In a tiny wooden room, filled with triangular shelves full of books I wouldn’t want to buy, Ellery asked, “Did you ever see your dad again?”
I’d thought we were done with this, so I wasn’t ready and I winced. “Um, no. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
She picked up a copy of Derek Jarman’s A Finger in the Fishes Mouth and flicked through it without much interest. “I don’t remember my dad either.”
“You must have been really young when he—” God, how were you supposed to say it? Passed on? Passed away? Departed?
“Died. Yeah. I was six or seven.” She picked absently at the mirrored cover of the book. “I have these images but they don’t mean anything. And Caspian won’t talk about him.”
God. He’d talked to me. That night on the balcony. Not much but…
Would it be breaking his trust if I told Ellery?
She was staring at the ground, one arm crossed over her body, fingers digging absently into her own skin. “It’s like he doesn’t want me to remember. Like he wants to keep him all to himself.”
Oh, what the hell. Maybe it would do some good.
“Maybe it’s because…um, he told me once that he didn’t think his father would be proud of him.”
Her gaze snapped up. “He was right.”
My mouth fell open so hard my jaw practically clanged off the ground. Not the response I’d been expecting.
We left soon after. Ellery didn’t seem into staying anywhere for very long.
It was slipping into evening, the light softening and the shadows lengthening, and I was pretty much boutiqued out. Besides, I had shit of my own to deal with.
“Listen,” I said, “I should probably—”
She caught for my hand again. “Want to go somewhere else?”
“More shopping?”
“No. Somewhere better.”
Not really, no. Except I made the mistake of meeting her eyes, and she looked almost…almost like she cared. “Well, um, okay.”
She turned away sharply, but not before I caught the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.
We took a cab to Canary Wharf—the fancy rejuvenated bit, where all around us the glass towers reflected the gray-gleaming river and the darkening sky. Ellery tugged me across the road to a construction site: about twenty floors’ worth of a building, open like a mouth around a giant red crane.
It was touch and go but, yes, it was probably better than another boutique.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
She nudged open a weakness in the barrier and ducked under it. And—after a hasty glance round in case anybody noticed what we were doing—I scrambled after her.
“Is this…I mean…this isn’t legal, right?”
She put a finger to her lips and nodded to a security cabin on the other side of the site.
I stifled a whimper. This was even worse than misappropriating the disabled toilets.
Trying to be as stealthy as possible, which wasn’t exactly a skill I’d ever cultivated on account of not being a fucking delinquent, I followed Ellery into the shell of the main structure. It was odd, to say the least. I was used to thinking of buildings as these solid and permanent things, but there was something both naked and fragile about seeing the interior of one exposed like that. Metal frames, dusty concrete, and skeletal scaffolds separated by thin plastic sheets that thumped upon the breeze like a heart.
I circled slowly, surprised by the unexpected…well…beauty was the wrong word. It wasn’t really beautiful. But it was kind of magical seeing something you wouldn’t normally see. The grayness of it washed to dirty gold by the last of the day’s sunlight.
