The Fall - By Claire McGowan

Charlotte

Charlotte sat still at the table, staring at the huge pile of post. However many times she closed her eyes, it wouldn’t go away. For the first time there was no one else to tackle it with her, and unless she slit open the innumerable window envelopes, money would not jump from one virtual pile to another, and soon the lights would go off and she’d be sitting in the dark without even endless re-runs of Friends to dull her into numbness.

Three piles, she decided. Wedding stuff – invoices, gifts still coming in from the slow or the uninformed, condolences – they were all going, there was no point in any of it. Then the dross – flyers, credit-card offers, takeaway menus. Finally, the bills. Some of them had red notices on now when they came in the door and she would have been ashamed for Mike and Susie downstairs to see them if she really cared any more. Dan always paid the bills, so she was hazy on the details, but surely they couldn’t be overdue so soon. Weren’t they all on direct debits from his account?

She got up and shuffled in her slippers to the little spare room. Dan sometimes worked in there at weekends. She rifled through the papers on the desk – lots and lots of printouts in a messy pile, columns and columns of figures, some ringed in red, stamped over with confidential. They meant nothing to her. She opened the top drawer and shoved in there were all the envelopes – gas, water, phone – unopened and, she would guess, unpaid. What did it mean? Had he cancelled the direct payments? Why?

She opened the second drawer and there were packets and packets of pills. Paracetamol, Ibuprofen, Zantac, everything you could think of. She touched the silver packets, the popped-out craters where the tablets had been. What did it mean?

Out loud in the quiet room, she said, ‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’ She’d have listened. Wouldn’t she?

In the middle of all the post was a heavy embossed envelope, the crest of Dan’s bank indented into the paper in resolute black. She ran her fingers over the grooves of his name: Mr Daniel Stockbridge. Could there be a name more solid, more sure? She had hoped to hide herself in it, to be equally sure and solid. Mrs Stockbridge. But everything could crumble. Everything could fall apart. She knew that now.

She opened the letter. Normally she never snooped, didn’t even check his phone; she knew how much he would hate it. But times had changed. When she finally made herself look at the words, it said what she feared. They were very sorry but they had to terminate his employment on the grounds of gross misconduct. If he had any questions he could pop in and see her, signed Kerry Hall, HR Officer. Charlotte flung it down angrily, saying out loud, ‘You stupid cow.’ He couldn’t exactly swing by her office. Dan had worked at Haussman’s for eight years and they didn’t care enough not to copy and paste.

Overwhelmed, she swept the pile aside, tears pattering down and smudging the ink. Who cared? What did it matter if she didn’t pay the credit-card bill? But uncovered by her dramatic gesture was a piece of paper with no envelope, scribbled on A4 fileblock, ripped awkwardly so one side tapered in. Curiously she picked it up and tossed it down again as if the paper had burned her. In the cramped crazy writing, the first phrase she’d seen had been, kill you racist cunt.

She was suddenly cold right down to her bones with fear. The words spiralled up and down the page in circles, the way a child might write. It lay on the table like a creeping spider, words scored in deeply with red ink.

Charlotte sat at the table surrounded by the litter of her old life. What was happening to her?


Hegarty

The Kingston Town club was shuttered in daytime, closed against the clatter of traffic and delivery trucks. There were grilles on the windows but the yellow police tape was gone. Were they opening again, then, this place where so many lives had been ruined? The back of a restaurant, flats up above with people’s plants and posters; a dry-cleaner’s. Not much to the street where Anthony Johnson had breathed his last, choking on his own blood.

It was hard to believe this was the same place where Hegarty had come across that scene of horror, the blood spreading over the floor under the fluorescent light, realising he was standing in it and that it was all over his shoes, the dull shine drying in sticky pools. He noticed the yellow sign on the dry-cleaner’s opposite – CCTV in operation here – and he tried to remember if they’d requested it. Surely they would have? How long did it take?

He pushed in, noting the flutter of an old bit of police tape. ‘The boss here?’ he called. Anthony Johnson’s brother was back, apparently, and had taken over the place.

The skinny black guy behind the counter squared up to him. ‘You the police again? You not catch the guy who did it?’

‘Is he here, please? Ronald Johnson – he’s in charge now?’

The man was slowly polishing a glass. ‘Sorry. He’s out.’

‘Really?’

He shrugged. ‘Not here.’

‘Right. Can you ask him to ring me, please?’ Hegarty placed his card on the bar, in a puddle of beer.

