Chapter 152: behind the laughter

Chapter 152 — Behind the Laughter

Roxanne read Liam’s message again, sitting up in bed with the lamp turned low and the laptop pushed to one side. If you were writing a character who always makes everyone laugh, how would you show that he’s not always happy?

She typed: Are you secretly planning a novel?

The reply came quickly, and it sounded like him again. I have several talents you’ve yet to discover.

Is the question actually about you?

Don’t make assumptions about your future bestseller. I’m a very private muse.

Roxanne looked at the screen. She could have pressed. But the door he had half opened did not feel locked, only closed, and a push might shut it harder. She wrote instead: A character doesn’t have to stop being funny to have serious feelings. You don’t have to make him miserable just to prove he’s human.

The dots appeared, vanished, and appeared again.

That’s disappointingly sensible. I was hoping for something tragic.

I’ll save the tragedy for the villain.

Fair. Goodnight, Silver.

She smiled and turned off the lamp.

Two days later, the workshop room was full of afternoon light and the smell of pencil shavings. Mr. Ellery tapped his pencil against his knee and asked who would like to share something, and Roxanne heard herself say, "I will. An excerpt."

Nora looked up so sharply that she dropped her eraser.

Roxanne stood, which was not required, and then wished she had stayed in her chair. The pages in her hand were trembling very slightly. These were not lines written for a performance. There was no crown to drop and no character to stand behind. It was only her own plain sentences, and nine people waiting to hear them.

She read about the girl, the shoebox, the chipped teaspoon, and the grandmother who had tapped its rim twice against the cup. Her voice steadied somewhere around the bus ticket. When she finished, the silence lasted exactly one second, and then Pippa let out a long, appreciative sigh.

Nora went first. "The teaspoon is the best thing in it. I could hear the tapping. But the box doesn’t hold my attention until the second page, and I think you know that."

"I do," Roxanne admitted.

"The opening needs a stronger question," said Corin, so quietly that Pippa had to lean in. "Why does she think the box is empty? Tell us before she opens it."

Roxanne wrote that down. She noticed, with some surprise, that she was enjoying this. She had spent months being told she was brave or strong or clever by people who wanted something from her. These people only wanted the story to be better, and the difference felt like cold water on a warm day.

"Develop it for the Winter Arts Evening," Mr. Ellery said, tapping his knee with satisfaction. "Don’t polish it to death."

She sat down feeling taller, though nobody had called her a prodigy and nobody ever would. It was a good feeling anyway.

Liam found her that afternoon outside the sports pavilion, leaning against a post with his sleeves rolled and a whistle round his neck that she did not remember him owning.

"Are you free for an hour? I’d like you to watch a practice."

"You’re playing?"

"Not exactly. Come and see."

She followed him round the side of the pavilion to the little field. Six or seven younger students stood in a ragged line, in mismatched kit, looking at a pile of cones as though it were a puzzle. Liam clapped his hands.

"This," he told Roxanne, "is a trial session for the youth sports initiative. I told you about it. They are not afraid of me, which is a mistake."

She sat on a bench at the edge and watched. He was loud and quick and absurd, and the children adored him within minutes. He turned a drill into a game about escaping a dragon, and a small boy shrieked with joy and ran the wrong way, and Liam ran the wrong way with him. But when a thin girl at the back kept missing the ball and went red in the face, his voice dropped. He crouched beside her. He showed her the same step four times, slowly, in four slightly different ways, until her shoulders came down and her foot connected.

Roxanne noticed that he looked happier here than he had ever looked at a royal dinner, and that nobody on this field was waiting for him to behave like anything in particular.

During the break, she carried two cups of water over and sat beside him on the grass.

"Why did you ask me about the character?"

Liam drank half his water before answering. "Someone told me, recently, that nobody takes me seriously because I joke too much."

"Who?"

"It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t cruel. It just stuck." He plucked at the grass. "I’m not heartbroken. It annoyed me. I like making people laugh. I don’t want to give that up to look mature. But I would like people to see that I can be dependable when it counts."

"Both can be true."

"Can they?"

"You can be the person who makes everyone laugh and the person they trust when something goes wrong."

Liam looked at her. "That’s almost poetic."

"Don’t ruin it."

"Too late. I’m writing it down." He patted his pockets, found nothing, and wrote it on his palm with a stub of chalk from the field.

The practice had just resumed when a boy of about ten landed badly after a jump and sat down hard, clutching his ankle. The whistle was in Liam’s mouth before the boy had finished yelping.

Everything stopped. Liam crossed the grass in a few strides, knelt, and spoke so quietly that Roxanne could not hear him. He sent one student to fetch the supervising instructor and told the others to sit in a circle and count cones. He stayed beside the boy, a hand steadying his shoulder, until the instructor arrived with an ice pack and a stretcher blanket and carried him gently off the field.

He did not look round for praise. He stood a moment watching them go, then turned to the circle of worried faces and said, "Right. Who here has ever been defeated by a cone? Show me your wounds." Within a minute, they were laughing again, and the colour had come back into every cheek.

Roxanne watched him with her chin on her hand. This was why he liked it, she thought. Nobody here needed him to be one thing, so he could be both.

When the session ended and the children had been collected, she told him it had gone well.

"Really?"

"Really. The dragon was inspired."

"I’d like to do it again," Liam said, winding the whistle cord round his fingers. "Properly. Every week, perhaps."

"Then do."

That evening she opened her story again and added a character, a boy on a school bus who made the whole row laugh at nothing and went quiet when someone was truly upset. She stopped, frowning. It was too obvious, a Liam in a borrowed coat. She changed his name, his hair, the way he held his bag, and gave him a habit of whistling off-key that belonged to nobody she knew. By the time she had finished, he was his own person, with his own sorrows and his own good timing.

She picked up her phone before bed.

I think I figured out your question.

And? Am I a tragic masterpiece?

No. You’re an irritatingly complicated character.

I’ll accept that.

A pause. Then: Thanks for today, Rox.

She smiled at the unusual sincerity, and had started to type a reply when another message arrived.

My family wants an answer about the leadership programme tomorrow. I’ve decided what I want to propose.

What?

I’m going to ask them to let me build the youth sports initiative into the programme. If they say no, I’ll find another way to do it.

Roxanne read it twice. He had not asked what he should choose. He was telling her what he had chosen.