The first time I met Jon Mansfield was 7.30 on a Thursday morning. It was the day after I’d found the envelope tucked into the rocks and I’d been asleep for fourteen hours. I didn’t hear the knocking on the front door but I did hear my dad yelling up the stairs. Eventually. I think they probably heard on the other side of the fell. He was shouting that I had a visitor, that I should get out of my pit. I was too tired to be confused by the fact that someone was here to see me in a town where I hadn’t met a soul.
I stumbled down the stairs and remembered the note from the day before. The memory was a punch in the stomach and I wanted to go back to bed, to give up on the day already, but I felt the fresh air rushing up the stairs to greet me and I knew someone was waiting. I reached the door and Dad stepped aside and my eyes met the bright morning. I blinked and squinted and saw that I was facing the boy in the road for a second time. Even in the early-morning sunshine he looked unusual. He had on the same granddad clothes: brown shoes, grey trousers and a dark-green knitted jumper. He was even wearing a bloody tie. He had a side parting that revealed a thin white line of scalp on the left-hand side of his head and each strand of hair looked separate and solid like it was being held in place by glue. He looked like it was 1945 and he was on his way to church. My dad had left us to it and we just stood looking at each other. For a long time. I squinted at him and didn’t know what to do. He had a coughing fit. He recovered himself. Eventually he spoke. ‘Your eyes are very green. Emerald green. Did you get my note?’
I was angry first. When I read it – stood out in the wind, high on the hill – it felt like a message from my mum, a hug I never expected to feel again. Then I’d shaken sense into myself. It wasn’t from my mum. She was dead. I didn’t think she was just around the corner. I didn’t think she was watching me. I thought she was killed in a massive car crash and we turned her into ash eight days later. I felt stupid. And it was this boy’s fault. Standing outside our crumbling, shit, house at 7.31 in the morning in stupid clothes with a stupid haircut. ‘That was you.’ He nodded that it was. I turned and walked down the hall and into the kitchen and dropped myself into one of the Thornbers’ old chairs. I felt exhausted. I felt like I could sleep another fourteen hours straight.
He’d followed and sat down at the other side of the kitchen table. Neither of us spoke. His right leg tapped and his neck twitched and he stared at the kitchen wall like there was something there that only he could see. He coughed a dry hard cough every few seconds, his skinny chest nearly jumping out of his jumper like it was trying to escape. I’m not sure he could even tell that I was annoyed with him, that I wanted him out of the house. I thought he might be retarded. Eventually, he started talking. He spoke quickly, in machine-gun rounds. Leg still tapping, neck still twitching.
His name was Jon Mansfield and he went to Duerdale High School. The head of year told them that I would be starting next term and she’d told them about my mum. She wanted everyone to be ‘supportive and welcoming in a difficult time’. He said he knew it was me when we nearly killed him, that nobody moves to Duerdale, most people try to leave, so it had to be me. He lived in a house further down the fell with his grandparents and had seen me painting on the top of the hill. He pushed the envelope into the rocks for me to find. He thought it would be a supportive and welcoming thing to do. He told me that the passage was written by Canon Henry Scott-Holland. That he had been a canon of Christ Church Oxford and he’d formed the Christian Social Union. He said that it’s one of the most popular readings at funerals. ‘I thought you might like it – someone gave it to me when my mum died.’ He came to a halt, he was finished. He’d tried to be kind, so I tried to swallow my anger, looked at the strange creature sat opposite and asked if he wanted a cup of tea.