I’ve often wondered since if I knew in some way, deeper than skin, deeper than brain, what I would wake up to. The next morning, when I woke up and walked into the living room, she was lying on the sofa, and she had found a good position. Her head looked comfortable. Her back was straight, her legs were over the edge of the sofa’s arm. Her bad leg had a cushion underneath it.
There were small plastic bags all over the table, and they were empty. And there were bits of folded card on what would have been her lap, if she’d been able to sit up.
Her gums were burned with it, and there was a needle on the floor next to her, the tip bent. I don’t know if she’d used needles on her own before. I don’t know if she’d used them right. There were red-black dots on the middle of her forearm, the place she’d told me, as a kid, was the right place to apply perfume. Higher up than you’d think. I touched her, and she was cold as clay.
It did not feel real. People say that. All these things people say. But we say them because they’re true. It did not feel real.
I tried to say her name but it stopped somewhere before it got to my mouth. I dropped to my knees next to her. I pushed her forehead out of a frown. I touched her hair. Apart from the very ends, it was her natural colour again. I looked at it against my fingers. Her hair. How could she not be there?
What do I do now? I asked her. I tried to see if I could read anything in her face. Anything. I said it again. What do I do now?
I could hear the sound of rushing water. I can’t just leave you here, I said out loud. I pressed my face against the cloth of the sofa. I did that for a long time. Part of me wanted to be angry with her. But that didn’t come at first. I stayed on my knees and tried to make her hand hold mine. I told her stories from when I was young. Her ones. Stories where she’d made me laugh, ran instead of walking, when her eyes burned bright, and her dimples were deep and dark, and she needed earth wires, and had no idea of where she would end up.
It was easy to pack. I just looked at Kole’s blood, spread in circles on the floor from when I’d tried to clean it, and at Ma, who still looked asleep but who could not get warm in the sun that filled the room. I knew I could not stay there. It was clear now. Clearer than anything. Nothing would stop me this time. I had to find you, I had to get my boy.
I put on trousers with pockets. I did my belt up one more notch. I repacked Kole’s bag. Underneath the gun, there were bullets, kept in an old ice-cream tub, to keep them dry. It felt strange to see that – I had never known Kole to be organised, but the person who had packed that bag had wrapped everything tightly. I wondered what he’d been doing. What he’d done. I took the gun from his T-shirt and re-wrapped it in one of my own.
By her bed, I found Ma’s notebooks. They were full of drawings. They weren’t good if good means like a photograph. They were mostly lines, a single line she followed across a whole page, but with each one I could see what she meant. I lifted her neck as carefully as I could and undid the clasp of her necklace. It used to have lots of different pendants on it, but she’d sold them one by one apart from one she’d had since a child, a St Christopher in a tiny circle. I took it off, and put it around my own neck. Her hair was caught in the clasp and I left it there.
I pulled the photo that my dad had taken off the wall. The picture of the door, hope, escape – I took it out of the frame, rolled it up and slid it in my bag.
In the real-life doorway, my hand on it because I couldn’t stop feeling like I’d stood up too fast, I looked at the flat. I thought of the first time JD brought us to the building – the tears, the takeaway. And when Kole brought us ‘up’ to this place. The plans Ma made to change the carpet, put in a new kitchen. I’m not saying it got better, over our time here. Just that we made it bigger, by being here.
For a long time, I could not leave her. I kept going back into the room. It was strange, because I had been making decisions for us for months now but as soon as she was gone, I realised I had all these questions I wanted to ask her.
I didn’t know whether to lock the door so no one would disturb her or to leave it open, just in case. In case. But in case what? At the last moment, I went back and kissed her again. Cold forehead, soft forehead, her hairline. I remembered climbing into her bed before, when her body was hot and she took my hand as a pillow.
I told her I was scared. It was true. I hadn’t been out of the building for weeks by then. Not all the way, anyway. There was a man down on the third floor who still had all this powdered soup and I’d been to see him a few times, but that was it. Got food from him, or Davey’s boys. Davey. I hadn’t seen him in weeks.
