The Long Fall (21 page)

‘What do we do now?’ I ask Beattie, who is just staring down at him, her face drained of all colour, her teeth working away at her lip.

She sits back on her heels, shields her eyes from the sun and looks straight at me. I notice there are tears rolling down her cheeks.

‘Is he dead?’ I ask, the full horror of what we have done hitting me as if I, too, have tumbled over the edge. ‘Have we killed him?’

Beattie is sobbing now. Her face contorted, her eyes shut, she nods.

I reach for her, to try to comfort her, but she pulls away, scrabbling to her feet and running down the slope, away from the edge of the cliff, towards the tree, which she grabs on to as if it were the only thing holding her to the earth.

I take one last look at Jake and watch as a giant wave comes out of nowhere and washes his body from the ledge, and into the sea.

He is gone.

‘What do we do now, Beattie?’ I scream into the wind. ‘WHAT DO WE DO NOW?’

She hunches into the tree as if she’s trying to bury herself in its branches. For a second I think Beattie, the girl with the plans, the girl I have come to rely on, has no idea what to do next.

But by the time I reach her, she’s still grasping the tree, but she is able to look at me, her eyes terrible, her mouth a gash in her face.

‘It’s all over,’ she says. ‘You pushed him over.’

‘I didn’t mean to, I—’

I don’t know exactly what I am saying or what I mean at this point.

‘You did it for me?’ she asks.

‘I – I –’ My brain feels like scrambled eggs, I don’t know what happened, what I did or why I did it.

Beattie steps forward and puts her arms around me, tight, like a vice. She takes my breath away. She kisses me, full on the mouth. Then she steps backwards, away, and points towards the road.

I’m scared; I don’t know what she’s doing.

‘Get out of here fast, Emma,’ she says. ‘Cover your tracks.’

‘But . . .’ I say, reaching out towards her.

‘Go. This never happened. We never met. We’ll never, ever see each other again.’

She turns to me like a tiger, her forcefulness making her seem twice the size of me.

‘Get out of here,’ she yells. ‘GO.’

I stand there dumbfounded, shaking my head. But she launches herself at me, her fists flailing. ‘We should never have met. You have to get out of here before . . .’

‘What? Before what?’

‘Go, Emma. Go. This is your last chance. Go away and forget we ever met. Forget about Beattie, forget about Jake.’

She slaps me hard round the face and, reeling, my eyes stinging, in shock, I stumble away.

I have got away. But I will never, ever be able to forget.

PART THREE

AFTER

2013

One

Mark told Kate she was to do nothing for a week when she got back from hospital. She complied for the first day, which she spent lying in bed, bolstered by pillows, gazing up at grey nothingness through the glass atrium and listening to the distant rumble of the city.

But as the concussion and shock receded, the details of her meeting with Beattie bored into her brain.

Somewhere in the world, Jake still existed. She had been certain she had killed him, but somehow, by some freak chance, he had survived.

What was she supposed to make of all that?

All the lies she had told, all the people and prospects and hopes she had turned her back on. And he wasn’t dead.

She had no idea whether to rejoice or to weep.

Tilly came and went that first day, tiptoeing in with cups of tea and pieces of fruit and toast to tempt her. But mostly she was left alone. She didn’t see Mark. Although it was a Saturday, he was at the office as usual.

Sophie PR sent over a big bunch of lilies, unaware of Kate’s problem with cut flowers. With the delivery came a little note – Sophie’s words but written in the looping hand of a young florist – saying that she would be writing the
Kate Reports
blog posts until she was ‘up and firing on all cylinders again’.

Kate wondered when that might be, but was grateful that one more source of guilt had been lifted from her shoulders.

The next day – Sunday – she couldn’t bear it any longer. As soon as Mark and Tilly were both out – he to Surrey to play golf with a client, she to serve those chips to those National Theatre actors – she pulled out the Starbucks napkin with Beattie’s phone number on it and called her.

‘I was so worried about you, Emma,’ Beattie said, a little breathless, as if she had run for the phone. Or perhaps it was just the catch of a smoker’s throat. Behind her voice, Kate heard the sound of traffic.

‘I’m sorry.’ Kate picked her holey stone up from her bedside table and ran her thumb over its smooth edges as she spoke.

