by Suki Fleet
Trailing his hand along the wall, Nicky made his way down the corridor to his makeshift quarters in the study—it would probably have been sensible to write to the electricity company, perhaps send them a wad of money to get the electricity turned back on—but again, that meant dealing with more people, and there was the possibility those people would have to come inside the house, and Nicky really couldn’t handle that at the moment.
Somewhere upstairs a floorboard creaked. The sound of a single footstep echoed through the dead air.
Nicky’s heart thudded. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought he’d heard someone moving around up there. He knew he hadn’t imagined the noise. With shaking hands, he shoved the warped study door closed behind him and twisted the heavy key. His pulse was racing faster than ever. He leaned his forehead against the door and determinedly gripped the door frame.
He was safe in here. He was safe. Old houses made funny noises. It was just a noise. There was no one else here. No one. Just him. He was alone.
He didn’t believe in ghosts.
He pushed away memories of the thin shadow of a woman he’d seen at the upper-floor windows on the rare occasion Lance had forced him outside. Every old house has a resident ghost, Nicky, Lance had said. Then he’d laughed. It’s just a trick of the light.
Taking a deep breath, he let go of the door frame. With what felt like the last of his strength, he dragged a decrepit armchair in front of the door and curled up on it. Sometimes he made a bed out of a few of the old chairs he’d brought in here from the less formal lounges—all of Lance’s nice modern furniture was upstairs in the apartment where he’d died—but most of the time Nicky made himself small and slept curled up like a cat in a single chair.
The sky outside would still be blue—he was sure of it—even though all he could see through the small rectangular window were the stubborn twisted bushes and their soon-to-be-dying leaves. Autumn was the dying season, after all.
Closing his eyes and focusing on his breathing again, Nicky tried to fall asleep. Sleep was the only escape he had, and he was exhausted. He dreamed he was dancing—spinning and spinning across an endless space beneath a sky full of exploding stars, freer than he’d ever felt.
Greenhills, blue sky, Cai
As he pulled over at the bus stop outside the school, Cai spotted Soph’s sunshine blonde curls immediately. She was leaning against the graffitied Perspex of the bus shelter. Beside her a skinny boy seemed to be attempting conversation. They both looked awkward. Soph’s face was a perfect blank, but the toe of her black plimsoll tapped agitatedly against the floor. Those damn plimsolls that were not the proper leather school shoes she was supposed to have. The thirty quid shoes Cai couldn’t afford to buy her. Cai glanced at the glove compartment and breathed a little deeper.
Looking up, Soph saw Cai, and her face brightened with relief. She walked quickly over to the van. At fourteen, Soph was proud and fiercely independent but also incredibly shy. The boy called out and waved his hand and Soph glanced briefly over her shoulder as if to acknowledge him, but that was all.
“Oh my god,” was all she said, slinging her school bag over the seat into the boot with all Cai’s toolboxes. She pulled the door shut behind her and slumped into the seat, her head in her hands.
“Was that the person you were telling me about who tried to talk to you at the bus stop the other day? The one said you wished you’d said something to because they were cute?” Cai asked, trying to keep his tone light and teasing.
The growing protectiveness he felt for Soph was sometimes hard to manage, especially given the fact that he never thought he’d be in this situation, never thought he’d be responsible for someone or even want to be, never mind a kid, albeit one only six years younger than he was.
It was funny how much his life had changed these past few months.
Soph groaned. “Please don’t talk about it. Please just drive.”
She peeked at him through her slim pale hands. She looked so much like Katy when she did that—the hair, the intense glimmering blue of her eyes, the way she would tilt her head, and sometimes, with the brilliance of surprise, Cai would catch brief flashes of himself in her too.
But they didn’t talk about Katy. Even at the mention of her mum’s name, Soph would grow wide-eyed and upset. Six months down the line and it hadn’t got any easier for her.
Knowing he should focus on something else, Cai leaned across and pulled open the glove compartment. He picked out the envelope and dropped it into Soph’s lap.
The traffic was getting heavier. If they got stuck in it now, it could take a good forty minutes to get across town instead of the fifteen it took when the roads were clear. Cai put the car into gear and pulled out into the road. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he caught the boy at the bus stop staring after them, a wistful look on his face. There was definitely something going on there. That sort of expression wasn’t usually fuelled by a purely one-sided affection—it was too hopeful, too yearning.
“You were spying?” Soph gasped with a laugh, making Cai turn quickly to look at her.
It took a moment to work out what she was talking about. But then he realised that of course Soph would read the envelope first rather than open it to see what was inside.
“Not spying.” Though he guessed peering into someone’s house trying to see who they were and what they were doing was technically spying on them. “I got a gardening job. Open the envelope.” He knew she would drop the spying thing once she saw the money.
“Ohhh,” she breathed.
Cai smiled, enjoying her amazement. He took his eyes off the road for a fraction too long and he nearly rear-ended the car in front. They jerked to a violent halt, tools clattering noisily as a box spilled open in the back, and the money slipped out of the envelope on Soph’s lap and scattered across the van’s leaf-strewn floor.
