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  ‘Ideal,’ he says to Jeff.

  Jeff unrolls several large sheets of paper which look like architect’s plans. He and my father spend the best part of the next half hour consulting, pointing, scribbling, gesturing towards the wasteland. The sun swells with thick vermilion light and sinks ever further towards the horizon.

  I sigh, leaning against the car. I can’t see what fascinates them so. It’s all stuff that I must have seen before but never particularly wanted to look at. There’s the wasteground stretching away, and beyond, down in the valley, there’s a mess of railway lines and factory buildings. Between those two landscapes, about three hundred yards away from us on the edge of the hills, there’s a pair of dead, condemned blocks of flats. They are a dull, yellow colour – wilting cheese with grey holes. Above them, the sky is decorated with those soft clouds that seem to hang upside down, like the acoustic mushrooms in the Albert Hall.

  A poet might come up here and expound about the haunted beauty of neglect in the ageing flats, and the way the sunset gives them a crumbling nobility evoking time and shifting patterns of love. Me, I just think they look like fucked-up council flats.

  After a while, they nod, and Jeff rolls up the plans. While Jon notes some things on a notepad, Jeff chats to me.

  ‘We’ve already entered into negotiating stages for the restructuring operation,’ says Jeff. He talks to me, gesturing with his clipboard, as if I would be interested.

  I shrug. ‘It’s all ugly,’ I point out to him.

  ‘Excellent, great,’ says Jeff, and he gives me a bright white grin. ‘The ideal end-user observation.’

  Behind, in the estate, roads radiate away from us. The culs-de-sac were a town planner’s folly, I remember reading. A Fally folly. They were made like spokes in a wheel to foster a caring, neighbourly atmosphere. Instead, they became the perfect nightmare-trap. The designer of one of those combat games on expensive piers couldn’t have done it better. Soon, night will fall, and the smells of petrol and dust fill the air as motor bikes tear up and down a ready-made playground. Lone women will scuttle from one street light to the next, sprays in hand, hurrying home to be beaten black and blue by salivating boyfriends.

  ‘You see, Bel,’ he continues, ‘I’ve been streamlining our utility acquisition programme.’

  ‘That must have been fun for you.’

  He smiles, but not with his eyes. I can see a hint of Damien in him, perhaps – the widely spaced eyes and dark, clearly defined eyebrows, with a flat nose and a knowing face. But Jeff is perhaps more lean, and certainly more stubbly. He hasn’t got Damien’s sleek, comfortable look.

  ‘You don’t take me entirely seriously, do you, Bel?’ he asks, moving closer to me. He’s lifting his chin in a slightly superior way. I can scent aftershave, the sort that’s advertised by telling you it helps you shag women.

  I meet his gaze, coolly, the sort of thing that I bet not many women actually do. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I assure him. ‘But I do wonder if you’ve learnt to maximize your interpersonal relationship margins.’

  He opens his eyes, wide, staring, as if he’s about to tell me he hadn’t thought about that.

  I smile. ‘Don’t bother. I’m taking the piss.’

  Throughout this exchange, my father, as he does at home, has achieved neutrality by non-intervention. He has been leaning on the rickety wall, looking out across the wasteland. He’s nodding to himself, as if he has decided something.

  I stroll over to him, stretching and yawning.

  ‘This is really boring,’ I tell him. ‘Did you bring me all this way just to see a load of troggy flats?’

  ‘Take a good look,’ he says quietly. ‘They’re going.’

  ‘Going?’

  He nods. ‘In three months’ time, the demolition order comes through. We’ve managed to get the go-ahead for the Fallowdale complex.’

  I can’t help snorting with laughter. ‘Don’t use words like “complex” round here. Keep it simple.’

  But I realize my dad is deadly serious. His face is full of that uncanny brightness which always comes upon him when he’s talking property. It’s the kind of glassy-eyed zeal which I’ve otherwise seen only in born-again Christians.

  So we stand and look at what is soon to be destroyed. The clouds, as if presaging something, are starting to disintegrate. Hazed with orange edges, they are shifting, fragmenting at the edges, pictures breaking up on a TV screen.

