Robin felt like stretching his legs and breathing fresh air when he left the clinic, but after a ten-minute rooftop stroll and a spell sitting cross-legged with Marion, scoffing Sam Scarlock’s mushroom-and-pepper omelette, he suddenly felt weak. He wobbled as he stood, and his vision flooded with purple splotches.
‘I need to lie down,’ he said, grasping the back of his head as Marion steadied him. ‘Sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ Marion said softly. ‘Shall I get someone to carry you down?’
Robin was too proud for that, but he had to hold both banisters as he went down the narrow roof steps. Marion put an arm around his back as they turned left onto the mall’s main arcade, with dead shops either side and tiny wrens making short, swooping flights under the roof.
‘Home, sweet home,’ Marion said, as she took off Robin’s pack, so she could squeeze between metal gates, pulled over a store entrance.
The high-ceilinged space inside stretched back forty metres and had once been the discount outlet for a major sports brand.
Two of Marion’s three little brothers were mucking around on a pair of escalators.
‘Matt’s nine. The oldest and most annoying,’ Marion explained. ‘The one chasing with the crazy red hair is Otto and I expect my mum is taking the little guy, Finn, to nursery.’
Most of the store’s shelving and display tables had been taken out, but there were empty shoe racks along the back wall, and the sides had giant black-and-white panels, with pictures of sports stars hurdling and dunking, and cheesy phrases like, Failing over and over is the reason you’ll succeed and The harder the battle, the sweeter the victory.
As Robin stumbled after Marion, towards an area screened off by a large blue construction tarp, Matt dived onto the shiny metal strip between the two static escalators and slid down head first. Robin was alarmed by his speed, and relieved when the lad crashed into a mound of swimming floats and yoga mats at the bottom.
‘Hey, dummies,’ Marion shouted, as Otto followed his brother down and landed on top of him. ‘Your mums will murder you if they catch you doing that.’
Matt put hands on his hips and shouted back across the echoey space, ‘Who made you boss?’ before stopping at the bottom of the escalators and adding, ‘Is that your boyfriend?’
‘Idiots,’ Marion sighed, as they neared the tented area. ‘Matt literally just got his arm out of a sling from jumping off the roof. It’ll be miraculous if he survives into his teens.’
‘Most escalators have those sticky-up things to stop people sliding between,’ Robin noted.
Marion tutted. ‘Matt unscrewed them.’
Then she pulled back a rustling blue flap of a tarp suspended from sprinkler pipes under the ceiling. As Robin followed her through, he saw a comfy space with tons of cushions, two electric fans wafting air, and daylight streaming from a crudely cut skylight.
‘The shop fronts are all glass, so this gives us privacy,’ Marion explained. ‘The solar panels on the roof don’t generate enough power to run the mall’s main heating and air conditioning, so we make dens like this.’
‘It’s cosy,’ Robin said, as he looked to one side and saw that shop fittings and shelving panels had been adapted to make five private sleeping cubicles. ‘Does it get cold in winter?’
Marion nodded. ‘At Christmas I was sleeping under two duvets with a hoodie and a woolly hat. This time of year isn’t bad, but in high summer you sweat buckets.
‘My aunt Lucy and her boyfriend have their own den up on the mezzanine level,’ Marion continued, as Robin slumped on a giant beanbag and tilted his head back. ‘They’re away now and my brothers are noisy, so you might do better resting up there …’
‘My batteries are flat,’ Robin said, pulling off one sneaker as Marion put down his bow and backpack. ‘And those peppers made me thirsty. Can I bother you for a glass of water?’
‘You didn’t drink the whole time you were unconscious, so you must be dehydrated,’ Marion said, as she opened a little fridge and felt the temperature of a drinking bottle. ‘The electricity is wobbly when the sun drops, so I’m afraid it’s not very cold.’
Robin gave no answer and when Marion glanced away from the fridge she saw that he’d crashed out with one sneaker still dangling off his big toe.