by C. J. Skuse
I grabbed his ears and slammed his head back on the sand. If it hadn’t been for the wave, I’d have killed him then.
But it ploughed into us, a real strong one, breaking us apart. Then I was in the water, breathless with the shocking coldness of it. I could still feel the sand underneath my feet, but I couldn’t keep my feet on the ground; I kept floating away and ducking under the water, gasping as the sandy brine filled my mouth. I came up to catch my breath, and another huge wave came over the top of me. And another one.
I couldn’t find the surface again.
Then this black shape was in front of me. Coming at me faster than I could move away. Until…
BAM! My whole body was smashed against a hard post, one of the jetty stilts. Then I heard the dull gurgling of the sea in my ears. And then just – darkness.
Now I’m sitting here with you.
And that’s the thing I can’t get over.
That trying to kill him took my life.
‘It’s not fair, is it?’
27
A Shock for All
It’s daylight. The clock on the wall of the café says 6.01 a.m. I’m not wet any more. I look out to sea. The tide is way out now, revealing a thick golden bar of sand.
I ask you if you came back just for me. You say yes. Someone always comes back. You say I needed to see a friendly face.
I’m glad it’s you, Jess. I’d forgotten how beautiful you are.
The café door chimes, and a woman enters, then another. More staff. The early shift for the lifeboat crew, and the overnighters just coming off a shift on the bypass. Whipped prides itself on being the only place for miles around that opens from dawn until dusk. The radio comes on over the speakers. Some DJ on the South-West’s favourite radio station is promising ‘non-stop hits all day long’, and appealing for listeners to send in their old bras.
I look back through the window and see the boardwalk through the window. Some police are still milling around like luminous ants. It’s still taped off.
You tell me it’s going to be difficult for me, but that you’re here. Everything will be OK in the end. I find that hard to believe. You say that, now I’ve told you the whole story, I can begin to get over it. I find that hard to believe as well. It’s too soon, I say. I’m only seventeen. I did nothing wrong.
You say I already know the answer to that.
I’m sitting beside the café window when I see the man running up the beach and I instantly know it’s washed ashore. The sand flicks up behind him as he sprints. And he’s screaming.
His face is alive with fear. He’s running so hard to get away from it, what he’s found. In those brief moments, I am the only person in the café to see him. But, within seconds, the quiet crumbles into chaos.
‘Somebody! Help!’
‘What’s he saying?’
‘Did he say a body?’
Someone calls my name, but I don’t turn around. I keep walking, out of the café, into the morning air, along the Esplanade, down the steps and onto the wet sand, like the sea is a magnet and I am metal.
People overtake me. Someone shouts, ‘Call the police.’ Thudding footsteps, snatches of breath. The sand’s covered in a billion worm hills and tiny white shells. A group of crows squawks nearby. They’re all clustered around an object, pecking at it.
‘Let the police handle it.’
‘Don’t look. Don’t look.’
I keep walking towards the mound, until I can see for myself what the man was running from. Until I can see for myself what I have done.
And I do see it. It becomes clearer with every footstep. It’s wearing my jogging bottoms. My hoody. It has my hair. It’s asleep but soaking wet.
It’s me.
I stare down at my bloated, bleached face on the wet sand, surrounded by tiny mirror pools and broken tree branches. One of my arms is slung out. The other is rounded, like I’m singing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’. I almost laugh. A tiny crab crawls into my open mouth.
‘God, it’s so strange.’
I know, you say.
Some other people have gathered round, a couple of builders in big brown work boots and two waitresses from the café. One waitress has her hand over her mouth. One of the builders is swearing, dialling 999. Another builder is taking off his jumper. He lays it gently over my head. One of the waitresses gets out her phone and clicks onto YouTube – one way to get more followers. The third builder rips the phone from her hand and hoys it into the mud.
‘Oi!’
‘Sue me!’
‘Where’s Max?’ I ask you.
You tell me he’s been at the police station all night.
‘All night? What happened exactly after I… after the waves?’
