The gate clicked behind Ethan and the cold got at the back of his neck.
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He didn't look back at the house. He had told himself, on the second trip out, that he wouldn't. He had also told himself he wouldn't think about the milk, and he had already broken that one. The milk was still in the kitchen. The milk was on the table. The milk was on her fingers where she had set the mug down in it, and she hadn't flinched, and Ethan didn't know what to do with the fact that she hadn't flinched.
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She didn't mean it.
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Ethan knew she didn't mean it. He knew it the way he knew the fifth stair creaked and the cutlery drawer stuck and the fridge door couldn't be slammed. He knew it at the level of house-knowledge, which was below thinking.
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She was tired. She was always tired. Tired was a word that had stopped meaning what it was supposed to mean in their house, because tired was a thing that came and went in other people and it was just the weather in theirs.
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Ethan walked.
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He wished, as he reached the end of his road, that he could do something. Not a big thing. Just a thing. Something that would make her sit down at the table one evening and be surprised. A letter. A drawing. Something left where she would find it. But every version of the thought arrived with a version of her face attached, and the face was always the one from the kitchen — the one that had shut, visibly, like a door.
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He didn't know how to knock on a door that was inside a person.
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Ethan adjusted the strap of his bag on his shoulder. Then he stopped walking.
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Mr Peterson was at the end of his own path, two doors down, dragging his empty bin back up towards the house. He saw Ethan before Ethan had finished deciding whether to see him.
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"Morning, Ethan."
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"Morning," Ethan said. It came out half a second too late, the way it always did. He had meant to say it faster. He had meant to sound like a person who said morning easily.
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"Warmer today." Mr Peterson was not really looking at him. He was looking at the wheel of the bin, which had caught on a flagstone. "Bit of sun for once."
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"Yeah."
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Mr Peterson nodded at nothing in particular. Ethan nodded back. Mr Peterson went on with the bin. Ethan went on down the pavement.
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It had been fine. It was always fine with Mr Peterson. Mr Peterson was an easy person because Mr Peterson did not want anything from him beyond the word morning, which Ethan could produce, and a nod, which Ethan could also produce. The trouble was that even easy ones cost something, and Ethan had not had enough to spend this morning before he spent it.
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Ethan reached into his bag as he walked.
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His hand found the shape of it without looking. The headphones were wound round the middle of the player in the particular way Ethan wound them, over and under, so they would not tangle. He lifted it out with both hands, because he always lifted it out with both hands, and he set the bag back on his shoulder and stopped just long enough to unwind the headphones and put them in.
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The player was heavier than the ones the other kids had. It had a proper weight to it, a small solid rectangle that fit in his palm. The buttons were real buttons — you could feel them click. Ethan pressed the middle one with his thumb in the small, specific way he pressed it. A tiny resistance, then the give.
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The world went quiet first.
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That was the best second of the morning. Not the song itself, not yet — the second before the song, when the headphones cut the world off and all the noise Ethan had been carrying since he woke up was suddenly on the other side of a door. The scrape of his shoes. The wind. A bird somewhere. All of it still there, all of it muffled, all of it happening to somebody who was not quite him anymore.
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Then the first chord came in. Soft, a long held thing, like somebody breathing in before they spoke. Ethan knew the shape of that breath. He knew it the way other people knew the voices of their family. He had probably heard it more times than he had heard any other sound in his life.
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{'Morning! Today's forecast calls for blue skies'}
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Ethan started walking again.
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The opening of the song was always slow. It took its time. It was not one of those songs that came at you — it arrived, the way weather arrived, and you noticed it in stages. The first thing to come in was the voice. The voice was friendly. The voice was talking to somebody, and because Ethan was the only one listening, the voice was talking to him.
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{'The sun is shining in the sky'}
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{'There ain't a cloud in sight'}
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{'It's stopped raining'}
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{'Everybody's in the play!'}
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{'And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day'}
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{'Hey, hey, hey!'}
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The cold on his neck receded a little.
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Ethan turned out of his road onto Magdalen Street and the morning opened up in front of him.
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A cat was on a wall, flat and yellow in the sun. Somebody's recycling had overflowed and a cereal box was lying on the pavement where the bin men had not picked it up. A For Sale sign had been up outside the house on the corner for as long as Ethan could remember, and the cardboard had gone soft at the edges.
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Ethan passed a house with a small brass plate by the door. It was the size of an envelope. The lettering on it was discreet, the kind of lettering that did not want to be read by people who were not looking for it.
