by Alex Marwood
4.30 p.m.
There’s a crunch as Chloe’s head hits the hardened mud. Jade and Bel brace themselves for the howl to come. Instead, silence drills into their ears. Hot-day country silence, filled with lark-song, the shush of the breeze that stirs the treetops, the lackadaisical trickle of the stream across the meadow and, in the far distance, the laughter of their neighbours as they duck each other in the smooth-running Evenlode.
Each has the same thought: Oh God, I’m in trouble now.
Chloe lies still like a discarded doll, her head thrown back, her right hand at an impossible angle against her shoulderblade. She’s bleeding: from the nose, and from the split in her scalp: a slow brown ooze filled with lumpy snot and viscous, transparent matter. Her mouth is open. So are her big blue eyes.
‘Chloe?’ Bel is the first to speak. Her voice wavers, like she’s short of breath.
Chloe gives no reply. Just lies there and oozes.
‘She’s unconscious,’ announces Jade, though she’s only ever seen the state as a result of alcohol before, and the two look quite different.
Bel rushes to the gate, hurdles it and drops to the earth beside the body. ‘I don’t even know if she’s breathing,’ she says. ‘Oh God, Jade, I think she’s really hurt.’
Jade just stands there. Bel glares up at her and swipes at her leg with a dusty hand. ‘Jade!’ she shouts. ‘Help me!’
Jade becomes suddenly animated and throws herself down beside them, grabbing Chloe’s hand – the one on the ground, not the one that lies beneath her back – and presses a thumb over the inside of her wrist like she’s seen the medics do on General Hospital. She feels nothing, but she doesn’t know what she’s feeling for, and anyway the beating of her own heart drowns everything else out. ‘Chloe?’ she says. Then repeats the name in a louder voice, as though this will somehow make a difference. ‘Chloe?’
She searches her mind for other things she’s seen people do with the unconscious on the telly. ‘Cold water,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘If we throw water in her face, it’ll wake her up.’
Bel has no experience of unconsciousness. But the assertion has the ring of sense. Certainly, a faceful of cold water would wake her up if someone threw it at her.
‘We’ve nothing to carry it in,’ she says, looking over at the stream. It’s a couple of hundred yards; there will be no chance that a running child could bring more than a few damp drops in their cupped hands.
‘Well, we’ll take her to it, then’ says Jade. ‘Come on.’
Bel eyes the silent rag doll doubtfully. ‘I don’t want to touch her. Look. She’s all over blood.’
Jade surprises herself with how practical her responses are, how matter-of-fact. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘You take her legs. I’ll take the top.’
Bel still looks queasy. ‘Her arm. That arm looks … please don’t hurt her arm.’
‘I think the damage is already done,’ says Jade.
The field is full of thistles. Jade has Chloe under the shoulders, her head flopping groundwards; sees body fluids smear themselves on her skirt and thighs, feels the scratch as she walks backwards through the plants. I won’t forget this, she thinks. This is a day I will remember all my life. She catches her heel on a tussock, staggers and almost goes down. Chloe’s head bounces, rebounds off the ground. Jade shivers as she feels the horrid scalp bash itself against the front of her knickers.
‘Oh God, let her be all right,’ pants Bel. ‘D’you think she’s all right? We need to get a grown-up. A grown-up will know what to do.’
Jade almost drops her end of their burden. ‘Are you mad?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at her, Bel. Look at the state of her! They’ll put us in prison.’
Bel’s red face gets redder as she grasps the gravity of their situation. ‘But …’ she protests, ‘it was an accident. We’ll tell them. It was an accident.’
‘Yer, right,’ jeers Jade. ‘And they’ll believe us, yeah?’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘Because my name’s Jade Walker, for a start.’
‘But I—’ begins Bel.
‘But you nothing. You’re with me. Everybody in this village’s been saying it’s a wonder a Walker hasn’t killed anybody yet. No. We need to get her woken up, and then we need to work out what to do next.’
Chloe emits a sort of gurgling exhalation. The girls looks down, each filled with a surge of sudden optimism; see the blue lips, the rolling eyes, and feel it drain away. ‘C’mon,’ says Jade. ‘We can wake her up. I know we can.’
