BLOOD AND ASHES

The morning Anya Reeves's life ended, she was drawing a pigeon. It wasn't a particularly beautiful pigeon. It was the sort of grey, bedraggled, one-eyed creature that South London produced in abundance standing on the ledge of the flat's single window like it owned the place, like it had not noticed that the paint was peeling from the sill and the glass was cracked in the lower right corner and the curtain behind it was held up by a safety pin because Anya had never gotten around to buying a proper rod. She drew it anyway. She drew it in the margins of her sketchbook, quick and careful, the scratchy black lines catching the tilt of its head, the particular exhausted dignity of a bird that had survived too many winters in a city that didn't care about it. She was good at that drawing things that didn't know they were being watched. "Anya." Eli's voice came from behind the bathroom door, which he had been occupying for the better part of twenty minutes. "We're out of shampoo." "Use soap." "That's barbaric." "That's Tuesday." She didn't look up from the pigeon. "Check under the sink. There's a travel bottle from when I went to that conference thing in Bristol." A pause. The sound of rummaging. "Found it. It smells like lavender." "Then your hair will smell like lavender. Terrible fate." "I have a reputation to maintain." "You're seventeen, Eli. Your reputation is that you left your trainers in the hallway again and I nearly broke my neck this morning." He emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, towelling his hair, wearing the expression of someone who was constitutionally incapable of feeling guilty about anything for longer than four seconds. He was tall, taller than her by a head now, which still surprised her sometimes with their mother's dark eyes and their father's jaw and a quality of easy warmth that Anya had always thought he must have gotten from someone further back in the family tree, because neither she nor Derek Reeves had ever worn warmth easily. Eli wore it like a coat. Like breathing. "Happy birthday, by the way," he said. She looked up. He was grinning, the wide, unguarded grin that still made him look twelve, that still made something in her chest soften down to nothing. He held up a paper bag. Through the grease-stained bottom, she could see the unmistakable shape of a pastry from the Portuguese café on the corner. "Pastel de nata?" she said. "Three of them. I was going to get five but they only had three left and the lady behind the counter looked at me like I was planning to eat them all myself, which honestly, fair, I was considering it." Anya set her sketchbook down. She pulled her knees up on the sofa and accepted the bag when he dropped it in her lap, and for a moment they were just two people in a small flat on a Tuesday morning, the radiator clanking its familiar complaint, the pigeon on the windowsill deciding it had somewhere better to be and launching itself into the grey November sky. "Thank you," she said. "Don't." He sat on the other end of the sofa and stole a pastry without asking. "You raised me. Feeding you custard tarts on your birthday is the bare minimum." "I didn't raise you. Mum raised you for twelve years and then I filled in." "You raised me." He said it simply, as though it wasn't something worth debating. "Dad didn't exactly step up." She said nothing to that. There wasn't much to say about Derek Reeves that could be contained in a Tuesday morning without ruining it, and she was not going to let Derek ruin this particular Tuesday morning, which was already despite the cracked window and the absence of shampoo and the fact that she had been awake since five because the pipes in the flat above them had decided to have a crisis already quite good, in the small and specific way that good mornings often were. She was twenty-two years old. She had a job she didn't hate (reception at a dental practice in Bermondsey, which was not glamorous but paid in time if not in money, and the dentist himself was a mild, apologetic man who never asked her to do anything unreasonable). She had this flat, which was hers and Eli's, bought with three years of scrimping and one well-timed government scheme and a loan from her colleague Janet who had asked for nothing back except the occasional home-cooked meal. She had her sketchbook, half-full now, and three more waiting on the shelf, and the vague, persistent hope that one day she might do something real with the art that lived in her hands. She had Eli, who smelled like lavender and stole her pastry and had never in his life understood that the world could be cruel in any way that was not fixable. She had enough. Later, much later, in the dark months that followed she would think about that Tuesday morning with a kind of desperate tenderness. The pigeon. The pastry. The way Eli's hair had dried into something that stuck up at the back in a way she hadn't gotten around to telling him about before he left for college. She had been so ordinary. She had been so safe. She had not known it was the last time. --- The letter came in the afternoon. Not a letter, exactly — Derek didn't write letters, had never developed the patience for anything that required sustained thought and a stamp. It was a text message. Four words: *Coming round tonight. Please.* She stared at it for a long moment, sitting in the break room at the dental practice, her half-eaten sandwich on the table in front of her, Elton John playing softly from someone's phone in the corridor. *Please.