Falling Leaves E-Book

Stefan Mohamed

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 366

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Twenty-three-year-old Vanessa is adrift in London. A year out of university and marooned in a quietly deflating relationship, she can't work out where her passion and creativity went – and on top of that, she is experiencing frightening visions, and an overwhelming sadness that doesn't seem to belong to her. Then something impossible happens: her best friend Mark, who vanished without a trace seven years ago, reappears, not a day older. As far as he is concerned, no time has passed. Shocked and confused but determined to help her friend make sense of what's happening, Vanessa returns to Llangoroth, the rural town she left behind after he vanished. Torn between her responsibilities as an adult and the adventurous passion that Mark inspires in her, she must fight for him, and for herself, confronting painful memories and a terrifying pursuer who would rather see her friend dead than back in the world.

Leseprobe

FALLING LEAVES

by 

STEFAN MOHAMED

The Guardian: Fresh voices: 50 writers you should read now

Twenty-three-year-old Vanessa is adrift in London. A year out of university and marooned in a quietly deflating relationship, she can’t work out where her passion and creativity went – and on top of that, she is experiencing frightening visions, and an overwhelming sadness that doesn’t seem to belong to her.

Then something impossible happens: her best friend Mark, who vanished without a trace seven years ago, reappears, not a day older. As far as he is concerned, no time has passed.

Shocked and confused but determined to help her friend make sense of what’s happening, Vanessa returns to Llangoroth, the rural town she left behind after he vanished. Torn between her responsibilities as an adult and the adventurous passion that Mark inspires in her, she must fight for him, and for herself, confronting painful memories and a terrifying pursuer who would rather see her friend dead than back in the world.

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK

‘I’m not normally one for hyperbole, but I can quite honestly say that Stefan Mohamed has written one of the best Young Adult trilogies out there, and certainly, in my opinion, the best by a British writer. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait too much longer for more from this author – you’ll find me at the front of the queue.’ —Luke Marlowe, The Bookbag

‘Never mind writing about superpowers, debut author Stefan Mohamed clearly has them himself – he’s produced a highly original novel for young adults that is clever and funny, with character you want to ask home afterwards.’ —Alex O’Connell, The Times

‘It’s part superhero fantasy, part comedy, with an underlying love story and a creepy twist in the tail, all served up with panache, pace and punch.’ —Sally Morris, The Daily Mail

‘Mohamed’s first novel is a thoroughly entertaining, charming and witty take on the crowded superhero subgenre.’ —Eric Brown, The Guardian

Falling Leaves

Stefan Mohamed is an author and occasional poet. He lives in Bristol, where he does something in editorial. Find out things you never wanted to know about him at www.stefmo.co.uk

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Copyright © Stefan Mohamed, 2018

The right of Stefan Mohamed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2018

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-78463-143-7 electronic

For Cath

Chapter One

Iwas crying when I woke up. Already crying, I mean. I’d woken up and started to cry before, of course, overwhelmed by the shock of transitioning from an unpleasant dream to the cold dark of reality. Everyone has. But this was different. It was as though it had been going on for ages, and I had just walked in on myself and was now standing there awkwardly, trying to work out exactly what the fuss was about. And at the same time I was lying in bed, my baggy old Simpsons T-shirt sweat-moulded to my body, flailing around in a chaos of panicky limbs, overwhelmed by some strange, foreign grief.

The two Vanessas snapped together and I pulled myself up into a sitting position, shrugging off the out-of-body feeling as misfiring neurons, some weird quirk of dreaming. I tried to ground myself, to be where I was, in the bed, in the bedroom, in the flat, but I couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t stop . . . ugh. I closed my eyes. I counted to ten, twenty, fifty. I paid a great deal of attention to my breathing. The trembling eventually subsided, but what I was left with was almost worse.

I felt sad, so terribly sad, and angry, and I didn’t know why, and that made me angrier still. I opened my eyes, sniffing, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, and looked down at Stuart. He was slumbering still, snoring sporadically, alliterative arsehole.

No. That was a bad thought. Shouldn’t think that thought.

I sat there and let myself cry quietly until the residue of the forgotten dream had faded. Then I looked at him again. Once upon a time he would have woken up the instant I had, maybe even a few seconds before, like he could sense what was about to happen, and his soft voice would have guided me back like a lighthouse beam and I would have let him cradle me until the crying stopped. To be fair, it had been a while since I’d had a nightmare.

Although that wasn’t the reason he hadn’t woken up.