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M. Halloran — Bereavement Consultations — by appointment.
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Ethan had walked past it hundreds of times. He did not look at it today either. He knew what it said the way he knew what every door on Magdalen Street said. The plate had been there for about four years. Before that, it had been a nail salon.
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Across the road, a woman in a blue coat raised a hand at him.
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Ethan saw the wave before he registered it was aimed at him. He was not sure who she was. She was not someone from school. She was not Mr Peterson. She might have been someone who knew his mum, or she might have been someone who had just seen him passing and had waved because she waved at people.
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He raised his hand back. Halfway. He was not sure how much wave was the right amount of wave.
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Ethan did not turn to see if she waved again. He kept walking. The song was still in its opening, still doing the slow soft thing it always did, and he could feel, in the way he had felt a hundred times, the song getting ready to do the thing it was about to do.
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The thing the song was about to do was the reason he played the song.
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The strings swelled. The voice lifted. Ethan felt his chest tighten a fraction in the good way, the way it tightened when you knew what was coming and you were a second away from it, and —
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And then it did.
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{'Running down the avenue'}
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{'See how the sun shines brightly in the city'}
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{'All the streets where once was pity'}
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{'Mr. Blue Sky is living here today!'}
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{'Hey,hey,hey!'}
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It came in bright. That was the only word for it. It came in the way light came in when somebody opened a curtain, all at once and everywhere, and the song stopped being a song and became the whole inside of his head.
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Ethan's shoulders dropped by a fraction.
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The corner of his mouth did a thing that was not quite a smile. He did not know he did it. His feet had changed — they had not changed much, just a little, but they had found the beat of the song, and he was walking in time with it now instead of in time with his own tiredness. Left right, left right, on the beat, and the beat was a good beat, the kind of beat you didn't have to work to find.
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His lips moved.
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He did not sing. Ethan did not sing out loud, not where people could see. But his lips moved around the words, quietly, inside his mouth, and sometimes the breath went with them and sometimes it didn't, and it was the closest he ever came to singing in public, which was to say it was not very close at all but it was something.
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The song was brighter than anything had been bright in his house for a long time.
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It didn't ask anything of him. That was the main thing. The song didn't need him to answer, didn't need him to look up, didn't need him to have done something differently. It just came in and was. The sun was out in the song the same way the sun was out on Magdalen Street, and the song did not know about the milk on the kitchen table, and the song did not know about his mum's shoulders going flat, and for the length of time the song was inside his head the song was more real than any of it.
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Ethan could feel, in the bit behind his ribs where the Kosura feeling lived, that the heavy thing was still there. It had not gone away. The song hadn't made it go away. But the song had put a hand on top of it, gently, the way you put a hand on top of a dog that was panting, and the heavy thing had gone quiet for a bit.
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That was what the song was for.
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Ethan kept walking.
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Up ahead on the left was St Cuthbert's, which was a church, which was a building Ethan had walked past every school day for two years and had never been inside. The noticeboard outside the gate was old — wooden frame, paint flaking at the corners — but the panel inside it was new. A thin e-ink display, the sort of thing that updated when someone wanted it to. The vicar had put a notice on it. Black letters on a pale cream background.
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Friday 16th May — 9pm — Vigil Service & Reflection — All Welcome.
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Around the edges of the notice were older paper ones that had not been changed for a long time. A Mothers' Union meeting from last autumn. A phone number for a bell-ringing practice. The Friday notice sat in the middle of them all, crisp and lit from within, and Ethan saw the shape of it and the light of it and the song carried him past before any of the words went in.
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The song was doing the bit where the hand-claps came in.
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Ethan loved the hand-claps. They were his favourite thing about the song, and he had never told anyone that, because telling people a thing you loved about a song felt like the kind of thing that could go wrong quickly if you did it wrong. The hand-claps arrived and they were on the off-beat, which meant that if you were walking on the beat — which Ethan was — the hand-claps landed exactly in between your steps. Step, clap, step, clap. It was the best thing. It was the best small thing.
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He crossed at the zebra crossing and went down towards the river.
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The priory ruins were on his right, through the railings. Grey stone, knee-high walls, a square of grass where the nave used to be. There were more visitors than usual for this time of morning. A man with a camera. Two women with a guidebook. An older couple standing close together, not speaking, looking at the place where the altar would have been.
