#bex fowler

Back into orbit now, and Dotty moves. Enters her house through the back door, strips her tights and tosses them into the bin, grabs another pair from the washing basket filled with clean clothes that she makes a mental note to put back into their wardrobes and dressers when she gets the chance, pulls them on before she goes into the living room and kisses Gran on the cheek who is having her supper and watching TV, smiles when Gran tells her to wear a scarf when she goes out because it’s almost winter now, grabs her bag and a scarf and leaves.

There’s a thirty-minute walk between the house Dotty and her Gran live and E20, the nightclub she works in. Or, one of the nightclubs she works in, the thought making her limbs feel heavier. There are two other clubs she works in, all so that the only night she doesn’t work is Monday, and that’s only because Dot had frowned after she’d asked about Dotty’s work schedule. Not that she can blame her Gran, really. Hearing that your only granddaughter works in a garage every weekday and works in nightclubs every week-night, including weekends, she supposes she’d frown too. There is a silver-lining though, her weekends are free during the day, so she can sleep the entire day and get up to go on a walk around the park with Gran during the afternoon before hopping back into bed, pretending that this means she’s getting enough sleep.

Tonight feels different, though, and there’s a second where Dotty forgets why. Then remembers that in a few hours it will be Friday and that means in a few hours it will be her birthday. She stares up at the E20 sign, blaring neon into the dark. (Happy birthday, indeed, she thinks. Unbidden, thoughts of tea parties and teddies come forward. Times when her birthday wasn’t celebrated by serving drinks to those already drunk and trying to dodge a sleaze who’s hitting on her, but rather with eating cake until she felt ill and staying up past her bedtime. Now all she wants is to have a bedtime.)

She’s going to turn nineteen in a few hours, and unbidden the thought of her father springs to the forefront of her mind, the thought of where he is. It’s an old box to poke that lurks at the back of her mind, and she doesn’t want to poke it, not right before a long shift when already she feels exhaustion lining her joints. But it’s hard not to when she realises that in a few hours it will be fourteen years since she last saw him.

It’s weird how she doesn’t remember the last time she saw him; it should be the thing that plays on repeat in her mind, maybe him walking out to grab something and never coming back, or him putting her to bed, those few seconds of him standing in her bedroom door, back-lit by the hallway before she never saw him again. But – nothing. She remembers grinning at him over a stack of pancakes and running around after her friends dressed as a witch because Gran said she could have a dress up party for her fifth birthday party, and then she woke up the next morning and never saw him again. (She supposes it doesn’t really matter in the end, considering he’s gone either way, but her eyes sting anyway, unbidden.)

Dotty pinches the bridge of her nose. There’s no point lingering on such things, she had tried for years, foolishly believing that if she just thought about him hard enough then he’d come back, but it never worked and by the time she turned ten she had turned to actively hating him and hoping he was dead wherever he was, never flinching when Gran spanked her for voicing such thoughts.

(The secret is that she never meant it, and would cry herself to sleep with her face buried into the soft teddy he had bought for her once, pretending she didn’t notice how Gran would pack something sweet for her lunch the next day.)

She sighs and between mentally putting a wall up between herself and all thoughts of her father and staring up at that neon sign that she feels everything tilt and before she can panic about her body finally giving out from the constant abuse she puts it through, she blinks and she’s in a ballroom, her feet are stiff in her heels and her dress tucks in at her waist before puffing out so far that she can’t let anyone within a foot of her body and she’s being spun around and around and God, Hunter is looking over, play it cool, play it cool, everything is perfect and so is he and he’s looking and this could be it, everything is -

Dotty stumbles and almost falls, clutching her stomach and feeling terrified that she’d feel tulle but it’s just her ratty, holey t-shirt. She stands, trembling, for a few seconds, wondering if she’s gone insane or having a fucking stroke or something, desperately trying to remember what the symptoms of a stroke actually are.

Someone who’s about to enter the club stops to stare at her. Probably one of her co-workers, she doesn’t mingle enough to really know any of them, not even their names. “You alright?” he calls, frowning in concern at her.

She feels her back stiffen and forces herself to stop shaking, her muscles tensing as she makes herself move and shove past her maybe-co-worker. “I’m fine,” she snaps.

He steps back to avoid being pushed by her. “Woah, just asking!” he shouts after her and she ignores him, speed-walking to her locker and jamming all her belongings into it except her apron that she ties to her waist as she heads to the bar.

Her boss, Ruby, throws her a sharp look. “You’re late,” she says, finishing up a stock take, placing her clipboard on the bar in front of her to fully focus her attention on Dotty. “We open in fifteen, you were meant to be here five minutes ago.”

“I forgot my phone at home and had to run back for it,” Dotty lies, not looking up from where she’s started to wipe down the counter, going faster to try and make up for lost time, already feeling the bitterness of the apology on her tongue but thinking about the gas bill tucked in her dresser at home that she needs to be able to afford and decides to tack on a, “Sorry.”

