‘Welcome to Ghost Town Studios.’ James Worthing opened the red, imp-adorned door wide, and stepped back to let Suki in. He’d cut his hair and shaved his beard, and it suited him. He looked good, confident, adult. His hand-stitched indigo linen jacket, fine silver denim trousers and canvas sneakers were trimly elegant and spoke of a sense of style he’d clearly retained from his sojourn in Japan. You don’t learn that shit in the Midlands.
‘Thank you,’ she said with a warm smile. ‘It’s been a while.’ Precisely since the night your father died, she didn’t say. ‘How are you keeping?’
‘Well, thanks,’ James said, before checking himself. ‘Of course, it’s taken some time to get over the shock and all that.’ But it was clear to Suki that he was recovering just fine; thriving, in fact, now that the overbearing paternal shade had cleared.
As if recognising what Suki saw in him, James expanded. ‘My aunt’s still out for blood – she’s suing Picton and the contractor for criminal negligence.’
‘What? She doesn’t accept the findings of the investigation? That it was an unfortunate accident?’
James tilted his head, evidently replaying what had happened that night. Petra’s urgency to get the headphones to Worthing. ‘She doesn’t – we don’t – believe that was all there was to it.’ Suki’s breath hitched before James continued, ‘The bastards were taking shortcuts. Picton apparently paid this guy to sign the electrical compliance off, but the wiring was riddled with faults. If it wasn’t that socket, it would have been another. We had it all stripped out and replaced.’ He paused. ‘But of course, none of that will bring him back.’
So, if Petra hadn’t run, she might have got away with it. Stupid girl. Suki sighed and the lump inside her throbbed.
‘No,’ she said, swirling around and expelling the dark past. ‘It looks wonderful in here, James. It feels really open.’ The main passageway felt wider and natural light was cascading down the stairs.
‘Yeah, it took some work to make it accessible.’
‘And it’s so light.’
‘Yeah, we’ve installed some skylights, made the windows bigger, changed out some of the gloomy, overstained old wood for lighter cedar and pine. It’s been crazy bright over the summer but as you can tell, it really does its work when the nights start to draw in. The kids love it.’
‘I can imagine. They probably don’t want to go home. Can I have a snoop around upstairs, or is he busy with a session?’
James checked his watch. ‘I think they’re on a break, so feel free. Come through and see us when you’re done. The coffee’s already on. It’s always on, I should say.’
He headed back and Suki made her way up the stairs towards the top floor. This was the staircase she’d chased up all those months ago, trying to stop Petra. That night had been such a clutter of indecent people and smell and noise and now it was unrecognisable. Walls and partitions of the poky rooms had been swiped away, the front wall had been blasted out and replaced with modern, minimalist luminescence, a glass wall framed with chunky stripped-timber beams. It was hard to tell where precisely the narrow sash window had been where Petra had attempted her escape.
A prize swathe of October afternoon sunlight spread itself over the stripped, sanded and sealed floor and the lightwood accents picked out the yellowed plane leaves, making them new. The room felt like a breathy Shinto temple, a million miles away from the stifling density of her home. Suki approached the glass and looked down to the pavement below, lost in thought for a moment before turning.
They’d hewn another large room out of the subdivided jumble of this level – the eastward room, the morning room – and this is where she’d find Vincent. As someone opened the door, she could hear the voices of the kids who’d come here to play. In the anteroom, a mother sat on the nutmeg-upholstered Japandi sofa, scrolling on her phone, a cup of green tea on the little round table beside her. The stylish sign on the wall behind the sofa – Vincent Rice Creative Therapies – was illustrated with one of his photos: mist-shrouded neon darkness on one side, resolving to an image of happy children running in sunlit uplands on the other. Suki nodded to her and slid the double-glazed glass door open.
Vincent was sitting at a long craft bench with four children of between eight and probably fifteen, cutting shapes out of large photographic prints. He smiled up when he heard her coming in.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting,’ Suki said, awkward around the small people. ‘James said you were on a break, but…’
‘We don’t mind if you join us, do we?’ he asked the kids.
The older two kids shook their heads wordlessly as they continued with their crafting, while the younger two stared at her. They assessed her for a full ten seconds before the youngest kid adjudicated: ‘Nah, you can stay.’
‘See? There you go. Come, sit. Grab a knife.’
Suki didn’t sit. ‘Really, it’s fine. I’m actually… I just came for a quick look. I hadn’t seen the studio since… I’ll see you soon, all right.’ She backed out of the room and headed through the waiting room to the stairs.
Vincent had followed her and hurried to catch her up. ‘Hold on. Wait a sec,’ he called to her.
She stopped by the window, eyeing the route down the stairs.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course… No. No, I’m not really, actually.’ She turned to look out of the vast window over the planes.
Vincent looked at her.
‘It’s exquisite here, Vinnie,’ Suki said. ‘I don’t know why it’s taken me so long.’
‘It hasn’t been that long. We only opened in August.’
‘I could live here. Honestly.’
‘Well, you know they’re doing the apartments next. The offer stands… until they’re sold, that is.’
She sighed the platitude away, her anger getting the better of her for a moment. ‘She just disappeared, didn’t she? We chewed her up and spat her out. She tried so hard… to carve a space, to belong. But she disappeared, and it’s like she never existed.’
‘That’s not true,’ Vincent said. ‘She’s here. I think of her a lot. Although…’
Although I owed her nothing. He didn’t say it, but the meaning still resonated and batted against the glass pane.
‘I’m glad it worked out for you and your grandmother,’ Suki said. ‘You deserve that.’
‘Deserve means nothing. People don’t get what they deserve,’ he said. ‘You know that.’
‘You’d better get back to your troubled, needy children.’
Feeling the acid in her comment, Vincent opened his mouth, decided against it, and walked away.
Suki made her way downstairs, where James and Vincent’s grandmother were busy in the control booth.
‘’Scuse me.’ A woman with a mug of coffee angled past her into the studio, and sat down in front of a microphone.
The secondary stage near the control-booth window where Curtis had stood and died in that ghastly accident was now occupied by a collection of audio equipment, all angles and jags and LEDs. Suki gazed at it, remembering the smoke and the panic, before flushing it away with a pre-prepared ideation: stupidly, a swan on the mist-shrouded Avon. Wilfully editing out the trash choking the riverside reeds, the shit that bobbed in Shakespeare’s river.
She turned and headed towards the red door.
‘Ready?’ Gloria’s voice sounded behind her back. ‘Track seven, secondary vocals. From the bridge. Let’s start with “Falling”.’