‘I’ll ask,’ the man said, but it was clear from his tone that Hegarty shouldn’t expect a call anytime soon.

On his way out Hegarty paused and saw someone open the back office door and peer out, a tall black man. The door quickly shut again and the guy at the counter said loudly, ‘See ya, Officer.’

So Ronald Johnson didn’t want to talk to the police who were trying to find his brother’s killer. Interesting.

Checking no one was around, Hegarty walked along the wall of the club, the windows blind with shutters. By the side of it was a small alley, easy to miss, blocked up with bins. He slipped into it. It was only a few metres long, and so narrow he couldn’t hold his arms out wide in it, but there, set in the brick wall, was the outline of a metal door. Alarm in use, it warned. He looked at it for a long time, wondering, and then turned to walk to his home in Kentish Town.


Keisha

She didn’t know what she was doing.

She was on her old street, walking towards what was still partly her flat. She paid the bloody rent, didn’t she? But when she passed the burger shop and turned into the concrete building, after that she had no clue. Maybe he’d be at home. Of course she wouldn’t go in if he was there – would she?

The last time they met he’d beaten her up, yes. She knew that. She wasn’t one of these stupid women they always had on episodes of The Bill, and they’re all like, ‘oh no, I walked into a door’. He’d hit her. Yes. But it wasn’t that bad. She didn’t need to go to hospital or anything. They’d just got pissed off with each other – who didn’t? Sometimes she’d have liked to slap him round the face, too.

What was she doing? There was no sound in the concrete stairwell, so maybe he wasn’t home. Unless he was asleep. She’d just go in and get her clothes, look for more cash, eat something – it was her f*cking stuff, after all. Then she’d go – somewhere. Do something. Deffo.

She reached her door, or her old door, feeling like a burglar. She breathed in all the air she could get, cold and smoke-smelling on the draughty stairs, and she knocked. If you pressed your ear up to the door you’d hardly have heard it, so no surprise no one came. She knocked a little bit louder: nothing.

She reached up on her tiptoes and felt along the dusty doorsill for the key she’d stuck up there. After Ruby got taken away, Keisha’d had a run of losing hers when she went out, pissed, trying to forget. But the key wouldn’t go in. She was just standing there like a retard, pushing at the door. He’d f*cking changed the locks. She was so shocked by this that she just stared for a moment. Then she heard a noise and her heart went crazy – he was here!

But no, it was a woman’s voice, raspy with smoke, belting out, ‘Liam! Watch the bleeding stairs!’ It was Jacinta from upstairs trailing her boy by the hand, while trying to lift her little girl’s pushchair down the stairs at the same time. No lift in this building and they put the family on the fourth floor. Sometimes Keisha thought these men who ran things could do with trying to lift a baby and shopping and a kid and a buggy up four flights of stairs. ‘Want a hand?’

Jacinta gave her a suspicious look through red-rimmed eyes, then jerked her chin, making her high pony-tail fly up. ‘Get the wheels.’

Keisha picked up the spinning bottom wheels, and panting, the little boy all the while about to fall and crack his bloody head, they got downstairs.

‘You seen Chris?’ she said as she put the buggy down, quickly, ashamed to have to ask.

Jacinta paused to take a packet of Silk Cut out of her pink cropped combats. ‘Kicked you out, did he?’

Keisha shrugged. ‘Had a row.’

‘Me and my Keith, we fight like cats and dogs some nights. But he don’t ever do that to me.’ She nodded to Keisha’s cracked face. ‘Listen, love. We all heard the racket – whole building did. Nearly called the boys in blue. So Keith up and asks him next day, Is your missus OK?’ She lit the cigarette, inhaling. ‘And he turns round and says, Ain’t got a missus. Then he comes up real close to Keith, all scary, and he goes, If she comes round, you better f*cking tell me. Else I’ll come after you too.’ She dragged deeply on her fag. ‘If I were you, love, I’d get off sharpish. He’s bad news, that fella.’

Keisha’s stomach was heaving. What was she, thick? He’d banged her head off the table and she came back for more, thinking they could just go back to Happy Families or whatever it was they’d been.

Keisha turned to leave, almost running to get away, but Jacinta called her back. ‘Oi,’ she said. ‘Where’s that little ’un of yours. She safe?’ Everyone in the building knew what had happened to Ruby.

