Boy Wonders: Chapter 10

Tony invited Jamie to break, a gesture Jamie could have done without. And even when he hit the triangle of reds it released only a fragment of his tension.

“Yeah, me and Sean was good mates,” Tony said even as the cue ball came to rest. He missed a pot into the corner as Jamie mumbled, “Oh, yeah?” His sense was that beneath Tony’s casual solicitousness something busier was happening. He tired sinking a red and left it in the jaws.

“How’s your dad, doing?” Tony asked, knocking it in.

“He’s alright,” Jamie lied.

“Still got that garage up in Walthamstow?”

“Yeah.”

“Still doing the bikes?” The black rolled smoothly and dropped.

“Yeah,” Jamie confirmed, uneasily. He risked a glance at the exit. The briefest contemplation of making a run for it served only to rule the option out: if he caved in to fear it would haunt him; Sean would haunt him.

They played on, silent for several shots. Tony built little breaks. Jamie, needing the toilet, wrestled with the rest.

Then Tony said: “They never caught anyone, then?”

He was lining up a colour. Jamie said, “I’m sorry, I…don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, it was an accident, right, but one car what was, like, involved, didn’t stop, right?”

He looked up at Jamie then. The blue would wait.

“I don’t know too much about it,” Jamie replied.

It was the truth. Sean had died, they’d moved house, Nan had come with them. Then Lisa had moved out to be with Garry. That had left him; left him with bloody everything.

“Yeah, leaving the scene of an accident, that’s an offence,” Tony said, watching the missed blue cannon away.

“Oh,” Jamie replied, feeling stupid. Lost too.

“Never caught them, then?”

“Well, no. I don’t know.”

Tony asked no further questions and won the frame. Then he said he had to go, and left with a handshake that pre-empted any more revealing gesture. Jamie watched the door swing shut behind him then rushed to it himself, hoping to see where Tony had gone. He saw the back of him swaying through the crowd outside the pub on the corner he’d slipped past earlier, then inside.

And then Jamie saw his father. He was across the street, heading towards him, walking fast but wearily, head down. Jamie ducked away and fled for shadows. He watched, knotted inside, as Melvyn approached the snooker hall but stopped short of going in. Who was he looking for, fixed within Mickey’s neon glow? What hope did he harbour of finding him?

He stood a while, a sagging figure. Then he started onwards again, continuing in the same direction as before. Jamie pulled up his hood and followed him.