by Simon Lelic
Charlie moved into Alison’s field of vision. He was grinning but cruelly. “Who’d’ve thunk it?” he said. “Who’d’ve thunk our Jakey-boy had it in him? Jake and Alison, sitting in a tree . . . You’re probably wasting your time, you know. We’re not even sure Jakey-boy here can get it up.”
Someone tittered—Pete?—and Alison could see Jake wanting to round on his friends. Instead, he focused his anger on her. Except . . . it wasn’t just anger. There was rage in the blackness of his eyes, yes, but humiliation too. His pupils glittered unnervingly, fixedly, and Susanna, imagining this, doesn’t doubt that Alison caught a glimpse then of his lust.
And now it was Jake she was most afraid of. This, whatever this was, it was out of control. She needed to get out into the corridor. And, when she got there, she needed to run.
She shuffled backward. She tried to stand. She might have said something about going to the headmaster, she might have said nothing at all, but it wouldn’t have helped by this stage either way.
“Stay where you are!” Scott’s voice, bearing an authority Alison had never truly felt able to do more than mimic. “Jake, stop her. Don’t let her move!”
Jake dropped lower. His knee came to rest on top of Alison’s, and his hand bore down on the front of her shoulder. She felt his palm press uncomfortably into her bra strap.
“Scotty?” said Pete. “What are we doing, Scotty?”
“We can’t let her leave,” Scott spat. “She saw us with the matches. I just accidentally fucking hit her! My dad’ll slaughter me if he finds out!”
“Yeah but . . . she’s a teacher. Maybe if we make her promise . . .”
Charlie stepped forward. “She’s not gonna promise. And even if she does she’s not gonna keep it.”
Alison looked at Jake. She saw his lips part, his tongue flicker nervously between his teeth.
“Get off me. Jake? Do you hear me? Get off me.” Her voice was quiet at first, preternaturally calm. But then, steadily, she began to panic. “Get off me,” she repeated, louder now. “Get the bloody hell off me.” She wriggled, started to kick. “Do you hear? Are you listening to me? Get off me!”
“For Christ’s sake, Jake, make her shut up! Someone’ll hear!”
So Jake hit her. Hard. And Alison’s head rebounded against the floor.
“Shit,” said someone. “Fuck.”
“Let’s go.” This from Scott. “Jake! Do you hear me? Let’s go!”
If Jake had turned, he would have seen Scott with a lighted match ready in his hand. He would have seen Pete and Charlie bundling toward the door.
“Leave her, Jake! We’ve got to go!”
Scott didn’t wait for Jake to respond. He tossed the match onto Alison Birch’s desk, which burst into silent flames. Without another glance at Jake, Scott ran the way his friends had. They were gone, fled . . . leaving Jake and Alison alone.
Alison recovered from her daze and saw Jake staring down at her blackly. He was deathly still, despite the fire, the concrete mass of him haloed by a hellish glow.
“Jake? What are you doing, Jake?”
He was on top of her, the whole of his body weight bearing down. The little crucifix Alison wore around her neck had caught on Jake’s hand and was being pressed jaggedly against her windpipe.
“Jake? Jake, please. Get off me.”
Something ripped. Was ripped. A noose tightened around her ribs and Alison realized with horror that it was the waistband of her skirt.
She started to flail. She sensed Jake recoil and the pressure that was trapping her ease—but then it redoubled and all at once there was a hand around her throat.
“Don’t . . .” she heard herself saying. “Please . . . stop . . . don’t . . .”
Because she knew what was coming. The fear was like nothing Alison had ever experienced. Perhaps in a dream, a nightmare, where you are powerless to fend off the approaching terror, but in a nightmare you always wake up. And when you sleep your senses are dulled. Here, now, Alison saw, heard, smelled everything. She felt Jake’s clawing hands and the ugly press of him through his jeans. She could taste his hunger for her, a bitter tang that made her want to gag. She did gag, when Jake released her throat and moved his fingers over her, under her, into her.
She froze, after that, and her eyes, through it all, remained locked on the open door. Help, her gaze said. Someone. But no one came, no one saved her, and there was nothing Alison could do to save herself.
17.
“And then the fire.”
The fire. The crime Jake and the others had set out to commit, reduced in the end to a postscript.
Susanna is weeping. She feels like a fraud for doing so but she cannot help it. Imagining what Alison went through—reliving the experience through her eyes—is almost more than she can take.
“And then the fire,” she manages to say.
It wasn’t quite the conflagration the boys had planned but the damage it caused was extensive enough. The school was closed afterward for more than a week, the main teaching wing for almost three months. They had to erect temporary classrooms on the playing field, which when the rain came turned into a muddy bog.
“You were there? You saw it?”
Susanna sniffs. It crosses her mind she must appear a pathetic mess. She doesn’t care what she looks like; it’s the pathetic part that bothers her. For Emily’s sake.
“I saw it. The alarm went off and we were all ushered out onto the street. The school didn’t have a sprinkler system, though, so by the time we were all outside the flames were up into the roof. And it was chaos. Most people, most parents, they wouldn’t leave the gymnasium until they’d located their children. And others, if they couldn’t find their kids outside, they went back in. Through the fire doors if they could fight their way past. Otherwise around and up along the drive.”
