Castlefields Academy to the Little Ouse, Thetford. 11:50am
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The note was in his blazer pocket.
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Folded twice. Along the creases first, then across. Left inside pocket. It said he was excused. It said go home and rest and come back at four. Mrs Iyer’s handwriting. Small and vertical. No space between the words.
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He did not go home.
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He stood at the bottom of the south wing steps. The sun was where it had been this morning, slightly higher now, landing on the tarmac in a way that made everything look flat. His ribs. The sky. He looked at the sky for a second and then looked away.
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Not home. Not yet.
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She might be in a certain kind of mood. He couldn’t always tell which one was coming. Sometimes she was fine — not fine but the version where the kitchen felt like a kitchen. Sometimes it was the other one. The room before something happened. He’d learned some of the signs. Not all of them. The way she held herself when she hadn’t slept. The kitchen when the radio wasn’t on. He didn’t always read them right. He didn’t always have time to make himself smaller before.
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He needed more time.
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He went the other way.
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Left out of the school gate. Along the service road. The corrugated walls of the industrial units were starting to warm up, throwing out a faint dry smell of hot metal. He walked in the strip of shade along the fence.
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Through the underpass. Cold in there even in May. Old water smell. His footsteps flat and close, the sound going nowhere.
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Out the other side. The path behind the leisure centre car park.
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Quieter.
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Two sixth formers coming the other direction, blazers off. One of them looked at his face and looked away. Ethan kept walking.
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The leisure centre fell away. The path got narrow. The Little Ouse on his left — brown and low, moving slowly. The surface dull except where a current caught it and threw up a brightness that was gone almost before it arrived. On his right, the backs of houses. A shed. A trampoline with the mat going wrong in the middle.
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He went left. Down the bank. Along the water.
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The river smell. Mud and something green and the elder flowers starting. It didn’t ask anything. The sound of it was constant and low and because it was constant he didn’t have to do anything with it. It was just there.
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He followed the bank.
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Three minutes and he reached it.
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The oak had come down years ago. He’d found it later — walking further than usual, past the point where he normally stopped. Dead but solid. The bank had eroded under the root plate and tipped it up and left a hollow underneath. Root plate on one side. Old concrete drainage channel behind. The opening faced the river. You couldn’t see inside from the path. You couldn’t see inside from anywhere unless you knew.
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He checked both directions. Force of habit.
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He ducked under the root and went in.
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Just big enough. One person with their knees up. The flat stone he’d hauled from the river edge two years ago — forty metres, two trips, too heavy for one. It sat in the middle as a seat. Behind him, a piece of broken mirror wedged into a crack in the concrete. On sunny afternoons at the right time it caught the light off the river and threw a small bright rectangle onto the roots above. About twenty minutes and then it moved out of alignment and was gone. He’d never planned any of this. It had just accumulated. The space had become his in increments without him deciding it was his.
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The crisp packet from last year was still in the crevice to his right. He kept meaning to throw it away.
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He sat on the stone.
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Bag down. Eyes closed.
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Earth. Concrete. River. The water going behind him, low, not asking anything. Birds in the dead wood above. Somewhere far enough away, a road that had stopped being a road and become a murmur underneath everything else.
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He sat.
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He didn’t count the time. There was no one to count it for.
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The morning came down. Layer by layer. He didn’t rush it. The classroom. The punch. The corridor. Hannah in the doorway of the nurse’s office. He let each thing settle before the next one came.
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His shoulders came down.
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He hadn’t known they were still up.
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When he opened his eyes the mirror was throwing its light onto the roots above him. A small bright rectangle, moving very slowly.
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He breathed in. His ribs said what they said. He breathed in anyway.
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He thought about Conor.
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Not on purpose. Conor was just the loudest thing.
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He didn’t understand why Conor had wanted to fight him. He’d been trying to understand since break. The blazer was missing. The shirt untucked. The graze on Conor’s knuckle — brown at the edges, dried — that had been there before school, before the lesson, before any of it. But Ethan didn’t know what it meant. He kept coming back to it.