She hears Ruby sigh but doesn’t look up, not even when Ruby stands right next to her and she can feel her eyes boring into the side of her head. “Dotty, if everything is too much, and you need to take the night off –”

“Everything is fine,” Dotty cuts her off, forcing her voice to be even when all she wants to do is snap because she cannot lose this job, she just can’t, there's too much riding on it, on everything. “I’m fine and I’m able to work tonight and the rest of my shifts.” She still doesn’t look up and watches her hand moving in circles as if someone else is doing it. She still feels too tense but knows she won’t calm down until Ruby stops staring at her.

Ruby sighs again (She does that a lot around Dotty). “Well, happy early birthday.” She leaves before Dotty can respond, which she was not going to anyway because she’s found her throat tight all of a sudden.

After she finishes prepping for customers, they all start to trickle in and then it’s like she blinks and she’s overwhelmed, not daring to take a second to catch a breath amidst the onslaught of drinks being poured and tips accepted and cash shoved haphazardly into the register.

The hours blur along with the music and the bright lighting, until she feels weightless, drifting along, pushed along by a current of people as she spins bottles in her hands. She doesn’t feel like herself here, here is just a bass that thrums in her ribcage and bounces her head.

Then all too soon it’s over and the music cuts off as people start trickling out just how they entered and Dotty wipes down the counters again, dodging Ruby’s eye as she clocks out and steps out into the world again.

It’s four in the morning, Dotty has been nineteen for four hours and barely noticed, and she has work again in five hours.

She feels the concrete through the thin soles of her boots, flexes the tendons of her feet. Breathes.

Exhale.

And Dotty moves.

//

Louise thinks for the amount of shit women get when they like dressing up in dresses and wearing high heels for events because it makes them ‘bimbos’ or whatever, is fucking ridiculous considering how difficult it actually is. She can feel the blisters forming on her heals despite the plasters she’s wearing and the constant vigilance she has to make sure she doesn’t trip over the hem of her dress is impressive, ok, and she makes a mental note to actually just beat up the next man that implies that she’s stupid just because she likes looking pretty.

There’s a hand around her elbow and she twitches, forcing down a gut reaction because the thought of breaking someone’s nose at the ball for her own birthday would probably haunt her for years.

It’s Ben, grinning at her and only looking slightly haggard but still in a suit, like he said he would. “Surprised to see me?” he asks.

She throws her arms around his shoulders and he hugs her back even though she knows how much tulle she’s in, just how puffy it is around her waist. “Well, you said you’d get off work early but I didn’t think you could actually do it, Dad seemed angry when he assigned you whatever you were doing.” She pulls back to brush off his shoulders, marvelling at how quickly he can get a suit dirty.

Ben’s smile almost falls off of his face before he plasters it back on, back to being all charm and easy going grins that are only 60% teeth. “Yeah, well, he didn’t account for me having friends in high places.” He winks but she can tell he doesn’t want her to ask any more questions about what he was doing earlier tonight.

So, she tucks her hand into his arm and starts leisurely strolling around the ballroom, milling through the mass of people all dressed in the best clothes they all own. “So, is Callum here with you tonight?”

Ben shakes his head as he grabs some glasses of champagne, handing her one and sipping the other one himself. “That’s a no, he’s at home with Lola and Jay, and I am just desperate to get home to him – ” here, he gives a weighted look to show her his meaning, “ – so I hope you don’t mind me skipping out on you after midnight and all the appropriate happy birthdays have been said.”

Louise makes a noise of disgust and shoves his shoulder and tries not to smile while he laughs at her. “Fine, fine, you only need to be here and mingle for – ” she grabs his other hand to look at the watch on his wrist, feels his muscles twitch, just like her's, “ – a half hour! Perfectly manageable, I’m sure, you’ll be able to cope, yeah?”

“Anything for you, dear sister,” he smarms and cackles at her disgusted look as he tugs her into the centre of the dance floor with the throng of people dancing. He adjusts his grip until they’re standing in the appropriate stance for a waltz and begins dancing with her, catching her looking at him, impressed. “What? Why is everyone so surprised I know how to dance?”

“Because you’ve told all of us, multiple times, that you’d rather shoot yourself than dance,” she shoots back. “Poor Callum, how is he going to cope when he finds out you’re actually capable of dancing but have pretended you can’t, just so you don’t have to dance at your own wedding?”

“Ha ha,” Ben replies, rolling his eyes as he spins her and catches her when she spins back to him. “Fine, I have decided to change my stance to ‘I can dance, I just have decided that no one should ever do it’.”

“Well, then, why are you dancing with me?”

Ben looks away from her, taking in the glass chandelier and the floor to ceiling windows that show the view of a perfectly cut hedge maze. “Maybe I like enough to put up with it,” he replies, eventually, eyes carefully not looking directly at her.

She smiles and squeezes his hand to let him know that she understands. He looks at her and smiles back and she thinks she loves her brother almost as much as she did when she was five and he put a plaster on her skinned knee after she had fallen off of her bike.

Over Ben’s shoulder, she can see another couple and feels herself tense with anticipation when she make eye contact with the male dancer who spares her a quick smile which she returns without a second thought, feeling herself start to get flushed.

Ben twists around to see what she’s looking at and immediately starts laughing. “Oh, Jesus, do you still have a crush on Hunter Owen?”

