Free We That Are Left by Clare Clark

a tight little laugh. ‘It didn’t seem to be much consolation.’
    Oscar did not know what to say. He looked at the floor. Inside his head, like a gramophone record going round and round, he heard the words his mother always used to sing when he went to sleep:
Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht
.
    â€˜She can hardly bear to look at us,’ Jessica said. ‘It’s like our being alive makes Theo being dead even worse.’
    Morgen früh, wenn Gott will, wirst du wieder geweckt
. Oscar bit his lip, squeezing the song out of his brain.
Tomorrow morning, if God wills, you’ll wake up again
. He thought of his mother in the library, Sir Aubrey like a broken toy in her arms, the sadness leaking out of him like sawdust.
    â€˜It’s the shock,’ he said helplessly. Jessica shrugged. She kicked at the leg of the bench.
    â€˜You and Phyllis looked pretty thick,’ she said.
    â€˜We were just talking.’
    â€˜Just talking.’ She looked at Oscar. Then she sat down next to him on the bench. It was dark enough for her face to be fuzzy round the edges, even close up. Sir Crawford had wanted electrical lights all the way up the tower but Trinity House had forbade it. They said that the tower was too close to the sea, that ships might mistake it for a lighthouse. ‘You were holding hands. I saw you.’
    Oscar made himself think about modular arithmetic, which his teacher called clock arithmetic because it was like telling the time, with one coming after twelve and not thirteen. Like everything, modular arithmetic was better with prime numbers. Jessica reached out and took the scarf from his lap. She did not ask him if she could. She wound it round her neck. Then she cocked her head on one side, considering him. Oscar made himself compute powers going up from one for modulo 5. 2 4 = 1, 2 5 = 2. He could feel his ears going red.
    â€˜Did you want to kiss her?’ she said. ‘I bet you did. Boys always want to kiss girls, even the not very pretty ones. But then I shouldn’t think you notice if someone’s pretty or not. She could look like Mary Pickford and you’d still prefer the encyclopaedia. Unless she was made of sums. Think of that. A girl with long division for arms and hair all curly with quadratic equations. Two times signs for eyes and an equals for a mouth. Look at you, just thinking of her makes you blush.’
    She thought it would make her feel better, watching Oscar squirm, but the hole inside her kept opening, wider and wider like a huge black mouth. ‘You’d eat pi for every meal,’ she said. The important thing was not to stop talking. ‘Pi and circumference, with slide rules for knives. You do know it’s rude, don’t you? To sit there like a codfish saying nothing at all. It’s bloody freezing out here. If you were a gentleman you’d offer me your coat.’
    â€˜We should go in.’
    â€˜Not yet. Those men haven’t gone yet.’
    â€˜How do you know?’
    â€˜Jim Pugh’s dog.’
    Outside the dog was a smear of white against the grey grass of the mown path. It rolled over, its mouth wide open as though it was laughing. Jim Pugh drove the trap that served, among other things, as the station taxi. His dog rode with him everywhere, sitting up very straight with its eyes bulging and its tongue lolling out of its mouth. No one complained because Jim was not all there. Theo had called them the Village Idiots. He once gave Jim Pugh a bag of bird seed and told him if he planted it it would grow birds.
    The hole was not a hole any more but a fat black snake, thickening inside her. Jessica tugged at the ends of Oscar’s scarf, wrapping the fringes as tightly as she could around her fingers. ‘I suppose you’re in love with Phyllis, then?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜You make it sound like there’s something wrong with her.’
    â€˜No, I don’t.’
    She thought