was spread out messily to one side and looked like she hadn’t brushed it in a long time.
From the expression on her face now, it was obvious she wasn’t going to give up, so he repeated what she’d told him.
“If you leave a door half open…”
It should have been surprising that he did remember it all, really, because he hadn’t made any special effort to make the words stick. But for some reason, they had. It was something about the rhythm. Sometimes he’d hear a song on the radio and it would end up going around and around in his brain for hours. Daddy had called it an earworm, which had made Jake imagine the sounds burrowing into the side of his head and squirming around in his mind.
When he was finished, the little girl nodded to herself, satisfied. Jake picked up his pencil again.
“What does it mean, anyway?” he said.
“It’s a warning.” She wrinkled her nose. “Well—kind of, anyway. Children used to say it when I was little.”
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
“It’s just good advice,” she said. “There are a lot of bad people in the world, after all. A lot of bad things. So it’s good to remember.”
Jake frowned, and then started drawing again. Bad people. There was a slightly older boy called Carl here at the 567 Club who Jake thought was bad. Last week, Carl had cornered him while he was building a LEGO fortress, and then stood too close, looming over him like a big shadow.
Why’s it always your dad who picks you up? Carl had demanded, even though he already knew the answer. Is it because your mum’s dead?
Jake hadn’t answered.
What did she look like when you found her?
Again, he hadn’t answered. Apart from in nightmares, he didn’t think about what it was like to find Mummy that day. It made his breath go funny and not work properly. But one thing he couldn’t escape was the knowledge that she wasn’t here anymore.
It reminded him of a time long gone when he had peered around the kitchen door and seen her chopping a big red pepper in half and pulling out the middle. Hey, gorgeous boy. That was what she’d said when she’d seen him. She always called him that. The feeling inside when he remembered she was dead had the kind of sound the pepper had, like something ripping with a pock and leaving a hollow.
I really like seeing you cry like a baby, Carl had declared, and then walked away like Jake didn’t even exist. It wasn’t nice to imagine the world was full of people like that, and Jake didn’t want to believe it. He drew circles on the sheet of paper now. Force fields around the little stick figures battling there.
“Are you all right, Jake?”
He looked up. It was Sharon, one of the grown-ups who worked at the 567 Club. She had been washing up at the far side of the room, but had come over now, and was leaning down with her hands between her knees.
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s a nice picture.”
“It’s not finished yet.”
“What is it going to be?”
He thought about how to explain the battle he was drawing—all the different sides fighting it out, with the lines between them and the scribbles over the ones who had lost—but it was too difficult.
“Just a battle.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go outside and play with the other children? It’s such a lovely day.”
“No, thank you.”
“We’ve got some spare sunscreen.” She looked around. “There’s probably a hat somewhere too.”
“I need to finish my drawing.”
Sharon stood back up again, sighing quietly to herself, but with a kind expression on her face. She was worried about him, and while she didn’t need to be, he supposed that was still kind of nice. Jake could always tell when people were concerned about him. Daddy often was, except for those times when he lost his patience. Sometimes he shouted, and said things like, It’s just because I want you to talk to me, I want to know what you’re thinking and feeling, and it was scary when that happened, because Jake felt like he was disappointing Daddy and making him sad. But he didn’t know how to be different from how he was.
Around and around—another force field, the lines overlapping. Or maybe it was a portal instead? So that the little figure inside could disappear away from the battle and go somewhere better. Jake turned the pencil around and began carefully erasing