‘Oh honey. It’s hard to take in, isn’t it?’

‘Yep.’

‘I know exactly what you’re going through. I was the same when I found out.’

‘What happened? You said he’s on to us. What does that mean?’

‘Look,’ Beattie said, ‘I can’t talk about it here. What do you say I come by and perhaps I can show you?’

‘Show me?’ Kate hesitated. Was it wise to bring Beattie into her house? To mix the oil of her past with the water of her present? But then, as far as Mark was concerned, she was an old school friend. In any case, he wouldn’t be back at least until supper time, and Tilly was on a long shift, so she and Beattie would have the whole afternoon to themselves.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Can you come now?’

‘Can I make you a coffee?’ Kate showed Beattie into her kitchen.

‘Thanks.’ Beattie turned around, taking in the space. ‘What a beautiful home you have, Emma.’

‘Can you try to call me Kate?’

‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. It’s just I’ve thought of you as Emma all these years.’

As Kate reached for the coffee beans, she realised that, so successfully had she erased her early life from her conscious mind, she had hardly thought of Beattie at all until now. It was unsettling in the extreme to have everything back here, in her house, forced in front of her nose like this.

‘It’s just—’ She turned and smiled apologetically at Beattie. ‘No one in my life knows anything at all about what happened.’

‘No. I know. It’s the same for me. I’ll try.’ Beattie sighed, shivering a little and hugging herself, running her hands up and down her arms. Kate reminded herself that her former best friend had said she was desperate, and it had something to do with Jake. She had to face up to her responsibilities towards Beattie. Her selfish desire not to have her nice little boat rocked was neither here nor there.

Beattie moved in front of the big family photograph on the kitchen wall. ‘Is this your little girl?’ she said, gently touching Martha’s face. ‘She was so pretty. I’m so sorry for you.’

Wanting to avoid talking about Martha, Kate stopped what she was doing and turned to face Beattie.

‘I’m sorry, Beattie, but I don’t really understand why you’re here. You’ve told me Jake’s alive. But what of it? What do you need to warn me about?’

Beattie looked to the floor.

‘I’m so sorry, Em— I mean Kate. I didn’t want to come in here and mess everything up. But I’m in such a state. I didn’t want him to get you unawares.’ She looked up and Kate saw tears in her eyes.

‘What do you mean, get me?’ Kate said, feeling the need to lean back against the kitchen counter. ‘What is it?’

‘Jake’s
alive
, Kate.’

‘I know. You said. But isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t that mean we can live the rest of our lives more easily?’

Beattie shook her head. ‘He’s alive. But he’s mad.’

‘Mad how?’

‘Mad furious.’

Kate rubbed her temples. Of course. Of course he would be mad furious. She had tried to kill him. They had left him for dead. ‘But why now? After all these years?’

‘Do you have that coffee?’ Beattie said. ‘I need some help with this.’

‘How about this?’ Kate pulled a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge.

Beattie raised an eyebrow and nodded.

Old habits die hard.

Kate fetched two glasses.

‘I still can’t really believe it,’ she said, when they were sitting on the living-area sofa, each cradling a large glass of wine. For the first time in years she had a tingle-lipped craving for a cigarette.

‘It’s hard to take in, I know. I’m sorry.’

‘I feel like I need to see him.’

‘Of course you do. So you can believe it’s true.’

‘It’s not that I don’t believe you, Beattie, it’s just – he looked so
dead
.’

‘He’s told me the whole story.’

‘You’ve spoken with him?’

‘Oh yes. He tracked me down a while back. Likes to Skype me. He enjoyed telling me it all, watching me squirm. This fisherman rescued him, apparently,’ Beattie said. ‘And then he was flown to some god-awful hospital in Athens, where he stayed for two years. First they thought he’d never come round, then that he’d never walk again, but he proved them wrong on both counts.’

‘Unbelievable.’ The thought suddenly struck Kate that they could have saved him, had they not panicked and run away. The thought that they had had a choice back then, and they had chosen to abandon him.

But
, a tiny voice piped in her head,
didn’t he deserve what he got?

She tried to bat it away.

‘I know. It’s too weird, isn’t it?’ Beattie said. ‘You could come back home with me and we could visit with him, if you want. I’ve not met him face-to-face yet. I’ve not dared.’

