Broken Soup

Broken Soup Jenny Valentine An intriguing, compelling and moving novel from the award-winning author of Finding Violet Park.When the good-looking boy with the American accent presses the dropped negative into Rowan's hand, she's sure it's all a big mistake. But next moment he's gone, lost in the crowd of bustling shoppers. And she can't afford to lose her place in the checkout queue – after all, if she doesn't take the groceries home, nobody else will.Rowan has more responsibilities than most girls her age. These days, she pretty much looks after her little sister single-handedly – which doesn't leave much time for friends or fun. So when she finds out that Bee from school saw the whole thing, it piques her curiosity. Who was the boy? Why was he so insistent that the negative belonged to Rowan? Copyright (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2008 Copyright © Jenny Valentine 2008 Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780007229659 Ebook Edition © May 2012 ISBN:9780007369638 Version: 2015-03-23 For Molly and Ella, Jess and Emma, and Kate. All great sisters. Contents Cover (#u62d93d30-51be-58a1-acad-985b10017800) Title Page (#u57fd131a-c27c-5bf3-a3e6-28fb6ccbdfa0) Copyright (#u412bf1aa-7e18-5097-a169-ad28ecb53f63) Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-one Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Books by Jenny Valentine (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) one (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) It wasn’t mine. I didn’t drop it, but the boy in the queue said I did. It was a negative of a photograph, one on its own, all scratched and beaten up. I couldn’t even see what it was a negative of because his finger and thumb were blotting out most of it. He was holding it out to me like nothing else was going to happen until I took it, like he had nothing else to do but wait. I didn’t want to take it. I said that. I said I didn’t own a camera even, but the boy just stood there with this I-know-I’m-right look on his face. He had a good face. Friendly eyes, wide mouth, all that. One of his top teeth was chipped; there was a bit missing. Still, a good face doesn’t equal a good person. If you catch yourself thinking that, you need to stop. All my friends were cracking up behind me. The girl at the counter was trying to give me my change and everybody in the queue was just staring. I couldn’t think why he was doing this to me. I wondered if embarrassing strangers was one of the ways he got through his day. Maybe he walked around with a pile of random stuff in his pockets – not just negatives, but thimbles and condoms and glasses and handcuffs. I might be getting off lightly. I didn’t know what else to do, so I said thank you, who knows for what, and I went red like always, and I pulled a face at my friends like I was in on the joke. Then I shoved the negative in my bag with the oranges and milk and eggs, and he smiled. All the way home I got, “What is it, Rowan?” and “Let’s see” and “Nice smile” – a flock of seagulls in school uniform, shrieking and pointing and jumping around me. And I did my usual thing of taking something that’s just happened apart in my head, until it’s in little pieces all over the place and I can’t fit it back together again. I wanted to know why he’d picked me out of everyone in the shop, and whether I should be glad about that or not. I thought about what he said (you dropped this … no really … I’m sure) and what I did (act like a rabbit in headlights, argue, give in). I was laughing about it on the outside, feeling like an idiot on the quiet. I had no idea something important might have happened. My name is Rowan Clark and I’m not the same person as I was in that shop, not any more. The rowan is a tree that’s meant to protect you from bad things. People made crosses out of it to keep away witches in the days before they knew any better. Maybe my mum and dad named me it on purpose, maybe not, but it didn’t do much good. Bad things and my family acted like magnets back then, coming together whatever was in the way. When I got home with the shopping, I forgot about the negative because there was too much to do. Mum was asleep on the sofa while Stroma watched Fairly Odd Parents with the sound off. Stroma’s my little sister. She was named after an island off Caithness where nobody lives any more. There used to be people there until 1961 and one of them was someone way back in my dad’s family. Then there was just one man in a lighthouse, until they made the lighthouse work without the man and he left too. That’s what Stroma and her namesake have in common, getting gradually abandoned. I made scrambled eggs on toast with cut up oranges and a glass of milk. While we were eating, I asked her how her day was, and she said it was great because she got Star of the Week for writing five sentences with full stops and everything. Being Star of the Week means you get a badge made from cardboard and a cushion to sit on at story time, which is a big deal, apparently, when you’re nearly six. I asked her what her five sentences were, and she said they were about what she did at the weekend. I said, “What did we do?” and she reeled them off, counting them on her fingers. “I went to the zoo. With my mum and dad. We saw tigers. I had popcorn. It was fun.” Five lies, but I let it slide, and after a minute she met my eye and started talking about something else I couldn’t quite make out because her mouth was full of orange. Stroma and I had whole conversations with our mouths full. It was one of the benefits of parentless meals. That and eating with your fingers and having your pudding first if you felt like it. After supper she did a drawing of a torture chamber while I washed up. “It’s us going swimming,” she said, pointing at the rivers of blood and the people hanging from walls. I said, “We can go on Saturday if you want,” which she did and I already knew it. She asked me to draw a unicorn, and even though it looked more like a rhinoceros and should have gone in the bin, she coloured it pink out of loyalty and called it Sparkle. When she was all clean and in her pyjamas, we’d read a book and she was feeling sleepy, Stroma asked for Mum. Just like a kid from Victorian times who gets to see a parent in order to bid them goodnight, but the rest of the time has to make do with the staff. I said Mum would be ten minutes because I’d have to wake her up first. I put this lullaby tape on that Stroma listened to every night since forever and I knew she’d probably be asleep before anyone made it up there. Mum hated being woken up. A cup of tea didn’t even scratch the surface of her hatred for it. You could see the world enter her eyes and become fact and pull her back under with the weight of itself. As soon as she was awake she just wanted to go back to sleep again. I knew that we had to be patient, and I do understand that sleep was where she got to pretend her life wasn’t crap, but I also think that two live daughters might have been something to stay awake for. I rubbed her back for a bit and then I said Stroma was waiting. She brushed me off and got to her feet and said, “What does she want now?” like it’d been her feeding and bathing and entertaining Stroma all evening, not me. I said, “She just wants a kiss goodnight,” and Mum rolled her eyes and moved towards the stairs like her whole body was glued down, like it was the last thing on earth she felt like doing. I watched her and I thought what I always thought – that the old Mum was trapped inside this new one’s body, helpless