The days after that passed slow and thick, ants in my legs, everywhere. Davey stayed with us for a few days, but he would barely speak. I saw him holding one of Blue’s toy cars, pushing at it with his thumb and then putting it in his pocket. I wasn’t supposed to notice.
He sent a kid who was hovering in the stairwell to pick up drugs. ‘I don’t give a fuck what you bring,’ Davey told him, ‘but bring something.’
‘You’ve never been like this before,’ I told him.
‘It’s you that’s fucking weird. How were you being normal?’
‘Because nothing’s normal.’
‘How come you didn’t say?’ he asked me.
Say what? That it was my fault? That it was okay, because I believed you’d be back?
‘You’re the one who doesn’t make sense,’ he said after that.
‘And you do? What the fuck’s that in your hand? You got some janky crack pipe now?’
‘Honestly, whatever, Cha,’ he said.
‘Look at me a sec—’
‘Just quiet,’ he said, ‘just for one moment as I take this.’ He turned a quarter of the way away from me, and then he turned his whole back, and the one thing I heard was the rough-scratch spin of a lighter stone.
A second wave of people tried to leave by boat. It took less than a week for Ramsgate’s harbour to empty. To empty completely this time, apart from the boats with holes in, though people were soon trying to fix those. We heard there were fights. People falling between boats and getting crushed, ribs poking through T-shirts, backwards knees, hulls stuck hard on the Goodwin Sands.
Back in Margate, from our window, I watched a family, kids in their arms, try to leave in a small blow-up dinghy they stole from one of the old tourist shops. They tried six. Half of them didn’t blow up at all, and with the other half, the glue must have dried to powder. They fell apart in the water. The youngest kid had armbands, the other kid was holding onto a big, empty bottle.
‘The one with the armbands was crying,’ I said when I told Davey.
‘What the fuck? Why didn’t you stop them? Why didn’t you wake me up?’
I told him they got 100 metres off the shore and then started to throw their bags out, as the boat started to fill with water. Eventually they kicked back to the beach, dragging what they could with them.
‘Their feet were bleeding,’ I said.
‘Why are you saying it like that? You can’t just sit here.’
‘You’re sitting here.’
‘Stop letting people leave. What’s wrong with you?’
‘I couldn’t leave you—’
‘And kids too – are you a psychopath? Suddenly you don’t give a fuck about anyone?’
‘I was looking after you,’ I said. But it sounded weak in my mouth, weak in the air between us. Yes, at moments, I’d kept water by his side, but apart from that I hadn’t done much.
He was right. There was this block in my head. The flat dinghies. Ripped shoulders pulling their way back up the beach. It felt like I was watching a film. And it was the same when we started to hear about people leaving the other way too. Viv said someone got the concrete blocks off the main A-road out of town with a forklift truck. She said that one of the minibuses that used to be The Loop had started to make the journey up to the border.
‘Apparently it’s like a campsite,’ Viv said, ‘but if you were there for a holiday, you’d shoot yourself in the head.’
‘Why the fuck are they trying to leave for then?’ Davey asked Viv. It was what he kept on saying. ‘What’s wrong with it here? Why are they ruining it?’
‘Shit overflowing from buckets,’ Viv went on, ‘rats with big fat tails like worms. Do you remember Misha? She went with her kids. Took a tent, but the ground’s too soft to even bash the pegs in. Shantytown,’ she said. ‘Lots of Ramsgate lot there. Broadstairs lot. Our lot. Like refugees, but everyone white. I heard they shot at people trying to cross.’
‘You heard or it’s true?’ I said.
‘I heard and it’s true,’ she said.
But still still still I couldn’t make the reality of it reach me. Not in the way it should have done. Part of it was because I was in two places at the same time. Here, the real here, but mostly there, far away with you and Blue. This escape I’d made in my head.
When anger came, when fear walked circles inside me, I would go to the China House. I would look at the music we listened to. I would lie in our bed. I would shut my eyes so hard that I heard white noise, and I would do that until the adrenaline fell out of my body and onto the sheets.
I thought about watching you sleep. How you made shapes with your fingers in the night, like you were conducting orchestras, but slowly, or putting your hands out to stop cars. Soft movements, deliberate. Your fingers long, not quite straight. How I kissed your hair away from your mouth. How you had actually been there.
I tried to remember what you tasted like. Clean, warm, moss, pink. Whenever I thought about something new, it could still whip through me.
And then, as soon as it did, the adrenaline would crawl back up, take over, feel worse, feel bigger, feel like my blood had turned against me.
My blood, my boy. His toys were still scattered around the flat. It was like there were force fields around them. I edged past. We all did.
