‘I got you a chai latte.’
I think about this for a moment, stick my head over the covers and squint at him. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Well, no. But I got Nick to bring one back for you. Here.’
He comes into the room and puts one of the takeaway cups from the coffee shop down on my bedside table and then stands there for a moment. I sit up, tangled in the bedsheets, and rub my eyes. ‘Nick went all the way to work and then came back to bring me a chai latte?’
‘We didn’t have any of the stuff at home.’
‘I know, but—’
‘He wanted to go in and check that Zahra was OK. The shop and everything.’
‘What do you mean?’
Danny sits down at my desk. He has to move a stack of magazines out of the way first. He doesn’t come in my room that often and when he does he never says anything about all the old photos and postcards I’ve collected and stuck everywhere – all round my mirror – even though it’s probably weird for him because there are photos of him when he was a little boy, even photos of our grandparents, who I never met but he did. One of our mum and Niamh when they were teenagers. I’ve always had them – just stuck there along with pictures of me and Teagan or collages I’ve made from magazines. I’ve got a picture of a young Ernest Hemingway with a dead animal, and a colour photocopy of the front cover of an old Eighties edition of Pride and Prejudice, which honestly I’ve never even read, I just like the guy on the front, even though he’s a drawing. I try to pretend that my dead grandfather means as much to me as the Pride and Prejudice guy but honestly if I had to save one of those two pictures from a fire—
Anyway, Danny sits down. He doesn’t look at my pictures. I think he’s going to start talking about Lynn Wallace again but instead he says, ‘There’s been another bomb. Someone’s been killed.’
I pick up my chai latte from the bedside table but I can tell it’s still too hot to drink so I just hold it in my hands. Danny is watching me and I look away, look at the little recycling logo on the lid of the cup.
‘Alena,’ Danny says. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘What do you mean?’ I say, my brain trying to grind into life. ‘How do you know?’
‘It’s on TV. It was early this morning. Near Liverpool Street.’
‘Who’s been killed?’
‘Don’t know yet. It was another supermarket.’
‘So it’s the same—’
‘Looks like it.’
I can’t see his face properly in the dark, but I realise, suddenly, that he’s wearing work clothes. A white shirt and not-jeans. I reach and turn my bedside lamp on to make sure, and we both flinch in the light. He looks tired.
‘Look, don’t get up,’ he says. ‘Sleep as late you like. Sleep all day. Don’t watch the news. I just wanted to bring you a coffee and say that I’ve got to go into work for a few hours.’
‘Why?’
‘Nick’s got to go to the shop later but he’s home now, I think he’s going to do frozen pizza or something for lunch. We have to – there’s going to be a lot of media coverage, we’ve got to put together some kind of response.’
For a second I think he means him and Nick, but then I realise he’s talking about his job.
‘But it’s Saturday,’ I say.
‘I know.’ He picks up a pencil from my desk, looks at it. ‘Listen. Alena.’
There’s a long pause. Then Danny’s phone starts ringing. He takes it out of his pocket and looks at it, then turns it off. ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘Later. Have a good day, OK? Don’t watch the news. It’s all bad.’
‘It’s always bad,’ I say, but he’s already out of the door, and a few minutes later I hear the front door open and close and I know he’s gone.
I don’t bother to have a shower or get dressed or comb my hair or do anything respectable. I put a hoodie on over my pink-elephant pyjamas and shuffle into the living room with my chai latte, where Nick has twenty-four-hour news on the TV, and they’ve stuck the BREAKING NEWS banner on the screen over the top of rolling footage of nothing: a police cordon and some ambulances with their lights off. At least one fatality confirmed in London blast, it says in smaller letters underneath. It looks cold, out there in Liverpool Street. The little people on the screen – police and random gawking strangers – standing around with camera phones; they’re all bundled up in layers and you can see wind whipping the women’s hair around. The sky is steel grey, no light at all, and even here Nick has all the lights on even though it’s the middle of the day. I can see a few stray drops of rain on our windows, and then I see a drop of rain on the camera lens on the TV, as well, because it’s all really not very far away from us.
