isn’t how the disease works. She can feel Esme retreating further and further into herself, so it seems sometimes as if she’s already halfway into the next world. Sometimes it’s as if her grandmother is travelling to this place and isn’t sure she wants to come back. Sometimes, when Scarlet walks into a room, her grandma will look at her as if she wishes Scarlet wouldn’t come any closer, wishes she’d leave again, so that Esme won’t have to return to Earth.
“Okay, Grandma, I’ll go by myself.” Scarlet keeps her voice light, bright. “I’ll stop at the market, I’ll bring yellow tulips to cheer you up.” She leans in to kiss her grandmother on the cheek, but Esme turns away.
When Scarlet reaches the doorway, she stops. She’s a coward. She’d vowed that today she’d tell her grandmother the dreadful news. So, what’s she going to do? Wait until the removal van arrives? Scarlet turns back, walking slowly to Esme’s bedside as if she were walking to the gallows.
“I—I need to tell you something, Grandma.” She crouches beside the bed. “I—we . . .”
The seconds stretch and swell, time elongates and thins, until Scarlet is taut as a copper wire about to snap.
“I’m sorry, Grandma, we can’t live here, we have to move, we can’t afford to keep the café anymore. We—I tried to save it but I—I couldn’t.”
Every word on a single breath.
Scarlet inhales. Her grandmother is looking at her as if she’s seeing something else entirely. Scarlet waits for her to scream, to slap her, to sob. When she does none of these, Scarlet wonders if she’ll have to repeat herself until she’s sure that Esme has heard. And then a tear slips from the side of her grandmother’s eye and slides down her cheek. And Scarlet feels as if a surgeon were sticking his fingers into the ventricles of her heart and slowly cleaving her apart.
She will have to replay this moment over and over. Every hour of every day. When the café closes. When the packing starts. When they leave, when they’re living in a strange new place. Scarlet will have to explain. She will relive her guilt and shame, again and again, until the time when finally her grandma remembers nothing at all.
10:52 p.m.—Liyana
Liyana takes a deep breath and sinks slowly under. She opens her eyes to the filmy expanse of water above. It’s her first night in the new flat—Clapton Way, Hackney—and in the dismal little bathtub. Squirming and shifting, she tries to fully immerse herself. But in this cramped plastic piece of shit, Liyana can fully submerge only while assuming the foetal position.
Her shift starts in an hour. Midnight until ten. She can’t stand another night at Tesco. But she will. Liyana pictures her aunt slumped on the sofa, ignoring the call of the boxes to be unpacked, watching repeats of EastEnders. Since they moved into the flat, Nya hasn’t stirred. Stuffing herself with Waitrose cheese crackers (charitably left behind by the bailiffs) and inhaling cheap chardonnay, Nya has ensconced herself in a bell jar of denial, the glass too thick for Liyana’s voice to penetrate, no matter how loud she shouts.
Liyana rises. Water droplets cling to her hair and skin, unwilling to let her go. She uncurls her legs. Shitty tiny bath. Shitty Tesco. Shitty life. The dissonant shrieks of Tiffany Butcher seep through the flimsy floorboards. Liyana feels a sudden wave of fury gathering force. If Aunt Nya hadn’t been so bloody selfish and irresponsible, Liyana wouldn’t be in this fucking mess right now. She’d be sitting in a bathtub that didn’t cramp her muscles, she’d still be living in her family home, she’d be studying fine art at the Slade. She’d have Kumiko—who still hasn’t fully forgiven her—in her bed.
The furious wave subsides, drawing back, only to swell again, undulating along the bottom of the bathtub as Liyana imagines snatching her aunt’s wineglass and smashing it on the floor. Water laps at the islands of her knees as Liyana’s hand draws sharply across her aunt’s cheek, a slap so hard it elicits a scream, finally snapping Nya out of her catatonic state. Waves splash over the sides as Liyana imagines seizing her aunt by her cornrows, dragging her up the stained staircase, then plunging her face into the water. Nya flails, but Liyana holds firm, pushing down until, at last, her aunt stops fighting and her body goes slack.
Fuck.
Liyana snaps out of her reverie. The bathwater is bubbling, suddenly so hot