* Derek Reeves did not say please. Derek said *love you sweetheart* and *just the once* and *I know I said that last time* and *it's different now, Anya, I've changed, I mean it this time.* He said the things people said when they needed something from you and thought that softening you up was the most efficient route. He did not say please. She texted back: *Fine. 7pm.* She put her phone away and looked at her sandwich and did not eat the rest of it. --- He arrived at half past seven, which was twenty-five minutes after Eli had gone to his friend Damien's house and thirty minutes after Anya had cleaned the flat in the reflexive, compulsive way she always did before Derek visited, not because he would notice, but because she needed something to do with her hands. He looked not bad, was the thing. That was always the trick of Derek Reeves. He looked like a father. He looked like a man who had made mistakes in the charming and ultimately forgivable way that some men got away with, who had a good face for apologising and a voice that landed soft even when the words were hard. He was wearing a new jacket. She noticed it immediately grey wool, well-cut, the kind of thing that cost two hundred pounds or more. She noticed it and filed it and said nothing. "Birthday girl," he said, and held out his arms. She let him hug her. Brief. Contained. "Come in." She made tea because it gave her something to do. He sat at the kitchen table and looked around at the flat with the expression of someone who was deciding whether to comment on it, and she was grateful when he decided not to. The flat was small and slightly worn and entirely theirs, and she did not want his opinion of it landing anywhere near her birthday. "How've you been?" he asked. "Fine. Work's fine. Eli's good, doing well at college." "That's great. He's a bright kid." "He is." Silence. The kettle boiling. She poured water into mugs and brought them to the table and sat across from him and waited, because there was always something with Derek. Always a thing underneath the other thing. "I wanted to come see you," he said. "For your birthday." "You're half an hour late." "I know, I'm sorry, the tube was…" He stopped. Rubbed the back of his neck. Something moved across his face that she couldn't quite read, and in her chest, something tightened. "Dad." Her voice was careful. "What's wrong?" "Nothing's wrong." Too fast. "Derek." He looked at her then, really looked at her and she saw it. The thing underneath. It was not guilt, exactly. She had seen Derek's guilt before; it was performative, extravagant, accompanied by reddening eyes and a trembling lip. This was something else. This was the expression of a man who had already made a decision and was now only waiting for it to happen. "I've just, there was a situation," he said. "With some money. A debt." "How much?" "It doesn't matter how much —" "How much, Dad." His jaw tightened. "A lot." "Gambling?" He didn't answer. "Dad." She set her mug down. "How much?" "Two hundred thousand." He said it quietly, like volume would make it worse. "Give or take." She stared at him. The number sat between them on the table like something physical. "Two hundred —" She stopped. Started again. "You gambled two hundred thousand pounds that you didn't have?" "It wasn't supposed to get to that. It was —" He waved a hand. "It doesn't matter. The point is there are people who want it back and they're not the sort of people who —" "Who what? Who accept 'I'm very sorry, I don't have it'?" "Anya —" "Who are they?" He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car went past with its music up too loud, bass vibrating through the windowpane. The radiator clanked. "Russian men," he said. "They run things. You know the sort." She did not know the sort. She was a dental receptionist in Bermondsey who drew pigeons. She did not know any sort. "And you can't pay them back." It wasn't a question. "I've been trying to, there are people I could talk to, if I had more time, but they're saying —" He stopped again. She watched his face. He wasn't looking at her anymore. He was looking at his tea mug, and in the looking there was something she had never seen on her father's face before. Shame. Real shame. The bottomless, specific kind. "What did you do?" she whispered. "Anya —" "What did you do?" He looked up. His eyes were wet. He opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again, and Derek Reeves, who had never in his life been lost for words, said nothing. The doorbell rang. She stood. Slowly, the way you moved when the world had gone strange around you. She looked at her father and the tears on his face and the new jacket on his back, two hundred pounds, at least and she walked to the door. There were two men in the hallway. They were large, and quiet, and they looked at her the way people looked at objects. "Miss Reeves," said the one on the left. He had an accent she couldn't place. Eastern European, maybe. His face was politely blank. "Please come with us." She turned back to the kitchen. Her father was sitting at the table. He was not getting up. He was not coming to the door. He was sitting at her kitchen table holding the mug of tea she had made him, and he was not looking at her, and she understood in the specific, horrible way that understanding sometimes worked, arriving all at once like cold water she understood. "Dad." Her voice came out strange. Thin. "Dad, tell them there's been a mistake." He said nothing. "Dad." Louder now. "Dad, look at me. Tell them there's been a mistake. Tell them —" "Anya." His voice was barely a sound. He still wasn't looking at her. "I'm sorry." She heard the door close behind her.