You take my hand and, as quick as one movie scene cuts to another, it’s night-time again. Last night. Except it’s all blurry, smudged at the edges, just a memory. I’m standing on the pavement, between Max’s roughly parked Audi and the rusty old Jeep from the farm. I’m watching myself and Neil arguing on the jetty. You stand beside me, on the pavement. Corey’s at the top of the jetty. Fallon’s next to him. They’re holding hands. Neil’s brandishing the knife. I watch him threaten me. I see myself launch at him, sending us both overboard onto the sand below. We’re tussling. I’m punching. I’m pulverising him. My fists ache, I’m punching so hard. All I can hear is the rush of the tide as it storms the shore and pounds the stilts of the jetty. Then the waves break us apart and I disappear under the water but Neil is washed up. He gets to his feet and starts stumbling towards dry land, spluttering.
I am nowhere. That must be when I died.
Max doesn’t know it. He runs to the end of the jetty and dives off, straight into the sea and disappears. His head comes up, he dives down again.
‘He’ll kill himself. Don’t let him, Jess,’ I say. ‘Please, stop him. Do something!’
But you tell me to watch. The wind howls around us like wolves and there’s a thumping noise of someone running down the jetty at full pelt, like a rugby player running for the end zone. I don’t recognise them at first – they’re in a white hoody. It’s not Fallon or Corey, they’re both still there. No, it’s Zane. He dives in after Max.
‘Where the hell are the police?’ shouts Corey. ‘They should be here by now, Pete called them ages ago!’
Fallon’s watching Neil stumbling down the beach, getting away. And she runs after him. Fallon and Corey chase Neil down as he runs with a twisted ankle back up the seafront, sopping wet and coughing up seawater. Corey rugby-tackles him to the ground.
‘He’s never played rugby in his life,’ I say. You smile at me.
Fallon sits on his legs, taking off her belt and handing it to Corey so he can roughly tie Neil’s hands behind his back. He’s not even fighting back.
‘What about Max though? Is he going to be all right?’ I ask, going back to the sea wall. I can taste salt in my throat.
You point back to the beach. Zane’s pulling him out, dragging him out of the water. He’s struggling, he wants to go back in, but Zane’s too strong for him. He’s out of breath, but shouting at him. I can’t hear them at first over the waves.
‘She’s gone! You’ll drown if you go back in there. She’s gone, Max.’
*
In a heartbeat, we’re back to the daylit beach. My body lying crudely among seaweed and wet branches. More people stand around. More people start getting their phones out. A woman in wellies and a pink anorak rubs a tear from her cheek; yet she won’t look away.
They’ve had search and rescue boats out all night, you tell me, but the sea had swallowed me whole. And now the early morning tide has spat me out again.
There are sirens behind us on the jetty and the builders start moving people back.
‘So I died because I tried to kill him?’
You say nothing.
‘Why me?’
You won’t answer.
‘Why won’t you tell me? Why am I still angry, even though there’s
no life left?’
You say, in time, that will go. But I don’t believe you.
‘I didn’t learn my lesson in life, so what’s the point learning it now?’
The police set up a white tent around my body and usher all the gawpers back, until they’re behind a cordon near the jetty.
‘Can I go back?’ I ask. ‘I mean, if I’ve learnt my lesson, can I be alive again? I’ve seen it on films. People learn their lessons and they get sent back. Can we do that?’
You say it doesn’t work like that.
‘But this is crap. This is a crap way to end a life. To end my life. That’s it? That’s it? No more anything? What about Max? What about my dad, is he going to be OK? And Fallon and Corey? I know I pushed things too far but come on! What about Zane? Zane’s not all right, he hurt himself. I need to go back there, Jess. I need to help them.’
You tell me I already have. You tell me everything will be all right.
But still I don’t believe you.
‘Trust me.’
