Nobody was chasing us, but we ran anyway. It gave me a tingly, Ferris Bueller feeling to flee the swaggering modernity and aggressive wealth of One Hyde Park for the crumbly Victorian grandeur of Kensington.
We stopped for breath near Hyde Park Corner. Ellery slumped onto the steps of something pillared, porticoed and flag-flying, and I discovered I’d left the apartment without a coat or my wallet or either of my phones. Thank God the place was above mere human keys; otherwise I might have been homeless. Which would have been infinitely preferable to turning up at Caspian’s office again in order to tell him I’d locked myself out of the apartment after running away with his sister.
“Well…thanks or whatever.” Ellery hugged her knees to her chest, walling herself off with her own body. “But you don’t have to stay.”
“What, and go back to a pissed off Caspian? I don’t think so.”
After a moment, I sat next to her and she rested her cheek on her folded forearms, watching me. Her eyes reminded me of the marbles I used to covet as a kid, glassy with a sharp twist of color at the center.
“Are you really with him?” she asked.
“I have no idea. It’s complicated.”
“You should be careful. You seem sweet and he’s fucked up.”
This didn’t seem like something I should be talking about with Caspian’s sister. I mean, yes, he’d been a dick to me. But that didn’t mean I got to be a dick back.
I gave Ellery what I hoped was a suitably ironic look. “Right, because you’re such a bastion of normality.”
“I only hurt myself.”
I wasn’t sure how to begin to answer that.
But then she stood, shaking out her dress, and asked, “You really want to do stuff with me?”
“Why not?”
“He won’t like it.”
“He won’t care.”
She smiled, a thin half-moon of a smile, one side of her mouth pulling up a little farther than the other. “Come on, then.”
She held out her hand and I took it. Leather bands and chunky bracelets clung to her wrists, making them look thinner than ever, and her nails were bitten right down, painted with chipped black polish. She was too cold, too frail.
But, hey, at least someone in the Hart family was okay being touched by me.
Ellery took me to Harrods, which I still hadn’t got round to visiting, even though it was just over the road from where I lived. It was kind of dizzying in there. A Victorian wonderland of gilt and excess. The sort of place where you could buy tiaras for three hundred grand and chocolates for twenty quid each. It reminded me of a museum more than a department store, with its myriad rooms and echoing antechambers. The statuary. The Egyptian escalator.
Crazy shit. Beautiful and grotesque in equal measure.
A shop designed by Kubla bloody Khan.
We had oysters. At an oyster and champagne bar. Because, apparently, that was a thing.
Oysters were something else I’d never done. Never seen the point, since they looked like snot and—apparently—tasted of girls. Not that I had any objections to the second.
It turned out to be a lie anyway. They tasted purely, almost overwhelmingly, of the sea. Clean and rich and a little metallic.
I liked to think I was a pro at the swallowing thing—plenty of practice and all that—though I couldn’t help notice Ellery chewed. I didn’t know if she was trying to psych me out or if I was doing it wrong. Shifty glances at the people around me revealed a mixture of techniques and I felt this sharp and sudden pang that I wasn’t here with Caspian.
It would have been so romantic—sexy too—to share something like this with him. He probably knew exactly how to eat oysters. I imagined the curve of his palm beneath the whorled silver-gray shell as he held it to my lips. The slight roughness as I opened for him. Then the flood of flavor across my tongue like the rush of the waves to the shore.
God. I was being a terrible guest. About three melancholy thoughts from weeping into my Krug Grande Cuvée—which was a champagne I definitely recognized as expensive this time.
Somewhere around the third glass of it, I plucked up the courage to ask, “Why Ellery?”
“I didn’t like Eleanor.” She licked a trail of lemon juice from the heel of her palm.
Once again, I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if it was natural talent or an ability she nurtured. If she enjoyed capriciously dead-ending conversations or if it was just about control. Like maybe that was something else that ran in the fucking family.
“Hey, I”—she looked up suddenly, catching at me with her too-bright eyes—“forgot your name.”
