Darker London

Since appearing naked in front of an angel in a hospital room, Yolande had been wringing every moment she could from the extra days she’d been given.

Every day was packed full of activity. So much of it was spent looking after Daria and Noah and their newborn twins, but the help was spread over many friends so there was time to reconnect, and play, with Neil and her other daughters too. And she hooked in anyone else who came to the house, Hayley’s friends, Joss. Once she’d gone clubbing with Allanah.

( ... )

GIRLS!! LOOK OVER HERE!! IT'S A NOTE ON THE KETTLE FROM YOUR MOTHER! COOEE!! WHY NOT READ ME WHILE THE JUG BOILS!!

I SUPPOSE ONE OF YOU MIGHT ALSO HAVE A BOY OVER SO IF THIS NOTE IS BEING READ BY A BOY, HELLO!! TELL ONE OF MY GIRLS THERE IS A NOTE HERE WAITING FOR THEM. KEEP THE BEDROOM DOOR OPEN, HAHAHA! (I AM KIDDING! IF YOU ARE HERE, YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN HERE ALL NIGHT!! IN WHICH CASE I ALREADY KNOW THE BEDROOM DOORS WERE CLOSED! GOOD WORK KEEPING YOURSELF SECRET FROM PRYING PARENTS! IF YOU LIKE, WHY NOT STAY AND MEET US?)

GIRLS! I HAVE TAKEN YOUR FATHER OUT FOR A MORNING RUN. HE TELLS ME THAT YOU WILL WORRY THAT HE WILL OVERDO IT SO I AM HERE TO TELL YOU NOT TO. HE WILL NOT OVERDO IT. HE WILL JUST DO IT! AND SO WILL I!

IF YOU TURN AROUND YOU WILL SEE ANOTHER NOTE. IF YOU LIKE, YOU COULD SEE WHAT THAT NOTE SAYS AS WELL.

( ... )

“Dad’s coming in after dinner with my girls,” Daria whispered to her mother, reading off the phone that Noah was holding, since both her hands were occupied with a breastfeeding Alastair. “And Merry again, and Hayley,” she watched her mother’s face as Yolande covered her mouth with her hands to keep the joy from bursting out. Daria felt the same, but with extra layers of tired, and extra layers of sore. She’d always been active, loved the gym, athletic sex, and finding new ways to push her body, but right now there were muscles aching she’d never thought about before. Her whole body felt like it had fallen out of a tree.

She had fallen out of a tree once too. She’d been getting high with Adam in after school and leaned back too far, hit another branch on the way down and was lucky not to break anything. It hadn’t been a very tall tree, but she was discovering new bruises for days.

“Neil and Merry and Hayley,” Yolande echoed, voice creeping out through her fingers. “Cassandra and Phoebe and Neil and Merry and Hayley.”

“I think we should tell Cass and Bee that you’re an Auntie, or something – I don’t want them telling their preschool they got two new siblings and a granny back from the dead,” Daria said, picturing it. Or rather – she didn’t want other adults telling Phoebe and Cassandra that they were making up stories when they weren’t. “That should work, right?” she looked over at Noah.

Merry stepped out of Daria’s room, and instantly found that looking at her mother without the distraction of her sister and new niece and nephew became far more difficult. Her gaze dropped to her hands, one of them slowly wringing anxiety out of the other.

“I’ll, uh, get coffees,” Joss said, thinking that this was a mother-daughter conversation and he better get himself out of there for a while. “What do you drink – uh – do you drink?”

( ... )

Merry had been struggling through the last few months in a way she was very reluctant to describe as struggling. She had support from her family and a nice place to live and a cat with more personality than ears – it wasn’t like she was homeless or suffering abuse or living in a war zone or anything. She even had proper medical support and a doctor who understood the reality of all the things that had happened to her. She was so fucking lucky.

Life was just... gruelling, and from where she was standing at the moment it was hard to see any progress and harder still to see how things could improve. Today, for example, progress was not feeling like progress at all: She’d started talking in group therapy and afterward she felt wretched.

