This Is How It Ends Read online

  ‘Another journalist?’ he asked. ‘Keeping your profile up?’

  Ella glared at him. ‘Actually she’s a librarian.’

  Dylan turned away from her, opened the bottle of water on the table and drank from it long enough to signal his complete disinterest in what she was saying.

  ‘She’s organising a direct action against the company who won the contract for her borough. The library staff are all being laid off, so she’s looking to do something pretty serious,’ Ella said, the colour rising in her cheeks as he kept his back to her. Disinterest beginning to feel more like disdain and she couldn’t stop herself explaining, hearing the excitement infecting her voice, wanting him to feel it too. ‘She’s been heavily involved in animal rights for years, so she’s capable of anything. This could be big.’

  ‘Big enough to justify ignoring me?’ His voice remained even, but she saw the tension tightening his shoulders and the way he planted his feet wide on the blackwood floor. There was something more going on, though, she thought. A slight moue, a twitchiness about him that she rarely saw.

  Was this what it looked like when Dylan’s feelings were bruised?

  Ella knew she’d been neglecting him but she thought they’d reached an agreement. A tacit understanding that things were different now and he couldn’t just click his fingers and have her snap to attention for him.

  ‘Is that why you were following me?’ she asked, more curious than angry. ‘Because I’ve been ignoring you?’

  ‘I wasn’t following you.’ He shrugged, a faint hint of embarrassment on his face. ‘You were leaving the house as I got there and I decided to see how long it’d take you to spot me.’

  ‘I spotted you on the Tube.’

  He smiled slightly. ‘No, I don’t think you did.’

  ‘I could feel you watching me.’

  ‘And it felt good?’ he asked, the smile becoming deeper and dirtier.

  ‘Creepy, actually.’

  ‘I always know when you’re lying, Ella.’ He crossed the tiny room in two steps and slipped her coat off her shoulders. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t like it.’

  Ella could feel the heat coming off him, sensed the desperation too. It had been a month or more since she’d seen him last. The longest they’d gone without meeting and she realised she was desperate as well. There had been other men in between, but not like him.

  ‘You know what I was thinking, while I was looking at you?’ He unbuttoned her denim shirtdress and Ella watched his fingers working, wanting to bite them. ‘I was thinking about everything I was going to do to you once I’d got you here.’

  ‘And what are you going to do?’

  Dylan described it all as he slowly stripped her, and Ella let go of the anger she’d walked in with and the old annoyances that had kept her away from him for so long.

  She stumbled as he tried to unroll her thick, black tights, fell backwards on to the bed and he was on her instantly, pulling them the rest of the way down, laughing at the size of her sensible knickers and batting away her offer to leave if they weren’t sexy enough for him. Then he flipped her over and there was no more laughter.

  He pinned her down and slipped into her, but not all the way before he pulled out, while she shouted at him to just fuck her. Deeper and slower and he pulled out again, as she gripped the pillows and arched her back where his mouth grazed her skin. Five times, six, and she was raging and aching, wanting to get on top and finish this, but she couldn’t move from under him. She pressed her face into the mattress, cursing him and moaning, as he whispered in her ear, telling her no other man could make her feel like he did, no one would ever fuck her like this. Would they? Would they, Ella?

  ‘Nobody knows you like I do.’

  She came, bucking and gasping, and for a few seconds there was nothing but the white noise of her orgasm and the starched cotton rough under her open mouth as her breath slowed again. He slapped her thigh and climbed off her, headed straight for the shower.

  Ella snagged his T-shirt from the floor and dried herself with it. The self-loathing a distant note but already humming as she listened to the shower running and a vacuum cleaner going in the next room. He hadn’t paid for this, she realised, probably just bunged the receptionist a few quid so they could slip in between the previous night’s guest and housekeeping. He had fucked her on sheets that hadn’t been changed yet.

  Ella pulled her clothes on quickly, stamped her feet into her Chelsea boots.

  ‘You’re not going already?’ Dylan asked, emerging from the shower with a towel around his waist and his wet hair slicked back.

