Page 8 of Out of the Blue
‘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 absolutelynochance 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 Beingmightjust 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.
Outside, people speed past with their heads bent and their hands in their pockets, or shielding their hair with their handbags. The drizzle has turned into a full-on downpour, and the sky is turning from pale grey to charcoal, but I don’t care. I turn away from the cathedral, surrounded by its usual orbit of tourists, and instead walk down the Royal Mile. I pound the pavement with my trainers, imagining I’m stomping all over Dad’s stupid research, stamping on his laptop. Crushing his notes and algorithms and time-wasting theories into pulp.
I turn past the Scottish Parliament Building and towards Arthur’s Seat, the hills tucked behind the city centre. Last time I came here, it was full of people: tourists taking selfies, couples lounging on the grass, walkers in ugly boots and warm fleeces. Now the hills are practically empty: just one very dedicated photographer, taking pictures of a ruin perched on a low crag overlooking a rain-spattered duck pond. I follow a steep path in the opposite direction, stopping halfway to find a stick to throw for Perry. She bounds through a puddle and races after it, then sprints back with it for me to chuck again.
By the time we reach the top of the hill, the rain has stopped and we’re both panting hard. I sit down on a rock, and Perry slumps to the ground, her tongue lolling. Below us, the city looks like a toy town. I reach into my pocket for my phone, before remembering I left it at home, so I try to commit it to memory instead. Windows glow in the twilight; the pinpricks of streetlamps swirl like golden galaxies. Church steeples and towering monuments pierce the skyline, standing sentry around the illuminated castle. And for the millionth time since last November I wish Mum was here.
Mum wouldn’t have put up with this Wingding crap. She cared about stuff. She cared about our littered seas, our burning forests, the species being wiped from the planet. She cared about the African towns being used as dumps for western gadgets, the factory workers in Asia paid pennies to make our high-street clothes. I’d seen her crying over photos of drowned refugees, and over people’s refusal to help them. There were times when all the bad in the world seemed to overwhelm her, and times when she couldn’t avoid being part of it. But she never resigned herself to it.
There was a time, back when they were students, when Dad had that much passion too. Mum would sometimes talk about the eighteen-year-old she met at university, the one who joined the Socialist Workers Party and got the sleeper train down to London so he could go to Carnival Against Capitalism, but I always felt like she was describing a different person.
I heard them fighting about it once, just after he’d accepted the job at Tomlinson Cigarettes. Mum didn’t say anything about it in front of Rani or me, but their arguing woke me up that night.
‘We’ll be living off other people’s lung cancer. How can you be OK with that?’ Mum was hissing – I had to creep from my bedroom to the top of the stairs to hear her properly. ‘What’s happened to you, Mikey?’
‘I grew up, Sonali!’ Dad sounded more exasperated than angry. ‘I grew up and realized that the world just isn’t perfect. There is no fair, equal society lying dormant under all this injustice, waiting for a student protest or peaceful demonstration or some stupid online petition to wake it up. I realized that, actually, moneycanbring you happiness, and that, you know what, Iwouldrather have a nice life than nice principles, and—’
Mum cut him off with a cold laugh. ‘Wow. Nice. Great example you’re setting for the girls there, Michael.’
I don’t know what she would have thought about the Beings, but I know she wouldn’t have let him turn our lives upside down to go chasing one. I close my eyes. I wish I could turn back time, back to that morning in November, change every choice I made that day. There’s no way Dad would have dragged us on this wild-goose chase if she was still here.
Somewhere in the distance, thunder starts to rumble. Raindrops slip over the edge of my hood, landing on my nose. I wipe my eyes and try to swallow down the lump in my throat, the knot of guilt in my chest that’s been there since November. When I look up, the sky has slid from dark grey into black, and the anger that drove me out of the house has morphed into a tired sort of sadness.
‘Perry!’ I shout, getting up to go home. ‘Come on – let’s go!’
I hear her rustling around in the bushes, then the soft scuffling of her paws on the grass. I clip the leash back on to her collar and hurry back down the path, only I must take a wrong turn somewhere, because suddenly I’m in some sort of clearing, rocks on one side and trees on the other, with absolutely no idea what direction I’m going in. There are streetlights glowing in the distance, but the Parliament has disappeared from sight.
‘Shit.’ It’s dark. Really dark. The moon is hidden behind murky black rainclouds, and I don’t even have my phone to use as a torch or, more importantly, to call for help.Don’t panic, I think, but my pulse is starting to race. I stumble forward, scraping my hand on a rock, when something appears in the sky.
It’s barely visible at first: just a smudge, a tiny ripple of movement. It lasts only a split second, and at first I think I imagined it, but then something shifts in the clouds, and a dull pink dot forms against the blue-black sky. It slips towards the earth, falling at breakneck speed so fast my eyes can hardly keep pace.
I start to run, but it’s coming closer, hurtling like a comet towards me, and though I’ve seen scenes like this a hundred, a thousand times, I don’t realize what I’m looking at until it’s just ten or fifteen metres away, until it spreads it wings and comes plummeting towards the hill.
Another Being, falling right in front of me.
SIX
I wait for the crash. I wait for bones cracking, a neck snapping. My eyes are scrunched shut. My hands clenched so tight, the handle of Perry’s leash digs into my skin. There’s a noise that sounds like fabric ripping, another of wood breaking. I wait for that achingthwunk, the sound of a body breaking against the earth.
It doesn’t come.