I half wished I had the balls to take someone for oysters without having a clue who they were. And then to admit it right to their face without a trace of shame. “Arden. After the forest.”
“The forest?”
“The Shakespeare version, not the real one.”
There was a silence.
Then, with flat disbelief: “Your parents named you after a forest?”
“Well, it’s a magical forest. A place of transformation and self-discovery where boys are girls and girls are boys and love is love.”
“You like it?”
“I’ve never been.”
“Your name.”
“Oh.” I’d never really thought about it before. “Yeah, I guess so. Mum chose it. It was kind of a promise.”
“What promise?”
I wriggled. Not exactly uncomfortable but very aware we were on the outskirts of Personalville: population me. “To keep me safe.”
“People break promises.”
“Not my mum.”
We were quiet again.
I was trying to decide if I was unsettled or simply drunk, and if I minded being either, when she picked up the last oyster and said, “Going to prick your finger on a spinning wheel someday?”
“Oh no. Um. It was. Well. My dad. He wasn’t a great person.”
“You don’t like him?”
“I don’t know him.” Could hardly remember him. Which was slightly crazy, since I’d spent the first eight years of my life in his house. But all I had were these memories of fear. His too-tall shadow staggering upon the wall. Like he was the fucking Balrog. “But he drank. And he…he wouldn’t let Mum leave.”
“How’d you get away?”
“We ran. All the way to Scotland to stay with Hazel. She was this friend of Mum’s from school. She’s married as well and stuff but…I guess they’re all together now?”
“You guess? You don’t know?”
“Well, no, they are. It’s just some people find it pretty strange.”
Ellery shrugged as if the very concept of being surprised was beneath her. “You want to get out of here?”
“Okay.”
Well, what was the alternative? No, I’d rather sit here confiding fragile, complicated stuff about my life and history to a total stranger?
Except I wasn’t exactly telling her secrets.
Secrets implied shame and I wasn’t ashamed. My mum lived for years in secrecy and shame with a man who promised her everything and took her apart piece by piece until he thought she was nothing but dust.
And she was still more than he could ever be.
The best and bravest person I knew.
By “get out of here” it turned out Ellery meant “take cocaine in the disabled toilet.” She yanked me in with her and tried to share, but I politely declined. I felt bad enough about abusing the facilities that I couldn’t really bring myself to break the law in them as well.
At least she wasn’t pushy about it.
Just terrifyingly efficient as she sandwiched the stuff between a couple of twenties and ground it to a pale powder with a Coutts bank card that matched the one Caspian had given me.
Afterward we went shopping.
I wasn’t even high but London blurred into an endless carousel of boutiques and “conceptual retail spaces” you apparently needed an appointment to be allowed into. They were the kind of places where there’d be just a shoe in a glass cabinet in the middle of a vast white room. Where the whole buying-a-thing aspect of the experience was refined and rarified to such a ludicrous extent that I had absolutely no idea how you actually, y’know, bought a thing.
We ended up in this deeply weird place—the Late Night Something or Other Cafe—located on the ground floor of this scruffy concrete block in a bit of London so wildly ugly it had to be wildly trendy. It was one of the appointment-only gigs and it was all rather too Dali for me. I certainly couldn’t remember having felt the lack of orange-lit wooden tunnels in the other shops I’d visited over the course of my life.
In a tiny wooden room, filled with triangular shelves full of books I wouldn’t want to buy, Ellery asked, “Did you ever see your dad again?”
I’d thought we were done with this, so I wasn’t ready and I winced. “Um, no. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
She picked up a copy of Derek Jarman’s A Finger in the Fishes Mouth and flicked through it without much interest. “I don’t remember my dad either.”
“You must have been really young when he—” God, how were you supposed to say it? Passed on? Passed away? Departed?
“Died. Yeah. I was six or seven.” She picked absently at the mirrored cover of the book. “I have these images but they don’t mean anything. And Caspian won’t talk about him.”
God. He’d talked to me. That night on the balcony. Not much but…
Would it be breaking his trust if I told Ellery?