She lifts the shoulders once more, and Bel takes hold of the ankles. Now they are trying to jog with their burden, tussocks impeding their way, the sun harsh in Bel’s eyes. They reach the edge of the stream. Low, cliff-like banks and a gritty, shallow bottom. A few feet to their left a cattle-wallow; the bank broken down on either side and, in between, a wide pool deep enough for large wet noses to drink their fill without having to strain out mouthfuls of mud. Jade nods towards it and the girls turn up the bank.
The field has been stocked recently. The slope is slippery, the floor six inches deep with grey-brown mud, the air thick with flies and cow-pats. They lurch down the slide with their burden, and find themselves having to drag their feet from the mud as it sticks to their soles. Jade loses a shoe, mutters a curse beneath her heaving breath. Wrenches backwards and lands on her arse, up to her neck in the water.
Chloe slips from her grasp, lands side-down. Bel, stuck in the mud herself, wobbles, lets go, flails and, coming abruptly free, falls forward on top of the others. She feels Chloe’s slimy face against her own, panics, thrashes in the murk, comes up gasping. Jade is down there, somewhere, forced underwater by the weight on top. Bel can see her feet kick, sees a starfish hand break the surface, grabs the wrist and hauls. Puts her weighted foot on a lichen-slippy rock and feels her feet go out from under her again. She lets go of Jade’s wrist and tries to find the bottom with her hands, to push back to the air. Under the surface, it’s particles and brown and bits of weed, the whoosh of bubbles stirred up by her struggling limbs.
She breaks the surface. Jade is on the other side of the pool, sliding backwards on her elbows, coughing and spitting, hair black with twigs and earth, a single mallow stem wound round her ear, the flower dangling, showy like a pirate’s piercing, by her left cheek. She feels it, swipes at it, panicked, and flings it out into the middle of the water.
It lands on Chloe’s half-submerged body. She is not moving. Her face is below the surface.
‘Oh Jesus,’ says Jade, and lunges back out into the pool. She grabs the back of Chloe’s top and flounders back to the bank. Bel throws herself after them. Together they manoeuvre the child on to stable ground, look desperately into her face for signs of life.
There’s duckweed hanging from her mouth, snagged on her gappy incisors.
‘She’s not breathing. She’s not breathing!’ Bel flops a lifeless wrist about; pats at lax white cheeks.
‘CPR,’ says Jade. She’s seen it time and time again, on General Hospital. The dead springing, coughing and weeping, back to life under the pumping fists of paramedics. She pushes Bel away, leans both palms on Chloe’s chest and pounds up and down from the hips. Keeps doing it, over and over, until, after five minutes, she hears something go crack inside and an oily bubble rises up from the child’s parted lips.
Chapter Forty-six
She finds the crumpled remains of a packet of cigarettes in her pocket: three Camel soft-top, a miniature lighter tucked beneath the foil: Jackie’s brand. She must have left them in here one of the many times she borrowed the fleece to go and stand in the garden. She looks at them for a moment, then thinks, Oh, what the hell. There’s no one to tell me not to any more, and it’s not as if I’m riding high on the longevity list.
She puts one in her mouth, lights it and inhales deeply, filtering out the ugly optimism of the dawn. It’s stale and harsh, and makes her ou
t-of-practice brain stagger under the force of the nicotine. She has to lean one hand against the station wall for a few seconds, to stop herself falling down. Goddamn, she thinks. You hardly notice the effects if you do it all the time, but tobacco is powerful stuff.
Martin stirs and utters a gurgle of mindless humanity. Amber looks down, sees that his blood has almost reached her feet. She steps back, repelled, and takes another drag on the cigarette. If he’s still bleeding, his heart’s still beating, she thinks. I have to wait till it stops. I need to be certain he’s dead before I call.
