Chapter One
Tonya was bundled up under a thick black puffer jacket, its gold zip pulled tight to her chin as she left her flat. It was dark and cold outside, but at least the rain had stopped.
For the second time this week the fridge was empty and her mum was out, so Tonya was quickly nipping out to the little chicken shop on the end of her block to get some food.
A bunch of older kids were hanging out in a group on the edge of the estate by the football cage. They were wearing thick dark coats with fur hoods pulled up, their faces in shadows. One boy was circling the cage on his bike, pulling the occasional wheelie. A muffled beat came from his headphones as she passed.
A few of the girls a couple of years above her in school were there. They were confident and animated, their voices booming, as their laughter cut through the cold night and breathed life into the city.
A far-off siren, a dog barking, mopeds revving, the hum of the local shops. All a mix of the familiar smells and sounds of her area, sewing themselves together into the tapestry of the night as they drifted over her.
She walked quickly through her estate, dodging the puddles. The trace of cooking oil wafted through the air. She came out onto a little strip of shops that sat directly behind her block of flats. The fried chicken shop was brightly lit, its fluorescent lights staining the night sky with their manufactured yellow glare.
Next to it was the corner shop, with its wonderful sweet-smelling trays of fruit and veg stacked up outside.
Everything about this night felt normal. She had grown up in the city her whole life, East London was her home. Her whole family lived here, her mum was raised here, and her grandparents were just around the corner.
As she began to push through the doors of the chicken shop, someone shouted her name.
"Ton! Ton, is that you? Give us a hand, would ya?"
She looked up the strip and saw her mum's new boyfriend (his name was Tyler, but everyone called him Tye) holding up Tonya's mum, who was slumped awkwardly like a rag doll against his side. She was slurring and giggling.
Tonya rolled her eyes as she walked towards the pair of them. They stank of booze. Tye – with a fag hanging out his mouth – gestured to Tonya to help him with her mum.
Tonya gently scooped her head under her mum's dangling arm and together she and Tye awkwardly walked Ruby back through the estate.
Tonya made sure to pull her hooded coat up over her face as she passed the gang of kids by the cage – her cheeks burning red – and prayed they didn't see her. She didn't want people talking. Things were bad enough at school without having to be the kid with a drunk mum.
Just as they reached the doors to her block, her mum seemed to sober slightly.
"I'm starving. Is there any food in the house, love?"
Tye looked at Tonya as she shook her head.
"Do us a favour will you, Ton? Go back and get us some wings? Here y'ar, take this," he said, smirking, pushing a fiver into her palm as if he were doing her a favour.
"It's orite, darlin'", he continued, looking proudly at Tonya, pumping his chest out. "Don't you worry, I've got your mum from here."
Tonya could almost taste his beery ash breath. She hated how his condescending tone suggested that he was taking care of them, like he was somehow the hero in this situation. He managed to twist things, to paint the story as if she was the one who went out tonight with her mum and got her really drunk, and Tye was just some innocent guy coming to everyone's rescue. It made Tonya's blood boil.
Her mum wasn't like this. They didn't need men to come and rescue them. They were doing fine before he came along. In fact, she'd never even really seen her mum drunk before this prick turned up. She wanted to tell him to fuck off and get his own wings, but she didn't.
She took the money – making sure not to say thank you – and headed back to the chicken shop, making the journey for the second time that night.
As Tonya walked away, she could feel Tyler's eyes on her. She glanced back and he stared at her, holding her gaze before turning to help her mum up the steps. Tonya's rib cage tightened in her chest and her palms began to sweat. She felt so uneasy when he was around. She couldn't put her finger on it but something in her gut made her feel unsafe around him.
The smells of the evening suddenly became heightened and sickly, and her empty stomach churned, flipping angrily inside her. More than anything she wanted for her mum to split up with Tye. Tonya couldn't understand why her mum was letting this happen, what could she possibly see in this creep?
As Tonya reached the chicken shop her hands were shaking and she felt lightheaded, so she sat down on the pavement outside to take a minute to get herself together.
She focused on a dog that had been tied to a lamppost. He was waiting for his owner to order his food inside, sniffing the pavement and making little impatient whining sounds, pulling against his tied-up lead.
To calm herself down she absent-mindedly peeled bits of sore flaky skin off around her nails, a bad habit she'd had since childhood.
The sky was darker now, and no one was about on the street. Suddenly the rain picked up again. She fastened her hood tighter around her face, securing the little popper so she was cocooned inside as the rain began to pelt down around her.
Just as she was about to stand up, a spark of light in the sky caught her eye. She blinked up into the rain, trying to work out what it was. She gripped the curb and the cool rough edge of the pavement dug into her palms.
