Like This, for Ever

water being run into glasses. He sat down at the table, thinking that the hardest thing he might ever be asked to do was to put food in his mouth right now. Because if there was an explanation why his dad had spent the entire evening researching Dracula, vampires and blood lust, he really couldn’t think what it might be.

42
Tuesday 19 February
    AFTER THE FRONT door has closed and his dad’s footsteps faded away down the street, Barney made his way upstairs to put into practice what he’d just learned how to do on the internet. He was planning to conduct a systematic search of his father’s bedroom, study and bathroom.
    The study would be the hardest, what with all those books and cupboards, so he was starting with the bedroom. Besides, if his dad was hiding anything, it was more likely to be in here. He and his dad respected each other’s privacy. They rarely went into each other’s bedrooms. He paused on the threshold, pushed open the door and looked in.
    He wasn’t going to find anything, there was nothing to find, but sometimes you just had to be able to close a door and bolt it. And leave the bolt to rust. He was going to settle it, then he was going to take down all the stuff in his room about the murdered boys and throw it away. He’d become too involved, his imagination was starting to play tricks on him.
    He was going to use the grid method. Start in the corner, make his way down the wall, then turn back. He’d search a strip of the room twelve inches wide with each pacing of the room. He was the boy who found four-leaf clovers in meadows that had millionsof leaves all the exact same shape and colour. This was going to be easy.
    He started walking, letting his eyes lose their focus and the patterns form. Near the head of the bed, he spotted a toenail clipping. At the foot of the bed he knelt on the carpet and peered beneath. Dust balls. A feather or two. A safety pin and a dry-cleaning label. Something else he didn’t immediately recognize. Barney pulled it out and held it up to the light. It looked like something he couldn’t remember ever seeing in the house – the pump from a hypodermic syringe.
    He sat back on his heels, thinking. There was no reason to have a hypodermic syringe in the house, and plenty of reasons not to. Injections were one of the few things that put the wind up Barney. He couldn’t explain it, he understood perfectly that the pain was small and short-lived, it was just the suspense of waiting, of knowing something sharp and insistent was going to puncture his skin.
    Forgetting about his carefully planned grid, Barney stood and walked into his father’s bathroom. It was a small room, with no natural daylight. Washbasin, shower cubicle, toilet and wall-mounted cabinet. The towels and the shower mat were cobalt blue. The tiles were white with a blue trim. It smelled of antiseptic and spicy old wood and was surprisingly clean and tidy for a room his dad had sole charge of. The cabinet was above the basin, fixed quite high on the wall. It was locked.
    Why would anyone lock their bathroom cabinet?
    Barney sat on the loo seat to think. Locking your bathroom cabinet was one thing, but keeping the key any distance away was another. Who wanted to hunt down a key every time they cleaned their teeth? It would be in here somewhere. He jumped up on to the loo seat so that he could see on top of the cabinet. Nope. He turned to look at the rim of the door-frame. There it was. Jeez, what sort of moron did his dad think he was?
    A second later, the cabinet door was open and Barney stretched up to see inside. Toothpaste, shaving soap, razors, dental floss, ear drops, Clinique for Men aftershave, Night Nurse, headache pills. Syringes. Lots of them in little sterile packs. And six small, plastic, colourless vials of liquid. Barney had never seen thembefore. He turned the first to read the label properly. Octocog Alfa.
    Upstairs at his own computer, Barney typed Octocog Alfa into Google and, a few seconds later, had his answer. Locked in his bathroom cabinet, his dad kept a drug, and the means to administer it, that had a primary purpose of making blood clot.
    Barney felt like there was a wild animal in his head. One that was scratching and clawing and tearing, desperate to be out. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t watch television. Reading was impossible. Every few minutes he checked Facebook and the twenty-four-hour news websites. The rest of the time he spent walking the house.
    His