Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas

tried to give a careless laugh, but it came out sounding harsh.

      ‘Yeah. What do you expect? Yes, I do. Have had.’

      He nodded. ‘I see.’

      She didn’t like his disapproval and tried to startle him back into sympathy with her. ‘No, you don’t. My boyfriend died. In an accident.’

      Ash’s eyes were very dark brown and the whites were so white they looked blue.

      ‘What? Accident in a car?’

      ‘No. He fell. He fell off the balcony of someone’s flat. It was late at night, a party. He had been drinking and taking stuff. I didn’t see how he fell. Maybe he jumped, I don’t know. He was a bit fucked up. His name was Jas.’

      Ash shook his head. This information was almost too much for him, but he took her hand gently and led her a few steps to a bench facing the river wall. They sat down with their backs to the traffic and stared at the ugly cylinder hotel across the water.

      ‘Did you love him, this Jas? Did he love you?’

      He asked this so simply and tenderly, and his directness seemed to flick a switch in Ruby. She almost heard the click. Without any warning tears welled up in her eyes and poured down her face, scalding her cheeks as they ran.

      ‘Maybe. Yes. It wasn’t like you think.’

      ‘I think nothing,’ Ash said.

      Ruby knuckled her eyes and sniffed hard. She tried not to cry, as a general rule. Not about Jas, or anything else. She usually tried not to think about Jas being dead either, except as a bare fact, but now she couldn’t stop the thoughts – or the images that came with them.

      The flat had been on the ninth floor of a stumpy tower block on the edge of a no man’s land of railway sidings and warehouses with broken windows that looked like cartoon eyes in the darkness. It was a rain-smeared late night that had begun in a pub with Jas and some of his friends, and ended in a boxy room with a couple of mattresses on the floor. There were quite a lot of people in the flat. Not the ones who had been there at the beginning, they had melted away and different faces had bobbed up. Two girls had been arguing about the music that was raggedly playing, and one of them had snatched a CD and flung it at the wall. Her boyfriend had given her a shaking and her head wobbled disconcertingly. When he pushed her away from him she fell sideways on one of the mattresses.

      Ruby was sitting on the other, with her knees drawn up to her chest like a shield. She had been wanting to go home for a while, or at least somewhere that wasn’t this place, and wondering how to negotiate an exit. She was dimly aware that Jas had moved away but she felt too out of it herself to pay any attention to what he might be doing. The next thing was a shout, and a ripple of movement in the room that pushed the girl on the next mattress into a sitting position and sent several others stumbling towards the door onto a balcony.

      Ruby found herself walking towards the door. Cold air blew towards her, and the few steps seemed to take a long time. There were one or two voices, high-pitched with alarm, but most of all she could hear a huge silence. She knew at once that something very bad had happened.

      The balcony was small. There was a flowerpot in a corner with the brown stalks of a dead plant sticking up, and a scatter of cigarette butts and roaches. The walls were brick, topped with gritty stone. A white-faced bloke was holding on to the stone as if he was on a ship in a bad storm, and a girl was half turned away with her hand over her mouth. Ruby walked very slowly to the wall and looked over.

      A long way down, Jas was lying on his side with his head and his arms and his legs all at weird angles. There was a dark pool spreading round his head. He was dead. Just in one glance you could tell that much.

      The girl took her hand from her mouth and started to babble.

      ‘I just saw his feet and legs going. His shoe caught on the edge. I wasn’t looking, I just sort of turned. I saw his legs and his feet, falling.’

      The sick-looking man put his arms round her. ‘OK,’ he said. Ruby wondered why, when it wasn’t OK at all.

      ‘Who is he?’ someone else muttered. She realised now that she hadn’t set eyes on any of these people before tonight. Jas had been her connection. He made friends easily, but never tried to keep them. They had drifted along together, Ruby and he, without asking themselves or each other any questions.

      When the police arrived, there wasn’t much she could tell them. It was that that shocked her, really. She knew his name, and the address of the house where he squatted. He came from Sunderland, and he liked curry and Massive Attack. He had made her a CD compilation and decorated the insert with red biro swirls.

      It wasn’t very much. It wasn’t very much for a life that was now over.

      The police drove her back from the police station to Will and Fiona’s house in Camden. It was already light and people were going to work in their neat clothes. A policewoman offered to come in with her and explain what had happened but Ruby shook her head. She scrambled out of the car as quickly as she could and bolted inside. She hoped that no one would be awake yet so she could slide into her bedroom without being seen.

      But Will was up. He was coming down the stairs, wearing a suit and a blue shirt and a dark-red tie, his cheeks and jaw shiny from his morning shave. In the kitchen there were kids’ drawings on the pinboard and a bunch of flowers in a milkjug on the table, the same as yesterday.

      ‘Fi’s still asleep. Where have you been all night?’

      He was in a position to ask the question because he was her stepfather’s brother, so she was part family as well as part lodger. But they were also conspirators because when they were alone Will didn’t always treat her like family. Or at least, the way families were supposed to treat each other. Ruby thought he was rather pathetic, but she had taken advantage of the situation in the past. Being in a conspiracy with Will meant she could get away with things that he and Fiona, as a fully united front, would never have allowed.

      But not any longer. Not after this night.

      She blinked, and her eyes burned with the image of Jas lying at the foot of the stumpy high-rise.

      ‘Um. I went to a party.’

      Will looked angry, in his plump way.

      ‘What are you like? What sort of behaviour do you call this? It’s five to six in the morning and you’re supposed to go to college today.’

      Ruby glanced away, down at the floor. She was thinking if she could just get away quickly, upstairs to her bedroom, she could keep all the spinning and churning bits of misery inside and not let Will see them.

      ‘I know,’ she mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

      He sighed. Then he came round the table and took hold of her. He put his hand under her chin and tilted her face so he could examine it. She felt too numb to break away from him, or to do anything but stand there. Will sighed again and then his hand slid over her bottom but he gently pushed her away at the same time, as if it were she who had come on to him. He was very good at making things appear the opposite of what they really were. A long time ago – yesterday – she used to think it must be one of the number of things he had a first-class degree in.

      But there was no place this morning for any of those old notions. They seemed to belong to a different person.

      ‘Go on, then. Go upstairs and get into bed, before Fi catches you. I’ve got to get to the airport.’

      He was fussing with his briefcase, snapping the locks.

      Ruby went up the stairs, very slowly. Her feet felt as if they had rocks tied to them.

      In her bedroom she took off her clothes and then stood holding them in a bundle against her chest, very tightly, as if she were hugging a baby. She even made a little crooning noise, out loud, and the disembodied sound made her jump. When she buried her face in the clothes she realised that they stank of sweat and smoke and sick. She had thrown up in a green-painted toilet cubicle at the police