“Shut up!” she hisses, interrupting their dance to yank him away, out of ear shot from Hunter and Ben stumbles after her, giggling away as she pushes her way through a crowd of people before they part from her.

As she marches up the stairs to get to the destination she has in mind: the balcony of one of the many bedrooms in this empty hotel (Dad definitely rented out the entire place even though it is massive, just so she could have the whole place for her party and she reminds herself to get him before it turns midnight so she can hug him and thank him by spending the first few minutes of her birthday with him), Ben continues to cackle behind her. “God I thought you got over him years ago, oh wow, this has been the best part of my night by far.”

She shoves him into the bedroom and storms over to the balcony, welcoming the cool air on her skin before she turns to Ben and crosses her arms. He strolls over to her and leans against the balcony, still looking smug. “I’ll have you know, I don’t have a crush on Hunter anymore,” she informs him.

“I see, so you dragged me all the way up here just to tell me that?” he asks, still looking like an asshole. She sniffs and doesn’t respond. “Ok, ok, it’s fine if you still like him,” he ignore her objecting and starts speaking louder, “But are you fine with liking him considering he’s a massive dick?”

“Says you,” Louise snaps.

“So, you admit he’s an asshole?” Ben shoots back.

“He’s not –” Ben raises an eyebrow. “He’s not completely an asshole. He’s nice to me.”

Ben sighs and looks at the view, bracing his forearms on the balcony. “I just think you could do better than him,” he murmurs.

Louise wants to roll her eyes and say something mean, her temper still simmering her blood, feeling like her dad for a second. She opens her mouth to, poison on her tongue but suddenly Ben isn’t there and she’s in a vehicle, looking over at the driver, mouth open to yell when she sees him swear and twist the steering wheel and she feels airborne, looking out the windshield as it comes closer to the back of another vehicle than it should before they’re spinning and her mouth is still open but she’s screaming as the sky becomes the ground becomes the sky goes up then down and her head has slammed into window next to her and he tastes blood and oh fuck –

Ben shakes her and she feels like she’s fallen fifty feet back into her massive dress and high heels and she wants to vomit but she shoves her head onto Ben’s shoulder and he wraps his arms around her for a second time that night as she tries to steady herself.

“Are you ok, what was that?” Ben asks and he sounds as worried as he does when he talks about Lexi and Callum and Jay and Lola, and isn’t that a high place to be placed by Ben, huh?

She just shakes her head and lets herself be held until her phone beeps in the hidden pocket of her dress to let her know that it’s ten minutes until her birthday. She pulls back and shakes her limbs out. “I’m fine, I’m fine, it’s nothing.” Ben clearly doesn’t believe her with a doubtful look on his face but she waves him away. “Just got shaky for a second there, can you give me a minute? I’ll be right down.”

“Lou, you looked like you were about to start screaming –”

“Ben. Please.”

Ben stares at her for a second and she doesn’t know what he sees but it’s enough because he nods his head and leaves with a final kiss on the top of her head and she decides to forgive him for maybe messing her hair up when he did it.

In the silence of the bedroom, Louise breathes deeply and wonders what her mum would tell her. To put herself back together, brick by brick, and act like nothing had happened.

She opens her eyes, and does just that.

//

Keegan kicks the beer can in front of him and it clatters into the gutter. He waits a few seconds before he sighs, picks it up and chucks it into the bin.

He can imagine Bernie smiling at him for being decent as if he didn't just do the bare minimum and scoffs to no one. Scuffs his shoe on the concrete and can hear his mum chiding him for trying to ruin his shoes.

He figures that he’s misplacing his anger at his thoughts of his family’s reactions to his actions to ignore the fact that he’s actually ashamed that he’s spending his entire birthday in another city without them and can’t stop remembering how their faces fell when he told them, but he doesn’t want to get that introspective right now if he’s completely honest.

He’s waiting for his friend – ‘friend’ being a loose term used here – to drive him to Manchester for a flat viewing he’s got tomorrow that he booked a couple of weeks ago. His friend is only taking him because he’s picking up something that he refused to get specific about – coke probably and Keegan pretends that doesn’t bother him – and would be going anyway.

(His mum hadn’t been happy when he told her he was moving to Manchester and told him so; told him all the risks that come with Manchester and him being alone in a city where he doesn’t know anyone, but most importantly, to Keegan at least, was her pressing him into a hug and patting his cheek. “I love you, eh?” She phrased it like a question and Keegan had nodded in answer and she had smiled like the sun.)

The question his whole family had asked was this: why Manchester?

He couldn’t explain it fully – he had given a variety of answers though, ranging from ‘I just love Manchester United that much, I guess,’ for his dad, and ‘Starting a business in a big city has to be better than starting one here, right? Bigger market and all that,’ for his siblings.

The real reason was this: he didn’t know. It eluded him, but it was this gut feeling he had, a stirring underneath his skin that gave him goose pimples; your life is in Manchester, it said.

So, here he was, a few hours before he turned nineteen, waiting for his friend to pick him up so he could stay in a hotel for the night because he didn’t trust his friend to drive him to his viewing punctually if they did the journey tomorrow.

His mistrust was rightfully given, considering he’s already an hour late.