“How much is here?” Soph asked, leaning down to gather it up again.
“I don’t know. I haven’t counted it. The ad said the job would be eight grand, and if this is half of it like it says, it must be four. Want to count it out for me?”
After picking it all up again, Soph laid the money out on her lap and began counting it into neat little piles. “They’re so new, but they look bigger than normal twenties.”
“They look pretty real, though, don’t they?” Cai said, unable to keep the doubt out of his voice that he’d been tricked somehow.
Soph held one up to the light and peered closer. “Yeah, they look real. We did a class on counterfeiting in science, once. It’s hard to fake the watermark. The date says 1970, though. I think they’re just old….”
Cai nodded in relief. That was what he’d thought.
The Greenhills estate was not the best part of town. It was an estate with its own rules and if you didn’t know that or work out what they were pretty fast, it was likely you’d get fucked over. Problem was, there weren’t many places that wanted an ex-offender renting, even if he did have responsibility for a minor, and the council wasn’t interested unless they became homeless, and then they would have been dumped somewhere without any choice at all. So, Cai rented a maisonette above the bookies in the heart of the estate, overlooking one of its only green spaces—a tiny square of grass dominated by two decrepit picnic benches and the burned-out shell of a bin.
The estate’s only official pub—a squat temporary-looking building with two boarded up windows—sat on the other side of the green.
It got noisy some nights, but Cai always knew what was going on and where the trouble was. Which was better than not knowing and being blindsided.
But as a result of living so close to the heart of things, the idea of Soph walking home alone after school worried him. So, she either got the bus to the shops right outside the flat—the same bus she took to school in the morning—or Cai picked her up.
Cai figured it was not quite the sort of place Katy would have chosen for her only child to live, but Katy was gone and Soph’s dad
was God knows where, and this was all Cai had to offer. He’d been thrown in at the deep end as far as responsibility went.
Fifteen months ago, he hadn’t even known he had a half-sister. Then one day Katy had turned up to visit him in the YOI, sporting a warm as sunshine smile beneath her tumbling blonde curls and drawing the gaze of just about everyone around her. She’d called him brother and hugged him tight until his shock wore off and he’d hugged her back.
Fifteen years older, and in sporadic contact with their dad, she said she’d found a letter from one of the care homes Cai had lived in, while rummaging through their dad’s papers, and had traced Cai from there. Her smile dimmed as she told him she had experience of the care system too. For over a year she’d visited him every week, without fail.
She’d brought Soph along with her many times. On one of her last visits, she asked him if he’d promise her something. Made him promise that he would be there for Soph, if anything ever happened to her, and that he wouldn’t let Soph go into care and grow up without a family, like they had.
Of course, Cai had promised, because Katy wasn’t about to die any time soon.
Only, then she had.
Cai stopped off at a chippy on the outskirts of the estate. The sky was growing dark fast, and without the warmth of the sun, the air had grown cool and crisp and shivery.
As soon as they got back inside the van with their packets of hot chips, all the windows immediately began to steam up. The ancient van’s blowers had long since died, so Cai rolled the windows down and waited a little until the air cleared.
“So, the boy at the bus stop—what’s his name?” he asked, swiping at the windscreen with the hem of his T-shirt as the van crawled slowly through the estate’s windy streets.
They were almost home, and a long way from the bus stop where he’d picked her up, so Cai figured it was a safe enough time to ask.
Beside him, Soph took in a shuddery gulp of air. “I couldn’t even open my mouth. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to…. Everyone thinks I’m an ice queen.”
Blindly, Cai reached over, squeezed her shoulder. Having never felt the kind of crushing self-consciousness Soph displayed, all he could do was listen and be there for her.
“Why don’t you, I don’t know, write him a letter or something?” He winced even as he said it.
“Write him a letter?” Soph shook her head as though that was the worst idea she had ever heard. Drawing her feet up onto the seat, she wrapped her skinny arms around her knees. “Their name’s Loz. It’s short for Lauren.” She didn’t look over.
Ah. That would teach him to assume.
Cai pulled the car over into the glass-strewn car park near their flat. Some loud disagreement was going on in the bookies—a man in a red cap was gesticulating wildly at the cashier, his voice getting louder and louder.
“Is that why you didn’t want to talk about them with me?” he asked, as he flicked through a wad of paper he’d shoved in the car door, trying to act distracted so Soph wouldn’t feel as pinned down as if he were looking at her. “Because it really doesn’t matter to me the gender of the person you like, as long as they make you happy.”
“They like looking more masculine than feminine. People think they want to be a boy, but they don’t. I overheard them explaining it to someone once. They don’t want to identify as a boy or a girl. They prefer gender neutral pronouns.”
This was getting too complicated for Cai. “What’s a gender neutral pronoun?”
“Like ‘they’. Not he or she. You did it just now when you said them. They get a lot of shit at school for it, though.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” Cai glanced over and caught Soph’s gaze.
She blushed. “Okay. I’ll try to be braver.”
“It’ll get easier the more you talk to them. Ride the awkward out.”
