How could someone like him have the slightest clue what it felt like to be me? I felt almost cross with him for wilfully not getting it.
‘Go on. Open your mind.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d be uncomfortable. I feel like … I feel like they’d know.’
‘Who? Know what?’
‘Everyone else would know, that I didn’t belong.’
‘How do you think I feel?’
We looked at each other.
‘Clark, every single place I go to now people look at me like I don’t belong.’
We sat in silence as the music started. Derek’s father was on the telephone in his hall, and the sound of muffled laughter carried through it into the annexe, as if from a long way away. The disabled entrance is over there, the woman at the racecourse had said. As if he were a different species.
I stared at the CD cover. ‘I’ll go if you come
