“Oh, shit. He’s only gone and necked the bloody Dettol!” Duane Wright hammered on the cell door. “Get someone in here. Now!”
When Gabe woke up in the prison infirmary, the first thing he thought was: Christ alive, my stomach is on fire. The second thing he thought was: I’m still alive. I failed. Depression washed over him.
“You’re a very lucky man,” the doctor told him. “A few more minutes before we pumped your stomach and you wouldn’t have made it.”
Oh yeah, that’s me. Lucky.
The psychologists asked him why he’d done it and Gabe told them the truth. There didn’t seem any point in lying.
“You bloody prat.” The chief psychiatrist wrote Gabe a prescription for methadone. “You think you’re the first addict to walk through these doors? We can help you. There are programs…”
But Gabe didn’t want programs, and he didn’t want methadone. He wanted enough H to put him out of his misery.
When he was well enough, he was transferred to another wing of the prison. This time he had only one cell mate, an ex-junkie lifer named Billy McGuire. Billy was Irish, a former jockey whose life had careened spectacularly off the rails after he got mixed up with drugs. What began as a few “innocent” thrown races and betting scams ended up as internecine gang warfare on the streets of Belfast. An innocent father was killed and Billy was sent down for a minimum twenty-year sentence.
“The IRA aren’t what they used to be,” Billy told Gabe.
“I’m confused. What did they use to be? Weren’t they always a bunch of murdering terrorists?”
“Ah, well, sure they were. But right or wrong, they had a cause. Now it’s all about the money. Money and drugs.” Billy shook his head in disgust. “That’s what heroin does to you, lad. Makes you forget who you are.”
Gabe couldn’t argue with that. The only trouble was that he wanted to forget who he was: a loser with no qualifications, no skills, and now, with a serious criminal record, no future.
I thought my dad was pathetic, wasting his life in the docks.
He was twice the man I am.
SIXTEEN
LEXI LAY SPRAWLED OUT ON THE BLUE-AND-WHITE-STRIPED Ralph Lauren couch at Cedar Hill House, poring over the guest list for her party.
At sixteen, Lexi Templeton had fully emerged from her awkward early teen years. Gone were the hated braces on her teeth and the mornings spent staring longingly in the mirror trying to make her breasts grow through sheer force of will. Draped over the couch like Cleopatra in a pair of cutoff denim hot pants, her lithe, tanned legs stretching out for miles, Lexi was at last a full-fledged sex kitten. Her brown stomach was as smooth and flat as a Kansas prairie, despite the three bowls of Cocoa Krispies she’d wolfed down for breakfast that morning. A simple white bikini top covered breasts as full, round and perfect as small honeydew melons.
To be strictly accurate, the guest list she was studying was not for her party. Much to Lexi’s chagrin, next week’s celebration at Cedar Hill House was officially a joint sixteenth for her and Max.
Why should I have to share my birthday with him? Can’t I have any life of my own?
Whatever Lexi did these days, her cousin seemed to show up like a bad penny.
Lexi’s father felt sorry for him: “I think he’s lonely, honey. Stuck in that apartment with his mother all vacation long. He probably doesn’t have many friends.”
I’m not surprised. He’s so arrogant and stuck-up.
Peter had always put Max’s moody silences down to shyness. Over the course of their childhoods, Lexi had formed a different view. Max wasn’t shy. He was aloof. She called it his superiority complex, and it irritated the hell out of her.
On the plus side, at least Max’s lack of social skills meant that a solid 80 percent of the birthday guests would be Lexi’s friends from Exeter, and not a bunch of stuffed shirts from Choate, Max’s prestigious Connecticut boarding school.
Lexi examined her list again:
Donna Mastroni, Lisa Babbington, Jamie Summerfield…oh, crap. Lisa can’t sit next to Jamie. He screwed her over spring break when he was still dating Anna Massey. Where the hell can I put Lisa?
The answer was obvious: Lisa Babbington should sit at Max’s table. God knew there were enough spaces. Lexi hesitated. Somehow the idea of seating one of her most attractive girlfriends next to her cousin did not appeal.
The truth was, though she would have died before admitting it, Lexi Templeton had mixed feelings about Max Webster. Three-quarters of the time, she hated him. He followed her around like a bad smell. He was rude, weird and more arrogant than any boy she’d ever met. During their joint internship at Kruger-Brent last Christmas (I can’t even get a job on my own) Max had made it perfectly plain that he saw himself as Lexi’s superior, intellectually and in every other way. Even at fifteen, the staff had begun to defer to him the way they used to defer to Robbie. Because of Lexi’s deafness, people just assumed that Max would inherit the company one day. This assumption, fueled by Max’s own sense of entitlement, drove Lexi crazy. At Kruger-Brent, Max made a point of playing up Lexi’s disability, treating her with kid gloves as if she were some fragile flower. He never treats me like that when we’re alone.
Lexi might be deaf but she wasn’t blind. She saw what Max was up to and it incensed her. She also saw, much as it pained her to admit it, that her cousin had grown into an incredibly good-looking young man. Black-haired and even blacker-eyed, Max had an irresistible air of danger and wildness about him, like Heathcliff or a young Lord Byron. Most boys Lexi’s age were gauche and immature. Even the jocks at Exeter seemed to have a built-in geekiness that surfaced in the presence of attractive girls like Lexi. But not Max Webster.