I thought about the reason. The reasons. And I felt as though I should feel sad about it, sad that beyond the basic need for some comfort at this most vulnerable moment, I didn’t actually mind all that much that he was still asleep. I didn’t, though. I felt some other sadness. Some foreign interloper in my brain, pulling my levers.

I slid out of bed and opened the window. Breeze poured in and my body tingled and I watched a three-legged fox hobble wonkily across the road before being absorbed by the shadows between someone’s dustbins. Foxes know, I thought, although I wasn’t sure why.

I wanted to speak to Alice.

I wanted a cigarette.

I wanted a drink.

I wanted to listen to Elliott Smith.

These last two things I could do. I retrieved my bottle of Captain Morgan’s from its home on the wrong shelf, that is the wrong shelf according to Stuart, because rum should live in a cupboard in the kitchen, or on the side with the other grown-up spirits, not in the bedroom among seashells and figurines and meaningful meaningless bits and pieces, well that’s just tough shit really isn’t it, and I went and sat in the kitchen and drank two rums with ginger beer and listened to half of XO. Halfway through ‘Waltz #1’ I had to turn the CD player off because I thought I was going to cry again. This wasn’t exactly revolutionary, as I’d cried to this particular song approximately fifty thousand times before and undoubtedly would a further fifty thousand times in the future, but . . . no. It was different. It wasn’t the song. And it wasn’t Stuart or the flat or the bills or any of that. None of the real stuff.

It was the dream. Whatever it had been about, wherever it had taken me, whatever it had shown me, had left this behind, this awful feeling. I kept coming back to the word residue as I clenched and un-clenched my fists, getting increasingly frustrated. There was nothing concrete, no explanation or meaning, just a deep, heavy melancholy, an ache in my chest and stomach that I couldn’t pinpoint or quantify. Origin unknown. Does not compute. Blue screen of death. Try unplugging it and plugging it in again.

My hand, seeming to operate at least partly of its own accord, walked itself across the table and grabbed my notebook and a pen. Interesting. This had to mean something. Such items were never within reaching distance when you wanted them, not when you were me.

I put pen to paper, trying not to think.

Just let the words out.

‘She died, and everything stopped. The fly on the opposite wall, rendered gigantic by a lurid splash of lamp post light. The rubbish fidgeting in the night breeze. The breeze itself. The blood chugging thickly from the knife wound in her stomach.’

I stopped and read it back. My writing engine was rusty, to say the least, so I wasn’t surprised that it was stalling after a single paragraph. I was also very bad at just letting myself write, I always went back and edited, deleting and moving things around and cursing myself for the utter shiteness of my prose, before I’d even finished what I was doing, even though I’d been told so many times that editing should come later.

And what the hell was I writing? A graphic murder scene? Is that what I’d dreamed about?

Come on, Vanessa. Get it out, whatever it is.

‘She was intrigued, though somehow not surprised, to find that she had not stopped. Not entirely. Her thoughts, her memories, her awareness, continued to simmer, shiver and spark, except suddenly weightless, un-tethered.’

Again, I stopped. The words were there. I could feel them in my brain and they definitely needed to come out. But it was like a frazzled mother coaxing an unruly teenager out of bed on a Sunday.

I put my hair up in a bun and chewed my lip. Maybe making myself look more writerly would help.

‘She floated free of herself, becoming a new component in the air above the girl’s body, an abstract mass. The five physical senses blurred and combined into something else, a sight that was total and far-reaching, and the dank death smell of the alley that had caught like rotten gas in the girl’s nostrils was no longer merely a smell but the idea of smell, both the actuality and the concept, exploded, like a schematic rendered in too many dimensions.

‘She knew she should feel dizzy, but all she felt was absolute calm.’

Had this been my dream? It really didn’t feel familiar. It didn’t connect with the sadness, which was still there, lurking, although less intense than it had been. This didn’t even seem like something I would have written, neither in terms of style nor subject matter. I didn’t go in for this kind of trippy shit. Trippy shit was very much not on the menu for Vanessa these days.

‘She observed the girl’s body. It looked so very small from up here. So temporary. She could see the sticky wound, see through it, following the ripples from intention to action to consequence. She knew exactly what could have been done to save the girl, what could have been pressured, plugged, re-attached.

‘She tried to sigh but instead she rippled, as though she was a patch of water catching a plummeting star, and then there was a sound like all the air escaping from the sky and she was everywhere. Everyone.

‘She was the girl. Her family, her friends. The boy who had somehow made all this happen.

‘She was everything that each of these people, these women, these girls, this boy, had ever felt and would ever feel.’

