Everlong: (Book One of the Everlong Trilogy) (6 page)

I grabbed my laptop and went downstairs. It was coffee that I needed more than anything.

I dropped my laptop on the dining table and went into the kitchen, made coffee and let the invigorating aroma wake me up. I took it into the dining room and fired up the laptop.

I signed into my e-mail account first; it'd been a while since I'd heard off Cassie, not that that was unusual. When it came to Cassie, I seemed to be right at the bottom of her list of priorities. I wondered how long it would've taken her to find out I was dead, if I had succeeded in killing myself. Would she have cut short her holiday? Probably not.

She was due back on the Fourteenth, in six days, but, to be honest, with Cassie, no one actually knew until she was stood there in front of you.

I flicked my eyes over the list of e-mails, ignoring most of them - especially those from Ali57, Razorgirl and other names I recognised but not because they were friends - and scrolled down to Cassiealex, double-clicking on it to open it.

7th January 7.09 pm

Hi Hun,

Me and Dan are having such a good time that we’ve decided to stay on a little longer, maybe an extra week? Have a feeling he’s going to propose to me!!! Wish me luck.

Mom xx

I looked up, feeling the ghost of her presence in the room, from the expensive candles, to the oversized cushions on the sofa, and the picture of us both on the mantelpiece, taken in happier times, when my father was still alive. I think I was five or six, and it was my birthday. We'd been shopping for my first Barbie (it was the most beautiful doll I had ever seen, with a pure white gown and feathers in her hair. I still have her somewhere, locked up with other memories that are too painful to think about). My father had taken us to McDonalds for dinner. I remember when we sat down to eat, he made a little silver ring, engraved with the letter "E", magically appear from the back of my ear. I thought it was magic, but now I know differently.

I shivered. For some reason, at that moment, I really missed him.

And I felt her absence in the empty space in the house too, the gaping hole that should've been Cassie.

Cassie. My mother.

I looked back at the message on the computer screen. I stared at the words, let them sink into my soul.

The demonic beast was stirring again; he was really hungry and he gobbled up the words of her message with relish. I flopped back in my chair and massaged the knot in my right shoulder.

Cassie was getting engaged.

Again.

To another no hoper.

Cassie had been engaged three times since my father had died. And then there were the ones in between, the randoms, whose names and faces I didn't know and Cassie herself probably couldn't even remember. Her relationships were a kind of sick ritual, a cycle of self-harm where Cassie fell for the wrong guy, ended up hurt and humiliated, drank herself silly, then after a few weeks, hooked up with someone else.

Simon was the first I could remember. I hated him, and not just because he was the first guy Cassie had dated after my father had died, although that would've been bad enough on its own. Simon was a complete creep who used to spend most days drinking and smoking pot. He lasted about six months before Cassie found him in bed with his best mate.

The second was Dave, a complete slob who just leered at anything female with a pulse, including me. I remember the hungry look he used to give me with his bloodshot eyes. The thought of him still made my skin crawl. I couldn't remember why Cassie had split up with him - and I didn't want to think about it too much - but I was very glad when it fizzled out, despite the months of Cassie's mad antics after it. I remember leaving the house for school on a Monday morning, when I was about eleven or twelve, and finding her curled up outside on the doorstep, drunk.

The third guy was over so quick that I didn't even know his name. In fact, I didn't even meet him, just the devastation after he'd passed through. I nicknamed him Hurricane.

And now there was Dan.

He and Cassie had been together for about seven months and they were "in love". He was a nice enough bloke, I suppose, but still, past experience told me it was only a matter of time.

I slouched forward in my chair, crossing my legs underneath it, and took a good swig of coffee as I clicked on the e-mail from Razorgirl. I knew what was coming, but for some reason looking at these vile e-mails had somehow become my own sick ritual, poking the knife in my never-to-heal wound.

But this time it was different. An image of my own face flashed upon the screen. My eyes were shut like I was sleeping, my ghost-like face splattered with mud.

I sat frozen, strangely entranced by the grotesque image on the screen. I couldn't ever remember a time when I had looked so peaceful, so beautiful. And yet looking at my own dead face terrified me. Someone had taken a photo of me when I was...

I felt sick. Dexter had saved me, brought me home, but who had taken this photo? Who had seen me first?

I stared at the photo, something was pulling inside me, making me look. Underneath the image were the words "Next time, do it properly. BITCH!"

I clicked on delete and the next e-mail flashed up on my screen. It contained the same picture, this time with only two words; "Just die!"

I slammed the top of my laptop down and swept the mug of coffee off the table with my hand. Coffee splashed up the wall and the mug crashed to the floor, smashing into lots of tiny pieces. Like my life.

Even after I'd closed the computer down, the image still burned in my mind, like someone had branded it onto my vision with a red hot poker. There was a war raging inside me and I wasn't winning.

I leapt up, letting the chair fall to the floor with a crash, and fled upstairs.

Yanking my clothes off, I flung them on the bathroom floor and stumbled into the shower.

The scalding water felt good against my freezing cold skin. I - again - imagined it washing the pain and the anger away and watched as it all was sucked down the plughole with the soap. It was purifying me, allowing me to wrestle back control.

When I felt like I had been washed clean, I stepped out of the shower and grabbed the towel to dry myself. I stopped stone dead as I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror; I was grotesque and miss-formed with bits of bone jutting out here and there. How had I got so thin? Food had become boring and dull and didn't seem worth the effort. Eating had become more of a chore than a pleasure and, as everyone knows, chores were there to be avoided.