She’d gone with Joss a few times before now. Joss, who also didn’t talk much but seemed less like he was suffocating under the weight of not-talking than she did. It had taken her weeks and weeks to first identify where this suffocating feeling was coming from and then longer to come to terms with the idea that talking about it might not destroy her as much as she’d once been convinced it would.

( ... )

“We’re a few months past September,” Joss said. “Mean’s you’ve taken more than a semester off.”

“Mm,” said Merry, watching his ceiling. She’d been lying on his bed listening to his music while he fiddled with the bibliography for the assignment due on Monday. Now that he was done – a whole day before it was due, he joined her on the bed. She'd come over to his house after having brunch at Daria's. She's arrived in a mood, she was still in a mood.

( ... )

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.

( ~ )

Joss had told Carly – echoing the words that Ismail had told him – that it felt like the hardest part of recovery was figuring out how to want to recover. This thought was a tangled road, full of guilty offshoots and haunted dead ends, and was an exhausting one to walk.

He didn’t want to be over Kenzie, because whatever she'd been she’d been important, and letting go of that sense of importance felt like lying to himself. Joss didn’t want to lie to himself and pretend like nothing had happened, pretend like he was not the person he was. But he did want to be a better person.

( ... )

Joss did not know what had happened to the last several months. Or, he did know, but he couldn’t believe how they’d slipped away. The days crumbled into each other like towers of a dry sandcastle.

He still went to university, but he dropped down to two papers instead of four.

Strangest of all; he'd been sleeping a lot lately, as if he had all those years of insomnia to catch up on (or almost as if the sleeping pills he had agreed to take were starting to work...) When he was awake, it was hard to get going. He’d made it so far, but finally it seemed like his mother’s depression had caught up with him, grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him out to sea.

( ... )

Leon threw a good party, a sprawling party, a motley mix of rooms each dancing to a different beat. Daria had brought her daughters and they played with Oscar as Leon tried to turn all the tiny people into a tiny xylophone-bongo-triangle band, Neil was drinking wine and telling Nova jokes, there were more people than could reasonably fit in the Blasphemy Font and most of them were naked. Merry felt a bit lost. Ellie and Geordie weren’t here. Her family was, but she still felt like everyone was way too cool. Everyone else was having a better time – everyone else knew how to have a better time. How did people just take off their clothes in front of people they’d never met before and sit in a Blasphemy Font, hot water bubbling around them? How did people walk into a room and strike up a conversation with other people?

Merry had a few bottles of berry cider in an attempt to be festive, in an attempt to loosen up, but all it did was make her belly feel fizzy and her arms felt heavy. Her head stayed exactly as problematic as it had been an hour ago.

( ... )

“Hello Joss, my name is Ismail, have a seat,” Ismail made a smooth gesture towards the chair near the window, as he rolled his chair out from behind his desk.

“Endlessly disappointed that you didn’t lead with ‘call me Ismail,’” Joss said, taking the seat but shaking his head.

( ... )

Warning: self harm mention.

( ... )

Ellie regained consciousness before they left campus, but she was still tired, and groggy enough that she didn’t feel like talking, and the one solitary thing on her mind was getting people to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep for a wee bit.

Merry desperately wanted to talk to her, waiting constantly by her bedside through the long, drawn out afternoon. Every time Ellie stirred Merry sat to attention, “Ellie? Ellie?” followed by questions. “Are you waking up? How are you feeling? Ellie?”

The doctors had said just let her sleep, that's all she needs. Sleep and support. Well, sooner or later she would have to wake up and then Merry was ready to give her so much support.

( ... )

“Merry!” Zoe called out as she saw the other girl walking stiffly past the library toward her first lecture. It was the first day of the final week of class; those who were up at almost-nine in the morning walked across campus with a determination that spoke of ploughing through, sleep or no sleep, till they reached the end of the semester. Those that weren’t walking across campus were still in bed.

