Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton Read Free Book Online Page A

significant.
    She’ll be so bored,
I was thinking as I scanned the playing field.
Up in the sick-room on her own. Surely she’ll leave her shift early.
    A figure at the edge of the playing field, half obscured by the border of chest-high azalea bushes.
    The figure is still and its stillness has attracted my attention.
    But I only looked long enough to know it wasn’t Jenny. Now I try to go closer, but I can’t get any more detail. Just a shadowy figure on the edge of the field; the memory yielding nothing more.
    The figure haunts me. I imagine him going into classrooms at the top of the school and opening windows wide; I imagine the children’s drawings pegged onto strings across the classrooms flapping hard in the breeze.
    Back on the playing field, Maisie came to find Rowena and I told her she was at school. I remember watching Maisie as she left the playing field. And something snags at my memory. Something else I saw on the outskirts of the playing field that I noted at the time; that meanssomething. But it is slipping from my grasp and the harder I try and pull at it, the more it frays away.
    But there’s no point tugging at it. Because by this point the arsonist had already opened the windows and poured out the white spirit and positioned the cans of spray mount. And soon the strong godsent breeze will be sucking the fire up to the third floor.
    The PE teacher blows his whistle and in a minute, not quite yet, but soon, I will see the black smoke, thick black smoke like a bonfire.
    Soon I will start running.
    ‘Mum?’
    Jenny’s worried voice brings me back into the brightly lit hospital corridor.
    ‘I’ve been trying to remember,’ she says. ‘You know, if I saw someone or something, but when I try and think about the fire I can’t…’
    She breaks off, shaking. I hold her hand.
    ‘It’s OK when I think about being in the medical room,’ she continues. ‘Ivo and I were texting each other. I told you that, didn’t I? The last one I sent was at two thirty. I know the time then, because it was nine thirty in the morning in Barbados and he said he was just getting up. But then… it’s like I can’t think any more, I can only feel. Just feel.’
    A judder of fear or pain goes through her.
    ‘You don’t need to think back,’ I say to her. ‘Aunty Sarah’s crew will find out what happened.’
    I don’t tell her about my shadowy figure half glimpsed on the edge of the playing field, because he really doesn’t amount to very much, does he?
    ‘I was worried you’d be bored up there,’ I say to herlightly. ‘I should have known you and Ivo would be texting.’
    Put together, they must have texted the equivalent of
War and Peace
by now.
    When I was her age, boys didn’t say much to girls, let alone write, but mobiles have upped their game. Some must find it pressurising, but I think it appeals to Ivo to send love sonnets and romantic haikus through the airwaves.
    But it’s only me who thinks Ivo’s texted poetry a little bit effeminate; while you are – surprisingly to me – firmly on his side.
    Jenny’s gone off to be with you, while I ‘
pop to my ward to get an update on how I’m doing
’ – as if I’m nipping down to Budgens for an
Evening Standard
.
    Maisie is sitting by my bed, holding my hand, talking to me, and I’m moved that she thinks I can hear too.
    ‘And Jen-Jen’s going to be alright,’ she says. ‘Of course she is.’
    Jen-Jen; that name we used for her when she was little, and sometimes slips out by accident even now.
    ‘She’s going to be just fine! You’ll see. And so are you. Look at you, Gracie. You don’t look too bad at all. You’re all going to be
alright
.’
    I feel her comforting warmth and another vivid memory of sports day flashes into my mind. Not a detective one, but one that comforts me and I’ll allow myself to play it for a moment; a paracetamol for my aching mind.
    Maisie was hurrying across the bright green grass, in her FUN shirt, stepping