‘Has something happened?’ she asked a woman in a camouflage parka and bright orange boots.
The woman sighed. ‘There’s a security alert at Victoria. The entire line’s been closed. Don’t even bother trying to get on the Piccadilly Line… the platform’s rammed. It’s total chaos down there.’
Ariel’s heart sank. ‘Are there any buses? I have to get to King’s Cross.’
‘Sure, if you’re willing to spend the rest of the day getting pushed around in a queue with everyone else here.’ She flicked her eyes to Ariel’s wheelie bag. ‘It’ll be a bun fight to get on them, though, especially with that. Personally, I’m calling it quits and going home.’
Ariel looked up and down the length of Seven Sisters Road. If taxis ever drove along it, they weren’t doing so today.
She checked the time on her phone. If she didn’t get to King’s Cross in the next thirty minutes, she wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching her train.
She stared back at the entrance to the tube station. ‘Sod it,’ she said, to anyone who cared to listen. ‘I’m going in.’
Tightening her grip on her wheelie bag, Ariel threw herself into the fray – one more nameless face (or so it seemed to her), caught up in the slipstream of the day, the rush hour crush eventually propelling her onto a heaving Piccadilly Line platform, its force pressing in around her, relentless, immense.
Five trains came and went before she finally managed to squeeze herself through the doors of a carriage which was already bursting at the seams. Her wheelie bag dug into her legs, as well as those of the strangers squashed up close and personal against her. ‘Sorry,’ she kept saying, over and over. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’
‘’S’alright, love,’ one man replied with a resigned grimace. ‘This is London. We can take it.’
Ariel gave him a nervous smile. All she could think about as the tunnel closed around them was that she wasn’t going to make it. No way was she going to make her train.
At King’s Cross, she spilled out of the tube train door and jostled her way through a scrum of commuters funnelling upwards into the mainline railway station.
The time on her phone showed 8:26.
‘Shit.’
She stepped off the escalator and paused to orient herself. A young boy with a freckled face and a mop of unruly hair crossed in front of her, tripping over his shoelaces, shooting her a curious stare. Hey, you look just like my brother, Isaac! she almost called out to him. But the crowd swept them onwards, the momentum carrying her all the way to the central concourse, where the boy disappeared from view.
Positioned high against the back wall, the electronic departure board displayed running updates on an array of trains bound for the north. Ariel scanned the screen until she found the one she was looking for:
Destination: Edinburgh. Departure: 9a.m. Status: On Time. Platform: Not Yet Allocated.
She glanced over her shoulder and spotted a Starbucks to her right. Weaving her way towards it, she placed her order at the till and moved to the end of the counter to collect her drink. Her hand slipped inside her canvas bag while she waited and wrapped itself around her phone. She toyed with it in the palm of her hand, then fished it out and saw that a message from Tumbleweed had just that second come in.
Ariel opened it. A close-up shot of a pair of bright purple running shoes – primed and ready for action in the middle of a sun-drenched field – filled the screen. As usual, there was no message; the rule was they always let the pictures do the talking. (‘Sounds like a cop-out to me,’ Linus liked to tease her, but then in her humble opinion, her father had always been overly fixated on words.)
‘Grande cappuccino for Ariel?’ A dough-faced barista slid her cup across the counter and winked. ‘Is that Ariel as in “brilliant cleaning every time”?’
‘Yes,’ she replied with a well-practised smile. ‘That’s me. I haven’t heard the washing powder reference in a while, actually. Lately, it’s either been Sylvia Plath or The Little Mermaid.’
A large, floor-to-ceiling window separated the interior of the coffee shop from the station concourse beyond. She dragged her wheelie bag towards it and turned her attention back to her phone. The implication of Tumbleweed’s message seemed to be that someone – she – was running.
But in which direction? she wondered. And towards, or away from, what?
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked her.
‘What am I going to do about what?’
For the past quarter of an hour, Ariel and Tumbleweed had been sitting on a stretch of gorse-covered cliff top; a long, rugged cummerbund of land which leaned, and eventually fell in jagged increments, to the sea. Behind them lay the billowy green contours of the Langland Bay Golf Course. Ahead, the bay itself, languid, flecked intermittently with wispy bursts of spray.
‘The package Estelle gave you,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you want to know what’s in it?’
Ariel shrugged. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Not really.’
She clamped her arms across her chest and reminded herself to breathe. It was the previous November, two days since Estelle’s funeral, and all she felt was numb. Was this normal? she asked herself. Everyone had told her it would bring closure. Relief. It was, she’d discovered, a lie. To her, it felt more like the ceremony’s solemn finality had brought with it a kind of shutting down – a formal sealing in, in a way – of everything that was ransacked, and empty, and broken.
Linus, Ariel, Isaac: they were three now. It didn’t fit, would never fit, she was sure of it. The void in her heart was indescribable. The last thing she wanted to think about was the package when it was as much as she could do to reorient herself on solid ground.
‘You’re still in shock,’ Tumbleweed said. He leaned his long, rangy body against his elbows. Tossed a hank of straw-coloured hair from his eyes. ‘My bad. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’
‘This sucks,’ Ariel replied. She gave him a placatory smile. ‘Sorry.’
She hadn’t been out on the cliffs in weeks. Once, when she was small, Linus had brought her not far from where they were sitting now in search of lost golf balls. He told her he’d be able to sell them on for extra cash, though as it turned out, the payout was barely more than negligible. She’d trailed along behind him, stopping every few paces to gaze at the mountains of bright yellow gorse. It was only when she felt a familiar pressure building between her legs that she remembered where she was.
‘Daddy, wait!’ she’d cried. ‘I need the toilet!’
Linus turned and gave a carefree wave of his hand. ‘Hurry up, then! We’ll stop off at the loos by the tennis courts on the way home!’
Ariel peered to her right. The gorse was almost as tall as she was, its prickly fronds rising just inches from her chin. Beyond it, she knew the earth sloped away to the edge of the cliff and a dense outcrop of rocks below.
Her legs froze.
‘Daddy, please come back and get me! I’m scared!’
Linus’s reply, breezy as the air itself, floated backwards on the wind. ‘What’s got into you? Come on, pet. I’ll wait for you on the path.’
She watched him plough ahead, hands on hips; his easy Sunday stride. Ariel lowered herself to her knees