  ‘I’ve got stuff to do,’ she said, rebuttoning her dress.

  He started drying his back, the muscles in his arms flexing as he reached behind him, watching her all the while as if he was waiting for the moment when she would change her mind, decide that the rest of her day was better spent here with him. As if neither of them had other responsibilities.

  ‘Why were you coming to the flat?’ Ella asked. ‘You never come to mine.’

  ‘You weren’t taking my calls, so you didn’t leave me much option.’

  She knew what he was doing: making her wait, wanting her to ask. Beg him, if he could get her to. But he’d come this far to tell her and Ella forced herself to stay silent.

  ‘I wanted to tell you in person,’ he said, as she was zipping up her parka. ‘It’s about Quinn. . .’

  Ella froze.

  The white room, the code words, the smell of kerosene and burning wires and charred confetti raining down on a predawn street.

  ‘What about him?’

  Dylan tossed the towel on to the bed. ‘He’s wangled an early release, apparently. He’ll be out next week.’

  Ella fell back against the door, saw his mouth moving, his serious expression, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Blood was rushing in her ears, a sound like fire raging out of control, the sound she would always associate with Quinn.

  Molly

  Now – 10th March

  It’s too cold to sit out on the balcony but I’m getting sick of the inside of my flat. This is the longest I’ve ever spent holed up in here. Coming up on three days; even when I had the flu last winter I still managed a walk down to the river and a medicinal brandy in the Rose. The brandy didn’t shift the flu and the evening air isn’t fixing my mood.

  I’ve always been claustrophobic. Not in the sense of panicking in confined spaces or freaking out on the Tube, but in knowing I’m trapped in a situation.

  That’s what brought me to London in the first place, the unbearable strictures of dinner at half-six precisely and the same meal on each night of the week, month after month, year after year. The same radio programme playing while the dishes were cleaned, the same soap opera recycling its stories and the same process of filling out football pools and washing the car on Sunday and a clean shirt on Monday to be worn until Friday. Restricted conversations, restricted thought patterns. It made me feel like I was locked in a box that I needed to kick my way out of.

  As a child I got through it by promising myself that once I was old enough I would never stay in a situation I hated. Whatever the consequences I wouldn’t let myself be trapped.

  I did, of course. Got married too quickly and far too young to a man I’d met at college and liked, but not that much. Not until he followed me into teacher-training school and hotly promised he’d keep following me anywhere I wanted to go. I thought that was deeply romantic. That’s how young I was.

  Would I have found it so touching if I’d known his ‘anywhere’ included driving five hours through the night to the Greenham Common Peace Camp? That he needed me so much he would try to physically haul me away from the protest?

  He learned what I was really made of that day.

  And so did I.

  I take another mouthful of whisky. Some cheap blended stuff I don’t even remember buying. It barely tastes like whisky, no peat or fire to it.

  From my spot, tucked back u
nder the shadow of the balcony, I can see into the new tower. At night it seems more glass than not, long expanses of it exposing sleek black kitchens and living rooms with huge sofas and factory-painted abstract expressionism, bedrooms too pristine for anyone to ever fuck in. They are shrines to pressed white shirts and red-soled shoes and the greedily acquired symbols of urban affluence bought by people who probably grew up like me. Out in satellite towns dreaming of different versions of themselves, dressing them up like dolls, mentally testing them out in new stage sets.

  I wonder how the reality is holding up.

  I should feel hatred towards them, I suppose, but I can’t. I see the hours they work and how their heads hang as they strip off their suits in the burnished light of the bedrooms before they trudge towards their rainforest showers. I know they’re killing themselves for that eight hundred square feet of high-spec living.

  They would reject my pity, but they have it all the same.

  The most intriguing windows are the ones that light up and go dark on timers, revealing unfurnished rooms that feel pregnant with bad possibilities. I wonder how long a murder victim could lie on one of those polished concrete floors before they were discovered.

