over his head and stands there shivering like a whipped dog. His chest is almost concave, delicate, like a boy’s. He has bruises on his ribs. The shape of him reminds me of Sam but the sharp, fearful smell of sweat is adult.
‘Where can he get dry clothes?’ demands Angel. ‘Which room?’
It seems challenging to think of the right answer to this question.
‘What, oh uh … upstairs, second door on the left,’ I say, then, ‘Shall I go?’
But Angel shakes her head. ‘No, not you,’ she inclines her head at Lucas. ‘Find all the landlines while you’re at it, yeah?’ As he begins to walk out of the room she calls out again. ‘Hey?’ He turns to look at her.
‘Wash your hands up there,’ she says gently, then gives a small, tight grin. ‘Your pits too. You stink.’ Lucas’s mouth twists and he leaves the room.
The baby screams on, hoarse now with misery. Every nerve end cries out to take over as Angel jiggles it roughly and says, ‘It’s OK,’ over, and over, again in a voice lacking any warmth at all.
Angel has seen her brother at his lowest ebb before, but this is something different. It is beginning to scare her now, the desperate look in his eyes. She hasn’t seen him for months and now this?
If he’d only tell her the whole story. She hasn’t had all of it, she knows that. It’s something about the way his gaze keeps sliding away from hers, like he’s frightened to meet her eyes full on.
When he’d rung earlier, Angel had been on her way back to a mate, Liz’s, where she’d intended to kip until the next morning. Then, bright and early, she planned to be off into London where she’d blow her money on a ticket to Inverness. She was really going to do it, too, this time. Make a fresh start in the clean sweet air, away from all the crap.
When her brother’s name had appeared on her screen she’d had the briefest moment when she contemplated not answering. It would serve him right for his recent lack of contact.
But she couldn’t do it. She could never really say no to Lucas.
When she heard the state he was in, she’d known straight away that this was it, a turning point in her life, albeit not the one she had been hoping for. He’d been incoherent with gasping sobs. As Angel tried to get him to calm down and tell her what had happened, it felt like everything inside her was swirling helplessly down a plughole. Whatever this was, it was very bad indeed.
She’d finally managed to extract the barest details from him and, while they’d sounded terrible enough, they hadn’t been everything. There was something missing.
It feels like he doesn’t trust her and that is beginning to piss her off. Hasn’t she always been the one to protect him? Didn’t she promise to do that very thing when they were kids?
Whatever he has done, they can find a way through it. How bad can it really be?
He just needs to calm down. Then they can make a proper plan and get the hell away.
The baby is on the table, next to her, screaming its head off still. The noise road-drills inside Angel’s skull. She shoots a look at the squalling creature. Tiny babies are so weird, with their jerky little limbs and crumpled pensioner faces. Strong and delicate all the same time. God knows she doesn’t want to have to hold it.
Angel’s disobedient brain immediately lobs an unwelcome image into her mind, like a shuttlecock over a net.
Her skinny sixteen-year-old legs with blood running down them, and the awful pains slicing across her stomach. The unsympathetic way the people in the hospital had spoken to her, about how she only had herself to blame and that she may have done some ‘permanent damage’.
Lucas keeps gazing at the baby, mournfully. It isn’t even his. But Angel knows her brother and has a strong suspicion that he isn’t going to agree to leaving it and getting the hell out of here. Why even bring it in the first place? It’s insane.
She pictures the bus to Scotland, weaving its way between soft green hills. Travelling far, far away from here.
For the moment, he’s still bubble-wrapped against the pain.
Getting away had been a good distraction. Pounding down those endless country roads, across rutted fields and along the side of the dual carriageway in the rain, feeling the bouncing squish of the baby inside the coat, had taken every bit of his resources.
But a juggernaut of guilt is bearing down on him and he won’t be able to out-run it for long.
Lucas recognizes this feeling. He wonders whether everything in his life has been a series of wobbly stepping stones from there to here.
‘I’ve found somewhere,’ said Angel when he’d rung her, almost incoherent with shock. ‘It’s not ideal but it’s all I can think of for now. A place with no connection to either of us.’
She knew only the bare facts and hadn’t pressed for more. But she will. And Lucas can never tell her the truth. He can picture all too well how she would look at him if she knew what he’d done. No, he needs her too much right now. His sister is the only person in the world he could have called. If she abandoned him …
Angel had been almost calm on the phone. But Lucas knows this is how she deals with the really big things. For all her dramas, she’s capable of going to a quiet, still place in a storm. That’s what he needs right now.
‘Whatever has happened, we’ll get through it. Together,’ she’d said, then, ‘Hey, do you remember Grandad’s? Remember what I said?’
How could he forget? It was what he’d been thinking about all the way to this woman’s house.
Their safe place.
The sharp animal stink and the prickly, itchy straw in the barn. Lying on their bellies and peering down, pretending no one could find them. Eating Grandad’s weird old-school food. Pies and tinned peas. Custard creams and cocoa.
Laughing at his crap jokes, and playing with Boris. Lucas having to be prised away from him every night at bedtime. And even then, the old sheepdog would find its way onto his bed and Grandad would pretend not to know anything about it in the morning. He’d say things like, ‘It’s the funniest thing, but Boris’s bed looks quite untouched. I can’t understand it,’ and pretend to shake his head, while Lucas vibrated with suppressed giggles and hugged the dog harder.
Angel doesn’t know about the photo he keeps in his wallet, soft now with age and handling. Marianne is in it, grinning
