Chapter Text
Never listen to adult advice. Grown-ups are generally useless anyway, trust me on this.
‘Don’t drink and drive.’ Fair enough, they might have been on to something there. Sports cars, a few cans of Stella, and the fellas really don’t mix.
‘Always wear a seat-belt.’ I was the only one who didn’t. Being flung out of the Triumph in a hairpin bend, right into Moorgate Pond, I was also the only one who didn’t end up dead or as a drooling vegetable.
‘Don’t you dare lie to me, young lady.’ Well, what use is telling the truth if your own mum won’t believe you? Everybody believed Mr Jacobs, though, when he swore on the graves of my friends and his dear departed mum that he hadn’t left his car keys unattended, the old boozer. He claimed I must have nicked them and given them to Alfie. I boarded the first train south from Newcastle the next morning.
Being a teenage runaway in London wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I had imagined. I forked over 500 quid in cash a month for the privilege of illegally renting a repurposed garden shed in Tooting, wedged in between a Thai curry place and a laundrette. Stocking shelves at the local Tesco Express didn’t quite keep me in funds for Spaghetti Hoops and cold beans on toast, new stationery, and the occasional bottle of cheap nail polish. So, I picked up some extra shifts at a coffee shop in Posho Central, better known as the ancient parish of Marylebone.
At least, Arif, my shift manager, was all right. He didn’t once tell me off for doodling in my sketchbook on a slow day. I loved dashing off rough portraits of the regulars, trying to capture their personality in a few bold strokes — and giving them rude nicknames to boot, with my mental voice sounding suspiciously like poor Norrie’s.
There was Bespectacled Boffin, with his unruly mop of dark curls, who tended to lug around way too many books and scarf down way too many donuts. Or take Miss Perk’n’Polish, petite and so effortlessly pretty, with her shiny dark hair and smooth brown skin, that I almost turned as green as lettuce with envy. Of course, she would order ‘just a small salad and a sparkling water, please’ on what must’ve been her dates with Posh Boy, while he heartily tucked into his bacon sandwiches and iced almond buns.
Oh yeah, Posh Boy, aka God’s Gift, with his blazer and tie from some absurdly fancy sixth-form college that I reckon had a motto and a coat-of-arms, like bloody Hogwarts. He always paired his school uniform and his slightly-too-tight trousers with black Converse trainers. Probably because he thought it made him look cool. Twat. Well, say what you will about his unfortunate fashion sense and his equally unfortunate upper-middle-class background, but he did tip generously and was scrupulously polite. He called me ‘Ms Carlyle’ the first couple of times we met, for fuck’s sake. Posh Boy kept hanging out in the shop so often my sketchbook was filling up with pictures of him and his stupid hair. I even started wondering if he, too, didn’t have a proper home.
‘So you remembered the way I take my tea? Thank you, Ms Carlyle, that’s very thoughtful of you.’ Was he taking the piss? He smiled so widely I thought I might go blind from his pearly whites.
‘I’m having a glass of orange juice today, Lucy. Yes, the one with the floating bits in it, please. Personally, I think straining it through your teeth is part of the fun. As a kid, I used to pretend I was a blue whale.’ A slightly abashed grin that time, as the tips of his ears turned a delicate sort of pink.
‘That’s actually a pretty good likeness, Luce. You’ve made me into quite the Byronic hero, haven’t you?’ Now it was my turn to flush and slam my sketchbook shut.
Anyway, I felt oddly relieved when he once showed up with three people in tow who looked so much like him — his dark eyes, his bony wrists, his ridiculous smile — that they could only be his parents and his older sister.
‘So, that’s the infamous coffee shop?’ The girl — Posh Boy’s sister — ordered a flat white, looking me up and down, from my smudged mascara to my scuffed Doc Martens. ‘Yes, I can see why you like … the almond buns,’ she said, hooting with laughter and ruffling his carefully styled floppy fringe.
For a split second, my stomach cramped, and the odd sense of relief turned into sheer, seething jealousy. Why couldn’t I have a sister like that? Or benignly smiling parents, clad in cashmere and tweed, who treated their children to buns and biscuits on a lazy Sunday afternoon? One more thing to envy Posh Boy — Anthony — for.
Private education? Check. Dentistry that clearly hadn’t been paid for by the NHS? Check. A loving family and a doting girlfriend? Check and check. Or maybe there was one item to strike off of Anthony’s list of god-given riches. The next time I saw Miss Perk’n’Polish, with her tasteful make-up and her cute-as-a-button vintage dress, she was kissing another sixth-form girl near the turnstiles at Baker Street Station. Kissing? They were snogging so hard that they were basically trying to perform an emergency tonsillectomy in public.
For some reason, the sight made me laugh so much I was more or less floating home, buoyed by a strange, inexplicable giddiness all the way. I even splurged on a set of charcoal pencils and a bit of random tat from a charity shop: a blue jumper, a coffee mug with a cartoon whale that announced it was having a ‘whale of a time’, and the loveliest bracelet I’d ever laid my eyes on.
I swear I felt it calling out to me from the junk box with the costume jewellery made of paste and rhinestones. With its gleaming jade-green stones, it looked as if it belonged into the window of a swanky antique shop in Bloomsbury rather than an Oxfam in Tooting Broadway. In fact, it was so beautiful I couldn’t bear to take it off when going to sleep on the camp bed in my garden shed.
I had the weirdest dream that night. Not normal-weird, like that time I’d dreamed of me and Anthony riding the Hogwarts Express, but proper-weird. I dreamed of a glowing shape that burned with otherworldly light, eyes blazing under a coronet of pure white fire, a golden radiance that called me by my name — me, plain, ordinary, down-on-my-luck Lucy Carlyle. Something very ancient and very powerful spoke to me. It had seen kingdoms rise and fall, and it promised me buried secrets, matters of life and death beyond the minds of mortals, and the mysteries of creation.
For once, I wasn’t woken up by the bin lorry, but by the frantic beating of my own heart. An unfamiliar name was hovering on my lips: ‘Ezekiel …’