The Cut

In the version I sent to the school, my brother never came through the door.

There was no cleverness to it. I put a marker at nine minutes past the hour, changed my mind, moved it back another three, and lifted out the whole gap between the speeches and the band. Nobody needed eleven minutes of an empty stage. Nobody had paid five pounds to watch a man in a fleece try to connect a keyboard.

The cut made the evening look better organised than it had been. That was the job.

Outside my bedroom window, someone was attempting to start a lawnmower. They had been attempting it since eight. Each time the engine caught, I thought I might be able to concentrate, and each time it died I became personally angry with a machine I couldn't see.

I played the transition again. Judith Lane thanked the volunteers. The band appeared beneath a wash of blue light. An audience that had actually spent eleven minutes looking at its phones was suddenly clapping.

Much better.

I saved the file as LANTERN_FINAL_3, which told you something about my working methods and nothing encouraging about my future.

Mum knocked with her knuckle against the frame. She had already opened the door.

“Toast?”

“Please.”

“You could have come down.”

“I could have.”

She put the plate in the space between my mouse and a stack of sixth-form prospectuses. One triangle of toast rested on the other like the roof of a house. She had cut off the corner I'd burned yesterday and apparently decided this was now how I liked it.

“Did you sleep?”

“A bit.”

“How big a bit?”

“A sleep-sized one.”

She looked at the screen. In the paused frame, Judith's mouth was open and her hands were spread apart. It looked less like a fundraising speech than a demonstration of the size of a fish.

“Lovely picture.”

“It's a video, Mum.”

“I know what a video is.”

Behind her, the landing light had gone out. Sam had taken the bulb from it two days earlier to put in the bathroom. Neither of us had told Mum. She still flicked the switch twice whenever she went upstairs, giving electricity the opportunity to reconsider.

“What time did your brother come in?” she asked.

I took a bite of toast. It was a better way of obtaining three seconds than saying I didn't know when I did.

“After me.”

“That's helpful.”

“He was clearing up.”

“He was supposed to be helping Val lock up. Val rang me at half past eleven looking for him.”

On the screen, Judith continued to measure her imaginary fish.

“I didn't see him at the end,” I said.

That was true. It was one of several true things I could have said, and I had selected it quite carefully.

Mum sighed and took an empty mug from the windowsill. “He’s nineteen. I'm aware of that. He tells me often enough. But if he says he'll do a thing, he needs to do it.”

“I know.”

“I wasn't asking you to explain him.”

“I wasn't.”

She waited. I waited. Somewhere in the garden next door, the lawnmower finally started and stayed started.

Mum touched the back of my chair. “Eat the other piece as well. You're working tonight?”

“Five till nine.”

“I'll leave something.”

When she had gone, I rewound the film before the cut.

The stage at the Lantern Rooms occupied the shallow end of what had once been Alderwick's municipal swimming pool. The blue depth markings were still on the walls. Judith called them a reminder of our shared history. Val called them a reason nobody could put up shelves. The balcony, where I'd set up the camera, had been the viewing gallery. Parents had stood there in outdoor shoes watching their children learn not to drown.

Last night, half of those parents had stood below it drinking warm wine from recyclable cups. They were helping, Judith said, to keep an important community resource in community hands. Tickets, donations and the auction would pay for repairs to the north roof. There had been a cardboard thermometer by the door, its red strip stopping a little shy of the sum printed at the top.

I had filmed the thermometer three times because the first two people who posed beside it stood in front of the number.

The balcony shot wasn't beautiful. The tripod didn't quite fit behind the rail, and part of a safety notice occupied the bottom corner. But it was steady, it showed the whole stage, and nobody could put a pint in front of the lens.

At 21:06 on the camera clock, Judith stepped down. At 21:07, Sam appeared at the far right of the frame, in the service passage behind the stage.

He was carrying a grey equipment case.

Not running. That was important to me then. He was not running, or looking around, or doing any of the other things you imagined someone did when they had something to hide. He walked with one shoulder lower than the other because of the weight of the case. A piece of white tape on the handle flashed as he passed beneath a light.

Then he was gone.

The viewing copy had no sound. I had started making it on my laptop during the second half, turning off the camera's scratch audio because it mostly contained me clearing my throat, and assembled the evening's files afterwards. We were supposed to get the proper sound from the mixing desk. The original card was in the equipment crate Finn had collected at the end of the night.

That was the system, such as it was: borrowed camera, borrowed tripod, laptop with a battery that lasted forty minutes if I didn't ask it to think too hard. We weren't a production company. We were a girl with an expired editing-software discount and several adults who thought exposure was an acceptable rate of pay.

I watched my brother cross the corner of the frame again.

Twenty minutes before that, he had come upstairs to the balcony. He'd smelled of hot oil and the lemon spray from the kitchen. A tear in the reflective strip of his work jacket had caught in the door.

“Can you give me a hand with something?” he'd said.

I had been trying to get Judith's microphone back into the right channel. I told him I was busy.

