Just A Boy

by Elena Varvello

Genres: Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Siblings

Synopsis

'Move over Ferrante, there's a new Elena in town' Independent

A gripping novel about family, loss and secrets, from the author of the Times bestselling sensation Can You Hear Me?

The boy is almost eighteen and has a loving family. He's polite and well-educated, quiet but always smiling.

When word spreads that he has broken into and stolen from a neighbour's house, his parents and sisters can't believe it. Then the unthinkable happens: an attack that will rip through the town and his family for years to come.

Just a Boy is a gripping, incisive novel about secrets, adolescence and how we can love someone - a child, a partner - without ever knowing their mind.


Praise for The Times bestseller Can You Hear Me?

'A novel of crime and darkness that eschews straightforward domestic noir' Guardian

'Utterly gripped me from beginning to end' Victoria Hislop

Release date: September 1, 2022

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

Boy

Before

The house was empty, hidden by a small wooded area: no one had seen him climb over the gate, that time, and walk across the courtyard. The kitchen had a slight odour of burnt toast. The large dark rock, which his arm had thrown through the glass door, had ended up by the fridge, shards of glass across the floor. The morning light on the opposite wall.

He walked around, stopping to listen several times. He thumbed through a few books, rummaged in a few drawers and a couple of cupboards. He tried on a jacket that was hanging on a coat rack in the hall and looked at himself in the mirror. ‘And who are you supposed to be?’ he asked his reflection, in a hint of half-light. ‘What, you don’t want to answer me?’ He put the jacket back and sat down on the settee, taking in his surroundings: framed photographs on a low piece of furniture, the stereo system, the paintings on the walls.

He had stood up, slowly, and headed upstairs.

 

It’s a hot night, in the heart of summer.

Lying on his bed, he often thinks about that morning in July: the quiet house, the glass door at the back, the large dark rock. He felt like he’d imagined them, or that the person who threw the rock, who wandered through those rooms and eventually climbed back over the gate, picked up the bike from the woods and quickly pedalled away hadn’t been him but another boy, instead. One that looked like him.

Now he walks along the path, moving from one side of the spine of dusty weeds to the other, his hood up and his hands deep in his pockets. The full moon lights his way through the woods all around him. It’s two in the morning, but it could easily be dawn. He picks up a branch, slender and almost weightless, and waves it in the air – the crack of a whip – and throws it towards a clump of trees. The rough path looks like a dried-up stream, carved by water who knows how long ago, straight and deep as a cut along the hill’s slope. The hem of a cloud brushes against the white halo of the moon.

He listens to his breathing, step after step. He is moving further and further from home, from his bedroom, from his parents and his sisters, as if someone were forcing him to march with a gun to his head. There is no going back. He stops for just a moment to catch his breath in the grassy clearing at the top of the hill. He raises his hands to the sky almost as if saying sorry, shivering despite the heat, a film of sweat on his neck and his heart slamming in his throat. There’s a large pine tree in the lake of grass, dipped in the moon’s brightness. A little further ahead is a trailer eaten up by rust, next to a pile of cracked logs.

He folds his arms, presses them against his ears and says: ‘Move,’ in a cruel voice he barely recognises. ‘Get a fucking move on.’

He follows the edge of the clearing towards another cluster of trees pressed against each other like a gathering of people. Then he slips into the woods through the undergrowth and the thorns, into the densest spot; he gets caught on everything, and he jerks his arms away. Now the brightness has dimmed, as if clouded by steam or smoke. He reaches a small dip filled with dry leaves and broken branches, and tests the ground with the tip of his trainer to make sure he doesn’t slip.

At last the metal roof glints in the dark, under the shadow of a chestnut tree: the shack. The walls are little more than rough, splintered wooden planks; inside are pieces of furniture and plywood panels stolen from a building site – a farmhouse being renovated – one night in June, carried here on his shoulders, three trips back and forth. Everything nailed together using his father’s hammer, taken from the toolbox in the garage and shoved into his rucksack while his dad was at the school, busy with the national exams.

He climbs back up the side of the dip as if resurfacing; the ground is muddy under the dry leaves.

