“This was not what I was expecting,” he says, peering over the edge of the roof. We might not have been able to get out without setting off a load of alarms, but the roof access is always open. Just a shame it doesn’t go anywhere but here, really. Although, maybe it’s not all bad…
If I look behind us, I can see the spot where we were standing five minutes ago – far down through the glass skylight. But up here, all around us is the night. Ahead is the darkness of the sea, edged with the lights of the coast like amber jewels sewn onto black cloth; an occasional lighthouse sparkles in the distance. To the left of us, the wild neon and swirling rides of the funfair blaze at the end of the pier. The occasional scream drifts over from one of the rides: a giant arm that swings out over the sea, turning riders upside down and right way round (and probably inside out). Even up here, the air smells of chip fat and doughnuts – and sea salt and waves.
Or maybe that’s just him. (The smell of the sea, I mean. I don’t think he smells like chip fat.)
“It’s not so hot up here – must be the breeze off the sea. I didn’t think I was ever going to feel cool again.” Suddenly, he points at the horizon out past the stem of the i360, and his voice changes, urgent now. “Look!”
“What?” All I can see is the night. Dark water, dark sky, a handful of stars slowly disappearing behind a veil of cloud.
“There. Right out there. Did you see it that time?”
I can’t see anything. Just darkness. “Nope?”
“You’re not looking in the right place. Come stand here.” He closes his fingers around my wrist and gently, so gently, pulls me towards him, stepping back and standing me in his place. “Now, look. Right there.” He raises his hand again, and his fingers are so long, so slender. Writer’s fingers.
I stare at the space just beyond the end of his fingernail so long and so hard that I start seeing spots – and I don’t think that’s what I’m supposed to be seeing. Although as he steps closer again – right behind me so I can feel his body pressing lightly against my back, feel his chin brushing against the edge of my jaw as he tucks his face close in to mine so he can see what I’m seeing – the spots get brighter.
And my heart…my heart…
“There. You had to see it that time!”
“Maybe?” I saw something. Something blurry and white, far off the coast.
“Look.”
I don’t know what I’m looking for. I can feel his arm pressing against mine; feel his breath on my cheek.
A white flash, way out in the darkness. Barely more than a flicker, and it’s gone.
“A ship?” I ask.
“Lightning. It’s a thunderstorm coming in.”
There’s another flash – and maybe it’s my imagination but I’m almost sure I hear thunder rolling somewhere far off. Or maybe it’s just my heartbeat in my ears.
I wrap my hands around the metal safety railing running at waist height around the edge of the parapet; all of a sudden, I need somewhere to put them, and there seems as good a place as any.
Aidan’s still staring out at the horizon – I can feel the rise and fall of his chest against my shoulder as he breathes. “If it was daytime, we’d be able to see it coming. Everything behind the rain would disappear and the world would get smaller and smaller the closer it got.”
I’m used to small worlds. For six or seven weekends of the year – every year as far back as I can remember – my world has been the walls of a hotel, and the only people in it have been the people attending a convention. And even when there isn’t a convention to run, there’s one to plan. We’re always running towards a future we’ve already left behind, thinking about the next thing and the next thing and the next thing after that. Being a part of this small world does something to you. When you make friends, they become your best friends because everything about it is so intense. Everything is busier, more urgent, more exhausting; time stretches and compresses and somehow, by making the outside world less, what you’re left with becomes more – becomes all there is – and only the people who’ve lived that understand it. It’s why Sam’s been my best friend for so long, even though I only see her for those seven weekends a year. It’s why Nadiya’s deadpan jokes always work – because we know each other so well. Because we were made in conventions. The first time Bede’s parents brought him along and I saw him sitting on the floor in the hotel lobby, reading, I knew. The first time I met Nadiya – who’d dragged her uncle to an event because there was a big panel for one of her favourite television shows but she was too young to come by herself – I knew… And now her family – just like Bede’s, just like Sam’s – is part of ours. Dad’s and mine. Just like everybody else who comes to these things, because coming to a convention feels a little like coming home.
Reading Piecekeepers felt like that. It felt like coming home, like hearing someone telling me a story they had made up just for me. It felt like meeting a friend I’d never realized I had.
Haydn.
Aidan.
I’m looking at the horizon – at the flashes of lightning, at the storm coming our way – and all I can see and feel and hear is him. And it’s like he was made for me.
“Should we go back inside?” I don’t fancy spending the night in sopping wet clothes if we get caught in the rain up here.
“Nah. We’ve got plenty of time – and that’s if the rain even makes it this far. It might move back out to sea, or along the coast, or anywhere.”
Over on the pier, the rides are still spinning, the riders still screaming. On the promenade below, the pavement between the hotel and the beach, a hen party heading in one direction meets a stag party going the other way and there are shrieks and cheers and laughter. Everything is carrying on exactly the way I’d expect it to outside the walls of the convention…and yet something in the world has shifted, somewhere deep inside the earth. Deep inside me.
He is the oncoming storm…and the lightning flashes and the clouds part, and I walk right on in.