like a princess in a tower, like a patient on the operating table whose anaesthetic’s failed so she can’t move or call out or let anyone know. She just had to watch with the rest of us while everything went horribly wrong. With everybody out of the room and all my jobs done and a moment to think, I remembered the boy in the shop and the negative that wasn’t mine. I got it out to have a look. I’d never really seen one before. It was folded over on itself and covered in the dust that lives at the bottom of my bag. It seemed so out of date, shinier on one side than the other, its edges dotted with holes, a clumsy way to carry a picture. I held it up to a lamp. It’s hard to adjust your eyes to something that’s dark where it should be light. It was like looking at a sea creature or a mushroom, until I saw it was an open mouth and I was holding it upside-down. The mouth was pale where it should be darkest, towards the back of the throat. That’s about all I could see, an open mouth filled with light and two eyes like eyes on fire, the pupils white, the iris shot with sparks against the black eyeballs. It was a face pushing out light from within, beaming it through the eyes, the open mouth and nostrils, like somebody exhaling a light bulb. two (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) I haven’t mentioned my brother Jack yet, which is odd because he’s the thing most people knew about me then. Wherever I went, being Jack’s sister was my ticket in. It was easy. Everyone loved Jack. I didn’t have to do anything to make them love me too. It was all taken care of. How would I describe my big brother to someone who doesn’t know him? I could start with nice to look at (my dad’s height, my mum’s skin). Or clever, because learning new stuff just never seemed hard for him. Maybe funny. When you’d been with Jack for a while, I guarantee your stomach muscles would start to ache. And generous, because he’d give anything to his friends if they needed it. But I don’t want to put anyone off. All of those things are Jack, but not in a smug or annoying way, not so you mind someone else having all the luck. If you ask me, he’s one of those people who make a room more interesting when they’re in it, who make everyone else wilt just a little when they leave. There’s two years between us and then nearly ten until Stroma, so we were like the first round of kids, the planned ones I suppose. If I was going to tell someone just one of my Jack stories, it would be his ‘Map of the Universe’. I think it came free with National Geographic. He’d had it for years, stuck on the inside of his wardrobe door, but no one else had ever really looked at it. One day Mum was ranting about the mess everywhere and how she couldn’t think straight because of everybody’s crap around the house. You could hear her coming up the stairs talking to herself about it. She came into Jack’s room with a pile of clean laundry. He had most of her coffee cups in there, all in various stages of penicillin. His sheets were balled up on the floor and his mattress was propped against the chest of drawers because he’d just been teaching me how to jump-slide down it. The bin was overflowing (and it stank) and the floor was so littered with books and bits of paper and caseless CDs that it was hard to know where to tread. “Why,” said Mum, “do I bloody bother?” and she looked around, and then down at the ironed clothes she was fool enough to be carrying. I could feel her slave speech coming on so I tried to blend into the wall. Jack put his arm around her and said, “Come and look at this, Mum.” He stood her in front of the wardrobe, stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. He was already way taller than her then. When he opened the doors, everything tumbled out like clothing lava. I think there was fruit peel and crisp packets in there too. Mum sort of bellowed and made fists and screwed her eyes tight shut, and there was this quiet pause where I thought she was going to properly start. But Jack said, “No! No, that wasn’t it, that’s not what I wanted to show you, honest,” and he was laughing and refusing to let her get angry around him. I was so close to that place where laughing is bad and it’s impossible not to. I couldn’t look at him. He pointed to the map and said, “This is the KNOWN UNIVERSE,” in a rumbling, half-serious voice like that man who does all the movie trailers. Mum was still holding the laundry. She rolled her eyes and started to speak, but Jack stopped her. He had the broken aerial of his radio in his hand and he was using it to point at the map like a teacher, like a weather man. “This tiny dot,” he said, “is PLANET EARTH. And that lives in this cylinder here, which is our SOLAR SYSTEM. That’s the sun and all the planets, right? You knew that.” Mum’s foot was tapping, double-time, like, “Let’s get this over with”. “Now this cylinder, our solar system, with the sun and the planets and everything, is this tiny dot in this cylinder which is the NEIGHBOUR GROUP.” He paused for effect, like he was looking at a class of scientists. “And the neighbour group is now this tiny dot in this next cylinder which is a SUPER CLUSTER. Are you getting this?” There were five or six cylinders altogether and the last one was the KNOWN UNIVERSE. “The KNOWN UNIVERSE’ he said to her over and over again. “THE KNOWN.” Mum said, “What does this have to do with anything?” “Well,” Jack said with his hands outstretched and this “love me” look on his face. “How important is a tidy room now, in the scheme of things? Where does it register on the map?” Mum laughed then and so could we. Jack gave her this big bear hug and she said he was far too smart for his own good. She threw his clean clothes on top of everything else on the floor. And she said, “You still have to tidy up.” Like I said. One of those people who make a room more interesting when they’re in it. I’m not saying Jack’s perfect. I’m not pretending he hasn’t wound me up or kicked me too hard or made me eat mud and stuff like that, because of course he has. Maybe all brothers do. It’s just that he also looked after me and made me laugh and told me I was cool and taught me things nobody else but your big brother can. So I miss him. We all miss him. We’ve been missing him for more than two years now. And it’s never going to end. three (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) Bee would have been in Jack’s year. I knew her face, but I’d never spoken to her. She came from somewhere else about a year after he died. I knew nothing about her. The only reason I noticed her that day in the lunch hall was that she was looking at me. At first I thought she was doing it by accident – that staring-into-space thing where you wake up and realise you’ve been looking straight at someone and they’re wondering why. She was watching me and I was waiting for her to snap out of it, but she didn’t. Instead she walked right up to me like I was on my own, and she smiled and looked around and said hello, and then she said, “What was it?” Like that, out of nowhere. I said, “What was what?” because I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Bee said, “The thing he gave you. What did he give you?” I said, “Who?” And she said, “The boy in the shop.” I asked her how she knew about it and she said she was behind us all in the queue. I tried to picture the people staring at me in the shop that day, but Bee wasn’t one of them. It was days since then. “I was there,” she said. “I saw the whole thing. He was cute. What was it – his phone number?” I laughed a bit louder than