by Luan Goldie
Malachi roughly folds the paper and has to try three times to get it into the pocket of his crushed and filthy trousers.
Harris’s home is smaller from the outside than he noticed last night. It sits within a close, each bungalow lined with rose bushes. Malachi doesn’t really know where he is. But beyond the immediate buildings he sees the two towers of the estate, fully formed and ugly, and next to them a thick trail of dark grey smoke oscillating to the left in the skyline. A shiver passes up his back as he realises he must walk towards it. The smoke pulls him like a magnet through a series of unfamiliar roads and streets, until he recognises one of the long residential roads that lead to the thin end of the green in front of the estate. A cool drizzle begins, mist-like. Pamela would have said it’s the kind of rain you don’t notice until you find yourself soaked. Even so, the warmth of yesterday hangs in the air and Malachi sweats in his unwashed clothes as he steps onto the green. He passes the pond, bits of paper floating on its top next to rubbish and several large foil blankets. They look like the tinfoil boats he used to make as a kid.
The grass is patchy and flattened, as if it hosted a large crowd for something celebratory, like a concert or funfair, not an evacuation. As he gets closer to the estate there is a sound typical of Sunday mornings: church songs. A large group of women in head wraps gather around a bench, some stand with their palms to the sky, others with closed eyes in tear-soaked faces, their song far from joyful.
Malachi steps over a plastic line of police tape, ripped and discarded. Officers stand on the edge of the green and talk among themselves. Occasionally one breaks away from the conversation to remind the line of media to move back.
‘Away from the scene, please,’ one of them calls, as if herding excitable girls from a celebrity.
There are so many people, traumatised, tired and shocked. But there are also heavily made-up women with blow-dried hair and men in boxy blazers and ties, here to pick at the bones of whatever is left of the burnt-out and destroyed building. They stand with their backs to the estate and talk into cameras in English, in French, in German, in a raft of different languages and accents. Last night at the relief centre people had complained about the flash of cameras at the exit doors, the persistent whir of news helicopters above and the worry that photos of their lost loved ones would appear on the news. Should he be worried about Tristan? That a photo of him will appear on a television screen somewhere?
An angry shout cuts through the crowd and Malachi pushes his way forward to see the dreadlocked man who yesterday tried to save him in the stairwell. He has on the same paint-splattered clothes, but there is a white bandage at his elbow.
‘Kill them all,’ he shouts as he prowls up and down and spits on the grass. ‘You don’t see this happening in Westminster. In Hampstead.’ He stops and looks at Malachi without recognition. ‘Crash the plane onto the poor. Say it’s an accident. A technical failure. It’s okay, no one will miss them.’
The inferno is no more, but huge, clear rainbows of water remain directed at the building. Firefighters, weary and oblivious to the crowds that watch them work, battle to put out the unseen blaze that must still live within the shell of Nightingale Point. Two firefighters return to their engine, faces drawn and blackened.
A man fusses with a video camera, while a journalist in a green dress reads to him from a pad of paper. Her eyes light up as Malachi passes. He drops his head low as he realises how worn he must look, how obvious a victim in his grass-stained trousers, torn at the knees and crushed from being slept in. Her energy almost pulls him in, her enthusiasm to be able to report on something other than the muggings and community centre closures that usually emanate from this area.
The last time the news crews came to the estate, after a series of robberies on the green, Tristan had been so pleased with himself that he managed to get in the background of all their footage. Smiling and throwing up some gang signs he saw in a Snoop Dogg video.
The woman in the yellow headscarf is here, the one who fainted at the relief centre. She looks distraught and Malachi gives her a wide berth, not wanting to invade her grief. A man he vaguely identifies from awkward encounters in the lift stands by her. Who have they lost?
A teenage girl becomes frustrated as she struggles to peel the price label off a bunch of hurriedly bought supermarket flowers. A well-dressed photographer circles the singing women and clicks away, keen to capture their grief. The journalist in the green dress approaches the crying woman and her husband, moving with caution and confidence.