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What he kept coming back to more was how angry Conor had been that he wouldn’t fight back. Not just angry. Something worse than angry. Like Ethan not raising his hands had broken something. Like Conor had needed him to fight and the not-fighting was the worst thing Ethan could have done.
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He didn’t know why someone would need that. He turned it over and couldn’t find the shape of it. But the graze was from before. And needing someone to hit you back that badly — that felt like it came from somewhere. Not from school. From somewhere else.
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And Conor had still hit him three times.
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Both things. He tried to hold both things.
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The sympathy and the concrete under his palms. The idea that something was wrong at home and the fact of three punches. The word Conor had used, which was sitting in him still, small and sharp. He hadn’t looked at it directly yet.
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He was going to tell Mr Andrews. Not to get Conor expelled. Just so someone checked. Someone looked at the blazer and the graze and the way Conor had needed something from him that Ethan couldn’t give. Someone who had more power in this than Ethan had — which was everyone, every adult in the building, every person with a lanyard.
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He thought about the last time he’d told a teacher something was wrong. Not about Conor. Something at home. He’d chosen his words carefully. He’d thought about them for days. The teacher had listened and said thank you for telling me and made a note on her tablet and said I’ll look into it.
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Nothing had changed.
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He thought about how many adults had looked at his life and looked away.
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He was going to tell Mr Andrews anyway. Because not saying anything felt worse than saying something that might not work.
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He’d learned that. He kept having to relearn it.
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But telling someone wasn’t the same as fixing it.
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It never was.
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The thought about Conor went where it always went.
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His mum.
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He hadn’t meant to go there. He went anyway.
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She was getting worse.
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He’d been thinking this for months without letting it become a thought he looked at. Looking at it now made it more solid. Like pressing on something bruised.
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He reached up to the root-hook. The stuff-sack. He didn’t open it. Just held it — the worn nylon, the cord pulled tight. The notebook was inside. He’d diagrammed it in there. His mum and the drinking and the way one thing fed into the next. Inputs and outputs. The places where you could theoretically change the outcome. He’d done it four times on four different pages, different versions. He’d stopped two months ago when he accepted that no version came out differently. The shape was always the same. The dead ends were always in the same places.
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He put the stuff-sack back on the hook.
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He knew about the DLA. He’d worked it out from the letters on the third step — the step where he tied his shoes — reading them before she woke and putting them back. He knew how much came in each month. He knew what the bottles cost at the off-licence on Bridge Street because he’d stood outside once and looked at the prices through the window without going in. Like going in would have made him part of it. He’d done the division. He knew the number of bottles that accounted for the gap. He carried the number quietly. In a place where he didn’t have to explain it.
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Hannah had tried to tell people. He knew that much — she’d told him once, not the whole thing, just some of it. She’d gone to court. She’d said what was happening in the house. He didn’t know exactly what had happened after that. He knew the court hadn’t done what Hannah wanted. He knew they hadn’t believed her the way she needed them to believe her. He didn’t know all the reasons. He just knew that Hannah had said the truth and the truth had gone somewhere and nothing had changed.
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His grandparents had asked for him too. He knew that part. They’d wanted him to come to Brandon. The court said no. Something about his school, his routine. The decision had been made over his head.
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He didn’t know if they’d been wrong.
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He thought about what he’d have said if they’d asked him.
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He’d have said no.
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Because if he left she’d be alone in the house. And she’d drink. And one night the drinking would go somewhere it hadn’t gone before. He thought about the tablets in the drawer. He hadn’t counted them. He was frightened of what the number would be. As if not knowing kept the number from being real.
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If he stayed the loop kept running. The money and the bottles and the months going past. Her getting worse by degrees so small that each day looked almost the same as the one before.
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He’d done the maths. Both ways ended the same.
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Both diagrams had the same dead end.
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He couldn’t fix it. He couldn’t leave. He couldn’t make the maths come out differently no matter how many times he tried.
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So he stayed.
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Not because it was working. Because leaving meant accepting it was over. And staying meant he could still be in the house where she could see him if she wanted to. Where she could remember he was there. Where she couldn’t forget there was someone who needed her to still be alive.
