Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 91

               I watch Mr Yates for a second. This man deserves everything that’s coming to him and more. Yates says he doesn’t know what happened to his mother. She might even still be with her disgusting, cheating husband. He’s bloated and red in the face, like even being turned on is an enormous effort for him. I see a sick look on the woman’s face as she turns away from him. I realise I shouldn’t judge so quickly. I don’t know what turned her to this life. She’s as much a victim in this like Yates. That’s what people like his step father do, they take the weak and use them, leaving them with scars that can never be healed. Scars that don’t show up on the skin.

                ‘Okay,’ I say, relishing the secrecy of our mission. ‘Elle, now!’

                Elle reaches to her right and flicks on the enormous TV beside her. She presses another button and the volume rockets all the way up. Then she starts flicking between channels. The result is deafening, the various presenters and actors on screen merging together like they’re telling us a new, hidden message.

                Mr Yates and the woman jump and he falls backwards off his seat. She screams, shrill with the sort of pitch that would crack a window.

                With beautiful poetic timing, that’s exactly what happens. The huge floor to ceiling windows overlooking the river crack as one. There is a squeal almost too high for the human ear to register, and the windows shatter, becoming opaque with an infinity of white spider’s web cracks and then the panes fall to the ground like a curtain dropping from a stage.

                The woman is screaming, stamping her stilettoed feet on the ground until one of them breaks and she falls over. Mr Yates has crawled into a corner, pulling books from a shelf and a chair towards him. He must think his world is ending.

                I nod to Elle and Yates, grinning from ear to ear and we seize various bits of furniture.

                Elle knocks a series of picture frames with no pictures in to the ground, moving to a shelf of first edition books that have never been read. She seizes one particularly expensive looking volume and begins tearing pages with relish.

                Mr Yates sees this and actually lets out a dramatic shout of: ‘No!’

                I grab two uncomfortable looking leather chairs and begin to shake them, dragging them across the floor towards the old man.

                Now he starts to scream. And we’re only just getting started.