Giant Days Read online

  “Yeah, well, she was. Now she’s back. Saw her in lectures this morning.”

  “Keep her away from me, or she’ll bugger off again because I’m so mean and hateful.”

  Kully stopped in his tracks to give her a startled look. “Will she?”

  “Of course. That’s how I drive all my friends away, apparently.”

  “Not this one.” He flashed out his hand and ruffled her hair none too gently.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Sorry.” The hand retracted.

  It was as if she couldn’t help it. “See? Mean and hateful.”

  Out in the stairwell, Susan left Kully behind the way she always did during a break. Normally she bolted for fresh air and the promise of nicotine, but her rhino-shaped heart made everything sluggish. By the time she actually got outside, Susan doubted there was time for a full cigarette before she’d have to make her way back for whatever integrated learning activity she had next. It had just tipped into December and was still dark when she’d arrived that morning. The night had long since closed around the hospital building, darkness pooling in Susan’s spot by the bins. She’d just lit up, head back, eyes closed, back braced against the wall, when she heard someone say her name.

  Kully was standing at the corner, a steaming cup in each hand and a bright red scarf looped elegantly around his neck as a nod to the cold that Susan could feel gnawing at her knees and creeping beneath her clothes.

  “You moved fast,” Susan said, almost impressed.

  “Don’t get too excited. These are from the vending machine in reception. Here, twenty sugars, right?”

  Susan took the cup with a grunt of gratitude. “Why are you bringing me coffee? What is it you said? ‘Smoke clings to cashmere like snot to a toddler.’”

  “I’m here because I care more about my friends than I do about my clothes.” He dodged a fleck of ash drifting in his direction. “Just.”

  It was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her, so obviously it needed questioning.

  “Even though I’m mean and hateful?”

  “Stop saying that.” Kully sipped his coffee, gagged, and swapped cups. “Sure, you’re cynical and blunt and the angriest person I’ve ever met . . .” Something Susan would usually have taken as a compliment. “You’re petty, you’re grumpy, and you’re so sarcastic, it’s hard to know if you ever mean what you say . . .”

  A truly uplifting pep talk.

  “. . . but, Susan, I’ve only ever heard you be mean to people who deserve it. Besides, I kind of thought this anarchic rage vibe was your shtick. I’m your friend because of who you are—not in spite of that.”

  “Thanks, Kully.” Susan bumped her cup to his, a small smile escaping from her lips. “I’m glad we’re mates.”

  “Me, too. It’s good to know there’s someone who’d come looking for me if I went missing.” As soon as he said it, concern crept across his expression, weighing down the corners of his mouth and wrinkling his brow. “It’s been happening a lot you know.”

  “What has?”

  “Students disappearing for a few days before popping back up, the way Grace has.” He sipped his coffee and frowned at Susan. “Have you really not noticed? She was gone for a week—her boyfriend came to visit and couldn’t find her, and all her housemates were really worried. Turns out she’d just been doing yoga in some guy’s basement and forgot to come home.”

  “Grace Latter, famously the hardest of partyers, forgot to come home because she was doing yoga?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “And we’re sure that’s not a euphemism?”

  “Positive. It was your friend Daisy who set her up.”

  Susan almost sucked the cigarette into her mouth, such was the force of her shocked gasp. I’m not to recruit any more members . . . that’s what Daisy had said. Was Grace one of those members?

  Kully was saying something, but Susan’s vision had become a film reel, splicing together all the strange interactions she’d had with Daisy since she started going to yoga: the shifty way she’d stopped letting anyone come into her room, the breakfast incident . . . the locked door that had been shut every time Susan walked past it in the last twenty-four hours.

  All of a sudden, it became very important that she find Daisy Wooton.

  Vectra’s band was playing in a pub called the Obscure Breed of Sheep, and it cost thirteen pounds to get in.

  “A pound per band!” the guy on the door had said, taking their money and stamping their hands. “A bargain.”

