We were in Edie’s one-bedroom flat above a junk shop on the cheap side of Highbury Corner. She was all boxed up and ready to go. Today was the day we started living together.
The removal men had just left and we would not see them again until Charterhouse Street, when we met them outside the block of flats directly opposite the main entrance of the old meat market.
Outside our home.
Edie sealed the duct tape on a cardboard box of CDs and books and turned to face me.
‘Are you sure about this, Max?’
‘Let me think,’ I said.
I touched my mouth against her mouth.
The fit was uncanny. I mean, I doubt if there was another pair of mouths in the world that fit together quite so well.
‘But we’ll be one of those families,’ she said, pulling away. ‘We’ll be blended! I know Scout likes me but maybe not so much when I’m at the breakfast table.’
I pulled her close again. Everything fit. Not just our mouths. Sometimes you just know where you belong. And when you know – really know – where you belong, then you don’t need to know anything else.
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘That’s what we’ll be.’ I kissed her one last time. ‘Now let’s go home, Edie.’
We carried the few remaining boxes down to the old BMW X5.
The street was empty apart from a woman in a full black burka walking down the middle of the road, carrying a pink and purple rucksack in her right hand, an Angry Princess bag, the bright splash of childish purple and pink colours standing out starkly against the funereal robes.
The curve her face – or what I could see of it – was familiar.
Because the woman was Layla Khan.
And I had seen that rucksack before.
I had seen it on that first day in Borodino Street.
And I saw it all clearly at last, I saw what had been there all along, staring me in the face, and I knew it was true even before Layla reached into the rucksack.
‘Max?’ Edie said. ‘That’s Layla, isn’t it?’
She began to walk towards the girl.
And I knew now how the two Croatian hand grenades had left the house on Borodino Street. I knew with complete certainty that Azza Khan had stuffed them into the merchandise of last summer’s Hollywood hit animated movie, and that she had carried them out in The Angry Princess bag through the armed officers ushering them to safety.
‘Get back inside,’ I called to Edie.
But she had already left me and now she was walking slowly towards the figure in black.
They drew closer. They stopped. They faced each other, close enough to reach out and touch.
‘Layla,’ Edie said.
‘We destroy your buildings,’ she said.
There was something in her hands.
In both of her hands.
They looked like death – black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. I was not close enough to read the name of the manufacturer on the side. But I knew what it said. Cetinka, it said, on those two grenades that should have been destroyed at the end of someone else’s war twenty years ago.
‘Edie!’ I screamed.
‘But you destroy our countries,’ Layla said.
‘This is your country,’ Edie said, and I saw her wrap her arms around Layla Khan with infinite tenderness, hugging her as Layla Khan removed the pins from first one Croatian grenade and then the other.
The sunlight caught the metal pins as they bounced on the sun-baked concrete of the little street.
Edie held her tight and smiled into Layla’s face, but I no longer recognised that face, it was someone I had never seen, the poison was in her now, and then I was thrown backwards without hearing the first explosion, or the second explosion, only the muffled sound of the air being forced asunder with astonishing violence, and then the echo of the rendering, like the sound of a door being slammed a thousand miles below the earth.
I was on my back.
I could hear what I first thought was falling rain, and then realised it was the sound of breaking glass dropping from shattered window panes the length of the street.
I looked around.
The broken bodies of the two women lay together in the middle of the road. A patch of red hair fell across the ghost white face of Edie Wren. I called her name, and it was a noise that came from a place inside me that I did not know existed, and it was the cry of something that had been smashed beyond repair.
And at last I began to crawl.