On the seafront, she hears a car engine start up, the crunch of tyres as it pulls out of its parking place. That’ll be her, she thinks. Please don’t let her change her mind. There’s been enough waste already. Our lives, this shrivelled, bitter existence, it has to stop at some point. The cycle of revenge and punishment and passing it on to the next generation, it has to stop. I won’t let it spread out, destroy her nice husband, those clean, safe little kids. What good would it do? Who would it help? Society. I know. Society. But let’s face it: society doesn’t really care who it blames, as long as it blames someone.
She takes another drag and walks over to where the coupler lies, blood and skin and hair entwined among the bolts and the butterfly nuts. The iron has been painted red against rusting, flakes chipped off where it’s seen impact. She picks it up, two-fingered, and dangles it in front of her face, strangely fascinated. Bet this won’t go down so well with Health and Safety, she thinks. Bet someone will lose their job over this.
She leans her arm out over the guardrail, and heaves the weight of the coupler out into the air. Watches as it spirals downward, is caught by a wave and sucked beneath. She can see it sink for a foot or so after it enters the water; is impressed that the Whitmouth brine is clean enough to allow any visibility at all. The sea will do its work. Nothing remains unscoured for long in those endless, restless depths. Even if they look, if they find it, if Kirsty’s fingerprints are still on it, there won’t be anything else to link her to the crime.
A sound attracts her attention. Martin has started to fit, there on the floor. His heels drum like pistons on the wood, fingers bone-straight and brittle. It won’t be long now. Even if she does call an ambulance, the chances that he will survive, she thinks, remembering the deaths she has seen before, are slim; his skin is blue and what remains of his lips are drawn back to show his wisdom teeth. But she’s not going to. There will be no one to bewail his passing, she’s sure of that, and if she’s going to make this sacrifice, she wants to ensure that it is not in vain.
She finishes the cigarette and drops it after the coupler. A gull swoops down in hope of a tasty titbit, sweeps on with a shriek of disgust. To her surprise she finds herself smiling. I should make the most of these last few minutes, she thinks. I suppose this is the last time I shall ever see the sea.
There’s a bench beside the station: white-painted wrought iron, a lovely view of Funnland. Beyond the walls, her friends – her erstwhile friends – will be finishing up: wiping down the final surfaces, packing away their gear with a yawn and a sigh of relief. She sits, and surveys the view: flags and bunting, the blue-and-white of striped canvas awnings, the shine of rain-soaked stones catching early-morning rays. Three tiny figures pick a slow route along the top of the rollercoaster: a maintenance crew, or some teenagers who got past Jason Murphy and are celebrating their sense of immortality. You’re not much of a place, Whitmouth. But you’re my place. The only place I’ve ever thought of, even if only for a while, as home. I shall miss you.
She lights another cigarette.
Another parting, a quarter-century ago. Amber remembers her mother, visiting her in the remand centre. Coming emptyhanded, wrapped in cashmere, looking older. Bel attempts to throw herself into her mother’s arms, and finds a hand extended, blocking her approach. ‘Don’t,’ says Lucinda. ‘Just don’t.’
They’re not allowed to be alone – Bel is slowly understanding that she will never, to all intents and purposes, be alone again – but the crop-haired weightlifter in charge affords them what privacy she can by sitting on the far side of the rec room. Bel sits on a stained, armless, tweed chair with tubular steel legs. Lucinda, after scanning her options, picks a moulded grey-plastic chair beside a table four feet away and perches on it gingerly, as though she is afraid of infection. Both seats are fixed to the floor: a precaution against fighting. She puts her bag on the table, leans an elbow watchfully on the strap, even though they are the only people there. Crosses one knee elegantly over the other. She wears graceful wedge-heeled boots in green leather.
‘How are you?’ She doesn’t sound more than politely concerned.
Bel responds as she’s been trained to from earliest childhood. She fixes a bright smile on her face and says, ‘I’m very well, thank you. How are you?’, as she has said to everyone who has asked her since the day of the murder. Lucinda is her first visitor – or the first one she knows personally, anyway – since the trial.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ says Lucinda. ‘I’m glad to hear you’re very well.’
Bel’s eyes fill with tears.
Lucinda pulls a face. ‘Oh, stop being such a baby,’ she says.
Bel hangs her head and seeks composure. Her mother has never liked displays of emotion; not from Bel, anyway.