  Something that Esther—had she been feeling herself—would have contested. In all her years of supporting local bands and weird acts, standing on pub carpets saturated with sweat and stale beer, or in basements with questionable health and safety standards, Esther had never paid more than a tenner for entry.

  Feeling guilty for dragging Ed Gemmell along, she marched right up to the bar that ran the full length of the room and waved furiously at the man behind it, who seemed preoccupied by poking the material of his T-shirt into his belly button.

  She turned to Ed Gemmell. “What do you want? My treat.”

  “Oh, er, thanks, but can I just have tap water? Maybe with a bit of ice and lemon? Treat myself and all that.”

  The bar didn’t have any lemon. Or ice. But it did have a tap.

  “Are you sure that’s all you want?” Esther said, handing him a not entirely cold glass.

  “Yes, thanks.” Ed Gemmell took his drink and eyed the limescale still clouding the contents. “Water’s good for you. Plus I need to stay up and finish reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ahead of tomorrow’s seminar.”

  “You work too hard.” Esther sipped her drink and pulled a face. She wasn’t even sure why she’d ordered it. Stout had never been her thing, but Vectra had gone on about how Northern breweries were suffering from the influx of London-based microbreweries. “The first year of university is about life experiences like these . . .”

  She waved a hand at the sparsely populated room. The venue was a function room at the back of the pub, with peeling wallpaper and mirrored pictures mottled with age. A bit like the patrons. The people there looked less like enthusiastic music fans and more like people who’d arrived early for a town hall meeting about parking restrictions.

  “Do you think there’s more people here to perform than to watch?” Ed Gemmell speculated, tugging his coat tighter as another couple of people swept in through the side door.

  Neither of them was Vectra. If she was already there, then Esther couldn’t see her. Which meant that Vectra wouldn’t know she was there.

  “What are you doing?” Ed squawked as Esther put an arm around his neck and yanked him so close, her nose ended up in his ear.

  “Taking a picture.”

  Ed Gemmell twisted as if trying to free himself. “Can’t I put my drink down?”

  “What are you, an amateur? Incorporate it into your pose.” Esther clamped him tightly enough to prevent further wriggling. He let out a pained wheeze as Esther held her phone up to catch them at the perfect angle. She took a few, cycling through all the appropriate poses—excited, moody, ready to rock. Ed Gemmell stuck with terrified.

  Five minutes after she’d posted the best one, sixty-two people had liked the picture . . . but none of them was Vectra.

  “Watch out.” Ed Gemmell nudged her. “First band’s up.”

  They were predictably awful. A mandolin, a xylophone, and a singer who sounded like a blue whale impersonating Michael Stipe. By the end of their ten-minute set, Esther’s picture was up to eighty-four likes. No Vectra.

  If anything, the second band was worse. So bad that Esther caught Ed Gemmell trying to stuff his hair into his ears.

  “Can’t we go for a drink somewhere else and come back? Rutting Corpse isn’t on till nine.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” he said plaintively.

  “In case Vectra’s here.” When his face indicated a missing of the point, E
sther clarified. “I don’t want her thinking we’re not going to show.”

  “No offense, Esther, but Vectra doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to worry about something like that.” He waved at the door. “We could just . . .”

  “We are going to stand here until Vectra Featherstone gets up on that stage and sees how cool and brilliant a person I really am in my limited edition Bleeding Orifices ’06 tour T-shirt as I mosh along to”—she checked the list she’d written on the palm of her hand—“The Devil Rode a Unicycle and . . . er . . . Washing Machine Head Duck.”

  “Are you sure it says ‘duck’?”

  “Yes, Edward, I’m not bloody autocorrect. DUCK. Look!” She pushed her palm into his face.

  Esther’s voice had risen with every syllable, a pressure building in her chest that she didn’t know how to release. Maybe if she could thrash about, expend it through energetic flailing to something fast and angry and . . .

  The man who walked onstage held an acoustic guitar, and when he cleared his throat, he announced to the room that he liked to rewrite cheerful nursery rhymes into mellow tunes.