Finally, after another half an hour in which Keegan googles how much jail time you can get for murder, and then tries to work out if he can get arrested just for googling that, his friend finally pulls up in front of him in his beat-up van.

The friend is called Rocket, the van is also called Rocket. Keegan decides to never talk about it out loud unless directly threatened with bodily harm.

“Alright, mate?” Rocket the Person asks, grinning toothily, several of teeth ironically missing.

Keegan nods his head in greeting and grabs his duffel bag and gets into the passenger seat, immediately setting about falling asleep after the appropriate ‘how are you’s’ are exchanged.

Rocket the Person doesn’t get Keegan’s loud hint of literally setting his feet on the dash and shutting his eyes, and starts talking about some woman he was speaking to last night and what they got up to in his flat, “If you know what I mean?” he adds with a wink that Keegan ignores.

(He can’t stop remembering Bernie’s voice when she whispered, “Did you have to book it for your birthday?” Because the answer is no, he didn’t have to, he chose to after an argument that he can barely remember that he had with his dad and booked it with the thought of how cool it would be to wake up in Manchester on his birthday and not have to see anyone he knew, caught up in the small town feeling that chokes, knowing that everyone knows you and your business. He hadn’t thought much about how the argument would blow over and he would reconsider this plan and actually want to spend his time in that small town he grew up in.)

Rocket the Person continues on, and Keegan tunes him out, watches as they enter the highway, checks his phone and sees that he has a couple hours until its his birthday but Keanu has already texted him a happy birthday and feels himself smile before he tucks his phone away after typing out a response, knowing that Rocket would make a gross comment about his grin that he doesn’t want to hear because it'll spoil his mood.

Rocket the Van rumbles beneath them and Keegan feels it vibrate through the back of his heels laid on the dash and up the back of his legs all while the other Rocket has moved onto how his friend’s bird is a tease; Keegan forces his face not to slip into a scowl and thinks back to his google search and how it hadn’t covered causing car accidents and briefly considers yanking the wheel to try and kill them both to end this conversation.

He snaps when Rocket reaches over to playfully push his shoulder, turning to yell at him to shut up and just leave him alone because they're not actually friends, can he just realise that already, but when he looks over Rocket isn’t there, there’s just a dark field and he’s not sitting in the passenger seat of the van, he’s standing with a shovel in his hands. He stares down at himself, baffled, and sees in the faint moonlight that he’s no longer wearing his t-shirt and soft sweats but rather dark overalls with darker splotches down the front. Before he can figure out what the stains are, he looks at the shape on the ground in front of him and it hits him like a freight train that it's a dead fucking body and he’s standing next to a grave and he’s digging it and god, his face feels sticky with what’s probably blood and he hates herself, she’s awful and she wants to be anything but this -

-and suddenly he’s back in the van but the rumble of the engine is gone and Keegan can barely inhale sharply before he realises that the van is airborne as in flipping over because the trees are upside down and he can see the cars next to them right before he crashes right into them and he thinks he’s going to fly right out of his seat and through the windshield and he’s screaming at the top of his lungs before he hits the glass and that’s it.

//

Ash holds a cigarette between her fingers and wonders if she’s going to pick up smoking. She’s sitting on the edge of a ledge next to a window in a warehouse, a somewhat haunting silence filtering through the open space that Ash finds somewhat comforting. She does this every time she gets a job – consider smoking, that is – and she goes through her mental list of why she shouldn’t like she always does:

Smoking will most likely give her a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and she doesn’t really want to deal with that and all that comes with it if she’s honest. Also, hacking up her lungs every few minutes seems extremely distasteful.

She doesn’t really want to take smoking breaks with Carl who leers and has yellow teeth and yellow fingers. She suspects that if she was alone with him for a prolonged period of time, he would leave with broken bones.

She doesn’t want to give up anymore of herself, because that’s what this would be: a sacrifice of herself, her willpower. She’d be giving it up and the list of things controlling her would be longer and she doesn’t know if she can take that.

But on the other hand:

She is so fucking tired.

She twists the cigarette and wonders if her entire list of reasons to not smoke will yield to the sheer exhaustion that has settled into her bones. Resisting is killing you, is what Vinny told her the other day. He’s right, but Ash thinks she might be dead before she can admit it, which she supposes is his entire point, which is annoying.

There’s a distant rumbling noise that gets louder until there is a van pulling into the open doors and coming to a stop a few feet in front of her. She focuses on the cigarette between her fingers and doesn’t look up even when two boots appear in front of her.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Ben Mitchell says to her, shifting so that he is standing with his arms crossed, leaning back. It’s too casual, too put on, he’s hiding how he really feels about this assignment. (She hates that her mind works to pick apart body language like that, people's secrets should be their own, not her's to pick apart from their stance.)

She sighs and tucks her cigarette back into the packet and stands up to put it in the back pocket of her overalls. “I don’t,” is all she says as she brushes past Ben and heads to the back of the van and yanks the doors open.

There’s tarp wrapped in a cylinder inside alongside two shovels and Ash wants to cry but beats down the feeling. She hasn’t cried when given clean up duty for three years now. Fuck, she realises. She’s turning nineteen in two hours and she has to bury a dead body for her family. She'll probably still be doing this when it’s tomorrow, when she is meant to be celebrating.

