15. Crow
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CROW
For the first time in ages, we don’t go to Bishop’s House.
It feels wrong that someone else has been there.
Moved things around during the day. It’s crazy, but it’s almost as if we’d forgotten the daytime exists.
That people still do things then. That everything isn’t nocturnal.
Especially at my house, when Mum sleeps in late and watches television all the time, and then still manages to go to bed early, claiming she’s exhausted. From what, I have no idea.
We can’t go back. It is too dangerous.
But we can’t lose what we’ve become. What we’re doing. There’s no question: we still have to go out. Meet in the dark.
So instead we find ourselves a short distance away, back behind the glass house, gathered on the path next to the gated park. In our black clothes, and me with my black nails. It’s warm, but the heatwave of when we first started doing this has long abated.
This is exactly where I’d like to live. Quiet, peaceful, secure.
Where the people wear expensive clothes and expensive accessories and there is an air of wealth to them.
Success. They’ve made it, and if you’re here, that means you have too.
They have worked hard their whole lives to exist somewhere like this.
Although it does confuse me when some people work extremely hard and still can’t afford houses like this.
Cuckoo tests the security light of the glass house again with another stone, and sure enough, it comes on as blinding as ever. But just like before, there is no response from the house. It remains dark, and the occupants, if they are in there, refuse to be disturbed.
“Then we’re doing it,” Cuckoo says. “We’re going over.”
My old self still has some fight in her, hesitant while the others chatter excitedly about how we’re going to get over the wall. “What if they’re inside? And they’re just really deep sleepers?”
“I bet they fucked off to the country when lockdown began,” Goldie says.
“Goldie’s right,” Cuckoo says. She almost always wears the same outfit, I’ve noticed.
There are the same stains on the thigh or on the chest that don’t seem to go away.
But I don’t say anything. “These kinds of people—they have second homes. Somewhere deep in the countryside or abroad where they can escape and pretend the world isn’t changing around them. They’re gone.”
“But what if they are here?”
“Then we’ll give them a right scare!” Goldie replies.
“Maybe more,” Cuckoo whispers.
“What if they have cameras?” I persist. “Or a big, scary dog, or—”
“Or what if there’s a lion behind the bars, and that’s why they’re there?” Goldie interrupts. There is a steeliness to her. “What if we jump over the gate, trip, and break a leg? Anything could happen, and I hope it does.”
“But . . .”
I hate my need for control. Even sitting in the passenger seat of a car, I find my feet pressing down in the footwell, anticipating the brake before the driver, fear thumping in my heart when it doesn’t come.
I’ve never been on a plane, but I imagine it’s a million times worse, at the mercy of two strangers and with no escape.
“They’re not here,” Goldie says. “There probably will be more security lights in the garden, but it’s not like there are any neighbors close by to spot them in that short space of time. And there are no cameras from what I can see.”
“There might be an alarm though,” Starling warns. “These fancy places always have them.”
Cuckoo shrugs. “Then we leave the house alone and just explore their garden.” Her voice drops low. “I think we can handle this.”
She doesn’t wait for a response, hitching herself up onto the wall and then making a leap down over it. We hear a soft thud, confirmation she has landed.
“No cameras here,” she calls. “Happy, Crow? You guys have got to see this place, holy shit.”
Goldie is next over the wall. Starling follows, surprisingly agile, helped by Wren.
“Are you going?” Wren asks me. “I won’t if you . . . I mean, if you don’t want to, we can stay here. Or go home.”
Is that what I want? Every detail of my life has been planned to precision.
I go to school, I work hard, I get my results, I go to university, I become a successful author.
But I didn’t plan for a lockdown. I didn’t plan to sneak out.
If I don’t go over the gate, I know what happens.
Wren and I will make awkward small talk, we’ll walk home, and the others will carry on without us and have an amazing night. Experiences forming without us.
I can make this part of the plan.
“We’re going,” I tell Wren. I don’t say, “What’s the worst that can happen?” because my brain will begin listing each and every possibility, relishing in informing me of the possibilities.