  ‘So the flats have to go, then?’

  The sunset is in my father’s glasses. He nods vigorously, without even turning to look at me. ‘This town needs change. Look at all the dead-ends round here. Dover. Herne Bay. Terrible places. Change. That’s what it needs.’

  ‘How do the people in those flats feel about it?’ I ask.

  There is a long pause, an evening pause, filled by an overlap of sound – seagulls over distant traffic and, perhaps the sea, just at the edge of our hearing as ever.

  ‘They don’t know yet,’ he says curtly, and then he turns around to head back to the car.

  Jeff, his hair blowing in the evening breeze, gives me a grin the size of a mobile phone, and a complicit wink.

  I give him a rueful smile back. ‘They ain’t going to like it.’

  Jeff shrugs as he chucks the plans on the back seat. ‘They don’t have to like it,’ he points out. ‘They haven’t got much choice. Some of them will be rehoused. The council’s got this scheme, actually.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Does it involve execution at all?’

  He laughs and rubs his nose. Yeah, I definitely saw a bit of Damien in him just then. ‘Not exactly. They want to put the worst ones in specialized housing. You know, strengthened concrete houses with reinforced windows and security cameras. It’s a sort of project, monitoring families with background problems. You know, try and understand them a bit better.’

  ‘Right. These houses wouldn’t happen to be rent-free, would they? In other words, paid for by normal people?’

  Jeff gives me another big grin and a non-committal shrug. ‘It’s an innovative idea,’ he points out. ‘The council like innovative ideas.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, as long as they’re PC enough.’

  This is the same body, I remind myself, which last year announced that it didn’t have the money for any new library books, but which somehow found a few thousand to send its councillors on a three-day Sexual Difference Awareness Enhancement course in a four-star hotel in Taunton.

  And so this is how it’ll work. Many of the law-abiding spend their nights papering over the damp and working out if they can afford to switch on the extra bar on the fire and being crippled by council-tax bills inflated by local government incompetence (and trips to four-star Somerset hotels). And meanwhile, the others – those with noses which are not quite so clean – end up having it all taken care of.

  I wonder how long it’ll take the Fallies to work out the connection between a bad reputation and a council grant. If they’re canny enough, they might start sending their kids out joyriding and robbing, just to get a slice of what’s going. Same story all over. Like riots. Nobody gives the inner cities any money until they have a really good riot and smash up their own neighbourhood. It seems that pissing in your own backyard is the only way to get anyone’s attention.

  *

  JJ gets the biscuits, while I pour more wine.

  Kate twitters around us. ‘Thank you, Joshua,’ she murmurs. ‘That’s very helpful of you.’

  If I know him, he doesn’t want to be helpful and he doesn’t want to be Joshua. But it is useful to be both, for the moment.

  We lean against the wall in the garden and watch the pageant of floating hats and glasses through the patio doors. JJ occasionally sips from a glass of orange juice.

  ‘How did Jon end up with her?’ he asks, tilting his glass towards the house. The question is not intended to sound impertinent or critical – JJ has spent the afternoon playing the golden boy, and only some of it was an act. He is Well Brought Up. He’s simp
ly curious to know the answer.

  ‘I don’t really know.’ He stares at me in an oh-come-on sort of way, but I shrug. ‘Really. He just came home with her one day. I think she was screwing some business partner or something, and she decided my dad had more money. You know she’s been married to three other men? All of them little gold-mines, too. She knows what she’s doing.’

  ‘Don’t you ever want to kill her?’ he asks me casually.

  ‘Often,’ I tell him, with feeling. ‘Very, very often.’

  He shrugs. ‘Why don’t you do it, then? You’d be doing your father a favour.’

  I grin, remembering what I said to him about the girl in the chemist’s shop. ‘No-one can get away with murder these days. They have DNA fingerprinting, all that stuff.’

  The best answer is always the pragmatic one.

  Inside, Kate squeals in delight as she embraces another new arrival.

  ‘Easy, from here,’ I murmur. ‘Pchow, pchow, pchow.’ My finger chops into the crowd, slicing it up with imaginary bullets.