I’d told Ma what had happened with Blue after I told Davey. She’d just nodded, kept on nodding. The relief, I think, of knowing it wasn’t her fault.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me questions?’ I said. At first I was angry. A fire growing at the back of my chest.
‘But I trust you,’ she said.
‘How can you trust me?’
‘Because look at me, Chance. My God I trust you more than I trust myself.’
‘What do you think he’s doing?’ I asked her one day when the silence built back up again. ‘My one,’ I said. I tried to take her with me. ‘Our one.’
She didn’t say anything for a while, then ‘Evacuee’, she said. ‘That’s what they used to call it. I was trying to think of it for ages.’
‘So you do…?’ I said. Blanket of pain behind my eyes. Behind my whole face. ‘You do think about him?’
‘All the time.’
Salt, heat, tightness, in a rush as the tears came. I turned so she couldn’t see.
‘For what it’s worth.’ She touched the small of my back. I liked that that was the way to say it. I wanted to feel smaller than her for a second. ‘I don’t think you did the wrong thing.’ Her thumb moved, then her little finger moved too, this soft one-two tapping. ‘The thing that I always think is, you lot would have been better without me.’
It was the way she said ‘you lot’ that got me, that there had been more than just me. That there had been JD.
‘So,’ she said. ‘You know.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘But it’s different for you. It is – it should be. Because you were good.’
‘Was I?’ I asked. She’d never said that before.
‘So good it made me jealous sometimes. Which is so dumb, isn’t it.’
It hit me then. The unfurling again, like the light coming back on. If you were coming back, if you’d bring him back, if Blue would come back here, we had to make it decent. We had to make it good.
‘I’m going to the roof,’ I said.
‘Don’t you even think about it,’ she said.
‘Not to jump.’
‘I’ll kill you.’
‘Not just yet, anyway.’
I set off up the stairs. At the very top, there was a window with a single fist punched through it, around it a rusty frame. I reached through, careful of the inside of my wrist, and undid a bolt. I pushed it open and, foot perched on the handle of someone’s door, I pulled myself up into the sky.
The wind caught in my T-shirt. Something about knowing how high up I was made my legs feel funny too, like I could trip up on air alone.
I was right. They were still there. For a while, when I was a kid, a woman in the building had built a garden on the roof. She’d been dead for years but the wooden planters were still there. And all around them, it looked like it had snowed – the whole roof was white with dried seagull shit.
I wanted Ma to see it. I went down to get her.
‘Air’s good for you,’ I said. I put her arm round my shoulder to get her up the stairs, and this time, I propped the emergency escape ladder against the Velux.
‘But my knee,’ she said.
‘Yeah well, it’ll never heal right if you don’t use it. Off you trot.’
‘“Trot.” Not a horse. Don’t be rude.’
‘I’ll push you from behind.’
‘Does it look straight to you?’ she said, when we eventually made it. One side of the building, the one with all the rigged-up TV aerials, looked higher than the other.
‘Leaning tower of Margate,’ I said. ‘But don’t you see?’
‘I see a dead penguin.’
‘What?’
‘I mean seagull. Whatever they’re called. Hope it’s nothing to do with that thing.’
‘No, nothing to do with that.’ I went over and lifted the dead seagull up by a big loose wing, then tossed it off the edge of the building. It fell in this slow circle. I turned back to the roof. It was about half the size of a football field. ‘It’s essentially a sea of shit up here,’ I said. ‘Which is perfect.’
‘Right,’ she said, sea legs swaying. ‘Perfect for what?’
‘Vegetables. Davey and I have been doing cans. But we need fresh stuff. For gangrene. To avoid gangrene.’
‘The one where your legs fall off?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Scurvy.’ She looked down at her tangled knee. ‘Well I can hardly afford that, can I?’
‘So are you going to help or what?’ I said.
‘Why are you being nice to me?’ she said. ‘You haven’t been nice to me since you were about seven.’
‘’Cos I’m trying to get free labour.’
And so I started. I used a saucepan to get up as much of the shit as I could and get it into the planters. Funny what sticks from childhood. Caleb had told us about guano, using bird shit as compost, and I remembered because Davey always called it Guantanamo. Said Margate was Guantanamo Bay.
Even on that first day, before I’d really started, all these fantasies sprang up – you arriving and seeing green, having something good to give Blue to eat, that I could handle things, that I was strong, that I had something good, that I had something to give.
That night, I asked Davey if he wanted to help. His back straightened. He sat up, then asked, like I was a supermarket, ‘Do you do carrots?’
‘What do you mean, do I do carrots? I only went up there this morning.’
‘Can you, though?’ he said. ‘Do carrots?’
‘I don’t know,’ I told him, ‘I can try.’
The next day, Davey came back with a bag of food scraps.