The machine died, or the mother gave up, or the teenager went back to sleep. I strained to force out a cursory ending, something to complete the thing, however naff and disconnected. But I couldn’t. That was definitely it. Your girl was dry.

I put down the pencil and read it all back. It did not sit right. I’d hoped maybe I could coax out the dream, write my way to the source of this sadness, but this wasn’t it. I hadn’t written this from memory, trying to depict something I could see in my mind’s eye. I could not visualise the girl, the women, the boy.

Well. I could visualise a boy, but I sincerely hoped that wasn’t what my brain was getting at. That way lay madness.

I sighed. Oh well. At least I’d written something, for the first time in about fifty years. I let my hair down, poured a third rum and ginger beer to celebrate, drank half of it, felt sick, told myself to stop being such a wanker and went back to bed.

Stuart left early in the morning. I was aware of him whispering goodbye but I didn’t move or say anything. He didn’t kiss me. I slept again instantly and woke up properly at eleven when my alarm went off, but it was pointless as I didn’t have to get up for anything until late afternoon, so I put on Selected Ambient Works 85–92 and was asleep again before the end of ‘Xtal’.

When I eventually rolled out of bed it was half one. I had a coffee, brushed my teeth, showered and looked at myself in the mirror, at the wet hair plastered against my head, neck and shoulders, dark blonde half-heartedly infiltrated by faded streaks of blue. Time for a change. I decided to call Alice before work and schedule une session de cheveux á domain.

The sadness had faded. In fact, all systems seemed to be operating within standard parameters. I meandered around, avoiding the notebook on the kitchen table, Facebooking and eating peanut butter on toast until I couldn’t eat any more, which coincidentally was the same point that the bread ran out. I’d have to remember to get some more later. Stuart wouldn’t say anything, but he hated it when I ate all the bread or used the last of the toilet paper or the last teabag and didn’t replace them at my earliest possible convenience.

To be fair, on the scale of things Stuart got uppity about, that was a legit gripe.

I drank more coffee and listened to the rest of the Aphex album, then some Elliott, then some early dubstep, then some heavy classical, then a bit of Robbie Williams, the kind of jarringly eclectic improvised YouTube playlist that rarely went off at parties, and I rang Alice but it went straight to her voicemail. I left a long rambling message because I knew it would annoy her, and at five I left the flat to go to work.

It was two for one day at the cinema, which meant loads of stress and zero pissing about. I hadn’t been here very long, having sacked off my umpteenth horrible bar job as soon as something different came up, and I quite liked it, although I was pretty low on the food chain and the pay was not what you’d call extravagant. I’d already established a good routine, though, and I didn’t plan to be here for long. Some of my co-workers were twice my age or more and had literally been here forever, since the days of audience members running screaming from their seats, terrified that the train was going to come crashing through the screen into the theatre.It was all right for now. I got free cinema tickets. Could have been a lot worse.

Certain aspects could have been better, of course. Principally our rancid team leader, Mike, who would have benefited from a few more years in development before being released onto the open market. I was in his bad books because he’d made a drunken grope-y pass at me a few weeks ago at a team-building drinks meet-up, and I’d slapped him really hard and said he had the look of a potential child molester about him. I hadn’t had the energy to report him, though, knowing that he was pally with the higher-ups, and as punishment for my rejection he kept assigning me jobs he knew I didn’t like.

Today I was at the front desk, which involved interacting with a million plebs with no taste. They only ever seemed to watch Adam Sandler films. Always, without fail, even when none were showing, even when he’d taken a five-year break from making films, even when it was the one where he did the voice of an anthropomorphised fart slowly making its way through the body of a morbidly obese man played by Paul Blart, Mall Cop. It was like everyone was scared of exposing themselves to anything that might require the use of more than one braincell.

Not that I’m elitist or anything.

The first few hours passed by OK. I tuned out and thought about music, gizmos and guys I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on, serving people on autopilot. And then, while I was talking to a nice but fairly vacant old lady, wearily explaining the plot of one of the dozen or so new Adam Sandler films we were showing, something about his soul getting trapped in a pair of ladies’ underwear, I started to cry.

‘Oh dear,’ said the old lady. ‘Are you all right, dearie?’ Yep, she actually said dearie.

I couldn’t answer, couldn’t apologise, couldn’t even make a joke about how upsetting I found the film. Could barely breathe. The grief was back, like a freezing anvil pushing my guts down down down, and with it came tears and harsh, racking sobs of an intensity I simply wasn’t used to. It was so overwhelming that I had to get up, run away and shut myself in the store cupboard. It took several minutes to regain even a rudimentary level of speech, and once I did regain it I started muttering to myself, ignoring the frantic knocks and queries from my co-workers outside.

