It took his mother three weeks of relatively close supervision before she got bored enough to leave David alone. (She and Tony simply had to go to the quiz night. They’d missed so many. And David was ever so much better now, wasn’t he?) The first thing he did when he had some privacy again was look online for a perfect resting place for Marc’s Things. He settled on an old biscuit tin he found on eBay, large, square, with a picture of kittens on the top, one of which looked a lot like Tinker. As soon as he saw it, he knew it was Significant enough to contain Marc.

For the next few days he waited anxiously for the post to arrive; he managed to get it up to his room without anyone seeing it. All in all, he’d done very well. He almost felt like he was back in control… pretty soon he’d be his old self again. He threw the hat, the stone and the knife into the box with no ceremony at all – Marc didn’t deserve one – buried the box at the end of the garden, next to the old oak tree, covered the soft earth with leaves, and that night he slept, and he didn’t dream.

The Kitten box worked. The next day, the Post ran a story about an unidentified body found in the canal. It had become tangled with weeds, and those weeds tangled with a dumped shopping trolley, and it had been in the water too long for a cause of death to be ascertained.

David clipped this article. A week later, once dental records had formally identified the body as Marc’s, he also clipped the death notice, and put both in ‘Precious Memories!’

For a while, he was safe.

Later, both Catherine and Piers looked back on the Tinker episode as pivotal. Before, they’d seen David’s secrecy and surliness as being within the bounds of normal adolescent behaviour. But after Tinker, they were forced, painfully, to reassess things, question their parenting, and – most painfully – admit that David was not well.

It had all started with one of Tony’s sporadic attempts to earn his keep. He’d decided to ‘help out in the garden’. Over a week, he’d begun, and abandoned, digging a vegetable patch, planted rows of daffodils that the frost immediately killed off, and needlessly pollarded two trees. He dragged their sappy branches into a pile, and announced that he was building a bonfire.

Piers looked worriedly at the conifers lining the boundary of the garden. ‘Not too close to the end?’ and Tony had dragged the branches further in, closer to the rockery that he’d half built a few years before.

But the branches refused to burn. Tony, rapidly losing his good humour, sprayed them with lighter fuel, which worked, but it wasn’t the glorious, manly blaze he was after. He added other things – that broken stool in the shed, a few cardboard boxes. The fire rose. The fizz and pop of the branches was loud enough to penetrate David’s headphones (‘Now That’s What I Call Party Bangers Volume 4!!’) and interrupt his training, and he wandered down to the garden to see what was happening.

‘Ah! The Boy David!’ Tony shouted. ‘Is this a bit too big? Possibly?’ He backed away, slightly fearfully from the flames. ‘D’you think you could get me the hose?’

And so, David, sighing, had got the hose, and together they drowned the flames before more of the garden was engulfed. A few little patches of flame persisted, and Tony – pointing to his moccasins – didn’t want to stamp them, so David did it for him. Then his boot touched something. Something that both squelched and crunched. He peered, jumped back. Then he began to scream.

There was Tinker’s little corpse: one half of her had been reduced to fur, fat and bones all charred and twisted, the other half, her pretty little face, her too-large ears and little pink nose, was untouched. David, still screaming, reached for the unburnt half, picked it up screamed louder when her head and front paws came away from the rest of her, leaving a trail of gory backbone. He turned, still holding her small head like a ghastly trophy, and vomited on Tony’s moccasins.

Tony was sincerely sorry! Awful, awful thing, believe me, I never would have done anything like this on purpose! He tried to tell David that it would have been quick, and Tinker was old. Old and deaf and probably ready to go. She probably just fell asleep in one of those old boxes, maybe, and he hadn’t seen her, and… David, please, please believe me, I’m so sorry she, she might not even have woken up. It was probably very… peaceful? And please, David? Please? Come into the house. Come into the house and try to calm down. Put her… put her down, now, OK?

But David didn’t put her down, and he didn’t calm down either. Tinker’s head stayed pinched between his fingers. When his mother tried to remove it, he shrieked and pulled it closer, rubbing blood on his shirt. All three adults crowded round him, trying to help, trying to understand, all confused by the level of his hysteria… they knew he’d liked Tinker, of course, but this much? When he finally quieted, the silence was large and loud. Tony hovered around sporting a nervous, poleaxed smile. Piers busied himself making tea, while Catherine crooned, patted, stroked… they’d give her a decent burial – even a headstone? I’m sure you can get headstones for pets…

David stood then, still cradling what remained of Tinker, and told them all, quietly, that he wanted to be alone. He wanted to bury her, privately, by himself, right now.

