Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid Page A

different. And not just because of the colour of Kathy’s skin. Oddly enough, the other kids seemed almost oblivious to his difference. He remembered one time when Julia had picked him up from school during his first term. Kathy usually did the school run because she ran her website design service from home, but she’d had to go out of town for some meeting, so Julia had left work early to collect him. She’d been helping him on with his wellies when Ben Rogers had said, ‘Who are you?’
    Emma White, who lived on their street, had said, ‘That’s Seth’s mum.’
    Ben had frowned. ‘No, it’s not. I’ve met Seth’s mum and this isn’t her,’ he’d said.
    ‘This is Seth’s other mum,’ Emma had insisted.
    Ben had totally taken it in his stride, moving straight on to the next topic of conversation. It had stayed like that - part of the landscape, how the world was, unremarkable - until Seth had been nine or ten, when his passion for football had brought him into direct contact with kids who hadn’t grown up with the notion that having two mums was just part of the spectrum of family life.
    One or two of the bigger lads had tried to use Seth’s unusual domestic set-up to get some leverage against him. They soon found out they’d picked the wrong target. Seth seemed to move inside a bubble of invulnerability. He deflected insults with bemused good nature. And he was too well liked among the other boys to make a physical campaign possible. Confounded by his self-confidence, the bullies backed off and chose someone easier to victimise. Even then, Seth thwarted them. He had a way of letting those in authority know when bad things were going on without ever being seen as a grass. He was, it seemed, a good friend and a pointless enemy.
    So he’d moved seamlessly into adolescence - kind, popular and direct, his only apparent problem his anxiety not to fail. Julia and Kathy held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It seemed like they’d been doing that since the day Julia had inseminated. There had been plenty of Jonahs ready with dire warnings. But Seth had been a happy, easy baby. He’d had colic once. Just once. He’d started sleeping through the night at an incredible seven weeks. He’d avoided childhood ailments apart from the occasional cold. He hadn’t been the toddler from hell, partly because the first time he’d tried it in public, Kathy had walked away and left him standing red-faced and howling in the middle of a supermarket aisle. She’d been watching from round the end of the breakfast cereals, but he hadn’t realised that at the time. The horror of abandonment had been enough to cure him of temper tantrums. He whinged sometimes, as they all did, but neither Kathy nor Julia responded in the desired way, so he’d mostly given that up too.
    The personality trait that saved him from being too good to be true was the constant stream of chatter that often seemed to start when his eyes opened in the morning and only ended when they closed again at bedtime. Seth was so entirely fascinated by the world and his place in it that he saw no reason why anyone would not want a blow-by-blow account of his every action and thought, or a remarkably detailed recitation of the plot of whatever DVD he’d last seen, the more trivial the better. Occasionally, belatedly, he would register his audience’s eyes rolling back in their sockets, or their whole faces glazing over as they waited for him to get to the point. It didn’t give him even a flicker of hesitation. He carried on to the bitter end, even when Kathy would lay her head on the kitchen table and moan softly.
    In the great scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst character flaw. His mothers had both noticed it seemed not to have the same effect on his friends as it had on them. And they were grateful that the onset of adolescence hadn’t turned their beautiful boy into a surly, monosyllabic hulk. Most of his friends made them shudder these