Malachi needs to get away, he needs to find Tristan. Quickly he ducks under the cordon and walks onto Sandford Road, which is covered with smouldering craters and littered with pieces of twisted, unrecognisable metal. There are also items that once had a life in a home, with a family: a red plastic toy box slightly charred on one side; a roasting tin, blackened by a lifetime of Sunday lunches and the fire; the door of a fridge, splattered with sauces and inexplicably still holding a large fizzy drink bottle; a teddy bear; a toaster; and a highchair half melted. Everywhere the remnants of people’s lives are ripped open and thrown around. How could this stuff, this household crap that no one will miss, survive to see another day? Yet so many people haven’t?
He finds himself looking for something of hers, something he can take, to prove that she was once real. It’s stupid; he knows he’s being stupid.
At the relief centre last night there had been so much talk from those who had just left their flat or missed their usual bus home. Countless tales from people who cheated death because they needed a pint of milk or a package picked up from the local post office. They had all been saved by something and were happy to brag about it, to shout their tales of good fortune while others waited for news of their dead.
‘Hey.’ A police officer waves over to him. ‘Get back.’
Malachi scatters back under the line quickly, unwilling to draw attention to himself. He knew Tristan would not be here, so he is unsure why he came or what he is looking for. Maybe he just needed to see it for himself.
The group of trees the council planted last spring have been scorched and stripped naked of their summer leaves. Last week he scolded Tristan for using the white bark of them to stub his spliff out on. They look grey; a film of powdery grey dust coats the wood. Surely dead now. He turns away from them and walks back onto the field, towards the benches. Looking, looking, looking. What else can he do? Go back to that stranger’s bungalow and sleep? That only happened last night because Malachi had no energy for anything else; he knew Pamela was gone and also he truly believed Tristan would turn up there. Knocking on the door in the middle of the night, accompanied by a police officer he would have built up camaraderie with on the drive over. Why didn’t he turn up there? Where is he?
Malachi has to find him. Looking after his little brother is all he knows. His memories don’t stretch back further than being five and visiting Tristan, who was born six weeks early, in the hospital. Malachi was used to seeing babies, but none as small as the one his mum cried over that day. In those first few years Malachi was always on the side lines, watching and waiting for Mum to ask for his help so he could step in and do things properly. Like check the temperature of the bottle, so Tristan’s tongue wouldn’t be scalded, or wash his school shirts, because he’s always been fussy about the whiteness of his clothes. Mum was never calm, always frantic with anxiety over something. If she was alive now she wouldn’t be able to cope with this situation, with not knowing. That’s why eventually it made sense for Malachi to take charge of things, to shop for and make the food, to book the doctor’s appointments and get himself and Tristan to and from school every day. Mum couldn’t deal with it. Even when Nan moved in to help them, she worked so much that the duties still fell to Malachi, or maybe he just claimed them. He never thought about his role that much. He just got on with it.
‘Tris, you need to learn to do this stuff yourself,’ Malachi told him once. ‘I’m not going to be here to tie up your
laces all the time.’ He was off to secondary school that September and it was playing on his mind that Tristan would be left alone in primary without him.
They sat in the school reception and waited for Mum to pick them up. She was late again. The school used to let him take Tristan home by himself, but had started keeping them in so they could check up on Mum. He hated waiting there, the way the secretary would continuously check the time, the knowledge of being the last kids in school, the smell of coffee and photocopier ink. Tristan kept getting up to look around, until Miss Hunt gave him a pot of pencils to sharpen, saying, ‘The devil makes work for idle hands.’
Finally Mum arrived, oblivious to the time. ‘Got you both something.’ She pulled two packs of Quavers crisps from the big pocket of her duffle coat and handed one to Malachi, then knelt down in front of Tristan and asked, ‘Did you stay out of trouble today?’
He nodded and grabbed at the bag, from which the air had been squeezed, leaving it flat.