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That was it. That was all of it.
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He was terrified of a future without her in it. More terrified than he was of anything else. More terrified than he was of the drinking or the DLA or the diagram with no exit. The terror was underneath all of it. A low constant sound like the river. Always there.
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He thought about his dad.
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About the story. The boy. Superman standing next to him because standing next to someone was the most powerful thing you could do.
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He’d been standing next to her for years.
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It hadn’t been enough.
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There was no Superman. There was just a dead oak and a piece of broken mirror and the river going past and he was sitting here thinking about diagrams that didn’t work and the price of bottles at the off-licence and he was so tired.
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Not sleepy. The other kind.
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He thought about the fire.
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It came in pieces. Always the same pieces.
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A wall of orange. The sound — not crackling, louder, a roar that ate every other sound in the house. The rug. The rug was on fire at one corner and the fire was moving across it in a way that didn’t look like fire, it looked like the rug developing a different colour. The weight of hands on his shoulders. A voice saying his name. His name again. Not understanding what the name was supposed to do. Being carried. The hallway wrong. Cold air. Snow under his bare feet. The roof going. The sound the roof made.
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After. The silence where a voice should have been.
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He didn’t choose to go there. The pieces came and then he was out of them again, the way a wave lifted you and put you down somewhere else.
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He tried to breathe.
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He was in the hollow. The river was running. The mirror was throwing its light.
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It’s not my fault.
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The words were wrong even as he thought them. He’d been told they were true. Hannah had said it. The school counsellor had said it. His own mind had worked through it and reached the same answer every time. But the words never took. They sat on the surface and didn’t go in. Underneath them was the other thing — older, heavier — that said if he had moved faster, if he had understood, if he hadn’t been frozen, if he hadn’t been the way he was —
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He knew that wasn’t true. He knew it the way he knew a maths answer. Knowing it and believing it were different things. They lived in different places in him. They didn’t talk to each other.
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It’s not my —
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He couldn’t finish. The sentence wouldn’t close. Reaching for the rest of it brought the fire back and he couldn’t have the fire back right now.
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He sat with the unfinished thought.
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The water. A bird, once, somewhere in the oak above him. Then not.
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He cried the way he cried in the hollow — with his whole chest, the sound held inside the root plate and the concrete and the river underneath. Not quietly. Not neatly. Just the thing that was happening until it wasn’t.
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He wiped his face with his clean wrist.
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He breathed in. Ribs. Out.
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The hollow held him. The water kept moving. No one came.
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He reached into his blazer pocket.
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The music player. Left outside pocket. Earphones wound round it the way he always wound them. He unwound them. Put them in.
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He scrolled to Fix You. Coldplay. 2005. Four minutes and fifty-four seconds.The same exact year his father was born.
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Middle button.
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The organ came in first.
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Low. One note held and then another. Filling the hollow gradually, the way water filled something — from the bottom up. He knew this opening the way he knew the fifth stair creaked and the cutlery drawer stuck and you couldn’t slam the fridge.
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When you try your best but you don’t succeed
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Close. Not performing. Just there in the dark with him.
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When you get what you want but not what you need
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He closed his eyes.
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When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep
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Stuck in reverse
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His thumb found the worn edge of the player. His dad had worn it smooth. His dad had held this same weight. Pressed this same button. Put this same song between himself and whatever the day was doing.
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And the tears come streaming down your face
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When you lose something you can’t replace
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Something dropped in his chest before his mind caught up. He knew that feeling. He’d been living inside it for five years.
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When you love someone but it goes to waste
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Could it be worse?
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His mum. His dad. Both of them in the same line. He’d never been able to separate them in this song. They were both in it. They had always both been in it.
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The drums came in. Just the kick drum at first. A heartbeat underneath the organ.
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Lights will guide you home
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And ignite your bones
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And I will try to fix you
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The guitar. His chest doing something — a tightness that was also an opening. He’d been holding his shoulders up. He let them drop. The ribs said what they said.
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He was not thinking about anything.
