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“Mrs. Gray?”

“Yes.”

“Hi. You don’t know me, but I’m … Philip. A friend of Alex’s, from school.”

“Oh, yes. Hello.”

“Sorry to just call round like this.” He waited for her to say it was okay, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything. He’d forgotten how green her eyes were. “Only … I wanted to speak to you about something.”

“To do with Alex?”

“Yeah. Yes.”

“Oh. Well, you … Come in. Come in, won’t you?”

Alex followed her inside. The smell was the first thing he noticed. Living here, he hadn’t ever realized that the house had its own distinct odor. He couldn’t have said what it
was
exactly but as soon as he stepped over the threshold, it hit him: the smell of home.

He set his schoolbag down, as he’d always done, at the foot of the coat stand. The bag was bulging where he’d stuffed his Litchbury High blazer and tie inside. In the hallway, Mum became awkward, as though she’d already forgotten who he was and how he’d come to be there. Collecting herself, she offered him a frail kind of smile and led him through to the lounge. Out on the doorstep, she had been similarly distracted. Confused. She’d seemed to gaze
through
rather than
at
him, and when she’d spoken, it was as though she was being prompted via an earpiece. The one time her attention had sharpened was at the mention of Alex. She’d almost flinched.

“This is the living room,” she said, like she was showing the house to a buyer.

Sam was there, cross-legged on the floor, directly in front of the TV, playing a video game. Motor racing. Back in December, Sam had been into some Tomb Raider-type thing. Even though Sam had his back to Alex, the sight of his brother got to Alex. The short-cropped reddish hair, like suede, the knobbly bump of his uppermost vertebrae, which he was so self-conscious about. Likewise, the sticky-out ears. Sam’s birthday had been and gone, he realized; he was
eleven
years old now, and after the summer, he would be starting at Crokeham Hill High. His little brother, growing up without him.

“Sam,” Mum said, “this is one of Alex’s friends.”

“Uh-huh.”

No hi, no turn of the head to see who it was. Just the jerking of his elbows as his car screeched into a chicane. At one of Sam’s birthday parties—the fifth or the sixth—the balloon man (Uncle Pete) asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “A Jedi warrior,” Sam said, deadly serious. They mightn’t have been brothers at all, their personalities were so dissimilar; but they
were
brothers, and Alex longed for Sam to turn round. To look at him. Just so he could see Sam’s freckly face again.

“Sam,”
their mother said. “Say hello.”

He answered robotically, attention fixed on the screen. “Hello, friend of Alex.”

Mum looked at Alex apologetically. “Why don’t we go through to the kitchen?”

She made tea, in the red and white stripy pot with the chipped lid. He figured it was to give herself something to do, because Alex said he’d be fine with water and, anyway, the tea remained unpoured the whole time they were talking. She was wearing a familiar lime green top and that frayed denim skirt, faded almost white; her ginger hair, as ever, was cut into a bob. Usually, she wore beige moccasins, trodden down at the heel, but that day she was barefoot. It threw Alex, the oddness. Her insteps were pale as chalk, and as she moved around the kitchen, the soles of her feet made a kissing sound on the laminate floor. She looked older. More than six months older. Tired. Her body had sagged. She was thinner than he’d recalled—gaunt, really—but more than that, and for all her bustle, she was less of a
presence
. A partially erased drawing was how he thought of it.

“Are you in Alex’s class?” she asked, handing him a glass of water. It was too full and some spilled down the outside, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“No, I’m in 9JH.”

Having started with a lie about being a friend of Alex’s, he had to go through with it. So much of what he would say depended on what she said to him. One thing was certain: he couldn’t just pitch up and declare himself to be Alex. For now, it was enough to establish contact with his family—befriend them, gain their trust—while he sussed out how best to play it from there.

“JH?” his mum said. “Is that—”

“Mrs. Harewood.”

“Old Hair Ball?”

Alex smiled at the nickname. “Yeah, that’s her. Teaches science.”

Mum paused, swilling the teapot under the tap as she waited for the kettle to boil. “She sent us a very nice card. Jennifer. Jenny Harewood.” She set the pot down, popped in a couple of tea bags. “Got Alex earmarked as a budding chemist.”

He thought about that: his teachers sending condolences to his mother.

Right here in this kitchen, at breakfast one morning back in October, Mum had tested him on the periodic table—calling out symbols from a homework sheet while he, between mouthfuls of cornflakes, named each element and its atomic number. Or tried to. By the end, she knew them as well as he did. From then on, Special K (Mum’s cereal) was always referred to as Special Potassium.

“Sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“Philip.” He hated lying to her. Before she could say she didn’t remember Alex mentioning him, or wonder why they hadn’t met him before, he said, “I only started at Crokeham Hill in September. We moved down from Yorkshire for my Dad’s work.”

“I thought there was a whatsit. A northern twang.”

Alex realized as she said this that her familiar south London accent was oddly comforting. One of the sounds of home. You heard Mum speak and you could tell where she came from, not like Mr. and Mrs. Garamond, whose speech was so neutral they could have come from anywhere. Where
did
they come from? He knew, from something he’d heard the mum saying on the phone one time, that they’d
moved up
to Litchbury for the dad’s job at the university, but that was all.

Any time now, they would be starting to wonder where Philip was.

The kitchen, the house itself, seemed so much smaller and shabbier than the Garamonds’. Mum filled the pot, then slipped on the grubby, never-washed knitted cozy that Dad had long threatened to burn as a health hazard. “So, was it the chess?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

“How you became friends with Alex.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, the chess club.”

“His grandfather taught him to play.” She smiled. “Their games lasted for hours. I used to take them sandwiches and drinks.”

