Darker London

By the time they’d arrived at the hospital she could hear the words people were speaking to her again. For a little while, that was all Zoe could give a shit about.

Though the voices were not clear, she could make out what Liz and her friends were saying and she just leaned back in the car and closed her eyes and relished in the fact that she could, that closing her eyes didn’t make the world such an alien and terrifying place anymore.

To say it was an immeasurable relief was an understatement, and part of Zoe was regretting saying anything at all, because maybe if they’d stayed at the funeral something would have happened and also if she hadn’t said anything then nobody would be worried. Only Zoe would have been terrified and Zoe firmly felt that it would have been better to bear the terror on her own than to share it among the people she loved.

( ... )

Cai spent the night trying to make sense of what Dom’s funeral would mean.

It was heartbreaking and horrible but if death was not the end it was hard to lose himself in grief. Dom’s death was unfair and horrible but if death was not the end then wasn’t it more like Dom had moved away, to the other side of the world maybe?

But at the same time, for the rest of Cai’s life Dom wouldn’t be here and Cai’s life and Nonnie’s life and the lives of the foster kids were the worse for it.

( ... )

Rachel’s hands shook as she laced up her shoes in the stairwell of the council flat. It might have been the cold. It was very chilly in the staircase. Inside her apartment it had been warmer, as Harley had set up the single oil heater in her room and had made her a hot water bottle and a hot chocolate, although hers was not smothered in marshmallows like Zoe’s had been.

She’d read Cai’s post over and over again, then gone back through his journal and read all of those posts over again. Cried at seeing him so happy over a treehouse. Cried at his excitement over the thought that they could all go to Chile with him. Cried till Harley came in and hugged her and rocked with her back and forth and promised that he would make it better, that he would fix everything.

As if he could bring anyone back to life.

( ... )

Cai woke up exhausted, his eyes gritty with sleep and old tears. Straight away, the memories of the day before came back to him, and his stomach sank him down like a rock.

Dom had died yesterday.

He sat up, rubbing the crusty dried tears out of his eyes. Danny was still asleep on the floor, and Cai didn’t want to wake him yet. He needed a moment to himself while he figured out what today was going to be like.

The morning after his mother died, he'd been surrounded by people looking after him. Nonnie and Dom were there, both of them, tag teaming it to get him dressed, fed, watered, and where he needed to be. But he'd been ten. Now he was eighteen.

( ... )

Rachel was waiting nearby when school got out. Cai spotted her immediately, across the road and down a little. There was a fence they used to meet at when they were all at London College together, low enough to climb on, high enough to look down on everyone walking past. She looks tired, Cai thought; when was the last time she didn’t look tired?

She slithered off the wall as soon as she spotted him, and jogged across the road in front of an oncoming car – not so close that it needed to brake, but close enough to make Cai grit his teeth till she was out of the way. Someone in the passenger seat shouted at her, but Rachel ignored them. From the way she ran over, he could tell she was stiff. “Have you been up there a while?” he asked.

( ... )

It was a little after eleven, and Casa Rosa was quiet. The rain fell across the window and down the weatherboards, and Zoe’s hot water bottle and the spare blankets were doing their job of keeping her warm. She was staying in the spare room, as she had done a couple of times before, and it wasn’t just so that she could put off explaining her face to Liz even though that was a not insignificant part of it. She didn’t want to leave yet. She didn’t want to leave Cai.

She moved slowly up the stairs, keeping to the edges because they seemed less likely to creak. Just because she hadn’t heard any movement in the house didn’t mean that everyone was asleep. Nonnie had a kind of supernatural awareness about her that meant Zoe wouldn’t have been completely surprised if she’d stepped out of the storage room opposite Cai’s, asking if perhaps Zoe had gotten lost. And Faye and Roe – well, Faye was too excited by Zoe’s presence and Roe was too suspicious, so Zoe was also prepared for a creak in a floorboard to bring them both out into the hall.

( ... )

There was no one else home when Cai and Zoe arrived at Casa Rosa. He let himself in, same as always, turned the key in the lock, kicked mud off his shoes, dodged automatically around the coat rack because it always used to try and grab him. Yet today it felt different, like he had to be careful. All the actions in coming home were the same, except for the feeling that he was home. Casa Rosa felt infiltrated by the fire.

Zoe was behind him, waiting. Her head was feeling worse after the drive back here, sore, a little sick. The adrenaline had worn off and the great plodding creature of dread had caught up with her.

( ... )

The first thing Zoe said to Cai when he came to pick her up from university was “I don’t have concussion.”