everyone else and said, “No way, as if,” and looked at my shoes. Bee said I’d put up quite a fight and I said, “Well, it wasn’t mine.” She said, “What wasn’t yours?” I wasn’t sure if I still had the negative on me. I had to dig around in my bag for a while before I found it. She held it up to the strip lighting, this bedraggled little opposite of a picture. We were quiet for a minute, then Bee said, “Who is it?” and I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “Do you think it’s a man or a woman?” but I couldn’t tell. She said, “What a weird thing to get given.” I said that was why I’d tried not to take it, because it was obviously a mistake. “Maybe he saw you drop it,” Bee said. But he didn’t, because I didn’t, and I said so. She asked me why somebody would make up something like that, what the point would be, and I thought about the boy smiling, about how many people there are out there that you don’t know the first thing about. “Takes all sorts,” I said, and I held out my hand for it back. Bee gave it to me and I put it inside a book to smooth out some of the creases. She asked me what I was going to do with it and I said I hadn’t thought. And then the bell went and seven hundred and fifty people started moving for the doors all at once, including Bee, back the way she’d come, without saying goodbye, like our conversation never happened. Our house was still a shrine then. Jack was everywhere, smiling out of rooms, watching on the stairs, aged nine and eleven and fourteen, his hair combed and parted, his ears sticking out, grown-up teeth in a kid’s mouth. Mum talked to the pictures when she thought she was alone. I heard her. Like one side of an ordinary phone call, like he wasn’t dead at all, just moved out and on the other end of the line. The kind of phone call he’d have probably got from her every week the whole of his life. You’d think death could have spared him that. I never knew what she found to talk about. I was right there and she hardly spoke to me. Home was quiet like a shrine too. Like the inside of a church, all hushed tones and low lighting and grave faces. There wasn’t any Jack noise any more. No loud music, no shouting, no playing the drums on the kitchen table at breakfast, no nothing. My room had been a landing. When Stroma was born and we needed the space, Dad blocked it off with a new wall and stuck a door in it, but it was too cold for a baby so Stroma got my old room and I moved in. It was tiny, given that it was really just a turning space for somebody using the stairs. There was no radiator and the power came in on an extension from the kitchen, so I was usually cold and I could never lock my door. Jack’s room was on the same floor as Mum’s and Stroma’s, next to the bathroom. It had two windows and tall bookshelves and an old wooden desk. The walls were a warm grey colour called ‘Elephant’s Breath’. It was the saddest place in the house, the living, breathing mother ship of everybody’s grief. If you were thinking you were getting over Jack and things were nearly back to normal, you’d only have to go in that room and you’d start missing him from the beginning all over again. Now and then that was just how I wanted to feel. Sometimes I’d put on some of his music. Sometimes I’d pick up his guitar, but I can still only play the first six notes of Scarborough Fair so that never lasted long. I don’t even like that song. Usually I’d stretch out on his bed and look at the sky through his windows. That night I sat with my back against the wall and my chin on my knees and I turned the negative over and over between my fingers. I thought about what Bee had said, about what I was going to do next. Nothing, I thought, and I aimed it into the bin from where I was sitting and went back to thinking about my brother. I wasn’t sure if Stroma missed Jack, not really. She stuck him at the end of her prayers with Grandad Clark and Great Auntie Helen (who she’d met, like, twice) and the people on Newsround, but I reckoned she forgot him almost as soon as he was gone. She hardly ever saw him anyway; maybe at breakfast when he wasn’t really awake, or in the car when he’d have headphones on and act like she wasn’t there. Jack did loads of nice stuff with Stroma, like taking her to the park or teaching her how to make paper aeroplanes, but I think she was too young to remember. She didn’t know him at all. I wonder how she added it up for herself, this stranger in her family dying and turning her family into strangers. It was me that had to tell Stroma because nobody else had done it. It was the morning after they told me. She had no idea Jack was dead. Everything around her was altered and she was trying so hard not to notice. She looked up at me and said, “What’s the matter with Mummy?” and I said she was sad. She asked me what Mum was sad about and I said, “Jack’s gone,” and Stroma carried on humming this little tune and pouring nothing out of a tiny china teapot. Then she said, “Where?” and I said I didn’t know. She picked up a cup and saucer and handed it to me. She said, “Blow on it, it’s really hot.” I said, “He’s dead, Stroma. He’s never coming back.” I could feel this weight, this downward pressure in my head, and I thought it was possible I could cave in or implode because I just said that out loud. Stroma was quiet for a minute, and then she sighed and looked right at me and said, “Can I have something to eat now? I’m starving.” And that was how it started, how I ended up looking after her. I went into the kitchen to make some toast and there wasn’t any bread, not even a crumb. I knocked on the door of Mum’s room and got some money and I took Stroma with me to the shop. And all the time I was putting stuff into the basket and working out what we could afford, and saying no to marshmallows, but yes to chocolate biscuits, and planning what we’d have for supper and then breakfast. I didn’t have time to lose it. I didn’t have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn’t have time to miss Jack. Stroma carried on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me too. four (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) Believe it or not, school was one of my favourite places back then. Everywhere else seemed like hard work, so school was a distraction. I didn’t have to worry about where Stroma was. I didn’t have to handle Mum. I didn’t have to think about the obvious unless I wanted to. The gap Jack left there got filled pretty quickly by someone else clever and good at running and a bit of a flirt. It was like a day off. Because of course that didn’t happen at home. There was no room for anything else. I sometimes thought that if Jack was looking down on us all, he’d be feeling majorly hassled, not free to enjoy the afterlife at all. I think Mum and Dad drove each other crazy with it in the end. They stopped talking altogether about three months before Dad moved out. There was this odd, loaded quiet around them. We kept out of their way. Maybe they split up because of Jack, because when they looked at each other they only saw him. Maybe they blamed one another for stuff. Maybe they were headed that way already. Maybe him dying kept them together a bit longer. I have no idea. When Dad finally came clean about leaving, he wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. He’d been staying on sofas for a while, pretending he was at the office, basically avoiding us. He needn’t have bothered to pluck up the courage to break old news. Even Stroma had worked that one out, aged five. He was gone a long time before he was gone, if