I’m sorry,” he said, and then, “Can I get you a drink?”
Part cushion, part nothing, which was fine.
I propped my bike against a wall and sat down in the doorway of the ambulance. While Harper was lifting the lid off the little hidden cooker and filling a kettle by pressing his foot down on the floor, I said, “Do you see why it’s weird? That I never saw it before and you found it and it’s of him?”
He said he really hadn’t meant to freak me out. He said, “I guess you owned it without knowing.”
“Yeah, but even that’s doing my head in. I wouldn’t have it and then forget about it. It’s a really amazing photo.”
“It’s a mystery,” he said. “I get it. You want to solve it.”
We sat on the floor of the van with the back doors open and our feet on the ground. The tea was some spicy, gingery thing that came out of a packet covered in proverbs, but it tasted quite good.
He said, “Have you always lived around here?”
“Norf London girl,” I said and he laughed.
“Upstate New York boy.”
I didn’t know what to say about New York. I’d never been there. I didn’t know what upstate meant. I said, “Wow,” or something just as vacant and then I asked him how old he was. Eighteen last August, three months older than Jack. I said, “How did you get it together to do all this, leave home and travel around and everything?”
“I always wanted to do it,” he said. “The world’s so big, you got to start early. I wanted to get moving, get away.”
“Get away from what?” I said, and he shrugged.
“Everything and nothing. I just wanted to move.”
I was rolling a bit of gravel around under my shoe. “Everything,” I said. “I’d like to get away from that too.”
There was a football match going on in the sports fields opposite. We could just see the players’ heads bobbing around above the level of the wall.
“Just so you know,” he said, “it turns out not to be possible.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re always gonna be you, doesn’t matter where in the world you are.”
I thought of Jack’s TOO DEEP WARNING LIGHT, this thing he used to say when anyone got a bit self-help on him, a bit road-less-travelled. It made me smile. If I’d known Harper better, I’d have told him what was so funny. I asked him where he’d been so far.
“I flew from New York to Paris. I wanted to go by boat, but it costs way too much. I wanted to be in the middle of an ocean. Nothing but water for weeks; see if I went crazy. Maybe another time. I stayed with a friend in Montparnasse for a while. Then I got the train here. I haven’t been doing this too long. I’m pretty new at it.”
“Where are you going next?”
“I just got here, so nowhere for a month or so. I want to go to Scotland and Norway and Spain and, well, wherever. Plus I’ve got to work when I can, when the money’s low. We’ll see. What about you?”
“Oh, nothing, nowhere,” I said. “I haven’t done anything yet.” He seemed to find that funny so I didn’t tell him it wasn’t a joke.
He asked me about Mum. I wished he hadn’t seen her that day, in the doctor’s. I told him she wasn’t like that really, which was a lie. I told him they were adjusting her medication and it was just a question of waiting. I stuck up for her because I knew I should, but I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I was him.
He said, “Was that your sister with you?” and I said yes, and what with the Jack fall-out and my dad going part-time on us, I’d pretty much been left in charge. I told him that my friends were getting bored with me because I couldn’t hang around too much, and if I did, it was with a six-year-old in tow. I heard myself grumbling and complaining to this person I’d just met, and I was telling myself, “Stop it! Be funny, be cool. Stop doing this.”
But it was true and I couldn’t make it leave my head if it was there. While my friends were thinking about what their jeans looked like in their boots, I was wondering how much milk there was in the fridge. When they talked about make-up and boys, I heard laundry and CBeebies. I said, “I’m not much of a picnic to know any more.”
Harper stood up and poured the rest of his tea on a straggly plant growing out of the kerb. He said he’d be the judge of that, if it was OK by me.
At about half six I stood up and started fixing the lights on to my bike. I wasn’t ready to leave at all. Harper said, “Did you want to stay and eat? I’m a not bad cook.”
“I can’t. I have to get my sister. I have stuff to do.”
I thanked him for the photo. I said, “I’ve no idea where it came from, but I suppose it’s mine and I’m glad to have it.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m glad it was you.”
I wheeled out on to the darkening road, past the sad cases and the kerb crawlers and the football players and Harper waving at me until he was out of sight.
I couldn’t stop smiling.
When I got to Bee’s, she said didn’t I get her messages, that she’d sent three while I was gone. “Even I started to wonder if he was an axe-wielder when I didn’t hear back.”
I hadn’t checked my phone. I didn’t think she’d be worrying. “He lives in an ambulance,” I said because I knew she’d like that. “He’s from New York.”
“Did you like him?”
“Yes, I liked him.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much. I wasn’t there that long.”
“Yes, you were,” Bee said. “You’ve been gone nearly three hours.”
“I suppose so. He’s travelling. He’s funny. He’s very cool.”
“Told you,” she said.
“I liked him a lot.”
“How did it go?”
“How did what go?”
“Did you talk about the thing, the picture? I thought that’s why you went.”
I said we had, but not really. “I don’t know. Maybe I did drop it. I must have done.”
“And you’re going to see him again.”
I shrugged, like it wasn’t something I was in charge of. Even if I did want to hang out with Harper, there was Stroma to think about. I said that to Bee with my hands over Stroma’s ears while