The flat is warm and smells like cinnamon and coffee, and Nick is standing in the kitchen slicing the film from a frozen pizza, with the oven already on. ‘You should turn that off,’ he says. ‘They’re just filling up air-time. They don’t know anything.’
I keep watching. A terror expert comes on. John McHane, Terror Expert. He looks rumpled, like maybe he was still in bed too, when he found out, when they called him up.
It’s March, now, more than a month since the last bomb, the one they found in Mile End. They’d only just stopped talking about it all on the news, like they’d run out of things to say. Now they’re showing a timeline of all the failed ones from before, with a little map of all the different locations.
Nick crosses over in front of me and turns it off.
‘Just remember,’ he says. ‘You’re more likely to be hit by a car than caught in a terrorist attack.’
Which is fine but, of course, that used to be true of the person who is now dead. So.
And anyway Nick was hit by a car, which I point out to him, and he pauses and says, ‘Well, and it’s not likely to happen again, is it?’
I can’t follow this logic. I turn the TV back on and the guy on screen is saying, ‘—of course, there’s no evidence that that’s even what we’re dealing with here. We just don’t know and that’s what makes it so difficult and now, tragic.’
Nick sighs and goes back to the kitchen.
‘There’s a growing sense of alarm in the city,’ the guy on TV carries on. ‘The police response is facing increasing scrutiny.’
‘Do you think Danny should have gone to work?’ I hear myself say. ‘Is it safe to be on the tube?’
‘Yes.’ Nick’s voice is very calm. ‘It’s safe. It’s as safe as any other day. We shouldn’t let this kind of thing frighten us.’
I remember Nick’s mum telling me at the time that his getting hit by a car was such bad luck that it had used up all the bad luck for our family in one go and now we’d have good luck for ever. This seemed to make sense, back then.
I finish my drink and take the lid off the cup so I can scoop out the remnants of cinnamon foam with a spoon. I watch the news and worry.
‘How was it?’ says Nick, collecting my empty cup from the coffee table. ‘Danny made me promise to bring one back for you.’
‘It was good. Thank you.’ I realise that I never bothered to say thank you to my brother and I feel briefly sad about this. That way you just feel sometimes.
Nick sits down next to me, eyes on the TV in spite of himself, still holding the cup.
‘Nick.’
‘Hm?’
‘Was I at my mum’s funeral? Did someone take me? Can you remember?’
He watches the screen for a few more seconds and then turns to me. ‘You weren’t at the service. You were at the reception afterwards for a little while.’
‘Oh.’
‘You wouldn’t talk to anyone. You held on to Danny the whole time and screamed whenever anyone else tried to talk to you.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Like when I met Niamh for the first time and I screamed at her.’
He frowns. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I suppose. I don’t remember that.’
‘Seems like I just used to scream a lot at people.’
‘Yeah,�
� he says. ‘Well. I knew how you felt.’
SEVENTEEN
Later, we both go to the coffee shop.
The shop is bright and warm and totally empty apart from Zahra sitting behind the counter looking at her phone. Still dark outside and with all the lights on inside it feels a bit like Christmas. The bell jingles as the door closes behind us, and she looks up. ‘Oh. I was excited for a minute there,’ she says. ‘I thought you might be a paying customer.’
‘Has it been like this all morning?’ says Nick, looking at the empty tables.
‘Uh huh. John called again. His driver’s still sick. He says can you go and collect the order yourself and he’ll give you another five per cent, maybe ten if you’re super nice about it and don’t give him any hassle. Hi, Lena.’
I hop on to one of the stools in front of the counter. ‘Hi.’
‘I’m not driving all the way out there today,’ says Nick. ‘Come on. Can’t John do deliveries himself ?’
‘He told you, he’s not allowed, he’s got a bad heart or something.’
