Tie Me Tighter

Chapter One: Arch Fourteen

The leak over the tumbling mats had gone from a drip to a stream, and Rosie Tarrow had stopped pretending she could fix it with a bucket.

"Right," she called, clapping once. "Everybody off the blue mat. It's a swimming pool. Nobody drowns in my class."

Eight kids dragged the mat sideways, arguing about whose turn it was on the silks. Under the arch's brick ceiling their voices bounced and doubled, so it always sounded like there were thirty of them instead of eight. Outside, a tram went past on the viaduct and the whole railway arch shivered, sending down a fine grit of Victorian dust that settled in everybody's hair.

Rosie caught the youngest by the back of her hoodie before she could climb anything. "Jaz. Harness."

"I don't need it."

"You don't need it right up until the day you need it." Rosie crouched, and the hip did what it always did when she crouched fast — a bright hot wire from the joint to the knee, gone in a second, remembered for an hour. She buckled the child in and tugged the leg loops. "What do we say?"

"Check it twice, land on your feet," Jaz recited, bored.

"Check it twice, land on your feet." Rosie flicked the carabiner gate with her thumbnail and listened to it click. She had heard that click maybe two hundred thousand times in her life. She had also heard, once, a sound that was not that click, and everything since had been arranged around never hearing it again.

By eight the kids were gone, tipped out into the wet Ancoats dark with their bags and their mothers, and Rosie was alone in the arch with the leak and the letter.

The letter had come Tuesday. It had a logo on it that looked like an architectural drawing of a leaf, and it explained in nine gentle paragraphs that Arch Fourteen was being brought into line with the current market, that the new rent would take effect in March, and that they valued their tenants' contribution to the vibrancy of the area.

The new rent was double. Not double plus a bit. Double, exactly, as though someone had multiplied a number without ever having stood in the room.

Rosie sat on an upturned milk crate with her hands hanging between her knees and looked up at her own rigging: two hard points she had bolted herself, load-rated, logged, inspected every fortnight in a notebook nobody would ever read. A rope. A silk. A trapeze she had bought secondhand from a woman in Salford who had also stopped flying, though for happier reasons.

She had built the place out of nothing over two years. Thirty kids on the books, eleven of them on the free scheme, one of them — Jaz — with a mother who worked nights and considered Thursday evenings the only reliable hour in her week.

"Right," Rosie said to the empty arch, because saying things out loud had become a habit somewhere in the eleven months she'd spent learning to walk again. "Well."

She killed the lights, locked up, and walked home in the rain with her hood down, because her hood always blocked the side she couldn't hear properly out of since the fall.

***

Tash Brogan was at the kitchen table with a sewing machine, four metres of black stretch mesh, and a mouth full of pins.

"Don't," she said, before Rosie had got her coat off.

"Don't what?"

"Don't do the thing where you come in and go straight to the kettle and say nothing and then at eleven o'clock you tell me something enormous while I'm brushing my teeth." Tash took the pins out of her mouth and jabbed them into a tomato-shaped cushion. "Say it now. I've got wine."

Rosie sat. The flat was one of those Manchester conversions where the ceilings were beautiful and the heating was theoretical, and the two of them had lived in it for four years, ever since Tash had answered an advert that said *quiet, tidy, will not be doing much walking about for a while.*

"They've doubled the arch," Rosie said.

Tash's face did the whole journey — disbelief, fury, calculation. "Doubled."

"March."

"Can you—"

"No."

"Fundraiser? One of those—"

"Tash. It's twenty-two grand a year I don't have. I can't bake that." Rosie took the wine glass, drank half of it, and put her forehead briefly on the cool tabletop. "I'm going to have to tell them in January. There's a kid, right, Jaz, and her mum—" She stopped. It was easier to be practical. "I'll take more inspection work. Theatres. The panto rigs are all going up now, that's four weeks of ladders."

"Or," said Tash.

Rosie lifted her head.

