I shake my head.
‘Look,’ Saul says, ‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just . . . wot difference will it make? Even if we did find out, it won’t bring him back. Shit happens.’
I stare up at the comet on the ceiling. It’s the same words as before, so I know he’s not just talking about Al. He’s talking about our dad walking out, too.
‘You can spend all your life tryna to work out why someone does summat. Tryna find answers and, in the end, none of it matters. That’s just people.’
I shrug. ‘Suppose,’ I say. But I don’t mean it. It all matters. Reasons matter.
Saul gets up and walks over to my bedroom door. ‘Try and get some sleep, yeah?’ he says. ‘It’s almost three.’
I nod. ‘Right,’ I reply.
Saul pauses. ‘We’ll get through,’ he says. ‘Same way we always do.’ He stands there for a minute, like he’s gonna say summat else, but he doesn’t. He just gives me this weird smile, then switches off my light and closes the door. I lie back and I stare up at the dim shapes on my ceiling – the half-moon, the plastic planets, a shooting star with a curved bit at the bottom. I don’t like it when I’m left alone cause then it’s just me and all these thoughts. Me and all these feelings that I don’t understand.
Maybe Saul’s right – maybe there ain’t always a reason why people do things; maybe there ain’t always an answer. And, if I would’ve showed him Al’s drawing, then he would’ve said that it was just a stupid picture that I was reading too much into. But I know Al. He was one of the smartest people that I know . . . knew. And he wouldn’t have left that drawing there unless there was a reason, unless there was summat he wanted us to find out.
And wot else do I have?
I breathe out slowly.
‘Eh, bro,’ I say, and I dunno if I really think Al can hear me or not, but it feels good to say it out loud anyway. ‘I promise I’ll find out wot happened,’ I say. ‘I promise I’ll find out why.’
The first time I met Megan, I told her that everything in life is maths. That, when you look closely, you see all these patterns, and numbers, and shapes. The same number patterns showing up in art . . . or nature . . . or even the number of cells in the human body. And you see it everywhere you go. Patterns and numbers repeated again, and again, and again. Bleeding into every part of your life, if you only take the time to look properly.
It’s funny, but not in a haha way, in a weird one. A way that I don’t really understand, like those confusing questions you get on a maths exam paper: So and so is going to make an apple pie so they buy 578 apples. What is the percentage of filling compared to the ratio of pastry? Or some crap like that.
Anyway, when I’d found out wot happened with Al, I thought it was some sort of joke at first, or that someone had got it wrong, cos I’d only been talking to him the day before. We’d been messaging back and forth on WhatsApp and he never said anything that made me worry. Not a single thing. I didn’t get that he was upset, or that anything was even wrong. When he didn’t turn up to art the next day, I thought that something must’ve been off cos Al never missed school. And he never would’ve missed it on a day he had art. But I just thought that maybe he was sick or something. So I messaged him:
I missed you in art, big head! Where were u?!
But I know he didn’t see it cos only one of those ticks appeared. And, when I had a look at the top of our messages, it said Last seen yesterday, at 15:42.
It was the next day, Wednesday, that I found out Al was dead. And all I could think was that all the time I’d been messing about on Snapchat, or scrolling through Insta, looking at someone’s story, all that time . . . Al had been dead. And I just couldn’t get my head round it. I just couldn’t believe that I’d lost someone else.
I still remember the first time we spoke properly. Al was sitting in the far corner of the art class, mixing powdered paints together, and he was really taking his time. Measuring out the paint like it was really important for him to get the right shade, like it meant . . . everything. There were all these other kids messing about, but Al was sitting on his own and you could tell that art was his thing. That he didn’t just pick it cos he thought it would be easy. He actually loved it. Just like me. But I know how to have a laugh, too, and Al didn’t really do that. I never saw him hanging around with anyone. Well, except his mate Lewi, but even that stopped. So I felt sort of sorry for him at first. Cos imagine having no mates at all. It’s sad. Really sad.
Anyway, I’d been trying to draw my dad, using one of my favourite photos of him, but, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t make it look like him and I’d used my rubber so many times that the paper was all furry, and there were these black bits everywhere. I was so annoyed, so flipping pissed that I couldn’t do it, that I just threw the rubber and started swearing. Swearing the whole classroom down cos it’s annoying when you’re trying your hardest to make something turn out perfect, but it just doesn’t work.
Then Al stopped mixing his paints and came and sat next to me, even though I never asked him to, and he said, ‘You know, everything in life is maths.’ Which is a pretty weird thing to say when you think about it. He pointed at the picture of my dad that I was trying to copy from the screensaver on my phone. ‘It’s all about patterns and numbers. But you’re trying too hard to make it perfect. No one’s face is a perfect oval. Faces don’t work like that. They’re more of an egg shape . . . with this bit that goes out towards the bottom . . . this bit that expands.’ Then he looked at the photo of my dad, picked up my pencil and showed me.
And at first I was angry cos I didn’t know Al and there he was, coming over to my table, insulting my dad’s face and thinking he knew everything. I was just about to tell him where he could go, but then I looked at the drawing. I almost couldn’t speak. It was like Al had brought my dad back to life. He’d managed to draw my dad’s stubble in and these tiny lines at the corner of his eyes, and he’d even shaded in these flecks of grey on Dad’s beard.
I thought he’d say something else, but he just got up and sat back down at his table, like it was nothing. He pulled his headphones on and I couldn’t stop staring at him. Not cos I fancied him or anything like that, but cos he was so . . . different. He didn’t have his hair shaved like most of the other boys, and he never wore a cap, and he didn’t have one of those Nike bags, and he didn’t even try to get away with wearing trainers instead of proper school shoes. Even when he spoke, Al didn’t sound like he was from Wythenshawe. You just knew that he was gonna do something with his life. You know, when you can just tell that some people are gonna go on and do something . . . amazing?
So, that day, when I got that Snap off my mate Tara – cos she’d heard from Chloe, who’d found out from Lauren, who knew cos she was going out with Al’s big brother, Saul – I couldn’t believe that Al had killed himself. That I’d never see him again. I didn’t know wot to do, but I was certain I wanted to do something. Something to keep Al’s memory alive somehow . . . just like he’d done for me with that drawing of my dad.