I looked out of our window. The tide was low, and getting lower, but the concrete was still wet. I had two hours max before the water would be back.
I made my bag as small as possible. Then smaller again. My pockets were heavy enough for me to have to make a second belt. I pulled the string from Ma’s old duffel coat. Tied it tightly. I wanted to look like I was just out for a couple of hours to see what I could find. That I’d be heading home as soon as the water started coming up. Because if you look like you’re leaving, people think you have somewhere to go.
I touched the walls as I walked down the stairs. Just a finger against the brick. I walked quietly. Wondered if I should have the gun in a place where I could reach it. Wondered if maybe we were the last people left. At Viv’s door, locked, no postcard on the door any more, I wrote a note, slid it under. It’s me, it said. i had to go. i hope you’re okay. Check on Ma, maybe. Sorry. i am sorry. And thank you, Viv, thank you for everything. On one of the lower floors, there was a pot plant in a plastic urn that it looked like someone was still watering. I walked faster, started to run. I didn’t want to surprise anyone, but no doors opened – apart from the ones that had been open for years, the ones that had holes in the doors instead of locks.
In what used to be the lobby, instead of carpets, there were mountains of damp sand. Broken shells and rubbish, all the colours faded. Seaweed. The glass of the front door was gone, but the wire meshing was still there. I climbed over the sand and tried to look out. It was like looking through a tennis racket. I pushed out onto the flat, wet street. Even though I was at sea level, I felt like I was higher than I’ve ever been in my life, like I was looking over an edge, and I would fall over it, and never stop falling. The door creaked open even though I pushed it slowly, then it spanked shut. Hard enough for my body to shrink into a crouch.
No one will ever understand how hard it was to walk forward. I wanted to go back for her. Never think I didn’t. I wanted to check on her one last time. I imagined her waking up. I imagined what would happen to her if she was alone. The open window. The open door.
There was no one on the streets near the building. I could hear the high-pitched battle of seagulls. They came closer, got further away again. I could hear the washing and sucking of the water. The only way that I could keep on walking was by not looking back.
I only broke that rule once, when I was almost round the corner. I turned round and the building was bright gold. The window we’d broken was the only place that didn’t catch the sun.
Davey was not in the main workshop. He was upstairs, in an empty room, with two guys I didn’t recognise. They raised their heads like they knew me, so maybe I knew them once. But they were men now and their faces had changed, cheekbones like Vs. They were burning something, sniffing it to see if it was ready.
Davey looked surprised to see me, but there was something quiet about it, like not all of the parts of his face were working still. He asked if I wanted to join them. He said it was new. He said I could help them come up with a name for it. I asked if he’d come outside with me.
His cheeks looked like putty, like if you pushed at them they would hold the shape. His hair was closer-shaved than the last time I’d seen him, but he must have done it with a blunt razor because he had cuts drying brown on the bits where his head was bumpy. He pulled on a T-shirt and while it was going over his head, my eyes caught on the downwards smile of his belly button. That made me want to cry.
It felt like longer than weeks since we’d seen each other. You look well, he told me, and I said you too, because what else can you say? Davey kept looking back into the room like he was worried the boys would try whatever it was without him. He kept on trying to scratch his back, a bit of it he couldn’t reach.
I pushed him round the corner so the boys couldn’t see us and I said I’d scratch his back for him. He faced the wall and I lifted up his T-shirt – his back was black with tattoos, and muscled and bruised and also red from being dry – and I rubbed him with my halfway knuckles so my nails wouldn’t take his skin off.
He hunched forward and his spine showed. Then he arched back until his shoulder blades looked almost like wings. He turned his head to the side to make his neck crack. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
My fingertips paused.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That I disappeared, you know?’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I did too.’
‘I know but – normally I…’ He coughed and his back felt like empty bones.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I said. I stopped scratching him. It came in a wave, this throat-closing feeling. I didn’t kiss the top of his back, I just put my face against it.
‘You’re not going too, are you,’ he said. He didn’t say it like a question. I stayed still. ‘Are you going to leave here?’ His breath turned sharp. Neither of us wanted to look at each other. That stinging that happens.
