idea. Daddy didn’t like him talking to her, but Jake didn’t think he would ever make fun of him for doing so. He was pretty sure that Owen would.
So he shrugged. “Nobody.”
“Somebody.”
“I didn’t see anybody there. Did you?”
Owen considered the matter, then leaned back.
“That,” he said, “was Neil’s chair.”
“What was?”
“Your chair, idiot. It was Neil’s.”
Owen seemed angry about this, although once again Jake wasn’t sure what he was supposed to have done wrong. Mrs. Shelley had told them all where to sit that morning. It wasn’t like he’d stolen this Neil person’s chair on purpose.
“Who’s Neil?”
“He was here last year,” Owen said. “He’s not here anymore because someone took him away. And now you’ve got his chair.”
There was an obvious error in Owen’s thinking.
“You were in a different classroom last year,” Jake said. “So this was never Neil’s chair.”
“It would have been if he hadn’t been taken away.”
“Where did he move to?”
“He didn’t move anywhere. Someone took him.”
Jake didn’t know what to think about that, as it didn’t make sense. Neil’s parents had taken him somewhere but he hadn’t moved? Jake looked at Owen, and the boy’s angry eyes were clearly full of dark knowledge that he was desperate to pass on.
“A bad man took him,” Owen said.
“Took him where?”
“Nobody knows. But he’s dead now, and you’re sitting in his chair.”
A girl called Tabby was also sitting at the table.
“That’s horrible,” she told Owen. “You don’t know Neil’s dead. And when I asked my mummy she said it wasn’t nice to talk about anyway.”
“He is dead.” Owen turned back to Jake and gestured at the chair. “That means you’ll be next.”
That didn’t make sense either, Jake decided. Owen really hadn’t thought this through at all. For one thing, whatever had happened to Neil, he’d never sat in this particular chair, so it wasn’t like it was cursed or anything.
And also, there was a much more likely possibility. It was one he knew he shouldn’t say, and he remained silent for a second. But then he remembered what the little girl had told him outside, and how alone he felt, and he decided that if Owen could treat him like this, then why couldn’t he treat Owen the same right back?
“Maybe it means I’ll be last,” he said.
Owen narrowed his eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe the bad man will take the class one by one, and they’ll all be replaced by new boys and girls. So that means the Whisper Man will take you before me.”
Tabby gasped in shock, then burst into tears.
“You’ve made Tabby cry,” Owen said matter-of-factly. The teacher’s assistant was making his way over to the table. “George, Jake told Tabby the Whisper Man was going to kill her like he did Neil, and she got upset.”
Which was how Jake went up to yellow on his first day.
Daddy was going to be very disappointed.
Eighteen
The day had gone better than I expected.
Eight hundred words might have been a relatively meager tally, but after not writing anything for months, at least it was a start.
I read it through again now.
Rebecca.
At the moment, it was about her. Not a story in itself, or even the beginning of one, as things stood, but the beginning of a letter to her, and one that was difficult to read. There were so many happy memories to draw on, and I knew that I would as I continued, but while I loved and missed her more than I could say, I also couldn’t deny the ugly kernel of resentment I felt, the frustration at being left alone with Jake, the loneliness of that empty bed. The sense of being abandoned to deal with things it felt like I couldn’t cope with. None of that was her fault, of course, but grief is a stew with a thousand ingredients, and not all of them are palatable. What I’d written was an honest expression of a small part of how I felt.
Groundwork, basically. I had an idea now of what I could write about. A man, a little like me, who had lost a woman, a little like her. And as painful as it would be to explore, I could do that, moving from the ugliness to the beauty, and hopefully some final sense of resolution and acceptance. Sometimes writing can help to heal you. I didn’t know if that would be the case here, but it was something to aim for.