Tideline (31 page)

I push the cushion harder over her nose and mouth. They’ll find him upstairs.

My eye catches sight of my mother’s pile of haberdashery with the darning mushroom lying on top. I reach for it with one hand whilst the other holds the cushion.

They’ll take him away from me.

I force the cushion into Helen’s now gaping mouth with the handle of the darning mushroom while my other hand holds the rest of the cushion over her nose.

They’ll tear us apart and I’m not ready for it. I couldn’t bear it.

Living near the river, you get to know the variety of ways there are to cross. There’s no bridge on this stretch so the choices are on the water or under. There are no
U-turns. You are committed to your destination. Even the Blackwall Tunnel refuses to let you turn around once you’ve entered its toxic bowels. Sometimes when driving through, I have the urge
to go back, gripped by a fear of passing beneath the mass of dark river. But the traffic before you and behind hustles you onwards. You can’t stop. You have to plough on, through the grime
until you emerge amongst the towering blocks on the other side. I think of this as I lean upon the pillow and know I can’t go back. There are no U-turns. I’m committed to my
destination.

Sonia

How do you know when it’s over? Helen’s hands open and close and claw at my sleeves. Her legs twitch. I’d prefer it if this weren’t happening in the
living room. But I had no choice. I hold on tighter to the cushion. Twist the darning mushroom harder. The fire I lit in the grate this afternoon has long since petered out. A draft scutters in
from the chimney, spreads ashes across the rug, lifts one of the curtains. The clock on the mantelpiece whirrs and strikes half past twelve. Helen begins to convulse. To retch. I don’t want
to hear. I don’t want to look. I turn my head to one side, letting my full weight press against her. At last her feet in their lovely suede boots collapse out to the sides. I lift the
cushion. It’s soaked in vomit. I feel for a pulse. I mustn’t think. The cold of the room. The smell of the fluids. The voices.

I leave her for a minute and go to the window on the river side. I lift the curtain and peer out into the darkness. It’s hard to see whether the tide’s high. I need the river full
for this. Carrying her in my arms down the steps with their glycerine sheen would be hopeless.

I slip into the courtyard and through the door to the alley. It’s as I suspected. The water has covered the shore and slaps the wall about eight feet below. I’ll have to wait at
least two hours, maybe three. Perhaps I should have thought of this before using the cushion. Waited a bit.

The smell of Helen’s vomit permeates everything. I feel it’s got into my hair, my clothes. I go to the kitchen for a J cloth and the Dettox spray and mop up the mess on her chest,
take the cushion to the kitchen to wash. On second thoughts, perhaps I should get rid of it. But where? Calm. Breathe. My mind won’t be still. There’s too much to think about. Like the
things Helen drew my attention to. The things the forensics might pick up. I should be far more attentive to the evidence I’m leaving.

In the end, I stuff the cushion into the washing machine on a hot wash and turn it on. Then I fetch Mother’s wheelchair from under the stairs. Helen’s such a light weight after Jez.
I lift her in my arms and shift her into it. She’ll be fine sitting there for a couple of hours.

I pick up the incriminating badge and take it up to the music room. In the faint light that seeps from the stairwell through the high windows, I find the hoodie at the foot of Jez’s bed
and pin it back on. He’s still in a feverish sleep, giving off a faint boyish scent that I draw into my lungs to rinse away that other smell of Helen. I lift a lock of his dark hair and rub
my nose across the fine down behind his ear, push my finger gently along the blue vein on his arm, down to the palm of his hand that lies upturned as if he’s offering me something precious in
it. Kiss the pads of his fingers where they are soft like peach skin. I let my eyes roam over the length of his body. Shiver at the anticipated sweetness, once we can be alone again.