‘Well, I can’t load all those boxes in the car either. My shoulder can’t take it. I can’t exactly—’
‘Fine, but we’re out of everything and they’re closed tomorrow. I’m sure he’s got someone who can help you load the car. And basically the only tea we have left is that vanilla stuff that everybody hates, so unless we’re only going to serve—’
‘All right, fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine. I’ll have to go back for the car.’
Zahra smiles and snaps her bubble gum. ‘Fine. And Lena can stay and keep me company.’
‘Fine.’ Nick gives me an apologetic look and says, ‘An hour, two hours max. Have whatever you like.’
‘She can’t have whatever she likes since all we’ve got is disgusting vanilla infusion that everybody hates,’ says Zahra, and Nick says, ‘Good point,’ and ruffles my hair before he leaves like I’m five.
Zahra is twenty-seven, and she’s been working for Nick for almost as long as I can remember. She used to babysit me, sometimes, and let me stay up late watching 15-rated films on TV. She has a tattoo of a bird on the inside of her wrist and she knows a lot about Iranian punk music. Teagan finds her so intimidatingly cool she can hardly speak to her. She’s not intimidating, though. She’s sweet. She has a very complicated love life and she always tells me about it. And she’s always reading serious things like Marxist history but then she also watches a lot of trashy TV. Last year she started a part-time law degree and Nick keeps joking that even when she’s a hotshot lawyer she’ll still have to come and work at the shop in the evenings, since he can’t cope without her. It’s not all that much of a joke: I never want her to leave.
Danny wanted to study law, once, he told me, after he finished university, but he never got round to it. I catch him looking at Zahra’s textbooks sometimes, when she leaves them lying around the shop.
She takes her gum out of her mouth and wraps it up in a piece of newspaper. ‘Scary day, huh?’ She says it lightly but when I look at her up close she looks serious. ‘I am so sick of this world sometimes. Really.’
‘I just started thinking on the way here,’ I say. ‘Maybe he didn’t really want anyone to get killed. Now they have he’ll feel so bad he’ll turn himself in.’
She doesn’t look convinced ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Yeah. Hopefully. Do you want a Coke or something?’
I nod.
‘So,’ she says, turning to get a glass. ‘I didn’t want to say this in front of Nick but they had Jacob Carlisle on TV about five minutes before you guys walked in here.’
Every time I hear Jacob Carlisle’s name I feel this pulse of anxiety, like it’s cursed or something. I don’t know when this started but I wish it would stop. Or that I could never hear his name.
‘How do you know?’ I say.
‘Watching it on my phone.’ She scoops ice into the glass and turns back to me. ‘They had him talking about security and policing and all that kind of crap. Like he’s an expert. It was a long conversation.’
‘I’ve never seen him on television before.’
‘I know. Quite a coup for the Carlisle campaign.’ She makes a face. ‘Honestly, I thought it was a little distasteful. Let them take the bodies away before you start reciting your manifesto, you know what I mean? No offence to your brother. Who you know that I adore.’
‘He’s there today. At work. He went in this morning.’
‘Well, there you go. He probably scripted all those soundbites for him. If this turns into Jacob Carlisle’s moment to shine, I am literally leaving this city for ever, Lena. Tell your brother that from me, please.’
I pick out one of the sweets they keep in a bowl on the counter and start unwrapping it.
‘I’d never have thought he’d exactly be Danny’s cup of tea, you know?’ she carries on. ‘Jacob Carlisle. Nick’s furious about it.’ She glances at me, gives me a sympathetic smile. ‘As you probably already know.’
I stir my Coke with the straw, clink the ice against the side of the glass.
Zahra’s dad died of a heart attack when she was twenty-one. He was at the airport on the way to visit his cousins in Tehran. She wears a necklace with a gold ‘D’ for Dariush, which was his name. And maybe for Dad, I guess. I wonder if I should have something like this. A necklace or a bracelet or something, with an ‘H’ for Heather, or an ‘M’ for Mum.