“Just cover for me if Val asks.”

“Cover what?”

“I've got to take a case round the front.”

“So tell Val.”

“Bea.”

I knew that version of my name. Sam could make one syllable sound like a reminder of everything we'd ever done for each other.

I'd looked up then. His face was shiny from the kitchen heat, but the rest of him seemed oddly still.

“What's in it?”

“Equipment.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I'll explain later.”

He hadn't. At one in the morning, I'd heard him come home, drink water straight from the kitchen tap and sit on the stairs for a long time before going to his room. The stairs complained in different places under our different weights. Sam was the third and the seventh. Mum was the fifth. I could usually manage them quietly if I went sideways.

Now his door was shut.

I exported the film. A progress bar crawled along the bottom of the screen, and for three minutes I had nothing to do but eat toast and look at my own reflection in the black strip beside the preview window.

My phone vibrated under a prospectus.

I expected Judith asking where the film was. She had already sent a message at seven seventeen saying no rush, followed at seven forty-two by a question about whether it would be ready before lunch.

It was Finn.

Have you heard from Rowan?

I typed: Not since last night.

Then I deleted it.

I had seen Rowan the night before, but we hadn't really spoken. There were people you could say hello to without having to consider everything the word left out. Rowan had stopped being one of them in November.

Why? I wrote.

Finn rang before I could put the phone down.

“Hi,” he said. “Sorry. Are you up?”

“Obviously.”

“Right. Yeah.”

He wasn't laughing. Finn usually laughed when I was rude to him. It was one of the advantages of having known somebody since you both had mittens on strings.

“What's happened?”

“Denise can't get hold of him.”

“It's nine in the morning.”

“He didn't go home.”

The export bar reached sixty-eight per cent. A small box announced that my laptop would soon run out of storage.

“Maybe he stayed with someone.”

“That's what she thought. She's been ringing round. He sent her a message last night, but—”

“But what?”

“It's weird. I don't know. He said he was going away for a bit.”

I turned in my chair and looked through the window. The man with the lawnmower had taken off his sweatshirt and hung it over a fence post. Beyond our little gardens were the roofs of the shops, the water tower and the hill on which everyone pretended the new houses weren't spreading.

There were plenty of places you could go away to. Rowan talked about most of them.

“What did Denise say?”

“That he hasn't answered anything since. His phone's off.”

“Has she called the police?”

“She is now. They don't make you wait, apparently.”

“I didn't think they did.”

There was a little silence. I could hear someone in Finn's house moving plates.

“Did you see him leave?” he asked.

“No.”

“From up there, I thought maybe—”

“I was filming the stage.”

“Yeah. Course.”

The progress bar stopped at eighty-two per cent, as if it too had been distracted.

“Did you?” I asked.

“What?”

“See him leave.”

“No. He was cross about something. Not cross exactly. You know Rowan.”

I did, but less well than I used to. Rowan could go quiet in a way that made everyone around him fill the silence with mistakes. He rarely had to raise his voice. You would hear yourself talking and realise, halfway through a sentence, that you were giving him more reasons to be disappointed in you.

“Maybe he wanted everyone to leave him alone,” I said.

“Maybe.”

Neither of us sounded convinced.

Finn asked if I would check my messages, and I told him I already had. He said he was going to the centre because Judith was making a list of people who'd been there. I said I'd send the film through as soon as it finished.

“Don't worry about that,” he said quickly.

“It's nearly done.”

“Just—if there's anything with Rowan in it, maybe send that too.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks, Bee.”

Only Finn called me that any more. He had started in reception because he couldn't say Beatrice, and the shortened version had somehow survived both of us learning to read.

After he hung up, I checked my messages again.

The last one from Rowan was four months old.

Please don't put that bit in.

I stared at it until the words ceased to look like something a person had written. Then I locked the phone.

Downstairs, Mum was calling that she was leaving. I went to the landing and told her about Rowan.

She stopped with her hand on the front-door handle.

“Oh, Denise.”

There was nothing else in it. Not suspicion, not a theory. Just the name of another mother and the idea of waking up to an empty room.

“Will you be here?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Tell Sam when he wakes. And answer your phone.”

“I always answer my phone.”

She gave me a look that allowed both of us to leave that claim unexamined.

When the door shut, I went back upstairs and knocked on Sam's.

He didn't answer. I pushed it open an inch.

His room was empty.

The bed had been slept in, and his black work trousers lay in a heap beside it. On the desk, under an unpaid parking notice, was the little paper label that had been attached to the handle of the grey case.

I knew it because I had written it myself.

LANTERN ROOMS — BACKUP CAMERA. PLEASE RETURN TO BEA.

For a while I stood in the doorway, listening to the lawnmower and the hum of my laptop through the wall.

Then my phone lit up again.

This time it was a photograph in the sixth-form group chat: Rowan on a school trip, squinting into the sun, one hand raised to stop whoever was taking the picture.

Underneath it, someone had written: Has anyone seen him?