She scrubs a hand down her face, trying to scrape away any traces of emotion even though she knows her poker face will stay firmly in place now matter what because that was how she was raised, but still, the last thing she needs is Ben Mitchell reporting back to his family that one of the Panesars is cracking and the next thing they know, they’re dealing with a coup.

She realises her thought process sounds like her mother, calculating at the head of the table as she orders about the rest of the families. It won’t last, is what Ash always thinks. There are five families joined together for their ‘business’ and eventually they’ll get tired of taking orders from Suki, just like Ash already is.

She glances over at Ben who is staring out of the window, attempting nonchalance. She can read how uncomfortable he is by how tight his shoulders are. She knows he would rather be at his sister's birthday party, who is also turning nineteen tomorrow.

The harsher side of Ash wants to say ‘tough’. It’s not like she wants to either, she didn’t volunteer to do this. This is a punishment for storming off from dinner last night after an argument with her mother about letting her go to medical school. Ash wants to go to Manchester and move out but her mother firmly denied this request and told her she could go to business school here in London, that she would not see her daughter tending to the men like those worked here as if she were below them. It had become a sore point, something Ash brought up at the table every time she wanted to dig her teeth in and bite. Her mother had assigned her this job this morning and Ash could see a glint in her mother’s eyes and knew exactly what it meant. It said: I will tell you to do this, and you will. I am in charge here and you have forgotten. Ash feels bitter; why should Ben Mitchell be allowed pity when Ash is spared none?

But Ash wasn’t all teeth, she wanted to go to medical school to help people. She could feel it in her bones, a bare kindness that she had nursed for years, took cares to make sure that it never disappeared no matter what she had to do for her family. It asked her: what has Ben done to be punished like this, like you? Your punishment is unjust, surely his is as well? She knew vaguely that Ben had a fiancé and a kid and an entire family outside of his other family that operates with her own. What was the point of forcing him here, when he had somewhere to go, unlike her?

“Listen, you take off, alright?” She says, and clambers into the van and tosses one shovel out and starts pushing the body out, feeling vaguely ill at how much it gives underneath her weight through the tarp.

“What?” Ben asks and appears just as the body falls out of the van and he pales at the snap they both hear as the body bends in a way it shouldn’t.

“You take the van and I’ll deal with this,” she repeats, not looking at him as she straps the shovel to her back with a clip on her backpack – not her first rodeo – and shifts the body so its back in a way that gives the person some dignity.

“There’s no need, I’m fine,” Ben snaps, posture shifting again, leaning forward towards Ash. Defensive, her mind supplies.

“I didn’t say you weren’t,” she replies, brushing her hair back from her face as flyaway strands start to stick to the sweat she’s already starting to build up. “Just, I know how to do this and you should go to your family. It's your sister's birthday, right?”

He stares back at her and she thinks he’s going to argue more, but he seems to falter and for a second she can see the yearning on his face. He really loves his family, she thinks to herself, both of them. “Won’t they know I wasn’t here though?” Ben asks.

She shrugs. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” she starts to grin and holds up a hand for a fist bump.

He holds her gaze for a few seconds before he grins too and bumps his fist against hers. They’re both wearing gloves but she likes to think that she could feel the heat from his hand touch hers for a second. Her chest feels lighter as he shuts the doors and clambers into the van, waving at her as he drives back out the front door, a ‘Later, Ash!’ floating in the air behind him.

Her smile slowly slides off her face and is gone by the time the silence returns and she doesn’t like it anymore, not now she remembers what it’s like to have someone speaking to you and fill that space.

She turns and starts dragging the tarp out of the warehouse and into the fields surrounding it. She can’t bury it too close to the building, otherwise the chances of it being uncovered are higher as more people will walk over it, she needs a more obscure part of a field, somewhere someone would rarely walk over in order to notice that anything was off about the land.

Ash sets her eyes on a distant spot and starts dragging the body.

She feels the strain of it in her forearms, a pull that runs up and through her whole body until she sweats through her overalls and she reaches up to wipe sweat off her face to stop it from dripping into her eyes but when she does her face feels stickier than before and she looks down and sees the blood is leaking through the tarp where her glove-covered hand is digging in for grip and feels herself gag but refuses to falter.

She digs her feet in and continues and can’t help the spiteful, I can do this because you can’t, you couldn’t handle the pain in my legs right now but I can, that she directs to her mother.

Finally, she reaches the spot she had decided on and starts digging, not allowing herself a break because if she stops to think then she’ll have to confront that this person might have a family who cares about them and she’s got their blood on her face, and she can't cope with that, she can't do it, she can't cope with all of this blood on her hands, literally and metaphorically.

She realises she’s crying, a quiet keening noise coming from the back of her throat, and a cold voice supplies that there’s now DNA of hers at the scene of the crime but she can’t care, she can’t, it’s too much and she wants to throw the shovel down and wait here until someone catches her with a dead fucking body and arrests her and she can tell them about every terrible thing she has ever done for her family and they have done themselves and then they can all go to jail together and she can deal with her mother’s rage behind bars because maybe that’s the only way to win.