‘For fuck’s sake, Vanessa. Pull yourself together. When was the last time you cried like this? Yes. Exactly. And you had good reason then. Not some abstract feeling. Pull yourself together.’

I slapped myself round the face for luck and took lots of deep breaths, and a minute or so later I felt composed enough to leave the cupboard. I walked past Sarah, Kizza and Mike, assuring them in a mutter that I was fine. As I rounded the corner in the direction of the toilets I actually heard Mike sneer something along the lines of ‘time of the month, yeah’.

‘You’ll pay for that, you greasy little fuck,’ I muttered as I stepped into the Ladies’, although I was heartened to hear Sarah tell him that it had been a dick thing to say.

I looked at myself in the mirror. The red, salt-blotched puffiness was fairly cringeworthy, but at least I didn’t look like a demented clown panda. I cleaned myself up as best I could, congratulating myself for scrupulously attending the ‘less is more’ school of make-up, and by the time I was done the sadness had completely vanished. Not only that, but I could barely remember how it had felt. All that was left was confusion, annoyance and embarrassment. I’d never been the type to break down in public, even with a perfectly good reason. This was just . . . nothing. It was pissing me off.

Sarah came in. ‘You OK?’ she asked hesitantly.

‘Yeah.’ I popped some chewing gum into my mouth. ‘Thanks.’

‘What happened?’

‘I . . .’ Well. What could I possibly say? Sarah was the only one of my co-workers that I considered an actual friend and we’d confided in each other before, but I didn’t feel I could tell her I’d completely lost it over a dream I couldn’t remember. So, shame rising like an iceberg, I lied. ‘The old lady I was talking to reminded me of my granny. The one who died last year. It was weird.’

Now, a granny of mine had died the previous year, that much was true. And I had been severely broken up about it. But at that point fact and fiction parted company, because apart from anything else, Granny Annie had been the sparkliest, sarkiest, most dynamic old girl you could imagine and she hadn’t looked remotely like the lady I’d been serving. So I felt guilty, especially when Sarah gave me a lovely cuddle and lots of ‘awww’, but I managed to justify it to myself, just about, figuring that Annie would appreciate the need to save face in such a bizarre situation. She’d been a pragmatic old thing.

Once I felt fully composed, I returned to the floor. Unsurprisingly, I’d been replaced. I doubted Mike was feeling charitable, more likely he thought it was bad for business to have a hormonal loose cannon on the front desk, ready to go off in unsuspecting customers’ faces at the slightest provocation. Whatever. It suited me fine. I just sneaked into a screen and went catatonic in front of a loud superhero film until the end of my shift.

Chapter Two

‘Do we have to listen to this?’

‘Fermé that bouche, Loch Ness. It’s my hair-cutting music. I need the groove.’ Alice reached over to her phone and turned it up.

‘You know I love repetitive electronic bleeps and bloops as much as the next gurning space case . . .’

‘This is techno, child.’

‘I stand by my definition.’

‘Appreciate.’

‘Merci non beaucoup.’ Shit French. Une specialite des Vanessa et les Alice.

‘I’m not changing it.’

‘Look, I love techno as much as the next German person on roller skates in the 90s. But couldn’t we at least have some slightly more interesting techno? This has been plodding along for about ten minutes.’

‘It’s a groove. You have to tune in. Do a bit of work. It’s mature techno.’

‘Old people techno.’

‘Refined techno. The sort of thing you want me listening to when I’m going at your hair with sharp implements.’

‘Noted. But . . . refined? Is this the kind of thing that soundtracks your days at We’re Literally So Fucking Now It’s Painful dot com?’

‘Shut it, Nessquik.’ Alice tugged sternly on a lock of my hair. She loved coming up with new and stupid names for me, almost as much as I liked coming up with new and stupid names for the uber-slick modern culture hub where she worked, writing long discursive articles and launching super-literate bon mots into the Twittersphere. Alice’s nicknames were always variations on a theme of Ness. Nessquik. Loch Ness. Wilderness. Bewilderness. Nessun Dorma. Nestling Between My Voluminous Breasts. And so on.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you were saying.’

‘Oh God. Yeah. I can’t remember it at all and it’s really pissing me off. I never ever cry for no reason and I doubleplus never ever cry for no reason in front of fifty thousand people.’

‘Maybe you’ve entered the menopause.’

‘At twenty-three?’

‘Could happen. I swear my sister’s been menopausal since she was born.’

