The Family Upstairs(41)

We were not, it seemed, the first to discover the secret roof terrace. There was already a pair of scruffy plastic chairs up there, some dead plants in pots, a little table.

I could barely believe that my father did not know about this space. He always complained about having a north-facing garden, that he could not enjoy the evening sun. Yet up here was a private oasis which caught the sun all day long.

The tiny squares of paper that Phin had been given at Kensington Market the week before turned out to be comprised of four even smaller squares of paper joined together. Each tiny segment had a picture of a smiling face on it.

‘What if we have a bad trip?’ I asked, feeling unutterably foolish using such language.

‘We should just have half each,’ said Phin. ‘To start off with.’

I nodded effusively. I’d have preferred to take none at all. I really wasn’t that type of person. But it was Phin and I would, to use the parental cliché, have followed him off a cliff if he’d asked me to.

I watched him swallow down the tiny shred and then he watched as I did the same. The sky was watercolour blue. The sun was weak but up here, in this trap, it felt warm against our skin. We felt nothing for quite some time. We talked about what we could see: the people sitting in their gardens, the boats idling down the Thames, the view of the power station on the other side of the river. After half an hour or so I relaxed, thinking that the acid was clearly fake, that nothing was going to happen, that I’d got away with it. But then I felt my blood begin to warm beneath my skin; I glanced upwards into the sky and saw that it was filled with pulsing white veins that became luminous and multi-toned, like mother of pearl, the longer I stared at them. I realised that the sky was not blue at all but that it was a million different colours all conspiring together to create a pale blue and that the sky was conniving and lying, that the sky was in fact much cleverer than us and that maybe everything we considered to be insentient was in fact cleverer than us and laughing at us. I looked at the leaves in the trees and questioned their greenness. Are you really green? I asked myself. Or are you actually tiny little particles of purple and red and yellow and gold all having a party and laughing, laughing, laughing. I glanced at Phin. I said, ‘Is your skin really white?’

He looked at his skin. He said, ‘No. It’s …’ He looked at me and laughed out loud. ‘I have scales! Look! I have scales. And you!’ He pointed at me with great hilarity. ‘You have feathers! Oh God,’ he said, ‘what have we become? We’re creatures!’

We chased each other round the roof for a minute, making animal noises. I stroked my feathers. Phin unfurled his tongue. We both expressed shock and awe at the length of it. ‘You have the longest tongue I have ever seen.’

‘That’s because I am a lizard.’ He rolled it back in and then out again. I watched it keenly. And when it came out again, I leaned in and trapped it between my teeth.

‘Ow!’ said Phin, grabbing his tongue between his fingers and laughing at me.

‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘I’m just a stupid bird. I thought it was a worm.’

And then we stopped laughing and sat in the plastic deckchairs and stared, stared, stared into the whirling aurora borealis above and our hands hung down side by side, our knuckles brushing every now and then, and each time I felt Phin’s skin touch mine I felt as though his very being was penetrating my epidermis and bits of his essence were swirling into my essence, making a soup of me and him and it was too too tantalising, I needed to plug myself into him so that I could capture all of his essence and my fingers wrapped themselves around his fingers and he let me, he let me hold his hand, and I felt him pour into me like when we went on a canal boat once and the man opened the lock and we watched the water flow from one place to another.

‘There,’ I said, turning to look at Phin. ‘There. You and me. We’re the same person now.’

‘We are?’ said Phin, looking at me with wide eyes.

‘Yes, look.’ I pointed at our hands. ‘We’re the same.’

Phin nodded and we sat then for some time, I don’t know how long, it might have been five minutes, it might have been an hour, our hands held together, staring into the sky and lost in our own strange chemically induced reveries.

‘We’re not having a bad trip, are we?’ I said eventually.

‘No,’ said Phin. ‘We’re having a good trip.’

‘The best trip,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The best trip.’

‘We should live up here,’ I said. ‘Bring our beds up here and live up here.’

‘We should. We should do that. Right now!’

We both leapt to our feet and jumped down through the trapdoor into the tunnel above the attic. I saw the walls of the tunnel throbbing, like the inside of a body; I felt we were in a throat, maybe, or an oesophagus. We almost fell through the trapdoor into the hallway, and suddenly it felt like we were in the wrong place, like in Doctor Who when he opens the door to the Tardis and doesn’t know where he is.

‘Where are we?’ I said.

‘We’re down,’ said Phin. ‘In down world.’

‘I want to go back up.’

‘Let’s get the pillows,’ said Phin. ‘Quick.’ He pulled me by the hand into his bedroom and we grabbed the pillows and we were about to climb back up into the tunnel when David appeared in front of us.