So do I.
I throw my phone at the fucking wall.
I sleep in Sol’s room.
Wake to a stiff neck, a looming night shift, and a phone with a screen that’s not much better off than my window.
Hunger gnaws at my stomach.
I ignore it and stagger out of Sol’s bed, grateful he has an old maritime clock on one of his bookshelves. I have an hour to get my shit together before I go back to work and it feels like a year wouldn’t be long enough.
Jack’s left me a note.
Sol’s left me dinner.
I take the note to my room and match it to what I’m seeing. The window’s boarded and the scorch marks in the carpet have been repaired. Everything else is still fucked and it suits my mood.
Sol’s left me chicken and rice.
I eat half.
Lose it.
Try again.
It stays down on my second attempt, but only because I eat it in Mal’s room on the bed he never sleeps in, staring down the bag that contains his entire life.
He’s never unpacked it and I don’t know why I’ve never noticed until now. Or what fuels me to set my plate on the floor and peer inside it.
Two t-shirts. A pair of socks.
His passport and a belt that looks like it could kill someone with the right swing. A medal box like Jack’s, and an envelope the same size as the one I wish had burned with my room.
The medal box makes me feel too much. I don’t even know what, just that I can’t. I upend the envelope. It’s unsealed and military paperwork slides out, along with a tumble of photographs. Like the ones in Jack’s album, they appear older than they are. Taken on a disposable camera, green-cast and badly exposed.
Mal, though,he’solder in these photos than the ones Jack has. He’s not a lad in these. His eyes are different, his features more defined. Harder. Sharper. Like a man who’s seen too many of the worst things.
Doesn’t mean he’s not smiling, though. I trace the edge of a photo with my thumb. It’s Mal and another soldier who’s a few years older than him. Jack’s age, maybe. Dirt on their faces, they have their arms around each other. Friends. Brothers. They’re laughing, Mal’s face split in half in ways I’ve never seen, and it’s another fucked-up feeling to miss something I’ll never have.
My vision blurs.
I need to eat more. Either that, or I’m crying, and I haven’t done that since I was fifteen.
Mal’s photos find their way back into the envelope. I put everything back in the bag and zip it up. I need to go, but leaving Mal’s room turns my legs into dead weight. It feels too final, like I’ll never see him again, and I’ve felt that before, about someone else, and I wasn’t fucking wrong.
Movement in the flat rouses me. I step out of Mal’s room as Jack appears in the hallway, holding a tablet that must be Sev’s.
“Can you help me with this?”
“Uh. Yeah.” I rub my eyes and follow him to the kitchen. “What is it?”
“Security footage. Sol doesn’t want me to look.”
“Why are you looking then?”
Jack sets the tablet on the counter, the metal casing thudding against the old wood. “Why wouldn’t I fucking look?”
Now it’s him who sounds like Mal, and the edge in his tone is sharp enough to yank me out of the daze I’ve been shuffling around in since I woke up in Sol’s bed. “Because Sol would’ve told you if there was something you needed to see.”