Page 16 of The Good Boy

“Squirrels?” he asks anxiously.

“It’s okay, Rory,” I say. “Everything’s fine. It’s just me not handling this situation nearly as well as you are.”

“What situation?” Rory asks. “Granny Rita, what situation?”

“The fact that you have a man’s body now,” Mum tells him gently.

“Oh yeah, not keen. Prefer peeing outside, actually. Which reminds me—can I go in your garden?”

“Best not, not when Grandpa is out there. He gets very precious about his courgettes. Bathroom’s at the top of the stairs, pet,” she tells him, adding, “You’ve got to learn.”

“There has got to be a way to get out of this,” I say once he’s gone. “A tear in the time-space continuum, a time-travel machine, or a wizard. Or something. There has to be, Mum. Say that there is? Please?”

“This isn’t like the time you had your nose pierced and it got infected and you had to let it close up,” Mum tells me. “You’ve made your bed, Genie Wilson. Now you have to lie in it.”

I gaze mournfully into my coffee.

“This is the first time in my life I don’t want a lie-in.”

“Don’t worry, darling,” Mum says, kissing me on the cheek. “Things have a habit of working themselves out for the best.”

“What did you wish for?” I ask her suddenly. “When you got granted your wish by Great-Nanna Serfina? What did you wish for? Was it Dad?”

“No, you silly goose,” Mum says, kissing me on my temple. “I’d been married to your dad for a year when I was granted my wish. I knew I wanted to be a mum more than anything, and so I wished for...”

“Was it me?” I ask her, wide-eyed in anticipation of a magical mother-daughter moment.

“No, I wished for money,” she says. “You were on the way and I wanted enough for a deposit on the house.”

“Oh,” I say. “That was a sensible wish.”

“I don’t want to say I told you so, but...” Mum says.

I don’t suppose now is a good time to start drink-driving, though it would seem on-trend for the quality of my life choices.

Chapter Eight

“I know Mum was all ‘there is no cure,’ but this is the twenty-first century. There has to be an answer to this,” I say as we pull up outside my house, still disappointingly sober. “I mean, I can’t just become a parent to a grown man overnight. I’m terrible with kids—all the children I know refuse to be babysat by me in case they don’t survive the night.”

“Also, I’m not into it,” Rory says from the back seat. “This sitting up and wearing a seat belt and peeing in the sink—”

“Not the sink, Rory!”

“What’s the difference, though?” he says. “They are basically the same thing. Anyway, I don’t want to be your human son—it’s embarrassing. I like being a dog. I am good at being a dog. Being your constant companion, guarding the house against dangers, ruling the park, holding dominion over all ducks and chasing tennis balls in the sea, eating cheese. I am good at that stuff. I want to go back to that being my stuff and not listening to you talking to me in the back of cars. I mean, look at Miles. He is the prisoner of a murder cat and obviously really lonely and sad. He’d probably rather be a dog too.”

“I’m not lonely,” Miles says, screwing up his face. “I get hundredsof offers for dates. Well, tens anyway. I am waiting for the girl I like to realize that she likes me back.”

“What does that mean?” I ask him, willingly distracted. “Does that mean you have met her? Is it that girl at the museum, the new one you told us about? Do you fancy her, Miles? What’s her name again?”

“Her name is Claudia,” he says with a sigh.

“Claudia-from-work,” I say. “And you like her, don’t you? You like the new girl at work, don’t you?”

“I do like Claudia-from-work, she is really nice, but not like that. But we are not going to talk about me right now,” Miles tells me firmly. “We are going to deal with the very pressing situation at hand.”

I had expected him to brush my suggestion of a crush off, but he did the opposite. He said he likes Claudia. He said “not like that” but we all know that when someone says that it means “exactly like that.” So does that mean he likes her like he likes curry sauce on his fries orlikesher, likes her? Gah! This is not the time to be thinking about this. Who Miles likes hasn’t got anything to do with me anyway, except that I’d got used to him being mostly single with me.

“So, if this wish is a real phenomenon,” Miles continues thoughtfully, “then it’s illogical to assume that it can only be found in one location and within one unique strand of DNA.”

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