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“Compared to what he’s taken with him?” Sol nods.
Shit, shit, shit.“He’s gone already?” We already agreed forever wasn’t what either of us saw in our futures. Now all I want is a little more time.
“No,” Sol says. “I mean the best images are in his portfolio. So is the journey he’s drawn with his students. He’ll have both with him.” Sol grabs my arm, steering me to the doorway. “If you hurry, you can catch him. He said he needed space to unroll it all the way out, so he’s taken them to?—”
The clearing.
I must say that aloud. Sol nods. “Go and tell him what you just told me. Be quick though. He can’t miss this train.” His gentle gaze meets mine. “But also don’t make the same mistake I did.”
“Which was?”
“Thinking that distance had to be a relationship problem.” He lets go of my arm, this time to touch a different artwork. The man it features is golden and laughing, his arm slung around Sol’s shoulders. “I lost years to thinking that. I needn’t have. Not saying it’s easy, but my partner travelling so often just makes us both work harder at staying connected.”
He searches my face. Fuck knows what he sees there to make this offer.
“The first few days apart are always the worst. If you need company this weekend, my door is always open.”
“Thanks. I’ll probably be working or…” I’m still not sure about this. “I might visit the fam.”
“So you’ll be busy? Good. Just remember, miles don’t have to matter,” Sol promises. “Not if someone is really worth the effort.” Fuck his gaze being gentle. Now it turns steely. “Is Rae worth it to you?”
I nod.
That steeliness is a sudden bright flash. He grins. “Then what are you still doing here?”
I don’t answer.
I’m already running for the clearing.
No brambles snagme on my way to find Rae. Every pathway is clear. So is the light. It’s as bright as the paper on which these kids must have just finished drawing their journeys. They spread like sunbeams from Rae in the middle of the clearing.
He doesn’t see me at the edge of this corona. None of them do.
They’re engrossed in listening, and I see why as he unfurls more of his own story. They can all see what he’s shared with me since the end of the summer in snippets of conversation. Now it’s autumn, and he sets out a timeline threading all of those snippets together, which he verbalises with the crackling energy he brings to everything that matters to him.
“So, now I’ve taken you through my whole journey once, I want to recap with the crucial parts that had the most impact. How I went from here to here,” he says while using a stick to trace a line drawn between housing estate tower blocks and a smaller building. He’s drawn a cartoon explosion. “Boom! Taken into care at seven.” He moves along the paper. “Boom! Taken into care again at eight. Boom, shoplifting for our supper sent me back to the same place at nine with Mia, and again at ten, eleven, and twelve. We talked about life explosions, didn’t we?” The kids nod, and he continues. “About having your world blow up over and over, yeah?”
The students nod again.
Rae is emphatic about this. “Then what else do you remember?”
Teo speaks up. “You said going into care was the best thing to happen to you.”
Because someone read him a bedtime story promising he’d get through it.
Rae nods. “Here’s what symbolises the time before that for me—what made the biggest mark on me.”
A pin could drop, it’s so quiet.
If birds sing, I don’t hear them. I don’t even breathe. I can’t. Not after he uses a Sharpie to join dots with everyone watching.
A needle emerges.
So do pills.
A spoon and shining silver foil do too, but I can’t look away from what he drew first, and I’m back at the academy, taking what made playing through my pain possible.
“Addiction blew up my whole world for real. Boom,” Rae says. He also scribbles over a sketch of a girl and boy holding hands. “It left a stain I can’t ever erase and meant I couldn’t trust the one person who was meant to love me.”