The flaking door panel is tied to the wall next to it with a metal wire. He takes the lighter out of his pocket and flicks it on: the hook is still around the nail, and two chrome hinges shine in the light of the flame. The door scrapes against the ground, blocked by a raised root: he can’t open it all the way. He ducks his head to go inside, and is immediately met by a waft of warm air, of things rotting. He lights up the inside: the crooked walls, the worn-out sponge of a bathmat – a small find from the beach. In the half-light, on two stumps he found in the clearing, are the things he stole from that first house hidden by the trees: a family photo, a candle, a plate and two pieces of cutlery. Then, a week later, from the detached house behind Gemma’s shop: a mug that says BUONGIORNO, a toothbrush and a screwdriver.

He sits on the spongy bathmat, in the dark, and hugs his legs. His family are asleep; there’s just over a mile between them, just a half-hour walk, but really, it’s an entire universe.

What are you thinking about? His mother’s voice comes to him like the rushing of a summer breeze through the grass. You’re so quiet recently.

He imagines losing himself in the woods or living by himself in the shack, like a young hermit, only heading down to Cave, Ponte or Rivafredda to find something to eat, blankets, or any tools he might need. Drinking and washing at the stream. He imagines his torn clothing, his battered trainers. Bringing his solitude to completion.

Leaning against a wall, he flicks the lighter on and off. In the dark, he hears a soft crackling: the sound of leaves being stepped on where the ground dips. He flicks the flame back on, aiming it at the door, at the darkness, and he goes still, listening.

Whatever it was, he thinks, it must have gone away.

 

The second house, that detached home behind Gemma’s shop, had a window already open – it was much easier.

As soon as he was inside, he asked: ‘Anyone home?’

Rectangles of light on the floors and carpets, and the sound of his own footsteps. The BUONGIORNO mug, still holding the dregs of someone’s coffee, sat on the dining table. The screwdriver was on the lid of a large jar of lotion next to the basin in the downstairs bathroom. That was where he filled the bathtub. He let the water start to overflow, then turned off the tap. He pocketed one of the three toothbrushes, headed back to the kitchen with the screwdriver and hid it, along with the mug, inside his hoodie pocket. He found a pen and a small notepad in the lounge: he ripped out a page, wrote on it Sorry to bother you and then set it on fire. On their return, the owners would find a bathtub full of water and some scraps of burnt paper.

In the morning sun he reached the gate; he strained his ears – just a dog barking and the echoes of a radio – then climbed over it. In that moment, as he was jumping down, the screwdriver fell from his pocket: he leaned over to pick it up just as a car turned onto the street. Initially, the man driving saw nothing but a figure in dark clothing bending over the pavement. But then he slowed down and drove along next to him, turning round to get a proper look, or maybe he just peered in his wing mirror. But he saw his long hair, his back and arms encased in the hoodie, his black trousers. The flash of his hood, pulled up too late. He recognised him, or so he thought, and talked about it with Gemma and Carlo, at the shop. ‘I saw him out on the street, just yesterday morning. He ran away. It was him, if you ask me.’

Neither of them really believe the driver.

He carried the stolen things to his shack and put them down on the logs. He left just in time, a hand pressed to his mouth, and was sick over the dry leaves.

 

There’s a spot in the grassy clearing, to the right of the rusty trailer, from where you can just about see a bend in the river. Molten metal, poured into the valley. In summer, before it became a tip, he would often go to the beach with his family. Back then he was just a little boy who liked to swim. He and his sisters would go as far as the small island, with its tall, thick reeds growing up among the bushes. They’d step out of the water, almost always cold, onto a thin strip of gravel mixed with sand and warm up in the sun, rubbing their freezing arms and legs.

One day he’d asked Angela and Amelia: ‘Can I stay here?’

Their mother was watching them from the beach; she’d raised an arm to wave at them. Their father, on a folding chair, was reading a newspaper.

‘Mum and Daddy would come to get you.’

‘But I like it here.’