Having paced around the entire roof – leaning way too far out over the railing for me to be happy about it, and crouching so close to the glass skylight that I genuinely expected to have to lunge forward and save him from plummeting to a messy death surrounded by trading cards and LARP equipment – Aidan finally stops on the side overlooking the city. From here, the streets and buildings spread out below and before us, unfurling in every direction; climbing the steep hills to the suburbs and sprawling out along the beaches and cliffs to either side. “It all looks different from up here, doesn’t it?”
Maybe things do when you get a different perspective on them. Places, events…even people. All of them look like something else when you see them from another angle. Bigger, smaller, softer, sharper; you never know until you see it – and once you have, you can never unsee it.
A train winds its way out of the station, high enough up one of Brighton’s hills that each carriage window is a light disappearing into the unknown.
“Wonder where they’re going?” Aidan murmurs next to me – right as the breeze catches my hair, blowing it into his face. So much for that particular moment. It’s hard to be magical and make deep, meaningful comments about life, the universe and everything with a mouthful of someone else’s sweaty, dusty, convention-scented hair. He recovers pretty well though, considering, and leans back against the railings. “Shame the cloud’s come in so fast. I bet the stars are brilliant over the sea.”
I shake my head. “You don’t need stars. Look over there.” I point at the side of the next hill along from the station. “There’s a kangaroo.”
“A kangaroo?” He hasn’t figured it out yet – but I don’t think it’ll take him long. I hope it won’t; partly because I suppose I’m testing him, and partly because if I have to explain it I’ll sound like a lunatic.
A lunatic he’s stuck with on a deserted rooftop.
Hmm.
I try again, picking out a spot further west. “And there’s a cat. See it?”
“A cat? What the hell are you looking…?”
“And right next to it, there’s an umbrella – it’s open,” I add after a second’s thought.
Silence.
He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it.
OhgodohgodohgodhethinksI’manidiot.
And then… “The street lights. You’re talking about the street lights. There’s shapes in them – like constellations.” He glances at me, unsure. “That’s it, right?”
He got it. I knew he would.
Well…sort of.
“I see it,” he laughs. “The umbrella. And the cat.”
“And the kangaroo?”
“Where was that?”
“Over there.” I point at the curving row of orange lights. “There’s its tail, and its stomach…”
He squints into the night in silence, then shakes his head. “Nope. Don’t see it.”
“You’re not looking in the right place…”
I tail off – because that’s exactly what he said to me earlier…and because he’s not looking at the lights at all. I can see him in the fluorescent glow through the glass skylight, against the backdrop of the pier. He’s not looking at the lights. He’s looking at me.
“You’d better show me,” he says, and his voice has dropped a level. It’s quieter – barely more than a whisper.
“There.” I lean past him and point at the outline in the streets.
Our positions reversed, now it’s my body pressing against his back; my arm outstretched around him, my chin pressed against his shoulder…
And maybe he doesn’t mean it; maybe he’s just turning his head to see the outline better, or perhaps his glasses catch in my hair…but when his cheek brushes mine, he doesn’t move away.
I am on a roof with a guy who just got asked to sign a girl’s arm, and I barely know him but I know him.
WHAT DO I DO NOW?
I’m afraid that neither of us are ever going to speak again. I’m afraid I’ve lost my voice; that he’s lost his. That somehow the world has fallen silent, and nobody will ever be able to talk again – although I guess the yells from the pier and from the street below do kind of spoil that illusion. And then:
“You know it isn’t a kangaroo, don’t you?”
“What do you mean, it’s not a kangaroo?” I ask, trying to sound both casual and offended at the same time. It’s the kind of thing Sam would be able to pull off – the kind of thing she does pull off all the time – but I’m not Sam. I just sound…vaguely bored.
“It’s a crocodile. Look. That’s not its tail – that’s its mouth.”
“It’s not a crocodile.”
“It is.”
“No.”
“Remind me never to ask you on an Australian tour,” he laughs, and he wraps his fingers around mine (which is still pointing, because, idiot), and starts drawing pictures in the air.
If we were in his book, our hands would leave trails of light like sparklers through the sky, glowing against the night; they would crackle and fizz with magic. But we aren’t, so they’re just mildly clammy and soundtracked by someone throwing up against a lamp post on the promenade (loudly).
It’s so hard to pull away from him that I feel it all the way through every fibre of me. It feels like someone has ripped off a layer of my skin – but I can’t stay like that, leaning into him. I can’t, because if I do it a minute longer, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to step away again.
“So maybe it could be a crocodile. Maybe. I’m not saying you’re right.”
“That’s funny, because I was absolutely going to say you were wrong.”
His voice sounds like a grin.
The wind is turning cooler, blowing more strongly now. If there’s rain coming, it won’t be long before it gets here.
I point to the door. “We should go back inside.”
“Fair enough. Besides, there was another wig I wanted to try on that stall – I’ve always thought I’d look awesome as a redhead.”
Hands in his pockets, he moves away from the railing and heads for the stairs back down to the traders’ room without a second’s hesitation, and without a single look back.
I could tell myself the dull ache in my ribs is just because I haven’t eaten, and not because he didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder at me.
I could…