“Ah,” said Merry, and at the same moment, both girls said: “I wanted to talk to you.”

Both girls looked at each other. "Well this sounds promising," Zoe said cheerfully.

( ... )

Merry was woken up by someone banging on her door, and she scrambled out of bed with her heart in her throat and her phone in her hand. The light burned into her eyes when she turned it on, and she paused at the door. “Who is it?” she called, blinking as she adjusted her eyes.

Though if it was… Russian ninjas or anything like that, surely they wouldn’t knock. She probably didn’t need her phone ready for an emergency but she had it anyway.

“April,” called through the door, and Merry swallowed a mouthful of heart and unlocked her door to let April in.

( ... )

Knowing he could attend university next semester was one thing, actually doing it was something else entirely. It was the first time since primary school he would be at an institution of learning where he couldn't just dash down the hallway and be safely in his mother's office. Considering just how often Danny had had panic attacks or felt ill because of his meds, the knowledge that his mother was always there had been a lifeline. Now he was going to be off on his own with so many people surrounding him. Anything could happen at any moment.

Danny was pretty sure he was going to spend his first semester in a state of constant terror. Luckily though, he would have his Zoe there with him. He hadn't even known her for a year, but Zoe had become his strength and his very best friend. He trusted her so fiercely that sometimes it scared him just a little. She could hurt him with so little effort, but he truly believed she wouldn't.

He had secured a daypass to visit the university with Zoe, hoping that seeing the place with her would calm him down. He could meet a few of the people she knew as well and that might help a lot. He met her at the front of Priory as arranged, climbing into Liz's car with a forced smile.

"I'm freaking out a little," he said, leaning forward from the backseat to rest his chin against Zoe's seat. "Or I could have said hi. Hi, guys, it's nice to see you.""

Merry woke up earlier than most people in McKinley Hall, enjoying the quiet hour before the campus burst into life. It was nice just to stay in her room without listening to conversations or music through the walls, without flinching whenever anyone ran down the hall. It was nice to be able to use the showers before they were crowded. There were a few others she saw most mornings, usually the group that would hit the gym early, though there was also a group who set up camp near the coffee in the kitchen and frantically finished assignments.

When Merry and Ellie first moved into McKinley they’d almost always had breakfast together, but she hadn't seen Ellie at breakfast for weeks. This year, Ellie was more likely to run past, minutes before class started, skull down a glass of milk and dart out the door, banana in hand. Merry missed the time they used to spend together in the mornings. They had lunch together when their schedules allowed it and dinners most nights, but there were always other people around and Merry didn’t think it was selfish to miss the days when she had her best friend all to herself.

( ... )

Merry heard April knocking on her door and knew it was April. The other girl wasn't quiet as she thumped around in the adjacent room, and Merry could easily follow April's footsteps out of Aprils room and to Merry's door.

She didn't answer, though. She was sitting at her desk, music quietly playing on her laptop, and Ellie was asleep on her bed behind her. Merry hoped April wouldn't knock again, because it might wake Ellie up.

( ... )

Things had gone sour at uni, anyone could see.

Joss had turned up once on Monday, stayed at home for the rest of the week, and turned up again on Friday afternoon. One side of his face was painted with fading bruises. He felt pummelled, but could not bear to stay at home another day. Razvan was judging him.

( ... )

Zoe tensed when she heard footsteps running up the library steps behind her, even though she didn’t expect that whoever it was was actually trying to catch up with her, even though people ran past her all the time, she still tensed. You could expect danger, and still not be prepared for it, which was why when she heard the voice behind her say her name, she wasn’t expecting it, and jumped.

Merry smiled because she understood jumping at the sound of her own name. It was a ridiculous thing to understand, but it was a ridiculous thing to do. Her stupid, jumpy self; she hated it. “Alright,” she said, to Zoe.

“Hi,” Zoe said.

The girls eyed each other suspiciously, out of habit.

( ... )