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The song had taken the space. There was nothing left over. He was just there.
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And high up above or down below
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When you’re too in love to let it go
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But if you never try you’ll never know
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Just what you’re worth
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The voice was reaching now. The organ climbing behind it.
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Someone had felt this. Had felt it specifically enough to make a song about it. In 2005. Had left the song running through decades and one music player his dad had bought and carried and left behind, and now it was in a hollow under a dead oak in Thetford in 2050 and a thirteen year old boy with a split lip was sitting in the dark listening to it.
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Less alone for four minutes and fifty-four seconds.
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That was enough.
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Lights will guide you home
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And ignite your bones
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And I will try…. to fix you
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The song crested. Everything in it at once — the guitar, the organ, the voice, the drums — rising into a single wall of sound that filled the hollow completely. He let it fill him. He had been holding himself together all morning, all year, and the song was doing the holding now and he didn’t have to do anything except be there.
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His face was wet. He hadn’t noticed when it started.
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Tears stream down your face
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When you lose something you cannot replace
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Tears stream down your face
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And I…
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The last chords. The organ fading. The guitar fading. The voice —I promise you I will learn from my mistakes — quiet now, almost gone.
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Tears stream down your face
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And I…
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Silence.
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The river underneath it.
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He sat in the silence and let it last. The mirror-light was at the very edge of the root. One thin line of brightness. Then it was gone.
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He breathed in. Ribs. Out.
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He sat for another moment. Not thinking. Just the hollow and the river and the birds and the afternoon outside, which was bright and ordinary and still there.
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He stood up.
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Player back in the left pocket. Blazer straightened. He looked at the mirror once — just glass in a wall now, throwing nothing — and then he ducked under the root plate and out.
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The afternoon was brighter than he expected.
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He stood on the bank. His eyes adjusted. The river. The elder on the far bank with its flowers starting — white, small. The sky above the trees the blue of a dry May afternoon. His shadow short, directly beneath him.
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He started walking.
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The path was narrow. The grass long at the edges, going to seed, brushing his trousers. The bank on his right, the river on his left. A wren somewhere in the elder. He listened for a moment without stopping. Wrens were very loud for something their size. He’d read that once.
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The priory ruins through the railings. Grey stone, knee-high walls, the square of grass where the nave had been. A man with a camera standing where the altar would have been. Two women with a guidebook. An ordinary Thursday.
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He walked past without stopping.
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The path widened. The memorial benches. The bridge further on, the road noise coming back, the town reassembling around him. He was not in the hollow anymore. He was in the world. Separate and present at the same time. Which was how he was always in the world.
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A woman with a buggy. A man jogging, earbuds in, not looking. An elderly man on one of the benches with a paper cup, watching the water.
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Ethan walked past all of them and none of them looked.
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Which was exactly right.
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He heard her before he saw her.
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Not crying. Not calling. The absence of sound in the shape of a child who had stopped making sounds because sounds hadn’t helped. He knew that shape. He knew it from the inside.
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He turned.
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She was on a side path that cut off toward the car park, about fifteen metres from the river, where the elder and hawthorn thinned out. Standing in the middle of the path. Five or six. Dark hair in two uneven braids, one coming loose. A green jacket. Her face was wet. She was not moving. Not calling. Not looking for anyone. She had the stillness of a child who had decided that stillness was all that was left.
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Ethan stopped.
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The set of her shoulders. The angle of her head. The hands loose at her sides. He knew this. He knew it from the inside.
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He was on the second step of the stairs at home — the one where he tied his shoes. A week after the funeral. His mother on the kitchen floor, he could hear her through the door. Hannah somewhere else in the house, another room, not coming. The house full of people and full of grief and him on the second step, gone completely still. Waiting for someone to come.
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Nobody had come to the stairs.
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The pieces arrived — the step, the door, both sounds, the not-coming — and then they were gone.
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He looked at the girl.
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He didn’t go to her directly. He moved to a position about three metres to her left and sat down at the edge of the path where the grass began. His ribs. He sat anyway. He didn’t look at her. He looked at the ground.
