Those nights, above all else, were the worst. They were the times when Tom was faced with the reality of his parent’s flaws, and no matter how hard he tried he could not block out the sounds. On mornings following these events, his mother would move slowly around the kitchen, wincing in pain with each step she took. She never said a word; she took it all in silence.
Tom stopped dreaming of the dog when he was eleven years old. It appeared in his dreams only once more after that, on the night his mother died. It was as if her death had finally exorcised some kind of crude ghost, a shoddy spirit that only ever came to him because he craved his mother’s love.
He had forgotten about the dog until he saw the vision yesterday evening in the Grove. He knew it was not real — it couldn’t possibly exist in the waking world. But what scared him more than seeing it was the thought that something had reached inside him and pulled out that childhood dream, putting flesh on its bones.
The man tending the fires looked normal again: just a thin figure with a pointed stick. Tom smiled, feeling sad and empty as he pulled back from old memories. Then he resumed running, heading towards Lana’s Fraser’s flat and the precious new memory of her face, her eyes, and her ambiguous smile.
Turning right onto Grove Road, he saw a car parked at the kerb. The vehicle was a Vauxhall Nova, the paintwork scratched, the wings battered from a collision, and the rear bumper hanging askew. Two boys in baseball caps sat in the car. The windows were rolled down. Another boy — this one younger, barely in his teens — was leaning against the side of the car and poking his head through the open driver’s side window. Tom slowed his pace to a walk. He was breathing heavily but still felt as if he had a few miles left to go. He watched the boys as they talked, and then caught sight of a small brown-paper package changing hands. The boy on the pavement straightened up, slammed his palm against the roof of the car, and then turned away, setting off in the direction of the Needle, whose pyramid-shaped roof and upper storeys could be seen from almost everywhere on the estate.
The car’s engine revved loudly. The rear wheels spun on the road surface, and then the car shot off, taking the right turn into Grove End at such great speed that the rear end skidded across the carriageway.
Tom knew that drugs were big business on the estate. He would have to be a fool not to recognise that he had just witnessed yet another deal, but rather than frighten him it filled him with an intense feeling of sadness. These kids, they were wasting their lives before they’d even begun. If they were dealing in that stuff now, what would they be doing in five, ten years’ time? Gun crime was a recent problem and it was only going to get worse. Things here still weren’t as bad as they were in the States, but surely that kind of gang-driven chaos wasn’t too far away… a decade, maybe even less?
Tom was glad that he and Helen had never been able to have children. Then, feeling guilty once more, he thought about Hailey, Lana Fraser’s girl. What kind of future did she have to look forward to, trapped on this godforsaken estate? Nobody seemed to care — not the local council, the central government, or the media. The latter were more than happy to demonise the people on estates like this, but they refused to examine the real problems at the root of this kind of behaviour. These sink estates were forgotten zones, dead spots in the nation’s psyche. The public would rather envisage them as the playgrounds of devils than the places where those who had lost everything ended up.
Facts were always difficult to consume; fiction made for a much less complex diet. Tom had learned, and accepted, a long time ago that most people were content to be spoon-fed a simpler gruel. It was easier to keep down, and to forget you had even eaten.
Tom stood on the pavement outside the Grove Court flats, undecided whether he should ring the buzzer or continue running. Part of him wanted to escape, to get away from the emotional holocaust he sensed might be the result of any further association with Lana and her daughter. Yet another part of him — this one stirring, as if roused from a lengthy sleep — reached out towards her, needing her by his side.
“Tom?” Her voice came from behind him. For a moment he was too stunned even to move. “It is Tom, isn’t it? From yesterday?”
He didn’t realise that he was holding his breath until he remembered to let it out. His chest deflated; his throat ached. He turned around.
She was standing on the pavement a few yards away, clutching a blue plastic carrier bag in her left hand. She was wearing a faded denim jacket, buttoned half way up with the neck left open, and her legs were bare beneath a red knee-length skirt. On her feet she wore a pair of battered running shoes. Her hair was loose, messy, and it framed her face like the fur of a hood. Her eyes were lowered, as if she were unable to meet his gaze.
“Hi,” he said, feeling small and weak and needy. “Sorry.”
“For what?” She smiled, tilting her head to one side. She showed him her small white teeth: they were perfect, like lovely ivory sculptures of teeth rather than the real thing. “Why are you sorry?”
“For being here, I guess. I’m not some kind of stalker. Honest. I was… well, would you believe I was just passing?” It sounded pathetic. He felt ashamed.
She laughed, then, her eyes widening, those flawless teeth flashing in the morning light. And all at once he knew that it was okay, that everything was fine. She didn’t think he was pestering her; she enjoyed the attention. “Come on up,” she said. “I was going to make coffee.” She held up the carrier bag, indicating that she had been shopping for provisions.
Tom followed her in silence. He did not want to speak, not yet, even to accept her invitation, in case she changed her mind.
Upstairs he stood at the window as she unpacked her shopping in the kitchen. He stared out at the view: the circular array of streets clustered around the Needle, and the imposing sight of the crippled concrete tower itself. The windows on the lower floors were covered with wooden boards and metal shutters, but those higher up the building, where nobody could gain access, were mostly unsecured. Some of the frames still held panes of glass, others had only shards, like curved and pointed teeth, where kids had shattered them with stones.
The glass of the pyramidal roof was in bad shape. It was unbroken, but birds had desecrated the panes with their droppings to mix with the other general filth. It looked to Tom like there was a swarm of flies gathered around the pointed tip of the skylight, but surely flies would be invisible to the naked eye at such a distance? They were too small to be sparrows or pigeons, and he didn’t know of any birds that were capable of hovering in such a manner. They were almost motionless: just a faint blurring of their wings against the sky.
There was a lot of graffiti on the walls at the lowest levels, where kids had sprayed obscenities and depictions of sexual acts. A few names had been added in a cruder style, almost as an afterthought. Further up, on the south wall, the word ‘Clickity’ had been daubed in dull red paint. Isolated in such a way, it was incongruous, entirely random, yet Tom felt that it must hold meaning to someone. He recalled something he’d often seen on the side of a footbridge over the A1 motorway when he used to travel south regularly for work: Cigarette Burns. He’d often wondered what that meant — was it the name of a band, a record label, or something more sinister? He hadn’t thought about the piece of graffito in years…
“How do you take it?”
“Sorry?” He turned stiffly.
“Your coffee. How do you take it?” Lana was leaning across the kitchen counter. She arched her black eyebrows. Her cheeks were pale, almost white at the edges, but small circles of red had appeared at their centres.