If I weren’t so against Dad’s whole Being obsession, I might have gone with them just for the company. Instead, I spend my first few days in Edinburgh bored and alone in my room, watching the latest Standing Fallen displays online and refreshing Leah’s profile pages for updates that never come.
I’m scrolling through her Instagram feed when Dad and Rani arrive back from checking out an angel statue in the National Museum on Wednesday evening. The last photo on her account is of Emma and me at the beach, taken back in March. Emma’s doing her best Kardashian pout; the corner of my mouth is twitching into a smile, but I’m not quite looking at the camera. My eyes are on Leah.
She stopped speaking to me a few days after that. No argument, no explanation; she just stopped acknowledging that I even existed. It wasn’t the first time – Leah was forever stressing about ‘us’, though what ‘we’ were changed as often as Emma’s nail colour – but it had never been so abrupt, or so extreme. Still, I didn’t think it was anything more than another freak-out. Sam and I even put bets on how long it would last: he said Friday; I said Tuesday lunchtime.
We never found out who won, because on Monday Leah didn’t turn up to school at all. The next morning, the worries started to creep in, and by Wednesday I couldn’t concentrate for the sickly feeling in my stomach. I made Emma skip second period and come to Leah’s house with me to find out what was going on. Her dad flung the door open barely a second after I’d knocked.
‘Oh. Hi, girls.’ His face flooded with disappointment. ‘Leah’s not here. Kirsty’s . . . Kirsty’s moved out – gone to her sister’s down in Stirling. She took Leah with her.’
‘Oh. Right.’ My initial reaction was relief, followed by confusion – why hadn’t they told anyone? When I’d asked at the school reception, they said they hadn’t heard anything. ‘Well, will they be back?’
Mr Maclennan swallowed. There was a long strip of stubble over his Adam’s apple that he’d missed shaving. ‘I don’t know, Jaya. I didn’t think she’d actually – I don’t know.’
He mumbled something about needing to make a phone call and quickly shut the door. And that was it. There was no note left for me from Leah, no emails or messages since. I must have called her a hundred times, but she never picked up. Her online profiles lay unchanged; eventually her phone started going straight to voicemail. Stirling might as well have been Saturn.
My phone vibrates in my hand, making me jump. The notification scrolls along the top of the screen: BREAKING: Glasgow chapter of Standing Fallen stage ‘protest’ on top of high school.
I click on the link; after a moment, a video flickers on to the screen. Dozens of tiny figures are stretched along the roof of an empty school building on the outskirts of town, holding hands like paper-chain people. I recognize some of them from past protests on the news. There’s the fat man with the acne scars, his stomach lolling over the waistband of his baggy jeans. The tall redhead who was a grown-up Princess Merida a few months ago, but now has dark shadows circling her eyes and hair hanging to her shoulders in lank, greasy strips.
The camera zooms in on the leader. He’s an emaciated white guy, maybe mid-thirties, with strawberry-blond hair, cauliflower ears and almost no chin. He’s standing by one of the chimneys, screaming into a loudspeaker, just like the guy here in Edinburgh did the other night.
My head begins to spin again. I feel as if I’m going to fall, though I’m lying on the bottom bunk with nowhere to go but through the mattress. I hate seeing them teeter there, knowing just one gust of wind could send them tumbling. I know I should just stop watching, but I can’t. It’s a compulsion. Rani’s addicted to tracking the Falls; I’m addicted to tracking the Fallen.
On the screen, the sirens are growing louder and louder. The group raise their arms, their own broken wings, like a troop of actors accepting applause. The leader screams something about the arrogance of the human race, and—
The video cuts out. Not just the video: the whole screen. My phone, medieval piece of junk that it is, has run out of battery.
I toss it aside and roll off the bottom bunk. ‘Rani!’
She and Dad are in the living room, working on their research. After just a few days, Dad has managed to transform the place into a madman’s laboratory: there are pinboards covered in notes, a fringe of Post-it notes stuck to the sofa and chairs, books on Zoroastrianism and weather patterns and aerodynamics spread like stepping stones across the carpet. It’s like the guy has never heard of Microsoft Office.
‘Can I borrow that?’ I ask, while Rani swipes at the screen. ‘Mine’s just died.’
‘I’m busy, Jaya.’ Her tone makes me bristle. Whenever she’s acting as Dad’s research assistant, she’s talked to me like I’m five years younger than her and not vice versa. ‘Why don’t you just charge it?’
‘I need to watch something now, genius. Come on, Rani. I’ll just be a minute.’
‘Jaya! This is important! They’re about to release the results of Being No. 86’s autopsy! This could tell us whether he was still alive or—’
She starts to explain, but I cut her off. My need to watch this video feels more urgent than usual, almost desperate. I turn to Dad.
‘Can I jump on your laptop quickly? It’ll just take a minute.’
He keeps on typing, staring zombie-like at the screen, and I have to shake his shoulder to get him to look up. He spins around, looking so annoyed that I actually take a step backwards.
‘What, Jaya? Can’t you see I’m busy? Your music videos or vlogs or whatever can wait until tomorrow.’
And I don’t know why, but that’s the thing that finally makes me snap. I kick the skirting board, leaving a muddy smudge on the off-white paint. Rani drops her phone into her lap; Dad spins in his chair, his mouth open. Before I can stop myself, all the anger that’s been bubbling up inside me for weeks, even months, comes spilling out of my mouth.
‘This is ridiculous! You’re totally delusional! There’s absolutely no chance you can do this – you do realize that?’ I kick over a huge leather-bound book so hard it sends shooting pains through my foot. ‘You’ve given up your job, ruined our whole summer, our whole lives, and for what? For the tiny, impossibly small chance that a Being might just happen to fall out of the sky at the right moment? It’s insane!’
Dad’s cheeks turn red, but he doesn’t shout. Instead, he closes his eyes and takes a long, deep breath. It’s such a Mum move it actually makes me feel a bit sick.
‘I’m trying to make things better,’ he says calmly. ‘I’m trying to make things right again.’
‘How? By getting some big cash prize? If you wanted to be rich so badly, why didn’t you just keep working at Tomlinson? Oh, wait, yeah, you’re “looking after” us,’ I say, adding air quotes with my fingers. ‘Hardly. Rani and I don’t need you; we’d be fine on our own. You barely act like a parent, anyway.’
‘Don’t you –’
He stumbles over his words, breaking off mid-sentence. He looks . . . wounded. There was a time when a look like that would have me apologizing in a nanosecond, but not now. I storm out of the room and grab my rain jacket and the dog leash from the coat stand.
‘Come on, Perry.’
The dog leaps out of her basket, tail wagging happily. I let her run out on to the stairwell, then slam the door behind me. I half expect Dad to shout at me to come back, or at least to ask where I think I’m going, but the door doesn’t open.