It would seem fake. Like what I lost was the same as what Zahra lost, which it wasn’t, because Zahra knew her dad for twenty-one years and I knew my mum for three.
Maybe I should get a necklace with a gold ‘3’. The three years she loved me for.
She is looking at her phone again. ‘I keep waiting for them to say who it is that’s been killed. It’s sick, isn’t it? Like you can’t help thinking, what if it’s a child or something, or someone’s grandma.’
‘You should turn it off. They’re just filling up airtime.’
‘Yes. Yes. That is good advice.’ She turns it off, tucks her phone into the pocket of her jeans. ‘You are wise, Lena.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m thinking about going on a long holiday until this is all over. Somebody left their bag at one of the tables earlier and I was five seconds away from calling the bomb squad before they came back in and got it.’
We both inadvertently glance around the shop in case there are any more unattended bags.
‘Anyway, don’t tell Nick that. There’s probably some procedure I’m supposed to know. I’m supposed to be getting familiar with all the supervisory stuff in case he goes on this Colombian adventure,’ she says.
‘In case he does what?’
‘Well, not adventure. I know it’s a business trip, meeting the growers and all that, but it still sounds kind of like—’ she breaks off, looking at my face. ‘Or, he’s probably not going, though. I mean, I don’t really know anything about it.’
The bell above the door rings as an old lady comes in and starts shaking out her umbrella. ‘If you’re here to get out of the rain you still better buy something,’ Zahra mutters, and glares at her for a few seconds when she sits down at the table by the window without ordering anything. ‘Nice,’ says Zahra. ‘That’s not rude at all.’ Then she gets up and starts dismantling the cappuccino machine to clean it.
EIGHTEEN
Ten minutes later, there’s a queue of people and Zahra is busy explaining that they’ll all have to drink vanilla infusion or black coffee. I go and slouch in the corner booth where me and Teagan sit, send her a message. At coffee shop, without parents. Want to join? Xx
She replies instantly. Have to keep practising. Also scared to leave house in case blown up. Come over? XXX
I don’t feel like going to Teagan’s house. I think for a minute about texting Ollie, calling him, even, but I don’t know what he does at weekends, don’t know if we have anything to talk about without Teagan there.
In my bag there is homework and the book I’m reading but my mind is al
l white noise and I know I won’t be able to concentrate. I think maybe I’ll go home again and watch the news, wait for Danny to come home, wait for them to say if the person who’s been killed is a child or someone’s grandma or what. Or maybe I’ll get on the tube and go to the shops, except I have no money and I know there’ll be police with machine guns everywhere and they make me nervous.
At the till, someone is complaining about being given the wrong change and Zahra is arguing with him, her cheeks flushing red. People are awful, I think. London is a horrible city. Nick is going away somewhere and didn’t tell us.
When the change-complainer stomps off, I lean over the counter and tell Zahra that I’m going home. She’s trying to serve somebody else so she waves distractedly and I slip out. It’s dark for real now, although it’s only four o’clock, and it’s raining harder, car headlights glittering as they pass by, spraying water onto the pavement. I pull up the hood of my coat and dig my gloves out of the pockets. The supermarket across the road has closed early, pulled its security gates down. A dejected-looking man is standing in front of it, smoking. He glances across the road and meets my eye, stares at me for a minute. I turn abruptly and start walking up the road.
The first place I get to that’s open is the library. I go in. It’s empty. I have the idea that maybe there might be a book about Greenham Common. I read a lot about it on the Internet but it would be nice to have a book.
I don’t know where something like that would be shelved: history or politics or what. I wander the aisles for a while and eventually I ask a librarian. She’s not that much older than me and she’s never heard of it, but she types something into her computer and says, ‘Oh, here you go. It’s in the women’s history section.’
I didn’t know there was a women’s history section and I tell her this, and she says, ‘Neither did I, to be perfectly honest with you.’ She helps me find it, but it’s just one shelf at the end of the regular history section, and the Greenham Common book isn’t there. She says it’s probably been stolen.
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