Tuesday Falling (20 page)

Lily-Rose stares out of the cafe window at the street outside. She can see a ghost reflection of herself, mingling with the road beyond, and it moves her further away from the reality of her past.

Lily-Rose’s mother stirs her coffee, her newly manicured nails still ragged from biting. ‘I don’t understand why she has done this for us. I mean, what are we to her?’

‘I don’t know, Mum,’ Lily-Rose sighs, trying to make her insides work; make them feel as if she is not in a dream. She knows she needs to talk to her mother. Help her understand. But she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t have the vocabulary. But she knows she has to try.

‘When I was … well, when I broken up by what they did to me, yeah? I used to go online. I didn’t do Facebook or any of that, cos I knew it would always get back to them. Everyone was connected, yeah?’ Lily-Rose looks at her mother, to see if she understands, and goes on,‘I used to go to these sites. Where people had been messed up. Raped, beaten up. Stuff like that. Anyway, the only way these people had been able to deal with it all was by completely controlling their bodies.’ Lily-Rose does not look at her mother, but her mother looks at her, willing her love into the tiny, thin, cracked and scarred body of her daughter. ‘And the way they did it was by controlling what they ate. Or by cutting. Or burning. Some of the girls, they hated themselves so much, blamed themselves so much that they deliberately went out to find people to, to
do
them, you know what I mean? To use them. They thought they were so shit that they deserved it, cos that was what they had been told.’

Outside it begins to rain again, and the drops tick against the window. In a doorway opposite the café, Lily-Rose sees a homeless boy with bleached blond hair pull his hoodie tighter around his head.

‘So I used to meet these girls in the chat rooms, and we’d give each other tips on how to eat less without dying. How to survive the nights when you can’t close your eyes. How to stay off drugs but keep your body separate.’

Lily-Rose’s mother can’t believe that her daughter is fifteen. She feels as if she has been living in a war zone and not even known it. She feels stupid, and a failure, and wrong.

‘Anyhow, this name kept on coming up. Tuesday. Tuesday saves girls who need saving. Tuesday fights rapists and gang-bangers. Tuesday can return your life to you. The girls in the chat rooms, no one had ever met anyone who knew her, but they all knew
of
her. They all had stories about someone they knew who knew someone who knew her.

‘Well one night, when my body hurt and I wanted to make a call to … to
them
to buy drugs, or give up, or let them have me or whatever, I went to a chat room and put a call out to her, asked everyone in there if they could hook me up, told them I was on my last night and I couldn’t take any more. And then this girl asked me to meet her in a private room, and then in another private room. And then on and on. Different IPs, different rooms, until finally she said she’d take me to her, but I had to give up my computer. Let her control it remotely, so she could wipe away the footprints.’

Lily-Rose’s mother didn’t really know what her daughter was talking about, but she understood enough. ‘So you met up with her? In your computer?’

‘In the Interzone, yeah. She asked me what had happened. What they did. Who they were. And then she said she’d help me, but that there’d be a price. A price on my soul.’ Lily-Rose stares into her coffee cup. ‘She said that she’d meet the boys, and whatever they brought to her, she’d bring it back to them full tilt. That if they brought violence they’d get it back double. She said that there would be no going back. That, although the responsibility was theirs, I might try to make it mine, and there would be no way to undo what was started.’

Lily-Rose takes out some money from the pocket of her new cargoes and places it on the table. Her mother reaches across the table and takes her daughter’s hand in hers. ‘I’m glad you did. I’m glad those boys got stopped. Not just for you, but for all the other girls they’ve, they’ve …’ She doesn’t know how to frame it. How to say what has happened to her daughter. ‘Fucked up. Would have continued to fuck up.’

Lily-Rose’s mum squeezes her daughter’s hand, but not too hard. She can feel all the tiny bones, and is afraid of breaking one of them.

Lily-Rose smiles at her mum. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you effing before.’ Her mum smiles back. ‘I’ll try not to do it again.’

Lily-Rose stands up. ‘Let’s catch the train. She told us any time before half past, so it might as well be now.’

Lily-Rose and her mother make their way into Victoria Station, and board the 17.11 fast service to Brighton.