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Ethan had heard his form tutor talking about the priory last year. The priory had been where people used to come to be buried near the saints, because being buried near a saint was supposed to help. He remembered the word supposed. The form tutor had said it in a particular way. Ethan had not understood why, at the time. He understood slightly more about it now, because of the programmes on the radio, but he did not think about it as he walked past. He thought about the ducks.
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There were two of them on the Little Ouse, at the edge where the water ran shallow. They were asleep or pretending to be. Ethan stopped on the footbridge for three seconds, which was his footbridge amount of time, and the song kept going underneath him, the bass line doing a walking thing that went with the water, and then he moved on.
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{'Mr. Blue Sky'}
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{'Please tell us why'}
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{'You had to hide away for so long, so long'}
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{'Where did we go wrong?'}
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On the other side of the bridge, at the corner where King Street started, two men were standing outside the newsagent with cups of something. One of them had a paper folded under his arm.
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"—telling you, it's going to be one of ours."
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"Get off."
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"It is. I'd put money on it. They wouldn't make all this fuss if it wasn't."
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"It'll be some American. It's always some American."
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Ethan walked past them. The song covered most of it. He caught one of ours and always some American, and he did not know what either phrase was attached to, and he did not stop to find out. The men were the kind of men who stood outside the newsagent every morning and had opinions. They had been there yesterday. They would be there tomorrow.
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The song had gone into the question-asking part. The voice was asking where we had gone wrong, and the strings had gone with it, lifting and falling in a way that was not sad exactly but was asking something. Ethan liked this bit less than the bright bit — nothing was as good as the bright bit — but he liked that it came when it came. The song knew where it was going. The song always knew where it was going.
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The bakery was open. The smell came out of the door and reached him before he got to it. Ethan walked through the warm part of the pavement where the bakery air met the cold air, and then out of it, and the music in his ears kept the beat.
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Ahead, a Lifeprint had opened where the old Superdrug used to be. The signage was cleaner than the rest of the street — a small, pale logo, the word Lifeprint in a font that was trying hard not to look like anything in particular. A short queue of people stood outside waiting for it to open. An elderly woman near the front was holding a cardboard folder against her chest with both hands.
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Ethan did not know what the folder was for. He did not wonder. He had seen people with folders outside Lifeprint before. It was a thing people did in the morning, like queueing outside the doctor's.
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Further down, the old Methodist chapel — which had not been a chapel since before he was born — was flats now. The stained glass was still in the top windows. Through one of them, someone had hung a shirt to dry.
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Ethan reached the bus shelter on the corner.
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The advertising panel on the side of the shelter was a flat, thin screen, and it was cycling. When he reached it, the screen was showing the council's recycling advert — green and white, a cartoon wheelie bin with a face. Ethan walked past it.
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Behind him, without any sound he could have heard through the song, the screen changed.
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A pale background. A figure in silhouette — standing, no features, faintly lit from behind. The BBC logo in the corner. Two lines of text above the figure, clean and unhurried.
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WHO YOU REALLY ARE — Episode Three
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1 DAY 12 HOURS
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The numbers moved. Not quickly. A slow tick, the seconds counting themselves down in the last position without drawing attention to it.
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Ethan did not look back.
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The song had gone quieter now. This was the bit Ethan didn't love and didn't skip. It was the bit where the song slowed down and went thoughtful for a moment, and somebody else's voice came in and said something about night, and the strings went low. When Ethan was smaller he used to skip this part, because it made something in his chest feel heavy, and heavy things in his chest were not what the song was for. He didn't skip it anymore. He wasn't sure when he had stopped. He thought it had been after.
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{'Mr. Blue, you did it right'}
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{'But soon comes Mr. Night'}
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{'Creeping over, now his hand is on your shoulder'}
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{'Never mind, I'll remember you this'}
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{'I'll remember you this way!'}
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The voice on the song sounded, for a second, like somebody saying goodbye to somebody who wasn't going to be there much longer. Ethan walked through it. His lips were not moving now. He was just listening. The heavy thing came and sat in his chest the way it had come and sat there a thousand times before, and he carried it for the eight bars it took and then the song moved on.
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A little further on, a woman was coming the other way with a small girl holding her hand. The girl was maybe six. She was hopping as she walked — the uneven rhythm of a child who had too much energy for the pavement.
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"But can I though?"
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"We'll see."
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"But can I? All of it? Even the end?"