you know what I mean. And when he left, things just got worse. Because we had him to miss too. So anyway, school was like a holiday, if you can imagine that. I don’t know how I’d overlooked Bee there before, because after that day she spoke to me, she was the first face I saw in any crowd. It didn’t matter who I was with, I’d suddenly be aware that she was around. It was like a special light went on that made her easy to find. The thing is, once you start looking at Bee you almost have to tell yourself to stop. We aren’t so different on paper: same height, same colouring maybe, at a stretch. But Bee has something I don’t. Her skin and hair are different shades of the same honey. The way she holds herself is so precise and effortless and graceful I still wonder how she does it. And it isn’t just me who thinks that. I see other people watching her all the time, trying to work out how come they aren’t put together the same way Bee is. It was after school the next time I bumped into her and she acted all surprised, but I had this quiet feeling she’d been waiting for me. I had to pick up Stroma and Bee said did we want to get an ice cream or something. We went to this place at the top of Chalk Farm Road that’s been there forever. They sell cones out of a window on the street or you can go in and have sundaes in tall glasses and scoops in a silver cup. Stroma sat on Bee’s lap, even though there were about thirty-nine free chairs in there. She was chatting away about some boy in her class called Carl Dean who cut a hole in his shirt on purpose, with scissors, because he needed that exact colour for his collage. She was making us laugh without even trying. I’d been remembering the birthday party we had there, me and Jack, when he was nine and I was seven. I thought about all the kids who’d come and where they were now, and if any of them remembered Jack or knew he was dead or even minded. I was wondering which chair he had sat on then, and if it was the one I was sitting on now. It was cool and quiet and empty in the shop. I saw a crowd from my class go past the window, yelling, dancing, drawing attention to themselves. Another day that would’ve been me, but right then I was glad to be hidden away at a marble table with a girl who said things I hadn’t heard ten times before. We finished off Stroma’s mint choc chip when she’d had enough. Bee tried to make an origami swan out of her napkin and failed. We looked at the pictures on the wall – signed photos of celebrities nobody’d ever heard of. When the waitress took Stroma off to get more free wafers, Bee asked me if I’d thought any more about the negative. I hadn’t, not at all. It took me a second just to work out what she was on about. She seemed interested, so I said I was going to get it printed, just out of curiosity, to see what it was. I wanted to say the right thing so I could spend more time around her. I knew it would still be in Jack’s bin because I was the only one who did the rubbish, Tuesday nights. And that was the only thing in his bin anyway, we never used it. Still, I was thinking I’d just get another negative if that one had somehow disappeared. It’s not like she would ever know. After a bit she said, “If you want to print it I can help you. I know how to do that stuff.” It was nice the way she said it, not pushy, and she said I could bring Stroma, so I said OK. We went to her house later in the week. Bee lived with her dad and her little brother in a top floor flat on the Ferdinand Estate, with a playground out the front and a view across London. The walkway outside her front door was lined with geraniums and daisies. You could see the Telecom Tower. Bee’s dad was called Carl and he had overgrown pale hair and sunken cheeks, and you just knew by looking at him that he played the guitar. Her brother was about two. He was wandering around with a snoopy T-shirt and no pants on, which cracked Stroma up straightaway. He had hair the same colour as Carl’s, but all matted and curly. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said. “You don’t know much about me at all,” she said, smiling. “We just met.” We watched the chubby little back of him padding down the hall, Stroma close behind, fussing over him like a sheepdog. “What’s his name?” “Sonny.” Carl took Stroma and Sonny off to the kitchen to make jam tarts. Stroma couldn’t stop giggling. I thought her knees might buckle with the joy of it. Bee was turning out cupboards in the bathroom. She said it would be much quicker to scan the negative into Photoshop and get an image straight up on screen, but she didn’t have a scanner and anyway she printed photos in the bath because it was how Carl had taught her and it was all his equipment. She said the old-fashioned way was better because she liked the not knowing, the time things took to happen. The taps were on and she had her head under the sink. She was talking to me about this thing called the Slow Movement, which seemed to mean baking your own bread instead of nipping out for it to the nearest shop, and making lunch take all day, and getting a boat and a train and another boat instead of flying, because the journey is everything, not just a way of getting from one place to another. She was telling me this stuff I’d never considered and I hadn’t even taken my coat off, but I think I got most of it. Bee’s brain is as precise and quick and extraordinary as the rest of her, the way she has you look at things. While I was waiting around, I picked up a book and started leafing through it. One of the photos inside was the first ever photo, Bee said. It was taken more than a hundred and fifty years ago by a Frenchman called Daguerre. She said in those days they had these huge plate cameras and everybody had to sit still for ages if they wanted their picture to come out. They had these special headrests that you clamped yourself in to have your portrait done or else you’d be nothing but a blur. The photo she showed me wasn’t a portrait, or not on purpose anyway. Daguerre had aimed his camera out of the window to take a picture of the street where he lived. It was a busy street in Paris, people everywhere, except in the photo nobody’s there, like ghosts in a mirror. The only two people in the picture, the only living things among all the ghosts, are a man having his shoes shined by a boy. Only they had stayed in one place for long enough to become real. I loved that picture. I looked at them, the two blurry figures in the near distance, and I told myself that sometimes people get noticed and remembered and appreciated without doing anything heroic or extraordinary, without knowing anyone’s watching them at all. The stuff that Bee hauled out of various cupboards was a big sort of microscope, a red light bulb, three trays like you’d plant seeds in, a torch, a pair of tongs and a couple of black bottles. She was setting things out the whole time she was talking to me, laying the trays in the bath, pouring out stuff, screwing the shower head off the bath taps so it ran like a hose, swapping the red bulb for the one that hung bare in the ceiling. She pulled down the blind and closed the wooden shutters, dropping the bar down to keep them closed. Then she bolted the bathroom door and turned on the red light, which took all the colour out of us and the room, apart from itself. Everything went soft around the edges and the whites of Bee’s eyes became the same colourless red as her hair and her lips and her skin. She said, “Where’s the negative?” and while I was getting it from my bag, she put her hair up with two pencils. I