‘How is everyone?’ she asks eventually.
‘How do you expect them to be?’ replies Lucinda.
‘I don’t …’ says Bel.
‘Michael almost divorced me,’ says Lucinda. ‘But, thank God, he’s changed his mind. He understands, you see. That I can’t be blamed for what you’ve done.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Bel, humbly. Looks down at the worn cuffs of her sweater, wonders how much longer this visit will last.
‘Anyway,’ says Lucinda, after a pause. ‘I just came to let you know we’re leaving. Going to Singapore.’
Bel doesn’t answer. It’s already clear to her that it’s all over, on the outside, that the house is locked up and the family fled. No one has made much effort to hide the press coverage from her; she’s seen the boards over the windows, the steel grille on the door, like the burnt-out wastes of Broadwater Farm. The Walkers have been rehoused, their names changed, the younger children taken into care and the eldest scattered to the winds. Her own people – there’s less help from the state if you’ve got bank accounts. Less interference, too.
‘The bank’s transferred him,’ continues Lucinda. ‘Kind of them, really. But then again, he’s good at what he does. Popular, too, though I don’t suppose you’ll appreciate that. Anyway, that’s it. I dare say we won’t come back. So that’s us, condemned to life as international gypsies, thanks to you. I thought I’d tell you. Let you know.’
‘OK,’ says Bel passively. In a way she feels relieved, knowing more clearly what the future holds. They’re not going to fight for her. She’s on her own.
‘Right, well.’ Lucinda starts to root in her bag. For a moment, Bel has a wild thought that she might have brought a gift. A keepsake for the years ahead, some small token that will remind her that she did indeed once have a family. Her mother’s hair, usually immaculate, is unruly, tied back in a ponytail, roots showing among the candystripe blond. She’s developed lines, she notices, around her mouth, in the six months since Bel last saw her. I did that, thinks Bel. It’s all my fault.
Lucinda finds what she is looking for, brings it out: a handkerchief, embroidered: her initials in one corner. She blows her nose delicately; brings her oversized sunglasses down from their perch on her head and covers her eyes.
‘At least your sister’ll get some chance of a normal life,’ says Lucinda. ‘Without people knowing. People looking at her. Wondering.’
‘Yes,’ says Bel.
‘How could you do it, Annabel?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t meant. We didn’t mean to – it just happened …’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Lucinda d
ismisses the crime as though it were some petty gossip, some vandalism, some schoolyard scrap. ‘Not that. For Christ’s sake. I mean those lies. All those lies about Michael.’
‘They weren’t lies,’ she says defiantly. ‘I told you. I told, but you wouldn’t listen. They weren’t lies.’
Lucinda doesn’t want to hear it. Has never wanted to hear it: not about the cellar, or the stables, or the late-night visits when her mother is deep in Valium dreams.
‘I tried to tell you, Mummy,’ she says, ‘but you wouldn’t listen.’
And she won’t listen now. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. He paid for your lawyer, for God’s sake. How could you do something like that to him?’
‘Mummy—’ she tries one more time.
‘Oh, shut up. I just wanted to tell you, that’s all. What I think of you. That man’s brought you up since you were a toddler. He took you on out of the goodness of his heart. He’s given us everything. I can’t believe you’d repay us like that. How did you get to be like this, Annabel?’
You taught me, she thinks. I learned that lying was the best chance I had. She stares and shakes her head. There is nothing to say. Nothing that will be heard, anyway.
In the corner, the corrections officer turns a page of Woman’s Own pointedly. Lucinda glances at her, then gets briskly to her feet. ‘I’m done,’ she commands. ‘I’m ready to go now.’
The woman slowly puts the magazine down and starts to pull her keychain from the pocket of her navy trousers. Her expression is inscrutable; the expression of someone who’s storing every detail for later dissection. Lucinda turns back to Bel, gives her the Look again.
‘Dear God,’ she says. ‘You always were a little liar. From the minute you could talk.’
She wheels on her elegant green heel and marches towards the door. The officer points at Bel’s chair. ‘Stay there,’ she says.
The door bangs to behind them.
