‘Can you come in here, Matthew?’

Matthew was passing the sitting room, and had been hoping to get upstairs without seeing his father or his mother. He stopped. It was his father’s serious voice. Fuck, he thought to himself. He had looked in the rear view mirror once he had got back to Lukas’ place from the beach. His eye was black, and his lip was swollen. He had told Lukas that he would have to take his car, asked him if that was okay, so that he didn’t have to catch a taxi like that.

‘Whose car is that?’ his father said as he was walking into the room.

‘Matthew!’ his mother exclaimed.

‘It’s Lukas’’ Matthew said.

‘What’s happened to you?’

Matthew said nothing.

‘Have you been in a fight?’

‘Someone punched me.’

‘Ellen. Can you sit down?’

She sat down again, flustered, and Matthew knew that he had to sit down also. He hesitated, but there was no way out of it. He had been through these conferences before. He wondered what the fuck it was this time, what the fuck he had done. He knew, whatever it was, that his father would make it as painful as possible.

‘I don’t think I’ve seen one of those before.’

‘It’s a Maserati.’

‘I see.’

There was a pause.

‘I haven’t crashed it.’

‘Obviously not.’

Matthew cleared his throat.

‘You’ve been in a fight.’

‘Someone punched me. In the surf. I brushed up against him, and he punched me.’

His father kept his eyes locked on Matthew’s.

‘You know your mother had the carpets cleaned today?’

Was that what this was about?

Matthew nodded.

‘I believe she asked you to help her move the furniture.’

‘I was going out. I didn’t have time.’

‘Yes. Well. I had to come back from work, during my lunch hour, and help her move a few things.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I think you will be.’

‘Don’t, Frank.’

‘I became very interested in your room, you see. I moved a few things around, and I found this.’

His father reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled the bottle of Desultrodol out of it. He leaned forward, put it onto the coffee table, and leaned back again.

‘Can you do me the favour of telling me what’s in that bottle?’ he said.

Matthew frowned, thinking that his father would surely know. ‘They’re antidepressants,’ he said.

‘I know they’re not Desultrodol, if that’s what you expect me to believe.’

Matthew stopped. He opened his mouth, and closed it again.

‘Desultrodol are white, Matthew, and they’re scored. They have a Bayer symbol on them.’

Matthew nodded, and swallowed. His eyes started to water.

‘You know these aren’t pharmaceuticals?’

Matthew shook his head and tried to start, ‘I didn’t…’

‘They’re not uniform, Matthew. They’ve been made in a home pill-press. You surely must know that.’

‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I thought they were…’

His father shook his head slowly from side to side.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re something else.’

Matthew nodded, though he started to wonder what…

‘I haven’t rung Damek Mueller yet, but I suppose I’ll have to.’

‘Can you not?’

‘Why?’

Matthew stopped. He realised what his father was trying to do, trying to get him to admit that he’d gotten them from Christian. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Do you think Damek might have prescribed Desultrodol for Christian?’ his father asked his mother.

‘Don’t, Frank,’ she said again, becoming more flustered.

‘I really don’t think he would. I don’t think a man with his reputation would be prescribing for his own son, do you, Matthew?’

Matthew shook his head.

‘And anyway, these aren’t Desultrodol.’

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘So? Your friend Christian? Prescribing for himself, and giving you…?’

Matthew said nothing.

‘I don’t suppose it would be too difficult, being a doctor’s son, to prescribe something for yourself. It gave me an idea, and when I went back to the office, I checked up on things.’

He stopped.

Matthew tried to breathe.

‘Although I don’t recall it, I’m apparently prescribing morphine for you along with ciprofloxacin, which I hope you understand is a powerful antibiotic used in major surgery.’

Matthew bit his lips hard, and nodded slowly, feeling tears come into his eyes.

‘I don’t suppose you can tell me what that’s for?’

Matthew said nothing.

‘No?’

Matthew turned his head away.

‘I see.’

His father stopped. He took a deep breath, and started again.

‘Well I suppose all of this explains why you’ve become a different person lately, why you’ve become someone unreasonable, someone only half alive, someone who doesn’t care about others, a person without a shred of feeling, a person who barely speaks a kind word, someone who doesn’t have the time to bother. In short, a person who is unrecognisable to me, to your mother, to our friends, and to your sister, who is so scared of you that she’s been staying with her Aunt for the past three days, though you don’t seem to have missed her.’

Matthew turned his head down and started sobbing.

‘What it doesn’t explain to me–’

‘Don’t, Frank.’

‘No, Ellen. What it doesn’t explain to me, Matthew. Do you want to look at me while I’m talking to you?’

Matthew turned his head up and saw his father through a blur of tears.

‘What it doesn’t explain to me is how…’ his father said, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets and wrestling with something, ‘…I have somehow managed…to bring…’ He tore his hands from his pockets, ‘…a pedophile into the world.’ He threw two pieces of cloth onto the coffee table.

It was Lukas’ jocks. The baseball ones. The Superman ones. In the sitting room. On the coffee table. With his mother and father.

Matthew stared at them.

‘Trinkets of love, I suppose.’

Matthew gritted his teeth.

‘Perhaps you can tell me who the boy is, and I’ll phone the police for you.’

Matthew clenched his fists.

‘Is it Janine’s son?’

Matthew roared.

He stood and roared and kicked all at once. Kicking the coffee table, catching his shin under it, and launching it onto his father’s lap. He stumbled forward and tore the coffee table away from his father, reaching onto the couch for the Desultrodol bottle. Lukas’ jocks. He had a brief impression of his father drawing back from him into the corner of the couch, and then he had the bottle and the jocks in his hand and was moving out of the room.

He turned before he reached the door.

‘Fuck you!’ He wavered for a moment. ‘Fuck you! Don’t fucking tell me I’m a fucking pedophile. You don’t know me. You don’t have any fucking right to tell me what I can and what I can’t do. I’m an adult.’

His father was standing, trying to stand, but he looked frightened. He was so much smaller than Matthew.

‘Not while you’re in this house,’ he said.

Matthew turned to go, and then turned back again.

‘I’m going, then. You fucking understand that, you fucked up sarcastic old prick. I’m going. Don’t expect to see me again. You fucked up any relationship we had years ago. And you just totally fucked if forever. You really think I’m a pedophile?’ he said, coming into the room again with clenched fists. ‘You really fucking think that?’

He ran forward and punched his father, punched him in the jaw, and then he turned, and ran.