Susanna, at the time, thought that was the worst of it. The frightened children, the panicked parents. But as well as the fire, it later turned out, there’d been an inferno of another kind. A rage of frustration and desire, as cruel and destructive as any blaze Susanna could have envisaged.
“But no one was hurt.”
“No,” Susanna says. “Not from the blaze.” She recalls what Adam asked her before. Do you wish it had happened as they’d intended? The plan, he meant, the fire. And her answer: More than anything. Because if a burned building had been the worst of it, Alison would have been untouched, Jake would still be alive and none of this, now, would be happening.
And then it strikes her. Reverberates in a way it hasn’t so far had a chance to.
Her grandson. Sitting across from her, threatening her daughter, is Susanna’s grandson.
“That must be a relief for you,” Adam says. “The fact that there are no other lives you’re responsible for.”
Susanna says nothing. She cannot.
“Tell me about Jake,” says Adam, changing tack. “You were with him when he told the police what happened. Right, Susanna? How did Jake seem, did you think?”
“How did he seem?”
“Was he confused, would you say?”
“Of course he was confused,” Susanna answers, making an attempt to tidy her eyes. “He was in shock. He . . .” She struggles to find the words. How to explain how Jake seemed after what had happened? He seemed at first to be unrepentant, as though he barely registered the horror of what he’d done. And rather than confused, he seemed in perfect command of his memory, recalling the sequence of events with barely a need for pause. He didn’t remember getting out—how, after what he did, he escaped the burning building, nor how Alison got out after him—and that should have offered Susanna a clue to his mental state. Perhaps the way he recounted the events should have too. Jake’s tone, his mannerisms, were robotic, utterly devoid of emotion. Sitting beside her son as Jake voiced his confession into a camera, Susanna found she h
ad to turn to face the wall. He’s a monster, she told herself. I’ve raised a monster. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t have held his hand if he had asked. Which he didn’t. He just kept his hands folded in his lap, not even reaching to take a sip of water.
But of course it was exactly as she told Adam. Jake was in shock. Profound, paralyzing shock. The emotion was there but it was balled inside of him. He was denying it, repressing it, squeezing it tighter, tighter . . . until eventually that bubble inside him burst.
“Jake was confused, afraid, bewildered,” Susanna tells Adam. “He was struggling to comprehend what he’d done.”
And Jake wasn’t the only one. There remains a part of Susanna that continues to disbelieve any of it ever really happened.
Adam is contemplating her response. Susanna can’t tell if he is satisfied with it or not.
“But you just accepted it? You didn’t doubt anything Jake admitted to?”
“What do you mean?”
“He was in shock, you say. He was confused. And yet you didn’t question whether he’d done the things he said he had?”
“I didn’t believe it, if that’s what you mean. I couldn’t believe it. But the evidence was there. Jake’s statement, Alison’s statement . . .”
“But you accepted he didn’t start the fire. Even though they eventually pinned that on him as well.”
“That was different,” Susanna says, not quite understanding where this is leading. “Alison verified Jake’s version of events, that Scott was the one to throw the match. But Scott, Pete and Charlie all claimed Jake was the one who started the fire as well. And Alison . . . in the end she admitted she wasn’t certain, that she couldn’t even recall how she’d first ended up on the floor. The police had no choice except to blame Jake, particularly in light of what he admitted to.”
Adam’s lips twist sideways.
“What about my mother?” he asks. “She got out. She escaped the fire just as Jake did. How do you think that happened?”
“It was instinct, I suppose. Just instinct, the same way it must have been for Jake.”
Susanna pictures Alison stumbling into the corridor, her clothes singed and torn, her lungs hacking out smoke. She’s seen a photo of her that was taken soon after the paramedics found her: Alison wrapped in a blanket and hunched on the floor beside an ambulance. “A survivor” the newspaper captioned her, before anyone reading the story could have known how much she’d endured.
Adam has risen from his chair. He taps the knife against his leg as he talks.
“How did you feel when you found out Scott and the others would get away with it?” he asks. “They claimed they’d only been along for the ride. Right? The lighter fluid they brought, the matches: they said they hadn’t really intended to use them. They’d been joking, they said, just messing around, and it was Jake who in the end lost control. And the police believed them.”
“They didn’t!” Susanna says. “They didn’t have any way to disprove what they said, that’s all. It was three against one. Scott and the others, they should have been punished for what they did. The fire, hitting your mother. And in the end they left her to burn!”
Adam turns to face her. Incredibly, he is smiling.
“You know Scott eventually went to prison?” he says.
“What?”
“I looked into it. I mean, I don’t know if he’s in prison anymore but he was. Lots of times. For lots of things. So in the end I guess he got his dues. And Charlie . . . I couldn’t find out what happened to Charlie. Nothing good, I think. And Pete—get this—Pete’s a fireman.”
“You’re kidding,” Susanna says.
