Another Life (21 page)

I can even work out what happened. I fell against a wall that was actually a door, and for some reason it was open and I fell right into a building.

I’ve feeling quite relieved and pleased with myself. Woo, Archie! With a leap he was free. . . And then I remember Ty flying through the air, trying to bridge that impossible gap, with a
gunman chasing after him.

Oh Jesus. What can I do?

I look around. I’m in a stairwell, with more stairs leading down – thank God I didn’t fall down those too, they look like they lead to the centre of the earth. There’s a
door, leading out onto a corridor. I push open the door – more doors. One has a bright pink sign on it – ‘Blanchflower & Blannin, Branding.’ There’s a buzzer. I
press it down. I keep it pressed down.

Nothing. No answer. Nothing.

And then I remember that it’s Sunday and this is an office building and there probably won’t be anyone here until the morning.

I search for my phone, but it must have fallen out of my pocket when I ran or when I fell.

OK, I have to escape from here. I have to find Danny and tell him that his son’s probably strawberry jam on the pavement, and the Following Man was real and even has a name and an address.
. .

And a wife who had my mobile number and who instantly realised that I was connected to Ty. . .

And. . .

It’s quite possible that Danny’s been shot himself. I am the only one who knows who did it.

Oh Jesus. This is the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me, including watching
The Human Centipede
(which was disgusting, rather than scary. Oscar almost threw up, although he
blamed a dodgy batch of sushi) and having three teeth out without a general anaesthetic (not quite as bad as you’d imagine).

I stand up, then sit down again pretty quickly. I ache all over. My arm is killing me. But I can’t be a wimp. Cautiously, I start slithering down the stairs, half sitting, half lying,
wincing when I knock my arm against the wall.

It takes forever, but eventually I make it down to the ground floor. I crawl to the door. It’s too heavy to open.

I struggle to my feet, throw myself against it. And I go sprawling into a shop – a shop selling office furniture for cool people. There are desks and chairs and filing cabinets –
aubergine purples and glowing reds and a fabulous silver desk which looks like the command desk of a starship captain. I’d love a desk like that. I wonder if my parents . . . for my birthday.
. .

Get a grip, Archie!

The security shutters are down and I can’t even attract anyone’s attention, although I can see feet passing on the pavement outside.

There must be a phone here somewhere. It takes some time to locate – you try finding the sales desk in a dark showroom full of office furniture. It’s worse than a needle in a
haystack. (I’ve always wondered what sort of idiot sits on a haystack to sew, anyway. They deserve to lose it.) But I make it eventually, grab the phone, stab randomly until I get an outside
line.

My head is fuzzy and hurting so much, so when I call 999 and they ask me which emergency service I need, I can’t think what to say.

‘I’m trapped in a shop,’ I say, ‘but I don’t know where. And my cousin might have fallen off a building. And my uncle might have been shot.’

And suddenly it’s all too much and there are tears pouring down my face and I’m shaking and shaking, and thinking of Ty’s body crumpled on the ground, smushed to strawberry
jam. My mouth fills up with vomit. All I can do is groan, ‘Help me,’ into the phone and lean forward to throw up into a designer bin from Italy that costs £284.

And then the lights go out, which is weird, because they weren’t on in the first place.

I wake up with someone yelling into my face, and I suppose I must be in an ambulance, because it’s noisy and small and bumping around all over the place, and I’m sick again right
away, which means I start choking and swallowing vomit, because some idiot has strapped me to a bed.

Then it all goes blurry again until we get to hospital, where I’m sick over and over – but at least there’s a bowl this time, and a nurse holding my hair back and giving me
sips of water and then they wheel me onto a ward – a children’s ward, bloody hell – and stick me in a bed, with a drip in my arm.

It’d feel a bit more bloody dramatic if there wasn’t a huge mural of Humpty-Dumpty on the wall and a bandaged eight-year-old in the bed opposite. His parents are looking at me like
they think I’m going to explode.

‘Here you go,’ says the nurse. ‘Your mum and dad have been contacted and they’re on their way. We just want to keep you under observation, in case you’ve got
concussion. That’s a nasty bump on your head.’

‘How did you know my who I am?’ I ask.

‘You had your wallet in your pocket,’ she says. ‘We just called your mum. She’s very upset. On her way.’

