Page 41 of Our Secrets and Lies

‘Yeah, well, that was bad luck and, anyway, eighteen months later he climbed Mount Everest to the top!’

‘He’s a man, Ollie. He was trained by the British Army. You’re just a kid. You can’t be likehim.’

‘I can try. If you and Dad weren’t so mean, I could be Ireland’s Bear Grylls, but you never want me to do anything so I’ll never make it.’

Beside them Darren was raking through the fire with a stick. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You have got to be bloody kidding me!’ he shouted, as he held up a pair of charred glasses. ‘A hundred and fifty euros these cost me. What the hell?’

Ollie lookedguilty. ‘I was using them to start the fire. You need glasses and then you spit on the lens and use it to angle the sun and some dry leaves and twigs and that’s how you start the fire. It took ages, but it worked, Dad. It actually worked.’

Darren threw his arms out. ‘Ah, well, then, it was worth it. Using my very expensive glasses to spit on and start a fire at nine on a Sunday morning was worthit. That’s just brilliant, Ollie, feckin’ brilliant. And tell me now, how am I supposed to work when I can’t see? How am I supposed to wire people’s houses when everything’s a blur?’

‘Maybe I could fix them. I’ll look it up on YouTube.’

‘I’ll tell you what you can do. You can stay the hell away from YouTube, Bear Grylls and anything to do with survival or fire or eating bugs or climbing mountainsor any of it. Get up to your room and out of my sight.’

Ollie stomped off. ‘Fine, I will,’ he shouted, over his shoulder. ‘But you’re a dream-stealer, Dad, a big fat dream-stealer.’

‘I’d rather be a dream-stealer than taking you to hospital with third-degree burns.’ Darren turned to his wife and sighed. ‘What are we going to do with him?’

Sarah had no idea. Ollie had come into the world tenyears ago kicking and screaming. When she’d got pregnant, they’d been overjoyed. She’d had two miscarriages after Shannon. But there had been a lot of complications during the pregnancy and Sarah had had to spend a lot of it on bedrest. Darren had barely let her move. And then Ollie had arrived eight weeks early. They’d nearly lost him, but he was a fighter. Sarah could still remember the first timeshe’d held his tiny body in her arms, her precious baby.

Ollie had spent eight weeks in the neo-natal ward being monitored. Darren had been incredible. He’d spent hours holding Ollie’s hand through the hole in the incubator, willing him to grow and get stronger. Darren had more love to give than anyone else Sarah had ever met. She knew how lucky she was to have married him. Always there for her,her rock.

At first Ollie had seemed a quiet, content little baby, but when he’d figured out how to crawl, all hell had broken loose. He was so different from Shannon, who had sat and coloured or calmly watched cartoons. Ollie never, ever sat still. Not for a single second. He was like a Duracell bunny. He went and went. ‘Lively’, ‘high-spirited’ and ‘energetic’ were some of the words the neighboursused to describe him, often through gritted teeth.

They’d signed him up for football when he was five, but he wasn’t interested. The coach said he’d spent the whole time climbing up the goalpost and hanging upside-down from it.

They’d put him in the Scouts, but he’d been kicked out: the boys had gone on a camping trip and Ollie had disappeared for four hours. When they’d found him, he was upa tree and refused to come down. He’d wanted to see if hecould survive there for the night, eating mushrooms and drinking his own pee. The Scout leader had had to climb up and get him down, but Ollie had struggled with him and the leader had fallen and broken his arm. That had been the end of Scouts.

‘Do you think he’s normal?’ Darren had asked one night, after they’d found Ollie microwavinga snail.

Sarah knew that Ollie was normal. He was just different-normal. He liked more extreme stuff than most kids his age. When Santa had brought him a skateboard last Christmas, in the hope that he’d go outside with the other kids to skate up and down the road, Ollie had had other ideas. He had put a ladder against the back wall of the house and tried to skateboard down it from his bedroomwindow. Thankfully, he’d only broken his wrist, not his neck.

The thing was, Sarah loved his adventurous spirit. That was who Ollie was. But it terrified her too. She’d wanted a big family, but Shannon and Ollie were all she’d ever have. They were her world. She wanted to protect Ollie but not stifle him.

Darren just wanted him to play football, tip-the-can and skateboard on horizontal surfaces.He wanted him to be a normal kid. He didn’t understand Ollie’s obsession with survival and danger. Sarah knew Darren was scared of something happening to Ollie. He adored his son, he just didn’t share his idea of hobbies.

Darren sat in the kitchen looking at the charred mess that had once been his glasses.

‘Cup of tea?’ Sarah asked.

‘I need a drink after that,’ he said.

‘It’s half nine sotea will have to do.’

Shannon came in wearing her pink fluffy onesie. ‘I presume Ollie’s done something mad again.’

‘Ah, nothing much, just started a fire in the garden with my glasses,’ Darren said.

‘He should be locked up. He’s seriously mental in the head.’ Shannon poured herself some tea.

‘Don’t say that, he’s just curious,’ Sarah said.

Shannon rolled her eyes. ‘He’s a lunatic, Mum, andyou never say boo to him. If I started a fire in the garden, you’d kill me. He gets away with murder.’

‘Do you think we could get Dylan to talk to him, maybe persuade him to give soccer another go?’ Darren asked.

‘Leave poor Dylan alone. He’s enough going on in his posh new school,’ Shannon said.

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