A Bag Without a Boy

Sam told me to meet him at home. Then he told me not to go anywhere. Then he said he would ring me back.

I waited outside the centre for four minutes, watching a woman reverse a car with a missing-person poster already taped inside the rear window. Sam didn't ring.

I sent him a message.

I found the label.

The three dots appeared, vanished and appeared again.

It's not what you think.

That was an ambitious claim. He had no idea what I thought. Neither did I, entirely.

Before I could answer, Finn came down the steps carrying a roll of tape in his teeth and two cardboard boxes against his chest. I took the top box before it fell.

“Thanks,” he said, removing the tape. “We're taking these to Denise.”

Inside the box were more posters, a stack of paper cups and a packet of biscuits. Someone had also put in a bottle of hand sanitiser. The items suggested a meeting rather than a disaster, which was probably the point.

“Who's we?”

“Me. You, possibly. Mum's over there already.”

I looked at my phone.

“Have they found him?”

“Not him. His bag, maybe. On the late coach. The driver handed it in.”

“Where?”

“Northbridge. At the depot.”

Northbridge was forty miles away. It had a university, three cinemas and trains to places we referred to collectively as everywhere. Rowan had once spent an afternoon explaining that it wasn't a destination, just somewhere you changed transport. I'd said that sounded considerably better than Alderwick, where you mostly changed your mind.

“Was he on it?” I asked.

“They're trying to find out.”

Finn led the way to his car, a little silver thing his dad had taught him to maintain. There was always a packet of mints in the door and never any rubbish on the floor. I got in with the box on my lap.

We drove through town at the speed of Saturday traffic. Outside the bakery, two boys from our year stood with their phones tilted towards each other. One looked up as we passed. I wondered whether they were talking about Rowan or football or something completely unrelated. It seemed indecent that unrelated things still existed, although I'd spent the first twenty minutes of the morning being annoyed with a lawnmower.

“Do you think he actually went?” Finn asked.

“I don't know.”

“He's talked about it enough.”

“Talking isn't the same.”

“No. Obviously.”

At the crossing, an old man took a long time to negotiate the dropped kerb with a shopping trolley. Finn waited without tapping the wheel. His mother said he had an old soul. My mother said an old soul ought to be able to remember to bring back the baking dish we'd lent them at Christmas.

“Did you see the message he sent?” I asked.

“Denise read it to Mum.”

“What did it say?”

“Something like he was sorry, but he couldn't stay. Needed to get away from everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“I don't remember it word for word.”

He moved forward when the crossing cleared.

“The bag had his headphones in it,” he added. “The blue ones. So that's something.”

I looked at him. “Something good?”

“Well. It means he packed.”

“Or he left his bag.”

“I'm trying not to think the worst, Bea.”

I looked down at the box. On the top poster, Rowan was still holding up his hand against the camera.

Denise lived in a maisonette above a row of shops on Cross Street. When we were younger, I had thought living over a shop must be convenient, until Rowan pointed out that the shop below them sold curtain poles. The entrance was around the side, up a narrow flight of outside stairs that collected leaves even when the trees were bare.

Finn carried both boxes up. I followed him with the sanitiser, which had fallen out in the car.

The front door was open.

I had not been inside since before Christmas. The hallway still smelled of washing powder and the lemon tree Denise kept unsuccessfully on the windowsill. A school photograph of Rowan and his sister Alice hung beside the coat hooks. Alice had been about eight in it, smiling with the unguarded certainty of someone who hadn't yet learned to inspect her own face in photographs. Rowan had looked faintly inconvenienced.

In the kitchen, Clare Sayer was making tea. She had taken off the smart jacket she wore even on weekends and hung it over a chair. Without it she looked more like Finn and less like someone who could ask a headteacher a question that ruined their afternoon.

“Darling,” she said to him. “Put those in the sitting room. Bea, hello.”

“Hi.”

“Your mum said she'd come after work.”

“My mum?”

“She texted Denise.”

Of course she had. While I had been choosing the least incriminating version of Friday night, Mum had been doing the obvious thing.

Denise sat at the table with her phone charging beside her. She wasn't crying. Somehow I'd expected that, and now I had to work out what to do with a face that looked almost normal except for its complete attention to the phone.

“Bea,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

“I brought this.”

I held up the sanitiser. Even as I did it, I wanted to put it down and leave the country.

Denise looked at the bottle, then at me.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll be clean.”

I laughed before I could stop myself. So did she, once, and then her face altered. She pressed her lips together and looked back at the phone.

I put the bottle by the sink.

Clare made room for me at the table. Alice sat on the other side with her knees drawn up under an oversized sweatshirt. There was a bowl of cereal in front of her, the flakes swollen in the milk. She was drawing on the back of an envelope, pressing hard enough that I could hear the pencil against the wood.