Oh great.

‘My cousin. . .’ I say. ‘Is he . . . do you know. . .?’ I can’t bear to say it.

‘What is it?’

I catch the eye of the little kid in the opposite bed. He’s listening to every word. His mum looks horrified. I try to whisper.

‘We were on the roof together. I think . . . I think he fell. . .’

‘I’ve not heard of anyone falling off a roof in central London,’ she says, ‘but mind you, I’m pretty busy when I’m on duty. Tell you what, I’ll see if I
can find out for you. Did you actually see him fall?’

‘I saw him jump,’ I say, completely without hope, and she looks a bit shocked, pats my hand and says, ‘Don’t give up. You do hear of miracles happening.’

I’m not very comforted. And I’m not very sure she knows anything about anything. And I really don’t want to have to explain what’s happened to Mum. So as soon as
she’s gone I struggle to sit up and start examining the needle taped to my hand. Can I pull it out? Can I get out of here?

I can’t. Or rather, I could, but I don’t really want to. I prefer telling myself that I feel really ill, weak, dizzy and hot, that I can’t walk – my legs are throbbing
with pain – that I may have fractured my skull. If I pulled out the drip I’d probably bleed to death. The little boy’s mum would stop me, anyway.

Besides, if Ty is dead, what can I do? I keep thinking about our last conversation. What if I led the gang to him? What if they got his number from my mobile somehow? What if they hacked into my
messages? Did any come from him?

What if he didn’t care any more? What if he thought he’d sacrifice himself for the safety of Claire and Nicki and Alyssa?

I could never do that in a hundred years.

The door bursts open and I’m expecting my mum. But it’s Danny, unshot, as far as I can see, wild-eyed and raving at a nurse.

‘Of course I’m allowed to see him! I’m his uncle! Jesus! Archie! What the hell happened? Where’s Ty?’

‘Ty . . .Ty. . .’ OK, this is worse than I expected. Why doesn’t he know that Ty’s dead on the pavement? Maybe he was unrecognisable? Maybe Danny didn’t make the
connection? And now I’m going to have to tell him.

‘There was a man . . . someone chasing us . . . shooting at us. So we ran . . . up . . . on the roof. . .’ I trail to a halt.

‘Yes?’

‘And we ran and ran. . .’

‘Ty! What happened to Ty? Is he here? Penny rang me, told me that you were here, but Ty . . . why isn’t he here? Where is he?’

‘I . . . he . . . he jumped. . .’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t know . . . I thought. . . I fell down some stairs. I might have concussion.’

‘He jumped? Where did he jump? Jesus, Archie!’

‘Do you mind?’ says the little boy’s mum. ‘My son’s getting over an operation and he needs peace and quiet.’

I can see Danny’s about to be rude to her, so I say, ‘Sorry,’ for him and whisper, ‘Between the roofs. From one roof to another. But I don’t know if he made it
– it looked really big—’

‘He must have,’ says Danny. ‘I’d have known. . .’

‘Yes, but what if he fell into a sort of alleyway or something and no one noticed?’

‘Jesus,’ says Danny again, and a whole lot more. Then he pulls out his mobile.

‘You’re not allowed to use that in a hospital,’ says the boy’s mum, ‘and I’d appreciate it if you moderated your language.’

I brace myself for Danny’s response, but he just collapses into a chair, puts his head in his hands and says, ‘I can’t face ringing them, anyway. What if you’re right?
What am I going to tell Nicki?’

I want to hit him, but luckily my mum arrives and takes over. She says very firmly that it’s extremely unlikely that Ty could have fallen off a roof.

‘I’ve just come in a taxi all the way from the City, I went straight past your studio, Danny, and believe me, if there’d been a major incident like that, I’d still be
sitting at Old Street.’

‘Yes, but what if he’s lying in some alleyway somewhere and no one’s seen him?’

‘So unlikely,’ she says.

The police come a bit later, and they ask loads of questions and tell us that a) they’ve checked every alleyway and there’s no Ty-flavoured jam on the pavement, and b) there is
evidence that a gun was shot on the roof.

So Ty was right.

And now he’s disappeared.

T
he only thought in my head is to get out of London. As soon as I’m sitting on a coach pulling out of Victoria bus station, I feel
better.

