The Version I Preferred

Finn had ordered for me.

There was a chocolate milkshake on the table nearest the window, with two paper straws because I used to bite one flat before I was halfway through. He was sitting on the bench side, leaving me the chair with the uneven leg. It was the same arrangement we had arrived at when we were thirteen and thought buying something meant we could stay all afternoon.

“You still like those, don't you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. I suddenly thought you might have become a coffee person.”

“I can like two drinks.”

“Ambitious.”

His own coffee had a white skin across it. He had been there a while.

Outside, a delivery driver was trying to drag a sack truck up the kerb. The café owner went out to help, and for a moment all three of us watched the stack of oat milk tilt towards the road. Finn put his palm on the window as though that would steady it.

I had liked that about him for years. The small, automatic involvement in other people's difficulties. When a child lost a balloon, Finn looked up. When somebody dropped money, he was already bending to get it. None of those things had stopped being true.

“You said you needed help,” I said.

He rubbed the heel of his hand across one eye.

“I need people to stop asking me what I need.”

“That makes it quite difficult to help.”

“I know. Sorry.”

He looked thinner than he had on Friday. Not dramatically. Just less well fitted to himself, with a sore place at the corner of his mouth and his sleeves pushed up different distances.

“Mum keeps offering to cancel things,” he said. “My driving test. The programme. Everything. As if an empty calendar is going to make any of this better.”

“Do you want to go to Harcourt?”

“I wanted to go last week.”

“And now?”

“Now I can't say yes without sounding awful.”

The milkshake glass was sweating onto a square of paper. I moved it before the moisture reached the little metal pot of sugar.

“I've got my original recording,” I said. “The one with Rowan talking about the bus.”

Finn looked at me. Then at the glass.

“Right.”

“The wording in your profile is nearly the same.”

“I know which bit you mean.”

“How did it get there?”

He picked up his spoon and laid it down again.

“We all talked about those things, Bea. Films, getting out, the buses never turning up. It wasn't like he had a monopoly on waiting at a bus stop.”

“I didn't say he did.”

“You're looking at me as if I've stolen his whole life.”

“I asked about a sentence.”

He leaned back. I could see him deciding whether to be angry. It was a movement I knew: chin raised, lips pressed together, then the little exhalation through his nose that meant he had chosen to be reasonable.

“The application asked why visual media,” he said. “I had about forty versions. Mum said the first one sounded like a prospectus. The next one was too much about equipment. I remembered that line because it was good. I didn't sit there planning to take something from him.”

“But you put it in.”

“Yes.”

“And said it happened to you.”

He looked outside again. The delivery driver was closing the back of his van.

“I shouldn't have used it,” Finn said. “All right?”

It was the answer I had come for, or part of it. I had expected it to feel more solid. Instead it seemed to arrive with a small door attached: we could go through into an apology and leave the rest behind.

“Did Rowan see it?”

“I don't know.”

“He helped people with their applications.”

“Not mine.”

“But he might have seen the showcase.”

“Anybody might have seen the showcase.”

There was nothing wrong with the sentence. That was what made talking to him so tiring. Each separate answer could be true without helping me understand anything.

I took a drink. The paper straw had softened already.

“What about the address?” I asked.

His eyes came back to mine.

“What address?”

“Birch Road. On your financial declaration.”

For the first time since I had sat down, he went completely still.

“Where did you see that?”

“In some papers Rowan kept. His mum found them.”

“And she showed you?”

“She asked me to help sort them.”

“That isn't really yours to go through.”

“No. It was hers.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and pushed his cup away so fast that coffee reached the saucer.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm not having a go at Denise.”

I waited.

“Mum dealt with most of that,” he said. “The money side. I did the film and the statement. There was a question about where I stayed, and I used Nan's because I was working there a lot. It's quiet.”

“Staying and working aren't the same.”

“I know that.”

“Did you live there?”

“Not permanently.”

“Was her income the household income you put down?”

He glanced towards the counter. The owner was steaming milk, making a noise like a long, irritated breath.

“You've seen the whole thing, then.”

“Not everything. Enough to know it wasn't your parents' address.”

“Bea, you know what these forms are like.”

I did. Mum and I had spent an evening finding payslips for a travel-support application, and another trying to understand which payments counted as income. We had put the wrong date on one page and corrected it in blue ink. I knew forms could be confusing. I also knew the difference between our kitchen and a house where we did not live.