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A beetle. Black with a slight green sheen. Moving across the dry packed earth with the certainty of something that knew exactly where it was going.
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The girl’s breathing had changed. He couldn’t have said how he knew. He just did.
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She was watching the beetle.
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“Rose chafer,” he said. Quietly. To the beetle, or to the path, or to no one. “They eat pollen. They don’t bite.”
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A long pause. The beetle reached a small ridge and went over it without slowing.
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“I’m lost,” she said. The smallest voice.
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“I know.”
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“I can’t find my dad.”
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“Okay.”
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He didn’t say it’s okay. He didn’t say don’t worry. He sat. He looked at the beetle.
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She looked at the beetle.
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“I’m Ethan. What’s your name.”
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“Anya.”
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“Anya. I know this path. When you’re ready we can walk back to the benches. That’s probably where your dad is.”
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She said nothing. The beetle had stopped.
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“It’s okay if you’re not ready yet,” he said.
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They sat.
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The river audible from here. A wood pigeon in the hawthorn above them, slow and repeated, the same two notes. Anya’s breathing had steadied. The frozen quality was gone. She was just a child on a path watching a beetle that had stopped.
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“Okay,” she said.
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He stood. He didn’t offer his hand. He walked beside her at her pace — small and slightly uneven. The hawthorn in flower on both sides of the path, the blossom beginning to go over, the petals browning at the edges, falling in the light wind. The smell of it mixed with the elder and the river.
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They walked.
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They didn’t talk.
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At the main river walk the path widened and the memorial benches came into view and there was a man beside the nearest bench with his phone to his ear and his face the particular grey of someone running on fear and trying to function anyway. He was looking toward the bridge.
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He turned.
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He saw Anya.
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He dropped the phone. Didn’t look at it. Four steps and he had her, both arms around her, lifting her, holding her so tight she made a small compressed sound against his shoulder.
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“I’m sorry,” she said into his neck. “I followed a butterfly.”
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He couldn’t speak. His shoulders were shaking.
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The father looked at Ethan. He took in the split lip, the bruise, the shirt with the dried blood at the collar.
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“Thank you,” he said. “I — she was right there and then she wasn’t and I couldn’t — thank you.”
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“She’s okay,” Ethan said. “She just needed a minute.”
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The father nodded. He held her with both arms, her face against his neck, and one hand was spread flat across her back — the way you held a child when you needed to feel them breathing, when you needed the evidence of the breathing under your palm.
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He started walking toward the car park. He didn’t look back. He was already somewhere else.
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Ethan watched them go.
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The hand on her back. The way he held her. The specific weight of a small person against a chest, held there as if letting go was not something that was going to happen any time soon.
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He stood on the path.
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The river going. The wood pigeon still. The hawthorn blossom falling very slowly, the petals turning as they came down.
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He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to.
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Then he started walking.
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The path joined the road near the priory gate. The brass plate on the railings. The noticeboard at St Cuthbert’s — the e-ink panel still showing the vigil notice for Friday. The memorial bench with the two sets of dates and the fresh flowers tied with green string.
He walked the way he walked. Neither in time with the world around him nor entirely out of it.
His father would have been at the meeting.
He let the thought go where it went. It always went to the same place. He’d been having it for five years.
He took the player from his left pocket. Earphones in. Middle button.
The organ came in.
He walked.
Magdalen Street was ahead. Home was ahead. The afternoon and the meeting and Hannah at the school gate and his mother in the chair with her coat on — coat on, like she might need to leave quickly, which was how she always came to these things.
He had time. The meeting was at four. It was not yet half one.
He walked as far as the junction where Magdalen Street went left and the road back toward school went right.
He stopped.
Home was left. The sequence was left. The note said go home and rest and come back at four and left was where home was.
He looked left.
Something in him was quiet. Not fixed — nothing was fixed. The diagram still had no exit. The number was still in him. Tomorrow was still coming. But underneath all of that, in a place the hollow had cleared out and the song had kept clear, something was quiet in a way it had not been since he woke up this morning.
He looked right.
He went back to school.
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