CHAPTER 42
10 years AC
Shepherd’s Bush, London
Home was almost as Leona remembered it. St Stephen’s Avenue, Shepherd’s Bush - a leafy suburban cul-de-sac flanked on either side by a row of modest terraced family homes fronted by modest gardens gone to seed.
They’d left this place a decade ago; the morning after Dad had died . . . in the aftermath of the riots. London’s skyline had been smudged with columns of smoke, the roads and streets cluttered with things pulled out from homes and shops; like some bizarre end-of-the-world street party left for someone else to clean up. And it had been strangely quiet the day they had set off to escape London for good.
Ten summers and winters appeared to have changed little here; last autumn’s leaves lay in small, wind-gathered mounds against the kerb and around the bases of tree trunks lining both sides of the narrow avenue. The front gardens were lost beneath waist-high grass and weeds. She noticed a tile had slipped here and there on one or two of the roofs.
She brought her bicycle to a halt with the squeak of brakes outside one of the houses.
She climbed off the bike, pushed open the garden gate with a creak and stared at the small front garden - liquor bottles and crumpled cans of lager nestled in the tall grass.
Hannah asked her once about their home and the crash. Was there fighting, Leona?
‘Yes, there was fighting,’ she replied. She still had nightmares about that week - ones that woke her with a scream in her mouth. ‘There was a gang of boys that hung around outside. Boys, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age having a party just outside our house every night of that first week.’ Leona spotted the fading peak of a Nike baseball cap and the rusting blade of a flick knife tangled in the long grass.
‘Then finally they got brave enough to start breaking into the houses one after the other. Stealing things, doing horrible things to the poor people inside.’
It must have been frightening.
‘It was, love. Me and Jake did all right. Better than others. We survived it.’
She pushed her way through the stalks of grass, up the short gravel path to the front door. She examined it. It was closed and locked, just as they’d left it a decade ago. It looked like it hadn’t been forced.
It meant he hadn’t beaten her home. Her heart sank. Jake’s not here.
He would have had to force the front door.
She fumbled for something she’d kept on a chain around her neck all these years, never really knowing why, and produced a worn and scuffed latch key that jangled against a brass ankh pendant as she pulled it out of her top. The key slotted into the lock and clicked effortlessly. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
‘Jacob?’ she called out hopefully. Perhaps he’d forced the back door.
It smelled faintly of damp, of mildew, just like every other building did nowadays. But unlike so many other homes, at least it wasn’t gutted, it wasn’t a mess of things pulled out, inspected and tossed aside or broken; walls sprayed with graffiti. It still looked like a place in which people once lived - just dusty and in need of an airing.
To her left the doorway leading to Dad’s study, to the right the door to the kitchen. There were cardboard boxes on the floor in the hallway, Mum’s handwriting on them: ‘Jenny’s CDs’, ‘Andy’s DVDs’. She knew they’d been considering a trial separation at the time the crash happened. They hadn’t been getting on for a while.
She shook her head sadly. It had taken the end of the world to bring the pair of them back to their senses. At least they’d had a chance to say to each other what needed to be said before . . .
Her eyes stung and she wiped the tears away.
She checked the back door, that too was still locked and unforced. Jacob hadn’t come here last night. Which meant . . .
She closed her mind to what exactly that meant. She didn’t need to do that right now. Not now.
Lee? Hannah’s insistent voice in her head again. What you going to do now?
She looked up the stairwell in the hallway. Up there were their bedrooms, Mum and Dad’s room, and presumably Dad’s body at rest beneath a rotting quilt. She slumped down on the bottom step in the dark hallway and gazed out at the overgrown front garden, the open gate and the quiet leaf-filled street beyond. The morning sun dappled the brick walls of the house opposite. Quite pretty really, poppies in their front garden and cherry blossoms on the tree.
‘I don’t know. I guess I’ll just wait here for a while.’