handed it over and she slid it into the top of the big microscope which she’d balanced on a piece of plywood over the sink. Then she flicked a switch and my negative, nobody’s negative, shone A4 size on to a white board below. I should have recognised it then, but I didn’t. Bee was sizing it up, blocking bits out and squaring them off. “It’s so damaged,” she said. “We won’t get all the scratches out of it.” It was the only source of white light in the room. She was adjusting things, bringing the image in and out of focus so it waved, one minute hazy, the next sharp; like an apparition, like the ghost of a photo, or a photo of a ghost. I couldn’t stop looking at the eyes, like those plasma globes that spark inside with lightning when you touch them. Bee was all business, making noises to herself about the quality of the shot, the aperture, stuff that went straight over my head. She said she was going to do a strip test to work out the best exposure time and she started counting, “One, two, three, four – one, two, three, four,” four times altogether before she poured some of the liquid into the trays and put the paper into the first tray with her special tongs. The room stank, a sharp sour toxic smell my lungs didn’t want to let in. “Watch this,” Bee said, and the paper began to darken and cloud. “It’s only a slice of it, maybe a bit of cheek or chin.” She picked it up and dipped it in tray two, trailing it through the liquid again. “That’s the fixer,” she said. “That stops the photo from disappearing on you later.” I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me. She unlocked the door and slipped out into the bright hallway for a moment. “Ten seconds,” she said on her way back in. “Ten seconds should do it.” The ghost came back on and Bee counted to ten, and then the paper went into the developing tray again and I held my breath. I guess I counted to twenty before something started to appear. Bee was right about the waiting bit, the anticipation. My chest was tight and I was taking these quick shallow breaths because of the stench, and everything was focused on this white paper, about to change in the red light. When it happened, it happened way too fast. Suddenly, there he was, looking straight up at us with his hand on his throat and his eyes shining and his mouth wide open in a laugh. Jack. The fluid lapped and rippled over his face as it moved in the tray. He looked like he was drowning in it. I was on my knees with my cheek on the cold edge of the bath. I wasn’t sure how I got there. I was swallowing and swallowing and my mouth kept flooding with water. Bee picked my brother up with the tongs and slid him into the fixer. She didn’t say a word. Jack looked at me and laughed. He laughed until the fixer was done and while she held him under running water to wash the chemicals off. He laughed while she cleaned up around me and switched the light bulbs back and opened the window. He laughed the whole time, pegged up on the clothes line, dripping into the bath. five (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) When Stroma was smaller, she used to try to see round the corners of things. Every time somebody read her Babar the Elephant she’d stop at the page where his mother gets killed and tie herself in knots for a look at the face of the hunter who shot her. I never told her that you can’t see all the way round on a flat piece of paper, but she must have found out somehow because she stopped looking. I reminded myself of Stroma, holed up in Bee’s bathroom, searching Jack’s photo for things that weren’t there. His eyes were pale and glassy, the irises ringed with black, the pupils like pinpricks. They looked like mirrors in the grey of the print. I thought I might see something reflected in them, the way you see things in the back of a spoon or in someone else’s sunglasses, but there was nothing there of any use, only the shadow of my own face peering into the shine of the paper. Bee’s dad got me out of there in the end because Sonny needed the loo and he really couldn’t wait any longer or things would get messy. Leaving the picture was like leaving a cinema on a sunny day. I didn’t know what to do with my eyes because they weren’t looking at Jack any more. Stroma grabbed me in the corridor and talked at a million miles an hour about how she’d rolled out pastry and used special cutters and put only half a spoon of jam in each one and did I want to see them cooking, did I, did I? But I didn’t. Bee gave me a glass of water and sat with me in the sitting room. She looked out of the window, hands in her lap, back dead straight, jaw held tight shut like she was forcing her teeth together. It must have been awkward for her. I said, “Do you know who that is?” and she nodded. I said, “How come? From pictures at school?” and she nodded again. I guess she didn’t know what to say either. I wouldn’t have listened if she had. Every sound was suddenly too loud for my ears and I couldn’t get my breathing right and I had this overwhelming need to be on my own in the dark, seeing and hearing nothing. Sonny came into the room with jam all over his hands and his face and his T-shirt. He started to use me like a climbing frame, like I was just more furniture. “Sorry,” Bee said, and she picked him up by his waist and twirled him around and kissed the jam on his nose. “Go and find Papa.” I was numb all over. I left the negative behind and I took Jack home in an envelope. Mum was in bed and if she heard us coming in, she didn’t show it. I opened a tin of soup for Stroma and skipped the bath and read her the shortest book I could find. I promised I’d ask Mum to go and kiss her if she got up. Then I took my brother to my room, sat against the door so no one would get in, and I looked and I looked and I looked. I’ve thought about it a lot, how much Jack changed in the time after he died. Don’t ask me how, but he wasn’t himself any more. So what if you couldn’t move for school photos and team photos and brushed hair and smiling? None of them were the real him. Jack would never have let Mum get those photos out to show people. He’d have burned them if he could. They had fights over it. And his room was the same, but totally different, like a stage set of itself, like a piece in a museum, a fake boy’s room. I don’t think I ever saw his bed made when he was alive. He let plates and cups collect and fester on his desk for weeks. He stashed food under the bed and he smoked out of the window, even when the wind blew it straight back in so everything smelled of weed and old bananas and his socks, not air freshener and dust and the stopping of time. When I think of people like Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe, it seems the most famous thing they ever did was die young. They stopped being real people who took drugs or told lies or went to the loo or whatever. They became saints and geniuses overnight. They became whoever anybody wanted them to be. It was the same with Jack. He was a saint. We were just the living. I pictured Mum lying in her room, all absence and silence and skin and bone. This boy she was grieving for, this perfect boy who made her life worth living, who made her forget she had other kids to love – who was he exactly? She loved him and everything, obviously, but I don’t recall her worshipping him like that when he was alive. I remember her calling him a little shit and grounding him for borrowing out of her purse. I remember her yelling at him to get up in the morning and stop peeing in the houseplants. Even Jack would look bad if you compared