Ed

I see the moment when Raff tells them. Lucy’s foot stops for half a second and then she puts it down and keeps walking. She doesn’t take her eyes off me.

‘Shadow,’ she says when she’s close enough to touch.

I don’t bother lying.

Leo shuffles away. Shuffle, shuffle. ‘Don’t move, Poet,’ Jazz says. Leo gives a smile like he gave his gran that day she caught him pissing on the roses.

Daisy’s slower at catching up than Lucy and Jazz but she gets it now.

‘Liar,’ she says, and drops the flowers on the ground.

I stare at Lucy. She stares back. ‘All those things I told you about Shadow,’ she says. ‘You must have thought they were pretty funny.’

‘I didn’t think they were funny,’ I say, and move towards her.

‘You laughed, though. Quite a lot. So you must have thought some of the things I said were funny.’

‘It wasn’t Ed’s idea,’ Leo tells her. ‘It was me who thought it’d be a laugh.’

Jazz thinks about that for a while. ‘You thought lying to us all night would be funny?’ She thinks some more. ‘All that time we were talking about poetry and you were quoting lines to me you thought it was funny? All that time we were dancing you were really laughing at me?’

Leo looks like he did that night at Emma’s house. He stares at Jazz, almost touches her hair but then pulls his hand back and does something that surprises everyone.

He runs.

He turns around and runs, pushing people out of the way, tumbling through the crowd. All six foot something of him. It seems pretty clear he’s not suited to a life of crime. Dylan isn’t either because he looks at Daisy and runs too. Raff and his mates run, as well. Jazz and Daisy take off after them all.

I don’t run. Lucy doesn’t move. She stands there in front of me. All mouth, all eyes. ‘I guess we’re even now,’ she says.

‘I didn’t do it to get you back.’ Shit, I didn’t do it for that. ‘Maybe at first. Before the party, I don’t know. But after.’ I’m not making a lot of sense but I keep going because her eyes are pinning me down.

She knows now that I’m him, that I’ve lost my job. That I’m planning to rob the school later. She knows it all but she doesn’t know why. ‘In your head, Shadow was this great person and I’m nothing.’ Her eyes keep pinning me down. ‘I can barely even read.’

I feel all those years of running and never catching up to everyone inside me. I’m back on the expressway like that guy in the painting, back on the side of the road with the concrete sweeping round and no way to make people hear or get it because they’d have to be inside my head for that to happen.

Lucy stops looking at me. She stands there not looking and not saying and I think about that Art essay and wanking clowns and Fennel and those birds on my walls, flapping on the bricks. I think of that ghost in a jar. I think about the hope Bert gave me that ended with him lying face up in aisle three, his hands clawed, old face sinking and old heart not ticking. I think about Leo and the dreams he’s too scared to have. And I think how much I want Lucy to tell me something that changes what I think about myself. I want to paint a wall right now and put those words in her mouth but I don’t know what those words would be.

Leo pulls the van into the taxi rank and yells, ‘If you’re coming, get in. It’s time. It’s way past time.’

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ I ask her, but she’s a blank wall. Leo’s beeping and yelling but I can’t leave till she says something. ‘Does it matter?’

She opens her mouth and Leo beeps the horn and if she says what I want her to say then I won’t get in the van.

‘It matters,’ she says.

And all the birds on that wall fall off the sky. I see them dropping and lying belly up. A snow of them covering the ground. Later I’ll paint that empty sky and the birds below. I’ll paint it and know that what’s worse than being trapped in a jar is not being anywhere at all.