‘The Head would like to see you,’ Miss Hunt said then. ‘Leave the boys here, I’ll watch them.’
Mum disappeared into the office to have another one of her ‘supportive meetings’. When she finally came out, storming back through reception, her face was puffy and she was too angry to acknowledge them. They followed her home in silence, Tristan jogging to keep up.
‘Those bloody teachers always think they can tell me what to do. How to raise my kids,’ she shouted as they approached the tower of darkened flats. Nightingale Point looked its most unfriendly at dusk.
Tristan ran ahead to call the lift.
‘If you’d stay out of trouble they wouldn’t be on me so much,’ she shouted at him. ‘Why can’t you be a bit more like your brother? Bet those teachers don’t even have kids themselves. What do they know about how hard it is to do this alone?’
It was cold in the flat so they kept their coats on and Malachi made tea, watching Mum the whole time in case she lashed out. But she was too tired for that so sat on her mattress, fiddling with the string of Christmas lights that had stopped working.
‘Why are they broken now?’ Tristan sulked.
Mum threw the lights to the ground and laid her head on the pillow.
Malachi put a tea in front of her. ‘They’re just lights.’
She stared past him and said, not for the first time, ‘I can’t do this. It’s too hard.’
‘You’re doing fine, Mum.’
‘No.’ The blank look was always the worst; he could reach her when she was in a rage or crying fit, but not when she checked out like that. She was unreachable.
‘The teachers are right. I can’t look after you two.’
It was true, but also it didn’t matter because he could. It was always his role. He didn’t know how to be anything else.
The rain picks up and the crowd of onlookers begin to disperse, apart from the most distraught of family members and macabre of voyeurs. The news crews retreat to their cars and vans. The sliding door of one remains open and inside a heavily made-up woman sits shoeless and laughs with a cameraman over polystyrene boxes of chips.
The woman in the yellow headscarf and her husband pass the bench. The man nods at Malachi, his shirt darkened and slick from the rain.
Malachi sits on the bench and waits for an answer.
His name is called by a voice he doesn’t recognise and for a split second he imagines it’s Pamela’s dad, come to tell him that he’s made a mistake, that she wasn’t really in the flat and had gone back to Portishead after all.
‘Malachi?’
Coming towards him is Harris, the man he never knew existed until yesterday. His hair has been pushed off his large sun-kissed forehead and Malachi catches a flash, in that way you sometimes do, of what someone looked like when they were young.
‘So glad I found you.’ He leans forward and puts his hands on Malachi’s knees before he says, ‘They found him. They found Tristan.’
Ten Days Later
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Chapter Twenty-Seven ,Tristan
Saying you hate hospital is kind of like saying Glenn Hoddle is a poor choice for England manager or Tupac is the greatest rapper alive. It’s just a given. So Tristan knows it’s weird that he actually likes hospitals, that they make him feel comforted and even calm. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in particular makes him feel warm inside. It’s where his mum went to get happy and medicated, and where Malachi spent a week after the asthma attack brought on by his Year Ten sports day. That was probably the closest they ever got to a holiday. Nurses snuck them bowls of rhubarb crumble and they had access to all the leftover chocolate on people’s bedside tables. Tristan still can’t believe there are people out there who don’t eat coffee creams. They even got away with streaming down the corridors in a wheelchair before a porter caught them and called them both ‘little fuckers’. That was hilarious.
He’s in hospital now. It dawned on him a while back, as he lay on his back, tuning into the regular beeps, some near, some far, and the soft sound of wheels on lino. That smell, too – distinctive and clean.
What Tristan isn’t sure of is how long he’s been here. Hours? Days? Weeks? He knows he was attacked. Jumped in the stairwell. Though he doesn’t remember much of it. He was thrown from behind and knocked out before he could fight. He would’ve fought, too, if only he had the chance. Gone out Tony Montana style, throwing punches left, right and centre. But now he’s stuck, unable to move or talk. Man, this is some Christopher Reeve shit.
