Chapter Two

The moment he was released from Chemistry, Douglas hurried to slip his books into his bag. While his classmates bustled around him, he made quick conversation – dropping smooth answers and excuses, and sounding reasonably excited for rugby practice at the end of school. That at least he didn't have to fake. Running back and forth would at least get some air in his lungs and clear his head for a few hours.

Now, however, he didn't have time to waste. If he timed it right, he could eat his lunch in the library when the librarian's back was turned. It wasn't like it would be the first time.

As soon as his coat was on, Douglas was through the classroom door and striding down the hall.

He was met in the next corridor by Arthur, who fell into step beside him. The other boy's hand was stained with multi-coloured ink as it always was after a Geography lesson spent highlighting maps and drawing diagrams. He wasn't great at the statistical side of the subject, or the natural side of it, or the maps to an extent, but he did take great joy in the diagrams – his ability to store one out of every twenty facts that he was given came in useful.

"Hey Douglas!" Arthur's cheer went a little way towards lightening Douglas' mood – like a miniature ray of sunshine. He bounded alongside him with his hands buried in his pockets, rucksack slung over one shoulder, until he realised that they had turned left a few too many times. "Um, Douglas... the lunch hall's the other way. Unless you're going outside... which is also the other way."

Douglas sighed and slowed to a stop. Stealing glances over his shoulders, even though there was no reason to be ashamed, he motioned for Arthur to follow him into the shelter between the IT room and the computer cabinets.

"What's going on? Why are we sneaking around?"

"We're not sneaking around," Douglas replied softly. He rolled his eyes, but couldn't quite dismiss the lump in his throat.

There was no shame in studying – everyone wanted to do well this year – but Douglas had spent the last few years building up his reputation. He was a sportsman, a musician, an actor, someone the lads could rely on to get them out of trouble and to break the tension at just the right moment. It had never been a lie before... then again, Douglas had never needed to put in so much effort before.

"Oh... it kind of feels like we're sneaking around," Arthur remarked.

"Believe what you like, Arthur. All I'm doing is going to the library," Douglas assured him. Again he stole a glance out across the hall, and inwardly cursed himself for his nerves. Plastering on a smirk, he patted Arthur's arm. "I need to consolidate some of my notes, that's all. Go to lunch if you want – I'll catch up later."

"I could come with you," Arthur suggested. "I've got a list of things I didn't understand from Geography that I could look up." He paused a moment as his brow furrowed with confusion. "That is what consolidate means, right? It's just I've been working on my vocabulary – for when I meet Mum's lawyers and the people that come round for the plane."

In spite of himself, Douglas felt his mood lift as he nodded and continued down the hall towards the library, with Arthur at his side. Company was distracting, but it was better than sitting alone while his head span.

"So what things have you written down to look up later?"

"Hmm?"

Douglas shook off his surprise as he shot Arthur a sideways glance.

"I just mean was Chemistry really difficult today?"

"No, it was fine," Douglas replied with a shrug.

For a change, it had been fine. The equations would take him a while to memorise, but they had been easy enough to copy down and the teacher had a slow and steady approach to teaching. The shapes of the words were unique enough and the cause and effect nature of the content made it easier to store the information. Douglas understood, even if he wasn't all that interested, which made the input and output far simpler.

He didn't feel like explaining any of that though – not to Arthur of all people, even if he was the most trustworthy person he knew.

"I had double Physics this morning," Douglas said in lieu of a real explanation. "I just need to check a few details."

In truth, he needed to completely rewrite his notes. The ones he had taken in class were garbled – distorted by the teacher's swift way of talking and his own ability to turn the words from clear concepts in his head into structured sentences on the page. It was nowhere near as shoddily done as the work he had produced in primary school, but there were some glaring gaps that were sure to come up in the practice papers.

Arthur must have missed the dejected weight in his tone.

"Already?" he exclaimed. "I've never known you to do your homework the same day you got it. Even I don't do that, and Mum's been getting really strict about it since last year."

Mercifully, they had reached the library and hush would be demanded. As Douglas pushed the double doors open, he turned to Arthur with a dashing grin.

"Well, let nobody say I'm not full of surprises."

Martin gritted his teeth and pulled the stack of books across the desk so that he couldn't see another inch of the library. Somewhere nearby, someone was frantically searching the shelves, yanking books of out place and slamming them back down without a care for who they were disturbing. Martin had caught a glimpse of a boy from his Physics class, but didn't think that it was him – that boy sat at the back of class and definitely didn't rifle through the library at lunch.

