Original Sound

On Monday, the college put a photograph of Rowan on a table in reception, beside a vase nobody had seen before.

It was his enrolment photograph. He wore a shirt he had bought for a cousin's wedding and an expression that suggested the photographer had asked him to do something unreasonable with his chin. Someone had chosen white flowers. Someone had printed his full name beneath the frame.

I stood looking at it until a boy behind me said excuse me and reached past to sign in late.

The world was going to keep doing that. Moving around him.

We were asked to go straight to the hall. No register in form rooms, no usual argument about whether having your coat on counted as being ready for the day. Teachers stood at doors and directed us with their hands. People spoke quietly, then laughed too loudly at something, then stopped.

Imani found me near the back. She didn't ask whether the seat beside me was taken. She sat and put her bag between her feet.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

We looked at the stage.

Finn stood near the front with the head of sixth form. His shoulders were rounded in a way I wasn't used to. He looked as if he'd slept in his clothes, though his shirt was ironed and the collar lay properly. Clare must have done it, or he had. Grief did not tell you who still managed an ironing board.

Our principal, Mr Ellison, came to the microphone carrying a sheet of paper. He unfolded it, smoothed it on the lectern, then looked out at us without reading.

He said Rowan's name. He said the police had confirmed a death and were investigating the circumstances. He asked us not to share rumours, images from the search or anything that might hurt Rowan's family. There would be staff available in the library throughout the day. Nobody had to speak in public. Nobody had to know how they felt yet.

For the first minute, I thought he was doing it well.

Then he began to describe Rowan as a young man who always put others first, and a strange anger rose in me. Rowan did not always put others first. He had once refused to lend me a charger because I'd lost the last one, which was entirely fair. He could be sharp, impatient, petty about being interrupted. He hated group work unless he could choose the group. He would have been furious to hear himself converted into a boy whose main virtue was making things easier for other people.

Beside me, Imani shifted in her chair.

“What?” she whispered.

“Nothing.”

She followed my gaze to the principal.

After a moment she whispered, “They don't know what else to say.”

I knew. That didn't make the words belong to him.

Finn was invited to speak. He took the microphone in both hands for a second before setting it back in the stand.

“I don't have anything prepared,” he said.

His voice broke on prepared. Several people in the first rows started crying again.

Finn said Rowan had believed the town could be better. He said they had argued about how to make that happen. He said an argument with Rowan usually ended with you doing something useful because it was easier than explaining why you hadn't.

A few people laughed, softly. I did too. That sounded like him.

“He could make you feel you were wasting your life by not recycling a yoghurt pot,” Finn said. “But he also made you feel your life was worth doing something with.”

I looked down at my hands.

It was a good sentence. Finn had always known how to find those.

When he finished, he stepped back from the microphone and stared at the floor until Mr Ellison put a hand on his shoulder. The hall stayed quiet. Nobody seemed certain whether applause would be wrong. In the end, nobody clapped.

Outside, people gathered in loose groups without going anywhere. A girl from Rowan's English class was crying against a friend who kept saying I know, I know. A boy near the doors complained that he couldn't cry and thought that meant something was wrong with him. His friend said it didn't, then offered him a piece of chewing gum.

Imani and I went to the art room.

Ms Delaney had put away the exhibition labels. The dog painting leaned against the wall, still disappointed. She told us we could work if we wanted or sit if we didn't. She had made tea in the staff-room kettle, which was apparently a rule she was prepared to break for the day.

I chose work because sitting seemed likely to become looking at my phone, and my phone contained a hundred people trying to decide what Rowan's death meant before his family had been allowed to understand that it had happened.

My laptop connected to the college network and began producing notifications with a briskness that felt offensive.

One was from Martin Pell at Alderwick Camera Hire.

The police have asked about the recording cards. The blue-latch case returned Saturday contains the camera body and two batteries, but no card wallet. Please confirm whether the wallet may have been packed separately. Do not clear any copies you hold.

I read it twice.

Imani was at the next table, trimming the white border from a print. I turned the screen towards her without speaking.

She put down the knife.

“Could you have put it somewhere else?”

“I don't think so.”

“That isn't no.”

“I know.”

I opened the photograph I'd taken at the end of the event to show how the borrowed equipment should fit back into its foam compartments. It was something Martin had asked us to do because, as he put it, everybody believed themselves capable of remembering where things went until they encountered a box with spaces in it.

The blue-latch case was open on a trestle table. The camera sat on one side, batteries on the other. In the shallow pocket under the lid, visible above the folded strap, was the corner of the black card wallet.

“There,” I said.

Imani leaned closer.

“Yes.”

“That was twelve fourteen. I texted Finn after.”

“Send them the original picture. Tell them what you remember after taking it.”

I did. I wrote that I had closed the case, clipped both latches, and left it with the other borrowed equipment for Finn to collect. I also wrote that I had not watched him take it away. There had been other people in the hall. Val, Judith, the keyboard player, two volunteers clearing glasses. I would not make the photograph prove more than it did.

Martin replied that he would pass the information on. A police officer contacted me separately a few minutes later to confirm the timeline. He did not tell me where the wallet might be. He asked whether there were other originals.

