She’s Not There. Tamsin Grey

a baking hot Friday – it turned out everyone was going to Frank’s for a swim after school. Jonah waited until after band practice to tell his friend he couldn’t make it.

      ‘That’s mad.’ Frowning, Frank nosed his guitar into its sleeve. It was cool and mellow in the practice room, the blinds drawn down against the sun. Because of his bad hand, Jonah used a harness to help him hold his trumpet. Frank watched him take it off. ‘Lola’s coming!’

      His friend’s sly smile made Jonah blush. He turned away and watched Mr Melvin cross the room, open the door and step into the rectangle of blazing light.

      ‘Who even are the Martins?’ asked Frank.

      ‘We knew them when we lived in London. Dora and my mum were, like, best friends.’ The blinds flapped in a sudden gust, and Jonah got a flash of the sheets on the Martins’ washing line billowing, the crescendo of wind chimes, and Dora, sprawled in her deckchair, her feet in a bucket of water.

      ‘Come on, guys.’ The other band members had disappeared and Mr Melvin was waiting to lock the door. Jonah settled his trumpet into its case.

      ‘Get out of it. Say you’re ill.’ Frank zipped up his guitar, frowning again.

      ‘I just can’t, really.’ Jonah made a wry face, but now his friend wouldn’t look at him. ‘It’s – a kind of anniversary. They cook roast chicken.’

      ‘Roast chicken? That’s mad. It’s like 30 degrees centigrade.’ Frank spun away, towards the door.

      ‘It was our favourite. Well, more my brother’s,’ he explained, but to himself, because Frank was ducking under Mr Melvin’s arm. ‘Roast chicken and roast potatoes.’ He got a sudden flash of Raff, aged six, wolfing down a leg.

       2

      It had been agreed that Jonah could go to the Martins straight from school, rather than traipsing all the way home to go with the others in the car. The thought of the journey cheered him up. He hadn’t travelled into London alone before. On the train, he put his backpack and his trumpet case in the luggage rack, shrugged off his blazer and sprawled across two seats, luxuriating in his independence. They’d been playing the ‘Summertime’/ ‘Motherless Child’ medley in band practice, and the interweaving tunes played on in his head as he gazed through the fast-moving glass at the slow-drifting clouds. Cumulus humilis. He had been obsessed with clouds that summer, had learnt all their names. He saw the white sheets rising again, Dora’s huge sunglasses, her yellow dress, the straggly hair in her armpits.

      Dora Martin. Quite a famous artist these days. She had written the invitation, in her elegant, spiky slant, on a postcard featuring one of her paintings: ‘It’s that time again, and I’m so hoping you’ll join us.’ He noticed that the creature – a kind of trapped emotional density – was awake again, and he shifted himself sideways, resting his head on his bent arm. It would be nice to see Emerald, who’d been in his class and would have updates on Harold and all the other Haredale kids. Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone. He closed his eyes, letting the sleepy, mournful tune weave with the rhythm of the train.

      He dreamed he was high above London, among the cool, silent clouds, looking down at the glittering sprawl. You were our home. He felt a leap of hope and dropped closer, looking for a sign of welcome, but the cranes rose and tilted, like slingsmen, the river shone like a ribbon of foil and, to the west, an acrid plume of grief rose from a blackened finger. He dove down like Superman, circling his old familiars: the Cheese Grater, the Shard, the Knuckleduster. Down further, between the chimney pots, into the grime of the centuries, and then southwards, along arteries and veins. The high street now, their high street: Chicken Cottage, Hollywood Nails, We Buy Gold. Left up Wanless Road, low under the bridge, the car repair yard, that smell from the warehouse. Dropping to the ground, he was his nine-year-old self now: bare feet on the warm pavement, fingers dragging along the fence. Opposite, the four shops, asleep, their metal shutters pulled down. And on the corner, there it was, their house, so familiar, but long forgotten. There was someone looking out of the sitting-room window, someone waiting for him. Mayo?

      The train entered an urban canyon, sound waves bouncing off concrete and glass. He sat up straight, wiping the drool from his chin, and leant his forehead against the window. The tall buildings had fallen away, and the clouds were towering. Cumulonimbus. He suddenly remembered the clouds poster, Blu-tacked to his and Raff’s bedroom wall, and the dream flooded him: the cool vapour, the eerie silence, the dizzying drop down; and their old house, right there, the scruffiness of it, every tiny detail. He hadn’t seen it since they’d left; they had never gone that way in the car: but now, he realised, he could go and have a look at it, on his way from the bus stop to the Martins’ house. A very short detour, to travel back five years. The shift again; the creature, wordless and sightless, like a blind baby seal, as his brother Raff’s voice came to him, clear as a bell, down the years. ‘We need a time machine.’ The two of them, in that messy kitchen, trying to work out what to do. Hands on his belly, he noticed his own face in the glass, his two eyes merged together. Then the train slid onto the bridge, and the breath caught in his throat. The million-year-old river, brown and glittering, full of boats, and the towers like giant androids, gazing glassily towards the future.

       3

      The car repair yard was silent, its gates padlocked, but there was that same oniony whiff from the warehouse. Same weather, of course, and the creature was moving again. Funny how, when it was asleep – and it was mostly asleep these days – he could forget it was there; that it had ever existed. He stopped at the bend in Wanless Road, setting his trumpet case down and wiping his palms on his trousers. Their house was still hidden from view, but he could see, across the road, the four shops. The Green Shop, the Betting Shop, the Knocking Shop, and London Kebabs. London Kebabs and the Betting Shop had their blinds down, and the Green Shop was all boarded up, but the Knocking Shop, on the face of it a hairdresser’s, looked open.

      ‘Why is it called the Knocking Shop, Mayo?’

      ‘Because of all Leonie’s visitors.’

      ‘But they don’t knock, they ring the buzzer, Mayo, so it should be the Buzzing Shop, shouldn’t it?’

      She had laughed and kissed him, and he had beamed with pride. He had loved making her laugh. Standing there, looking at Leonie’s shop, he realised that the memory had brought the same grin to his fourteen-year-old face. He used to talk to her in his head when he wasn’t with her, he remembered; tell her jokes and see her laughing face. He picked up the case and walked on.

      After five years, it was a huge amount to take in at once. First, there was a new building where the Broken House had been. Scaffolding still, and no windows, just the empty squares for them to go in. Running in front of it, a new fence, higher and more solid than the old one, with proper ‘Keep Out’ signs. A gap, and then the corner house, half on Wanless Road, half on Southway Street, the end of the Southway Street terrace; a strange, wedge-shaped house, which had once been a shop, and had been through many conversions. Their house.

      Apart from it wasn’t their house. He stared, his eyes blurring. The same shape, and same size, but it had been all tidied and prettied, with pale blue walls and window boxes full of lavender.

      Stupid idiot … He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. The house had sold very quickly, while he was still in hospital. It had been someone else’s house for five years. He walked round into Southway Street and looked at the shiny new front door, wanting to kneel and peer through the letter box. He turned away instead and looked up Wanless Road, towards the flats where his friend Harold had lived, and where he and Raff had had the run-in with the bigger boys. Then he looked back the way he had come. The passionflowers had survived, their gaudy, sulky faces tumbling over the new fence.

      ‘They