speaks again.
‘He will not stay for long. He never does. A month, maybe. I will phone you when he leaves.’
‘So you have made your decision then? Another decision that does not include me?’ Petulantly, Harris uncrosses his legs and slides away from her, before crossing them again in the opposite direction.
She looks down at her uniform, at the fat white stitching in the wide hem below her knees.
‘You don’t have to choose him,’ he says.
‘I already did. He does not come home often; I owe him my time.’
‘You’ve already given him so many years, years in which you’ve waited and waited. And now you want to pretend that I don’t exist for a month.’ He shrugs. ‘So go ahead, imagine that I’m dead so you can get on with playing husband and wife.’
Why can’t he understand? It’s only a month. She pushes the nets aside as she storms through to the bathroom, where she rolls a large ball of tissue in her hand to help her get through the bus journey.
Harris waits by the front door.
‘Let me at least drive you to work.’ His eyes appear watery, but he does not look emotional, only annoyed, probably from having to go up against a man much lesser than himself, of competing against vows made in another time and anxieties that manifest themselves in the form of twitching elbows and bad dreams.
‘Okay.’
He slides his feet into his brown sandals and picks up the keys from the slim wooden side table. As they set off towards the hospital, Mary tries to distract herself from the silence between them. His car is messier than usual: mud-caked walking boots and some shrivelled orange peelings on the floor, a pile of his students’ workbooks on the backseat. He fusses with the tape player as the car slows at the traffic lights, pushing in the Simply Red album she bought him at Christmas. The first song is their song: ‘You Make Me Believe’. They look at each other and smile.
They could never go a month without each other.
Then a sound from above, a sound so deep it makes the windows of the car shake within their frames. Then a blast. It vibrates through the car.
Harris turns the tape off.
Moments pass, odd, thick moments, before a softer tremor is felt. They turn to each other, this time for an explanation. The doors of the bus in front open and people start to scatter out, all of them turning to face the same way.
Mary steps from the car and looks as well, into the distance, to a huge fire in the sky.
‘It hit the flats,’ the bus driver shouts.
Harris leans across the hood of the car, his eyes wide and dazed by the scene.
It is clear but Mary can’t yet accept it.
Then a voice, in shock and rambling to all who will listen, confirms, ‘That block of flats exploded.’
Mary’s block of flats.
Elvis peeps around the corner of the block. The bad black boy went inside Nightingale Point a few minutes ago. There are two boys left by the wall; they cycle in little circles and do tricks on their bikes.
Elvis needs to get back to his perfect flat with his perfect things. Now is a safe time to do it. Quickly, he comes out of hiding and walks into the block behind a man pulling a brown suitcase on tiny wheels. The man has shiny black hair slicked back neatly like the men in the photographs of barber shop windows. Elvis has never seen him before, but hopes he is here to sell encyclopaedias, the kind with the gold spines where you can look up words like Serengeti and Kathmandu. The man grunts as he presses the lift button. People were not only dangerous on council estates but they were also unfriendly. Archie had warned Elvis of this as they ate their last full English breakfast together. As Archie scooped beans onto his toast he informed Elvis that brown people especially would not give you the time of day. It was ‘a cultural thing’.
‘Do you have the time, please?’ Elvis asks the man.
He checks his watch. ‘Eight-forty. No, sorry.’ The man counts some numbers under his breath. ‘I have come from the Philippines and have not yet reset my watch. One-forty.’
Elvis has had a bad morning but it makes him happy to know that Archie could still be wrong about some things and that not all brown people were too ‘cultural’. The man hits the call button for the lift again.
‘They are both broken,’ Elvis says.
Earlier Elvis had flicked through his notepad of information and found the lift engineer number. He called it to report its breakage but there was only a voicemail message saying: ‘Bolton Lift Services are closed over the bank holiday weekend. Please do not leave a message on this number.’
The Filipino man gives Elvis a half nod and starts up the stairs. The back of his red T-shirt is darkened with sweat, like a knot in a tree. Elvis waits till he can no longer hear the shuffle of the man’s shiny shoes on the steps before he slowly starts up the stairs himself. On the third floor he sees the plant lady, Beryl. She is the one who makes the third floor look so pretty with all the colourful plastic flowers. She sits on a dark wooden chair, which looks like it should not be outside in a stairwell landing but inside and around a table. She gives him a wide grin and he is happy to see someone friendly.
‘Elvis, love, how you keeping?’ she calls. ‘You all right? You look a bit peaky.’ She leans forward in her chair and squints at him. ‘You gingers do get red in the sun, though, don’t you? Need to slap on some sun lotion.’ Beryl dips down and feels the fake soil of her pots. ‘Good grief.’ She makes a tutting noise like you do when there is a nice cat that you want to stroke. ‘These are needing another watering,’ she says to him. ‘They’re sucking it up today. Roses, you know what they’re like. I went to the Chelsea Flower Show once, did I tell you? Even met Her Majesty. I’ve got some photos. Hang on, love, let me get them.’ She waves a hand and gets up slowly off the chair and walks over to her front door.
Elvis waits patiently for her to return with a shoebox filled with photographs. He has seen the photos before, yesterday and the day before that. He likes them but wishes they had more flowers in them and less of the plant lady’s blurred thumb and edges of people’s raincoats.
His tummy rumbles as Beryl points out Her Majesty. His pie, his lovely steak and kidney pie. He had forgotten all about it. It will be cold now and Lina will be mad. She will flick her nails at him and call him an idiot. He hates it when she does that.
‘I need to go home,’ he says suddenly to the plant lady.
‘Okay then, Elvis. See you later.’ She sits back on her chair and smiles at her photos.
He slows as he reaches the spot between the fifth and sixth floor, but it is quiet, the bad black boy is not there, only the faint smell of his rule-breaking funny cigarette. On the tenth floor he stops and turns to the skinny window that lets you look down onto the green. The windowpane is thick with grey, dried mould spores, but beyond it the sky is so blue and the sun so bright. He loves days like this. Maybe living in Nightingale Point will not be so bad after all and the bad black boy will come and say sorry and never smoke in the stairwell again. Maybe Elvis will go to the Chelsea Flower Show with the plant lady and have his photo taken next to a giant Helianthus Annus, which is the posh name for sunflower.
He watches as a plane flies across in the sky. It curves around the three towers of the estate and disappears behind him. Then seconds later it comes back, but this time, it looks closer. It turns slightly. One wing goes straight up in the air and the other points straight down to the floor.