28
Away on Their Own
What the living never find out is that dying is actually OK. It’s them who have to do all the suffering, the people who stay behind. I don’t feel rage now, or resentment or anything. I don’t feel the urge to punch walls or pummel punchbags. And I don’t itch. You say we can stay as long as we need to. You tell me the dead don’t leave until their living are ready to lose them. I’m glad that’s the way it is. I just wish they all knew that. I’m still here with them.
You keep me away from the raw grief, the awful first few weeks. I don’t want to see that, anyway; I know how it goes, because I felt it when you died. So we don’t hang around our houses and we don’t go to the places we know they’ll be. Instead, we wander, and we watch other things to keep ourselves occupied. The one good thing about dying is that you can go anywhere, do anything. I’d always thought Heaven was a big white place where everyone sits around in white clothes talking about beautiful things, but it’s not; not for me, anyway. My heaven is everywhere. It’s walking around, smelling flowers I’d never noticed, going to places I never knew existed. Walking, not running. It’s having fun with a friend and laughing all the time. That’s my Heaven. It always has been.
I still see the odd thing I’m not meant to in those first few weeks. My dad sobbing as he puts the shopping into the boot in Tesco car park. Fallon and Corey taking the baby down to the seafront and looking at all the flowers people have left. Max going down there and ripping apart the flowers, bunch by bunch. People in the town I never met have left them there. People I went to school with. People who watched me run at Area Trials or County Champs and who’ve never forgotten it. Pete Hamlin leaves me some roses.
I see Max and Corey and Fallon going to the undertakers with my dad, the day before my funeral. They want to see my casket, lid closed, so it’s not such a shock for them tomorrow morning. They’re all still sucking on the pastilles my dad gave them in the car. I can hear them clicking against their teeth. I can taste the blackcurrant in the back of my own throat.
My casket is wicker, I don’t know why they chose that, but it’s quite nice, I suppose. The sides are laced with lemon ribbon and there’s little lemon bows all along the lid. Max places his hand on the top, and Fallon puts her hand on his, then Corey too. They stay like that for minutes, until there’s a knock at the door and Zane walks in. He looks embarrassed. He’s late. His boss at Lidl is an asshole. He puts both his hands on top of theirs, and they all cry together.
I don’t go inside the crematorium the next day. I wait outside on a bench, reading an Order of Service someone has dropped and listening to birds in the high trees. They chose a nice picture of me for the front. I’m holding my County Champs trophy and biting my gold medal. I look at the floral tributes laid out in the courtyard. A taxi pulls up about ten minutes into the service and my mum gets out of the back, dressed in a black skirt suit about twenty years too young and two sizes too small for her. She’s looking old. Even in death, I am such a bitch.
You come out and give me the edited highlights from the service when it’s all over. How Dad and my brothers carried me on their shoulders, joined by Max, Zane and Corey. How Dad broke down in his eulogy when he referred to me as his ‘Little Fish’. How Ollie and David and David’s husband Jack stood beside him throughout like his soldiers. How they all held hands. How Celestina, my dad’s girlfriend, was there too. How she’d cried, even though she’d never met me.
How my four friends recited a poem together, a poem you had written yourself, that Max had found in one of your notebooks. The poem was called ‘Five Go Adventuring’. You wrote it about us. How you were always on the outside, while the five of us were ‘a solid circle of burning wonder and magic, all on fire with happy youth’.
Max helped Dad and my brothers choose the music and my favourite song played as my wicker casket disappeared behind the red curtains while everyone filed out. Only Max could have suggested that.
They all go to a nearby pub for my wake. Pete Hamlin’s there. My dad shakes his hand and pulls him into a hug. He looks strange in a suit. He tells my dad he’s moving back to London soon to run a gym with his sister. He says he’s never seen anyone my age with as much fire in her belly as me. My dad agrees. They hug again.
I make myself known to them; you can do that, when you’re dead. As my brother Ollie stands at the bar, I flick his ear. He looks around, but thinks nothing else of it. I do it again on his other ear while he’s chatting to Corey – he looks annoyed when he sees there’s no one behind him, and then his face relaxes, like he knows. David comes back from the buffet with two plates for him and Jack. I bite a corner of his cheese and pickle sandwich when he’s not looking and watch his reaction – his face trying to work out a reasonable explanation but only coming up with a smile.
