The air in the cottage smelled of damp wool and yesterday’s tea, and the dog—a scraggly terrier named Alfie—snored by the hearth. I clutched my grandson’s untouched plate of beans on toast, the butter congealing into greasy islands. Fourteen years old, and already a ghost in his own home.
Listen, please. I’m a grandmother, not some dotty old woman from a telly sketch. I taught literature for thirty years in Manchester. Colleagues still call me for advice on Byron’s epistles. But now? I’m adrift.
His name is Oliver. My daughter Emily and her husband left for work in Portugal when he was eleven, back before the world turned upside down. They send pounds, video calls, Christmas cards with sun-bleached edges. But Oliver? They left him with me in this village near York, where the only excitement is the postman’s whistling.
At first, it was lovely. We read Tolkien at night, he helped me prune the roses. Polite, tender—a boy who still believed in woodland fairies. Then came the laptop. “For schoolwork,” Emily insisted. My nephew set it up. Oliver’s eyes lit up like he’d found the door to Narnia.
But Narnia swallowed him whole.
Now he hunches over that screen like a goblin over treasure. The boy who once built forts from laundry baskets now flinches if I touch his shoulder. I make treacle pudding—his favorite—and find it fossilised by dusk. His face is the colour of printer paper, his eyes red-rimmed as a熬夜的 university student.
“All kids are like this now,” Emily says from her balcony in Lisbon, sipping sangria. “It’s the digital age.”
But I see the way his fingers twitch when I hide the router. The tantrums when I suggest a walk to the duck pond. He’s not gaming—he’s haunting.
The GP in the next town over shrugs. “Grades fine? No trouble then.” The school nods. No one sees how he jumps at doorbells, how he forgot Alfie’s name last Tuesday.
At night, I press my face into the pillow so he won’t hear me cry. I dream of the Oliver who chased ice cream trucks, who believed in pirate codes and secret kingdoms under hedgerows. Now he speaks in acronyms I don’t know, to friends I’ll never meet.
If you’re reading this—anyone—tell me how to break the spell. Not for my sake. For the boy who still exists, somewhere behind that flickering glass. Before he vanishes completely.