  This is the way my mind has been turning for the last three days. I can’t shake myself out of it. Half of me knows he must be dead but the other half credits every odd noise the building makes to his escape attempt. Last night I dreamed he was climbing the rusting cable in the lift shaft, broken fingers sticking out at unnatural angles as he slowly dragged himself up, hand over hand, past the second floor, past the third, heading for the light above him and the gap in the doors.

  Without thinking, I pick up my phone and check the display to see if Ella has called me back. She hasn’t, and the clock tells me it’s only fifteen minutes since I last looked.

  It seemed like a good idea to give her space to process what happened but after the first ignored phone call I started to worry and now, with still no word from her, I wonder what kind of state she’s in. Her social-media feeds are still ticking along, but I know that stuff can be scheduled in advance.

  Is she at home in bed, unable to crawl out from under the covers?

  Shit.

  Has she gone to the police and confessed?

  The world lurches under me as I imagine her in a holding cell, knowing she’ll be handled as harshly as the law allows, because she’s Ella Riordan and her stance on the police is well publicised.

  No.

  This is just my overactive imagination talking.

  If she’d done something stupid I’d know about it by now, wouldn’t I? If she’d dropped off the map her friends would call me first. I’m her London next of kin, the nearest thing she has to a mother here. And maybe in general, judging by how little she’s ever spoken about her mum.

  No chance of taking this dilemma back to Durham and the Riordan residence to thrash out a coping strategy. Her parents would probably perform a citizen’s arrest if they knew what she’d done. Self-defence be damned.

  She’ll be scared, that’s all.

  And haven’t I been just as bad? Hiding in here, and listening for corpses coming along the corridor, sleeping in fitful jags and scanning every news outlet I can for reports of a man going missing.

  A fist batters my door and I start so strongly I spill some of my drink. Shaking my hand dry, I go to answer and I’ve had this dream already, looking through the spyhole and seeing him. Standing frozen as his broken fingers turn the handle, so slowly, the dirt in the mechanism screeching, the lock non-existent, and then. . .

  I open up to find Callum holding a four-pack of Beck’s and a Domino’s box.

  ‘You’re still alive then, hey,’ he says, coming straight in and heading for the coffee table, which is covered in paperwork and photographs, my laptop open but powered down. ‘Where am I putting this? My arm’s getting greasy.’

  ‘On the balcony?’

  ‘Is it not a bit cold for that?’

  ‘I thought you Highlanders didn’t feel the cold,’ I say, going out again.

  ‘Aye, but I’ve been down London so long now I’m a proper soft southern bastard when it comes to the weather.’ His accent drifts as he says it, an attempt at cockney he’s never quite got the drop of. ‘That why I’ve seen hide nor hair of you – winter getting into your old bones?’

  He smiles, cheekily, and it charms me as usual.

  How was he a soldier, I wonder. Not for the first time. I hate soldiers. It’s a visceral thing. I hate everything they do and everything they stand for, their obedience and psychopathy and squeaky-clean brand of filth.

  And yet I like Callum.

  He insists he was in the catering corps, but I’m sure that’s a lie. No army chef ever admits it. They were all special forces or some dumb macho shit. Only the proper hard cases want you to think they did something so innocent. The ones with the wrong kind of blood on their hands.

  Cooks don’t wake up screaming in the middle of the night either, clenched and sweating, with tears running down their cheeks.

  ‘Face on you,’ he says, handing me a beer and pushing the pizza box closer. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing’s up. I’ve just been busy.’ I take a slice of pizza, surprised at how hungry I am suddenly. ‘Ella’s party the other night made me realise how close to the deadline for the book we are. I’ve got hundreds – thousands – of photos to go through, select the best ones, edit them. We agreed not to do too much to the images because it should be real. We want to see the real faces of the people this is affecting. But even doing the minimum takes time.’

  Callum shifts in his seat, turns away from me for a few seconds, looking out towards the river, but I know he doesn’t see it. His eyes are bad and he hasn’t replaced the glasses he smashed a few months ago, insisting he can get by just fine without them.

  He doesn’t believe me.

  I don’t blame him.

