Sometimes it was just Max, or Max and Tommy, or Max and Tommy and Will. Other times there were more of them, holed up out there in the den, having themselves a little party. Usually they’d stay over, piling onto the sofa bed, or crashing out in sleeping bags on the floor. I bought them beer. After all, as Melanie said, it was better that they should drink in my den than out in a field somewhere. When she said that I was shocked, not so much by her words as by the ease with which she said them, her acceptance that that was just what boys did. As if at least at my house they’d have a roof over their heads, they’d be out of the rain. The thought of my Sam ever lying drunk in an open field horrified me. It wouldn’t happen. It musn’t happen. But if he was out with his friends, how would I know where he was? How would I know what he would have to do, to go along with the crowd? And how would I ever find him, if they left him out there somewhere, alone? Horror at the sheer endlessness of the night around here flashed through my head, the remoteness, the darkness, going on and on, blanketing the land.
