“Well, I hope I haven’t embarrassed anybody,” my mother said with imperfectly concealed pique. “Just ignore me, Roy. I don’t want to spoil whatever you have.” By now she had rediscovered gentleness, and slid the phone towards him as waiters with dishes of fiery delights converged on our table. “Here’s to meeting your girlfriend in the flesh,” she said.

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

A Source of Visions

Hunter was in the throes of a vision as he crossed the desert when I heard a car draw up outside my aunt’s house, and I slipped a tasselled marker into the book. My parents would be staying overnight before they took me home. I let them in, and my mother peered along the hall. “Isn’t Thelma here?”

“She’s upstairs painting.”

“I thought she’d be looking after you.”

“I’m sure he’s old enough to do that for himself, dear,” my father said.

“I’ve been reading, mum.”

As my father pushed down the handle of their dwarfish two-wheeled suitcase, my mother glanced into the front room and caught sight of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I’d left on my chair. “Is that what you’re reading?”

While her tone made me wary, I couldn’t lie too much. “Looking at it,” I said.

“Isn’t it about—” She turned it over as if she thought insects might be lurking underneath. Having scowled at the blurb, she brandished the book at me and my father. “This is all about drugs, Jonathan.”

“He isn’t taking them, is he? Just learning about them.”

“We don’t want him doing that either. There’s absolutely no need.”

“Mum, Aunt Thelma didn’t know I was.”

“She ought to have known. We put her in charge. Has she told you there’s anything you can’t read?” When I had to deny it my mother said “Then she should be watching what you do.”

“She has her job as well, dear, just like us.”

“Not like ours at all.” Although this didn’t end the argument, the sound of a door upstairs did. As light footsteps crossed the landing my mother called “Is that you, Thelma?”

“Who else is it going to be?” my father murmured.

“I’m hoping Neville may be back,” my mother said by no means as low.

The answer – perhaps to her original question – came from the top of the stairs. “No.”

It was a man’s voice, not one I thought I recognised, unless I’d heard it once before. My mother stared at me before saying fiercely but just audibly “Why didn’t you tell us someone else was here?”

“Mum, I didn’t know.”