The Last Frame

In September, I learned that the first bus to college did not always stop if the driver could pretend not to see you.

I learned this on a wet Tuesday while holding a portfolio case above my head in an arrangement that protected neither the work nor me. The bus went past with three empty seats visible through the window. I stood in its spray and said something Mum would have objected to mainly because she had already used it that morning.

The next bus came twelve minutes later.

I arrived at the local college damp, cross and very much not transformed by higher education. A boy in my class lent me a towel he used for cleaning brushes. It left a blue mark on my cheek that nobody mentioned until lunchtime.

There were fourteen of us on the foundation course. Some were younger than I expected, some older. One woman had worked in a bakery for six years and could draw a hand so accurately that I found it personally threatening. A boy who had arrived with an expensive camera made a film in which nobody's feet stayed inside the frame. I was relieved by this for about an hour, then he showed us a photograph that made the whole class go quiet.

It was useful to be reminded that people could be good and bad at different things on the same day.

I still worked at the supermarket three evenings a week. Lou had changed my rota around the course and told me that this did not mean I could submit essays while standing at a till. Zoe passed her driving test and sent everyone a photograph of the certificate with her thumb covering most of her surname. Sam got two regular kitchen shifts at the station pub and occasional extras when somebody was ill. He came home smelling of onions and dishwasher steam, which Mum regarded as an improvement on the smell of worry she claimed had filled his room in June.

The repayments were small. The folder of letters was not.

There was a court date ahead for the camera theft. Sam did not talk about it as something that had vanished because a worse crime had happened nearby. He was still attending appointments about the gambling. Some weeks he said very little about them. Other weeks he came home annoyed because somebody had asked a question he did not want to answer. Mum learned not to treat either mood as the whole report.

The letter about my own false statement arrived in August. No further action would be taken against me. I read the words in Caroline's office with Mum beside me and felt a relief so sharp that it was almost pain.

Then I thought about how close I had come to using that decision as proof that I had not done much harm.

I put the letter in a folder and did not ask it to do more than it said.

Finn had been charged in connection with Rowan's death and the attempt to conceal what had happened. He had not yet been tried. There were proceedings ahead, accounts to be tested, decisions that did not belong to me. I had given more statements and been told there might be further questions. I kept the records I was asked to keep and stopped trying to build a private courtroom in my head every night.

The police had found Rowan's phone at Birch Road, where Finn said he had left it. The application papers were there too. Some original footage had survived; some had not. The case involved those things, the messages, the accounts of other people, and more work than I would ever see. It was not a story in which a single sound clip made everything certain.

I still did not have the cards back.

Clare came into the pharmacy sometimes. Mum served her like any other customer, though there were occasions when they spoke quietly for longer. Patricia moved back into her house after the repairs. I saw her once at the bus stop and asked whether the radiator still clicked. She said it did, and that the plumber had called it character when he did not want to fix it.

We did not talk about Finn that day.

I had not decided what every future conversation with his family should contain. They were not a test I had to pass in order to be either loyal to Rowan or a decent person.

Rowan's funeral had been in July. Alice wore trainers with her dress because he would have complained about the other shoes she had considered. Denise asked people not to bring cameras. There were still moments I remembered with painful clarity and others I could not retrieve at all. I stopped treating the gaps as something I ought to repair.

The private film remained private.

Sometimes Alice sent me a message saying which clip she had watched. Sometimes weeks passed without her mentioning it. She and Denise took a small table at the comic fair in August with Jules. Alice insisted on keeping twenty per cent of the money from the postcards she had helped prepare. Denise let her, then made her contribute to the cost of lunch. It seemed like the right sort of argument.

They sold more pigeon postcards than anyone expected. Jules's little animation played on a laptop with a handwritten sign explaining that the bus driver had been voiced by someone else because Rowan's recording had never been made. She had asked Denise before adding a small dedication at the end. It was not the centre of the film. The washing-up-glove monster still missed its bus.

I bought a print and paid the full price. Alice refused to give me a discount on the grounds that I already owned a free postcard.

At home, I pinned both above my desk.

On the second Saturday of September, the Lantern Rooms opened for a limited afternoon of workshops in the front rooms.

Not the whole building. The old pool hall remained closed for repair and inspection work. The service yard was still inaccessible. There were new notices, a new temporary management arrangement, and a list of financial questions that had not been answered by putting up fresh paint. Judith was no longer running the centre. The review of the restricted fund continued separately from the criminal case about Rowan.

The place had not been rescued by a single donation or a moving speech. People had found smaller rooms, borrowed tables, argued about insurance and agreed to run fewer sessions. It was less impressive than the plan Tarrant had described at the library and much more likely to result in somebody learning something on a Saturday.

Val stood by the entrance with his new walking-stick ferrule and a clipboard he claimed not to need.

“You're late,” he told me.

“I'm twelve minutes early.”

“Late for helping with the chairs.”

“You didn't ask me to help with the chairs.”

“I thought you'd developed initiative.”

I took two from the stack before he could continue.

The room smelled of paint, damp coats and the cheap biscuits somebody had put on a table beside the kettle. It did not smell exactly as it had before, but enough of it was familiar that I had to pause in the doorway.

Val noticed.

“You all right?”

“Give me a second.”