Adam shows her his dimples. “I am, actually,” he admits. “Wouldn’t that be great, though? But no.” He raises the knife to study the blade. “What actually happened to Pete is that he died.”
Susanna swallows. She wipes the sweat from her palms.
Adam notices her unease. “It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was an accident. Something at work. Involving fire, predictably enough.”
Susanna sees that Adam, this time, is completely serious.
“Look,” she says. She rocks to shuffle forward on her seat. She leans toward Adam, as near as she can get without rising. This, right here: it is the closest she has come to outright begging.
“Look,” she says again, “I’m sorry. So, so so sorry. About what happened to your mother. About what my son did to her.”
She reaches a hand and then forces it down. It joins the other and the fingers of both hands interlock. And now she is: she is actually begging.
“It was awful. Just horrendous, and I can only imagine how it’s impacted on your life. I can see how much it’s impacted, how angry and upset you clearly feel. And you’re right. You’re right to be angry, particularly at me. And I will, I’ll do anything you say. Just please—please—let Emily go.”
Susanna doesn’t know what she’s expecting. For Adam suddenly to accept her apology? To pick up the letters and his bag, and perhaps to hand over Emily’s phone, and then to go merrily on his way? Oh, all right. Like she was a child and he was tired of her constantly asking. Go on then, I forgive you. Let’s let bygones be bygones.
Instead, “You’re sorry?” he says. And then he laughs. “You’re sorry,” he echoes, “for what happened to my mother.” He looks at her. “You still don’t get it, do you? After everything I’ve said, after everything you’ve said.”
Susanna stares back at him blankly.
Adam starts pacing around the room.
“Talk to me about the letters,” he says. “You haven’t told me yet what you think of them.”
“What I think of them?”
Adam is waiting but Susanna doesn’t know what for.
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I—”
“The letters,” Adam emphasizes. “The notes your son wrote to my mother. They prove he loved her. Don’t you think?”
Love? Susanna is thinking. Really? “They show he was infatuated, certainly. That he thought he loved her, maybe.”
She has said the wrong thing. She catches the glint of irritation in Adam’s glare.
“Would they have made a difference, though?” he presses. “At the trial, I mean.”
“But there wasn’t a trial. It never . . .”
Adam, swooping, is across the room. He levels the knife. “I know there wasn’t a trial, Susanna! I know that! I’m asking if. If there’d been a trial. Would the letters have made any difference?”
Susanna forces herself backward in her seat. Her hands are tight around the armrests. “What kind of difference? I don’t know what you mean!”
“To Jake! To the verdict! To whether or not he was found guilty!”
“No. No. He raped her. What does it matter if he wrote to her first?”
Again, it is not what Adam wants to hear. He spins away, disgusted.
“What about in your eyes, Susanna?” he says, his back to her. “What do they alter in your eyes?” He turns to look.
Susanna shakes her head. She doesn’t know what to say. “What do you think they alter?” she counters. “Why did you show them to me in the first place? What is it you think they prove?”
“Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”
“Yes! Please.”
Adam slams the knife down on Susanna’s desk. He strides until he is once again in Susanna’s face. He counts on his fingers as he talks.
“The letters. They prove Jake loved her. That’s one.”
Susanna knows better now than to demur.
“Two,” Adam continues, wiping away spittle. “It never did come to trial. My mother, so called, dropped the charges.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But what, Susanna? But what?”
Susanna shrinks. “Nothing,” she
mutters.
“Three! Not only did she drop the charges, she changed her story. Said that Jake didn’t actually rape her after all.”
But . . .
It is there again at the back of Susanna’s throat, tussling to get out. She wants to object even though she doesn’t understand what Adam is saying, what it is he’s trying to contend. Because the points he’s made, one, two, three, they’re all so familiar. So sickeningly, maddeningly familiar.
“Four: you just admitted Jake was in shock, that he was confused about what actually happened. Meaning his confession doesn’t count. No one saw him rape my mother. There weren’t any witnesses, remember? And anyway he took it all back, every word of what he said!”
“But . . .” It slips out. This time Susanna cannot stop it. Jake only recanted his statement as a response to Alison recanting hers. And anyway, it wasn’t even Jake, not really. It was Neil, their solicitor, her—because the truth is Susanna went along with the solicitor’s advice just as Neil did. “Jake was only doing what everyone told him to do,” Susanna says. “That’s the reason he changed his story, not because what he said wasn’t true.”
“Five! Even the newspapers said Jake was falsely accused. They called him the victim, said it was a travesty what he’d been put through. And I know you mock them, Susanna, and I know you mock me for reading them but the papers can’t print these things unless there’s some truth in them. They can’t! There are laws!”
It is—it’s like listening to Neil. The desperation, the naïveté. The sheer bloody wrongness. What Susanna can’t work out is what these words are doing coming out of Adam’s mouth.
“Are you saying . . .” Susanna shakes her head again, with incredulity this time. “What are you saying, Adam? That it never happened? The assault, the rape, what my son did to your mother.” She gestures wildly in Adam’s direction. “You’re standing there! You’re living proof!”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying! I’m not saying they didn’t have sex. Clearly I’m not saying that.”