Putting the racket from his mind, Martin chewed on the end of his pen and scribbled down another answer in his practice paper. They had until next Wednesday to complete it, but there was no harm in getting it done the day it was set. And there was no harm in copying down the key points from the books – or finding concepts in the books that the teacher hadn't covered that morning. Anything relevant to the functional aspects of aviation wouldn't go amiss either.

Besides... he might have accidently picked a fight with one of Simon's youngest friends. His brother may have graduated, but certain of his friends were in Martin's year and he had no intention of letting them throw his briefcase onto the roof... again... best to steer clear of them until they forgot that he had insulted... well, he had insulted a lot of things. If Simon hadn't made a point of throwing him into the air every now and again, they wouldn't have had anything to mock and he wouldn't have had to retaliate.

Another clatter and a curse rang through the library. The soft shoed shuffle of the librarian followed in its wake and her furious hiss cowed the culprit into submission.

Martin turned his attention back to the papers in front of him. He smirked as he concluded another question with a flick of his wrist.

A faint cough – a clearing of a throat really – shook Martin from his reverie. He looked up and was met with the round face of a boy from his English class. In fact, they had shared at least one class every year since the Crieffs had moved to Fitton from Wokingham, but they didn't speak often.

To be fair, Martin didn't speak to many people often, with the exception of Theresa.

"Oh, hello Arthur."

"Hi Martin."

"Was there, um... w-was there something you needed?" Martin asked, pushing his pile of books aside as an afterthought so that the other boy didn't have to strain and lean just to see his face.

"A book," Arthur replied brightly. He pointed to the middle of Martin's pile, leaning in close so that he could squint at the spine. "Douglas is going mad over there trying to find it. Red cover, white letters – written by Q.T Smyth – he didn't say whether it was Smith with an I or Smyth with a Y, but this looks about right."

Martin glanced towards the source of the racket, which had migrated towards the other side of the library. He couldn't see the culprit, but at least they were making an effort not to curse aloud anymore. Then he looked back to Arthur, who was waiting patiently.

With a guilty smile, Martin hurried to pull the book in question from his pile – he didn't need it quite yet. He had hoped to spend Thursday lunch reading up on C-130s, but he supposed he could come back tomorrow to finish the notes he missed. The pile threatened to topple, but Arthur caught it before the books could hit the floor.

Together they extracted the right one and in seconds Arthur was waving the book above his head, calling out to his friend whilst the librarian chased him down. Martin heard a groan of relief and watched both boys sprint from the room, arms full of books that they couldn't possibly have signed out properly.

Scoffing under his breath, Martin went back to his work.

"You know, it's not good for you to revise in bed."

Douglas looked up at the sound of his father's voice, which cut clear over the trill of his stereo. Looked up, in fact, from his bed, stop which he had spread his Chemistry notes. His pen hovered over the page, where he was copying out the same page of facts again so that the feel of the words would hopefully sink into his muscle memory like the notes that he on the family piano.

Clarke Richardson was a clear-cut kind of man – neat and tidy, more suited to professordom than a hospital, and yet brimming with medical knowledge. It was a rare day that he wasn't found in a knitted vest with his thick glasses – even when he was gardening, fingers caked in soil. There was a natural sway in his step – a casualness that wasn't cool but lazy and welcoming.

Some days Douglas wasn't sure whether he would rather be like him, or his mother – also a doctor but far more strict in personality and form. Even her clothes were sharp and unyielding, unless of course she was hidden beneath a white coat stained with different shades of medicine. Only then was she frazzled – and loving it – in the midst of hospital rush hour, leaving her exhausted at the end of the day.

"I didn't want to get in the way," Douglas replied.

What he didn't say was that underneath his notes lay his script for Macbeth, which was taking up far more of his attention.

"You're not in the way," Clarke replied. Pushing back his shirtsleeves, the man crossed the threshold and wandered around Douglas' room. He moved as if to perch on the edge of the bed, only to think again when the papers were unsettled by the weight of his hand. Instead, he tapped the spines of the books on the bookcase. "In fact, the kitchen table's free until supper. Your mother's got her feet up, so I'll be knocking up a stir-fry for seven o'clock sharp."

"I'm fine here."

Clarke paused and peered down at him.

"You're very quiet," he remarked. When Douglas did nothing but nod and look down at his notes, hand still poised without moving over the lot, Clarke clapped his hands together and plastered on a smile. "Come on, Dougie – I think it's time to take a break. Help me out in the kitchen? Or sit with your mother?"

