He doesn’t mean to go missing. He is sixteen years old and his clothes are falling off him and his father is at work in an office that he used to think was important and his step-mother is with her lover and downstairs is a girl who used to be the au pair and is somehow still here, after so many years, as a constant reminder that his bottom used to need wiping. He is sitting in his room and he is watching TV: someone hits someone else and the second person hits the first person back. He’s so bored that he feels he’s been sitting in this room his whole life, staring at men hitting each other and old posters of Bart Simpson dating from the time it was exciting to say words like ‘bum,’ and waiting for other people to stop talking and pay him some attention, and everything else has been a dream. Or else this is the dream and he is in it, and something has to break— loudly, and into lots of pieces—for him to wake up. So he starts throwing balled-up socks at the beer glass on his desk that holds his old pens and he hears his step-mother’s voice: ‘What if everyone started throwing socks at beer glasses?’ This is familiar: what if everyone picked their noses in public or shouted out swear words or put their hand inside their trousers and scratched?
