I had a text on my phone when I had a little sneaky check of it under the bar, and there was still nobody around so I looked at it. It was a picture message from my sister, Hannah. It was of her face cos they’d been having another go at it, I remembered then. It did look a bit better even though it was still all red and tight and scarred and her eye still drooped and gaped in a weird way and it still wouldn’t move with the other, I knew that even though obviously I couldn’t tell just from a photo but they’d told her all along that it would never work properly again and I think she’d just got used to that. Her face probably looked loads better but it was hard to judge when the photo had half the normal side of her face in it, half her nose and half her mouth and half her forehead, all normal pale smooth skin and then the jagged monstery part across her cheek and her eye. You couldn’t see the arm in the picture, just a close-up of her face but that didn’t really matter cos they’d done all they could do with the arm, they’d already told her that, and it didn’t look all that bad when it was in her sleeve; it just wasn’t much good for anything any more, that was all.
It was weird, thinking about how it wasn’t all that long before that all the news had been about the bomb and now it was about Fate Jones. In a weird way I sort of knew how Fate Jones’s family felt, but when it was Han’s face on the screen it was with loads of other people’s pictures too, flashing up as they listed the injuries and even worse the dead, and later as they filmed her and other people attending court to testify and to hear the verdict of the inquest and all the other stuff that dragged on and on long after it was over. Fate Jones was on the screen on her own and that must have been a lot worse. I looked up at her front door again and thought about the people behind it and whether their TV was on and showing the same picture and whether they ever pressed blue for Fate Jones.
Thinking about what it had been like back then and the horrible sadness and worry of it all, I felt terrible thinking Hannah’s face still looked bad and that I hadn’t seen her for a long old time, so I texted her back and said nice things about how good it looked and then I put two kisses instead of my usual one. The lunchers were finally staggering out and they’d have headaches by teatime, I reckoned, but I smiled and waved ’bye and then I went over and started clearing their table.
Well, I was right about being late, that was for sure. Must’ve been after three by the time I finally took the drawer out of the till and shut it in the storeroom and said night to Cadbury. By the time I got to the house I was knackered and I knew I needed to get in the mood quickly or I’d just end up curled in a corner of the sofa all night like a right miserable git. Al was sat on the front step and she looked dead pleased to see me but her whole body was bobbing to the beat and her eyes were like big black marbles and she looked pretty spangled all in all, so I just patted her on the head and carried on up to the front door, leaving her conducting the beat with one finger and smiling at the little moustachioed guy next to her. Inside it was all a bit much for my fragile tired mind. It was just one of those things. I knew if I’d been there from the start I’d have been having a whale of a time cos it was pretty impressive: the whole hall had giant sheets of paper taped up and all of it was covered in doodles and slogans and lyrics and love, and all these different-coloured lights were creeping out from under doors with snatches of bass line and people were milling about looking at each other and the walls happily. But because I was sober and shattered I couldn’t be arsed with it all, really, even though I wanted to be. I felt a bit out of it so I sort of waded through the crowds into the lounge, grabbing a can bobbing in a wastepaper bin on my way past. I caught a glimpse of Delilah stomping about in the corner with a tall brown-haired girl so I headed over, stepping round another girl casually gagging into a plant pot on the way.
‘All right, Lilah,’ I said, tapping her on the shoulder for a bit until she finally turned round.
‘Ooooh, Fitz,’ she goes, all squealy. ‘You’re here! Isn’t it great? Have you met Meg?’
‘Yeah, it’s awesome,’ I said, half waving at Meg. ‘Saf about?’
She looked at me all confused and gurning her chops off and said, ‘Who? OhSafyeahsheiscoursesheissorryforgot! She’supstairsintheotherlounge.’
A little tiny warning bell went off in my head in between the bass of the music. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah,’ she goes. ‘It’s nice up there, allpinkandplinkyplonk-music!’
The warning bell quadrupled in size and started ringing cheerily against the back of my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The other lounge is a ket party – you’ve not left Saf with a ready supply of K, have you?’
She’d stopped listening ages before cos she just nodded and said, ‘IdunnoFitzsorry!’ and then she carried on grunting the beat with grinning Meg, sloshing their mugs of wine about and hugging each other and the people around them loads.
I gave up and wandered off up the stairs, stepping over people sprawling about, mumbling at each other and trying to focus on each other’s faces. I made for the pink glow at the far end of the landing and pushed the door open, feeling weird and nervous and scared about what I was going to see without knowing why.
The room felt empty even though it was full. Nobody was DJing, someone had just stuck an iPod on shuffle, but some bald bloke off his head seemed to think he was, listening dead serious to one of the headphones round his thick neck and grinning round at the room really proud of himself. Everyone else was melting into sofas, giggling and stretching themselves out, a leg or a finger at a time, pawing at each other or the air. In the middle of the room were these two guys, one of them I thought I recognised and he might’ve worked with Al but it was hard to tell because they were lying down with happy looks on their faces – well, the one I thought I recognised was face down but the back of his head looked happy anyway. They obviously couldn’t move and that’s why I didn’t do K – apart from this once in the summer holidays when I was a kid – I’ve got a fear of being still. Spike, Alice’s rescued Staffy, was sniffing about them with a bow of tinsel round his neck and this toy in his mouth that Al had bought him a few weeks back. The dog had chewed one end and when it looked up at you with the toy in its mouth the bit sticking out had on it a big cartoon grin so it looked like the mutt was smiling at you. It would’ve been funny but Spike didn’t like being laughed at so you wouldn’t chance it, you just smiled along politely like he was telling you the joke not like he was the butt of it. There he was, trotting around the two blokes, grinning like the Joker and sniffing around, getting his nose right into some unfortunate places. He casually cocked a leg against one but that was okay, I reasoned, because it didn’t look like the smell’d make much difference to him if I’m honest. But then he was looking round with mischief on his cartoon grinning face and he was sizing up their heads and while I was stood leaning against the door and he knew I was watching, and he was glad, he mounted the poor bloke’s face and began humping it, I mean really going at it, and there were a few squeals from the rest of the room and a few people sat staring at the scene like it was one of those toga fellas being eaten by a lion and nobody was moving, even I couldn’t for a minute, his stubby tail bobbing up and down in and out was hypnotising me and I’d only had half a beer. I stared at the tinsel rustling away on his neck and the bloke’s floppy foot, which was rocking back and forth ever so slightly with the movement, and then at all the people around the room staring all transfixed and it all seemed unreal and slow, like things are in a dream. But when Spike leant onto one paw to get a better angle, the spell was broken