She couldn't work out what she was seeing. Whatever it was, it kept disappearing in and out of her vision. Although it was hard to make out, what looked like tiny electrical waves of light formed in the sky. Swirling pigments, like tiny pieces of thread, came together in little bolts of wavy light.
She sat frozen on the pavement as the electrical sparks flashed in and out of her view. Then the charged light seemed to plummet through the sky. The sparks skidded with the rain and slammed against the wet pavement, vanishing into a pool of muddy water collecting in a sink hole by the road.
She told herself her eyes were playing tricks on her, but she still felt compelled to get up and go over to where the sparks of light had fallen.
Tonya leaned over the pavement where the water was collecting in pools against the curb. She searched the water for the wavy particles of light, but they had disappeared into the pool of water.
She wondered if this is what her dads' hallucinations had been like. She wished her mum wasn't so secretive about this stuff, she had so many unanswered questions.
Tonya instinctively reached into the muddy water. She swished her hand around in the puddle, searching for the strange sparks of light, but was interrupted by a police car as it sped by. It splashed dirty rainwater up against her body and she jumped up and away from the curb, onto the safety of the pavement.
The car's neon blue lights strobed across her wet cheeks. The siren jolted her to her senses, making her think how insane she must have looked crouched in the rain by the roadside.
Without looking at the curb, she started to run back through the estate, up the four flights of stairs and along the shared walkway.
It was deserted except for one of her elderly neighbours, who was often there, standing in her dressing gown, slumped up against the brick wall, lighting up her cigarette. Avoiding any eye contact, Tonya dashed by the woman until she reached her front door and knocked hard.
Tye opened the door, but she pushed past him and ran inside.
She ran through the narrow entrance corridor and into the bathroom, quickly locking the door behind her.
"I've got a bad belly, Mum, sorry I didn't get the wings," she shouted in answer to a barrage of her mum's questions about the food and what was going on. Tye banged on the door.
"What the hell, Tonya? Where's our wings?"
Her mum loudly whispered, the way drunk people do when they think they are being subtle and quiet.
"Leave it Tye, calm it, she said she ain't well and she forgot, orite?"
Tyler's voice boomed down the hallway.
"Ain't well? What's wrong with her, Ruby? She was fine literally two seconds ago. She needs to get out of her head and into the real world, that's her problem."
Tonya could sense her mum cringe even in her drunkenness.
"Tye, please babe, come on, she's only fifteen, leave her alone, yea?"
Tye muttered something about the money and how he wanted it back.
Their footsteps moved away from the hallway and the living room door closed. A thudding beat started rumbling loudly through the flat.
Finally feeling some privacy, Tonya crouched down on the cool of the bathroom tiles. Her coat was soaked through, and her thick unruly mangle of brown curly hair stuck to her face wetly. She tried to make sense of what had just happened.
She reached into her pocket for her phone, typed "I'm seeing things that aren't real" and clicked search. The phone's answer glared out, illuminating her face, confirming what she feared. The screen informed her that she was having an hallucination. Scrolling down, she read the words "Alzheimer's, dementia and schizophrenia". She switched her phone off and shoved it back in her pocket.
At that moment, as Tonya sat in the bathroom, staring at the old shower curtain and the peach-coloured walls, she decided that whatever she saw wasn't worth telling anyone about. She mulled it over and concluded that it would probably never happen again and if she said something now, she would have created a big fuss for nothing.
Besides, there was no one to tell anyway, no one that would understand.
To distract herself she tried focusing on what she could see: her mum's shoddy paint work that was chipping away, her faded shampoo and soap bottles sitting on the side of the bath, the old towels that hung from the back of the door.
As the familiar smell of damp filled her nostrils, she glanced up at the little bathroom window. It was open a crack and the cold air was coming in from the outside.
Her mum's music thudded, and their drunken voices wrapped around the flat. Everything was as it should be. What had happened was probably just a trick of the eye; in fact, the more she thought about it, she wasn't even entirely sure she'd seen anything anyway.
Slowly picking herself up off the floor, she peeled off her wet clothes, splashed her face and rinsed her mouth with water from the tap.
She squeezed the rain from her mass of curly hair, wrapped a towel around herself and crept out of the bathroom and into her bedroom, where she changed into an oversized T-shirt.
She lay down but couldn't sleep. Her mind kept replaying what she'd seen over and over again and her head throbbed. After hours of tossing and turning she sneaked out into the kitchen in search of a pain killer tablet and a glass of water.
Tonya could smell stale smoke in the air from Tyler cigarettes. She wrinkled her nose, thinking back to how the flat used to smell. Ruby loved to cook, and the windowsill used to be dotted with little pots of green herbs sprouting up and leaning towards the light from the window.