I’d never met Alice’s legendary basket-case sister, but she sounded intriguingly nightmarish, much more so than my tediously nightmarish Bible-bashing one. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s what’s happening to me.’

‘Nah, agreed. Unless . . . hot flushes, at all?’

‘Nope.’

‘So it must be something else that’s on your mind. Stuart maybe?’

‘Nurrrgh.’

‘You’ve been finding reasons not to break up with him for an impressively long time. Maybe your brain finally broke.’

‘Meargh.’

‘See?’

I sighed. ‘I know it’s been building up . . . but no. I don’t think it’s Stuart. I know what my Stuart angst feels like. I could pick it out of an emotional line-up with a psychic blindfold on. And I am sad about it, don’t get me wrong. He’s lovely and it’s shit that things have . . . decomposed. But this was different. I can’t remember it completely clearly, which is also really weird, but this was like . . . despair. Actual despair.’

‘Shit. How’s that look?’

‘Bit more off the fringe.’

Alice kept snipping. ‘Maybe it’s London.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Living in London. Maybe it’s getting to you. The overwhelming grimness of everything and everyone.’

‘But I love London, you nitwit.’

‘Nitwit yourself, you nincompoop.’

‘It’s not London. I have no idea what it is. Maybe I’m just going mental.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re, like, the bestest best friend ever.’

‘Kidding. Of course you’re not mental. Although we should both put a quid in the Not Woke Jar for such ableist language.’

‘I’ll owe you.’

‘You just . . . I don’t know. Need something. But you’re not sure what it is.’ She snipped some more. ‘So are you going to finish with Stuart or what?’

I wrinkled my nose. ‘I should. God, I have to. It’s definitely not working. And my reasons for staying are . . . really bad. Like, this calculating selfish bitch deserves the revenge porn bad.’

‘That feels like hyperbole to me.’

‘Je suis une hyperboler.’ I sighed again. ‘Je suis le wimp. I’m much better at being dumped than dumping, even if our relationship is about nine months past its sell-by-date. I should have ended it when we finished uni . . . but it was too nice.’

‘Well, you know I’ve always put my tick in Stuart’s column. But I’m not sure that “nice” is a word that dreams are made of.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. I am going to do it. And if you want to tick Stuart’s column in the meantime, be my guest. Then I could be the wronged party and my conscience would be clear. I’m sure you and I could repair our relationship pretty quickly.’

‘Ugh. Vileness.’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘Right, how’s that?’

‘Perf. Well, by my standards anyway. I should probably find a hairdresser who doesn’t have totally badass cornrows. Next to those, I look . . . well. Just a bit shit, really.’

‘You want your hair like mine?’

‘Are you offering? I thought you said I was five hundred per cent too white.’

‘You are. So no, I’m not offering. We can’t have matching hair anyway, you weirdo. That would be borderline . . . I dunno. “Incestuous” is totally the wrong word, but it feels like that level of no.’

‘You’re right, as usual.’

‘Guilty as charged. Come on, let’s purple this bitch up.’

I got home at five, went straight to the kitchen and made a cup of chai. Sweet steaming spicy comfort. I took it through to the living room and froze with the cup an inch from my mouth.

There was something in the corner of the room, slumped against the sofa. A human shape. It was white and featureless, like a clothes mannequin, but it looked soft, like flesh, like it would yield if you touched it . . . and there was a knife in its stomach. Blood slopped, gurgling, from the wound. I knew it was real blood. It had to be. It turned me to stone and I don’t know how long I spent staring at it, numb and wishing I was blind, until I remembered how to close my eyes.

I counted.

One.

Two.

Three.

The room was so cold.

Five.

What came next?

Eight?

I opened my eyes, braced and ready for it to be standing there, face to lack of face with me, screaming with its lack of a mouth, but it was gone, of course, and the room was warm.

I returned to the kitchen and my eyes fell on the notebook. I put down my tea, picked up the notebook, tore out the offending page and calmly scrunched it into the tiniest ball I could manage. Into the bin it went. Then I sat down, forgetting my drink, and stared into space until Stuart got back.

‘Hi,’ he said, all lovely and tall and blonde and blue-eyed and oblivious. ‘You’re purple!’

‘Hi. Yeah.’

‘What’s wrong?’

I looked at him. Really looked at him, for the first time in a while. ‘I need to talk to you.’

Later on, when it was dark, I was still at the table, staring at my notebook. Stuart had gone to bed hours ago. Somehow I hadn’t felt that I could follow him to the bed, the shared bed, so intimate a place now irrevocably changed. Not until he was one hundred per cent definitely asleep. Not after that talk. It could have been worse, to be fair; he’d been more upset than he’d let on during the endless conversation, but I think he knew it was all the truth. He understood. Neither of us had cried, but there had been a look in his eye, one I’m not sure he’d even been aware of.

