Read Picture Me Gone for Free Online Page B

flapflapflap!!! He makes a high squeaking noise like a bat. Gil is standing behind me, watching.
    He’s very endearing.
    He is, I say. He makes you love him. I throw the ball again and he flips and flaps but I can see that his face is starting to screw up like last time, so we stop playing ball and I snuggle him into the corner of the squashy sofa and jiggle him on my lap and sing him a song and he calms down and doesn’t scream again.
    I wouldn’t leave him, I say.
    Gil shrugs a little and frowns and doesn’t say
There’s nowt so queer as folk,
which is another of his favorite expressions and probably one he doesn’t particularly want to apply to his oldest friend, it being not very flattering. He doesn’t look happy.
    What are the possibilities? I speak quietly because I can still hear Suzanne on the phone in the next room. She has quite a bright voice on—maybe it’s someone at the university or a neighbor she doesn’t know very well. She even laughs a little to show that she’s OK, but it doesn’t have that effect.
    I suppose he might have got mixed up in something he shouldn’t have.
    Like?
    Like bad company.
    What sort of bad company? For an instant I imagine something like the gas company, only full of villains.
    Gil shrugs again. Drugs? Gambling? He raises an eyebrow. Smuggling, prostitution, contraband, arms trading, money laundering.
    My expression makes him laugh.
    Well, you asked, he says. And no, I don’t actually think Matt is running a prostitution ring. Not his style. Or at least it never was before. People do change, I suppose. Or something happens so you don’t recognize them anymore. It happens.
    A wave of anxiety chokes me and I think of Catlin. I know it happens. The possibility that someone I know well can all of a sudden change makes me feel sick. I pull Gabriel close and kiss him so Gil won’t see how I feel.
    Though more usually it’s the other way round, Gil continues. More usually you don’t see someone for thirty years and when you meet up again it’s exactly the way it was back then.
    He thinks for a minute, and then says, Matt’s had a bad time. It probably goes back to Owen, but what do I know? Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe he’s gay and living a lie. I’ve known him a very long time, he says. But you never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head.
There’s nowt so queer as folk,
he says.
    This makes me smile and Gil looks up and blinks, as if he’s forgotten I’m here. And that’s the end of today’s lecture, he says as Suzanne comes back in, staring at her phone accusingly.
    What lecture? she asks, but it sounds more automatic than curious.
    I’m still snuggled up with Gabriel but when he sees his mum he begins flapping his hands and making his high-pitched bat noise. Suzanne’s phone rings again. She looks at the number, answers it, and her voice changes once more. Let me phone you back, she says and turns her attention to Gabriel, sweeping him up out of my lap.
    Pooh! she says, giving an exaggerated sniff. Smelly boy! And she’s off to change his nappy.
    I have the nose of a bloodhound and he didn’t smell of anything but baby.
    Let’s hit the road, Dad says. It’s getting late.

thirteen
    F luency in two languages does not make you a translator. And translators from French to German (for instance) rarely translate from German back to French. It’s a one-way process, Gil says, but there are always exceptions.
    He also says the trick is to visualize the rhythms and idioms of Language One in Language Two—to find the connections between, say, a German mind and a French mind, so that the peculiarities of one voice can be teased into the other without a
calamitous loss of meaning.
Which he always says in italics.
    Today, I will be translating from American to English and back again, which should be just about manageable.
    We set off at last, after Suzanne phones the insurance company twice to check that her policy covers any driver, including