At half past five the first tube station in central London is evacuated.

DI Loss is standing outside the cracked remains of the refuge off Charing Cross Road, where his daughter used to work in between shifts at the hospital. It is Victorian, its smoke-damaged brickwork pocked, eroded by 130 years of acid rain. The mortar between the red bricks is similar to scar tissue. The whole structure is being pulled apart in super-slow motion by weeds and some form of mutant city honeysuckle. There are crows flying in and out of the broken roof. The late-afternoon London light seems to get sucked into their feathers, then reflected back, prism-like, through city oil and polluted air. It does nothing to ease the knot of pressure building in his spine. Rather, it feeds into the despair he feels whenever he thinks of Suzanne. There is a thin cloak of cooking smoke drifting around the area, possibly from a squat in one of the adjacent buildings. Since the change in the law prohibiting squatting, a new kind of unauthorized occupation has developed: pop-up squats; people who live in the buildings for a few days, and then move on. Slash and burn.

Survival always finds a path.

The door and windows to the refuge have been covered by metal security sheeting, bolted, and stapled, making it look as if the building is being tortured. A faint smell of putrefaction seeps out of the garbage bags scattered against the walls, shiny and slick, non-biodegradable and utterly impervious to the march of time.

DI Loss is not surprised to notice ‘Tuesday’ spray-painted across the scarred metal sheet bolted to the wall that has replaced the door. The lettering is cracked and blistered with at least one year of city heat and cold, and he wonders if Tuesday did it. If this is the first tag she ever wrote.

‘Just give me the keys, darling,’ says a voice he barely recognizes. He looks round, but nobody is there; impossible shadows in the sunlight. Time is stuttering in front of him. The doorway to the broken building in front of him morphs into the doorway of his flat. His old flat. Suzanne is standing in front of him, seven years old. She is wearing black jeans and a sweatshirt. Her hair is tied back in a loose ponytail because that’s all he can do, and she is blocking the door her mother will never walk through again.

And she has hidden his car keys. She doesn’t want him to leave for work. She has had too much leaving. You can see it in her too pale face and her too old eyes. He wants to hold her and tell her it’s all right. But it isn’t all right. It won’t ever be all right again.

‘Don’t leave, Daddy.’

But leaving is all he can do. He can’t stay here in this flat.

‘I need to go to work, Suzanne.’

Loss wipes his hand in front of his eyes. The determined look on his daughter’s face falls apart, and the past disappears.

The street in which the refuge is situated is run-down. London is endlessly amazing, he thinks, his mind cart-wheeling, trying to find something to cling on to: poverty and prosperity lie next to each other, with only a courtyard or a side street between them: the past and the present. In the gutter outside the building he can see used disposable lighters, crumpled squares of blackened tin-foil, and deflated balloons, which would, he knows, have been filled recently with nitrous oxide. For a moment his mind stutters again and the black garbage bags become morgue bags, the contents too awful for him to face.

He thinks about the children at the refuge whom his daughter tried to help. Children being destroyed by circumstance. Imprisoned by culture. Children for whom ‘family’ was the word for pain rather than love. Children who would rather live on the streets of London, with the gutter-men and drug dealers, with the skin-girls and hobos, than with their own parents. Loss looks at the building and thinks of the girl known as Tuesday.

‘What happened?’ he whispers. Even to himself it is unclear who he means: Suzanne or Tuesday.

He thinks of his daughter. He sees her life staggering in front of his eyes. The withdrawal when her mother died, like the cutting of a flower. The betrayal when he left for work, again and again, for longer and longer, unable to cope with the pain in his own body. More withdrawal as his job took him to desperate places. Vice. Drugs. Gangs. The work getting darker and darker. The distance between him and his daughter growing each day.

Suzanne’s resolution to become a doctor; to make sure no other son or daughter had to lose a mother as she had, and his inability to hold her because, year after year, she was moving toward the likeness, inside and out, of his wife, and it made him want to scream. Scream at himself. Scream at the world.

‘I’m so sorry, Suzanne.’ Loss leans his head against the door of the refuge, trying to fill what remains of his daughter’s spirit with his love.

Too late.

All that is left are ghosts.

