She trained herself out of dreaming, because every time she dreamed, she woke up in a panic. It was a sad time. For one thing, she remembered missing Tish very badly. But more dreams meant more sessions with Dr Carter, more interrogations, more time being smiled at. For months she woke up four or five times a night, dragging herself from the Other Place by main force.
Then she didn’t have to any more. The dreams stopped coming. She slept with her head under the covers all the way into her teens, woke up remembering nothing. And the angels…
The angels went away and didn’t come back. Tish didn’t come back either. Maybe they all just got tired of waiting for Jess to come out and play. She could barely remember now what her nightly journeys had been like. They had been very real to her at the time, she knew that much. But she’d forgotten almost all of this. She remembered Tish, but mainly as a story she’d been told about herself rather than an actual presence. She’d been very young, after all. When you’re a kid, pretty much anything can heal over and leave no scar.
Aunt Brenda changed the subject. “You were in the papers every day,” she said. “They were coming out with terrible things about you, Jess. Some of these people who call themselves reporters…”
She went off on a rant about journalistic ethics, which Jess knew was intended as a show of solidarity. The substantive point – Alex – couldn’t be contested, but it was some comfort to know that her aunt was on her side and wanted to lift her mood.
Finally Brenda put her hand on Jess’s arm. “It was the drugs,” she said. “It wasn’t you. You’re not capable of hurting people, Jess. Not on purpose.”
But Jess knew she was. Everyone was. It was basic human kit.
“I’ll come and see you,” Brenda promised. “Up there. It’s a long way, but I’ll come.”
“No, you won’t,” Jess said. “You’re not even to try until you’re better. But I’d love it if you could write.”
“Of course I will. Every week. And as soon as I’m up to making the trip, you’ll see me there. No arguments.”
They embraced and Brenda left, trying not to let Jess see that she was crying.
I’ve let her down so badly, Jess thought. There were never very many people who were willing to think well of me, and I smacked them all in the face.
It felt right then as though that was what she’d been doing all her life.
6
Jess went to sleep still thinking about those old nightwalks, those dead angels. Perhaps that was why, for the first time since her childhood excursions, she dreamed. Real dreams, not bodiless whispers. Dreams where she walked and moved, saw and did things.
In the most coherent of the dreams, she was lying right there in the remand cell when her phone started to ring. She looked around for the phone but couldn’t find it. She was dimly aware, even in the dream, that her phone was with the rest of her effects in a police lockbox somewhere. It seemed logical, all the same, that it should be trying to make its way back to her.
But she didn’t find it in the bed, or on the table, or in the locker (without a lock or even a door) where prisoners were meant to stow their meagre belongings. So she went looking elsewhere. She opened the door of the cell and stepped out – into the lobby of her flat in Muswell Hill.
She climbed the stairs to her own landing, which was dominated by a huge, ugly mirror mounted on the wall directly across from her door. She could see that she was casting no reflection in the mirror, which she took to mean that this was a temporary visit. She wasn’t coming home to live just yet.
(It burned down. Didn’t it burn down?)
Alex Beech was sitting on the next flight of stairs, in his usual spot. He looked the way he had when she saw him last – or at least, the last time she could remember seeing him. Wearing an Arsenal T-shirt that was too big for him, most likely a hand-me-down, and a pair of denim shorts out of which his spindly legs protruded like the two halves of a wishbone.
Jess plopped herself down next to him and they sat in slightly uneasy silence for a little while. Not perfect silence: the ringing of the phone continued from somewhere very nearby, muted but distinct.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said at last. “I’m so sorry, Alex.”
Alex didn’t answer, or look at her.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she ventured again. She put a hand on his arm. Or she tried to. Her fingers slid right through him as though he wasn’t there.
That was when she realised – with dream logic that came to her fully formed – that she was dead. It wasn’t Alex who was burned up in the fire: it was her. And he was still waiting there for her, would wait always, but she would never come.
And that was why her phone was ringing, she suddenly knew. She had told him he could call her. He was doing that right now. If she could find the phone, she could pick up and they could talk, at least. And maybe he could tell her the way back so she could come to him.
She left the boy’s side and went into her flat. The door was standing open, the hallway empty. She always left her phone on the bedside table when she slept, and death was a lot like sleep. It seemed that it even came complete with dreams. The ringing got louder and she knew she’d guessed correctly.
When she went into the bedroom, the phone was right there on the table. John was lying in the bed, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in a slow, shallow rhythm. The ringing didn’t wake him. The phone couldn’t reach into his sleep, his dreams, because it was only meant for Jess.
She reached out to pick it up, but the skin on the back of her neck prickled. Someone was behind her.
She turned slowly, and they were there. Thousands of them. Naked, with their arms at their sides. In order to accommodate them, the room had ceased to be a room. All that was left was the bed and the bedside table and the angle of two walls, standing now on a wide, flat foreshore that stretched as far as her eye could see.
They were almost all women. The few men stood out by contrast. They all had their eyes closed. Their faces mostly wore similar expressions of blank indifference although a few looked sad or troubled. They were not watching Jess: they had no idea that she was there. In fact, she knew, each of them had no idea that any of the others were there. For all each of these women knew, she stood alone. Only Jess could see them all.
As she had seen them when she was a child. Perhaps they had looked like angels to her then simply because they had no clothes on. The only naked bodies she remembered seeing as a little girl were those of Christian saints.
The phone hadn’t stopped ringing all this time.
It took an effort to turn her back on the silent assembly, but she did. She picked up.
“Alex?”
Just static on the line. No voice that Jess could make out, although the crackle and hiss rose and fell with the inflections of a voice.
She tried again. “Alex?”
There was a voice there, but it was so far down she could barely make it out. She closed her eyes. That was dangerous, given that the whole place might burst into flames at any moment, but it felt like it was vitally important to take this call.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“Who’s there?” someone else asked at the other end of the line. Not an echo. She was almost able to identify the voice.
“It’s Jess,” she said. “What do you want?”
The voice answered but the static spiked and peaked right over the words, drowning out most of them. She heard fire and lost and something that might have been a frame but was probably afraid.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” Jess said. She was still thinking that this might be Alex, although it didn’t sound like him. “I’m here if you need me. I’ll always be here.”
“How?” the other voice whispered. The static had cleared, but the volume had dropped away with it to the limit of what she could hear.
“How?” Jess repeated. “What do you mean?”
“How…?”
Then silence.
Then, “How did…?”
A storm of static, so abrupt it seemed that the ether was trying to snatch the words away before they reached her.
But they did.
“How did I get here?”
The voice was hers. She was talking to herself. But that didn’t mean she had an answer.
7
How did I get here?