So where does the coincidence come into all this? I’ll tell you. I’d been wishing for someone to tell my story to and he was up there all the time. He was up there with a story of his own.

Chapter 4

4

KISSING FACES THROUGH GLASS is no longer my style. But I still have that photograph of Daniel, still in its silver frame. I took it with me when I left old Mrs. Fisherton’s, stole it, I suppose. After all, I had stolen the photograph in the first place. It and a lot of copies of it were on the table when I went to see Mrs. Fleetwood after the hospital discharged me. I should really say when she summoned me to tell me what she thought of someone who’d sent a boy of sixteen, her only son, to his death. She went out of the room because she was crying so much and while she was away I took one of the photographs, rolled it up and put it inside my jacket. Poor thing, she’d have torn up those prints rather than give me one.

That portrait stands in our living room now, along with one of Mum and Dad. There ought to be one of my husband but the only time he ever had his photograph taken was when we got married. Our wedding photograph has pride of place. But Daniel is there too and the one man who might be jealous doesn’t mind. When people ask me who the boy with the keen eyes and the cheerful grin is, I don’t tell them, I say in the words of Emmylou Harris’s song that it’s just someone I used to know.

The days, the weeks, after that interview with Max have jumbled in my memory. The diary was abandoned for a long while. All sorts of things happened; it’s the order I can’t recall. I started at GUP in a daze, confused by everything, but at least my journey there was underground- and underpass-free, and I discovered buses for days when I didn’t feel like walking to Paddington Station. As for the place itself, the college, I was so deeply uninterested in what I was supposed to be doing and so unable to find my way around that I passed whole weeks in a trancelike state. Because the buildings were on opposite sides of a fairly important road, many rooms were reached by means of an overhead walkway and yes, of course, an underpass. I never used the underpass but toiled upstairs to the walkway, was late for lectures or sometimes hopelessly lost. I spoke to scarcely anyone and after a time people stopped making overtures to me. As early as that first term I was missing lectures, skiving off or not bothering to go in. Most people have bad dreams that are specifically about that sort of thing, dreams in which they find themselves back at school or college with tests or exams or finals looming, they have attended no classes, done no work, made no notes, and, barely knowing the basics of their subject, either retreat from the scene or fly into a panic. But it’s a dream and you wake up from it. For me it was real life.