him to his dead self. It was as if by losing him, she got him back, the son she wanted, the one she imagined having, before Jack was born and his personality got in the way. Looking at that picture I realised there was something about it that was different to all the other ones plastering the house. His hair didn’t look combed or over-shiny. It looked thick and dark and messy, like every day. His skin looked like you could reach out and touch it. It was so detailed, the chicken pox scar on his brow bone, the flush on his cheeks, the way a smile could change his face completely if he meant it. There was a brightness about him. He was happy, not acting that way in front of a cheesy backdrop. It was off duty. It was real. It was the person I was missing. It was the Jackest picture of Jack I’d ever seen. six (#u60b3d627-4245-554c-9e29-dc77af75b666) There’s no need to go through all the ways I tried to make sense of my own brother’s face showing up like that. None of them worked anyway. A stranger had given me something I’d never seen before that turned out to be mine. How was I supposed to feel? How could it be mine if I’d never seen it? If I had no idea something existed, how could I manage to drop it? I checked the lining of my coat, the insides of my bag, the pockets of everything, and I didn’t find anything else I’d never seen before. And this boy who gave it to me. I tried to remember what he looked like. Dark hair, dark eyes, I had a few details, but I couldn’t see him clearly. I wasn’t even sure I’d recognise him again. Did he know what he was doing or was it a coincidence? Which of those was worse? I’m not a fan of coincidence and fate and all that. It makes me feel like there’s no point doing anything if you can’t change things, if you can’t be even a tiny bit in charge. Plus I realised that if there was coincidence, there was also anti-coincidence, the thing that only just never happens by the skin of its teeth, and because you’re not expecting it, you have no idea that it almost did. Everywhere I went, I pictured him just leaving, disappearing round a corner or about to arrive, but only when I’d gone. It wasn’t a good feeling. It tied me up like a ball of string in a cartoon. I didn’t show anyone else in my family the picture, not Mum or Dad or Stroma. I kept it to myself, hid it in the dark far corner underneath my bed where I could reach for it at night and where nobody else ever bothered to go. It had found me so it was mine. That’s what I figured. Every so often, Mum had to go to the doctor to prove she was taking her medicine and not selling it on the black market. She must have cost the NHS a pile of money with all the pills she was on so they probably needed to make sure she was worth it. I swear she had the wrong prescription because the only thing different about Mum since she’d started taking it was that she’d got thinner. The bones in her hands and face were clearer than they used to be, like the ground coming back under melting snow. I had a list of questions for the doctors, like whether they knew Mum was bereaved and not overweight, and if she ever actually said a word to them because she was pretty much silent at home. I wanted to ask them what happened next, but they couldn’t talk to me because I was a minor and it was all a big secret. They didn’t know that I came with Mum every time because without me she wouldn’t even get there. It flew under their radar that I was the one making sure she arrived in one piece and behaved herself, not the other way round. The waiting room was jammed with bored kids and posters about sexually transmitted diseases. There were polite notices everywhere that said if you punched any of the receptionists you were in big trouble. Mum was sitting next to me with her eyes closed and her nose and mouth buried in a scarf. It wasn’t even cold. Stroma was doing her best to play with three bits of Lego and a coverless book. When they called Mum’s name over the loudspeakers, she ignored it. I watched her trying to disappear inside her own clothes. Stroma said, “Mummy, that’s you,” and started pulling at her. The receptionists were watching. The doctor’s voice came on again: “Jane Clark to Room 5.” Stroma managed to pull Mum’s sleeve right over her hand, so her arm stayed somewhere inside her coat, lolling against her body, inert like the rest of her, hiding. “Come on, Mum,” I said, pulling her towards her feet by her other hand. “You have to get up and see the doctor.” We looked ridiculous, we must have done. Two kids trying to force a grown woman to move. In the end, somebody muttered into a phone and a doctor came down to take Mum upstairs. “It’s not working,” I said to him. “Whatever you’re doing isn’t working!” And my voice got louder and angrier in the hush of the room. I sat back down and waited for people to stop staring. Stroma climbed on to my lap and put one arm round my neck. Part of me wanted to push her off and walk out. The other part kissed the top of her head and looked around. And that’s when I saw him, the boy. He was sitting on a bench opposite and to my left, in the corner, and he was watching us. Stroma must have felt me tense every muscle because she looked up at me and said, “What?” I shook my head and said, “Nothing,” but I didn’t take my eyes from him because I couldn’t. He was wearing a black top with the hood up. He didn’t move when I saw him. He didn’t flinch or even blink. He didn’t look surprised. He smiled and I remembered the chip in his tooth. My face felt tight and clumsy, like someone else’s, so I didn’t smile back. I just rested my chin on Stroma’s head and carried on looking. I knew I had to ask him about Jack’s picture. I knew this was my chance. I was working out what to say when the woman at the desk called out, “Harper Greene? Harper Greene? Can you fill in this form, please?” And the boy stood up. At the same time, Mum came out, empty-faced, eyes dead ahead, and Stroma jumped off my lap. They headed for the door. I couldn’t let either of them cross the road without me. “It’s just your address,” the woman with the clipboard was saying to the boy. “You haven’t put one down.” He had an accent, American maybe. I hadn’t remembered that. “Market Road,” he said. “Number 71.” And he looked straight at me when he said it. Market Road is not the sort of road you stroll down lightly if you’re a girl. I said that to Bee as soon as she started her go-and-meet-this-Harper-Greene campaign on me. I reminded her that most of the girls walking down there were working pretty hard to pay off their drug debts. She said, “Don’t walk then. Go on your bike if it makes you feel better.” We were sitting under a tree in Regent’s Park, watching Sonny and Stroma fill a bin bag with conkers. Stroma liked being the oldest for once. She was ordering Sonny about like her life depended on it, doing quality control on his offerings, and he didn’t seem to mind one bit. I’d been talking about the photo. I’d been telling Bee some stuff about Jack. I said, “I just don’t get how it could show up like that out of nowhere. It’s like he’s trying to tell me something. And I never thought I’d hear myself talk crap like that.” “Maybe the boy knows, maybe he doesn’t. I just think you need to ask him.” “I’m not going,” I said. Bee shrugged and stared up through the leaves. “I mean it,” I said. “I’m not going.” “You’re chicken,” she said quietly, almost like she didn’t want me to hear. “You’re being a coward.” I said she was right. I said I was a coward, a sensible one. Isn’t that what you’re told to be when you’re growing up and