(Remember when winning was beating Jags at Monopoly? Or racing Vinny to the end of the garden? Or trying to learn chess to beat Kheerat, and pretending not to notice how pleased he was whenever she made what he thought was a right move?)

She drops the shovel and braces herself on her knees and sucks in a large breath. I’m going to stand up straight, she tells herself, and when I do, I will get back to work.

She inhales again and feels every one of her muscles stretch as she stands up straight but she doesn’t see rolling fields in front of her, rather an entire crowd of people, all not underneath the moon like Ash was a few seconds ago but rather neon lights that flicker and Ash feels dizzy looking at the lights and the constant movement of the crowd. It feels easy to lose herself and let her limbs go loose and easy, let her head fall back as she laughs, the sound lost in the pounding music, her veins on fire as she thinks to herself that she's a bird, she's a bird and she's going to fly up up up, away from everything and everyone and be free -

Ash’s breath snaps in her throat as she falls backwards and doesn’t land into a pile of people who would catch her and laugh with her as she explained her bird theory, but rather, the grass beneath her rushes up to meet her and she gasps and lays still for a moment, blinking up at the dark night and wonders where that came from, where thoughts of nightclubs, and being a bird and dancing had come from.

She sighs and lets the sound of her own breath fills her ears for a few seconds before she pushes herself up and grabs her shovel from where she had dropped it.

She wants to be back in that moment, even if it was temporary insanity, because that moment of freedom, of just laughing for no reason is lingering in her throat. She wants it so badly that she could cry.

She forces the emotion down and keeps digging. No point in lingering on feelings you’ve never had.

(If her hands tremble on the shovel, then it’s a good thing no one is around to see it.)

//

There’s a moment between throwing back another pill and waiting for it to hit her, that Rebecca wonders how her mother is.

It’s a strange thought in this context; this being Becca throwing back drugs like candy in a nightclub's bathroom and this also being that she hadn’t spoken to her mother in years.

Years being two years, precisely; Becca is a fan of technicalities.

She presses her forehead against the wall of her stall and sighs, starting to feel her muscles loosen up, and lets the thought of Sonia sitting alone every night since she left slip from her mind in favour of the thought of the dance floor just outside the bathroom.

(Besides, Sonia lives with Whitney, so she’s not actually alone. Technicality.)

She stands up and brushes herself off, fingers scratching against the sequins that make up her top, her bare back chilly from the air conditioning but she knows she’ll heat up when she starts dancing again.

She exits the stall and smiles at the other women standing at the sinks before she stares at her reflection. The girl looking back at her has glitter running down her cheeks from underneath her eyes like she’s been crying pure glitter and her hair curls around her shoulders, but she can see where the curls are already starting to fall out. The girl grins at her, and Becca grins right back.

It’s her birthday in a couple hours, she realises as she checks her phone on her way out of the bathroom and she wonders if her mother is going to celebrate for her, without her. Probably not, Sonia was never the sentimental type, not one for lighting a candle for those who are gone. (Is Bex gone? She wonders if her mother pretends she’s dead instead of having to confront the truth that is her daughter ran away from her, exchanged parental love for molly. Wonders if her mother pretends she's dead because that hurts less.)

As soon as she opens the door, the sound of music hits her, loud and heady and slamming right into her chest and she feels breathless as she stumbles into the thick of it, feeling like a lightning bolt whenever her arm brushes against someone else’s, thinking that this is how it’s meant to be all of the time.

She spins around, the bass of the music cradling her skull, her arms loose and she can see everyone around her smiling at her and returns the gesture just like she did in the bathroom, and that’s how it’s meant to be; everyone is meant to be friends like they are here.

She tips her head back and laughs and feels light off of it all, like she’s flying, up up up, and she’s bird, they’re all birds and it’s all light and flying and birds and everyone smiling at her would agree but she can’t get her tongue to agree with her which just makes her laugh more and so do they and it’s just all of it, everything.

There’s a moment between tipping backwards with laughter and trying to right herself that she feels like she stands up as someone else and desperately blinks rain out of her eyes, lifting a fruitless hand to wipe the water collected on her face as she shivers. She’s dragging herself through empty streets, feeling her clothes cling to her skin and cursing as she goes, her feet going numb through her shoes and she lost feeling in her fingers minutes ago but it feels like hours and she could cry, she wants to but she shoves the feeling down in her chest, I have to find Habiba, is what replaces it because it’s all that matters and –

Becca gasps, feeling shoved back and falls backwards, feeling hands around the skin of her waist where her jeans don’t cover and it doesn’t feel like before where everyone was her friend, it feels like nails digging in and twisting, it feels like hands yanking on her wrists, like a voice hissing at her to snap out of it, all bared teeth.

The people around her aren’t smiling anymore (were they ever? Becca feels scrambled like she’s lost something, like an arm in the bathroom, or a leg in Sonia’s living room) and she feels like her chest is open when she pulls away from the hands on her waist and tries to run for the exit, and only crashes into a few people before she’s outside gasping for breath. She's standing in the alleyway next the club and she catches the sight of rain falling in the main street just as a few drops manage to get through the fire escapes on the side of the building next to her to land on her head.

