Thomas stands up. Teeters for a moment as he finds his balance, then folds his arms and grins at her like a death-head.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ says Cher, and can hear how pathetic she sounds. Like some girl in a teen movie who’s about to have her head cut off. Oh, fuck, she thinks, but that’s what I am. That’s exactly what I am. ‘I mean it,’ she adds, tentatively, but it doesn’t sound convincing.
‘Cher,’ he says, ‘you don’t have a lot of choice, you know.’
‘Get to fuck, you loony bastard.’
To her surprise, he looks hurt. It’s as though he doesn’t realise that there’s anything odd about what she’s seen. As though, in his mind, she’s the one in the wrong, the interloper.
‘I’m going to come up,’ he says. ‘I think you could do with a hand.’
Cher runs her hands over the tiles. Manages to get her fingers under one and prise it loose. Waves it at him.
‘Oh, come on.’
‘I will. You come one step closer, and I will.’
He takes a step closer. Cher throws the tile at his head. He ducks sideways and it sails past, misses him by miles. He comes upright, a beatific smile on his face. ‘Well,’ he says. Looks down at his feet for a moment, then hurls himself up the roof with a speed that shocks her. She only has a moment to throw herself backwards, gripping the roof flashing between her thighs like a circus rider, howling as her dead arm flops back and opens out her collarbone with its weight.
Thomas snatches at thin air where her face used to be and lurches to a stop, his centre of gravity far over the other side of the roof beam. He staggers. Rocks at the hips like a comedy drunk, drops of rainwater flying from his windmilling arms.
She takes the only chance she’ll have, and kicks his legs out from under him.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Collette dreams she is on the banks of the Ganges, among the funeral pyres, surrounded by wailing mourners. She has covered herself in ash, matted her hair with mud, and is weeping, weeping, weeping. She picks up a stone and chips at her hairline, feels blood trickle down her forehead, digs cracked fingernails into dirty wrists. All around her, figures in white, blurred by smoke, howl out their sorrow in family groups. I’m the only one who’s alone, she thinks. I’m the only one.
A man in a coarse linen dhoti shalwar stops to look at her. His feet are bare and he wears big gold rings. ‘You’re crying, madam,’ he says. ‘Have you come to the funeral?’
‘Yes,’ she replies, and the howl in her head grows louder. ‘My mother. She’s died. I wanted to say goodbye.’
‘And which one is she?’ he asks, and sweeps an elegant hand across the burning landscape. She follows his gesture with her eyes, and sees a hundred burning ghats placed down the water’s edge, black smoke boiling from crimson flames and blotting out the sky. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which one.’
‘Well, you’d better hurry,’ he says, ‘you don’t want to miss it.’
And then she’s on her feet, tripping on the hem of her overlong lehenga choli, pulling her scarf across her body because she feels wrong, with so much of her torso on show, when people have died. And she’s running from pyre to pyre, slipping in mud stamped out by a hundred generations, and weeping, clutching passers-by by the arm and begging: ‘I’ve lost Janine! Which one is Janine? I can’t find her! Oh, God, where’s Janine?’
And then she’s awake, and her grief is choking her. Her throat has closed up and she struggles for a moment to breathe. She breaks through the barrier of tears and inhales. It’s not true, she tells herself. It was just a dream. And then she remembers, and it’s as if it’s happened all over again.
She stares at the ceiling and listens to the insistent shush of the rain through the open window, feels tears prickle in her eyes. This is no good. I can’t afford this. I must get up, get on with something. Be busy. She checks the time on her phone. Nearly five. She’s been asleep for four hours. Hossein should be home from his Home Office signing-in duties soon. If she lets herself sleep any longer, she’ll be awake all night.
She slides out from the bed and runs herself a glass of water. Coppery lukewarm London tap water, but it tastes delicious. She must be dehydrated, not surprisingly. She remembers a couple of plastic cups of tea in the night, Vesta going off to the vending machine in the ground-floor lobby, sugaring them up for energy, but she didn’t drink much from either. She runs another glass, drinks half of it down and goes to the window. It’s amazing how different the back gardens of Northbourne look in the rain. The greens are greener already, and brickwork she’s thought of as faded terracotta turns out to be dark rust now that the dust has washed off it. She pulls the curtain back and watches the world; wonders at the way people can simply vanish as if they’d never been.
Someone’s crying. She thinks they’ve been crying all along, since she woke. The desolate sobs of someone young, lost, vulnerable.
Collette squints out of the window. The crying sounds as though it’s coming from outside, but it’s so hard to tell. Though the heat has broken, everyone has left their windows open to let the cool air in. The crying could be coming from anywhere.
Is it Cher? It sounds as if it could be. She leans out of the window and looks up, but the girl’s window is firmly closed. As she ducks back in under the sash, she looks down and sees that a number of roof tiles have fallen into the basement area and shattered. Thank God I’m moving on, she thinks. This place will come down round our ears in the winter, if this is what a little shower of rain will do.
The sobbing continues, low, miserable and despairing. The occasional ‘ow’ breaking in to the rhythm. They sound like they’re in trouble, she thinks. It sounds like somebody’s hurt.
Am I still dreaming? Am I having one of those dreams where you think you’re awake? Am I hearing myself cry in my sleep, and thinking it’s coming from outside me? I am so tired. Maybe I’ve never woken up at all.
She drifts across the room and slips through the door. In the corridor, the faint sound of Gerard Bright’s music lulls her, makes her feel safe. If I were awake it would be a hundred decibels louder, she thinks. I’m hearing it through the fog of sleep, registering it because it’s there. She stands at the foot of the stairs, looking up, for a long time. All is silent up on the landing: just the ticketty-ticketty-tick of rain on glass. Something’s changed about the light up there. Despite the overcast skies, the landing looks brighter that she’s ever seen it. She’s halfway up the stairs before she sees that it’s because Thomas’s door stands wide open.
The sound of sobbing has disappeared. She pauses on the landing and listens at Cher’s door, but hears no sound within. She taps, calls her name, but hears no response.
Something draws her to Thomas’s door. It’s so odd to see it open. She’s never seen it so before, never even glimpsed in to the stairwell. A terrible smell rolls down the stairs, a smell of rot and chemicals that fills her with dread. And yet she finds herself walking up. This must still be a dream, she thinks, as she runs her hand up the plasterboard wall of the stairwell. In real life this smell would be enough to send me back down the stairs to look for one of the others. So I might as well go with it. At least I know it’s not real, not like when I was on the banks of the Ganges. That felt so real I thought I was going to die.
She reaches the door at the top of the stairs and finds that it, too, is open. She calls, tentatively, into the room: ‘Hello? Thomas? Hello?’ And steps inside. Sloped ceilings, a generalised grime, and an extraordinary and pungent collection of cardboard air fresheners drawing-pinned to the sloping ceiling as though they are a decorative flourish, a television on a stand and a record player on which the arm goes back and forth, back and forth, in the centre of an old LP. She goes over and takes it off. Can’t bear to watch old things damage themselves.