When she was growing up there always seemed to be a pot bubbling over with hot stew. The kitchen countertop would be covered in cut-up vegetables and messy splodges of plum tomato sauce or a loaf of her dad's favourite honey-brown Agege bread cooling on a rack, filling the whole flat with its delicious sweet doughy smell. Music would be playing on the radio and her mum would be humming along.
It wasn't like that anymore, though. The flat felt hot and stuffy, the bin overflowed with takeaway boxes and plastic ready meal containers, and the pans were piled in a heap in the kitchen cupboard collecting dust.
Pushing these memories from her mind, Tonya made her way back down the narrow corridor. The walls were covered with pictures of her childhood. Beaming smiles from long-ago summer holidays spent at her grandparents' caravan, pictures of Tonya and her dad on the beach and in the arcades. She had a happy childhood and the walls of the flat held on to those days like a museum held objects from the past.
Tonya got into bed and her head continued to throb as she lay in the dark waiting for the pain killer tablet to kick in.
In the past, in moments like this, she would just go and get into bed with her mum. Tonya yearned for her mum. She wanted so desperately to tell her about the sparks in the sky. At fifteen she was too old for it now, but when she was growing up they had slept together most nights. When she felt unwell or lonely Tonya would crawl in next to her for comfort. They wouldn't cuddle or talk; it would just be an unspoken moment where her mum would roll over slightly as her way of welcoming her in.
She imagined going in now. Tye would be in her place, his big body stretched across the bed. He would be lying on his back, his naked chest exposed – covered in faded tattoos from his past lives – his gold chain resting like a snake around his thick neck. The room would stink of their alcohol breath and sweat.
It wasn't just her space in the bed Tye was taking; it seemed like when he was there, he filled the whole flat up, like there was nowhere she could go anymore without him being there, taking over her life, taking away her mum, her friend.
Her loneliness was all consuming and she felt it more than ever as she lay in the dark, alone, picking at the broken skin around her nails.
Her mum must have forgotten to turn the heating off before she went to bed because the air felt stuffy in the flat.
Tonya got up and opened the window in her room. The rain was still coming down hard outside and a noisy hum came from the air caught inside the walkway that ran alongside each row of flats on her block.
Enjoying the feeling of the cool breeze as it came into her room she crawled back under her duvet.
She was finally drifting off to sleep when she heard an unusual sound. A long continuous humming, faint at first and hard to distinguish. Yet it didn't sound like a machine or the wind outside, there was something odd about it, it almost sounded alive and breathy.
The frequency oscillated, gently swinging back and forth in a regular rhythm creating a long continuous drone as Tonya wriggled her toes anxiously and scrunched her clammy palms tightly together.
She sat up slowly in bed, drawing her knees up to her chest.
Recently her mum had tried to clear out a load of her dad's old T-shirts, but Tonya had kept hold of them.
Her dad had worked as a roadie and was a massive music fan, over the years collecting T-shirts. Most of them had pictures of reggae and ska artists of the past. Tonya pretended she remembered him wearing them, but most of her memories came from old photos that she had treasured over the years. She had started wearing these faded T-shirts to bed. They were oversized on her, draping just below the knee. She liked the retro-ness of them and enjoyed the idea that they allowed her to know her dad a bit better.
In this moment, caught up in the fear, she pulled the T-shirt over her knees and Smiley Culture's cracked face stretched with the fabric.
She wanted to dive her head inside and pretend she was five again, snuggling into her dad's warm chest, but she wasn't five anymore, she was fifteen now and he'd been gone for eight years, and right now she had to face the reality that there was, quite possibly, some kind of spectral presence in her room.
Tonya had never heard anything like it before. It was a long low-pitched sound, so human, like someone was forcing air through their lips, trying to imitate the wind, with breathy whistles occasionally breaking through the low hum. It felt like it was coming from underneath her.
Peering down into the darkness, she started to see swirls of white light that flashed in tiny sparks along the bedroom floor, forming random shapes and tiny dots that expanded and faded.
Whatever this was, it was in her room. She could hear it and she could smell its thick earthy aroma.
She willed herself to get up and run, but she was frozen, trapped in terror.
Her throbbing head worsened into a migraine, making her eyes twitch in pain. Her bedroom curtain flapped violently in the strong wind, reminding her she had opened the window. Regaining control of her legs she got up and shut it.
The humming sound stopped immediately.
Tonya felt like a fool for being so afraid. As she got back into bed, she convinced herself that the sound and light had been from outside all along. Trapped air often sounds human.
Angry at herself for getting worked up over nothing, she tossed and turned throughout the night, dropping in and out of a fretful sleep.