Now – 6th March
This had been a happy home once.
You could see it in the scatter of light patches on the walls where photographs of a large and loving family had hung. In the placement of the his-and-hers armchairs, positioned close enough that they could reach out and hold hands as they watched television. They’d done that for over forty years. A whole lifetime together passed in relative contentment.
But all Ella could remember were the final weeks of acrimony, the fights she’d witnessed, unwillingly and uncomfortably. Him wanting to take the money and run. Her insisting they stay until the bitter end, even if it ruined them, looking to Ella for support because she was the authority they had all been deferring to for months. Despite her youth and the fact that they hardly knew her.
There she’d sat, at the small melamine table underneath the broad, condensated window that overlooked the Thames, a not-so-neutral observer as they tore chunks out of each other. She’d decided to play the peacekeeper, because by that point damage limitation was the best she could offer the couple.
Now they were gone, off to a new flat in a town by the sea. Rundown and dreary. Family nearby but their friends left behind. Ella hoped they were settling in. They were a nice couple. They deserved better.
In the end, they left quickly. One of them had slipped a card under the door of the second-floor flat where Ella was technically squatting. A postcard of the shiniest new landmarks, the Shard, the London Eye, the Millennium Bridge. What the city was becoming and what they were being pushed out for.
‘Thank you for trying to help us.’ That was all it said. Such a brief message it felt almost sarcastic, but Ella knew they weren’t those kind of people. Just taciturn, a generation who held their emotions close. She respected that. Wished sometimes that she was tougher.
Times like now.
She forced herself to stand and walk over to the window, clung on to the sill to keep herself upright. As always her gaze was drawn to the new tower, less than thirty metres away, standing so high and so close that she felt it might topple, its splayed lines made even more precarious-looking by the severity of the balconies, each one coming to an accusatory point. But that building would not topple. It would remain long after this one was gone.
Soon the second tower would start to rise, but for now the acre of cleared land was just rubble and dust, pierced by huge splinters of steel reinforcement, bent like pipe cleaners. Nothing left of the flats, which were still occupied before Christmas. The site looked like a war zone, ripped apart and churned up. The only thing missing, its dead.
Ella shoved the window open and let the night breeze chill the flushed skin across her cheeks. The Thames was a dark slash, smeared with lights from the parade of new developments to east and west, the reflections so long in places that they almost reached the opposite bank, linking the old money of the north to this new money south.
She closed her eyes, hearing the sounds of the party she’d left behind dropping from the roof, traffic noise thrumming reassuringly and then a sudden, ill-natured shout going up from the Embankment path below. When a siren blared she opened her eyes again, saw the strobing blue of a police car speeding across Vauxhall Bridge, heading this way. She slammed the window shut and turned her back on the city.
The party noise kept coming, muffled, through the ceiling. A hundred guests. Her friends and supporters, all drinking and talking and laughing. Her Kickstarter project was fully funded. The book would happen, the voices of London’s lost would be heard.
Cheering and toasts, smiling faces and Prosecco in paper cups. She’d made a speech she couldn’t now remember, even though she’d spent hours writing and rewriting it, polishing and memorising, knowing it would be quoted across every social-media platform, picked apart and attacked.
Now she didn’t care what she’d said.
Ella looked away from the man’s dead body. Dead, she thought, but didn’t know, because she couldn’t bring herself to touch his skin again. She could feel the places where he’d touched her. Knew they would be bruises tomorrow, perfect impressions of his fingerprints.
Overhead the music was getting louder and soon someone would realise she was gone and come looking for her. It was her night. She couldn’t just disappear. Not for this long.
But there were dozens of empty flats she could be in and, in the distant, still logical part of her brain, she knew that the odds were in her favour for a while longer. This door locked, at least. Hadn’t been kicked in like so many others.
Every few minutes her phone vibrated in her pocket, like a series of aftershocks, as another notification came through.
A gentle fist tapped at the door.
‘It’s me.’ No more than a whisper.
Ella crossed the room shakily, feeling like each footstep was an impossibility until she made it, like the whole building was tilting and skewed around her. She pressed her eye to the spyhole, needing to be sure the person she heard was the one she was expecting, and with a sigh of relief that relieved almost nothing, she fumbled back the security chain and hauled Molly in, closing the door quickly behind her.
Molly looked worse for wear, bottle-black hair mussed around her face, kohl sweaty and smudged into the deep creases under her eyes. Was it a mistake to call her? Was she in any fit state to help?
Ella watched with trepidation as Molly walked over to the man, footsteps heavy in her biker boots, no hesitation in her stride. This wasn’t the first person she’d encountered laid out in a room he had no place being, Ella thought. Except this would usually be an accidental overdose or a kicking from a debt collector gone too far.
There was an explanation on Ella’s tongue, but she swallowed it. Gulped it down hard, her throat dry and closing up again as the anxiety reasserted itself.
‘Who is he?’ Molly asked, in a toneless voice which suggested that no answer could possibly faze her.
‘I don’t know,’ Ella said, the last word barely audible as she felt the fear curl a fist around her windpipe.
She stumbled across the room, catching hold of the arm of a chair in time to stop herself falling. Molly was with her in a moment, easing her down. Dry, strong palms on her cheeks, eyes boring into her own, reassuring in their intensity.
‘Just breathe,’ she said, in her forty-a-day voice. ‘You’re going to be fine, sweetheart. It’s not real, it’s just fear. It can’t kill you.’
The room blurred. Ella put her head between her knees, while Molly stroked her shoulders, talking her down the way she had so many times before. She didn’t listen to the words, only the rhythm and pitch of them, until her breathing calmed again and the pattern on the sun-faded carpet between her feet resolved into sharper lines.
‘It was an accident,’ she said finally, forcing herself to look at him.