you’re a girl? Don’t go to chat rooms, don’t go out alone, don’t trust anyone, don’t talk to strangers and don’t meet them, ever. I’d had it drummed into me so hard, safety, safety, super safety, and I’d soaked it all up like a sponge. I hardly ever crossed a road unless the green man told me to. I didn’t sleep right if the door was unlocked or I knew there was a window open somewhere. I carried my keys, stuck out sharp between my knuckles, if I was out after dark; even if it was still daytime, even if it was just the walk home from school in winter. So why the hell would I send myself to that part of town to look for some strange boy I had no reason to trust? I told Bee about the time me and Stroma were walking down the canal. We came round the corner on an empty path and ahead of us was a man, fishing. He was dressed like he’d seen too many war films, combats and dog tags and mirrored shades. He had a bare, bright white, too-bony chest and instantly I didn’t trust him. I got this picture of him in my head, slicing open a fish with a big glinting knife. I grabbed Stroma’s hand and ran back the way we’d come, looking behind me to see if he was chasing us, dragging my poor sister through nettles and dog shit. And he wasn’t, poor guy; he didn’t do anything. “He was just fishing,” I said. “But I didn’t think so because I’m paranoid. That’s my point.” Bee listened and she said she got it, the whole stranger-danger thing. She said it was good to be careful. She also said there was a big difference between being careful and being shit-scared of everything. She said, “Being afraid all the time is no way to live. What’s it going to be? A bomb? A dark alley? Some boy who picked up a photo off the floor? Do you think you can stop bad things happening to you just by fearing them?” “No,” I said. “Then why are you bothering?” she said. We were quiet for a minute, then she said, “He’s not some fifty-year-old bloke pretending to be a teenage girl on the Internet, Rowan.” “I know that,” I said. “But he still might be an axe-wielding maniac.” “Whatever,” Bee said. “He might also be a cool person. If you insist on never trusting all the people you haven’t met before, just because you’ve never met them, your world’s going to be a very lonely place.” “I’ve got enough friends,” I said. “I’ve got loads.” Bee laughed and said that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. She changed the way she was sitting and turned to me. “How would you like to die?” I said I wouldn’t like to at all and she laughed and said I had to choose a way, I couldn’t say that. “How would you like to die?” I asked her. She said, “I want to fall out of an aeroplane,” and I said, “What? You’re joking! Why?” She said that she’d want to really know her time was up and there was no possibility of hope, so she could kind of throw herself at it and dive straight in. “Plus,” she said, “I’d be flying.” I stared at her with my mouth open. To be that brave, I thought. Bee said, “So, what about you?” I didn’t want to say now. I felt like a fool. “In my sleep, when I’m old. Nice and peaceful,” I said. “I thought everyone did.” “You surprise me, Rowan,” Bee said. “The shit you deal with. I think you’re way braver than that.” We sat under the tree and I thought about it. Mum and Dad moved us to a school because they thought it was better. They moved house to keep us safer. They gave us swimming lessons and cycle helmets and self-defence classes and a balanced diet. They paid our phone bills so we’d never run out of credit in a crisis. They promised us five grand on our twenty-first birthdays if we never smoked. And still one of us died. What can I say? Death is just one of those things that you can work out a thousand different ways of avoiding, but you’re going to meet head on regardless. I looked at the side of Bee’s beautiful face under the shadow of the leaves. I thought about the things she knew and the places she’d been and the books she’d read. I thought about how much better I felt just for knowing her. I thought about her and Carl and Sonny and their front door with the flowers outside. I thought it couldn’t hurt to be a little more like her. What was the point of being afraid of things before they happened? Why not wait till they were on top of you and then deal with them? “You’re right,” I said. “You’re always right.” “So do it,” Bee said. “What have you got to lose?” Which is how I found myself at half-past four on a grey afternoon, getting rained on and looked at, cycling not too slow and not too quick, counting down doorways on Market Road. Bee was looking after Stroma. That was the final brick in her house of getting Rowan to do it. seven (#ulink_a2784374-90c3-5687-981c-83efa9af3369) Market Road was long and the buildings were fairly spaced out. There was a massive estate set well back from the road, six huge blocks with cheerful names like Ravenscar and Coldbrooke. I tried to look purposeful (but not businesslike) and I kept going. I was beginning to wonder if 71 even existed. And then I passed it. It was on a corner, a smashed up, boarded up, covered-in-bird-shit old pub. The signs had been painted out in black and the number 71 was daubed on the front door in white gloss. It didn’t look like anybody but the pigeons lived there. There was no way I was going in. I stopped at the kerb a little way past and turned round. I was balancing my bike with one foot on the ground, looking for my mobile to call Bee and tell her it was a big nothing, when I saw the van parked outside the building, round the corner. It was an old ambulance with long double doors at the back and stripy curtains. The driver’s door was open on to the pavement and Harper Greene was sitting there, his seat pushed back, both feet up on the windscreen. He was reading a book. For maybe ten seconds I stood quite still. His hair was cut so short you could see the skin beneath, the shape of his skull. I liked his face. I could break it down and say his nose was straight and his eyes were brown and all that, but it wouldn’t work like his face worked, together all at once. Like Jack used to say when something good happened, you had to be there. I watched the slow movements of his breathing, his quick eyes scanning the page. I breathed in hard and I thought, What would Bee do? When I got off my bike and started pushing it towards him, he looked round and smiled like he’d been expecting me. Then he got up and disappeared over the back of his seat and opened the double doors at the back, as if that was the way you received guests in an old ambulance, like everyone knew that was the way you answered the door. We said hello at the same time. I wasn’t doing a great job of looking him in the eye. “I’m Harper,” he said. I nodded and said, “I know,” but I was supposed to say, “I’m Rowan,” so I did, when I finally realised. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and he put his hands in his pockets, I guess instead of shaking mine. “Is this where you live?” I said. “At the moment,” he said. “I move around.” “Market Road?” I said. And he laughed and said, “Yeah, very scenic, but the parking is free.” I asked him where he was from. He said, “New York. You?” “Around here,” I said. I pointed at the pub. “Who lives in there?” “Oh, no one,” he said. “I guess they moved out a while ago. It’s wrecked in there.” “I like your ambulance.” He smiled. “Me too.” He said he got it “from a guy” for hardly anything because the guy was going back to New Zealand and he wanted it to have a good home. It was strange, Harper talking about stuff while the thing I wanted him to talk about just waited. “Do you want to come in?” he said. “I don’t think so.” I was still holding on to my handlebars. He asked me if I was worried about my bike. I shook my head. I said, “Why did you give it to me?” “What? The thing you dropped?” “I didn’t drop anything.” “I saw you,” he said, and he was smiling, like he couldn’t believe I was arguing with what he knew to be true. “You dropped it on the doorstep of the shop and I picked it up.” I told him I thought it was a joke at first. “I thought you just gave stuff to people for a laugh. I thought you were trying to show me up in front of everyone.” He said that would be too weird and we both laughed, but only a little. “What’s weird,” I said, “is that I’ve never seen that photo before. But it does belong to me.” He asked me what I meant and I said, “It’s of somebody I know.” “Isn’t that because you dropped it, because it was yours?” He smiled and held his hands out in front of him to say, why are we still talking about this? “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I did, but I still haven’t worked out how.” “I don’t get why that’s hard. People drop things all the time.” I got the feeling he was beginning to wonder about me; about my sanity, I mean. I said, “It’s a picture of my brother, and my brother is dead.” I hoped really hard he wasn’t going to say something cushiony. “God, I’m sorry,” he said, and then, “Can I get you a drink?” Part cushion, part nothing, which was fine. I propped my bike against a wall and sat down in the doorway of the ambulance. While Harper was lifting the lid off the little hidden cooker and filling a kettle by pressing his foot down on the floor, I said, “Do you see why it’s weird? That I never saw it before and you found it and it’s of him?” He said he really hadn’t meant to freak me out. He said, “I guess you owned it without knowing.” “Yeah, but even that’s doing my head in. I wouldn’t have it and then forget about it. It’s a really amazing photo.” “It’s a mystery,” he said. “I get it. You want to solve it.” We sat on the floor of the van with the back doors open and our feet on the ground. The tea was some spicy, gingery thing that came out of a packet covered in proverbs, but it tasted quite good. He said, “Have you always lived around here?” “Norf London girl,” I said and he laughed. “Upstate New York boy.” I didn’t know what to say about New York. I’d never been there. I didn’t know what upstate meant. I said, “Wow,” or something just as vacant and then I asked him how old he was. Eighteen last August, three months older than Jack. I said, “How did you get it together to do all this, leave home and travel around and everything?” “I always wanted to do it,” he said. “The world’s so big, you got to start early. I wanted to get moving, get away.” “Get away from what?” I said, and he shrugged. “Everything and nothing. I just wanted to move.” I was rolling a bit of gravel around under my shoe. “Everything,” I said. “I’d like to get away from that too.” There was a football match going on in the sports fields opposite. We could just see the players’ heads bobbing around above the level of the wall. “Just so you know,” he said, “it turns out not to be possible.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Oh, I don’t know. You’re always gonna be you, doesn’t matter where in the world you are.” I thought of Jack’s TOO DEEP WARNING LIGHT, this thing he used to say when anyone got a bit self-help on him, a bit road-less-travelled. It made me smile. If I’d known Harper better, I’d have told him what was so funny. I asked him where he’d been so far. “I flew from New York to Paris. I wanted to go by boat, but it costs way too much. I wanted to be in the middle of an ocean. Nothing but water for weeks; see if I went crazy. Maybe another time. I stayed with a friend in Montparnasse for a while. Then I got the train here. I haven’t been doing this too long. I’m pretty new at it.” “Where are you going next?” “I just got here, so nowhere for a month or so. I want to go to Scotland and Norway and Spain and, well, wherever. Plus I’ve got to work when I can, when the money’s low. We’ll see. What about you?” “Oh, nothing, nowhere,” I said. “I haven’t done anything yet.” He seemed to find that funny so I didn’t tell him it wasn’t a joke. He asked me about Mum. I wished he hadn’t seen her that day, in the doctor’s. I told him she wasn’t like that really, which was a lie. I told him they were adjusting her medication and it was just a question of waiting. I stuck up for her because I knew I should, but I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I was him. He said, “Was that your sister with you?” and I said yes, and what with the Jack fall-out and my dad going part-time on us, I’d pretty much been left in charge. I told him that my friends were getting bored with me because I couldn’t hang around too much, and if I did, it was with a six-year-old in tow. I heard myself grumbling and complaining to this person I’d just met, and I was telling myself, “Stop it! Be funny, be cool. Stop doing this.” But it was true and I couldn’t make it leave my head if it was there. While my friends were thinking about what their jeans looked like in their boots, I was wondering how much milk there was in the fridge. When they talked about make-up and boys, I heard laundry and CBeebies. I said, “I’m not much of a picnic to know any more.” Harper stood up and poured the rest of his tea on a straggly plant growing out of the kerb. He said he’d be the judge of that, if it was OK by me. At about half six I stood up and started fixing the lights on to my bike. I wasn’t ready to leave at all. Harper said, “Did you want to stay and eat? I’m a not bad cook.” “I can’t. I have to get my sister. I have stuff to do.” I thanked him for the photo. I said, “I’ve no idea where it came from, but I suppose it’s mine and I’m glad to have it.” “You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m glad it was you.” I wheeled out on to the darkening road, past the sad cases and the kerb crawlers and the football players and Harper waving at me until he was out of sight. I couldn’t stop smiling. When I got to Bee’s, she said didn’t I get her messages, that she’d sent three while I was gone. “Even I started to wonder if he was an axe-wielder when I didn’t hear back.” I hadn’t checked my phone. I didn’t think she’d be worrying. “He lives in an ambulance,” I said because I knew she’d like that. “He’s from New York.” “Did you like him?” “Yes, I liked him.” “What did you talk about?” “Not much. I wasn’t there that long.” “Yes, you were,” Bee said. “You’ve been gone nearly three hours.” “I suppose so. He’s travelling. He’s funny. He’s very cool.” “Told you,” she said. “I liked him a lot.” “How did it go?” “How did what go?” “Did you talk about the thing, the picture? I thought that’s why you went.” I said we had, but not really. “I don’t know. Maybe I did drop it. I must have done.” “And you’re going to see him again.” I shrugged, like it wasn’t something I was in charge of. Even if I did want to hang out with Harper, there was Stroma to think about. I said that to Bee with my hands over Stroma’s ears while she wriggled to get free. I said it wasn’t so easy making plans with a kid in tow. Bee raised her eyebrows at me. She said I didn’t have to make life so complicated. She said she’d look after Stroma any time. She said, “Not everyone minds being around little kids.” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jenny-valentine/broken-soup/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.