I wrote a bad poem, tore it up, binned it with the other night’s nonsense, flicked through the other pages. Idea after idea, some of them good, none of them finished, very few of them developed further than a couple of pages. I tried to expand a script whose opening I quite liked, but inspiration stubbornly failed to materialise. Helen and Charlie, despite some appealingly snappy dialogue, were stalling, refusing to come out of the kitchen. I didn’t know where they’d come from, or where they were going, and with a dull throb of disappointment I realised that I didn’t care. And if I didn’t care, how could I expect anyone else to?

I sighed and closed the notebook and made myself a fiftieth cup of tea, to which I added a generous amount of honey with the wooden honey dripper Alice had given me. A present from a holiday. Always nice to be one of the people who gets presents from someone else’s holiday. Watching the honey unwind, thick, sweet, decadent and amber gold, was a small, satisfying pleasure, like Amelie’s bags of grain, and I stirred and sipped and enjoyed the way it made my blood bubble. It made me feel a little better.

All the same, when I did eventually head to bed, I conspicuously avoided even glancing in the direction of the living room. I felt guilty heading back to the bed, his bed, guilty and awkward, but I couldn’t sleep in the other room as I’d originally planned. I just couldn’t.

I knew I should have been panicking. I’d have to move out, and soon, and there was no way I could afford a place by myself. I’d have to find a house share . . . with strangers. A year ago, Vanessa would have been all over that new adventure. New faces, new opportunities for drinking and salty banter. Not now, though. When had the change happened?

Should have been panicking . . .

But I felt weirdly calm. It didn’t seem to matter all that much, not compared to my impending psychotic break.

Don’t think about that, I thought.

I could stay with Alice for a bit. Not long, but a bit. The one thing we couldn’t do together was live. Travel, yeah. Hang out for hours on end. But living, day to day? That had almost destroyed our friendship once. I wasn’t going to risk that again.

This train of thought led me to a memory. That argument. I could see it, hear it, with crystal clarity, like a video in my brain. Alice standing over the sink, the filthy sink, piled high with mould-colonised plates and bowls, every item of cutlery in the house encrusted with next-level gank, sobbing with rage and pain, staring at her bleeding thumb. She’d cut it while trying to unblock the plughole; as it turned out, the plughole was blocked by a sharp, broken fragment of her favourite mug, a mug with serious sentimental value, a mug that someone – not me, I swear – had used as an ashtray and then dumped in the sink. It was awful and I felt bad, but because I was hungover and grumpy and because it was Alice being all prissy about tidying up for the hundredth time, I wasn’t sympathetic. Not like I should have been.

I was a dick, basically.

Even now, when we tried to laugh about that argument, it made me feel uncomfortable. We’d lived separately in third year and it had worked out brilliantly.

Sorry Alice, I thought.

I love you.

But you’re a fucking nag.

That actually made me smile.

Maybe I really was going bonkers.

I was out of bed at eight and at work at eight-fifty. Stuart had already gone and I was ecstatic to discover that Mike was away today, and although I still had a lot to do, I didn’t mind. It kept me distracted from unexplained emotional breakdowns and strange visions.

I kept order in two screens, silencing mouthy kids and phone wankers. It always baffled me when people paid large sums of money for cinema tickets and then spent the whole film loudly arsing about or texting. Surely there were places one could hang out and act like a prick for free? Kids today. I sort of understood the ones that sneaked in, but we were getting much better at catching them.

About the only thing I didn’t like about enforcing the law in the screens was coming across frisky couples. I knew that Sarah took great delight in embarrassing anyone she caught perpetrating a sneaky handjob (or sometimes even the full two-backed beast) at the back of the room. She’d once told me she thought I’d have been the type to see the funny side, and I agreed, I was that type, but I just hated it. It was too cringeworthy. The first time it had happened to me I’d been too cowardly to say anything and had just left them to it. The second time I’d shouted and they’d shouted back as if I was somehow being unreasonable, and the guy was all red in the face and the girl’s hand was sticky and to be honest, bugger all that drama. So since then I’d either ignored it or just turned the lights on and skedaddled sharpish. Luckily sexcapades mostly happened at night and I was only working until five today, so I enjoyed myself administering hearty bollockings to twatty kids and boosting pick’n’mix. Even fetching and carrying and till-related guff was better than seeing dead things, or finding sweaty perverts going at it on a carpet of discarded popcorn. Sarah and I had a mojito and a giggle afterwards and then I headed home and realised I’d managed to forget about Stuart, and felt bad.