‘What about your mum?’ He was almost whispering. We could hear the boys shout and laugh in the other room. Davey’s voice fell between the cracks. Hard to hear him. I tried to scratch him again but he shrugged away, said I didn’t have to.
‘She’s not coming,’ I said and I shook my head against his back, and when I didn’t stop shaking my head, I think he understood.
We stood like that for a second or two but it felt like longer. Then Davey turned around and held my head to his shoulder. The way he did it, my face was tight against him and I could taste his T-shirt and I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t mind.
‘Where are you going to go?’ he asked, and I just said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone.’
‘Who is there to tell?’
The boys next door put on music – it was a tinny sound, with a fast beat. They shouted over it. Davey turned towards the door, and straightened his T-shirt. ‘So you just came to say goodbye?’
I nodded. I could feel the weight of Kole’s gun in my bag.
‘So-bye-then,’ he said. He pushed my shoulder. He tried to smile.
‘Davey,’ I said, ‘you can come if you want.’ But I mostly said it because I knew that he wouldn’t.
He shook his head, but his smile seemed more real after that. He pushed me away one last time and then went back into the room with the boys and the music. Before the door shut, I saw one of the boys flexing his arm and pumping his hand to get the blood going. The other boy had a syringe between his teeth, a rollie behind his ear. He took the syringe out, flicked it and blew the tip. ‘For after,’ he said to Davey.
I couldn’t look. I started down the stairs, but by the time I was at the bottom, Davey had followed me. He’d shut the door behind him and was shouting after me to wait. He ran down the stairs and found me. His eyes looked less cloudy. He blew whatever they’d been smoking out through his teeth, then he coughed again. He asked me to come with him for a second, and then he took me through to the garage.
‘You have to understand that I can’t leave because I’m here. I mean, I’m from here. I’ve made a life here.’ He almost pointed in the direction of whatever was going on in the other room, but stopped himself. ‘I mean, I’ve thought about it. I have, Cha, seriously…’
‘Then why, Davey?’
‘’Cos it’s lots of things. I feel a fear in me sometimes,’ he said, ‘when I think about going far.’ His fingertips were on his collarbone. ‘Like a cloud right here,’ he said. ‘Sounds dumb, but you know what you know, if you know what I mean.’
I nodded.
‘And I always imagined it, since I was a kid, that we’d be old here. You and me. Other people. Together or something. Since I was a kid,’ he said again. ‘Not a very good imagination, I know.’
‘It’s a good imagination,’ I said.
‘And my mum too. She’s right here. I visit her. She died here, I’ll die here too. I’m okay with that. That’s how it works.’
‘It doesn’t have to be how it works.’
‘I don’t know why I grabbed you again, but I just wanted to give you something. I don’t even know what you need.’ He laughed then. ‘Is there anything that you need?’
He picked up a screwdriver but then put it down. He offered a set of bolts, then pulled a face and said, ‘Probably not these.’ We went around the room, and honestly, everything he had he wanted to give it to me. In the end I left with a padlock and a penknife and some matches, because, as Davey kept saying, you never know.
‘Stop now,’ I said. ‘So heavy it’s going to break.’ I smiled too and it was the first time I’d smiled in ages. Davey looked at me for so long, and I looked back.
‘You look pretty,’ he said. Kept looking. ‘Don’t do that.’
He told me I should cut my hair. I asked him to do it for me, and my hair fell off my shoulders onto the floor.
‘Keep it like that,’ he said. He handed me scissors which I put in my bag. In a way, he said, flashing his eyes at where my breasts should be, it was good I’d got so thin.
And then, before I left, Davey asked if I would stay with him. He said he would look after me.
‘I wanted to do it better than he did. That was the whole thing. I wanted to be able to look after you better than he did,’ he said. ‘It was the only thing I wanted. Do you understand that?’
‘Davey.’
‘But I was just the same.’ His chest was itchy now, or maybe he was just rubbing his heart. ‘I’m sorry for that.’ He was rubbing at his breastbone, anyway. ‘You know that I…’ he looked very hard into my eyes. ‘You know I always have, right?’