  Without realizing, Esther had started shaking. She felt a gentle hand resting on her shoulder, Ed Gemmell’s voice coming to her as if through a thick veil woven together by stress and anxiety and the out-of-tune twang of a melancholy rendition of “Humpty Dumpty.”

  “Esther. We’re going to go and sit in the beer garden, and you are going to tell me what’s wrong. OK?”

  “OK,” she whispered.

  Breaking and entering was immoral. Susan knew this. She also knew that the immorality of breaking and entering doubled when the victim was a friend, and the crime moved from a violation of privacy to a violation of trust.

  She waited for the skeleton to object.

  Ach. No jury’s going to convict you.

  “Because I won’t get caught,” Susan pointed out.

  Well, then. What are you waiting for?

  Shoving some balled socks, a bra, and some medical textbooks out of the way, Susan shimmied under the bed to where a grease-stained pizza box lurked in a far corner. Pulling it out, she flipped the lid to reveal a plastic bag containing a roll of fifties, a signet ring that had once belonged to a man referred to only as “Big Papa,” a crime-scene kit, and a selection of fake IDs for Mr. Sufjan Tolemy, Ms. Suzanne Pottolemy, and (Susan’s personal favorite) Miss Susin P. T. Olemy. Taped to the lid of the box were several smaller bags containing an assortment of useful tools, and it was from one of these that Susan selected a black velvet pouch.

  The locks in J-block might have been temperamental when it came to keys, but when it came to picking, the simple pin tumbler should prove a breeze. As Susan crouched in the hallway, she cast an eye over the lock and selected her tools from the black pouch.

  A pick and a torque wrench, a one-of-a-kind tool handmade by a man who knew locks the way a nun knew the Bible.

  “May Jesus bless you, McGraw,” Susan said, her smile an echo of adventures past: breaking into the sealed cabinet in the headmaster’s office to steal the skeleton that now resided in her room (and replace it with a tower of sarcastic-looking cuddly toys), rearranging all the mannequins in the windows of the local department store to look like they were performing “Y.M.C.A.,” gathering evidence against that notorious Northampton reprobate Logan Hogan.

  Ah, youth . . .

  In her more fanciful moments, Susan had anticipated a den of chaos, as if Daisy had been taken in the night and her room trashed by men in balaclavas looking for a USB stick filled with state secrets. There was also a dark, entirely implausible scenario in which Susan opened the door to find Daisy unconscious, with Baby Gordon pecking at her glasses in an attempt to feast on her eyeballs.

  What she got was something else entirely.

  Daisy’s room was bare.

  Not the stripped bare of the recently departed dropout, but more like a room that had been on a faddish diet and lost all its weight too quickly. Gone was the flesh—and with it, the soul. There was no Anglepoise desk lamp, no glitter lamp, not even any photo frames—the photos themselves were pinned haphazardly on the university-issue bulletin board. Even poor Enya had been stripped of her frame, left to curl at the corners under the bed, and the speakers through which she had once warbled were gone.

  It didn’t make any sense. Based on what remained, it was inconceivable that Daisy had moved out. But then . . . where had all her stuff gone? And why?

  No wonder she’d been so shifty about letting anyone in here.

  But still, a bare room and an absent Daisy weren’t any reason to panic . . . only wherever she’d gone, she’d taken Baby Gordon with her. Smothering a bubble of worry with reassurances that Daisy had often taken the chick with her to lectures, Susan went to inspect the desk.

  Sitting in the middle of the desk was a patchily highlighted handout: Pottery in the Neolithic Era—An Overview.

  “Thrilling . . .” Susan muttered, noting that Daisy had written the date of the lecture at the top. Two days ago. Unlike Esther, Daisy was diligent in her class attendance. According to the timetable pinned to her board, she’d had two more lectures since. There were no handouts, but there was a selection of primary-colored exercise books—the sort Susan had used in junior school—lined up in a neat little row along the back of the desk. Each one had a topic written on the front, which Susan checked against the timetable.