He drew closer, his hand gently outstretched toward the bandage on her head, but Zoe pulled back before he could get closer. Guilty, Cai dropped his hand quickly, and grasped both hands behind his back. Zoe leaned against the bonnet of his car. “I did hurt my head, but most of this is where I dragged it across the ground. I didn’t bash it when I fell.”

( ... )

Two days after the fire, Dom took Faye and Roe to talk to a councillor, or one each, Cai wasn’t sure. He didn’t ask because he didn’t think the answer he’d get would be enough. Something was wrong here, he could feel it starting.

Instead of waiting about the house, Nonnie went out to buy curtains, and took Cai with her. He put up no resistance; he wanted to spend the day close. He was too old to cling to his grandmother, but he needed her all the same.

( ... )

The Finches had a money plant. It sat in the hallway on the second floor, a little way along from the door to the kitchen, under a window where its dry papery leaves could glow in the sunlight, could shine gently in the streetlights at night. It had been a gift, Cai thought, though he’d never wondered who had given it to them because it had been sitting in the hallway, in its thrift-shop ornate pot, for years. Just part of the familiar backdrop of their lives. Cai remembered collecting the leafy coins to use as money with his friends, so long ago that he didn’t remember who the friends were, just other kids from church, names like Keiran and Amy, people he hadn’t thought of in years. Definitely not since Danny and Zoe and Rachel, who were vivid in a way that other friends in his life had not been vivid.

Cai couldn’t picture himself old and unable to remember every tiny detail of their lives. It seemed unfathomable that memories of Zoe or Danny or Rachel would fade like memories of childhood friends. They weren’t background, like the money plant. They were the real thing, layered and troubled and funny.

Still, it only took one little twist to bring the background hurling to the foreground, to make everything change.

The money plant was on fire.

( ... )

Rachel was waiting outside the school gates for Cai, her fluffy coat pulled in tight around her body. It was not freezing outside today, but she hadn’t been able to get back to sleep last night after her nightmare – and the realisation that, at some point, her father has acquired a handgun. She was too scared to ask him about it; scared to find out if he’d always had one, or if he’d acquired one after the thing with the vampires, not knowing that his daughter thought she was more dangerous than all the handguns in the world. She wanted to forget it existed, because if she forgot, she was less likely to tell anyone. Zoe wouldn’t let her stay if she knew Harley had a gun. Neither would Danny. Nor Cai.

She felt like she was on tenuous ground with them all anyway. None of them liked her moving back in with father and none of them knew why she’d become so stubborn about it, not really. But she couldn’t stay at Cai’s since the chicken incident, and she couldn’t stay at Danny’s because what if she did something to Wolf and besides, Danny’s mum didn’t like her, and she didn’t want to stay at Zoe’s because she didn’t want Zoe to find out that maybe Rachel was way more destructive than Zoe thought she was.

( ... )

All across the city, London was the city of nightmares.

In a private room in the hospital, where she'd gone because she was feeling angry and shaken, Josie woke from a dream of her hands cracking a man's neck. She lay still, staring at the window she'd left open before she went to sleep so the curtains blowing in and out of the room would remind her she wasn't trapped. The man had been one of her kidnappers, one of Astrid's kidnappers, who would have sold her if she hadn't escaped. The man had died, and maybe she'd killed several others - her memory was a little jumpy, a little sped-up and jittery. She'd gone over the memory too many times and wasn't sure what was imagination any more. She knew she didn't imagine the sensation of draining so many of them dry, the heady intoxication of souls. Even remembering it now made her feel giddy, and she splayed both hands against her face as if to hold her mind steady.

( ~ )

By the time Cai returned to Rachel’s room after running into Zoe, Rachel was asleep and Danny was watching over her, holding her hand. For a while, the boys spent some quiet time on their phone, reblogging things for each other or passing the small screens back and forth. Rachel slept a long time, and Zoe didn’t meet them like she said she might, and the evening grew later and later and eventually, Nonnie arrived, kissed both Danny and the dozy Rachel on the forehead, and took him home for dinner.

It was a tense dinner, and a vegetarian one. “I am not eating chicken!” Faye was yelling at Dom when Cai and Nonnie arrived home. “I am not eating chicken ever ever again!”

Roe was silent and sullen in a tall chair pulled up to the bench, slowly crushing garlic with the flat of a knife.

( ... )

Cai peered at himself in the mirror, his face looked tired and old, and he glared at it. This just made him look tired and old and grouchy. He tried smiling, but looked fake and annoying. Stupid face. Why'd he bother?