Looking away, Soph nodded just as the shouting in the bookies exploded into the street. The brief terrified look on her face as she shoved the envelope of money into his hand made Cai’s heart lurch. She’d grown up in a lovely treelined avenue on the other side of town. No one had known until her death that Katy had been drowning in debt to keep the house and all the nice things in it.
“Come on, let’s get home,” Cai said, opening the rusty van’s door and wishing, not for the first time, that home was somewhere else.
Nicky not interested
The morning sky was still mostly dark when the sound of a vehicle labouring up the drive woke Nicky from his doze. Surprised by the noise and apprehensive about who could be arriving at the house at this time of day, he glanced at the expensive silver watch he’d taken from Lance’s room. The watch was far too big for him and slipped around somewhat annoyingly on his bony wrist, but he never took it off. Sometimes it seemed to be the only connection to reality he had. The glowy hands showed it was just after six thirty.
He shoved his blankets off and pulled on an extra jumper over the clothes he’d slept in, and then clambered across his chair maze to unlock the study door. Closing his eyes, he listened to the house before feeling safe enough with the quiet to tiptoe down the dark corridor to the drawing room.
After two years, Nicky’s body had come to accept being denied the addictions of his previous life, but still, first thing in the morning, he longed for caffeine. An espresso would be perfect, but he’d settle for a plain cup of tea. When he was a teenager, his gran used to bring him a cup of tea every morning when she woke him up for school. She was one of the kindest people Nicky had ever known. He ran a shaky hand through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut. Flashes of memory like this were not helpful.
Perhaps there were some things a body never got used to missing. Just as a heart would always ache for the love it lost.
Outside it was quiet now, the engine that woke him no longer running, and all Nicky could hear were the birds singing to one another, the wind whispering through all the leaves and his own heartbeat thudding progressively louder in his ears. He strained to listen above it, barely allowing himself to breathe. It was still mostly dark out there, the navy sky shot through with threads of silver as the sun began to rise.
Pulling up his hood, Nicky risked stepping closer to the window. His top and trousers were dark, some undetermined, faded shade of grey that came from accumulated dust and dirt and the way Nicky indiscriminately washed all his clothes together in the rust-stained iron bath. Only his bright hair and the paleness of his skin would give him away to anyone looking.
Winding his fingers in the soft fabric of his top to stop his hands from trembling, he peered around, wishing he felt more aware. After spending far too many hours lying awake last night, his brain going over and over the whole ludicrous way he’d employed a gardener and everything that could go wrong because of it, his eyes were burning with tiredness. A few fitful hours sleep at various points throughout the night wasn’t really enough, and he knew he’d spend his waking hours in a constant state of flux between anxiety and exhaustion.
When he spotted the tatty white van parked near the front door, he took a deep relieved breath. The guy had come back. He’d not run off with the money, though of course there was still the possibility he’d come to rob Nicky for more. At least it was him, though, and not someone completely unknown for Nicky to panic about. Disconcertingly the guy was no longer in the van. Nicky stepped closer to the window trying to see where he’d gone. There was no sign of him.
Yesterday, the van had been parked the opposite way around, so Nicky hadn’t noticed the bad paint job that tried to cover up a previous owner’s logo and over the top was written in messy block letters: Cai Chance Handyman, odd jobs and household clearance specialist. The last words were obscured by graffiti—a messy skull and crossbones tag—and below it was a telephone number, but it was written in such slanted, small numerals, Nicky couldn’t read it. So, the gardener was called Cai. If he hadn’t just borrowed this van anyway.
Yesterday, before Nicky had impulsively decided the third guy who’d
turned up for the gardening job was the right one, and had stuck the cash on this decrepit van, he’d barely gotten more than a glimpse of Cai. All he’d known was that the guy was young and strong-looking. The other two guys that had turned up had been much older. The first one hadn’t hung around for more than two minutes after ringing the bell. The second guy had sworn and kicked the front door when Nicky hadn’t answered, and Nicky had curled up in a chair in the study until he was sure the guy had gone.
Although Cai had been nosy, he’d seemed calm, and calm was what Nicky needed. So, where was he? Nicky guessed he should be grateful Cai wasn’t knocking on the door. He seemed to have got the message Nicky didn’t want to deal with him directly. Perhaps he’d decided to take a walk around, to survey the garden. That would make sense. Still, not knowing where he was made Nicky nervous. He stepped so close to the window his breath fogged the glass, but no one was out the front. Wishing he’d put his shoes on to stop getting splinters from the slowly disintegrating floorboards, Nicky headed quickly towards the kitchen.
Of all the downstairs rooms he had to use, Nicky hated the old kitchen the most. Lance had had all the units ripped out at the beginning of the year and had never gotten around to replacing them—with the kitchenette in his apartment upstairs there had been no urgency. All that was now left in the big empty room was an ancient green range Nicky had no idea how to fire up, and a fridge he could probably stand up inside, that made the most godawful groaning noise when it was turned on. Even the sink had been torn from the wall beneath the window, and the pipe to the taps closed off, though not entirely successfully; a small lake had formed to cover a large portion of the kitchen floor. Every day the lake was bigger, and every day Nicky tried to ignore it.
