Somebody Else's Words

Finn's photograph on the showcase page was one I'd taken.

He sat on the edge of a rehearsal stage, elbows on his knees, looking just past the camera. I'd told him to think of something mildly annoying because every time I asked him to look natural he produced the expression from his driving licence. He had thought of me, he said. The photograph had come out well.

Underneath it was his name, the title of a short film and a paragraph about growing up in Alderwick.

I read the whole page, as Imani had asked.

His work was good. That mattered, though I wasn't sure why at first. The film linked under his profile showed people arriving at the market before dawn: stall legs unfolding, van doors opening, hands arranging fruit beneath strings of lights. He had a better instinct for movement than I did. His shots found one another easily. Watching them, you felt the town assembling itself out of small deliberate actions.

He didn't need to borrow somebody else's life to make the film worth seeing.

The paragraph beneath it began with ordinary application language: ambition, opportunity, wanting to tell stories that weren't always heard. I had written versions of those sentences myself. Half the people in the art room probably had.

Then came the line Jules remembered.

I started making pictures while waiting for the eight-twelve bus. Drawing the houses opposite made the waiting look deliberate, as though I had chosen to stand still.

I read it once.

Then I opened the old documentary file.

Not the public link. The copy on my laptop, in the folder I had been keeping out of sight without quite admitting that keeping a thing out of sight was not the same as dealing with it.

Rowan appeared at the bus stop with his notebook balanced against his knee. It had been raining earlier, and the shelter roof still dropped water at irregular intervals. I remembered being annoyed because each drop made him look up, breaking the shot I'd imagined.

In the recording, my voice asked when he'd started drawing seriously.

“Define seriously,” Rowan said.

“More than just in lessons.”

He considered the question while moving his pencil across the page.

“Probably when I started getting the eight-twelve. It came at eight-forty or not at all. I got tired of looking like a person who'd been forgotten, so I drew the houses opposite. It made the waiting look deliberate.”

He looked up then, directly at me rather than the lens.

“Don't make that sound profound. I was mostly bored.”

I stopped the video.

The print room around me was quiet except for the ventilation fan. Somebody had left a pot of brushes in the sink, their handles leaning together like a group of people waiting for bad news.

I had cut the last sentence from the documentary. It interrupted the tone. At the time, that had seemed like a technical decision.

Now Finn's profile had borrowed not just Rowan's words but my cleaned-up version of them, the part that sounded more meaningful because I'd removed the person stepping back from his own seriousness.

I sat with my hands away from the keyboard.

The afternoon we filmed at the bus stop had been cold enough that Rowan kept swapping the pencil from one hand to the other to warm his fingers. We'd missed two buses on purpose because I wanted an empty shelter, then discovered the next one was cancelled. Rowan laughed at me for being defeated by the subject of my own film.

We walked home through the rain. I carried the camera under my coat. He held his notebook inside a plastic bag that had once contained bread.

“You know you can just draw in the rain,” I'd said.

“You know paper can just dissolve.”

“Use better paper.”

“Buy me better paper.”

I had promised that if the film won anything, I'd buy him a notebook with pages thick enough to survive an English winter. He said there wasn't enough prize money in the world.

At the corner near the market, we stopped beneath the awning of a closed shop. He showed me the drawing he'd made while I changed the battery. It was of me, hunched over the camera, one hand raised as if I were about to tell the weather where to stand.

“My nose is not like that,” I said.

“Art isn't always comfortable.”

“Neither is friendship, apparently.”

He grinned.

That was the version of the afternoon I had not put in the film. The wet bread bag, the ridiculous drawing, the way we'd laughed so hard a woman carrying shopping smiled at us without knowing why. None of it explained anything neatly. It was simply us being friends.

I remembered the warmth of that for a moment before remembering what had happened afterwards.

On the showcase page, Finn's paragraph continued.

He wrote about learning to look carefully at overlooked places. He wrote about the cost of leaving a town where opportunities arrived rarely and often through people you already knew. Parts of it were true of him. Parts were true of me, Rowan, Jules and almost everyone who had ever waited for a bus outside the college.

The specific memory of drawing those houses was Rowan's.

That did not make the rest false. It did mean Finn had put his own name above an experience he knew belonged to somebody else.

I took screenshots showing the page, the wording and the date displayed on the profile. Then I saved the page as it was. I did not add arrows, circles or a caption calling anybody a thief.

I wrote down the time in my original recording where Rowan said the line. I wrote when the documentary had first been screened. I wrote that the film had been available to the student events team through the shared folder, including after I removed my own public link.

Then I sent a short factual account to the investigating officer.

I did not use the word proof.

When I finished, Imani came in carrying two mugs.

“Delaney made more tea. I took the one with the least suspicious stain.”

“Which one's that?”

“Mine.”

I accepted the other.

She looked at the screen, then at my face.

“You found it.”

“Yes.”

I showed her the passage and played Rowan's original answer. I let the final sentence run this time: Don't make that sound profound. I was mostly bored.

Imani smiled sadly.

“That bit should have stayed.”

“I know.”

She read Finn's paragraph again.

“He might say he remembered the phrase and forgot where it came from.”

“He might.”

“Would you believe him?”

“I don't know.”

I wanted to. That was the part I had to keep separate from the answer.

Imani put her mug down.

“Have you told them?”

“Yes. With the dates. And the fact that he could have seen the film.”

“Okay.”

She sat on the stool beside me, not close enough for our knees to touch.

“Do you think this is why Rowan was upset?”

“Maybe part of it. The declaration form is another part.”

“You don't know the whole conversation.”

“No.”

I looked at Finn's photograph. I had taken it on a day when we'd argued about which of his films he should submit. I'd said the market one. He'd said it was too ordinary. I'd told him ordinary was only a problem if you hadn't looked at it properly.

He had listened to me then.

I couldn't work out why that memory made me angrier than the stolen sentence.

My phone lit with a message from Finn.

Are you still in art? Can you help me with something later?

I stared at it.

Imani watched my face.

“What?”

I showed her.

“What does he want?”

“He hasn't said.”

“Ask.”

I typed: What do you need?

The reply came after a minute.

Just to talk. Everyone keeps talking at me.

I put the phone down.

“I should tell Mum,” I said.

“About meeting him?”

“Yes.”

“That would be sensible.”

“You don't have to make it sound so unlikely.”

She smiled a little.

I texted Mum, explaining that Finn wanted to talk and that I had found something in his public application profile that seemed to come from Rowan. I said the police had the details. Mum replied that a public place was fine, but I was not to conduct an interview for anybody, and she wanted to know when I was home.

I told Finn I could meet him at the café opposite college for half an hour.

Then I added another sentence before I could lose the nerve.

I need to ask you about the words in your Harcourt profile.

The message showed as read.

For a long time, no reply came.

When it did, it was only three words.

Oh, that. Okay.

I looked at the screen until Imani touched the side of the laptop and lowered it gently, not closing it all the way.

“Finish your tea,” she said.

It had gone cold. I drank it anyway.