Ruby. Suddenly Keisha’s feelings sank down to an even worse level, and it felt like something heavy was sitting on her chest. She couldn’t breathe for a minute. She’d never thought of it, ’cos he was never interested in the kid. But if he wanted to get back at Keisha . . . What if all the time she’d been hiding in the f*cking hostel, he was . . . Oh, f*ck.

Setting off at a run to the bus stop, she fumbled for the blonde girl’s purse and took out the Oyster card. Surely the girl wouldn’t mind her using a bit for the bus. Not when it was this big a f*cking deal.


Charlotte

She had to admit she was grateful her mother and Phil had come, if only because they’d left her enough food to eke out for nearly the whole first week. But eventually she’d eaten even the manky Bran Flakes and all the food in the freezer and she’d been having her tea black for days. It suited her mood, dark and bitter.

On the Friday – the day before what would have been her wedding – Charlotte was going crazy. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on the stupid burbling TV, hadn’t so far dared to pick up the phone or go online. It was only hiding from that onslaught of pity, that tsunami of sorry, that was keeping her on her feet, and she knew it. Her thoughts were sliding back and forth like a low-slung pendulum – eat, TV, sleep – and that was where they needed to stay. But now she was twitching with loneliness, standing up, sitting down, waiting for the kettle to boil, then coming to and realising she’d been there for ages and the water had cooled. To make matters worse she knew there were hundreds of things to do. She had already started four different letters to Dan’s parents, asking them to help her find a lawyer, and abandoned them all. They weren’t answering the phone.

Charlotte pulled her laptop over to her, the tiny silver case light as a box of chocolates. Desperate for contact, any human contact, she clicked on to Facebook, and the white-and-blue screen came up. Photos, names – Alison is watching Britain’s Got Talent, oo-er. Pete thinks lemon cheesecake is yum. So many words spilled out to say more or less nothing.

She took a deep breath and clicked on her own wall.

Hey Mrs Stockbridge how was the wedding? Someone who hadn’t heard, idiot.

Charlotte r u ok? Saw the news honey wtf?

From the rest, some kind of shocked silence. If Dan was dead, messages would pour in, she didn’t doubt it. There was no grief so deep as to be wordless any more – RIP, miss u mate, your a great guy, the usual misspelled rubbish. But what did you say to this? What did you say when someone you knew fell so far and so irrevocably? Maybe it made you look down at your own feet and see how far you could slip, too.

She clicked on and there it was, what she’d dreaded. Messages from people she didn’t know. A different sort of hate mail but just as bad. She clicked feverishly to delete, trying not to see them. Racist. Bitch. You should die. Dan didn’t have a Facebook page, said it was a waste of time. She was glad, now.

It took Charlotte half an hour to work out how to do it, clicking bewildered from screen to screen, but eventually she turned off her profile, so no one could send her messages. She left her relationship status as engaged – it was still true, wasn’t it? Alone with the tick of the clock, she slowly turned the diamond ring on her finger. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

At eight it was growing dusky and she pulled on her trainers and got ready to go to the shops. It took an unbelievably long time to find her keys, run a brush through her hair, and then she had to go back because she’d forgotten her phone and didn’t want to provoke another visit down the M6 from her mother thinking she might be dead. She had lost her purse in the attack, but luckily Phil had been on the case and ordered her new cards.

The sun was setting over the rooftops outside, the sky bright but the pavements already darkening to shadow. It was a sad night, woodsmoke on fading bright air, or maybe it wasn’t and everything just seemed sad to her.

She trudged towards the shop in the same clothes she’d worn all week. She probably smelled, but still, it was only Finchley Road. There was a shop in Belsize Park ‘Village’, as people liked to call it, but she needed cash, so she went the other way, down the hill. It was a mistake.

Charlotte only realised afterwards that the man in the shop had been staring at her. Normally they didn’t look at customers at all, just carried on talking very loud and very fast in what she assumed was Arabic. She wandered the aisles, desolate with choice. She didn’t want any of this, Pot Noodles, Pringles, Diet Coke. What she wanted was not to be here at all. She wanted none of this to have ever happened.

When she went outside there was a gang of teenagers hanging about the station, so she walked past quickly with her head down. As she was waiting to cross the road past Waitrose – going in there would have been too cruel – something hit her softly, and she put up a hand to her head and brought it back, red. For a second she wobbled – not again! But nothing hurt. They’d thrown something at her, and red syrupy filth was all over her blonde hair.

The group was a sea of faces under caps and hoods. Boys, girls, mostly black. All shades, in that nonsense way of describing colour, so some were paler than she would be with a tan. They were staring at her.