I decided to put off going back to the flat – it wasn’t home, not now – and went to the park instead. It was mid-May, warm, and the place was a gold-green glow of buds and bloom, and I sat on a bench by the pond and watched the ducks, geese and swans go about their secret society business. It was a lovely little park and I wondered why I didn’t come down here more often. Oases like these were few and far between in London. My old mate Londinium, I thought, giggling to myself. I sat for a long time, thinking the thoughts of the lazy writer, that I’d love to capture this dreamy tranquility in a poem but knew I wouldn’t bother, and justifying the fact that I wouldn’t bother by thinking I could never do it justice and that there were fifty thousand perfectly good poems about sunshine and ponds and parks and darling duckies and what could I possibly add to the canon, and that sometimes a poem about a duck is, in fact, not about a duck at all.

And kicking myself for being pretentious, but not secure enough in my pretension to actually channel it into something.

And realising that this mess of thought, uninvited and unbidden, had sucked all the enjoyment out of sitting in the park. Nice one, Vanessa.

My phone rang as I was getting up to leave, and I answered with fresh joy in my voice. ‘Auntie Paulie! How are you, my love?’

‘Vanessa, are you sitting down?’

I stopped. She was about to tell me that something had happened to Mum. Or to Dad, alone and quiet in Scotland. Or my sister, impossible and pious in America. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

‘You should sit down.’

I felt cold, but I didn’t sit. ‘What is it, Paulie?’

‘It’s . . . it’s Mark, Vanessa.’

‘Mark who?’ I knew Mark who. There was no other possible Mark. But it didn’t make sense. Why would she be calling about Mark? Mark was gone.

‘He’s here, Vanessa. He’s at my house. He’s alive.’

Chapter Three

Ilie back and sink down into the grass, one foot, two feet, three, four. ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Maybe?

‘Those clouds. In the sky.’

‘Yeah?’

‘They’re . . . they’ve become . . . you know Tinkerbell from Peter Pan?’

‘The Disney one?’

‘Yeah. Well . . . the clouds are . . . they’re like her, fairies like her, but they’re the size of skyscrapers.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. And they’re . . . kissing.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. And one just winked at me.’

He laughs. ‘Cool.’

‘Are you seeing?’

‘Not really . . . just colours. Nothing solid.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. How come you get lesbian fairies? That’s way better.’

‘Yeah.’ I watch the fairies, bigger than dreams, kissing playfully, the top of my head touching the top of Mark’s, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to anyone. ‘Mark?’

‘Yeah?’

‘This is amazing.’

‘Yeah.’

I was dimly aware that I was on my knees. The park had faded to a vague outline, a basic rendering of an environment, sound muted, air sucked inside-out.

‘What the hell, Paulie,’ I said, my voice low and grey, curdled. ‘What the fuck. Why would you say that? That’s not funny. That’s horrible. Why would you say that to me? Why would you—’

‘It’s true, love, he’s here, he’s at my—’

‘No. No, no, NO! It’s not possible!’ I was crying now.

‘I know! I know it’s not possible! But he’s here! He is at my house.’

Why would she play a trick like this on me? My darling Paulie? It was too cruel. Too cruel. Mark was seven years gone. This was—

‘Here,’ she said. ‘He wants to speak to you.’

‘No! I—’

‘Vanessa?’

The basic outline vanished. Even I vanished. Everything blank. Just my voice and his.

Mark’s.

It was Mark’s voice.

I stumble from Erin’s front door, leaving the beats and smoke and giggles of the party behind, and walk up the road, hugging myself, staring at the stars, distorted into a bright blur by my stupid tears. ‘Bastard,’ I whisper. ‘Fucking lying bastard.’

‘Vanessa?’

I don’t turn around. ‘Go away, Mark.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to talk to anyone.’ My voice is horrible. Low, grey. Curdled.

‘Because of Dan?’

‘Go away.’

He puts his arms around me and rests his chin on my shoulder. He’s never hugged me like this. I shouldn’t like it so much. I don’t want it to be out of pity. I don’t turn around. ‘Please Mark. Leave me alone.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘Dan is nothing. You’re so, so far above him.’

I can’t answer.

I want him to make me turn.

I want him to kiss me.

But I know he won’t.

‘Vanessa, is that you?’

He sounded exactly as he had when I’d last spoken to him. Like he hadn’t aged a day. Like this was seven years ago and we were talking on the phone and I was putting on a grown-up voice. He sounded scared and confused, but apart from that . . .