“I collect gnomes,” she replies.
I am heaving myself onto the wall at this point, but her words make me stop. “What?”
Wren is wearing an oversized hoodie, her face half obscured by it, so I can’t tell if she’s winding me up. “I collect gnomes.”
“As in garden gnomes?”
“Yeah. I think they’re cute.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
“To make you laugh,” she says. “To distract you from worrying about this.”
“Gnomes,” I say, and I do laugh. “Got it.”
I make the jump over the gate, eyes squeezed shut, and land on soft, dewy grass.
Wren is close behind me. The garden is huge, bigger than my flat.
This bottom end is mainly grass and wildflowers and the hedge, but leading onward are decked pathways.
It’s exactly the kind of garden put in a magazine, as if we’ve created some indulgent display of wealth from our own heads and plastered it in front of us.
There’s even a fountain, for God’s sake, though the water has been switched off and what remains lies stagnant and somewhat green.
Next to it are a row of gnomes, and I nudge Wren to make sure she sees them.
The house is predictably enormous, looming in the distance.
Someone could be in there watching us lark about and we’d have no idea.
“They have a hammock,” Cuckoo says. “Oh my God. I’ve always wanted to try one. Check me out!”
She leaps into it, the entire thing spinning and sending her catapulting to the ground.
It takes her several attempts, in between fits of giggles, before she can master it, and then she strikes an exaggerated pose, hand across her forehead, the other behind her head, eyes closed, ankles crossed.
Goldie and Starling are on the fancy deck loungers, while I can’t help investigating the outhouse.
The door is unlocked, opening easily, revealing a home gym.
“Guys, look at this!” I call.
Everyone is behind me in seconds.
“I’d be so fit if I had this,” Goldie says. “It’s not fair. Hey, do you reckon we can have a go?”
I glance back at the house, still dark and undisturbed. Resolve finally kicks in. “Yes.”
Goldie heads straight for the treadmill, switching it on at the wall and deciding on a setting. Sure enough, it begins working, and she’s walking at a steady pace. Starling picks up a weight; Cuckoo does a few pulls on the rower.
There’s no alarm. No shout from the house.
Maybe they really aren’t here. Like Cuckoo said, they ran for their second home when lockdown hit.
These people have no idea what the real world is.
I look around for Wren, who hasn’t joined us in the gym, and find her next to the gnomes. She’s putting one in her hoodie pocket.
A loud bang distracts me; I turn and see Cuckoo fumbling with a couple of dumbbells. She lifts up the lightest with relative ease, raises an eyebrow at me when she catches me staring, and jerks her head toward the television sitting high on the wall.
“Watch this,” she says, and throws the dumbbell into the screen.
There is an amazing thunk sound, and then the screen cracks like a web, the dumbbell clattering to the floor.
“Holy shit,” Starling says.
I think of these people, sitting right now in their other fancy house, probably one of many, so secure and privileged they can abandon this place for months on end.
“Vigilantes, baby,” Cuckoo whispers.
It’s all the permission we need.
Soon we’re all grabbing dumbbells, smashing inspirational paintings off the walls, breaking the docking station and the game consoles, destroying the gym equipment.
Anything too heavy to ruin completely we smash parts off of, and when we’re done, the gym is in a state of chaos.
For good measure, Goldie and Cuckoo break the windows that give a brief glimpse inside the studio, and we leave the door open so it is exposed to the elements.
Wren is still in the garden, though no longer next to the gnomes.
She must have heard our racket because she’s committing her own act of damage, ripping up the carefully laid flower beds and stamping all over them.
She takes handfuls of earth and throws them at the sliding doors to the house, but Starling grabs her and warns that there is an alarm system nestled underneath the overhanging lead roof tiles and not to risk triggering it.
It doesn’t matter that we can’t go in. The garden is plenty big enough and full of enough things to make our presence known. To make sure when they come back that they know someone was here and deliberately messed with them.
There is an immense satisfaction in turning the beautiful ugly.