day after speaking to Sarah I tried telling my mother.
I took the phone into my room, I sat on the floor with my knees pulled up into my chest and I started to dial the number.
I looked at a photograph on the wall, taken that summer, taken a few days before it happened.
Half a dozen of us, huddled together in a front garden, ashtrays and cushions spread across the grass, a speaker mounted in the front-room window, a beanbag spilling its beans across the pavement.
It’s a photo that makes us look young, it makes all of us look very young.
Our faces taut and shining, grinning awkwardly, squinting into the sunlight, everyone’s arms around everyone else.
Waving cans of beer as though they were novelties.
Looking like we thought everything was going to last forever.
I put the phone down before it started ringing, and I looked at the other pictures.
The photo of Simon must have been taken the same day, the day he left.
He’s sat in the front passenger seat of his dad’s car, window wound down, waving.
His dad’s at the back of the car, leaning all his weight on the boot, trying to get it closed against three years’ worth of possessions.
Against duvets and pillows, a stereo, a television, books and magazines and folders full of notes.
Against plates, saucepans, cutlery, a shoebox full of halffinished condiments, a food processor with the attachments missing.
A box of CDs, a box of videos, a box full of photographs and postcards and letters.
And a standard lamp, which he bought in a junk shop to make his room look civilised, lunging over his shoulder from the mess behind him.
All of it squeezed into his dad’s car, and he sits there and smiles and holds his open hand up beside his face.
In the background there’s a boy on a tricycle, staring.
There’s a photo of me and another girl, Alison, and I can’t remember who took it.
I’m standing next to her, pointing, shocked and laughing, and I’m surprised to see how similar I look, really, the same short blonde hair, the same small square glasses.
Alison’s pulling a wideopen face at the camera, freshly studded tongue flaring out of her mouth, fingers curled out like cat-claws.
And I’m pointing at her tongue and looking right into the lens, looking right out at myself these few years later, with a telephone in my hand, unable to dial.
I sat there thinking about the day she’d got it done, talked into it by the boy with the ring through his eyebrow who lived in her house, how she kept changing her mind all morning.
Eventually she went to a place round the corner, an upstairs place with a sign on the door saying no children no spectators.
It was a week before she could speak properly again, and then all she talked about was how excited and pleased she was with it.
She kept sticking her tongue out at men in the pub, just to see how they’d react.
By the end of the summer she was saying she might have to take it out to get a job.
It was a strange time.
People were slipping out of the city unexpectedly, like children getting lost in a crowd, leaving nothing but temporary addresses and promises to keep in touch.
I didn’t know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities wasted.
It was a good summer, long and hot, the days cracked open and bare, but it was hard to enjoy when it felt so deadended.
We spent our days on the front doorstep, circling job adverts with optimistic red felt-pens, trying to make plans, talking about travelling, or moving to London, or opening a cafe, each plan sounding definite until the next morning.
I don’t think any of us had the confidence, not for the sort of plans we were making, not for all those websites and fashion boutiques and doughnut shops.
A time of easy certainty had come to an end, and most of us had lost our nerve.
We used to sit on those front steps long into the evenings, long after the conversations had faltered, dragging our duvets downstairs when the stars finally squeezed out, flicking the ringpulls of empty beercans, blowing tunes into empty wine bottles.
Wondering what to do next.
Most of the photos I’ve got were taken in that last week, rushing around, trying to make up for three unrecorded years.
Pictures of the house, my bedroom, the front door with the number painted on it, the view of the street from my window.
But mostly the pictures are of my friends then, drinking tea in the kitchen, piled up in someone’s bed, throwing a frisbee across the street.
And in all the pictures they’re looking straight at the camera, always grinning and waving.
I sat in my room that evening, the phone still in my hand, looking at all those photographs, looking closely, as though I’d not seen them before.
Studying the expressions on their faces, looking for hidden details.
It was strange how important the pictures felt, like vital documents that should be kept in a fireproof tin instead of being blu-tacked and pinned to the wall.
Somehow, although we spent the whole summer doing nothing, it felt like the most significant part of my life, until now.
I dialled the number again, and it was engaged.
I don’t think I knew what I was going to say. I don’t know why I thought I’d find it any easier to tell her than Sarah.
I think I thought that, once I’d managed to say it, she’d at least be the one who would be able to help.
I think I hoped there would be shock and tearful reaction, that then she’d offer practical help and sensible advice.
That maybe she’d say why don’t you come and stay for a few days and we’ll talk it through, you and me and your dad.
Like a family, like a proper family.
I don’t know why I thought these things, I don’t know why I thought anything would be any different suddenly.
Perhaps I thought that exceptional circumstances could change the way of things.
I sat there, listening to the engaged tone, trying to think of the right words.
Telephone conversations with my mother are never very easy.
There always seems to be a weighting inside them, things left unspoken, things not fully spoken.
She says things gently and discreetly, carefully holding back her full implication.
Like holding playing cards against her chest.
When I told her about my latest new job she said that sounds very nice and what other opportunities have you been looking at?
She says things like, I don’t think you’re making full use of your degree, my love.
She says things like, it doesn’t sound as though you’re stretching yourself.
She doesn’t say what the hell kind of a job is that, or what are you actually doing with your life here?
I wonder if I wish she would.
I got through eventually.
My dad answered, he picked up the phone and sighed and said yes, please?
He’s always answered the phone like that, as though he was afraid of who might be trying to speak to him, of what they might be intending to say.