He sighed, and slowly made his way back to Rachel's room, trying to take his time to let them talk about... whatever hellish secrets needed to be shared. He stopped at the vending machine to kill time, but it was a helpful sort of stop. More sugar, that would help. Just cans and cans of coke, yeah, that was what they needed right now. And a raspberry coke for Rachel, because she needed liquids and sugars and liked raspberry things. Cai fed the machine and was punching in buttons when Zoe’s voice said “Cai?” behind him. He spun round to find her watching him, hands in the pockets of her hoodie and a frown on her face that was as tired as his and just as confused. Had he sent her a message as well? Had she had a vision to let her know they were here? “What are you doing here?”

( ... )

The moment he got the text (and after quite a bit of panicking) Danny called Deirdre to ask her to take him to Peter's hospital. If anyone could protect him from Greg, it was Deirdre, and luckily for him, she was willing to help out. It was only for Rachel that Danny would dare set foot in Robert MacGavillary Memorial Hospital. His evil uncle was incarcerated there and Danny never wanted to see the arsehole again.

Deirdre arrived at Danny's house quickly, and bundled Danny into the front seat as her twins were in car seats in the back. He spent the entire car ride facing backwards, chattering away with Gabriel, while Eiley ignored them and played with her stuffed kitty in silence.

Once at the hospital, and after quite a bit of time maneuvering twins into the double pram, Deirdre led Danny into the hospital. Danny rushed over to the front desk and gave them Rachel's name. Once he had her room number, he dashed off, trusting Deirdre to keep up with him. He skidded to a halt in front of her room and caught sight of his brother. "Cai!" he yelled out, "oh my god, what happened?!"

It was a bad night, but the sun dawned on a worse morning. She woke up groggy, and got up slowly, unwillingly, and only because she needed to pee. Most mornings she woke up with one of the family tapping on her door announcing breakfast – the whole family ate together, every morning. It was a little like Imogene’s house, in that respect, but breakfast was noisier, and faster, and the kitchen was smaller and warmer.

But not this morning. There was no one in the kitchen, though there were cereal boxes and bowls out like there had been. Rachel swallowed, imagining… she wasn’t sure what. Rapture, maybe. A silent world where she’d been left alone with the ghosts.

( ... )

The time Rachel had spent at Casa Rosa was a grounding experience, and once she felt wholly unentitled to.

Cai kept giving her projects to work on, putting something heavy in her hands and showing her what to do with it, and together they built a chair and a park bench and a swing for the boys down the road. The swing had been Rachel’s favourite. She’d knotted the rope herself and insisted on climbing the tree to tie it up: "I'm a better climber than you,” she said. Which she was. Cai watched her from the ground, grinning, and jumped feet first onto the swing when it was ready.

( ... )

To pick her up, Cai would have to drive the ridiculous distance to Zoe’s house and then all of the way back toward Danny’s, which was only a mere twenty minutes (on a good day) from Cai’s church. It would have been faster for Zoe to get a ride to Danny’s house with Liz, and though Zoe was worried about Rachel… speed didn’t feel like the most important thing.

She waited outside, across the vast lawn from the house, shivering in her coat near the gate. Cai gave her a very unimpressed ‘why aren’t you waiting in the warm?’ look as she piled into his car, pulled off her gloves with her teeth and pushed them up against the heater. “Turn off your face,” Zoe said, not looking at him.

( ... )

Cai heard the screaming from his tower room, where he was trying to write his conclusion for his history essay. As usual he took the stairs two at a time, jumping the final three to land on the second floor with a thump to announce that he was coming and things better quiet down. Things didn’t quiet down, but they never did. No one respected his thumping footsteps.

Not that his foster sisters could probably hear him over the shouting anyway. Faye was yelling “GIVE IT BACK” over and over and Roe was shouting “YOU’RE WRONG IT’S WRONG YOU’RE WRONG.”

( ... )

It wasn’t until Lent began that Cai realised how much he’d been keeping inside over the last few months. He was certain that, this year, he had so much more to talk about at confession than he had last year.

Last year he’d been worried about his psychic powers. Last year he’d been hurting over Alex. Last year he hadn’t even met Zoe or Rachel or reconnected with Danny. Looking back at last year Cai couldn’t believe he’d had much to talk about with the priest at all, though thinking about it logically he knew he’d felt just as concerned with events then as he did now. It was just that all the events felt that much bigger.

( ... )