The Room Upstairs

Denise's sister had brought enough food for a much larger gathering and solved the problem by putting half of it straight into the freezer.

“That's next week dealt with,” she said, handing Mum a bag of bread rolls. “Don't let anybody tell me off for the foil.”

There were twelve of us in the house when we arrived. People stood in doorways with plates because sitting down seemed too definite. The television was off. On the mantelpiece, Alice had arranged six of Rowan's drawings using mugs as supports.

The pigeon king occupied the middle.

“I picked the ones he'd be annoyed about,” she told me.

“Why?”

“Because people keep calling him inspiring.”

I looked at a drawing of a man fighting a self-service checkout.

“He'd like that choice.”

“You don't know.”

“No,” I said. “I think he might.”

She considered the correction and handed me a plate.

Jules was sitting on the floor by the bookcase, cutting a piece of bread in half with a knife too blunt for the job. She had brought a little cardboard bus stop from her animation set. Rowan had drawn an advert for it: a pigeon selling insurance to other pigeons.

“He made the policy exclusions longer than the advert,” she said. “You can't even read them in the shot.”

Alice knelt beside her.

“What do they say?”

“No cover for preventable bread-related incidents.”

Alice laughed so suddenly that the room went quiet around it. Then Denise told everybody to stop looking at her daughter, and the conversations resumed.

I ate a roll standing beside the kitchen doorway. Sam had come with us, though he had spent most of the journey saying he should not. Denise had looked him in the face when he arrived and said she was glad he had come. Nothing more. He was now washing things that did not need washing because it gave him somewhere to put his hands.

Finn arrived at half past seven with Clare.

He wore a clean grey shirt. There were shadows under his eyes, and a small dressing on one knuckle. He gave Denise flowers that she put in the sink because all the vases were already full.

“Sorry,” Clare said. “I should have asked.”

“They're lovely,” Denise said. “I'm just running out of horizontal space.”

Finn saw me and stopped for half a second before coming over.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

He looked towards the drawings.

“I remember that one.”

“The checkout?”

“Yeah. He said it was based on Dad.”

“It was based on everybody's dad,” Jules said from the floor.

Finn smiled. “Fair.”

For a while he was easy to be around. He told Alice about Rowan making a paper moustache for a statue during an art trip. I had forgotten that, though I had been there. The teacher spent ten minutes trying not to laugh while telling us it was disrespectful.

“He made you take the picture,” Finn said to me.

“He made three of us take it. He didn't trust anyone to get the angle.”

“That sounds right.”

Alice asked whether we still had it. I said I would look and send it privately if I did.

Then Finn said, “He always wanted people to see things differently.”

The sentence changed the air for me. It was smooth enough to put beneath a photograph. Jules looked down at her cardboard bus stop.

“He mostly wanted the statue to have a moustache,” she said.

Finn laughed, a little too late.

“Yeah. Obviously.”

I went upstairs because Denise had asked me to help Alice find a charger in Rowan's room. Alice went ahead and sat cross-legged on the bed while I searched the drawer she pointed to.

The room smelled faintly of paper and the deodorant he had used too much of. There were three different kinds of tape on the desk. A mug held dead pens. On the wall, a calendar still showed May because he liked the picture better than June's.

I had been in the room often enough that my body remembered where not to step. The floorboard beside the bed squeaked. The wardrobe door caught on a fold in the carpet. None of that knowledge helped with being there now.

“Blue cable,” Alice said. “Not the black one. The black one only works if you threaten it.”

I found the blue cable tangled around a ruler.

“Do you want this here or downstairs?”

“Downstairs.”

She did not move.

I sat on the floor beside the desk.

“People keep saying he's still with us,” she said.

I waited.

“He isn't. They can't say that and then get sad when I ask where.”

“No.”

“Do you think I'm horrible?”

“No.”

She picked at a loose thread on the duvet.

“I don't want to go back to school. I do want to go back to school. I don't want anyone to ask anything.”

“That sounds difficult.”

“It is.”

We sat there until she was ready to stand. I did not try to find a sentence that would make it less true.

On the landing, we heard Finn talking in the kitchen below.

“I took the jacket back as soon as the speeches finished,” he was saying. “Before the break, really. It was too warm.”

I stopped with my hand on the banister.

Gareth answered. I had not noticed him arrive.

“It was on my chair after the first set. Val shifted it.”

“Someone else must have used it.”

“Could have.”

Finn said something I could not hear. A cupboard closed.

Alice looked at me.

“What?”

“Nothing you need to do anything about.”

It was not a complete answer, but it was an honest boundary. She went downstairs ahead of me.

In the kitchen, Finn was drying a plate Sam had washed. Sam's shoulders were tight. Gareth stood by the back door with a glass of water.

“You borrowed Sam's jacket?” I asked Finn.

“I told you that.”

“To move equipment.”

“Yes.”

“And returned it before the break?”

He put the plate down.

“Bea. Not here.”

The words struck me before I could decide whether they sounded like the recording. I had heard two uncertain syllables too many times that afternoon. Now any ordinary phrase risked becoming what I wanted it to be.

I looked at Sam instead.

“Do you need help?”

“No.”

He handed Finn another plate, not quite gently.

I went into the garden. The grass had grown long around the washing line. Denise's sister was sitting on the back step smoking a cigarette she kept holding away from the house.

“Too many people?” she asked.

“A bit.”

She moved her foot to make room on the step.

Inside, somebody laughed. A chair scraped. Alice was explaining one of the drawings to Clare in a voice that sounded almost impatient enough to be ordinary.

“I don't know what to do with my face,” I said.

Denise's sister looked at me.

“Neither do I, love.”

We sat without solving it.

Before we left, Denise gave me a container of food. I tried to refuse because people were meant to be bringing things to her.

“Take it,” she said. “My freezer isn't a portal.”

At the door, Finn touched my sleeve.

“Can we leave it tonight?”

I looked at his hand until he took it away.

“Yes,” I said. “Tonight.”

His relief was immediate, and I wished I could tell what it belonged to.

In the car, I told Mum what I had heard about the jacket. I did not play the clip for her again. At home I wrote down Finn's words, where I had been standing, and who had been in the kitchen. Gareth and Sam could give their own accounts.

Then I found the photograph of the statue with the paper moustache.

Rowan was in the edge of the frame, laughing so hard that one eye had closed. I sent it to Alice with no caption.