‘Yes I know it smells,’ he said. ‘I went through bins for that.’
‘Well, it’s definitely organic.’ I peered into the bag, saw a parsnip top, and an apple wrinkled to the size of an apricot.
‘Dunno how you do it, so I got both,’ he said. He threw what looked like playing cards at me. They made a maracas sound. Seeds. ‘They went off about five years ago but I won’t tell if you don’t.’
‘You’re amazing.’
‘Yeah, I know. But even superman’s gotta have a break. You want?’ His kem was rolled thumb-thick.
Ma was asleep so I said yes. ‘Fucking hell, it’s strong.’
‘Yeah, it’s not bang on, is it?’ he said.
‘What do you mean bang on?’
‘I gotta go. I’ll be back, though. Tell you what we’re missing, and I need it, Chance, I really do…’
‘What?’
He turned his mouth into a trumpet so he could do his posh voice, ‘Purple sprouting broccoli.’
From abandoned flats below, I stole men’s shirts for me and Ma.
‘Gardening gear,’ I told her. In white cotton, with the too-long sleeves rolled up to her wrists, she looked like a painter again.
I worked in bursts because of the heat. I watered all the time from the cracked-open fire hydrant at the foot of the building. There was pleasure in the pain of it. Carrying buckets heavy as rocks up all those stairs, my fingers squashing thin under the plastic, turning yellow with all the blood trapped in the tips.
Up top, I’d go to the edge and watch the waves. I’d watch them go white, go whiter, go even higher, break. Sometimes it felt like a siege, these crests of white, like rows of soldiers. I’d do the calculations. If I was on the beach for that, would I try to dive through it? Would I run?
‘If it wasn’t full of rubbish,’ Ma said, deckchair tilting so she could see, ‘you could probably surf one like that.’
‘I’d like to see you try.’
‘Do you remember that thing Thanet Earth?’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with the waves, just I was thinking. Biggest greenhouse in Europe or something, like a city. All for cucumbers.’
‘JD took me there on his bike once, I think,’ I said. ‘Weren’t there guards? Swear they nearly shot when we got close.’
‘It’s the light I remember,’ she said. ‘Spent an evening in Canterbury once. Not sure how I got there. One of those. But anyway, the guy was driving me back, and at one point he refused to go on. There was this orange light on the horizon, crazy big. I remember, he was like: “Fuck that. I’m not driving towards the apocalypse.” But it was just Thanet Earth. They kept the heat lamps on all night.’
‘This is what I mean,’ I said. ‘People’ll do anything for vegetables.’
She nodded. She tucked her feet under her, so they were out of the sun. ‘I like it up here,’ she said. ‘Thanks for this.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘In a way, it’s like therapy.’
‘Course it is if you’re reclining in your chair with a parasol.’
‘It’s my leg!’ she said.
But she was right, it was nice. Nice to have her there even if she didn’t help much. Her knee was healing with all these cracks, like an egg stuck back together, but something about her was softening again. And not in that sloppy way. Tender for being tender, not because she wanted something.
In the evenings, when we got back to the flat, she’d kiss my head, tell me it smelled of olives and cooking, nice things. And up on the roof, it was easier to speak to each other than it had been for years. Something about our hands being busy, our backs facing each other.
One afternoon, I just came out with it. I asked her why it had got so bad. There was silence at first.
‘Not in a mean way,’ I said.
‘No, I know,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking.’
I waited. Pushed the earth tighter into a pot.
‘Because it starts as fun,’ she said. ‘It starts as living. It started as all this life, Chance. Does that make sense? When it feels big in your chest?’
I had my back to her. I nodded.
‘Some people do it ’cos they’re depressed. I thought I was different. I did actually feel happy. I do think I did. It’s just the line,’ she said. ‘It always got a little rubbed out for me.’
‘And Kole?’ I said. Again, it was only because I had my back to her. ‘I never got it. You stood up to Liam. When he got weird and everything, you left him.’
‘I did.’
‘Then Kole…’
I heard her breathe out. ‘They say there’s a person for everyone,’ she started.
I was about to turn round. I couldn’t bear for her to say that still.
‘It’s true. There’s a person for everyone who will completely break them. He was that person for me. I could never say no to him. No matter what. No matter what. I never could.’
I nodded.
‘I’m so glad that’s never happened to you,’ she said.
I nodded again. But that’s exactly what had happened. That was exactly what it had been like with you. I still couldn’t understand it. How our bodies could know something is wrong for us and do it anyway. Do it, and do it, and do it again.
Up on the roof, the sun was strong and we used shower curtains to cover the patches when it stormed. Gradually, something started happening: it wasn’t too long before we had the beginning green of new leaves.