His phone beeps. Detective Loss keeps his eyes closed and his hands clenched, trying to stop time. Trying to find the space between the seconds where his daughter might live.

His phone beeps again, and he takes a deep breath and pulls it out of his pocket. It’s a text from his DS, telling him she’s at Euston tube station, but in his head he is so far away he can barely see it.

Hacking into the national database that collates the DNA of over 10 per cent of the population of Britain is not an easy task. There are security protocols that are rock hard, even for me. And it’s not as if all you’d have to do is replace one set of data with another. Sometimes they go back to the original samples. You’d have to set up a rolling program that would Trojan in behind, and return to a request and
shiv
in your false reading each and every time. It would be an absolute nightmare.

Lucky I don’t have to bother then, isn’t it?

By the time I’ve set up everything I want to do, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, or at least that’s what my watch tells me. Down here it doesn’t matter what time it is. It’s always my time.

I keep my watch set to GMT, cos that’s what the
World Service
runs on. I don’t fuck about with British Summer Time. I’m not a farmer, or Scottish. I live underground. I don’t have friends, only clients.

I don’t have appointments, I just find out what appointments others have, and make sure I’m there too.

The last time I cared about time was when my daughter’s was stolen.

Stopped.

Taken.

Since then. Well since then, who cares? I’m awake, I’m asleep. I hear the water in the sewers and rivers. I hear the air compressing and releasing in the tunnels. I hear the rats and the bats and the tunnel foxes with no eyes, and I know some sort of time passes.

One day it will stop passing for me, but in my world down here it will carry on, become less human and stranger. I like that.

I hit the button on my laptop and start shutting down the tube system. Really, people are so closed in their little worlds. They create this entire network; tubes, signal boxes, escalators, air flow, and then instead of employing loads of people to run it, they computerize it. And then they allow remote access because it’s so fucking complicated when you go out to fix this or that you need to access the whole system. And that means there are laptops that are live.

Hooked in.

Connected and open on the tunnel Wi-Fi.

They make it too easy. I just slide in behind a hot laptop and ease myself into the train-web, copy all the access protocols, and ghost out.

Easy.

The first station I shut down is Leicester Square.

I don’t want any panic and trampled babies; I just want the station empty.

First I shut down the timetable screens, and replace the train information with a message to leave the station as quickly as possible. From the pop-up box in the top corner of my screen showing the CCTV feed I can see everyone looking confused. The staff are talking into their radios, but nobody’s saying the T word yet.

That’s terrorist, not Tuesday. I’m not some egomaniac who thinks, just cos she’s shut down London, she should get top billing.

Next I send a system-wide message for no trains to stop at the station. Now I can see the staff running, and people are beginning to head out. The staff are really doing very well. I hope they get some sort of bonus for today, I really do.

I press a button and all the lights in the station black out.

Ta-daa! OK, I might be a
bit
egomaniacal, in my James Bond underground bunker.

I’m not sure, but I think I can hear the screams from here.

‘So. Tell me again why we aren’t going to the cinema?’ DI Loss enquires as he and DS Stone tramp along the road, their clothes sticking to their bodies in the heat.

‘Are you asking me out on a date?’

Loss wipes his face; he is too tired for this. ‘The abandoned cinema where Five lives, as you well know. By the way, is that even legal? I thought the squatting laws had changed. And what about fire regs and stuff?’

‘Well, if you’re worried about that you’re going to brick yourself about this.’

He sighs; his feet hurt and he has a headache caused, he has decided, by too much caffeine and too little nicotine. ‘What’s “this”?’

‘“This” is this,’ says Stone, coming to a halt. ‘The Temperance Hospital. Five’s new home, apparently.’

They have walked the short distance from Euston underground to the derelict hospital on Hampstead Road. The London sky is midnight blue, lit up and time-fractured by lightning. It is impossible to tell from which direction the thunder is coming. To Loss it sounds as if it is coming from everywhere. Or maybe just from his head. Everything seems to be moving to a beat that he can’t quite hear: the rape riots, as certain parts of the media had begun to call them; the feeling that his city is ready to erupt in flames; the confusion of the gang world, its handles on power being blown away, the tension in the office, not just because of him. The case seems to be affecting the entire staff.