‘No,’ Kate said quickly. She did not want to go ‘home’ with Beattie. The stories she’d have to tell Mark and Tilly, the preparations she’d have to make, the facing of people, the shock of the flight; then, oh horrors, the arrival and confrontation . . .

‘I’ve got some photos he emailed me, though,’ Beattie said. She pulled an iPad out of her handbag.

Kate steeled herself, but nothing could prepare her for the shock of what she saw. Until that moment, whenever she thought of Jake – and where she had mostly managed to push the thought of Beattie from her mind,
he
had been a regular, unwelcome visitor both to her waking and sleeping hours – she pictured a tall, skinny boy with thick, curly dark hair. It was almost entirely the opposite of what she saw in the photograph.

If time hadn’t been kind to Beattie, it had been positively brutal to Jake.

It was what Tilly would call a ‘selfie’ taken with a webcam, and it showed a fleshy body, barely contained by the camera frame, spilling over the edges of what appeared to be a wheelchair; a great bald bullet head held at either side by a padded support; a mouth lolling open in the middle of a vast beard, purple lips parted by a loose tongue.

‘I thought you said he could walk,’ Kate said.

‘He could after the accident
we
caused him,’ Beattie said.

After her years of wrangling with the fact, Kate could have argued Beattie’s use of the word accident. But she let it go.

‘But that was just the beginning of his story. He hasn’t had a lucky life.’

‘So it seems,’ Kate said, looking again at the screen. ‘But are we sure this is really Jake? It doesn’t look like him.’

‘Emma, he was twenty-one when we thought he died.’

Kate mentally corrected this to
when we thought we killed him
.

‘He’s mid-fifties now. People change. But look.’ Beattie swiped the screen until the photograph closed up on the man’s sharp blue eyes. ‘No one I have ever met since has eyes like this. Not this colour. Not that look. There’s no way anyone could fake those eyes. Tell me that’s not Jake.’

Kate peered at the screen. Much as she wanted all of this to be some elaborate hoax, Beattie was right. Looking into those irises was like stepping back in time. She even experienced a ghost of the thrill she remembered from when she was eighteen, immersing herself in that blue, believing herself to be in love with the person behind them.

And was he still there, that boy, somewhere inside? Or had she played a part in ripping him to pieces – not physically, as she had once thought, but psychologically? What was he like, the man in there?

‘And there’s this,’ Beattie said, scrolling to the next photograph, in which Jake displayed his right forearm to the webcam, showing the Triskelion tattoo. Instinctively, Kate put her hand to her own ink. There was no doubt. This was Jake. Or what remained of Jake.

‘It’s him, believe me,’ Beattie said. She shivered again and looked away from the image. ‘I wish it wasn’t, but it is.’

‘What is he doing, Beattie?’ Kate asked. ‘What does he want?’

‘He calls it reparation. He wants his life back.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s bled me dry, and now he says it’s your turn.’

‘What?’

Beattie’s iPad screen changed, and the jaunty sound of an incoming Skype call – familiar to Kate because it was how she kept in touch with Mark when he was away on business – was accompanied by another onscreen photo of the obese bald man in the wheelchair.

‘What’s this?’ Kate said, her eyes shimmering with horror.

Beattie passed a hand over her face. ‘I’m sorry, Emma. I don’t want you to think I’ve led him to you. He found you himself and would’ve let you know far more brutally. I came to warn you so that you’re ready for him. Imagine if this all just came out of the blue.’ She thrust the screen into Kate’s hands and moved quickly off the sofa, onto an armchair opposite.

‘What do I do?’ Kate said. ‘What do I do?’

‘You have to answer. If you don’t, we’ll both be in trouble.’

‘What?’

‘Please,’ Beattie said, her voice tiny, strangled in the back of her throat. ‘He made me come to you.’

Kate froze, holding the screen away from her body as if it carried some terrible disease.

‘Please answer, Kate,’ Beattie said.

Kate looked at Beattie once more. She seemed to have shrunk into the big armchair, where she looked almost childlike. Her white shirt gaped a little at the front to reveal the stain of a bruise on her chest. The skin around it looked fragile, delicate, old.

Kate took a deep breath and pressed the reply button.