  The second slice of pizza doesn’t go down as easily but I need to eat and it’s a distraction I hope makes me look more at ease than I feel.

  ‘I . . . uh, is Ella alright?’ he asks finally, chin tucked into his chest.

  The last mouthful sticks in my throat and I wash it down with a swig of gassy beer. ‘Far as I know, yeah. Why?’

  ‘I heard her arguing with some bloke the other night. Reckon it was her. They were outside my place.’ Callum grimaces. ‘I thought about going out and seeing what was up, but I didn’t think she’d thank me for that.’

  ‘When was this?’

  But I already know.

  ‘When she had her party,’ he says.

  ‘Are you sure it was Ella?’ I ask, trying to sound calm even though my heart is hammering. ‘She never said anything to me about getting into a fight.’

  He passes a hand over his skull. It needs shaving again, grey stubble coming through, long enough already to see where he’s receding.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘They all sound the same, don’t they? All Home Counties playing at street.’ I force a smile. ‘Some girl from the party having a set-to with her boyfriend, was it?’

  ‘Aye, probably.’ The tension goes out of his face. ‘That’s what it sounded like. She was giving the poor bastard a right earbashing.’

  ‘Won’t have been Ella, then.’

  Quickly I change the subject, ask him if he managed to find another bathroom sink to replace Derek in 309’s broken one. He tells me he’s tried a dozen empty flats today and found the whiteware irrevocably damaged in every one of them. Something that would have made a lot of noise if it was done for sport, but he heard nothing and suspects it’s the developer’s handiwork. Putting the flats out of commission to deter squatters. Or, more likely, to stop us repurposing the items left behind.

  I’ve stopped listening. I’m just nodding and sipping my beer and trying to keep my eyes fixed on him as my thoughts slip away, back to Ella and that man she was arguing with outside Callum’s flat.

  Callum is too sha
rp-eared to have mistaken her distinctive Durham accent when it’s only a thin wall away from him. Which means something more went on and she was too scared to tell me about it at the time and so scared she hasn’t been able to talk about it since, either.

  Is this why I’ve not heard from her?

  I’ve been selfish, wallowing here just when Ella needed me the most. Telling myself I’ve been giving her space because I’ve not been ready to face the fallout from what we’ve done.

  No more hiding.

  Ella needs me.

  Ella

  Then – 15th February

  Ella hugged her folded towel to her chest and tried to tune out the sound of her flatmate’s boyfriend singing in the shower. She’d been waiting in the hallway for pushing fifteen minutes and the longer it went on the more tempted she was to go back to her room and have a quick wash in the kitchen sink.

  At this rate all the hot water would be gone anyway.

  He had a good voice, to be fair to him, but she’d heard enough of it last night, when he’d drunkenly serenaded his girlfriend from the street.

  Ella had spent her Valentine’s night curled up under a blanket, watching Roman Holiday, thinking about how it reinforced shitty gender stereotypes and promulgated the lie of noblesse oblige, as she wished she was riding down winding Italian streets on the back of a scooter with some tall, dark smartarse.

  She’d received one card, from her mother, who still sent them every year to her and her brother, just as she had since they were teenagers. It had annoyed Ella back then, but now it made her smile, especially since it came in a care package with good espresso and the marmalade she couldn’t afford to buy herself, plus a Tupperware container of homemade cinnamon biscuits.

  Sometimes she did miss being at home.

  Finally the shower shut off and the bathroom door opened, her neighbour’s boyfriend coming out in her polka-dot dressing gown, his skin scalded red, hair plastered to his skull.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t know you were waiting,’ he mumbled.

  Ella told him it was fine through gritted teeth, and went in to find the floor wet and the air steamy. She switched on the extractor fan and brushed her teeth while it wheezed and clattered, slowly clearing the fug, washed her face and decided her hair would be fine for another day. When she stepped into the shower she found the water lukewarm and cursed her inconsiderate flatmates and the cheapskate landlord who had made it clear that he knew the boiler wasn’t powerful enough for a three-storey house carved into seven studios but would be doing absolutely nothing about it.