‘Do you mind?’ she said, haughtily, and one of them, a boy, threw another carton, some kind of drink. As it flew at her and she put up her arms, she heard him hiss: ‘F*cking Nazi.’

One of the girls, emboldened, whooped up. ‘Yeah, racist bitch. Your fella’s a killer, inee?’

Charlotte just stared at them. The carton had bounced off her arms and spattered her face with more red goo. ‘But – I . . . I . . .’

‘Gonna f*cking kill us too?’ The boy threw again, this time something harder, green, spinning. It was a beer bottle. Like the one that had killed Anthony Johnson. She ducked, and it shattered on the pavement, and with a high thrill of panic, Charlotte turned and ran, her pathetic dried goods rattling in the thin plastic bag. When she got home she bolted the door fast, and sank down against it, panting. Gloop slid down her face.

It was the hair that did it. She had lovely hair, everyone said so. Now it was the night before what should have been her wedding day, and instead of a conditioning mask, her hair was full of acid-red ooze. It was too much to bear.


Keisha

Keisha’s mum had lived in Gospel Oak ever since she got up the duff at the unusual age of thirty-five to a mystery white man. Mercy had arrived from Jamaica with a course booked at London University and big plans for her future, but it hadn’t exactly worked out that way. Keisha’d always thought her mum liked the area because of the name, because it made her think of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and all those fellas. She stood out, Mercy. In the same way a massive ship on the water did, tilting with each slow step. No one had ever walked as slow as Mercy shuffling down the street, pausing at every okra and plantain.

Keisha didn’t even try to phone – her mum wouldn’t get a landline, never mind a mobile. She went to a phone box if she needed to make calls, holding up half the world as she fiddled round for her change. Keisha just got on the bus and willed it to go as fast as possible, hanging on tight to the orange railing. If she didn’t sit down maybe it’d go faster. But lots of people got on and an old man gave her a death-stare. ‘Can I get past, please?’

‘I dunno, can you?’ Keisha had a lip on her. It always got her in trouble, but she never learned.

Finally the bus ground to the slowest stop ever, and she got out, jostling past old ladies and buggies to jog down her mum’s street. It was why she always wore trainers – you never knew when you’d have to get out, sharpish.

She rattled the letter box of the little terrace house. ‘Mum! Mum! Are you there?’ At this time where would Mercy be? At home watching TV, an open packet of Maryland cookies in reach of her hovering hand, or at church, or at the shops buying more food. Keisha had a key, but she’d left it at the flat, hidden in a mug at the back of a cupboard. He’d never look there, would he? He wouldn’t know what it was for. No, he wouldn’t.

‘Mum!’ She rattled even harder. Through the net curtains the house looked the same as always, tidy, dark, stuffed with the smell of old furniture and boiling food.

Keisha heard a click and the door of the house next door opened an inch. Mrs Suntharalingam peered out from the chain. Sri Lankan by birth, she had massive glasses like Deirdre out of Coronation Street. ‘You here?’

There was no love lost between Keisha and Mrs S – it went way back to one time Keisha had puked blue WKD over the garden wall onto some stupid purple flowers, and apparently they’d died. Mercy was always leaning over the back fence to moan to her neighbour about Keisha, blah blah blah, can’t look after her own kid, rubbish boyfriend, got kicked out of the good school, works in a nursing home. Of course the Suntharalingams were all accountants or doctors and living in massive houses in Wandsworth.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘For days we are calling you. All weekend.’ The chain rattled.

‘What? No one called me.’ She fumbled in her bag, catching her fingers on the ripped bits from where Chris had torn it up. The phone hadn’t rung in days.

‘Not in service, is saying. Over and over we call.’

‘What – oh, shit.’ The screen was blank – no network. ‘F*cking bastard!’ Of course he had, he’d cut her off. Mrs S was making loud sucking noises of disapproval. ‘Look, where is she?’

Mrs S took on a great expression of triumph and disgust. ‘She at the hoss-pital. Her heart, it just go right out of her body.’

‘What? She had a heart attack? Christ, is she OK?’

Mrs S flapped her hands behind the still-chained door. ‘Very bad, oh, very bad. We call and call you. After he come round, she cry and cry – then she shout out, she clutch herself – drop her samosa on carpet. Oh, Mrs Suntharalingam, she say.’

‘I don’t get it. Who came? What are you on about?’

‘The boy, you cheeky miss. The bad boy. Your bad boy.’

