Chapter Three
That Night
The door was flimsy. Whatever it was made of couldn’t withstand the bass, so it rattled with each pulse and Anika’s nerves jangled in time with the music.
Someone had decided they needed to mount a tribute to Michael Jackson on the stereo, even though most of her classmates had probably only really paid attention to his music in the last week or so since he died.
‘Remember the Time’? Probably not. She recalled another of the worn vinyls her father had given her years ago, a copy of Off the Wall, and sighed.
She kept thinking she could hear someone knocking and Anika worried that they’d think this was a loo, like she had.
Then they’d wonder why she’d been in there so long …
The embarrassment of that would just have to stack on top of the mountains of cringe already piled up around her.
She leant her back against the door to stop its rattle, avoiding her eyes in the mirror opposite her above the small sink next to the washing machine and trying not to think about needing the loo, which she hadn’t before she’d gone in there pretending that she did.
The lack of a queue leading up to the door should have been her first clue, but what did she know?
She’d never been to a house party. She hadn’t wanted to admit that to Zaya, though, obviously – who was one of the only people at her new school who was vaguely nice to her.
The tone of Zaya’s suggestion during double maths that afternoon that Anika should come to the shindig had sounded genuine, but it turned out the invite to Ali’s party had been shared on Facebook and was a free-for-all for their whole year group anyway.
Still, Zaya had broken into a warm grin and pulled Anika into a boyish bear-hug when she’d run into her at the party earlier.
But her classmate had soon been wrapped up in other interactions and there was no denying the surprised, ‘Oh,’ before she’d said hello.
In her head, Anika had thought, I’m as surprised as you, mate.
Mainly, she’d just wanted to get out of her own house.
After all, it was her birthday.
Just over a week ago, Anika’s mother had looked out of the living-room window and nodded over the road towards Kwame and Zaya as the siblings stepped out of their front gate and, with matched, bobbing strides, walked off towards the junction.
Their frames were similar and Zaya’s chin-length locs versus her brother’s short, tight fade were sometimes the only thing that seemed to separate their appearance.
Well, that and the undeniably ample bosom Zaya kept restrained in a sports bra under her school shirt.
As friendly as Zaya had been in the week since Anika had started at the new school, it was Kwame to whom she felt drawn like a magnet.
She had already clocked what time the two of them left in the mornings and calculated how to linger the exact number of paces behind them on the other side of the road so that she could stare at him but not be noticed.
‘I spoke to the mum,’ Nella had said. ‘Ghanaian family. She says they’re your age. That girl tan lek boy, though.’ She smiled but shook her head somewhat disapprovingly. ‘They are twins, apparently.’
She’d said it as if their presence had escaped Anika’s attention this whole time.
Her mother was sipping tea from her vintage Princess of Wales mug as she spoke, hair still nestled in her purple silk scarf and the pow of her curves accentuated in the coordinating belted silk robe she still wore even with no husband around now. Good riddance.
‘Aren’t you going to be late?’ Nella asked.
Yeah, she was. Anika sighed, going to redo her school tie in the hallway mirror as she realised she’d miss out on her stalking that morning.
The particular way her classmates seemed to tie theirs here still eluded her.
Anyway, what did her mum want her to do – run giddily down the road and magically befriend Kwame and Zaya?
Anika basically went straight into her exams at a new school, all while still processing moving from Streatham to East Sussex and now back again.
Well, near enough. After five years away from London, this new place in Thornton Heath was far enough from their old flat that Anika didn’t know anyone local.
She was deep in the cut of starting from scratch.
At school she might as well have been invisible, until she opened her mouth in class and heard herself through everyone else’s ears after so long away, now half sounding like Princess Di was her aunty.
Hah. Her mother wished. Sometimes Anika wished she could have some kind of outlet to control the way people saw her – an invented persona, like a musician or an actor.
But no. She was an observer and probably always would be.
She watched and then turned inwards. To the outside world she probably seemed passive and contained, but inside she felt like dry kindling ready to ignite.
When Anika and Zaya were paired up in Biology, it was hardly Edward and Bella dissecting a frog (there were rumours about Zaya, but Anika didn’t swing that way) but it forced them to interact more.
Kwame’s sister obviously had no idea it would be Anika’s birthday the same day as the party, but it was better than spending her seventeenth watching Saturday night TV with her mum.
Was this situation right now much better, though?
Hiding in a … what would you call this? A utility room?
Who even had one of those? But then Anika hadn’t expected any houses in this area to have a conservatory either, even one as shabby as the one this utility room was built into the corner of.
Nella was burning through her divorce money from Clive by renting their new place a short walk away from there, but in Anika’s opinion they’d have been better off back in Streatham in the pokey two-bed they’d been in before.
Even though the party was ten minutes from their house, her mother had instructed her not to walk home after it had finished.
Anika pulled out her Nokia and stared at the time on the little screen.
Nine-thirty? Had she really been in this room for nearly twenty minutes?
Anika flipped the phone open, considering whether she should just ring Uncle Ernest in his taxi now.
He could come get her when he was done with his next drop-off and then she’d get home at an hour that meant her mum would assume she’d been out making ‘friends-for-life’ …
Before she could scroll down past the three other phone numbers she had stored to get to her uncle’s, Anika heard a load of shouting coming from the party, even over the pounding of UK Funky, with ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ blending clumsily into Donae’o’s ‘Party Hard’.
The music didn’t stop, but the shouts became punctuated by shrill feminine shrieks.
The voices got louder, as if they were spilling into the solid glassy echo of the conservatory, which had previously been filled with couples slow-dancing to fast songs, grinding against the prefab walls.
Anika reached a hand out like a reflex to flip off the light in the room.
She pressed her ear to the door, but all she could make out against the pulse of the music was a jumble of voices escalating from tense joviality into a fever pitch of out-and-out fighting.
One voice sounded familiar from class. And, of course, from watching and re-watching the short clip on Kwame’s Facebook of him jokingly freestyling.
He patted out a beat on a Tupperware box produced from his schoolbag, while Zaya spat a complex rhyme pattern, her cadence precise, her pitch low, joking in her rap about how often she was mistaken for a boy.
The video had been shot outside the corner shop where Anika always volunteered to run errands in the hope she’d see him hanging around outside.
Kwame’s deep voice on the other side of the door was now repeating, ‘Allow it, man,’ with his usual mischievous ring of humour, but that was pressed out of the phrase as the fight continued. ‘Zay, ’llow it.’
Then suddenly another girl shouted, ‘Feds! Feds are out there. Oi, you lot …’ The melee got more frantic.
‘Out the back, bruv!’ Anika heard Zaya call, then the reply.
‘Nah, man, there’s one parked out there, too.’ Kwame again. Anika’s breathing started to grow shallow. How was she going to get out of there? Shit. Why hadn’t she just left before?
‘Fuck it, I’m jumping that fence. Don’t be a pussy! Come, man!’ she heard Zaya reply. There were more shouts and sounds of scrabbling, a long pause. Then …
Boom, boom, boom!
Anika sucked in a high-pitched gasp as someone pounded open-palm against the door she was still leaning against. She bolted away from it and spun around, staring at the shuddering wood.
Boom, boom, boom!
‘Who the fuck is in there, man? Let me in. Shit. Let me in, yeah?’
It was him. It was Kwame.