“They've found a bag,” Denise told me.

“Finn said.”

“They sent a photograph. It looks like his.”

She turned the phone so I could see. A dark rucksack lay on an office chair. One zip was open, showing the pale edge of a T-shirt and a loop of headphone cable. There was a little enamel badge on the front: a cartoon pigeon wearing a crown.

“I gave him that,” Alice said.

“The badge?”

She nodded without looking up.

“It was a joke. He said pigeons were the only thing the council funded properly.”

That sounded like Rowan. I could hear exactly how he'd have said it, with a solemnity that made the joke take an extra second to arrive.

“Did he take clothes?” I asked.

Denise moved a teaspoon that didn't need moving.

“His blue jumper's gone. His wash bag. I can't tell about the rest. He does his own laundry, mostly.”

“He doesn't,” Alice said. “He puts it in the basket and says he's about to.”

Denise glanced at her. “Alice.”

“What? He does.”

“You're right,” Denise said after a moment. “He does.”

The kettle clicked off. Clare poured water into the teapot. Finn leaned against the counter, arms folded tightly enough that the cuffs of his jumper rode up his wrists.

“Can I see the message?” I asked.

I should have waited for Denise to offer. I knew that almost as soon as I said it, but she was already tapping the screen.

“It came at nine twenty-three.”

She passed me the phone.

Mother, I'm sorry. I can't stay here. Please don't make this a big thing. I need some time away from everyone. I'll be in touch.

The message sat above a row of green replies.

What do you mean?

Where are you?

Rowan please answer.

There were more below the edge of the screen. I didn't scroll.

“He calls you Mother?” I said.

Denise took the phone back slowly.

“Sometimes. If he's being funny.”

“He says Mum,” Alice said.

“People write differently when they're upset,” Clare said from the counter.

She meant to be reassuring. I could see that. She was trying to turn every detail into a reason not to be frightened.

Denise looked at the words again.

“I don't know why he wouldn't tell me.”

Nobody answered.

It was the first time since Finn's call that I understood how little a missing person left you to do. There were tasks, certainly. You could make tea, print posters, answer questions. But the central thing was an absence, and there was no useful way to hold it.

Finn crouched beside Alice's chair.

“Can I see what you're drawing?”

She covered the envelope with her hand.

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

He didn't push. He got up and took the posters into the sitting room.

Denise asked whether Rowan had looked happy the night before. I told her I'd only seen him briefly. She asked what he'd been wearing. I described the green checked shirt, sleeves rolled unevenly, one higher than the other. She closed her eyes for a moment.

“He ironed that himself,” she said.

I had no idea what to say to that. I could describe a person down to the clothes they wore and still offer nothing that brought them nearer.

My phone vibrated in my pocket.

Sam: I'm home. Come back. Don't talk to anyone about the case.

I turned the screen against my leg.

“You all right?” Denise asked.

“Work,” I said. “They're checking my shift.”

Another true thing about my life, used in the wrong place.

I stayed for fifteen more minutes because leaving immediately would have felt obvious. Clare asked about my application to the Harcourt summer programme. I explained that the screen-arts foundation was a different thing, at a college in Northbridge, and that I hadn't applied yet.

“Oh, of course. Finn's applying for Harcourt. I get them mixed up.”

“Still filling things in,” Finn said from the other room.

Denise looked up. “I thought Rowan said—”

The phone rang.

Everything in the kitchen stopped.

Denise answered so quickly she nearly dropped it. She said her name twice. Then she listened, and the little hope that had lifted her face settled back down.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that's his. I'm sure.”

Finn came to the doorway. Clare put a hand on Denise's shoulder.

Alice kept drawing. She had uncovered the envelope. On it was the pigeon from the badge, but enormous now, towering above a row of houses. She was working on one of its feet, making each claw carefully sharp.

I wished I could stay and talk to her about it. I wished I could be the sort of person who knew that was the right thing to do and did it without looking at their phone.

Instead I waited until the call finished, said I was sorry, and went downstairs.

Finn followed me onto the steps.

“Do you need a lift?”

“I'll walk.”

“You sure?”

“It's ten minutes.”

He looked as if he wanted to say something else. Up close, I noticed a pale green mark at the edge of his right cuff. It could have been paint or some elaborate food they'd served the donors. Half of us had gone home with evidence of the event on our clothes.

“Bea,” he said. “If you hear anything from Rowan—anything—will you tell me?”

“I'll tell the police.”

“Yeah. Obviously. I just meant me too.”

I nodded.

He went back upstairs. I stood at the bottom for a moment, under the curtain-pole shop's faded sign, and looked at Sam's message again.

Then I started walking.