I wasn’t paranoid. I wasn’t making it up. They were still after me.

I was getting a bit worried about my own sanity for a few minutes there.

But then the questions kick in. And there are always questions. What happened to my dad? Were my mum and Alyssa safe on the train? How about Archie – I don’t think he fell, but what
happened to him? Patrick and Helen – are they safe?

I can’t call anyone because I dumped my phone at Victoria station. Phone in one bin, SIM card in another. I scratched the SIM card as much as I could, tried to destroy it so no one can
trace it back to me.

I can see what I have to do now. I need to wipe myself out – start again.

Can you save yourself by starting another life? And is it worth it, if you have to lose everything you love?

It is, I decide, because I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it to keep everyone else safe. I’m too dangerous. I’m bringing bad stuff to everyone’s lives.

The coach rumbles into the night and I know that in the morning I’ll be somewhere new where no one knows me and I can look for work and somewhere to stay. I’ll put on an accent and
all the people I’ve ever been will be washed away.

I’ll buy a newspaper and I’ll see if there’s anything about a celebrity photographer being shot, about a woman and a baby being attacked on a train, about a teenage boy called
Archie falling off a roof in central London, falling and falling and—

What will I do if they’re all dead?

N
o one hears from Ty at Christmas, and no one hears from him at New Year – at least, as far as I know. The police found my phone on the roof
and gave it back to me, so I keep on calling him. It never rings.

I think about contacting Claire – there’s been radio silence since our snog – but I don’t really want to tell her that Ty might have been shot, or captured, or possibly
splatted in some place that the police haven’t stumbled over yet.

I’m spending as much time as possible getting stoned with Oscar and Lily. We compared notes on Boxing Day, as to who’d had the most rubbish Christmas.

‘Mine was awful,’ I offered. ‘Grandpa and Grandma were really down about my cousin who’s kind of disappeared. And my parents argued all the way there and back –
that’s two lots of two hours.’

‘Mine was crap,’ said Lily. ‘I hate Mum’s new boyfriend and I hate his brats and we all went to some hotel where I couldn’t even have wine. I lit up in the ladies
and the smoke alarm went off.’

Mine was worst,’ said Oscar. ‘My parents staged an intervention with Marcus. That’s when you tell someone how much it’s hurting you that he’s addicted –
except Marcus says he’s not addicted. There was a huge fight, Marcus hit Dad, and they chucked him out and changed the locks at 10 pm on Christmas night.’

OK, that did sound like the crappest Christmas.

‘Why did they pick Christmas Day to do this intervention thing?’

‘They’ve been seeing this rubbish counsellor. She’s from America and she’s very into discipline and boundaries and getting your kids to do as they’re told. She said
it was a good idea to do it at Christmas, because it’d work on Marcus’s happy memories of the past.

‘Did you even get any dinner?’

‘We were halfway through the turkey when they started. Never got as far as the pudding. Actually, it’s still in the fridge if anyone fancies some.’

We did fancy some, even though it meant creeping past Oscar’s mum to get to the fridge. She seems to spend all her time sitting at the kitchen table, weeping. I felt a bit awkward, but
Oscar shrugged his shoulders.

‘Serves her right if she’s upset,’ he said, once we got back upstairs. ‘She was the one banging on about tough love and limits and stuff. Just because he borrowed a bit
of cash from her purse. I think it’s an abuse of his human rights. I mean, he’s seventeen. Surely it’s his choice if he wants to stay in full-time education and follow their
agenda, or give it up to become a musician?’

‘Of course it is,’ said Lily. ‘Poor Marcus. He’s a misunderstood artist.’

‘He’s a misunderstood stoner,’ I pointed out. I didn’t like the admiring look in Lily’s eyes.

Now it’s New Year’s Day, we go and see Marcus in the bedsit that his parents have arranged for him. I think it’s going to be an exciting, grotty dive, but it’s actually a
large, light room in a house owned by some famous writer. Oscar’s mum produced some of her plays.

‘It’s a pit,’ says Marcus, sitting on his bed, plucking his acoustic guitar. His stuff is in black plastic bags all around him, although there’s a chest of drawers and a
wardrobe. There’s a pizza box on the floor and five empty cans of Stella. At least, I think they’re empty, but when I accidentally kick one over, it turns out to be half full.