I got dressed and flopped on to my bed, my hair still dripping wet, and I stared up at the ceiling; I was supposed to be distracting myself, not pulling myself deeper into thinking about things. About me, the chaos that was my life.

I needed more coffee, so I went back downstairs. The coffee I'd thrown had marked the wall in the dining room. It had dried on like a congealed blood stain in a crime scene. I knew that no matter how much I scrubbed at the stain, the smell would mark my flesh like the blood-stained hands of Lady Macbeth.

And there, on the table, was the laptop. I could almost hear it whispering to me, tempting me to look at those ghostly images, like the Sirens calling sailors to their death on the jagged rocks. The voices told me to look. They told me to open up the wounds again, that picking at them with a sharp knife would make me feel better.

Now that I felt pain again, I had started to crave it like a drug; it made me feel alive, made me feel wanted and yet, when I was in pain, I longed to push it away and feel nothing again. To play dead. Another conundrum, another reason why I didn't belong in this world.

Not even fighting it, I opened one of the e-mails and the image flashed up. My image, although it felt as though it was someone else lying there, cold and blue. It didn't feel like it had happened to me, and only a few days ago. My ghostly-white face looked like it was carved from marble, an angel encircled by a halo of darkness, as if all my impurities, my sins, had leeched from my skin. But they were only petrol black feathers of a crow.

Only in death could I be truly beautiful.

Something flickered inside me, an image, a forgotten memory. It danced across my vision and then was gone, but its echo remained, telling me that it had once lived outside of my mind.

The feathers.

I had seen one in my room, the day after my "accident".

I raced upstairs and flung open my bedroom door. The room was a tip, and still smelt rancid even though I'd changed the bed covers.

When had I started living like this? I disgusted myself. I hated living in mess, but it was like some switch that went off in my head when Cassie was away, a silent way of sticking two fingers up to her. It was always the same; she came home, saw my room, we'd have a slanging match and then Cassie would storm off and go to Celia's. Again.

I began to rummage through the junk on my floor; old essays, sketches, dirty clothes (including socks that would probably stick to the wall), lipstick stained tee-shirts, CDs, DVDs, (and their empty covers) lined the floor like a second carpet. I flung everything on the bed, but even when it was piled high, only the dirty carpet left on the floor, I didn't find a single feather, even though I knew it had to be there, I could feel it.

And then I remembered the day Celia came around; I had seen that feather on the top of my stinking clothes. I plummeted down the stairs and into the utility room where I'd left the washing I'd done over the last few days. I'm not even going to pretend I'm good at laundry; most days I take clothes off and file them on my floor, then, the next day if they smell okay, they're clean enough for me. I grabbed the clothes basket and tipped the contents out. There, snuggled in amongst the clean laundry, was a single black feather, all tattered and bent.

It was one of the most beautiful feathers I have ever seen, even though it was damaged. The main shaft, the rachis, was probably thirty centimetres long, with beautifully soft, but equally strong, barbs that looked black at a distance but on close inspection where actually made up from all the colours of the rainbow, like petrol on a wet floor.

I locked it in my wooden box on my dressing table; the place that I kept all of my most precious things, before I turned my attention to finally cleaning my bedroom.

Josh

I hated the frailness of my new status; half human, half angel. A freak. The weakness I carried around with me was like a disease, sapping my strength, making my new-born wings heavy, my body tired.

I flew over the Atlantic ocean, accompanied only by the stars and the sound of the wind and the waves, arriving in Harlem deep in the dead of the night.

I stood in front of the Brownstone house, snowflakes flittering around me on the squally breeze like faeries, their wings illuminated by the golden glow of the street lamps. Snow lay in piles at the edge of the frozen pavement; a white wall that extended in both directions for as far as I could see.

The townhouse looked derelict, with its flaking paint and boarded-up windows covered in flyers for local gigs and bars, but I knew an angel lived there; I could hear the muffled notes of the angel's celestial music coming from behind its crumbling facade.

I stood beneath one of the leafless trees that lined the avenue and listened, deciphering as best as I could, the sorrowful, simple notes that repeated over and over again. This angel was a Watcher, and had been for a very, very long time.

A clock struck three.

I carefully climbed the ice covered steps up to the front door, its crumbling archivolt covered in green moss and dirt. I rapped my knuckles on it three times, then waited.

There was a thump, and a brief pause, before the door slowly creaked open, angelic music sweeping out of the house through the widening crack in the doorway; lamenting fingers of celestial harmony which wrapped themselves around me, massaging my aching bones and filling me with an inner warmth.

An elderly angel stood bent double in the doorway, his slender frame hidden beneath multi-coloured layers of frayed cardigans, all tied around his waist with a belt of knotted string, his umber wings, flecked with tawny gold, protruded from slits cut in the back. Despite his age and frailness, this angel was beautiful; his weathered face, although etched with wrinkles that told of centuries of life spent in the human world, was alive with warmth, compassion and beauty.

'Hell-' The angel stopped, his eyes, although covered in a white layer of cataracts, bore into me, with a look so intense it made my skin prickle. 'You're an Angel of Death?'

'I am-'

'So, it is time,' he said gently, bowing his head.

'No! No. I mean, I was an Angel of Death, but that's not why I'm here,' I said, hastily backing away from the door.

'Oh, I-' The old angel swayed on the spot, throwing his hand out to steady himself on the doorway, but he missed and started to fall towards the floor as his legs buckled under him.

I raced forward, catching him before he hit the ground. Shockwaves of raw pain crashed through me with the memories of the angel's life on earth, each layer of the man's existence pushing itself into my mind, forcing me down onto my knees under the burden of it.