Downstairs I tug some rubber gloves from the clutter in the cupboard under the sink and place them on the table ready for the tide. They lie there, pink bloated fingers monstrous after
Jez’s slender, golden ones. The next hour is interminable. I try to clear up the kitchen but it’s already almost tidy. I put the empty wine bottles in the recycling bin, and wash
Helen’s glass in the sink, three times, scrubbing it with the washing-up brush before putting it into the dishwasher. Every so often I pop my head round the living room door to check that she
hasn’t started to breathe again. I have an urge to wrap a rug around her, though she will no longer be able to feel the cold. I don’t like to see her slumped there in her orange
miniskirt and opaque cerise tights, her cerise crew-neck jumper and orange scarf in the draft that continues to blow from the fireplace. All so nicely co-ordinated. One leg of her tights has
wrinkled up around her knee a bit, probably from her struggle with me on the sofa, and I have the urge to pull it up and smooth it out. I don’t like to see her like this at all, but I had no
choice. What other option did I have?

I find the blanket, the one I wrapped Jez in this afternoon, the green and white check, and drape it around her. The clock strikes again.

I go back to the kitchen. Sit, my head in my hands. Go back to check on her again. Realize that this time I’m hoping she might be breathing. I put my hand under her mouth, her nose, lift
her wrist, try to find a pulse.

Nothing.

The phone rings. It’s two in the morning. No one phones at two. I consider picking it up, then refrain. It clicks on to answer machine. I hear Mick’s voice.

‘Sonia. I’m sorry to disturb you at this time. But Helen’s gone off and I wondered whether she might be with you. If you could give me a ring in the morning . . . I’m
worried about her.’

Why do people assume everyone’s with me? If they suspect she’s here, how long will it be before they come snooping around? I must get rid of her.

I go out to the door in the wall and stop. There are voices coming along the alley. Foreign accents. Polish or Russian. Students coming back from a night out. Laughter, a shriek. One of them is
probably leaning over the wall to feign jumping into the river. You get used to the pranks played by students, the same old games as if they were the first ones to ever think of them. He calls to
his mates, they are just a few centimetres from me on the other side of the door.

Go
, I mumble,
move on
, though I don’t think there’ll be enough water to deposit Helen into yet.

At last the footsteps retreat down the alley, the voices fade. I turn the key in the lock and step across to the wall. As I suspected, the water rolls indifferently, at least six feet below me.
Does it always rise so reluctantly?

A police launch bounds past on the river, its lights blazing and the water goes mad, rolling and slapping and splashing up against the bricks. Swirling around the great chain that’s bolted
to the wall there. There’s the mournful wailing sound from the pontoon just along the shore as it creaks in the wake.

I have about an hour until the water should be high enough. How do you sink a body? I need some weights. The obvious place for these would’ve been the shore but that’s no use now the
water has crept in and covered it. I unearth a few broken bricks from the courtyard, ones my mother used to raise the flower bed, and carry them into the living room. I stare at Helen in the
wheelchair. There’s nowhere to put them! Then I remember she had a jacket on when she arrived. I find it in the kitchen. It’s the lovely blue-green wool jacket with a hood she had on at
the Pavilion the other day. I unwrap the blanket, pull her arms into the sleeves, and place some broken bricks in the coat’s deep pockets. I’m not sure, even now, that she will be heavy
enough to sink. As a precaution, I put two more half bricks in an old Sainsbury’s carrier bag and tie them to the little chain Boden put in the collars of their garments in case you
haven’t a hanger and need to hook your coat on a peg. The bricks nestle in the hood. This makes me think of Seb, the way he put cans of lager in fishing nets and tied them onto ropes so he
could swim out to the barges, dragging them.

I feel light, out of my body. I must stay calm, I must not become hysterical. That’s when mistakes are made. I must think logically.

In the end I sit at the kitchen table and listen to the clock tick. My fingers find Jez’s horn earring that I’ve kept in my trouser pocket. The earring! Everything falls neatly into
place. It’s meant, as I knew it was when Jez first came to me.

I rummage under Helen’s coat, find a pocket in her skirt, place the earring deep inside. I take out her mobile. Thumb in a text. Find Mick’s number, press send. Then I get up and go
back outside to check the tide. I let her mobile follow Jez’s into the water. The river is on my side now.

Sonia

I release the lock on the wheelchair. Helen’s head flops onto her chest. I pull the checked blanket over it. Shove the wheelchair over the threshold, across the courtyard
to the door in the wall. Press my ear against it. It’s silent at last. I push the door open. The lights are off in the flats along the alley. We go straight across to the wall, to the exact
place I dropped the mobiles into the water.

