1 Chapter 1

They’d taken over the church for their blood drive, and Ali felt more than a little odd staring up at St. Mary’s mournful, stained-glass face as the nurse removed the needle from his arm.

“There you go, dearie,” she said in true nurse fashion, despite looking about ten years younger than Ali. “You just stay there for a little bit while I sort this out, and then we’ll sit you up.”

“‘Kay,” Ali mumbled. He felt a little light-headed, as usual, but not too bad. He gave blood regularly. He was used to this, even if not St. Mary and her petulant expression. “Stop staring,” he told the window. “It’s rude.”

She didn’t seem to care, and he rolled his head towards the door. There was a little queue, and a very sick-looking woman protesting that she was fine and she could do this, thank you! Ali snorted. She’d faint within thirty seconds.

“Alright, dearie,” the nurse trilled, reappearing with a smile fixed in place. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Let’s try and get you sat up nice and slow, then.”

Ali had been giving blood since he was eighteen years old. It was the year his father had been diagnosed with cancer, and Ali had immediately signed up to every donation service going. It hadn’t saved his father—nothing could have saved his father, Ali had come to accept—but it might save someone else.

Ali went through the motions—the slow sitting up, the sliding of his legs off the bed, and then the final standing. The moment he was steady on his feet, he was ushered to the tables and chairs in the corner of the cavernous church, and given a steaming cup of tea and a biscuit. Only one, though. Bloody NHS cuts.

Reunited with his bag and phone, he thumbed out a text—done here :)—and settled in to wait for a little bit. If half an hour produced no boyfriend, then Ali would just walk home. It was only around the corner.

He sipped his tea, watched his phone, and waited. It was busy. At twenty-eight, Ali had donated blood in a mad variety of places, but never in a church before. The vaguely disapproving faces of the saints in the windows was a bit off-putting, truth be told. Like they knew why he technically shouldn’t be donating at all.

Across the yawning church, the nervous girl fainted. Ali checked his phone, found no reply, and got up to walk home.

* * * *

Home—for now—was Devonshire Avenue.

Devonshire Avenue was a wide, leafy avenue in Nottingham, with lines of cars that would have been clean, if not for the leaf litter on their shiny paintwork, and—in the midst of overgrown hedges and squat bungalows—a large white house split down the middle to form two slightly smaller houses. In the left-hand one lived—

“Hello, dear.”

Phyllis Pemberton.

“Afternoon, Mrs Pemberton,” Ali said, smiling genially at the little old lady who peered at him over the fence. She always materialised the moment she heard him, a thin wraith with a heavy walking stick and a cloud of fluffy white hair. “Have you seen my partner?”

“Ooh, couldn’t say, dear,” she said, and that wizened face twisted into a smile. “He said I had to keep it quiet, he did.”

Ali laughed. They rented their house—the right-hand one—from Mrs Pemberton’s grandson, and when Ali had first seen the doddery ninety-year-old hobbling home from church, he had been worried she wouldn’t like gay people next door, or Yazid in general.

Goes to show, really, what Ali knew.

“And if you don’t start feeding him up, young man, I have plenty of granddaughters who would take him off your hands,” she warned, and Ali chuckled.

“He’s getting there, Mrs Pemberton,” he said politely. “He’s got another check-up at the hospital next week, and then if that’s clear, too, we’ll go out and celebrate.”

Her face softened. “Horrible disease,” she murmured, and clucked her tongue to herself. She shuffled back along her garden path to her bench in the sun, where she basked and spied on all the neighbours, and Ali let himself into the deathly quiet of the right-hand house.

“Yaz!” he yelled. “I’m home!”

Yazid washome, despite the quiet. His trainers were under the hall table, and Moxie was indoors, sprawled out in a patch of sunlight, belly up and basking. She purred when Ali stooped to pet her, but otherwise didn’t move. The scrunched-up and used bus ticket had once been on said table, but had drifted to the floor when Ali closed the door. Yazid just didn’t—couldn’t, maybe—go anywhere without leaving traces of himself. Like other people left DNA, Yazid left a…presence.