‘It’s very dark out there, sweetie,’ his mother said doubtfully. ‘And very cold. And you’re still not one hundred per cent—’

‘I want to do it,’ David said again, flatly.

‘But—’

His father laid a hand on his mother’s shoulder. ‘Let him do it.’ He nodded seriously at David, as if he understood.

Everyone backed away from him then. Father brought him a spade from the garden shed; they all watched respectfully as David, slight, so young looking in the gathering gloom, trudged down to the end of the garden. Soon nobody could make him out, and his mother made to go to him, but his father stopped her.

When he came back into the kitchen, pale, very sad, he said that he wanted to make a cross, and use Tony’s soldering iron to burn Tinker’s name on it.

‘Right-o, of course!’ Tony was glad to do something. ‘Come with me and I’ll show you—’

‘No,’ David said quietly, firmly. ‘I want to do it myself.’

‘It’s quite a tricky instrument though—’

‘How about if I help you?’ Piers put in. ‘I think I can remember the rudiments? David?’

And so, father and son retired solemnly to the summer house – David standing on the threshold, his back ostentatiously turned to the entrance – and together they burned TINKER on one of the few pieces of wood that had escaped the bonfire. It turned out later to be an unused frame that Tony had been saving for something, and that felt good. It felt good to destroy something of Tony’s; it felt good to know that Tony couldn’t complain about it either, not after what he’d done.

* * *

For the next few days David stayed in his room, in a state of blank, crushing sadness. The depression absolutely terrifying. David had never felt depressed before; before Tinker, he’d strongly suspected that depression was just an excuse for layabouts like Tony to do nothing, drink too much and never be held to account for their actions, but now it was happening to him, he had to accept that it was real.

David couldn’t move for it, couldn’t train, organise ‘Precious Memories!’, sink into Jenny’s mind. He couldn’t even leave the house to follow her. He didn’t even want to open the windows of his room – the air was fetid, humid in there; it smelled of loss and fear and death. Sometimes, when David woke up, he’d smell the fishy evil of the canal, and he knew that Marc hadn’t gone away after all; Marc was still here, and getting stronger all the time, because Tinker wasn’t there to ward him off.

The only thing that stirred from his gloomy torpor was extreme irritation and very loud noise, both of which were amply provided by Tony who was entering the annual event he called his Spring Cycle.

Tony’s Spring Cycle – ‘having a good clean out’ – involved great displays of self-conscious endeavour over what could sometimes be weeks. Tony hauled everything out of the summer house and dumped them all over the lawn. Wooden chairs, cigarette-scarred and musty, were piled with papers, with clothes. A guitar was propped up on a djembe drum; a ukulele poked out of a bucket full of cleaning products; why, David didn’t know, because Tony couldn’t play any instrument, had no musical talent at all. Some of the ugly, muddy daubs he called art were stacked against the door, others lay face up on the grass, staring up into David’s room; all those eyes, staring from murky depths, dozens of Marc Doyle’s… David stopped opening his curtains and kept his back to the window at all times.

During his Spring Cycle, Tony liked to prop the speakers up at the windows of the summer house and listen to one of his eight records – opera mostly – each scratched and tinny. He even sang along with the godawful noise while he ‘pottered’. Tony ‘pottering’ was horribly compelling and repellent at the same time. The mess of ugly paintings, un-upholstered chairs, and cheap, chintzy fabric in the garden grew ever higher, as Tony wandered around, deciding, loudly, what to keep, what had ‘promise’, before inevitably cramming it all back into the summer house in even less order than before. On the few occasions even Mother had complained about the mess, Tony had said, ‘There’s madness in my method’, as if it was clever.

Normally, David wasn’t around during the entire Spring Cycle. His parents went on holiday together, once a year, religiously, and they always took David too: Greece last year, Egypt the year before – and this meant that David only witnessed the very start and the very end of Tony’s yearly foray into decluttering. This year, though, David flatly refused to join them. He didn’t want to go anywhere, see anyone, or leave his room. Father didn’t think they should leave him, but Mother needed a holiday, and perhaps it was a good sign? Independence? Give him his space, he’ll come through this… and so they agreed. One week though, not two.

‘And call whenever you need to, son?’ Father said more than once. ‘I’m just at the end of the line, OK?’

When they left, Catherine kissed both David and Tony wetly. ‘Behave, you two!’

‘Oh, we’ll have a grand old time!’ Tony told her, and winked at David. ‘Won’t we, chum?’

Then, when the car disappeared down the drive, Tony went straight to the summer house, and David went straight to his room. And that was the way it was for the next five days. If it had stayed like that, everything would have been fine. But Tony had to push it. It was all Tony’s fault – everything that happened later was his fault.