  ‘Could you kill someone?’ he asks. ‘Just out of interest.’

  ‘People do, just out of interest. Vested interest, and compound interest.’ I giggle. ‘Never know, Kate might be mixing up the weed-killer for Dad, right now.’

  I have avoided the question. JJ just sighs and shoves his hands in his pockets. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s go into town.’

  *

  Upstairs on the bus, it smells of piss and sweat, and it rattles with abandoned cans every time we go round a corner. I tell him about my father’s and Jeff’s plans for the Fally estate.

  JJ looks perturbed. He fiddles with his bus ticket and slices a hole in it with his fingernail. ‘And no one on Fallowdale knows yet?’

  ‘Nope. I think they’re gonna tell them when it’s too late to protest.’ I grin ruefully. ‘Rather neat, don’t you think?’

  We don’t talk much more about it. Neither of us really cares.

  In town, we amble down the main street, kicking a carton between us until I finally lose patience and send it ricocheting off against a car. We stop outside one of the well-known chain stores.

  ‘I want a new jacket,’ I tell JJ. ‘Come on.’

  In Ladies’ Wear, he hangs around a few feet behind me as if he’s frightened of being thought a transvestite. The leather jackets are all fixed together with something that looks like a bike chain, so no joy there. Black denim, though, is a definite option.

  ‘You haven’t got any money,’ JJ points out.

  ‘Who needs money?’ I ask him disgustedly. I select a jacket in size 12 and twist off the label with the bar-code. Then I take it from the peg and walk off, whistling.

  JJ keeps close to me, nervously, as I stride off. I’m dangling the jacket very obviously by the hanger. ‘You’re not very discreet,’ he hisses at me, as we jostle our way through the late Saturday crowds.

  ‘You’ve never done this before, have you?’ I shake my head pityingly, and we stop at a cash desk.

  ‘Hello!’ I say with a smile. Instantly, I am well-spoken, upright, adult. I plonk the jacket down in front of the cashier, who’s a middle-aged woman in wire-framed glasses, like someone’s kindly gran. My smile is returned, which is a good start. ‘I wonder if I could possibly exchange this? I bought it here last week, and it’s the wrong size.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you, love,’ she says in a quiet, amiable voice, peering at the collar. ‘What size was it you wanted?’

  ‘I’m actually a ten now!’ I tell her, remembering to simper slightly. ‘Must be the diet. I’ve been following it regularly.’

  And a minute or so later, I’m strolling out of the shop with a green carrier-bag swinging from my fingers, the proud owner of a size 10 black denim jacket. A bewildered JJ scurries after me.

  I have a look up at the sky. ‘No rain. Oh, well.’

  ‘Rain?’ he asks, baffled.

  ‘Just after it’s been raining – always the best time to go lifting. Know why?’ We stop at another shop window.

  JJ shrugs. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You can spot the store detectives more easily. They’re the ones with dry shoes.’

  ‘Any more tricks up your sleeve?’ he asks. I’m pulling the jacket on now, and I abandon the carrier bag in a municipal flowerpot.

  I grin at him. ‘We can try.’ I beckon him inside the shop.

  It’s one of the more hopeful local shops, called Bright. This place has an alarm set-up at the door, one of those barrier things like at an airport, and thick plastic security tags on all the clothes.

  Downstairs, they’re nearly ready to close, and they’re cashing up. Upstairs, there’s no one except a stupid bitch with green nails, feet up on the counter, reading a magazine.

  I take a little red number into the changing room and start working on the disc. It seems to take an age, but I can feel it coming. Finally, it rips off with what seems to me like a huge noise. The dress is torn, of course, but that’s the price you pay, and I can easily fix that at home. I shove it into my pocket and stride confidently out.

  JJ, who’s been scratching his nose hard enough to take the skin off, seems to have got this idea that he’s supposed to do some distracting – probably seen too many police films at school. He’s asking the girl about paisley ties. She’s giving him a hard stare and saying, ‘We don’t do men’s,’ or something like that, but by that time I’m halfway down the stairs with the little silk dress scrunched in my jacket pocket.

