Day three, sometime in the morning, the sound of Liam running up the stairs again, like he was younger than he was. He was out of breath when he got to us.
‘It’s them,’ he was saying, ‘it’s them. It’s fucking them.’
‘Who’s them?’ Ma said.
‘Of course they didn’t come.’
‘Who, Liam?’
‘They’re the ones who did it.’
‘Liam – slow…’ Ma said. She reached for him. He tilted his body away.
‘It’s the government who’s doing it. Who’s done it. Who’s turned everything off. Even though people are dying. They’re dying outside.’
‘Don’t be an idiot. Course it’s not them. It’s illegal.’
‘What do you mean legal, illegal? Who cares about legal? They own the police. It’s fucking Winstable himself! Even Winstable’s in on it.’
‘Why, though?’
‘They did it to get our arses up off the road, fine… but now they’re just—’ he grabbed a mug from the table and I remember thinking, he’s about to throw that at the wall, ‘—they’re killing people, Jas. Look outside – it’s madness.’
Riots started that night. Ma tried to stop him, but JD went out, looting more than anything. He came back hours later with cuts on his hands from smashed glass and a backpack full of bottles and packs of shaving razors with the chunky anti-stealing device still attached.
He was pumped up in a weird way. He kept on trying to pick me up. His top lip was sweating. His breath smelled of burning. I don’t know what he’d taken. ‘I met a guy,’ he told us. ‘Fucking wicked guy.’
‘You shat on your own doorstep,’ Liam said, looking at JD’s stash. ‘That’s what you did. Prick.’
When anything worth taking was gone, it went quiet. Shop doors left hanging off one hinge; glass fronts smashed in the middle so it almost looked like the remaining shards were a frosted Christmas effect.
Not that I saw it all in person. I’d never in my life been inside so much. ‘It’s not that as a girl I want to treat you differently,’ Ma said to me, ‘Beyoncé and all that. But it’s always the first thing. Even in a nightclub. Lights go out and men are like dogs. And when it’s hot outside too, Jesus. Turns up the volume on all of it.’
Everything felt long, because everything’s slower in the dark. School was cancelled, and not just like normal, and not just by Ma. Davey came by and said they’d already put wood over the windows. The fridge was silent. We stopped bothering to shut it.
By midday, the living room – plain south, sun from 8 a.m. – was so hot, every breath felt like a half-breath. I have this memory of Liam trying to make the hands of the fan spin with his hands, but his fingers kept getting caught in the cage around it. Liam slept on the sofa and Ma let me sleep in their bed. Whenever she woke up in the night, she pulled the sheet so tight around us it felt like we were in a hammock. She was good over that time. A proper mum, if that makes sense. I was small and she was big and I was young and she was old and she kissed my head and said she’d look after me. There was something very simple about it.
She told me that nothing stays dark for ever. The sun rises every day. We’re used to the light coming back. It has to. It will.
One evening, thirteen days later, for a single second, our lights flashed on. We looked at each other like we’d each imagined it, the way you look around to check if a sound is in your ears only. It flicked on again. None of us spoke.
Then this slow, building sound. The click of filaments waking up, the purr, again, of the fridge. I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like a fern unfolding in a nature documentary.
JD said we should have a party. He mixed dregs of the bottles he’d stolen in one of our saucepans and poured in pineapple juice.
‘Lee, my friend!’ JD said when Liam came home, his mouth furry with booze. ‘We won!’
‘What do you mean, you little idiot, “we won”?’ Liam said. That anger again. It made a curl of his face.
‘They’re back on,’ JD said, ‘the fucking lights! Got cold beeeeeers, Liam,’ he said, opening and shutting the fridge to make a show of the light coming on inside.
‘Cold beeeeeers.’ Liam said, ‘Oh, is that it? Fucking Ing-er-lund, eh?’ He danced with his fists, the football dance. ‘You know what happened, do you?’ he said. ‘You know what happened while we were sitting like mugs in the dark?’
‘Speak for yourself, like mugs in the dark,’ JD said. ‘I went out. I helped myself.’
‘The lights are back on, buddy, ’cos they signed all of it away. Every last little thing of it.’