She throws herself forward, landing harshly on her knees but the pain feels distant like it’s not her body but the acid climbing her throat burns, and she feels all of it as she heaves, throwing up all of the meagre dinner she had eaten and she’s crying and shaking and she wants to climb out of her body and leave it here because it all hurts and she’s exhausted with it all, she’s done, she wants to crawl back into her bed and have her mum on the other side of it and have her push the hair out of her face and tell her that she loves her.

That doesn’t happen and Becca stays on her knees – which she can now feel throbbing and regrets landing on them the way she did and wishes she had any care for her body – until she stops trembling and forces herself to her feet and pushes her hair out of her face. It’s her birthday soon, it’s basically her birthday, there’s a rule about not throwing up on your birthday right? Or is it about crying? Becca can’t remember but she makes a mental note to look it up, and immediately forgets.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and feels that she’s still grinning, teeth wet, lips dry.

Her mother would cry if she saw her, her daughter shivering in a gutter and smiling while she vomits. She won’t though, Becca thinks, forcing her feet to walk, one foot in front of another, over and over. She won’t because she is back in London. Technicality.

//

Iqra and Habiba created a system when they were kids, crouched together with their pinkies linked underneath a table while they waited for dinner to be ready. Iqra was all about systems and constantly followed her grandfather around, asking a non-stop stream of questions about how everything worked which made him smile until his eyes crinkled. Her newest system was this: if she or Habiba were ever in trouble, they would tell each other, A-ozu billahi mena shataan Arrajeem. Iqra had spent the entire afternoon practising her pronunciation and was finally satisfied that she had nailed it.

Habiba immediately fouled her mood by telling her that it would take too long to say, and what if she was being taken hostage and only had a few seconds to say her parting words and used up all of them on the first word, then what?

Iqra responded by whacking her sister in the face with the cushion she had been sitting on.

(Iqra got a lecture about treating her sister with kindess and the phrase was shortened to the first few syllables for convenience and Iqra, very graciously, sat and helped Habiba practice them until she got them right.)

Which is how Iqra is here, dragging herself through the rain and shivering so badly she thinks she’s about to shatter her teeth, all because Habiba texted her their emergency code.

Iqra hadn’t thought twice before throwing herself out of the door, barely pausing to yank a coat on and shoving on boots before she was out in the rain, pushing herself to run in the direction of the address Habiba had airdropped as her location.

She had briefly considered getting a taxi but the thought of standing around and waiting while Habiba needed her left her feeling wired and the second she had stopped to think about it left her feeling fried and she pushed herself to run faster as a sort of punishment to make up for it.

A-ozu billahi. It could mean anything and Iqra reminds herself that Habs once used in when she didn’t have a tampon at work and looked confused at Iqra, throwing herself into the restaurant where they both worked as waitresses, out of breath and frantically scanning her for injuries. But, Iqra reminds herself that she could actually be injured or hurt the one time she decides to take her time to get there and can only imagine how much self-hatred that would bring.

Iqra herself has never actually used their code, she realises as she skids around a corner and kicks water all up her calves and tells herself that if this actually isn’t an emergency she is going to throttle Habiba and then promptly give her the cold she is definitely going to have when she gets home.

Her feet slamming into the concrete send jolts up her legs and she feels like an exposed wire that’s frying underneath this rain, like she’s electricity that’s sparking as she runs across a road and doesn’t spare a glance backwards for the car that beeps its horn at her.

A-ozu billahi. Iqra ignores the gut feeling that tells her that something terrible has happened even thought her grandmother always told her to listen to it. She can’t give it a voice because if she does then she might be showing up to a scene that’s just – unimaginable. She can’t do it, she can’t, and tells herself instead that she actually hopes it’s just going to be Habs asking for a charger because her phone died and she’s waiting for a text from some guy.

Her hood has fallen down, and she can feel her hair plastered to her scalp and the rain runs down her head and all over her face. Some water drips into her eyes and she reaches up to scrub them, but when she brings them back down the street she was about to cross isn’t there anymore but there’s couches and food on the coffee table in front of her but she hasn’t touched any of it because she feels ill and her gran is telling a story about his dad and he doesn’t want to listen anymore because his dad is dead and he was murdered but no one is talking about it and he feels sick and god he wants to leave –

Iqra inhales sharply and stumbles back onto the pavement as a car races by, the headlights blinding her for a second as she centres herself and reaches out to steady herself on a lamppost as she tells herself that she is actually in the street she thought she was, not some suburban nightmare that has left a knot in her chest.

She wants to sit down because her head feels like it’s about to explode and she feels off balance like the world decided to tip entirely to one side without telling her but worry about Habiba feels like a firework and she’s running again before she can really think about it.

There’s only two blocks now and Iqra forces herself to go faster, her breath snapping in her lungs but it doesn’t matter, Habs does and whatever moment she just had has to be put on the back burner for her.

One final turn and Iqra is skidding to a stop in front of some abandoned house that’s crumbling at the seams and the panic is getting worse because what the fuck is Habs doing here.

She yanks the door open and almost rips it off of its rotted hinges and steps inside and in the low light that is slicing in through the holes in the roof, she can see Habiba standing to turn to her, mascara running down her face and blood on her hands and her temple.

