Now – 10th March
It’s too cold to sit out on the balcony but I’m getting sick of the inside of my flat. This is the longest I’ve ever spent holed up in here. Coming up on three days; even when I had the flu last winter I still managed a walk down to the river and a medicinal brandy in the Rose. The brandy didn’t shift the flu and the evening air isn’t fixing my mood.
I’ve always been claustrophobic. Not in the sense of panicking in confined spaces or freaking out on the Tube, but in knowing I’m trapped in a situation.
That’s what brought me to London in the first place, the unbearable strictures of dinner at half-six precisely and the same meal on each night of the week, month after month, year after year. The same radio programme playing while the dishes were cleaned, the same soap opera recycling its stories and the same process of filling out football pools and washing the car on Sunday and a clean shirt on Monday to be worn until Friday. Restricted conversations, restricted thought patterns. It made me feel like I was locked in a box that I needed to kick my way out of.
As a child I got through it by promising myself that once I was old enough I would never stay in a situation I hated. Whatever the consequences I wouldn’t let myself be trapped.
I did, of course. Got married too quickly and far too young to a man I’d met at college and liked, but not that much. Not until he followed me into teacher-training school and hotly promised he’d keep following me anywhere I wanted to go. I thought that was deeply romantic. That’s how young I was.
Would I have found it so touching if I’d known his ‘anywhere’ included driving five hours through the night to the Greenham Common Peace Camp? That he needed me so much he would try to physically haul me away from the protest?
He learned what I was really made of that day.
And so did I.
I take another mouthful of whisky. Some cheap blended stuff I don’t even remember buying. It barely tastes like whisky, no peat or fire to it.
From my spot, tucked back under the shadow of the balcony, I can see into the new tower. At night it seems more glass than not, long expanses of it exposing sleek black kitchens and living rooms with huge sofas and factory-painted abstract expressionism, bedrooms too pristine for anyone to ever fuck in. They are shrines to pressed white shirts and red-soled shoes and the greedily acquired symbols of urban affluence bought by people who probably grew up like me. Out in satellite towns dreaming of different versions of themselves, dressing them up like dolls, mentally testing them out in new stage sets.
I wonder how the reality is holding up.
I should feel hatred towards them, I suppose, but I can’t. I see the hours they work and how their heads hang as they strip off their suits in the burnished light of the bedrooms before they trudge towards their rainforest showers. I know they’re killing themselves for that eight hundred square feet of high-spec living.
They would reject my pity, but they have it all the same.
The most intriguing windows are the ones that light up and go dark on timers, revealing unfurnished rooms that feel pregnant with bad possibilities. I wonder how long a murder victim could lie on one of those polished concrete floors before they were discovered.
This is the way my mind has been turning for the last three days. I can’t shake myself out of it. Half of me knows he must be dead but the other half credits every odd noise the building makes to his escape attempt. Last night I dreamed he was climbing the rusting cable in the lift shaft, broken fingers sticking out at unnatural angles as he slowly dragged himself up, hand over hand, past the second floor, past the third, heading for the light above him and the gap in the doors.
Without thinking, I pick up my phone and check the display to see if Ella has called me back. She hasn’t, and the clock tells me it’s only fifteen minutes since I last looked.
It seemed like a good idea to give her space to process what happened but after the first ignored phone call I started to worry and now, with still no word from her, I wonder what kind of state she’s in. Her social-media feeds are still ticking along, but I know that stuff can be scheduled in advance.
Is she at home in bed, unable to crawl out from under the covers?
Shit.
Has she gone to the police and confessed?
The world lurches under me as I imagine her in a holding cell, knowing she’ll be handled as harshly as the law allows, because she’s Ella Riordan and her stance on the police is well publicised.
No.
This is just my overactive imagination talking.
If she’d done something stupid I’d know about it by now, wouldn’t I? If she’d dropped off the map her friends would call me first. I’m her London next of kin, the nearest thing she has to a mother here. And maybe in general, judging by how little she’s ever spoken about her mum.
No chance of taking this dilemma back to Durham and the Riordan residence to thrash out a coping strategy. Her parents would probably perform a citizen’s arrest if they knew what she’d done. Self-defence be damned.
She’ll be scared, that’s all.
And haven’t I been just as bad? Hiding in here, and listening for corpses coming along the corridor, sleeping in fitful jags and scanning every news outlet I can for reports of a man going missing.
