The descent to the Underground led her into a frenzied warren of escalators and tunnels. Ariel negotiated her route to Finsbury Park with relative ease, surfaced at ground level and walked down a long, starkly lit passageway until she reached a busy sleeve of London high street. She emerged onto Seven Sisters Road and faltered. A dense knot of pedestrians scurried past her, snatching her breath away, their faces armed with hard-edged confidence – the kind of attitude, she decided, that only a city as awesome as London could produce.
She stepped to one side, flipped open the canvas bag slung over her shoulder and searched for Tumbleweed’s email on her phone. Mags is cool with you staying the night, he’d written. You’ll like her. Just don’t call her Magdalena. Crazy girl thinks it makes her sound like a disciple.
She memorised his directions, crossed over the road and set off to her right. A zigzag of turns, and she arrived at last at a steep run of concrete steps leading to a side-street basement.
Ariel lingered for a moment on the pavement and peered into the milky darkness. ‘Mag-da-le-na,’ she intoned, airing the word out, freeing it so it wouldn’t sneak up on her later and catch her unawares.
She dragged her wheelie bag to the bottom of the stairs and pressed her finger to a bronze buzzer. A light snapped on beyond the window, and a wiry cat, perched territorially on the windowsill, glowered at her with bilious green eyes.
‘Hi there,’ she said, backing carefully away from it.
Behind her, the door swung open. ‘You must be Ariel,’ said a girl with violet, asymmetric hair. ‘I’m Mags. Come in!’
The first thing Ariel felt was the music, slipping inside her, squeezing the air from her lungs like a vice. ‘Aladdin Sane,’ she said, dropping her shoulder bag to the floor. ‘Ziggy goes to America. 1973.’
Mags raised her eyebrows. ‘Yeah, it is! You a Bowie-head?’
Ariel tilted her hand from side to side. ‘Kind of, I suppose. I used to think I was the only person on the planet who thought it was called A Lad Insane until I found out the pun was intentional. Estelle – my mother – was a massive Bowie fan. It’s weird to hear it here. Reminds me of home.’
‘Shit. Sorry.’ Mags took an aborted step towards an old-school iPod and seemed to be weighing up whether or not to turn it off. ‘Tumbleweed told me what happened, I’m –’
‘It’s okay. It’s fine, don’t worry.’
Ariel smiled awkwardly and looked away, her throat thickening, an icy, sinking sensation billowing through her insides. She tried to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings: low ceiling; a lumpy sofa; floorboards bare apart from a shabby, oversized Persian rug; cheap lamps and mirrored cushions and a half-eaten pizza scattered at random intervals around the room.
The back wall was covered with what she assumed must be Mags’s artwork. Sketch after sketch of semi-naked, contorted torsos which somehow managed to look both fragile and disarmingly self-possessed.
‘Are those yours?’ she asked, moving closer. The hand-drawn charcoal figures were softer close up; less physically arresting. ‘They’re amazing! Seriously, I wish I could do that.’
Mags threw her an appreciative smile. ‘Gracias. They’re part of my coursework. I’m still working on my technique, but honestly, I’d rather look at those than at that hideous woodchip wallpaper underneath.’
Ariel pulled off her gloves and ran a finger over the pockmarked surface of the wall. She’d grown up in a house full of woodchip wallpaper, but this stuff looked original, like it had actually been there since the ’70s, long before she was born.
She took a step back and inhaled. The air smelled damp and faintly aromatic, an oddly comforting blend of the rundown and the exotic.
‘You’re a lifesaver for putting me up,’ she said, turning back to Mags. ‘Linus thinks I’m in Oxford with Tumbleweed, so at least being here with you makes me feel less guilty.’ She caught the look of curiosity on Mags’s face and shrugged. ‘It was a necessary lie. Given the circumstances.’
‘No worries. Any friend of my cousin’s. Who’s Linus, anyway? Your boyfriend?’
Ariel smiled. ‘No, he’s my dad.’
‘You call your dad by his first name? Wow. Progressive.’
Ariel rolled her eyes. ‘Trust me, you wouldn’t say that if you met him. The name thing’s just something I’ve done for a while. It’s no big deal, really.’
Her gaze drifted to the sofa.
‘That’s where you’ll be crashing, I’m afraid,’ Mags said. ‘Or if that doesn’t grab you, my boyfriend and I are going to a party in Kensal Rise. It might even turn into an all-nighter if the booze holds out, so don’t be surprised if we don’t come back…’ She paused. ‘You know, you’re welcome to come with us if you like?’
As she spoke, a tall, monobrowed guy in a donkey jacket slunk into view in the bedroom doorway. He looked over at Ariel and grinned. ‘Alright?’
Ariel held up her palm in greeting. She opened her mouth to answer Mags’s question, then faltered. A student party. In London. Cool, arty, interesting people her own age. No one to answer to but herself. Wasn’t that what eighteen-year-olds were supposed to do? Let their hair down and have some fun?
She took a breath, felt the sharp thud of a door slamming shut somewhere deep inside her, and slowly shook her head. ‘Thanks, Mags, but I have to leave early in the morning to get to King’s Cross. I can’t risk missing my train.’
When they’d gone it felt as though they’d taken every trace of oxygen from the room.
Ariel laid her coat and scarf on the arm of the sofa. She stood tugging at the sleeves of her jumper, trying to adjust to the stillness. In Oystermouth, she was used to it. At night, once the bay had grown cool and dark and secretive, not even the low roll of the waves carried to her bedroom at the back of the house. But here – in the city – it was unexpected. Unsettling, even.
She turned and searched for the iPod before remembering that it, too, was gone; swept into Mags’s pocket along with a packet of Rizlas and some gum. The only sounds now came from the street: the swoosh of passing traffic; the truncated slamming of car doors; the dull scrape of anonymous, torso-less feet on the pavement beyond the railings; low voices, muffled voices, distant, unintelligible all.
Alone in the city’s alien underbelly, Ariel watched the pulsing of her heart through her clothes, the first leg of her journey begun.
She settled herself cross-legged on the floor and unzipped her wheelie bag on the Persian rug. Her hands slid beneath the hastily packed layers of clothing until they found the large, padded envelope at the bottom. She lifted it out and placed it in her lap, contemplating, as she had done so many times before, the startling immediacy of Estelle’s handwriting etched across its front.
Ariel read the words out loud: ‘For E.M.H.’
Secured with a strip of Sellotape beneath it was a Post-it Note containing a phone number and an address on the outskirts of Edinburgh – some far-off village she’d never even heard her mother mention before. And below that, five words, their lettering markedly less defined: ARIEL, PLEASE DELIVER BY HAND.
Ariel ran her fingers over the words, held the package to her chest, closed her eyes. It was bad enough not knowing what was inside it, but now she’d had to lie through her teeth, too. ‘Promise me you won’t tell him,’ Estelle had asked her. ‘You must promise me you won’t tell Dad anything about this at all.’
Why???
‘Fuck.’ Ariel glanced at the low-rent