I said the right thing when I told Isaac she left us to become a star in heaven and light up the sky over Oystermouth Bay. He started looking for her every single night, and when he couldn’t see any stars he asked if she’d forgotten to shine for us. I panicked and told him Estelle’s star was so beautiful and bright, she was probably needed somewhere else…
Confession 2: My head’s been full of demons again. It’s kind of intense. There’s just so much pressure to be a fully formed person, straight out the gate. Maybe I’m losing it. Maybe it’s just me?
Confession 3: A secret scares the crap out of me. Do you think my promise to Estelle will make everything come right?
Ariel lifted her thumbs from the keypad. She entered Tumbleweed’s name in the To box. Scanned over what she’d written. Faltered.
Tapped Delete.
In the distance a car alarm began to wail.
She slid her legs from her sleeping bag and carried her phone to the woodchip wall of artwork. Shivering in the half-light, she ran her eyes over the shadowy rows of pictures until she settled upon a sketch of a woman, her arms loosely folded over her small, bare chest. The woman’s face was in profile, her expression hard to read. Ariel leaned her head to one side. From one angle, she thought she saw rapture; from another, grief.
‘What are you looking at?’ she whispered.
A thin wedge of light from the window shimmied across the floorboards. London was lonely at night, she decided. It wasn’t the great big adventure she’d been expecting.
‘Loneliness is nothing more than an illusion,’ she reminded herself. ‘Just like Frank said.’
She accessed the camera function on her phone and held it up in front of her. ‘Anyway, I’m not here for an adventure,’ she added in a purposeful voice. ‘I’m here because of a promise.’
Ariel stared at the wall ahead. Then again, what if her cross-country mission brought her closer, somehow, to Estelle?
She snapped a photo of the woman in the picture and sent it to Tumbleweed.
Somewhere nearby, in the city of shadows, a clock struck five.
Her train to Edinburgh was at eight…
She made her way back to the sofa, zipped herself inside her sleeping bag and dropped her gaze to her canvas bag lying nearby. The person who’d sent her the letter – summoning her to Scotland in such a polite, cryptic way – had no idea Ariel would be arriving early. And that was just the way she liked it.
In fact, it was about the only part of this entire weird undertaking that was perfectly fine with her.
The Tower
BLACKPOOL, FEBRUARY 1948
Henry
Henry’s jaw drops. The moment he steps inside, he can smell it: something raw; and electric; and alive.
The entrance hall at street level is bigger, grander than he’d imagined; high-ceilinged, ablaze with light, fizzing with expectation. He joins the queue behind a man in a flamboyant silk tie and gazes overhead, cap raked at an angle, hands resting casually in the trouser pockets of his uniform. The new year is six weeks old. He’s back in Britain at last. He is almost, but not quite, home.
Henry roots his feet to the floor, his grey eyes drinking in the wonderment of it all. Lined up ahead is a medley of earnest faces, young men and women like himself, each more dedicated than the next to the business of having a good time. His thoughts flit impatiently to the music, to the chance to finally kick back and relax. He sucks in his cheeks and whistles, long and low. This is it, he thinks. This is something marvellous indeed!
In the shelter of the foyer it’s warm, too. Outside, a blistering wind tears along the promenade, snapping at the skirts of a group of girls who bustle through the open doorway behind him, giggling, a saucy glint in their eyes, their cheeks rouged raw by the chill. He reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette and pulls his hand out empty. Damn it. He gave his last one to Davy Hardcastle. ‘Good luck!’ they’d called out to him. ‘See you back at the billet! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
Henry smiles to himself. The Tower Ballroom. It had been his idea to come here all along, but the others had their own plans. O’Malley (it was always O’Malley; was there any place on earth the guy didn’t know?) had heard of a bar where the girls kicked up their heels, danced a merry jig on the tables, and if you were lucky, let you run the tips of your fingers up and down the finely stitched seams of their stockings, all the way to no-man’s-land where the gossamer silk ended, and a narrow strip of quivering bare flesh lay waiting to lead you all the way to heaven…
Henry pays his entrance fee and makes his way up a vast staircase, two steps at a time, all the way to the top floor. The dull click of his right knee as he climbs. The heavy drag of his boots. He tries not to think about how disorientated he feels, how the heft of his body would fall slack and clumsy from lack of sleep if he let it. As he rounds a bend, the muscles in his calves protest and contract beneath his skin. He keeps his eyes fixed on the turn ahead. Pushes on.
The scent of perfume, of anticipation, clouds the air. He wishes his uniform didn’t hang so loosely on his diminished frame, but there’s not much he can do about that now. Back at the billet he’d stumbled upon a hollow-eyed stranger in the mirror – a human coat-hanger – no body inside to speak of, just his air force blues suspended like a phantom before him. Henry tugs at the hem of his jacket and pulls himself upright. It’s an automatic movement, ingrained by now. But there are no commanding officers here. No roll call awaits. Just soaring melodies, couples whirling like spinning tops on the dance floor, and eight shimmering glitter balls rotating overhead.
He reaches the top floor, passes through a pair of double doors and enters the ballroom at balcony level. A blast of music rains against Henry’s skin, and a sweet, invigorating rush of adrenaline surges like nectar through his limbs. To his left, row upon row of plush, upholstered seats fan out vertiginously one behind the other, each arranged to afford the best possible view of the dance floor. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the low-level lighting, but he can tell at once that he made the right decision to come upstairs – there are far fewer people up here, and the spectacle is magnificent, like a view from Mount Olympus itself.
‘Bet you any money the Café de Paris never had anything on this.’
Henry turns, sees the man in the silk tie standing in the shadows to his right.
‘The place in London,’ he continues. ‘Piccadilly. Got bombed in the Blitz?’
‘I never went there,’ Henry replies. He shrugs, his mouth curling into a smile. ‘I wasn’t old enough to get in at the time.’
‘Wouldn’t have stopped me,’ the man says with a