A fist batters my door and I start so strongly I spill some of my drink. Shaking my hand dry, I go to answer and I’ve had this dream already, looking through the spyhole and seeing him. Standing frozen as his broken fingers turn the handle, so slowly, the dirt in the mechanism screeching, the lock non-existent, and then. . .
I open up to find Callum holding a four-pack of Beck’s and a Domino’s box.
‘You’re still alive then, hey,’ he says, coming straight in and heading for the coffee table, which is covered in paperwork and photographs, my laptop open but powered down. ‘Where am I putting this? My arm’s getting greasy.’
‘On the balcony?’
‘Is it not a bit cold for that?’
‘I thought you Highlanders didn’t feel the cold,’ I say, going out again.
‘Aye, but I’ve been down London so long now I’m a proper soft southern bastard when it comes to the weather.’ His accent drifts as he says it, an attempt at cockney he’s never quite got the drop of. ‘That why I’ve seen hide nor hair of you – winter getting into your old bones?’
He smiles, cheekily, and it charms me as usual.
How was he a soldier, I wonder. Not for the first time. I hate soldiers. It’s a visceral thing. I hate everything they do and everything they stand for, their obedience and psychopathy and squeaky-clean brand of filth.
And yet I like Callum.
He insists he was in the catering corps, but I’m sure that’s a lie. No army chef ever admits it. They were all special forces or some dumb macho shit. Only the proper hard cases want you to think they did something so innocent. The ones with the wrong kind of blood on their hands.
Cooks don’t wake up screaming in the middle of the night either, clenched and sweating, with tears running down their cheeks.
‘Face on you,’ he says, handing me a beer and pushing the pizza box closer. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing’s up. I’ve just been busy.’ I take a slice of pizza, surprised at how hungry I am suddenly. ‘Ella’s party the other night made me realise how close to the deadline for the book we are. I’ve got hundreds – thousands – of photos to go through, select the best ones, edit them. We agreed not to do too much to the images because it should be real. We want to see the real faces of the people this is affecting. But even doing the minimum takes time.’
Callum shifts in his seat, turns away from me for a few seconds, looking out towards the river, but I know he doesn’t see it. His eyes are bad and he hasn’t replaced the glasses he smashed a few months ago, insisting he can get by just fine without them.
He doesn’t believe me.
I don’t blame him.
The second slice of pizza doesn’t go down as easily but I need to eat and it’s a distraction I hope makes me look more at ease than I feel.
‘I . . . uh, is Ella alright?’ he asks finally, chin tucked into his chest.
The last mouthful sticks in my throat and I wash it down with a swig of gassy beer. ‘Far as I know, yeah. Why?’
‘I heard her arguing with some bloke the other night. Reckon it was her. They were outside my place.’ Callum grimaces. ‘I thought about going out and seeing what was up, but I didn’t think she’d thank me for that.’
‘When was this?’
But I already know.
‘When she had her party,’ he says.
‘Are you sure it was Ella?’ I ask, trying to sound calm even though my heart is hammering. ‘She never said anything to me about getting into a fight.’
He passes a hand over his skull. It needs shaving again, grey stubble coming through, long enough already to see where he’s receding.
‘I dunno.’
‘They all sound the same, don’t they? All Home Counties playing at street.’ I force a smile. ‘Some girl from the party having a set-to with her boyfriend, was it?’
‘Aye, probably.’ The tension goes out of his face. ‘That’s what it sounded like. She was giving the poor bastard a right earbashing.’
‘Won’t have been Ella, then.’
Quickly I change the subject, ask him if he managed to find another bathroom sink to replace Derek in 309’s broken one. He tells me he’s tried a dozen empty flats today and found the whiteware irrevocably damaged in every one of them. Something that would have made a lot of noise if it was done for sport, but he heard nothing and suspects it’s the developer’s handiwork. Putting the flats out of commission to deter squatters. Or, more likely, to stop us repurposing the items left behind.
I’ve stopped listening. I’m just nodding and sipping my beer and trying to keep my eyes fixed on him as my thoughts slip away, back to Ella and that man she was arguing with outside Callum’s flat.
Callum is too sharp-eared to have mistaken her distinctive Durham accent when it’s only a thin wall away from him. Which means something more went on and she was too scared to tell me about it at the time and so scared she hasn’t been able to talk about it since, either.
Is this why I’ve not heard from her?
I’ve been selfish, wallowing here just when Ella needed me the most. Telling myself I’ve been giving her space because I’ve not been ready to face the fallout from what we’ve done.
No more hiding.
Ella needs me.