He gave me the second without speaking into it.

Mum had volunteered for the tea table. Sam was working, but he had repaired two loose chair backs the evening before under Val's supervision, which both of them described as an ordeal caused by the other. Mrs Pemberton was at the desk with a sign-in sheet and a large, clear notice explaining what the session cost and how the access places were funded.

I read the notice twice. The information was not exciting. That was part of its value.

I was helping with a beginner's stop-motion session, not running the whole workshop. The tutor from my course had agreed to lead it. My job was to set up cameras, keep cables out of the walkway and avoid answering questions before the children had tried things themselves.

The last part was the hardest.

A girl called Lena arrived with a teabag, a matchbox and a very specific plan. She was twelve and regarded my suggestion that we begin with a simple movement as evidence I lacked ambition.

“The teabag's escaping,” she told me.

“From the mug?”

“From a job.”

“What job?”

“Being tea.”

I nodded.

“Understandable.”

She had made the matchbox into a suitcase. The handle was a bent paper clip, and a folded piece of blue paper represented a passport. She wanted the teabag to climb out of the mug, collect its luggage and leave the kitchen.

“Does it have legs?” I asked.

“No. That would be silly.”

“Of course.”

We set up a small table with a plain background. I showed her how far an object needed to move between frames if she wanted the motion to look slow rather than like a series of emergencies. She moved the teabag too far anyway, watched the result, and decided it was panicking.

“That works,” she said.

“It does.”

A boy at the next table was making a plastic dinosaur deliver a letter. He asked whether the teabag could appear in his film as a neighbour. Lena considered the terms.

“Only if it doesn't have to go back to work.”

“No. It's retired.”

“All right.”

They spent ten minutes arranging a crossover more carefully than we had planned the entire fundraiser.

I caught myself reaching into Lena's set to straighten the suitcase. I stopped with my hand halfway there.

“Do you want that moved?” I asked.

She looked at it.

“No. It's meant to be wonky. The wheel's broken.”

I took my hand away.

When the teabag fell into the mug for the fourth time, she pushed back her chair and said the whole thing was rubbish.

“Which bit?” I asked.

“All of it.”

“The suitcase?”

“No.”

“The passport?”

“No.”

“The story?”

She looked at the mug.

“It won't stay where I put it.”

We tried a smaller mug. Then a tiny folded support behind the teabag, out of the camera's view. The tutor came over and showed Lena a different way to attach the string so it did not drag the whole character back down. Nothing about the solution was magical. We changed one thing at a time until the picture did what she wanted.

Halfway through, Imani arrived with her father. He had come to drop off a box of donated art paper his sister had collected. Imani carried a camera but asked before taking any photographs, and then spent most of the afternoon helping a boy cut a cardboard moon into something less like a potato.

She had accepted a place in Manchester. We had talked about it on three separate evenings and failed to become experts in long-distance relationships. There would be visits when we could afford them, calls that would sometimes be inconvenient, and room for things neither of us could predict yet. We were not calling that a tragedy in advance.

She passed my table and touched my shoulder.

“How's the film?”

“Industrial dispute. Tea-related.”

“Important subject.”

Lena looked up.

“Are you her girlfriend?”

Imani glanced at me.

“Yes,” I said, before she had to answer for both of us.

Lena nodded and went back to adjusting the suitcase. The information required no further meeting.

At four, parents began arriving. The room filled with coats, bags, explanations of projects and adults being told not to touch wet glue. Mum came round collecting mugs. Val counted chairs as though one might attempt to leave with the teabag.

Lena's film was almost finished. She had made the character travel past the dinosaur's house, reject a job advert and arrive at a small paper station. The last shot was meant to show it boarding a train made from a biscuit box.

Her mother called from the door.

“Five minutes.”

“I need seven.”

“You've got five.”

Lena looked at me, expecting either rescue or betrayal.

“We can save it where it is,” I said. “You don't have to make the ending wrong just because the room's closing.”

She considered this. Then she moved the teabag back from the edge of the biscuit-box train.

“I want it to wait,” she said.

“For the train?”

“No. For the other one. This one goes somewhere it doesn't want.”

“All right.”

She adjusted the paper suitcase, moved the teabag a tiny amount and stepped out of the frame. I took the picture. Then another, after she made a smaller movement I could barely see.

We played the sequence back. The teabag reached the platform, looked towards the wrong train and stayed where it was. The film ended before anyone had decided what waiting would cost it.

Lena watched it twice.

“That's better,” she said.

Her mother came to collect the suitcase and passport. I saved the project in the place the tutor had set up for workshop files, checked the backup and gave Lena the viewing copy in the way her mother had agreed to receive it. The little set went home in a paper bag with air holes because Lena thought the teabag deserved them.

When everyone had left, the room looked smaller. Scraps of card lay under the tables. Somebody had glued a star to a chair leg. Imani found half a biscuit balanced on the windowsill and asked whether it counted as an installation.

“Depends who's paying,” I said.

We stacked the chairs together. Mum turned off the kettle. Val checked the windows and complained about the star without removing it.

At the door, I looked back at the empty table where Lena's paper station had stood. The camera was packed away. There was nothing left to frame, only a room people had used and would use again.

Imani held the door for me.

“Coming?”

“Yes.”

I switched off the light and went with her.