  Renaissance, Reformation, European Colonialism . . .

  Lecture match!

  Flipping that particular book open, Susan nodded in appreciation at the opening page of methodical color-coding and bullet points, carried on throughout . . .

  Until more recently.

  Here the notes were fragmented, doodles of what looked like a flower emerging in the margins, a motif repeated over and over with increasing intricacy. As the occurrences of the flower motif increased, the quality of Daisy’s note-taking deteriorated to the point where the notes barely made sense.

  The path to enlightenment is paved by sharing . . . Zoise opens the door to those of us who have opened ourselves to Zoise . . . Share the sanctuary only with those who wish to embrace it . . . Zoise desires more . . .

  And then, on the next page, a single question: What sacrifice are you willing to make for your family?

  Beneath, in capitals, the answer: THE WORLD WILL TURN WITHOUT ME.

  Susan slammed the book shut in horror. Daisy hadn’t joined a yoga group. She’d joined a cult.

  “I don’t think Vectra likes me,” Esther said, bum resting on the bottom step leading down to the beer garden, feet planted wide enough that there was a nice big patch of paving for her to stare at while she avoided Ed Gemmell’s gaze.

  “I don’t think she likes anyone.”

  “Really?” Esther was surprised.

  “I think that’s why she makes herself kind of hard to like.”

  “Oh, you mean the whole . . .” Esther indicated her own attire with a wave of her hand.

  “No, actually . . .” It was Ed Gemmell’s turn to stare at the pavement, brushing his fingers through his hair, then evening out the toggles on his hoodie as he said, “All that’s really quite appealing.” His voice broke a little on “appealing,” and he took a sip of water. “It’s more about her personality.”

  “But she’s just like me! Sisters of the dark, kindred black souls, rebels in the night, united against a world that hates us.”

  “No, Esther—she really isn’t. She might like the same music and wear the same clothes. She might have a cool piercing and sing in a band—which, by the way, is probably going to be terrible, because they’ve been together for all of twenty seconds, and my friend Shelley says she’s heard Vectra singing in her room and she’s not good . . .”

  “Have you made enough noise for your sonar to have located the point yet?”

  “Sorry. My point is, Esther, that you are a ray of human sunshine, and Vectra is a joyless vortex sucking all that is good and pure out of the
world because she can’t bear the thought of anyone else experiencing happiness. You are pretty much opposites.”

  “But she’s my dark twin, exiled to the void—”

  “That might have been the case before you came here. Kids are mean. But in Sheffield? Everyone you meet loves you.”

  “Except Vectra.”

  “I don’t want to dig too deep into this one, but take it from me, you really need to not focus on the one person who doesn’t like you and focus on the ones who do. Why would you pay thirteen pounds to come and watch someone who loathes you when you could be in your room playing Communist Monopoly with two people who think you’re brilliant?”

  But Esther was pretty sure Susan didn’t think she was brilliant, and Daisy . . . well Daisy had all but disappeared.

  “Communist Monopoly takes ages,” Esther said, not sure she was capable of any more heart-to-hearts until she’d gotten hold of another drink. One she actually liked. “Besides, no one ever wins.”

  “Spoken like a true capitalist,” said a familiar voice from behind them.

  “SUSAN!” Esther shot off the step and launched into a hug with the sort of force that could take down a tower block. And when she did, Susan didn’t tell her to get off. She hugged her back. Grudges were for people who didn’t care that they’d wronged you, not for people like Esther. Not for friends.

  The hug was broken up almost immediately by the bouncer from the front door.

  “I warned you. No fee, no entry.” He tightened his grip on Susan’s shoulder and held his other hand out. “Pay up or shove off.”

  “Unhand her, you tenacious ape!” Esther said imperiously. “We were about to leave.”

  “We were?” In a moment of joyous abandon, Ed Gemmell sprang up and flung the contents of his cup over his shoulder—just as the stage door opened.

  The scream that rent the air tore through the city of Sheffield with all the force of a sonic boom.