She was staring at the ground, one arm crossed over her body, fingers digging absently into her own skin. “It’s like he doesn’t want me to remember. Like he wants to keep him all to himself.”
Oh, what the hell. Maybe it would do some good.
“Maybe it’s because…um, he told me once that he didn’t think his father would be proud of him.”
Her gaze snapped up. “He was right.”
My mouth fell open so hard my jaw practically clanged off the ground. Not the response I’d been expecting.
We left soon after. Ellery didn’t seem into staying anywhere for very long.
It was slipping into evening, the light softening and the shadows lengthening, and I was pretty much boutiqued out. Besides, I had shit of my own to deal with.
“Listen,” I said, “I should probably—”
She caught for my hand again. “Want to go somewhere else?”
“More shopping?”
“No. Somewhere better.”
Not really, no. Except I made the mistake of meeting her eyes, and she looked almost…almost like she cared. “Well, um, okay.”
She turned away sharply, but not before I caught the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.
We took a cab to Canary Wharf—the fancy rejuvenated bit, where all around us the glass towers reflected the gray-gleaming river and the darkening sky. Ellery tugged me across the road to a construction site: about twenty floors’ worth of a building, open like a mouth around a giant red crane.
It was touch and go but, yes, it was probably better than another boutique.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
She nudged open a weakness in the barrier and ducked under it. And—after a hasty glance round in case anybody noticed what we were doing—I scrambled after her.
“Is this…I mean…this isn’t legal, right?”
She put a finger to her lips and nodded to a security cabin on the other side of the site.
I stifled a whimper. This was even worse than misappropriating the disabled toilets.
Trying to be as stealthy as possible, which wasn’t exactly a skill I’d ever cultivated on account of not being a fucking delinquent, I followed Ellery into the shell of the main structure. It was odd, to say the least. I was used to thinking of buildings as these solid and permanent things, but there was something both naked and fragile about seeing the interior of one exposed like that. Metal frames, dusty concrete, and skeletal scaffolds separated by thin plastic sheets that thumped upon the breeze like a heart.
I circled slowly, surprised by the unexpected…well…beauty was the wrong word. It wasn’t really beautiful. But it was kind of magical seeing something you wouldn’t normally see. The grayness of it washed to dirty gold by the last of the day’s sunlight.
Ellery beckoned me to the staircase.
Somewhat nervous about the partially-open-no-banister aspect of it, I climbed. It got us to maybe the sixth floor, the noise of the street vanishing into the sounds of the building itself. Private music: the creak of wood and metal, the rush of the wind through the still-open spaces.
After that, we took to the scaffolding.
Which was when I also realized just how high up we were. And that normally people on building sites had safety equipment.
“Um, Ellery?”
“Yes?”
“What happens if we fall?”
She twisted on the bars with practiced ease, the wind catching at the hem of her skirt and ruffling it up to show the pink bows at the top of her fishnet hold-ups. “We’ll probably die.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Must be nice.”
“Seriously. Maybe we should go down again?”
“Just don’t fall.”
“Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
She laughed, harsh and a little rusty, the sound of it swallowed up by the empty air, lost to the sky. Then she spun around and began climbing again.
I peeked between the bars.
Bad idea. Terrible idea. Terrible, terrible, idea.
Through the crisscrossing metal I could see the dark smudges of pedestrians and cars, the streets turned into ribbons, the buildings into toys.
Sweat burst across my palms and between my fingers, and I tightened my grip on the scaffolding before I was chasing pavements in a terrifyingly literal fashion. For a moment or two, I just clung there with my eyes closed. Going up and going down both seemed equally unpleasant just then…so I sucked in a breath of startlingly cold air and pulled myself onto the next bar.
Climbing was hard work once the novelty wore off. And even the fear got boring after a while. All I could hear was the clunk of Ellery’s boots and the wheezing of my own breath.
If I survived, I’d probably have to do something about my general fitness. Yoga just wasn’t cutting it.
