I grit my teeth, trying to still the anger bubbling up inside me. He’s so stupid. This whole ‘plan’ is so stupid. You can’t catch a Being. You just can’t. They fall at insane speeds. They’ve smashed through buildings, turned highways into craters. One caused a mini tidal wave when she landed in the South Pacific, and another accidentally killed a woman when he fell in a town square in Armenia. It’s not a bloody Looney Tunes cartoon: you can’t stick a trampoline under them and spring them back to safety.
Nobody knows when the next one will fall. Sometimes three will tumble down in one day, and sometimes weeks will go by before another appears. There are scientific and religious institutions pouring billions into working out a pattern, but they haven’t even come close to finding one. It’s not like Dad, former Sales & Marketing Manager for Tomlinson Cigarettes, now stay-at-home layabout, is going to be the one to crack the code.
He makes a right turn on to a brightly lit street of shops and restaurants. Outside Pizza Express, a man in a kilt and tin-foil wings is playing something that sounds vaguely like Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’ on the bagpipes. Dad sings along, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Rani joins in for the chorus. They belt it out together, carefree and off-key, the excitement crackling off them like static. A dash of pity simmers my anger. He really thinks he can do this.
He actually thinks he’s going to catch an angel.
TWO
The flat that Dad has rented is a dump. The kitchen is Barbie-sized, the bathroom walls are cloudy with damp, and the living-room carpet looks like somebody’s gone all Jackson Pollock with a bottle of red wine. Behind the smell of chemical lemon cleaning products, there’s a stubborn undercurrent of beer, weed and takeaway pizza.
‘I rent it out to students during term time,’ says Shona, our landlady for the next few weeks. ‘Gives the place a youthful energy.’
She fixes me with a wide mulberry smile. She’s white, fifty-something and looks just like an aubergine: skinny on top, round on the bottom and purple all over. Baggy violet trousers, an indigo blouse, hair the exact shade of Ribena. At first I thought it might be a cult uniform, but then she told me I had ‘aggressive red tones in my aura’, so I think she might just be a bit odd.
‘I’m sure you’ll be comfortable,’ she says, as she leads us back to the living room. ‘It’s small, but the chi flows very well.’
‘It’s great,’ Dad says. He hasn’t noticed the scowl on my face, or that Rani has pulled the collar of her T-shirt over her nose to block out the smell seeping from the sofa. ‘Reminds me of my uni days.’
For Dad, this flat is yet more proof that his angel-chasing plan is destined to succeed. Just a few days ago, he was frantically searching hostels and campsites – with the festival a couple of weeks away, most accommodation in Edinburgh has been booked for months. Shona’s place was too, until one of the acrobats she’d rented it to broke his ankle tripping over a paving slab and the duo had to cancel.
‘And it’s just a few metres from St Giles’ Cathedral!’ he said as he eagerly sent off the deposit. ‘Being No. 8 fell there on New Year’s Day, remember? That has to be a sign!’
Now in the living room, he goes to the window and pushes it open. ‘You can see it from here! Look, Ran, see the scaffolding?’ He twists back to look at Shona, a stupid grin on his face. ‘If this doesn’t help my research, I don’t know what will.’
Shona nods gravely. ‘Aye, I find the atmosphere in this part of the city very vitalizing. It’s sure to inspire you.’ Her eyebrows – also purple – rise slightly. ‘So, is it just the three of you?’
I shoot her a dirty look. This again. I’d noticed a split-second of confusion in her eyes as she opened the door, wondering how my pale, blond father could have two brown-skinned daughters. It quickly faded as she worked it out, but now she’s looking for the missing part of the set. It happens a lot when we’re out with Dad, sometimes accompanied by a bunch of nosy questions. I’ve always hated it when people do that. Since Mum’s accident, though, it’s felt a hundred times worse.
To my relief, Dad changes the subject without answering. Soon they’re talking about his research, and the trip that Shona’s taking to a silent retreat in Italy. I leave them to their small talk and wander off to the room that Rani and I will be sharing for the next few weeks: cucumber-green walls, grey metal bunk beds, three dried-up ferns in one corner. My heart sinks a second time as I dump my bag on the floor.
‘Bagsy top bunk!’
Rani scrambles up the ladder and dives on to the bed, tossing her spindly legs into the air. She’s barely hit the mattress before she whips out her phone again.
‘Guess what? They think No. 85 could be the sister of the Being who fell in Greenland in April. Look, they’re like twins!’
She holds out the phone to show me, but I swat it away and go to the window. I miss my room back home already. It’s one of the few places in the world where I can escape the news, photos, adverts and non-stop mindless 24/7 chatter about the Beings. Not much chance of that here.
‘No. 85 also landed at the same longitude as the Being in Laos.’ Rani taps on another link, ignoring the fact that I’m ignoring her. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’
I bump my head against the windowpane. Raindrops race down the glass, sketching ghostly rivers over my vision. ‘Fascinating, Ran. Utterly fascinating.’
It poured last time we came to Edinburgh too. That was two years ago, during the Fringe, the huge arts and theatre festival that happens here every August. Never one to be put off by a ‘bit of drizzle’, Mum dragged us all over town to see the street artists: a cappella groups and contortionists and hip-hop dancers, acrobats and fire-eaters and a tightrope-walking violinist, all scattering flyers like wedding confetti. My hair went frizzy, Perry smelt like compost, and Rani kept moaning about her wet trainers, but it was sort of fun.
‘A city of spirit and spectacle,’ as Mum said. She was always saying stuff like that. Dad used to call her ‘my poetess’, then laugh when she’d go off on a rant about the term being sexist.
This time round, Edinburgh is full of fake angels. Performers dressed head to toe in gold are dotted around the street, re-enacting the Falls in stilted clockwork dances. Two little girls skip past Starbucks, plastic halos bobbing over their heads, and tour guides lead groups of Wingdings to and from the cathedral. The spectacle goes on, but the spirit has darkened: it’s all just a way to squeeze money from dead Beings, and I hate it.
‘Jaya!’ Rani shouts suddenly. ‘Jaya, look!’
I spin around. ‘What, Rani? What now?’
She points through the second window. I follow her stare – and my heart drops. Across the street, twenty, thirty, forty people are emerging on to the rooftops of the flats opposite ours. It’s them. The Standing Fallen.
They look just like the chapters on the news: a mix of ages, all dressed in stained shirts, ragged jumpers, jeans far too ripped to be fashionable. Most of the men have uncut beards, and the women’s hair lies long and lank around greasy faces. One of the members, a short, squat man holding a loudspeaker, tiptoes across the ridge. He hops nimbly on to the chimney as the others inch towards the roof’s edge, forming a line behind the rain gutter.
I’ve seen scenes like this on TV dozens of times, but it’s different this close up. I’d imagined fear on their faces, panic in the air. The members slither a little as they creep over the wet tiles, but most of them don’t look scared. Beneath the dirt, their expressions are cold and blank.
‘Jaya!’ Rani grips the edge of the bunk bed. ‘They have kids with them!’
My mouth goes dry. She’s right: there’s boy of around thirteen up there, and a younger girl, maybe seven or eight. Unlike the adults, they’re obviously terrified. The girl has her eyes squeezed tight shut, as if making a wish, while the boy stares at the crowd gathering seven storeys below. His legs are shaking so much I’m sure he’ll slip. A small woman holds one of their hands in each of hers, but she doesn’t comfort them. She doesn’t even look at them.