‘What do you like so much about it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Hiding in the reeds, he would watch them get dressed again, pick up their chairs, bags and towels, start along the path and disappear, headed for the car. At dusk, the beach was silent and empty. Then darkness would fall; around him, the running of water and the warm whisper of the leaves; the vastness of the woods. The moon the tip of a finger pointed at the world.

 

No one has found the shack, at least not yet: the door is always shut and his things are always in order.

The previous week, as he was pulling out grass from around the spongy bathmat, a boy and a girl arrived in the clearing. He heard their voices and he slipped out and watched them unobserved, squatting on his heels among the weeds behind the cluster of trees. They lay in the shade of the pine tree, kissing. Then they stood up, and he saw them walk away hand in hand.

On those final days, despite thinking of himself as a hermit, he has considered bringing one of his classmates to the shack: a skinny guy with black eyes and a very strange laugh.

Hiccup Laugh – that’s what he calls him in his head – is the only person he’s really bonded with in the first months of secondary school, and the only one to invite him round to his house. He helped him with his homework then they played Atari.

Hiccup Laugh often talked about girls, about football, about a new video game: ‘Which one’s your favourite?’ He never knew what to say – it was as if he’d been speaking a foreign language, completely indecipherable. He’d just look at him.

‘Why are you staring at me?’ Hiccup Laugh would ask.

‘I’m not staring.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘Sorry.’

‘And you’re always quiet. Even in class. They’re right – you’re a fucking weirdo.’

The last time he went to Hiccup Laugh’s place, he told him: ‘I need to use the bathroom.’ He opened up the cupboards and took a peek, leaving them open, and shoved a piece of a bar of soap into his pocket – a small souvenir. Hiccup Laugh stopped inviting him over.

He could show him the shack: maybe he’d like it. They could sit on the mat with their legs crossed and the candle slowly burning down, like survivors. He could tell him about the two houses he’d broken into.

So it was you? Cool. And how did you find this place?

I built it.

And you always come here alone?

Well, now you know where it is too.

He rocks back and forth, then suddenly reaches an arm out towards the logs, grabs the screwdriver and slides it out of the darkness, wielding it like a knife.

You need to go now, he thinks. Come on.

He loops the hook back around the nail, feeling the wall. The night is even brighter in the grassy clearing, the air transparent like a shard of glass. And he’s alone, hood over his head, screwdriver in the back pocket of his jeans, and the grass is rustling.

 

There are things that come to him as he heads down into Cave, the route a mix of paved road and paths. His mother’s hand, for example, resting on his arm that same evening over dinner, her hazel eyes boring into him: ‘Aren’t you too hot in that hoodie?’

She went to bed early. His father stayed in the lounge in front of the TV for a while, then he joined her upstairs. Angela and Amelia went out with some of their old school friends, and came home shortly after midnight. They sat on the porch under his open window: he heard Angela’s voice, slack from the wine or the beer, her inebriated giggle; Amelia telling her, ‘Be quiet, everyone’s sleeping.’ They were talking about him.

‘But if that’s the case, what should we do?’

‘It’s not the case,’ Angela said. ‘I mean, can you see him doing that? And for what, to steal some rubbish? Come on.’

‘I know, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Why was he outside that place?’

‘Because that wasn’t him.’

‘But he says he saw him,’ Amelia replied. Words he couldn’t make out, and finally: ‘Well, I’m trying again tomorrow.’

He heard the key turn as they locked the porch door, their whispering, the small thuds and bare footsteps, the bathroom door closing, and their bedroom doors. He waited for them to fall asleep, and when he was sure they had, he slipped on his shoes and pulled himself up, the plate of the moon in the open window.

 

He slips out of the woods onto the untended field behind the building site he raided in June – an excavator, spectral in the night, next to a Portaloo. A car’s headlights force him to stop on the side of the road: wait, he tells himself, stay still. The lights and the soft sigh of the engine fade into the dark and silence, as if the car had shown up in a dream. Now he can cross. On the other side is a house surrounded by a low fence, a weeping willow in the bare garden and a brick barbecue. Along the fence, a narrow path leads to the garage. There are two metal tanks filled with half-burned garden w. . .