, throat cancer,” said Thomas, he’d heard it somewhere.
    “Right?”
    “Letting the smoke linger in your mouth. Cig smokers get lung cancer but cigar smokers get face and throat cancer. Because they do that. My dad told me.”
    Squeak looked angry again. “Does he know yet?”
    Thomas shook his head. “He wouldn’t call until study anyway. He knows the rules.”
    “Didn’t have mobiles when he was here, I suppose.”
    “They used to ring the two big black telephones in the back corridor and a passer-by would answer it and then run off to find you, like a mug,” he smiled, knowing he sounded like his father. “Other end of the school sometimes but they’d do it.”
    Squeak didn’t care. “Tastes nice, though, when you blow it out and suck it back.”
    Thomas smiled, tentatively, sad really but a smile nonetheless. Squeak talked through a mouthful of smoke, “You should smoke. You’d look older if you smoked.”
    “Hmm.” It wasn’t a dig. Thomas didn’t care that he looked so young. Squeak was more ashamed of how thin he was and how his ribs stuck out at the bottom. They knew everything about each other. Thomas suddenly realized that it explained why yesterday had thrown them so much. For the first time since they were eight they had surprised each other. Surprised by what had happened.
    “Shock and awe,” he pondered aloud.
    Squeak had to look at him to see if he was taking the piss or starting something. When he saw it was neither he smiled. “Shock and awe?”
    Thomas nodded sadly at the lake. “Was though, wasn’t it? Yesterday.”
    Squeak drew on his cig again. When he exhaled he was grinning. “Fucking A.”

FIVE
    All the houses in Thorntonhall were big and lonesome. Even the smaller cottages were nestled in ostentatiously large gardens or had massive extensions hidden at the back. The hedges along the road were groomed into immaculate angles.
    The arrangement of the village didn’t make sense to Morrow, looking out of the passenger window. On the outskirts the houses were tall Victorian villas, but towards the center they had seventies flair, angled roofs and big picture windows. She wondered if the center of the village had been bombed in the war.
    Her driver took a sharp left down a tree-lined avenue towards the incident address. Away from the main road the houses were even newer, beige brick mansions monkeying the style of the older villas but with double garages, double glazing, double everything.
    The avenue forked into two driveways at its end; a brand-new road of yellow chevrons led downhill to a modern ranch-style mansion and the uphill fork was a strip of raw-edged tarmac, leading up to a crumbling gray flint country house.
    “I don’t get this place,” she said. “Where’s the shops round here? Why would you build a mansion down the hill from that mess?”
    “That’ll be the original