“Did Rowan ask you to change it?”

Finn put both hands flat on the table.

“He was making it sound much bigger than it was.”

“You said you hadn't talked about Harcourt.”

“I meant properly. About the programme. We hadn't sat down and discussed courses.”

“But you talked about the declaration.”

“For about two minutes.”

“When?”

He looked at me for long enough that I began to hear how I sounded. Short questions. No room between them. Mum had told me not to conduct an interview, and here I was arranging a person I had known since primary school into answers.

“On Friday,” he said.

“Before the event?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“That I ought to sort it before Monday.”

“Did you?”

“My mum's dealing with it.”

I put the straw down.

Finn leaned forward. “Can you stop for a minute?”

“All right.”

“No, actually stop. Not wait until I've said something you can use.”

The café owner brought a plate with two broken pieces of brownie on it. “These aren't saleable,” she said, in the voice adults use when they are trying to give you something without making you grateful. Neither of us touched them until she was gone.

Finn broke one piece in half.

“I was good at this,” he said. “Before all of it. I was good at something.”

“You're still good at making films.”

“Am I? Because you just told me I'm a fraud.”

“I told you I recognised a sentence.”

“And an address.”

“Yes.”

He laughed once, without amusement.

“Dad's been telling people about Harcourt for months. Before I even had the offer. Every client who came round. Every person at the centre. ‘Finn's our filmmaker.’ It got to the point where I couldn't bring a camera anywhere without having to prove it.”

“You could have told him to stop.”

He looked at me with such immediate disbelief that I felt stupid.

“I did tell him,” he said. “He thought I was being modest.”

I thought of Finn at twelve, making a cardboard spaceship with lighting wired through three different battery packs. His dad had brought people into the garage to see it. Finn had smiled until they left, then kicked a box because one of them called it a toy.

“I remember the spaceship,” I said.

His face changed.

“The hatch never opened properly.”

“You used a baking tray as the door.”

“It was the right shape.”

“It was very heavy.”

“You were the one who said it needed to look real.”

“I was twelve.”

“So was I.”

For a moment we were there instead: the hot garage, the smell of cardboard and solder, Finn handing me a plastic helmet with an elastic strap that caught in my hair. He had made a whole little film in which we saved a city drawn on a bedsheet. At the end, the city fell off its washing line. We kept that part because it was funny.

He slid the larger piece of brownie towards me.

“I know I messed up the form,” he said. “And the statement. I'm not saying it's fine. But people are acting like there's something wrong with me for wanting to leave this place.”

“Who is?”

He shrugged.

“Rowan?”

“I didn't say Rowan.”

“What did you mean, then?”

He took a long time to answer.

“I don't know what I mean any more.”

I believed him. That frightened me more than a neat denial would have done.

My phone buzzed. Mum asking whether I had left yet. I typed that I was leaving now.

“Have you told the police?” Finn asked.

“About the profile, yes. And Denise gave them the papers.”

He stared at the wet ring left by my glass.

“Of course you have.”

“They're trying to find out what happened to him.”

“And you think I know?”

I had not let myself put it that way. Even now, with his face in front of me, it seemed both possible and unbearable.

“I think you knew he was worried about your application,” I said. “You told me you didn't.”

Finn nodded slowly, as though I had disappointed him in a predictable way.

“You know what it feels like,” he said. “Having one stupid thing turned into everything you are.”

I stood up too quickly and knocked the chair against the table behind me. A woman moved her shopping bag out of the way.

“Sorry,” I said to her.

Finn was still sitting.

“I don't think taking that sentence defines who you are,” I told him. “I don't think a false form does, either. But both things happened.”

He pressed a thumb into a crumb on the plate.

“Can we talk when you aren't doing this?”

I wanted to say yes. I wanted the answer to be that simple: a time and a different conversation, when we could remember the spaceship and forget how carefully we had avoided saying Rowan's name.

“I don't know,” I said.

Outside, I stood beneath the café awning and wrote down what I could remember before I got on the bus. Not every pause or movement. The things he had actually said about Friday, the form, and his mother.

At the bottom I added that I had asked most of the questions, and that I had been upset.

The bus arrived while I was still writing. I let it go and called Mum instead.