It’s also the one idea that I haven’t really allowed myself to think about before. Not properly, anyway.
The morning after the first Being fell, Elsie Jackson, a mousy girl who ran the Scripture Union group at school, ran up to me and Sam in the corridor on our way to French. Her eyes were shining with tears.
‘You must be so happy!’ she squealed.
I stared at her – we’d never spoken beyond ‘Can I borrow a pencil?’ but suddenly she was squeezing my hand in both of hers.
‘Now you know you’ll get to see your mum in heaven.’
Before I could process what she’d said, she’d started reciting Bible passages at me: ‘And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . See? She’s with the Lord now, Jaya. She’s at peace.’
Apparently Elsie hadn’t considered that my mum was a Hindu, though not a practising one, or that she might have had an abortion or committed adultery or done any one of the hundreds of things that void your ticket to heaven, at least according to some Christians. Elsie wasn’t that kind of person. She was terminally nice: the sort of girl who could see the good in a serial killer. If she was telling me this, it was because she really thought it would help me.
‘Maybe your mum saw him,’ she added as she shifted her backpack on to her shoulder. ‘The angel. Maybe they crossed paths on her way to the stars.’
Sam bit his lip until she’d turned the corner, then burst out laughing. ‘Poor Elsie,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘She’s going to be so disappointed when it turns out it’s all a publicity stunt for Samsung or something.’
But Elsie wasn’t proved wrong; if anything, Sam was. Even the staunchest atheists had to at least consider, once three or four Beings had landed and the general consensus that the Falls were a hoax was starting to fade, that there might be something beyond the grave. Attendance at religious buildings suddenly skyrocketed; the waiting lists for christenings and blessings stretched from weeks to years; online shops ran out of holy water.
For people like Elsie, who had always had one eye on the afterlife, it was a confirmation of what they’d always known: this life was just a stepping stone to whatever came next.
For me, it was just confusing. I’d never been religious – even with angels falling from the sky, I felt some scientific explanation had to come sooner or later. But, as much as I tried to shrug it off, I couldn’t get that image out of my head: Mum and the angel crossing paths, like two cars passing on a lonely highway in the night.
I’m rubbish at keeping secrets. It always feels like having a bunch of balloons trapped in my ribcage: they swell and swell, and eventually it’s either pop them or suffocate. The first time Marek told me that he fancied Jennie Zhang, back in S1, he swore me to secrecy. I lasted all through double English and the first half of Chemistry, but by History I’d traded it for a rumour that Emma had heard about Kelly Hislop’s cousin and a packet of Starburst. I don’t know how I’m going to keep the fact of an angel from Dad and Rani.
Luckily, they don’t even seem to have noticed that I’ve been gone all day. They’re sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by maps and books and scribbled notes. I lean against the doorframe, trying to look natural and failing miserably.
‘Oh, hi, pet,’ Dad says, forty-eight seconds (I count them) after I say hello. I begin to ask what we’re having for tea, but he holds up a finger. ‘Hang on – I think I could be on to a breakthrough here . . . don’t want to lose my flow.’
Among the papers, I catch a kaleidoscope of broken angels: glassy eyes, smashed limbs, heads surrounded in halos of golden blood . . . a tragic family photo album. It makes my head spin to think how easily my Being could have ended up like these poor creatures. Just another sad, dead person, smeared on the front of the Sunday papers, ripped apart for her feathers –
Feathers. My stomach flips. Feathers floating around the hillside last night, glints of pink in the dim light. Feathers that would fetch hundreds or thousands of pounds online – the only clue that another Being has fallen.
Feathers that I left for anyone to find.
NINE
Maybe the wind blew them away. Maybe I’ll find them in the corners of the gutters, or tangled in the gorse, or tucked into birds’ nests in the bushes. That’s what I tell myself as I pace around the ruin, looking for hints of pink against the grass. Because I’ve checked the spot where she fell, I’ve followed our route across the hillside, and the feathers are gone. Every single one of them.
‘Crap, crap, crap.’ I kick a broken bottle of Buckfast against the wall of the ruin. ‘You absolute idiot, Jaya.’
At the foot of the hill, two people are sitting on a bench by the pond. They look up in unison as the glass shatters against the stone, then go back to watching ducks fight over scraps of bread. Perry snuffles around by the gorse, following some invisible trail. For a moment I have this vision of her leading us back to whoever took the feathers, breaking into their house and disposing of the evidence, like a less-stoned version of Shaggy and Scooby Doo . . . but then she yawns, pees on a bush and comes padding back to me.
‘Oh, great work, sniffer dog,’ I mutter, rubbing her head. ‘No job at Heathrow for you.’
I slump down on to a rock and rip out a handful of grass from the earth. There’s a dull dread gnawing at my insides. I know it wasn’t just the wind. Some of those feathers are huge, twice the span of my hand, and such a distinctive colour; leaving them lying around was like writing ‘an angel woz ’ere’ across the hill in giant neon letters. Somebody’s sure to brag about finding them on Wingpin or CherubIM, and then Dad and loads of other Wingdings will put two and two together and realize there’s an undiscovered Being somewhere in the city. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes after us now.
I need help, but I don’t know who to ask for it. Marek wouldn’t believe me, Sam would freak out and Emma can’t keep her mouth shut – it’d be all over Twitter in five minutes.
I could trust Leah, if I knew where she was. Leah was always the one people went to with their problems. Every time we were at a party, you’d find her in the bathroom with whoever happened to be in tears that night, nodding like a priest as they spilt their confessions. We always said if Leah ever wanted to blackmail us we’d be totally screwed: she knew everybody’s secrets.
She had quite a few of her own too. There was that time we got lost on the school trip to Paris, when she held my hand as we walked around the Catacombs, when she said it was just because those leering skulls were creeping her out and I knew she was lying. There was the first time we kissed, in the bathroom at one of Sam’s parties: Leah leaning back against the sink, my hands gripping the ceramic. There was the day she came over to watch a film, and Rani was at gymnastics and Dad, by some miracle, dragged himself off CherubIM and went to do a food shop, giving us a whole hour alone in my room. There were other times we slept together – just a few, but each one a step, I thought, to something proper. Something with a name.
But then there were all the days she stopped talking to me, the times she acted like there was nothing between us, the night she kissed Joseph Macrae right in front of me. There were all those words – labels that we didn’t need, but that wrapped themselves around us, suffocating whatever it was we had.