Extraordinary by David Gilmour

Could you?”
    â€œHow did you know I wouldn’t tell someone?” I said.
    She was looking right at me now. She waited a moment. “Because I know what you’re like. Because enough is enough.”
    The phone rang.
    â€œDo you want to get that?”
    But she didn’t answer. She had retreated into herself, and I suddenly had the feeling she was thinking about her son, Kyle. But I didn’t want to bring him up. Not tonight. She seemed to read my thoughts, though, and taking a deep, involuntary breath as one does before beginning a task that has been done before but needs to be done again, she began. “About six months after my accident, I got a letter from my ex-husband, Bruce. Chloe and I had moved back to the house in San Miguel. I was in a wheelchair, but managing.”
    The phone stopped ringing.
    â€œIt was a disturbing but not a surprising letter, something I had expected for some time. Kyle, who was seventeen, had gotten himself into trouble. Teenage trouble. But from the lugubrious and self-satisfied tones of his father’s letter, you’d have thought it was murder. None of which would have happened, it implied, if I hadn’t
whored
off to Mexico.”
    â€œDid he use that expression?”
    â€œNo.” Pause. “That’s mine.”
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œKyle and a couple of his goony friends from the neighbourhood got drunk one night at some girl’s house—her parents were away—and broke into their own school. Their
own
school. They wandered around the halls, trashed a few lockers, pissed in the water fountain, smashed a mirror in the girls’ washroom and then drifted downstairs into the basement. There, at the far end of the school, they found themselves in the music room. The door was unlocked. Inside, they came across five electric guitars that had been rented for an upcoming student performance. Somebody said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ So they stole the guitars, slipping out the tradesmen’s entrance.
    â€œBruce was out of town, working with a highway crew up near Lake Athabasca, so they took their loot back to his house. Kyle was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid, and when he woke up hungover the next morning, he realized that he was in real trouble, that he had to do something to fix it.
    â€œHis friends had stayed overnight, but they were morons—Kyle’s friends generally were—and when he asked them for help, they sat with their fingers up their asses and then buggered off. So there was Kyle, with five stolen guitars heating up his bedroom like a hothouse.
    â€œWhat do you do? He came up with an idea. He found the vice-principal’s number in the phone book and called him at home. He claimed that a buddy of his—he couldn’t name him—had gotten drunk, broken into the school and stolen some stuff. Now, in a fit of remorse, he wanted to return them, with Kyle as the intermediary. Could this be arranged discreetly?
    â€œThe VP said sure. But when Kyle arrived in a taxi half an hour later, the five guitars stacked like corpses in the back seat, he found two plainclothes detectives waiting for him on the front steps of the school. They took him downstairs into the music room and grilled him. No windows, just the two cops, the vice-principal, and Kyle reeking of gin. A cop with a shiny, fleshy face started things off. It was pretty obvious, he said, that Kyle was a prankster who’d gone on a toot. He could smell it from here. But there was no way that his so-called ‘buddy’ had got these guitars out the door, up an embankment, across a playing field all on his own. Not unless he was ‘a fucking octopus.’
    â€œSo he must have had some help.
Kyle’s
help. So why didn’t Kyle just come clean and help everyone ‘straighten this out’ so they could close the book on it. No harm done. Just kids being kids.
    â€œBut Kyle, having