Dad’s saying goodbye to people at the door. I walk behind him, step on tiptoes and blow slightly on the back of his neck. He stops, his eyes dart from left to right. He closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out, opens them again and they’re watery. He doesn’t cry and he doesn’t say anything, just carries on saying his goodbyes. But he knows I haven’t gone yet. They all do.
29
Five Have a Wonderful Time
I want to go to the trial. It starts at the end of the following summer, almost a year to the day after the night I drowned. My mum comes back from Mykonos for that too. She brings Firat with her this time. He seems nice enough, another pushover like Dad; he tries to shake Dad’s hand, but Dad refuses. Mum chooses a quiet moment during recess to ask Dad for a divorce. Dad gets in first and presents her with the papers from his solicitor. Sucker-punched. Neither of my brothers speak to her this time. They stay beside Dad like two marble pillars, strong and silent.
Neil’s lost a lot of weight. He has to be helped onto the stand by a couple of guards. Every single detail of what he’s done comes out. I’d always been worried that four years and no evidence meant what he did could never be proved – that my selfish silence meant he’d get away with it. But it’s been quite the opposite – my death has caused a landslide.
Max gets the best lawyer money can buy, Tamara Strallen-Sheppard, who is based in London but flies all over the world. And brick by brick she dismantles Neil’s throne. That’s the point of her whole case – Neil has made himself untouchable with his money; a king amongst peasants. “But remove the king’s court, remove the sycophants and the money and what is the king but just a man? Just one lone, pathetic man with delusions of grandeur.” She makes his defence lawyer look like a small boy on his first day of school.
The police have the diaries – six in all on the bookshelves, two more in the wardrobe and a journal hidden under the bed. Some of it’s hard to listen to, but I decide I must. This is where it ends now. Zane gives a witness statement – what he saw when he was a child himself, what I told him that day we went to the island.
Corey gives a witness statement too. He remembers everything abou
t the night I died – Max with the knife, my argument with Neil. The defence tries to discredit him – it was a blustery night, he has hearing difficulties, mobility difficulties. There’s no way he could have heard much at all. But Corey is so strong. He knows what he saw, he knows what he heard. His replies are faultless. They don’t know how marvellous Corey can be. I almost pity them.
Then Fallon takes the stand and her statement proves to be the most damning yet. She knows the location of my baby’s grave – under the smallest stone in the Pirate Graveyard on Ella’s Island. She’d placed it in a coil of toilet paper inside a small rectangular biscuit tin she’d found in one of our kitchen cupboards; a French shortbread tin that my parents brought back from their honeymoon in Normandy. Dad had been using it for cookie cutters.
The trial is halted while the police dig up the grave and perform tests. The tests prove positive. It’s definitely been there for five years. It’s definitely Neil’s baby.
And then it’s all just a matter of time as more evidence piles up. Two laptops from Neil’s home office, loaded with hidden folders of girls, are presented by the prosecution.
Jo Rittman hasn’t spoken since the trial. She had a complete mental breakdown two weeks after he was arrested. Auntie ‘Call me Manda’ Manda booked her into the Priory. New buyers took over JoNeille just before Christmas. Max hasn’t spoken to her since. I don’t know if he ever will again. He knows how to live without a mum. He’s got that off me.
But the trump card was a living, breathing witness statement from a living breathing witness to Neil’s crimes – his niece, Shelby Gilmore. She’d been molested from an early age, earlier than both of us. She was so nervous at the trial that her hands were shaking. She drank a whole jug of water throughout her cross-examination and the defence lawyer was brutal. He brought up her many failed relationships, he knew about her and Max and the six guys she’d slept with in the past year alone. He put all of it down to her being ‘naturally over-sexed’ and made her go over what Neil had done to her, over and over and over again.