Douglas didn't quite meet his father's eye. He wanted so much to go with him, but he hadn't quite grasped one little thing – he understood the theory, he just couldn't make the words stick. Answering the question was easy in his head, but he had already condensed three versions of the same answer into a single sentence –and he was still struggling. He needed more time to learn the shape of the answer.

He needed to revise so badly.

"You're not going to have me chopping vegetables are you?" Douglas asked with a smirk, even as his head cursed him for giving in so easily.

Clarke grinned and motioned for him to follow him from the room.

"Why not?" he retorted. "You've got steady hands – surgeon's hands."

Douglas swallowed a smile as a part of him preened at the encouragement. Taking care not to disrupt his papers, he clambered from the bed and followed his father from his room. It wasn't as if he had anything urgent in for the next day. He could take a break.

The Crieff household was never quite. Granted, it was quieter than it had been when Martin and Caitlin had been young and Simon had been only slightly less young. Still, as Martin curled up at one end of the dinner table with a manual from the sixties in his lap, he couldn't help but wish for a tiny bit of silence.

At the other end of the table, Caitlin was listening to music with the volume turned as high as it would go, so that when she let the headphones hang around her neck everyone in the room could hear the thrumming baseline. Simon was home from a long day's internship with the council, relating the day's events at the top of his voice to anyone that would listen. Every now and then his fingers stroked the faint bristle on his upper lip. Meanwhile, Wendy Crieff clattered between the stove and the sink, talking just as loudly about a weekend cake sale at the Women's Institute meeting as the gravy bubbled merrily unattended.

Raymond Crieff patted his son's shoulder as he passed behind Martin on his way to the empty chair at what had been appointed the head of the table, leaving an oil stain on his shoulder. As Martin picked at the stain, Raymond ruffled his hair, ignoring the indignant squawk that he got in return.

"You alright, son?"

"What?" Martin blinked as his attention was drawn away from his shirt. "Hm? Oh, yes – I'm fine. Just reading up while I can."

He lifted his book so that his dad could see the cover.

Raymond grunted in response and rolled his eyes, but smiled nonetheless.

"You've got a year yet before you can go anywhere," he said as he took a seat. "Don't go wishing the time away just yet. Those planes'll still be there no matter how long it takes you... there's no rush."

"That's exactly what I'm saying," Wendy interrupted before Martin could respond. She bustled over, pressing a kiss to her husband's cheek before casting Martin's manual a withering glare, and her son a far fonder smile. "We barely ever see you anymore, Martin."

"I'm here now."

"I know, dear, but you're not really here are you. You've got your nose in that book," she replied. She placed her fingers over her lips as if momentarily wobbled, only to sigh and return to the stove, still talking. "I'm just saying, we should spend more time as a family – together. We should go out of a weekend – go to events."

At that, Martin sat up a little straighter. Caitlin saw the motion and groaned.

"Not another air-show!"

"What's that about an air-show?" Simon interjected, finally breaking from his speech.

"Nobody said anything about an air-show," Martin muttered. He cast Caitlin a sharp glance. "And I wasn't going to, actually."

"Yes you were!"

"I wasn't."

"The both of you shush and listen to your mother," Raymond cut them off with a wave of his hand before they could gather up any steam. "What were you saying about the weekend, Wendy?"

"I was saying it would be nice to get the children all together for once. It's not about me, it's about them," Wendy explained, punctuating her sentences with a swift swing of her wooden spoon. "And I know, Simon's got his fancy job and Martin's got his exams at the end of the year – they're being pushed so hard."

"What about me?" Caitlin interjected. "I've got exams soon too."

It was at that point that Martin rolled his eyes and tuned out the rest of the conversation. He re-read the page he was on. He didn't break from his trance until he felt his dad's hand on his shoulder, nudging gently.

"You are doing alright at school, aren't you?" Raymond asked in an undertone.

"Of course I am," Martin replied, brow furrowing.

"I don't just mean in class," Raymond said. "I mean socially – you're not having any more trouble, are you? From the other boys?"

"No, Dad, I'm not," Martin sighed. He tried to turn his gaze back to the book, but Raymond wouldn't let him.

"And you're not causing trouble?" Raymond raised a pointed eyebrow as Martin's eyes darted down to his hand.

Martin's mind wandered to Simon's old friends, and to Theresa's lack of interest in any of her classes, then to his own growing frustration with his teachers. None of it was any different from the last six years of secondary school. True, he was spending more time in the library – but that was time that he would get back when he was flying from country to country. He liked the isolation. It would be worth it in the end.

With a forced smile, Martin met his dad's gaze and gripped the edges of his book.

"Everything's fine."