“The sound desk recorder,” I said. “Gareth was going to give us that.”

“We're speaking to him. Do you have any files from it?”

“Not yet.”

“Thank you. Keep anything you receive.”

After the call, I stared at the blank space between the laptop's keys and the screen.

“What if the wallet's just in another bag?” I asked.

“Then they'll find it.”

“What if it isn't?”

Imani didn't answer immediately.

“Then guessing won't put it back.”

I closed the email.

Across the room, a girl named Natalie was trying to mount a photograph for the exhibition. She had cut one corner crooked and was becoming increasingly upset about it. Delaney went over, looked at the print and said they could use a larger mount. Natalie said it wasn't the mount, then began crying with both hands pressed over her face.

Delaney sat beside her. Nobody else looked over for very long. We were all learning, clumsily, how not to make another person's distress into an event.

My phone vibrated again.

Gareth, the volunteer sound engineer, had left a voice message. He sounded tired and angry with himself. The desk recorder had stopped at eight fifty-four. A power lead had been kicked loose; the internal battery had run down. He'd noticed only after the band began and restarted it then. The police had the unit. He was sorry. He kept saying that, as if he had failed to capture the evening on purpose.

I listened twice, then put the phone down.

“No sound for the break,” I told Imani.

She looked at me.

“Of course there isn't,” I said.

“Bea.”

“I know. It's not a conspiracy. Things break. People forget.”

“That's not what I was going to say.”

“What were you going to say?”

“That you're shaking.”

I looked at my hands. She was right.

I hadn't eaten breakfast. I hadn't slept properly. For two days I'd been moving between fear and tasks, and now the tasks were beginning to run out or turn against me. I had thought a clean original recording would do something simple: show what happened, show what didn't, make my lie smaller beside a fact nobody could dispute. Instead there was a silent copy, a missing wallet and a sound recorder that had stopped for an ordinary reason at a terrible time.

Imani got up.

“Come on.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere with food.”

“I have work.”

“You have a laptop open.”

There was no sensible answer to that.

We went to the canteen. Most of the tables were empty. The woman at the till gave us toast even though breakfast service was technically over, then pretended not to notice when Imani's card took two attempts.

We sat near the window. I tore the toast into pieces rather than eating it until Imani pushed the butter towards me.

“I'm not going to supervise you,” she said. “But you do actually have to put some of it in your mouth.”

“Sorry.”

“You don't have to apologise for breakfast.”

I buttered a piece.

Outside, the groundsman was collecting litter with a long-handled grabber. He stopped at a plastic bag caught in a hedge and worked at it patiently, moving from one angle to another. I watched until he freed it.

“Thank you for yesterday,” I said.

“For what?”

“Not asking me to answer.”

Imani looked at the window.

“My aunt died last year. People kept sending questions. Lovely questions. Kind questions. But every message needed a little piece of me sent back.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you.”

She accepted the words simply. I was used to people saying it's okay when it wasn't.

“Did you know Rowan well?” I asked.

“Not like you did.”

“That doesn't mean—”

“I know. I liked him. He gave me a very detailed explanation of why my bus photographs should include the timetable.”

I smiled.

“He said empty seats were only sad because people couldn't get where they needed to go. Otherwise they were just available seats.”

“That is painfully Rowan.”

“He was right, a bit. Annoyingly.”

We ate in silence for a while.

Then Imani said, “I don't want you thinking yesterday's conversation is sorted because something worse happened afterwards.”

I looked at her.

“About the police statement,” she said. “I care about you being all right. I'm still angry you put me in the position of wondering whether I'd helped you hide something.”

“You didn't.”

“I know that now.”

“I didn't ask you to keep the picture back.”

“No. You asked whether I'd given it to them. Then you let me spend an afternoon trying to help you while you knew why the answer mattered.”

I put down the toast.

“You're right.”

She looked almost surprised by the lack of argument.

“I don't have a better explanation,” I said. “I wanted to know what they could see. I wanted you to like me. I wanted those to be two separate things, and I acted as if wanting made it true.”

Imani turned her cup slowly between her hands.

“I did like you,” she said.

The past tense struck harder than it should have.

“Did?”

She looked up then, and there was a small, exasperated tenderness in her face that I didn't know what to do with.

“Don't make me grade it right now.”

“Okay.”

I picked up the toast again because it gave both of us something else to look at.

My phone lit with a message from Mum. The police had arranged to speak to me at two. She would meet me at home first. I showed Imani, who nodded.

“Tell them the uninteresting bits too,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The bits that don't fit the story you think you're in.”

I thought of the keyboard player, the extension cable, the grey case, the stupid light bulb on the landing. All the things that had existed before any of us knew which ones would matter.

“I'll try,” I said.

For the rest of lunch, we talked about her exhibition print. She said her father still wanted a version of the bus that looked less lonely. I suggested putting him in it. She said he would spend the whole time telling her which seat had a broken spring.

I laughed, properly this time.

Then the bell rang, and we put our plates on the trolley and went back to the day.