Cheese, sliced thick, with rings of red onion that made your nose sting. White bread. Milk for him, cocoa for Granddad. He took a slug of water to distract himself from the memory, to stop himself from blubbing. If he blubbed, he might just throw his arms round her and call her Mum. Alex had been doing okay until then. Even here, in his own home, with his own mother, he’d managed to hold it together. But this talk of marathon chess sessions with Granddad, and the realization that Mum had lost them both—her father, her son—and the thought of what Alex himself had lost, or been torn away from … all of this came close to overwhelming him. It was suddenly way too freaky to be standing in this kitchen he knew so well, a stranger to his own mother.

He’d imagined a moment of epiphany: an incredulous look in her eyes, her hand reaching tentatively for his cheek, exploring the contours—like she was a blind person reading his face like Braille—and her asking the hushed question, not daring to believe it herself:
Alex … is that you?

She hadn’t shown the slightest hint of knowing him, of course. He was just Philip, a boy she’d never met, Alex’s friend, in whose company she could reminisce about her dead son.

“That looks like a nasty bump,” she said.

His lip, she meant. “Bump” was Mum’s word for just about any kind of injury, from a grazed knee to a broken arm (that time he’d taken a tumble off the trampoline). “I got hit by a cricket ball.” Alex touched the scab with his fingertips. “In the park,” he added before she thought to say that they didn’t play cricket at Crokeham Hill.

They talked about how lucky he had been not to lose a tooth. Then, with another of those frail smiles, Mum said, “Now, what did you want to talk about?”

So he took her through it: the plan to set up a fund at the school—with donations, sponsored events—to pay for an annual interschools chess trophy in Alex’s name. The Year Nine Council wanted to check if it was okay with her before going ahead. On the train, it had seemed like a good cover story—explaining why he’d called round, while enabling them to talk about “Alex.” Face to face, it sounded cheap and nasty. A scam. He felt like a door-to-door con man trying to trick this woman—his own
mother
—into buying something she didn’t need.

That she seemed genuinely touched by the idea only made it worse.

“This whole business—” She stood at the sink, gazing out into the back garden. So choked up she had to check herself. She took a deep breath, blinked back the tears. “I … sorry … I suppose I didn’t realize he was so well
liked
. ”

Alex didn’t say a word. He wished he could unsay everything he’d already said.

“To be honest with you, Philip”—she turned towards him, her eyes red-rimmed—“we’ve always worried that Alex was a bit too much of a swot to make friends at that school. Apart from David Bell, you know, he hardly ever brought anyone home.”

“It’s just an idea, really. I don’t—”

“But it makes people realize, doesn’t it? When something like this happens.”

He waited for her to continue.

“It makes them think ‘That could be me,’ or ‘That could be my son.’ ” He started to speak, but she talked over him. “And please don’t think I’m ungrateful—because I’m not, truly I’m not. It’s a lovely … gesture.” She pressed her palms to the sides of her face, then lowered them. “But the timing. The timing isn’t wonderful.”

The washing machine clicked into a new phase in its cycle; up till then, Alex hadn’t registered that it was on. He wasn’t sure what she meant by “timing.” In chess, whenever you made a move, you had a fair idea of the other player’s response, but he couldn’t read Mum at all. A moment earlier she’d been pleased to the point of tears. Now his mother seemed altogether less happy.

“It’s the six-month anniversary this week, did you know that?”

“Oh, okay. No. I mean, yeah, I kind of knew it must be around now.”

“Sometimes it seems like yesterday. Other times, it’s …” She turned back to the window, not looking out, though; her head was bowed, the fingers of both hands gripping the edge of the stainless steel sink. The kitchen smelled faintly of cooked food—meaty, like sausages. Sam’s tea, probably. Did they eat the same meals? Your son died, but you still had a husband and another son. You had to go on. Cooking, eating. Making pots of tea. Doing the laundry. After a pause, Mum said, “Could you go back to the year council, Philip, and thank them for me? For us. Tell them we’ll think about it again when … when it’s more appropriate.”

She picked up a mug from the draining rack and hooked it onto the mug tree. It had a picture of a man in dressing gown and slippers, jumping over the moon, and the slogan
He’s all right, my dad
. A birthday present from Sam. Alex wondered when Dad would be home. It depended which shift he was working. Much as he longed to see him, Alex was unsure what his rational, skeptical father would make of “Philip.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“You mean well, I know that. All of you.” Mum moved away from the sink and took a step towards him. Started to place a hand on his shoulder, but hesitated and left the gesture incomplete. She pushed a stray lock behind her ear. Her hair looked dull, in need of a wash. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Doing the right thing. Saying the right thing.”

Alex put the glass of water down. “D’you think I could use the bathroom?”

He made straight for the bedroom. His bedroom.

Alex paused on the landing, half afraid to go in, still clinging with the fingertips of his imagination to the idea of entering the room to see himself at the PC or sitting on the bed, reading or listening to music. That name panel he’d made in woodwork, with its wonky
X
, was still fixed to the door, along with the notice he’d done on the computer:
Killers fans only beyond this point
. Alex had once run face-first into this door, hurtling upstairs in the dark to escape a whack from Dad. What for, he couldn’t recall. Now he heard Mum downstairs, pottering about, and the synthetic racetrack roar from the lounge. Hesitant as he was, he didn’t have much time before his trip to the loo would be taking too long. He opened the door, went in.

And there it was. He had wondered if he might find it like this, but he hadn’t actually expected to. They did this in movies or TV dramas, not in real life: the bereaved family leaving a child’s room untouched after he’d died. As though he might return home at any moment, or as though they couldn’t bear to let him go, and by preserving his room, they were allowing themselves the illusion that he wasn’t dead. Maybe they came in here from time to time, Mum and Dad—Mum, most likely—to talk to their lost son while they were surrounded by his things.