You’ve got to be careful, this is becoming a habit!
mocks a high-pitched voice in my head.

The tide’s up and lolls against the wall about three feet below. The tree branches make a tangled black net above my head, and the wall of the flats to my left is covered in a mat of ivy.
I’m cocooned on one side at least. The other side is open but deserted as far along the path as I can see, to the power station, to the coaling pier.

It’s harder than I thought it would be to lift Helen out of the wheelchair. Have my arms become weaker since I put her into it? Or has her body, empty of its soul, taken on extra weight?
The bricks! I’ll have to remove them. My fingers are numb with cold or nerves. They won’t work. I can’t untie the plastic bag. I rub my hands together, try to kick-start the
circulation. A police siren sounds out on the high street. I fumble with the knot of the bag, straining my ears. Is that a voice? Footsteps? I stop for a minute, trying not to breathe so I can
hear.

I give up on the bricks and use all my strength to heave Helen up in my arms and hitch her onto the wall. I lift her legs over it as if she were a child I was putting onto a swing, and shove
hard. She flops forward, face down onto the surface of the water. The checked blanket is left in my hands. Helen’s arms spread out, as if she were doing the star pose Kit was made to do in
swimming lessons at primary school. She stays there for a few seconds. Seconds that turn into minutes.

‘Go down!’
I mutter.
‘Go down!’

Her head dips, her bottom rises up, as if she’s peering beneath the surface of the water. Then the bricks start to do their job, and bubbles rise from somewhere, from her pockets? Her
hood? Her lungs? Her beautiful blue jacket balloons upwards. Then it too turns dark as the water soaks into it and soon all I can see is the orange bottom of her skirt and the underside of one
foot, the crepe sole of her lovely boots the only bit of her clothing, judging by evidence I’ve gathered from my beachcombing over the years, that will survive the river’s appetite. I
rue the fact that all her gorgeous clothes are wasted.

Why won’t she disappear completely? Surely it’s exactly this that keeps the police launches so busy, the tendency of the human body to sink to the riverbed without a trace?

I go back to the courtyard and find the hoe with the long handle I retrieved from the garage the other day. I have to lean over the wall in order to poke Helen with it, prod her. Still the crepe
sole bounces back. I push the hoe harder, and she bobs away from the wall. At last a current takes her up. She swirls about, her boot doing a peculiar solo dance in the moonlight.

At last, after I don’t know how long, the sole of her boot bobs away, the tide seems to have turned and is carrying her down towards Blackwall. I wait to ensure she doesn’t turn
around again. That the river doesn’t decide to do something perverse and bring her back to me. I wait five, ten minutes.

The moon’s up and casts a silver light over the water. It mingles with the street lights that cast their glow deep into the river along the banks. I’m suffused with a sudden sense of
peace.

I don’t move. A plane passes overhead. Lights crackle on the other side of the river, the bright beacon at the top of Canada Tower flashes on, off, on, off. A gaggle of swans comes past.
They gaze into the depths of the water. Then they huddle near the wall together, as if deciding this, Helen’s final resting place, was the very spot they were searching for to roost.

At last I turn. I barely bother to look up or down the alley before I push the wheelchair back through the door in the wall, across the courtyard and into the house. I fold the blanket up, stash
it in the cupboard in the hall. Collapse the wheelchair, store it back under the stairs. It’s done. I feel oddly deflated, as if I deserved a round of applause that didn’t come.

I won’t be able to sleep yet. For some reason I have a strong urge to go and have a look at Helen’s house, to see if Mick’s lights are still on after his phone call, to see
whether he is still waiting for Helen to come home or has given up and gone to sleep.

I go out again and hurry down the alley to where I park my car. It’s not far to Helen’s house. I drive carefully, through the now deserted streets, my eyes prickling with fatigue. I
leave the car across the road on the park side. I cross and walk briskly to the front gate. The lights are all off. Mick has given up and gone to bed. I look up at the dark windows. Which is her
bedroom? I think it’s the one on the right. Mick’ll be alone in their double bed thinking Helen will come back at any moment. He’s oblivious that the expanse of sheet left by her
absence is eternal now and it’s this that brings a sob to my throat.