  Outside, it takes a lot to persuade JJ to have a go, but eventually I do, by letting him go for the easiest option of all – the double-layer manoeuvre. Still so few shops have actually twigged to this one. We try it in a place pounding with techno, called Klobber (yuk!), just off the main square.

  I stand outside and watch him take two identical red check shirts in one hand into the changing rooms. Make sure you get the label off, I tell him. They’re always tagged, even when they don’t seem to be. Luckily, he’s got quite a loose shirt of his own on today. He emerges, very red, after about ten minutes – Jesus, we’re going to need to get some practice in – and puts his one shirt back on the peg. Now, the key is not to scarper straight away. You stay, look at a few similar things, peer intently at price labels. JJ’s not happy about this bit, I can tell. Eventually, we slip out of the shop. He’s got his eyes closed as if he expects alarms to blare at any moment.

  In the street, I jump up and down, laughing, and kiss him, but he doesn’t seem happy. It’s only then that I notice the collar of the check shirt sticking out from under his own. And no one even saw.

  Chapter Eight – Unsound Waves

  There are ghosts.

  *

  Belinda Archard says there are ghosts.

  My mother’s eyes open wide in the hollows of my memory.

  Of her memory.

  She is Belinda Archard. I am Bel. I have to remember that.

  *

  There are ghosts here, of course, at the end of the world.

  There are the wraiths of girls who never turned up to their weddings on the marshland churches and now haunt their pewless shells with blue light.

  Then, on the stumps of crumbling stone high above the town, which some wag on the tourist board decided they should call a castle, there’s a woman in grey patrolling the ruined walls. I often wonder what she thinks of the town on a darkening September night, when the blackness is dusted with the orange and blue of sodium and mercury, and cars squeal down on the harbour wall, and great steaming clouds of light move across the horizon as the hovercraft thunder towards Dover and Folkestone. I wonder what she makes of the pungent fish-and-chips air and the empty fag packets in the holes between the ruins. The spiky needles. The sloppy, dead condoms.

  JJ told me he knew someone who’d seen her face. He said she had thick, dark glasses with no earpieces, welded to her white face – insect’s eyes – and that the grey cloak was actually all shiny, like silver foil. He told me this theory that ghosts can e
cho back as well as forward in time, and that she could be a ghost from the future, not of the past. One who’d come to see what her Aids-decimated, post-holocaust world had once been like, recording it all with the dark cameras of her eyes. I sort of tried not to think about that.

  This is a renowned place for ending your life. You’d have thought people would want to end it on a high, rather than in the South’s biggest shit-hole, but never mind. And there’s the cove, out beyond the pier, where nobody goes these days, where the sea water’s clogged with decaying cars.

  Some are no doubt frightened of the slippery, frog-eyed bodies within the wrecks. Me, I’m more worried about the cars themselves. I imagine those great steel demons, dripping with seaweed, rearing up on their fragments of rubber legs. They bare their metal teeth and flash their green, algae-filled eyes as they lunge at the unwary traveller.

  *

  Night. What is it about night that brings out the darkness in us all?

  *

  At night, I listen to the radio. Sometimes it makes my ears hurt, the same way that those 3-D pictures – the magic cardboard cut-outs that emerge from a sea of colour – hurt my eyes.

  The town lights are lollipop orange and ice blue. They’re scattered in a glitter on the slopes between here and the Edge of the World.

  Voices jabber away, transmitted from somewhere up beyond the hills, washing over us on their journey to the sea.

  ‘I saw this programme an’ they was talkin’ about puttin’ the M1 unnerground. That’s what they wanna use that Millyum Fund for. Buryin’ the motorway unnerground.’

  ‘I . . . see.’

  ‘Put loadsa trees and stuff over it they said, and bury it unnerground and no one would know it’d ever been there.’

  ‘Ah, really. Yes. Kelly, there is a possibility – isn’t there – that some irony was at play here?’

  ‘Irony.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Wha’s irony?’

  ‘Well, it’s when you say something that you don’t really mean. You’re keeping a kind of distance from it by being not entirely serious.’