“Around here,” I said. I pointed at the pub. “Who lives in there?”
“Oh, no one,” he said. “I guess they moved out a while ago. It’s wrecked in there.”
“I like your ambulance.”
He smiled. “Me too.” He said he got it “from a guy” for hardly anything because the guy was going back to New Zealand and he wanted it to have a good home. It was strange, Harper talking about stuff while the thing I wanted him to talk about just waited.
“Do you want to come in?” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
I was still holding on to my handlebars. He asked me if I was worried about my bike. I shook my head. I said, “Why did you give it to me?”
“What? The thing you dropped?”
“I didn’t drop anything.”
“I saw you,” he said, and he was smiling, like he couldn’t believe I was arguing with what he knew to be true. “You dropped it on the doorstep of the shop and I picked it up.”
I told him I thought it was a joke at first. “I thought you just gave stuff to people for a laugh. I thought you were trying to show me up in front of everyone.”
He said that would be too weird and we both laughed, but only a little.
“What’s weird,” I said, “is that I’ve never seen that photo before. But it does belong to me.”
He asked me what I meant and I said, “It’s of somebody I know.”
“Isn’t that because you dropped it, because it was yours?” He smiled and held his hands out in front of him to say, why are we still talking about this?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I did, but I still haven’t worked out how.”
“I don’t get why that’s hard. People drop things all the time.”
I got the feeling he was beginning to wonder about me; about my sanity, I mean. I said, “It’s a picture of my brother, and my brother is dead.” I hoped really hard he wasn’t going to say something cushiony.
“God, 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