"Hey, Lee, man," he said. "You're looking... alive!"

He snorted with laughter. I didn't know where to look or what to say, so I just looked at the ground and said nothing. He thumped me playfully in the shoulder blade as I passed him. He followed me back over the road. The taxi pulled away.

"I actually believed it for, like, half an hour, you know," he said.

"Believed what?" I asked.

"That you'd killed yourself."

Martin was a lanky kid of about five foot two. He didn't look like he had grown so much as an inch past his fifteenth birthday and his hair was undercut, the kind of style both Lee and I had when we were fifteen ourselves. I already knew that Martin couldn't have known Lee all that well, but I wondered for a minute if Martin was even old enough to be another student.

"After that, it was a pretty good joke, you know," he went on. "We had, like, a dozen people ring us up to see if we'd heard."

I nodded as I went up the path to the house and knocked on the door. I was ready to tell him, I just didn't think he was ready to hear. He followed me all the way and started to balance on the low brick wall as I chewed my thumbnail and waited.

"Of course, then when you didn't show up, like, days later, and nobody saw anything of Andy or Ben or Alex either we all started believing it again." He stepped off the wall, grinning. "We thought maybe the four of you had been in a suicide pact or some shit like that, you know. Either that or they'd killed you and beat it."

I turned sharply.

NOTES:
And that's where I left it. I went out to sit in the sun and relax and muse after an hour at the computer but when I felt like going back again that evening, there just seemed to be something critically wrong with the story as a whole.

After this point, Jack would point out to Martin that actually Lee was dead, and that he is Lee's twin brother. I've always thought this the main comic twist of the novel, but this was turning out to be a pretty downbeat chapter, ending with Jack telling Martin where to go. Jack, as the story went, eventually meets up with his brother's old housemates and starts looking for his brother's murderer - who doesn't really exist. Maybe I should try something a little less convoluted next time.

What I tried to do with Jack was make him as distinct from all the other characters as possible. I wanted him to be a more relaxed, observant character - perhaps due to my realisation at this point that everything was flying by too quickly. I've used the past tense for this character alone because he was always to be the moral heart of this picture, and I wanted to be a good moralist and suggest the good guy is the only one with a future (the past tense, of course, being someone telling a story that happened in the past).

Problem is, I fell in love with the rest of the characters as well, whatever their flaws. In fact, some of them I fell in love with because their flaws just made them all the more fascinating to write about (Alex in particular, as I envisaged writing about him when he came to the fore in the middle act). Well, it was a great learning experience. Sad to let it go. Might come back to it. One day.