“Iqra,” Habiba whispers, face ghastly and Iqra forces down her hysteria and what’s she’s pretty sure was about to be vomit.

A-ozu billahi, she thinks, and yanks off her jacket.

//

The thing with funerals is this: the ones the day before your birthday are always going to suck. Bobby remembers when he saw his gran realise that he would have to bury his dad and then go to sleep and wake up nineteen, how she looked like she was going to start crying again while he tried to tell her that it was ok, that he didn’t mind.

(He did. Mind, that is. But, he’d rather feel like shit on his birthday, which he was going to anyway, rather than see her burst into tears again because she couldn’t even remember when her grandson’s birthday was. That’s not fair, she has enough on her plate. But – But, don’t they all?)

The service was nice enough. A quiet affair with a red-faced minister who read some passages from the Bible and called his dad a good, honourable man a few times (Not entirely true, Bobby recalls his dad sneering at him several times during his childhood whenever he tried to express an opinion he didn’t agree with. But, Bobby supposes death allows for some of your unsavoury qualities to be brushed over).

He had sat in the front pew with his gran and Peter and Lucy who were crying, stoic and also crying in that order. Bobby also didn’t cry and thought he and Peter were setting a terrible precedent for men being allowed to express emotions everywhere but he couldn’t stop thinking about how Dad never liked church all that much and whenever they did go as a family when they remembered or Gran dragged them, he would grumble and tap his fingers impatiently the entire time.

Bobby had made a note to ask Peter if he remembered the time when Dad bumped into an old colleague of his – what was his name again? – and basically ran out of the church with them in tow, but he had forgotten around the fifth bible verse.

Once the service was done, Bobby had to stand outside with his family and shake hands with everyone else who had came and accept their condolences.

(It was all a sham, most of these people all thought Ian was the worst and now they showed Bobby their swollen eyes and snotty noses as if they had lost a limb. But, Bobby supposes they could have loved him under the annoyance and tried to shove down any frowns he had and passed them all tissues and consoled the best he could. What good would there be to be cruel?)

Then it was home and that’s where Bobby had been for the past few hours. Sitting in silence with a glass of water and a plate of untouched sausage rolls on his lap while his gran and sister let people filter through to grab something to eat and reminisce about their favourite memories of Ian before leaving and being replaced and repeat. Peter had sat next to him the entire time, his side a warm grounding point that Bobby pressed into whenever he felt like he was drowning. He keeps thinking that someone is about to say it, say that Dad was murdered but no one does. They all seem to be ignoring it, pretending that the coroner wasn't completely lying when he said that Ian just fell and hit his head and that it was just a unfortunate accident. But Peter stays silent, and Gran and Lucy are steadfastly only reminiscing and so Bobby is staying quiet about it too.

Now, a few minutes until midnight when Bobby would turn nineteen, Peter finally speaks. “So what do you want for your birthday?”

Bobby almost smiles. “If your asking because you haven’t gotten me anything, then you’ve left it a bit late,” he replies, looking at his watch and seeing it was two minutes until midnight, turning to look at Peter so he doesn’t have to think about how his dad had given him that watch when he was sixteen and told him he had to be a man now.

Peter smiles for the first time that day. “You know, I actually did get you something, I’m just scoping out if I got you the right thing.”

“Terrible detective work,” Bobby replies and they share a grin over the sound of Gran and Lucy talking by the dining table, heads close together.

Peter stands up and pats Bobby on the shoulder. “I’m off to bed, happy birthday, Bobby.” Bobby smiles for the first time that day at him.

Bobby gets up himself and heads towards the door. “Bob?” Lucy calls.

“Just getting some air,” he says, and ducks out into the cold before she can say anything else.

The cold is a shock to his system and the second his sock-clad feet touch the freezing concrete, he feels like he falls out of his body and into a nightclub, the loud music shaking him to his bones as he pours shots and slides them down the counter and bops his head as the bass makes everything feel like it’s floating but also impossibly grounded and it’s so much to get caught up in but underneath it all is this exhaustion that lines her joints and she could sleep forever but she can’t, she can’t, she has to keep moving, there’s too much, there’s too much –

Bobby gasps and almost falls back into his house but braces himself on the door frame, reaching over to yank the door shut before anyone can come see him because he’s struck with the need to be alone right now, and maybe for a while, if he’s honest. He breathes deeply for a few seconds, mind scrambling to figure out what that was, does grief make you hallucinate?

When his hands stop shaking, he pushes himself up (when did he start sitting on his front door step?) and stumbles towards his car. He remembers when he passed his driving test, when his dad smiled at him and showed him the key to this car but had held onto them long enough to give a lengthy lecture about safety and maintenance and responsibility before he actually handed them over.

Bobby unlocks the boot and looks at his hand that are shaking again, tremors starting at his wrist and knows he doesn’t want to look inside, hasn’t wanted to for the past week since they all found his dad with blood all over his face.

(Have to rip the bandage off at one point, right?)

He opens the boot and looks inside.

Right in the middle is Peter’s award for straight A’s in high school, a small statue of his school’s crest, blood staining one side of it.