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“Tell me,” he said.
And so he did.
* * *
•••••••••
One Wednesday when Will was nine, his father picked him up after school in his Jaguar. This in itself was unusual, as Will couldn’t remember the last time he had not walked home from school with the childminder. Also, his dad rarely ever let him anywhere near his prized Jag on account of his “sticky handprints.” But now Will was on the cusp of double digits, it seemed Eddie Wright saw him as nearly a man, and worthy of being welcomed into his car—and his confidence.
“Where are we going?” Will asked.
“I just need to see a friend about something,” said his dad, pulling up outside a terrace house Will had never seen before. “Come on!” He flashed his son a wild white grin and practically leaped from the car, keys jangling in his hand. It struck Will as curious, as he followed his father into the house, that he hadn’t knocked.
“Eddie,” said the woman in the living room. “You’re early! Breaking the habit of a lifetime?” Even though Will was just nine, and already wondering why he didn’t seem as fascinated by girls as his male classmates, he knew this woman was beautiful. Her wild black hair and olive skin made her look like she should be dancing flamenco or singing opera in Italian. But when she spoke, it was with a broad Black Country accent.
“Can you blame me?” Dad took her by the hand, leading her out into the hallway and toward the stairs. “Will, why don’t you go in there,” he said, nodding back to the living room, “and watch the telly with Margo.”
Will nodded mutely, unsure of what to do other than simply obey. He knew instinctively what was happening here, but the words for it lay, like the adult world at large, just beyond his reach.
A three-seater sofa and large armchair took up almost the entire living room. At the center of the sofa sat a girl, sixteen or so—he was terrible at guessing people’s ages, especially those of girls whose makeup and perfume and hair straighteners were like warp engines propelling them into adulthood at a speed with which the boys could not follow.
“Margo?” he asked. She didn’t reply. “I’m Will,” he said. Still no response. He glanced over toward the television. “What are you watching?” he asked, moving toward the sofa. Margo instantly flopped down and pulled her legs up so that she was lying lengthways across the entire couch. She didn’t have to speak, it turned out, to get her message across. Queasy now, Will glumly traipsed over to the armchair and took a seat. It’s fine, he thought. It’s like detention. I’ll just keep my head down until it’s time to go home.
On the screen, a group of startlingly thin women were standing in a line, looking for all intents and purposes like they were waiting to be shot.
“It’s America’s Next Top Model,” said Margo, still horizontal. “And I’m about to find out who gets eliminated this week, so no talking.”
“All right,” said Will. She hit him with a pungent glare. Sorry, he mouthed silently.
At nine, he did not yet know the future: that he was gay, that in years to come he would feel more comfortable around women than he did most men. On that day in the mid-2000s, all he knew was that teenage girls fucking terrified him. Maybe even more than the abstract idea he had in his head of what was going on between his father and Margo’s mother upstairs.
It became the closest thing to a father-son activity Will would ever know. Each week, Dad would pick him up at the school gate, and they would make the trip to Carla’s house—that was her name, he soon learned, Carla—under the pretext of Will having some after-school club or other. That Will’s mother never asked for details of any kind, or even seemed to notice that this club never met on the same day from week to week, made the lie easier to uphold, and took up a lot of the afternoons later in life when Will would unpack all of this with his therapist.
The visits blurred together. Each week, he would perch quietly in the corner of the living room and watch whatever reality show Margo had recorded the night before, America’s Next Top Model or The Hills or The Simple Life or Faking It; then his dad would come downstairs, red-faced and smirking even wider than when he went up, and drive him home.
“Your mum wouldn’t understand,” he said the first few times, as they sat in traffic. “Best not to tell her, ey?”
Will said nothing. Had no idea how to articulate the cauldron of anger and shame bubbling away in his guts.
“A man of few words,” his dad said on one such journey. “I like that. I respect that. My guy. My little man.” He reached over to ruffle Will’s hair, something he had never done before, and which felt so awkward to both parties that he never attempted it again.
If this was what it meant to be a man, Will thought, he wanted no part of it.
And then it happened. The day that changed everything.
A couple of months after his father first brought him to the house, Will walked into the living room to find Margo’s dog, an ancient, hideous little thing named Bandit, on the armchair. It growled at him when he approached, and Margo refused to let Will move him, so she reluctantly shifted over and allowed him to take a seat next to her on the sofa. She did, however, still insist on keeping a full cushion between them, and would occasionally glance over at him as if he were the source of a particularly nasty odor. He didn’t blame her, really. He was a symptom of the thing they both continued to pretend was not happening in the room directly above them, the sound of which was blissfully drowned out by Margo’s mother’s record collection. A decade from now, all it would take was a few bars from “Desirée,” by Neil Diamond, to make Will feel vaguely nauseated.
They were back on Top Model this time. By this point, Margo had started to offer up curt context clues so Will could understand an episode even if he had missed the last one. She did this without ever looking at him and in such a way that made it clear follow-up questions were not encouraged. “She did well in the challenge so the other girls don’t like her,” she might say, or “They made her cut off all her hair this week, so she’s obviously going home, they always do that.” One time she whispered, Will suspected more to herself than to him, “Nigel is so fit.”
This week, Tyra was once again lording it over the girls. But something was different. Even through the TV, it was like Will and Margo could both feel a change in the air pressure.
“Be quiet,” Tyra snapped. “Be quiet, Tiffany!”
Margo sat bolt upright, eyes fixed on the screen.
“Is she usually like this?” Will asked quietly.
“Shut up!” Margo hissed. Then, a second later: “No. This is new.”