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"I said we'll see, Maisie."
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"But I want to stay up. Dad said I could."
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"Dad said you could ask. I said we'll see."
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Maisie hopped past Ethan at knee height. She did not look at him. The mother smiled at him, briefly and automatically, the kind of smile that adults gave to children they did not know, and Ethan returned it the same way, and then they were past, and the conversation went on behind him and faded into the music.
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Stay up tomorrow, Ethan thought, and then the thought didn't go anywhere, because the song was climbing back up now, gathering itself, and the bright part was coming back.
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The road widened. The shops thinned out. He was leaving the centre now, heading out towards the longer stretch of road that led to school.
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Ethan passed a memorial bench.
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The plaque was brass, set into the wood of the backrest. Two names. A husband and a wife. The husband's dates were 1962 to 2039. The wife's were 1965 to 2048. Nine years between them. There were fresh flowers at the foot of the bench, tied with a piece of green string — somebody had put them there this morning, or yesterday.
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Ethan registered the bench without stopping.
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Something moved, low behind his ribs. Not the full weight of the Kosura feeling. Something smaller, and more local, and more his. He did not look at it. He kept walking, and the song kept going, and the feeling settled where it had come up from.
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On the other side of the road, a group of kids his own age were heading the same direction. Three of them. He didn't know them well. One of them was in his maths class. They were talking loudly about something to do with a game. They didn't look across. Ethan stayed on his side of the road at his pace, and they stayed on theirs at theirs, and the distance between them held.
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Ethan was grateful for the road. The road was doing useful work.
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He walked.
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The song had started its last section. It had gone into the long part at the end, the part that wasn't really the chorus and wasn't really a verse, where the voices came in on top of each other and built. One voice became two voices. Two voices became four. Four voices became a wall of voices, all singing the same two words, and the two words were the name of the song, and the name of the song was the name of the sky above Ethan's head right now, which was clear and blue and getting bluer.
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{'Hey there, Mr. Blue 'Sky'}
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{'We're so pleased to be with you 'Sky'}
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{'Look around, see what you do 'Blue'}
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{'Everybody smiles at you'}
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The voices went up a layer. And another one. And another one. It was the bit of the song that sounded, more than any other bit, like people actually singing together in a room, which Ethan had never done, and which he was not sure he would have wanted to do, but which he liked the sound of when other people were doing it on a record from a long time ago.
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His lips were moving again. Just a little. He didn't notice.
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Castlefields came into view at the top of the hill. Low brick buildings, the sports field to one side, the green-painted gate with the word CASTLEFIELDS ACADEMY above it in white. Kids were filtering in. The usual morning noise was starting to build, faint still from this distance, but there.
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Ethan slowed down.
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Not much. Just a little. He slowed down enough that the song would finish before he reached the gate, because he did not want to walk through the gate with the song still in his ears. That wasn't how he did it. You finished the song first. You put the player away. You went in.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvURnfbJX7R
Ethan walked through the last thirty seconds at the pace of the outro.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyTyrpC1bzO
He was still invisible. Nobody had looked at him for a while. The sun was on the side of his face. His shirt was still done up wrong under his jumper, and his hair was still sticking up at the back, and the milk was still on the table at home, and the doll was still tucked into his bed with its head on the pillow, and Ethan walked through all of it inside the song and none of it reached him.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtbI4XQKRWF
He thought — briefly, without drama — that he didn't want the song to end.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡC6FerNerGs
Then the song ended.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVe2e23P7z2
It did not stop cleanly. It faded, the way it always faded, a slow soft fading-out that let the voices go one layer at a time, until there was one voice, and then there was no voice, and then there was only the little hiss that the song always had at the end which Ethan had always suspected was just the recording itself. Then that was gone too.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡk4WCr7pdOG
The world came back in layers. The distant noise of the playground. A car somewhere behind him. A bird.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡreHwwskUfp
Ethan stopped at the edge of the pavement, twenty feet from the gate.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLmtiuxqXl4
He took the headphones out of his ears. He wound them round the middle of the player, over and under, the way he always wound them. He opened his bag. He put the player in the inside pocket where it lived. He zipped the inside pocket closed. Then he zipped the main bag closed over it.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjRzcfj0Srk
Ethan looked up at the school.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbKlU0BRn55
He adjusted the strap on his shoulder.
17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrxgDOowfXu
He walked in.17Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡw3KZKi8g1f
and then Add to home screen.