As though the idea of their son not being in the garden was utterly illogical.

Frank placed the newspaper on the table and looked down the garden. He could see the den from where he was sitting. He and Jake had spent a whole morning making the damn thing out of canvas and wood. He stood up and looked a little closer. There was something lying near the entrance. Something that looked vaguely familiar.

He walked to the patio doors and shouted his son’s name.

“I just did that,” Cindy said, rolling her eyes. “Go on down and see what he’s up to.”

Frank stepped out of the door and headed down the garden path towards the den.

Weeks later he tried desperately to remember the point at which he realized Jake had disappeared, wanted to torture himself with the memory of that devastating lurch in reality, the moment at which the snow globe was shaken and the landscape of his life was changed. But his recollection of events threw up nothing. Just a dull imprint of another ordinary act of fatherhood, like countless others before it; of which this one would be the last.

Frank stepped down the garden path and called Jake’s name again. When he heard nothing, not even a stifled giggle, he began to frown. And as he stepped closer to the den, the faded canvas already sagging inwards, he looked again at the objects lying near the entrance. Behind them the den was empty; his heart burst; he could feel a scream already lodged in his throat.

He looked down and felt the axis of the world—his world—slip. He saw Joey’s black boots, lying in the grass. The last point of contact he would ever knowingly share with his son.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3: THE MOUTHS OF MEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mack was sitting in the common room watching his daddies in white coats. There were five of them, all with exactly the same face. Some of them had tried to disguise themselves, but he knew who they were. He always knew. Occasionally, the disguise would crackle and shift, breaking up with static like a bad signal, and the face would slip from his daddy to someone else. A complete stranger, whose features, when they looked at him, were dull. But his daddy always came back. That’s how it worked. If he waited and closed his eyes and relaxed, his daddy would find him. It used to frighten him, but as he’d got older the idea had become more comforting. It reassured him to think that his daddies were never too far away.

He adjusted himself in the seat, his frail body moving slowly. He looked at his hands and thought he could see deep ridges of bone beneath the skin. He didn’t know what the brown spots were patterning the back of his hand, but he didn’t like them. It looked like someone had been trying to leave him a coded message in brown ink. He squinted his eyes and tried to read it. Had one of his daddies done it while he’d been asleep? The scrawl of the writing looked familiar. He thought he recognized the word dig, but even that taken on its own terms was meaningless.