Where the hell was Malachi when Tristan was getting his arse kicked in the stairwell? Not that Malachi can fight, but still. Thank God that retard from the tenth floor was there. Tristan’s sure of it. The big ginger guy with the Elvis Presley T-shirt. He scared off the attackers and helped Tristan get away.
But there was a fire too, for some reason, he’s sure of it. It doesn’t make sense. It’s so confusing.
‘Olisa, if you change the dressing then I’ll do this, okay.’
‘Yes. Looking good today.’
And all these people talking around him all the time, blah blah blah. Definitely nurses. He’s never been able to work out why but they do love to go on. Like Mary. Guess they’ve got a captive audience. Though he can’t hear it all. It’s his left side that’s the issue. There’s some kind of warm thickness over his head, which is muffling the sound.
‘Is he from the plane crash?’ a voice above him whispers. London accent, bit common.
‘Yes. Pass that to me.’ This is the Nigerian nurse, her name’s Olisa; she wears too much perfume and is always humming something irritating like a Celine Dion or Phil Collins song.
‘Freaks me out. A plane just crashing like that. I don’t get it. You expect that kind of stuff to happen somewhere like Iran or Africa. Not in the UK,’ says the common nurse. ‘Poor kid.’
‘Why are you feeling sorry for him? He survived a plane crash.’ Nigerian nurse breaks into the chorus of ‘Because You Loved Me’, which, to his shame, Tristan knows some of the words to.
But what are they going on about? Plane crash?
He keeps thinking of the crystal angel Mary used to hang from her curtains; it would catch the light and turn it into beams of purple, orange and green that would shoot off across the room. He’s not sure if she still has it, he hasn’t been in her flat in months now. She’s always working or running errands or hanging out with her new friends from the hospital, whoever they are. Maybe she’s got a bit on the side, that would explain why she’s not spending so much time with him anymore, and why she’s started wearing her hair down. He’s not sure if she’s come to visit him yet, he hasn’t heard her voice. Maybe he was asleep when she came; he sleeps a lot at the moment. She’ll be well pissed that he got himself attacked. Probably now stressing about gang warfare on the estate and talking about how she dreamt this was going to happen in one of her weird, creepy dreams, which are never about anything good.
Each time Tristan wakes up and smells the antiseptic it make
s him think she’s here. That it’s one of those summer holiday afternoons and he’s just arrived at the hospital to pester her to take an early lunch with him. To sit in the patients’ garden and feed him whatever food she packed into her blue-lidded plastic tubs. He loved those days. Even though she would lecture him on finding something else to do with his weeks off and suggest ridiculous things, such as going to a ‘Teenagers Read-A-Thon’ at the local library or the summer camp at church. But really, he could tell she enjoyed their lunches together. What with David still peddling his crappy Abba act around the Philippines and her own children grown up and gone, Mary was sometimes a bit lonely. Tristan felt the same way too, especially when Malachi had to do all-nighters at the library or was shacked up with Blondie. So Tristan didn’t mind getting the bus over to the hospital for lunch and sometimes waiting for Mary to come off shift, sitting in the hallway watching as the same woman in labour walked around and around for hours.
Oh shit. Tristan hopes he’s not wearing one of those nasty hospital gowns, with his arse hanging out. That would be proper embarrassing. Especially when his visitors come by. They don’t need to see him dressed like that. Despite Mary being a no-show, there have been loads of visitors. Like his boys from Barton Point. (‘It’s like he’s dead, man. This is nuff weird.’) His form tutor from school. (‘Don’t think this will get you out of doing your Maths GCSE next summer. I’m still expecting that A from you.’) And the girl with the red weave from youth club. (‘He’s still fit, though.’) He hopes he didn’t get a semi when she visited. Now that would be shameful.
There have been a few weird visits too. From some brer who speaks like a kid but with a man’s voice. He comes often and talks about the same boring stuff over and over again, like which tinned pie is the nicest, why Margate is the best seaside in the world and how to care for a tomato plant. Tristan zones out.