We're sitting against the wall in the main bedroom, using one of the spare dust sheets as a blanket. I'm telling her all about Darren. Not that I meant to tell her everything, but after a point the words just started spilling out. I end up telling her the whole thing right from the beginning: how Darren used to be around me. How he wanted to be a mechanic, how he was always messing around with that stupid bike of his--the one that now sits rusting in the back garden. How he and his friends were into everything in this town. How he was cool and popular and brilliant . . . and how much of a hole it left when one day, one ordinary Monday he never came back home from his hockey match.
And the police investigation that turned up nothing. The vigils and the Missing Person posters. The TV campaign. The website his friends set up. All the efforts that everyone made that in the end came to nothing, as if he simply disappeared off the face of the earth. How, nowadays, my dad is always drunk and my mum is always asleep. How it feels as if when Darren went whatever held my family together went with him.
And then, when those words run out, when I've told everything there is to tell I find myself just talking about Darren. Just these little things I remembered. The way he had of laughing when something amused him. How he always used to smoke out the window of his bedroom, thinking nobody noticed but him. The stupid tattoos he had; a rose on one shoulder and a skull on the other. How he used to call me Lilli.
I stop talking, take a deep breath. Talking about this is choking me up, and all at once I can't go on. I look Lynch directly in the eyes for the first time since I started my story. Whatever I was expecting her expression to be, this isn't it. She looks scared and sad and resigned all at once. For a moment I think she is crying, but then she turns away and wipes furiously at her eyes.
"Sorry," I say. "I didn't meant to dump all this on you. You've got your own . . ."
She shakes her head. "It's not that."
"Are you okay?" She doesn't look okay at all. She looks terrified. Perhaps looking more scared now than she has since we first met.
She licks her lips. "Listen," she says, with difficulty, as though the words are costing her deeply. "There's something I think I have to tell you."