‘My – oh, shit. Do you mean – you mean Chris? Ruby’s dad?’

‘Yes, yes, the bad boy. Upset her very much. She cry and cry, then she clutch.’

‘Oh, f*ck.’ Keisha grabbed on very hard to the door handle. ‘Where’s Ruby? Mrs S, please, please, where is she? Did he take her?’ Oh f*ck! Oh f*ck!

‘Lady took her. I cannot keep her here, you see, I have the arthritis.’ One gnarled hand came out from the frosted glass.

‘You mean the Social took her?’ F*ck. Well. That was better than Chris, at least. ‘Where’s Mum then?’

‘Hoss-pital.’

‘What hospital?’ Daft bitch.

Mrs S sniffed and pointed towards Hampstead. ‘That one, Royal Free one.’

Keisha set off again running, until she stopped being able to hear Mrs S muttering, ‘Cheeky miss, language she used to me . . .’


Charlotte

Something was going to have to change, that was obvious. It couldn’t go on this way. On the morning of what should have been her wedding, Charlotte slept as late as she could, even getting up to rummage in the chest-of-drawers for an old airline sleep mask, stubbing her toe and shouting, ‘F*ck!’ to the empty air. But the buzzer going over and over woke her, and trailing into the living room she answered it before she remembered what had happened the night before. Four washes seemed to have cleaned out the gunk; her hair was still damp.

‘Charlotte? It’s Mrs Lyndhurst from number two. You need to come down to the lobby.’

‘But . . .’

‘Now, please.’

The old biddy! Charlotte stomped downstairs in her pyjamas to where a little crowd had gathered on the front steps. Mrs Busybody, Mike and Susie from downstairs with their immaculate baby in a sling, the odd techie guy who lived in the basement with a million DVDs.

Mike spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte, but we think this is aimed at you.’ He was squirming with middle-class discomfort.

‘It worries us, you see, for Harry,’ said Susie earnestly, arranging the baby. Charlotte remembered that she found her annoying.

On the doorstep, it was etched out in red paint, messily done and misspelled – MUREDER. ‘Oh.’ Charlotte stood and looked at it, and then without meaning to sank down on the doorstep in her pink pyjamas. Her feet were bare and the ground cold.

Mrs Lyndhurst sighed. ‘Really, I was only trying to shop for supper. This ought to be dealt with.’ She departed, and Mike said he and Susie had to take Harry to Baby Movement.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said wretchedly. ‘You should really call the police.’

‘Come on,’ Susie chided, hurrying her child away from Charlotte’s contamination.

Basement Guy slunk away, he’d only come to see what was interrupting his playing of FIFA 11.

Charlotte sat on the cold step and wondered if she was going to cry. Was there any point? No. There wasn’t. She was in a place beyond, where tears weren’t going to make any difference, melt any hearts, remove any paint from stone. She went upstairs, leaving the front door wide open. Charlotte hardly ever looked inside her rammed hallway cupboard, but now, for the second time that week, she went through it half-mad, pulling out dusters and cans of polish and tennis racquets and Dan’s hiking boots, all the junk of a shared life, the things that have no real place. There was a chisel in Dan’s toolbox – untouched – and a stiff wire brush for cleaning shoes. His shoes were always so lovely, shining like mirrors.

She took the chisel and brush downstairs and began to scrape and pick at the red paint, kneeling in her pyjamas and bed hair as if she wanted everyone to see. Penance, that was the word that came to her unreligious mind. But what she was penitent for, she couldn’t have said.

Much later, only the ghostly outline of the word stayed. But she would always know it was there, every time she opened the front door. Washing her stained, ruined hands, wincing at the little cuts on her fingers, she thought maybe it was right that she wouldn’t forget. Maybe while she was consumed with sorrow for herself and for Dan she should remember that someone else was dead.

You should call the police, Mike had said, the standard middle-class trust in those people to bring justice. He’d said it in a kind way, with a keep-your-mess-away meaning. But she had the number of a policeman on a card in her kitchen. Maybe she would take that kindly but judgemental advice, after all.


Keisha

Everywhere she went there was some bitch of a woman up in her face. ‘Look, I’m f*cking sick of this,’ she shouted in the end, to the black nurse behind the hospital desk, giving it all that with her Sawf London accent. ‘S’not visitin’ hours, you gotta come back lay-ta, yeah?’

But when Keisha said f*cking to her, the nurse moved back like someone’d tried to whack her. ‘Why’d you say that? Oh!’ Keisha saw she was crying.