Finally—somehow—I made it to the top. Hot, sweaty, on the verge of a heart attack, but triumphant.
Ellery was sitting on the edge of the roof. Feet dangling over the abyss.
On slightly noodly legs, I went to join her. Eased myself down very, very carefully. And stared out at the city. A chaos of light, green and gold and white and pink. Glittering reflections thrown haphazard across the Thames. The London Eye cast like a hula hoop against the horizon.
“That’s…it’s…” I raised a hand to brush the water from my stinging eyes. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s okay.” She deployed what I was coming to think of as her trademark shrug. “Sometimes I climb the crane.”
“Let’s not do that,” I said firmly.
She nodded.
I didn’t know how long we sat there. Long enough for the chill to set in deep and the dark to settle. But I liked it. I really liked it. It was peaceful. A city of eight million inhabitants reduced to distant noise.
There was something about Ellery that communicated the very strong impression that touching her without explicit invitation would be akin to sticking your hand into the lion enclosure at London Zoo. But I nudged my shoulder lightly against hers. “Thanks for bringing me here. It’s amazing.”
I didn’t think she even heard me. She was staring at her lap and plucking restlessly at her bracelets. “I did it wrong.”
“Did what wrong?”
“I did it the wrong way. Look.” She held out her wrist, pushing aside one of the leather bands to show me a pale slash of a scar. “You’re supposed to do it diagonally from here to here. But I didn’t know. So I did it wrong.”
“I guess you wouldn’t think to Google first.”
She gave me a faint twist of a smile. “Yeah. But nobody believes me.”
I didn’t know if was the right thing to say, but I said it anyway. “I believe you.”
“Really?”
I ran the very tip of my finger over the rough, raised skin. And, to my surprise, she didn’t flinch or pull away. “Really.”
She turned her gaze back to the city, her hand still and quiet under mine.
I was touched and scared at the same time. It felt good to be someone she trusted. But, all the same, she clearly wasn’t in…well, a happy place. I wasn’t sure she’d have wanted to be, but that didn’t mean it was right to encourage her.
Except.
Was I encouraging her? Had she brought me up here so she could jump off a building? What was I supposed to tell Caspian? He obviously didn’t like his sister very much, but I didn’t think he would appreciate it if she killed herself after an afternoon in my company.
Fuck.
Now I had to do something.
“Would you try again?” Ouch. Awkward. “I mean,” I rushed on, “now that you know…um…you know how.” Nope, even more awkward.
“I think about it.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for. “Ah.”
“But I’m too scared.”
“That’s probably…for the best. Your mind’s way of telling you something.”
She gave me one of her most scathing looks. “I’m scared in case I fuck it up a second time.”
“Right.”
Oh help. I didn’t want to just sit there in the silence and have her cheerfully conclude I was on board with the suicide plan. But how did you talk about something like this without sounding clueless or patronizing or falling back on the platitudes I knew she’d despise?
“Why did you do it the first time?” I asked finally.
“Wanted to.”
“And nothing’s changed since then? Nothing might change in the future?”
“Things change. But it never makes a difference.”
Great.
But that was when I thought of something. “Hey, have you heard of Dorothy Parker?”
She shook her head.
“Look her up sometime. She wrote this poem…”
Which was how I ended up reciting “Résumé” for Caspian Hart’s sister on the top of a half-finished luxury apartment block in Canary Wharf.
Ellery was silent for a long time after I’d finished, the heels of her boots drumming against the concrete edge of the roof. Then she said, “So I might as well live?”
I tried to mimic her shrug. “Might as well.”
And for the second time that day, she laughed her rough and throaty laugh and I felt…okay. I felt I’d done okay.
Her phone buzzed and she wriggled it out of…somewhere…with a carelessness that nobody sitting on the edge of a building should exhibit. The briefest glance at the screen and then, “Okay. Time to go.”
I had no idea how late it was. Maybe ten? Maybe midnight.
“Go where?” I must have been getting old because bed was seeming like a really good idea right now.
Her eyes glittered like the city. “You’ll see.”