‘Do you remember the funeral? What a beautiful eulogy your father gave?’

Gordon barely remembered anything about the funeral beyond seeing the toughest adults he knew, the superheroes of Bluebird Beach, in tears.

‘He rose above himself. He spoke with such love and admiration for our son. My heart was already broken. It broke again to hear your father speak like that. He talked about the boy Owen was, how graceful and intuitive and loving and kind, and how sensitive he was too. He said nothing about what Owen was really like, and he said nothing about—the end. We couldn’t do that to you, of course. We did everything to avoid any further attention falling upon you. It was our wish that you didn’t even go to the funeral. But we reconsidered, and I was glad that you could hear your father speak about your brother. Ronald was … I think Ronald was in love with your brother. That love came out so eloquently and movingly in his tribute. Simply beautiful. It was his finest hour. But something finished in your father that day. He became … empty. He lost his belief in the goodness of people. It was only the bad, the nothingness, that he could see. It killed something in him. He never rose to those heights, and he would never talk about Owen again. Even in the dead of night.’

Not for the first time, Gordon wondered at the boy he had been. How the fuck had he got through that? It was Sam, of course, then and now. In the instant of Owen’s death, Sam had doubled in size. He had told Gordon what they would do, what they would say, and Gordon had obeyed. Gordon had accepted both fictions: the fiction of Owen and the fiction Sam had helped him create of himself. Who was that eight-year-old? He seemed a stranger and a myth to Gordon now, as spectral as his dead brother. He had grown up so fast, all in one afternoon, and from that point he had not grown up at all. His dedication to The Lodge, to the past, to preserving every trivial little detail of Old Bluebird, down to his destructive friendship with Dog and his submission to his parents, were all in some way deliberate failures, thrown up as sacrifices to gods who might return what he had sacrificed to them the afternoon Owen died. And yet he wasn’t just protecting himself. Sam was right. His failures were also the fulfilment of his actions: what he had done, he had done for Bluebird. In saving himself, he had relinquished a phantom version of his fate. The scared little boy who had kicked Owen in the face was the man Gordon might have become. Owen had held on to that man and taken him over the edge.