Keisha could actually see her mum behind a glass partition in the ward beyond, it was why she’d gotten so pissed off. She breathed in. ‘Look, I’m sorry. S’just really important, yeah? Like life or death, you know?’

Still with her shoulders heaving, the nurse waved her in. Keisha heard her blow her nose noisily and mutter something about being effing sick of it, too.

Mercy was asleep in the third bed down. There were three other women, two fat and asleep, and the third a wizened Chinese lady like a scrap of bark. The only one awake in the humming quiet, she smiled at Keisha with no teeth. She remembered being here for Ruby, how mental she’d been on the painkillers and adrenaline, how she wanted to talk and talk to everyone and wouldn’t put the baby down to get some sleep. ‘Christ, give it a rest,’ Chris had said when they’d finally found him down the pub.

‘Mum,’ she whispered. Mercy had a tube up her nose and in her arm, and she was giving out her usual snores, like bloody earthquakes. ‘Mum.’ Keisha prodded her a bit and Mercy’s eyes shot open. She gave a snort. For a second Keisha was afraid, she was so f*cking afraid that maybe her mother wouldn’t know who she was any more.

But Mercy clicked and gummed with her dry mouth. ‘Shush your noise. People sick here.’

‘You’re sick here.’

Mercy rearranged her IV tube, just like when people came to her house and she tidied away her teacups. ‘My goodness, such a fuss. I’m in rude health!’

Where she got these words from, Keisha had no idea. ‘Are you OK? Like really?’ She didn’t look OK. Her face was a sort of plum colour, like bits of fruit that ended up on the pavement under the high-street stalls.

Mercy waved her hand. ‘Just a little turn.’

‘They said you’d had a heart attack. I saw Mrs S. She said . . .’ Keisha couldn’t say it. ‘Mum, was he there?’

Her mother said nothing, but fiddled with the IV tube again.

‘Mum!’ Keisha couldn’t breathe when she realised there was a glassy sheen on her mum’s bruised-plum face. In all her life she’d only seen Mercy cry like this one time, and that was when Ruby had her accident. Except it wasn’t an accident, was it? ‘Mum, please! What happened? Where was Ruby?’

Mercy wiped pathetically at her eyes, but couldn’t reach with all the wires.

‘Oh, here.’ Keisha pulled some tissues out of a box on the bedside and dabbed at her mum’s face. ‘He came, didn’t he? Did he try to take her?’

Slowly, Mercy nodded.

‘And you stopped him?’

Mercy blew her nose with a big honk and, disgusted, Keisha chucked the tissue in the bin. She’d probably catch swine flu or something.

‘He tried to take her. The baby. I keep the door closed. She’s watching what’s it called, that programme? Strange name.’

‘Balamory?’

Mercy nodded. ‘She saw him banging on the window. Very bad. I said I will call the police. He went away. But then – well. I had a little upset.’

Keisha said dully, ‘I’ve left him.’

Her mother gave her an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it look.

‘No, really. Look.’ She leaned over so Mercy could see her healing eye. ‘That’s what he did to me. I swear, Mum, I swear to God – sorry – I just never thought. I didn’t think he’d come to you. He never looks near her, does he?’ She was so stuck up in shame now there was no point in pretending any more. ‘Mum, I’m sorry. You were right.’ Saying it was so bitter that tears almost burst out her nose. ‘You were right, OK? He’s a f*cker. I’m sorry for everything. I never meant to get kicked out of school, it was just all those posh kids and— God, Mum, I’m sorry, OK?’

Her mum sucked in air through her dodgy teeth. ‘Don’t take the good Lord’s name in vain.’

‘S-sorry.’ Keisha sat gulping by her mum’s bedside. ‘Is she OK? Ruby?’ She felt so ashamed to be asking, when she was Ruby’s mum. People should be asking that question to her.

Mercy honked again, this time choking on a wad of phlegm. ‘The Social lady come. They have to take her, they say, if no one’s at home.’

Because Ruby was officially in care, wasn’t she? It was called ‘kinship caring’, and it meant they didn’t pay Mercy half as much as a non-related foster carer would get. Not that she ever made a word of complaint.

Keisha felt overwhelmed by it. It was as if they’d both disappeared, her mum into the mouth of this huge hospital, down endless squeaky corridors, and her kid somewhere similar. Was Ruby at someone’s house, playing with strange toys, eating different food? She couldn’t imagine her at all. It was as if she had vanished completely.