smile. ‘Gracias. They’re part of my coursework. I’m still working on my technique, but honestly, I’d rather look at those than at that hideous woodchip wallpaper underneath.’
Ariel pulled off her gloves and ran a finger over the pockmarked surface of the wall. She’d grown up in a house full of woodchip wallpaper, but this stuff looked original, like it had actually been there since the ’70s, long before she was born.
She took a step back and inhaled. The air smelled damp and faintly aromatic, an oddly comforting blend of the rundown and the exotic.
‘You’re a lifesaver for putting me up,’ she said, turning back to Mags. ‘Linus thinks I’m in Oxford with Tumbleweed, so at least being here with you makes me feel less guilty.’ She caught the look of curiosity on Mags’s face and shrugged. ‘It was a necessary lie. Given the circumstances.’
‘No worries. Any friend of my cousin’s. Who’s Linus, anyway? Your boyfriend?’
Ariel smiled. ‘No, he’s my dad.’
‘You call your dad by his first name? Wow. Progressive.’
Ariel rolled her eyes. ‘Trust me, you wouldn’t say that if you met him. The name thing’s just something I’ve done for a while. It’s no big deal, really.’
Her gaze drifted to the sofa.
‘That’s where you’ll be crashing, I’m afraid,’ Mags said. ‘Or if that doesn’t grab you, my boyfriend and I are going to a party in Kensal Rise. It might even turn into an all-nighter if the booze holds out, so don’t be surprised if we don’t come back…’ She paused. ‘You know, you’re welcome to come with us if you like?’
As she spoke, a tall, monobrowed guy in a donkey jacket slunk into view in the bedroom doorway. He looked over at Ariel and grinned. ‘Alright?’
Ariel held up her palm in greeting. She opened her mouth to answer Mags’s question, then faltered. A student party. In London. Cool, arty, interesting people her own age. No one to answer to but herself. Wasn’t that what eighteen-year-olds were supposed to do? Let their hair down and have some fun?
She took a breath, felt the sharp thud of a door slamming shut somewhere deep inside her, and slowly shook her head. ‘Thanks, Mags, but I have to leave early in the morning to get to King’s Cross. I can’t risk missing my train.’
When they’d gone it felt as though they’d taken every trace of oxygen from the room.
Ariel laid her coat and scarf on the arm of the sofa. She stood tugging at the sleeves of her jumper, trying to adjust to the stillness. In Oystermouth, she was used to it. At night, once the bay had grown cool and dark and secretive, not even the low roll of the waves carried to her bedroom at the back of the house. But here – in the city – it was unexpected. Unsettling, even.
She turned and searched for the iPod before remembering that it, too, was gone; swept into Mags’s pocket along with a packet of Rizlas and some gum. The only sounds now came from the street: the swoosh of passing traffic; the truncated slamming of car doors; the dull scrape of anonymous, torso-less feet on the pavement beyond the railings; low voices, muffled voices, distant, unintelligible all.
Alone in the city’s alien underbelly, Ariel watched the pulsing of her heart through her clothes, the first leg of her journey begun.
She settled herself cross-legged on the floor and unzipped her wheelie bag on the Persian rug. Her hands slid beneath the hastily packed layers of clothing until they found the large, padded envelope at the bottom. She lifted it out and placed it in her lap, contemplating, as she had done so many times before, the startling immediacy of Estelle’s handwriting etched across its front.
Ariel read the words out loud: ‘For E.M.H.’
Secured with a strip of Sellotape beneath it was a Post-it Note containing a phone number and an address on the outskirts of Edinburgh – some far-off village she’d never even heard her mother mention before. And below that, five words, their lettering markedly less defined: ARIEL, PLEASE DELIVER BY HAND.
Ariel ran her fingers over the words, held the package to her chest, closed her eyes. It was bad enough not knowing what was inside it, but now she’d had to lie through her teeth, too. ‘Promise me you won’t tell him,’ Estelle had asked her. ‘You must promise me you won’t tell Dad anything about this at all.’
Why???
‘Fuck.’ Ariel glanced at the low-rent transience of her surroundings. Here, in this abandoned basement, the package had mysteriously transformed itself into the most intimate object in the room…
She lowered it to her lap and slid it back inside her case.
The second envelope – the much smaller one containing a letter ‘inviting’ her to begin her journey – had arrived by post the previous week, addressed in an unfamiliar hand to Miss Ariel Bliss. It remained tucked away where she’d hidden it, in the inside pocket of her canvas shoulder bag.
Remained, as it turned out, an enigma, even after reading.
The bathroom, Mags had told her, could only be accessed by walking through the bedroom. (‘Cracks me up,’ she’d called as she headed out the door. ‘Whenever I want to blow people’s minds, I tell them my shitty rental has an underground en suite!’)
Ariel pushed open the bedroom door and switched on the light. Immediately to her right was a desk weighed down by a large pile of books on art and design. Alongside them were a couple of well-thumbed Ursula Le Guin novels. Half a dozen by Stephen King. She reached out her hand and touched the woody texture of their spines with her fingertips. Home, she mused, with an unexpected smile.
The bathroom itself, tucked away in the far corner of the room, was narrow, windowless, white; surely, she thought later, the least likely location on earth for what was to happen next. And yet it was right here, as she was bending over the sink – one hand drawing her hair back from her face, the other holding her toothbrush – that she suddenly felt a pair of hands brush against her shoulders from behind.
Ariel dropped her toothbrush into the basin and spun round. Every cheesy horror movie she’d ever seen flashed before her eyes. Slowly, she turned once more to face the mirror. The reflection staring back at her was her own, the backdrop nothing more than a plain, ceramic tile.
‘Holy shit,’ she said in a horrified voice. ‘Get a grip! Idiot.’
A shiver of recognition rippled along her spine. Ariel gasped, her eyes open wide. What she’d felt had been cold, fragile, and something else – something she almost didn’t dare articulate – something familiar. The invisible hands had lain on her body for the briefest of seconds, but they had been there, she was certain of it.
Just before dawn, a pair of car headlights sliced through the living room darkness with two exploratory beams of light. Ariel stirred and raised her head from the sofa. She listened for the sound of Mags’s key scraping against the door, the drunken rapping of knuckles on the window pane, but none came.
A shadow flitted briefly past the window. Bollocks. She hated being scared!
She stared up at the ceiling, her heart thundering in