"Or," said Tash, with the specific gleam she got when she was about to interfere in someone's life for their own good, "you could come and look at a rig two streets away that is currently a lawsuit waiting for a name."

"The rope place."

"The Ropewalk," Tash said, "is not *the rope place*, it's the most expensive private members' club north of Soho and I make eleven hundred pounds a month sewing costumes for it, which is why we have a fridge."

"You make costumes for people who get tied up."

"I make costumes for aerialists and rope performers who work in front of a membership that pays four grand a year to sit in a converted rope factory and watch them. Very little touching. Extremely good lighting." Tash turned the mesh over and started pinning again. "On Friday a girl called Sonja came half a metre out of a transfer because a shackle was on backwards. She's fine. Bruised her ribs, cried in the dressing room. And the rigger — massive man, bad attitude, been there four years — had a screaming row with the floor manager about who signed off the check sheet and walked out through the front, which nobody does."

Rosie had gone very still. "Half a metre."

"Half a metre."

"On what — a hoist? Hand line?"

"See, this is why I'm telling you." Tash pointed a pin at her. "You've gone all," she waved, "professional."

"If a shackle was on backwards, that's not a mistake, that's a system," Rosie said. "That means nobody's checking. That means the next one isn't half a metre."

"Mm." Tash let the silence do the work.

"How much do they pay a rigger?"

"I have no idea. But the owner's got money like a weather system, and he is currently, as of Friday night, a man with a hundred metres of hanging line and nobody qualified to touch it." Tash's machine buzzed. "They open Wednesday to Saturday. Sunday the hall's empty. I've told Errol Bramley you'd come and look."

"You've *told* him."

"Nine o'clock," said Tash serenely. "Bring your notebook. Wear the boots that make you look like you'd kill somebody."

Rosie turned the wine glass in her fingers. Two streets away. She'd walked past it a hundred times: the long brick flank of the old rope factory, blank as a prison from the outside, the ropewalk itself — the two-hundred-foot hall where they had spun hemp for the ships in the eighteen-hundreds — hidden behind it like a secret held in a fist. There was never a sign. There was never a queue. Once, at two in the morning, she'd seen a woman in a full-length coat get out of a car and be admitted through a door that opened before she knocked.

"I don't perform," Rosie said.

"Nobody asked you to perform."

"I'm saying it now so it's said."

Tash looked up from the mesh, and her face softened out of the teasing and into the thing underneath, which was four years of a friendship built partly on physiotherapy appointments and partly on the fact that neither of them had ever asked the other to be less than honest.

"Rosie," she said. "I know."

***

She couldn't sleep, so she did what she always did and lay in the dark and went through it.

Three years and four months ago, a festival field in Shropshire. A doubles rope act, her and Tabitha Lorne, the two of them so synchronised after six years that they'd stopped counting each other in. A borrowed truss because the promoter had cut costs. A wind that got up in the afternoon and nobody derated for.

She remembered the moment the world went weightless in the wrong way. Not falling — she had fallen a thousand times, falling was a thing with a bottom to it — but the sensation of the point above her *moving*, of the sky itself letting go.

She remembered the ground.

Eleven months to walk. Two operations. A hip that would tell her about weather for the rest of her life. Tabitha had come out of it with a broken wrist and a sponsorship deal and had stopped returning calls by the following spring, which Rosie had eventually understood was not cruelty but a kind of terror: you don't want to look at the person the accident happened to, because then it can happen to you.

What nobody ever asked about, and what Rosie thought about most, was the second before. The second when she'd looked up and seen the shackle and thought: *that's wrong.* And had gone into the air anyway, because two hundred people were watching, and because the promoter was standing at the side of the stage with his arms folded, and because she had been twenty-nine and immortal and had not wanted to be difficult.

She had spent three years since then being difficult. It was, as far as she could tell, the only useful thing she had left.

At half past three she got up, found her boots, and stood them by the door.