Levi rolls Tongue on to his side and covers him with a blanket, tucking it around his shoulders with a surprising tenderness. Then he follows Jonah over to the roll mats, mutters a half-hearted and weirdly ordinary “g’night” and collapses.
Ose picks himself up, uses his long fingers to extract two beers and two Cokes from the crates nearby and comes and sits with us. He hands me a beer, hands the Cokes to Farah and Chiu, then sits on the sofa next to me and cracks open his own drink.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he says softly.
“I don’t understand what happened?” Farah murmurs. “What were those … things?”
“We call them Puzzles,” Ose explains. “Tongue’s dying. That’s what it looks like here when we’re dying.”
“We grow eyes?” Chiu says.
“It’s different for everyone,” Ose says. “We treat the symptoms, like in the ordinary world. A cancer grows in your brain, you cut it out. A cancer grows in your lungs, you cut it out.”
“Not with a hunting knife,” I say, incredulous.
“Not eyes,” Chiu adds.
“Cutting them out will keep him going for a while,” Ose says. “If we tried something like this in the other world he’d fill with bacteria and he’d go septic. But bacteria aren’t a problem here.”
We sit in numb silence for a while. My drink tastes like I’m drinking a bottle of my own saliva but I’m intensely grateful for it.
I drink to remember.
This is my blood, drink this in remembrance of me.
Tongue moans softly in his sleep. Beyond that, the heavy, sleeping breaths of Levi. Jonah lies nearby, silent. I guess even Jonah likes to be near other people when the sky turns black outside.
My eyes search the metal framed roof, the panelled windows showing a blackness so complete it terrifies me if I look at it for more than a moment.
“Is that going to happen to us?” Chiu asks.
“Maybe,” Ose concedes. “But Tongue has been here for a long time. He was here before I came. Time’s different here, but it’s not for ever.”
“How long do people last with Puzzles before they … you know?” Farah asks.
“Everybody is different,” Ose says. “Some last a few moments. Some last for days. Tongue … with our help … several months now.” He shrugs. “We don’t know, really.”
I’m sure Farah is thinking about the baby, wondering if she could have saved it.
“It’s awful,” I say.
Ose takes a long, bitter drink. “Nobody knows when they’re going to die, Kyle. That’s no different here than it was there.”
TWENTY-TWO
You’re not supposed to know when you’re dreaming. It’s a secret your brain likes to keep from you. But I’ve seen Grandad in my dreams so often it’s become a dead giveaway.
“What about these?” I say.
I hold up a jam jar filled with assorted bolts. They look like silvery maggots, gummed to the glass with grease.
“Box,” Grandad replies.
I’m fifteen and Grandad has come over to clear out the garage. I drop the jam jar into the cardboard box where it clunks against a pile of screwdrivers.
“Careful,” he scolds. “You’ll break it.”
He adds his own jar to the box, delicately, almost lovingly, even though we both know we’re taking the whole thing straight to the tip after this.
“You don’t have to clear out the garage,” I say. “We don’t use it.”
“Better I do it than leave it to you and your mother after I’m dead,” he replies.
I bite back a twinge of annoyance. He insisted I spend my Saturday helping him while Mum was at work but now we’re here he’s acting like I’m getting in the way. He always does this, treats us like we’re both equally useless. It’s his burden, I guess, to care about us no matter how disappointed he is in us.
I pick up the starter motor from the workbench. “I remember you showing me how this worked when I was little. I spent ages trying to fix it.”
Grandad glances indifferently at it. “That thing was never going to work.”
He takes it from me, drops it in his box and opens another drawer.
My earliest, warmest memories are of being in the garage with Grandad, tinkering with various car parts while he tells me about his job as a fitter at the Jaguar plant. I think it maybe only happened once or twice but the memory has grown so much it feels like more.
“Ah! That’s what I’m looking for.” He pulls out a sheaf of papers. “This is important.”
“What is it?” I ask.