It couldn’t be.

It had to be a trick.

‘Yes,’ I said.

There was so much relief in his sigh. ‘It’s you. Thank God. I . . . I don’t know what’s going on. I—’

‘Mark!’ Shrill. Jagged. Not my voice.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s the last thing you said to me? Before . . .’ Before you disappeared forever. ‘Before. The last thing you said.’

I blow out the last, acrid remnants of the joint and toss it away.

‘You always smoke right to the end,’ said Mark.

‘So?’

‘It’s disgusting. Tastes disgusting.’

I shrug. ‘I like to get the most out of my joints. Unlike you, who tosses it away with about an eighth left in it. Wasteman.’

‘Shut up.’

I check my phone. ‘Ugh. Family dinner. I’d better go home and shower away the smell of druggie debauchery or Mother Dearest will have an epi.’

‘OK.’ Mark shoulders his rucksack. ‘What exam is it tomorrow?’

‘English.’

‘Tess?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Shit. Should have read it, really.’ He smiles his famous smile and starts walking away.

I call after him. ‘You know she kills Dracula at the end?’

He laughs but doesn’t stop or turn around. ‘Oh yeah. Shortly after she finds out Mr Darcy’s her father, right?’

‘Something about Tess? Mr Darcy?’

I had become an attic with a draft whistling through it, hollow and numb, but tingling. ‘Mark?’ It was all I could say.

‘Yes. Yes! It’s me! For fuck’s sake, Vanessa!’ Mark never swore. Or at least, not when serious stuff happened. Swearing was for when he was being silly. ‘Tell me what’s going on! Is this a joke?’

‘What happened? After you went home?’ Now so tiny. Still not my voice.

‘Last night?’

‘No . . . I mean . . . yes.’ Last night seven years ago.

‘I . . . I don’t think I got home. I don’t really remember. I left you and then . . . I woke up in the bushes, just up the street. I figured I passed out from being stoned. Whitey or something. I went to my house and it was completely different, there was no-one in it and there was an extension, it had been re-painted. My phone didn’t work. I didn’t have a clue what was going on. So I came to Pauline’s and she reacted like I was a ghost.’

‘You are.’

‘What?’

‘I mean . . . you disappeared. You disappeared. Seven years ago.’ I wished I was there to hold him, hug him as I told him this impossible truth, although I wasn’t sure I’d be able to speak if I saw him, smelt him, felt him. Hearing him was bad enough. I pictured his eyes and his smell came unbidden to my nostrils. I felt faint.

‘That’s what Pauline said! But it’s not possible! It’s not . . . it’s not . . .’

‘Look at the calendar.’

‘I did. Good Photoshopping. This whole thing is pretty impressive. Must have taken you weeks to plan it. Come on, Vanessa. What’s the punchline? That I’m massively gullible? Come on . . .’ With each word his tone was losing certainty. I couldn’t speak and now he couldn’t either. I heard him stumble and throw up and I couldn’t even say his name to comfort him. I could hear Pauline’s muffled voice, the sound of her getting water and paper towels, and I waited until she picked up the phone again.

‘Vanessa? Are you still there?’

I had no idea. ‘Yes.’

‘I . . . I don’t know what to do.’

‘You don’t know what to do?’

‘I can’t . . .’

‘Just look after him!’

‘You should be here.’

‘I’m two hundred miles away!’ I closed my eyes, counted, breathed. ‘I can’t . . . I . . . put Mark back on.’

A pause. ‘Hello?’ He sounded ghostly, far away.

‘Mark. I need you to hold it together.’

‘Vanessa, what do I do? What . . . where’s Dad?’

He never said ‘Dad’. Always ‘my dad’. ‘I don’t know. He . . . he left town after you disappeared. I tried to keep in contact but he kept moving. I don’t know where he is.’

‘I need you. Please. Where are you?’

‘I’m . . . I can’t be there right now. I will be, as soon as I can. For now you need to stay with Pauline. Hold it together. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘Please . . .’

‘As soon as I can.’

I hung up and collapsed into myself. The world had reappeared, I was no longer just a voice in a blank space, but everything had slowed to a sludgy crawl. I was there for a while, only dimly aware of anything, of people asking if I was OK. I managed to nod. I was almost impressed that I could do it, I was concentrating so hard on keeping my breathing level.

Mark.

I got up and walked. Back to the flat. One step at a time. As I walked, I dialled the cinema. It was as though someone else was operating my controls.

‘Hello?’ Mike.

‘I have to go home.’

‘Vanessa? You what?’