The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  Without realising it, she had curled up into a small ball.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Is it the thought of flying? You could have more hypnotism like you did for Africa.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s nothing.’ She forced herself to breathe, her eyes tight shut against him.

  ‘For God’s sake, Kate. You’ve got to let her grow up some time.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was tinier even than she felt.

  ‘And you’ve got to sort yourself out, too.’

  Not this again. Kate wished she could stick her fingers in her ears.

  ‘Get out, get in touch with some friends,’ Mark went on. ‘Or you’re going to be awfully sad and alone when she’s gone. And that’s too much of a burden to place on Tilly’s shoulders.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And mine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He lay down, facing away from her.

  ‘Mark?’ she said, reaching out to touch him.

  ‘Look, love. I need to sleep. I’ve got to be in for a six a.m. conference call with Tokyo.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Eventually, his breathing became slow and even, and the tell-tale gentle snore started at the back of his throat. Kate watched the moon-etched shadows of the atrium edge across the sweep of white-carpeted bedroom floor, marking the passage of her sleepless night, and the thoughts she tried to keep at bay seeped in, until she was inundated.

  EMMA

  31 July 1980, 3 p.m. Athens. OTE office, Patission St.

  I’ve been here for ages, waiting for the phone-office people to place a reverse charge call to my parents. The room is cavernous, brown with dust and stinky with stale sweat. It’s hot, hot, hot and I feel so weak I can hardly hold my pen.

  My body still aches and I’m sweating into the cuts and grazes from when The French Shit pushed me up against that wall. Also, I now have about a million mosquito bites and a good few of them are sore and infected.

  I’ve been here for half an hour already, holding a ticket with 347 on it. Every now and then, a board clicks to a new set of numbers, but they don’t seem to be in any sort of order. Mine hasn’t come up yet – unless I’ve missed it. Like everything else here, the system is chaotic. The fact that, even with English, French and a little German, I don’t even understand the basic roots of the language doesn’t help, nor that the alphabet is all over the place. Ps for Rs, indeed.

  It was a LONG train ride to get here. Two days and two-and-a-bit nights in the corner of a crowded eight-seater compartment on the slowest train in the universe, which seemed to stop at every village on the way. Yugoslavia is one endless, big, dusty, hot country and, from the look of the people getting on and off the train, it’s extremely poor. With my bruises, bites and blisters and the way I’m feeling increasingly spaced-out, subtracted from the world around me, it was a surreal and uncomfortable ride.

  At least I could read again. I’ve given up on Henry James, though. I don’t think I’ll ever return to The Bostonians – not just because it is a bit of a slog, but also because I’ll always associate it with The French Shit. So I read The Tin Drum (weird book) and then Thomas Mann. I’d rather read about death in Venice than tempt fate and run the risk of experiencing it with a visit. But it was disappointing. I know it’s supposed to be beautiful and about Dionysus and Apollo and all that, but I can’t view it as anything but the story of an old creep now.

  That’s how I view the world now. A place full of old creeps.

  Ugh.

  I suppose one good thing is that, as I haven’t had periods now for two years, there’s no danger of me being pregnant. Can you imagine the horror?

  Yesterday I stood in the corridor outside my compartment and hung my head out of the train window to watch Athens approach like a slate-grey cloud shimmering in the hazy plain. There’s a heatwave at the moment – it’s been the hottest July ever recorded, according to the guy at the desk in the Peta Inn, where I’m staying on the roof for about twenty-five pence a night.

  The pollution here is frightening – you can literally see the yellowy haze as you walk along the pavement, and every street seems to be choked with cars, engines revving, horns blasting. I’ve been here just one night, and already my skin’s coated with a grimy layer of dust.

  The upside of looking like a filthy old tramp is that with the dirt, the black shroud dress thing (which I’ve worn for days now) and my Sid Vicious hair, I’ve only had a few ‘tsk tsks’ from a couple of men. Most seem happy to ignore me and carry on drinking beer, flinging their worry beads around and staring at passers-by.

  But, horrors, I thought I saw The French Shit today. A man walking ahead of me could have been him. He, too, suddenly stopped, turned and walked back towards me. I felt a sharp shock, prickling pins and needles all over my face. My feet wanted to run away, my hands wanted to attack him, to claw the flesh from his face.

  The violence I feel towards him shocks me.

  But I was on a crowded street and nothing happened. And anyway, of course, it wasn’t him. I’m thousands of miles away from him. All this man wanted was to go into the kafeneion I had just passed.

  I’ve got to pull myself together. I can’t let him get the better of me like this.

  It doesn’t feel like Europe here. It’s more like how I imagine Asia might be. The men seem to be more polite, less like they think they can do whatever they like with you. And today I saw a ferocious old woman telling off a group of noisy young men. Looks like they’re kept in order here.

  My bed is a grey-stained mattress on the top of a metal bunk bed crammed with ten others out on the roof of the hostel. If I wanted, I could reach out and hold the hand of the boy sleeping in the bunk next to mine (I don’t want, though). He’s called Mick, and he’s an acid-casualty Australian of about twenty-five, whose beard and hair cover his entire face. But he’s quite nice. I don’t think he’s a threat. Even so, because it’s a mixed dorm, I keep my Swiss Army knife open and ready under my day bag, which I use as a pillow.

  I was tempted to up the nightly fee to fifty pence and take a bed in a room downstairs (which would still be mixed), but the guy at the desk – Dimitri – said it was better on the roof – cooler and more airy. And it never rains, he says. I can believe that. Everything is parched here, and filthy. Piss just dries to stinky stains on the pavement. Dog turds look like they might crumble.

  And it is cooler up here at night. But as soon as the sun is up – which is about six in the morning – you start sweating; by seven it’s impossible to stay in your sleeping bag any more. And there’s nowhere to go to cool down, or even to get any air.

  Shit. So, after two hours, my call got placed. But there was no bloody answer. My parents were out. Where the fuck did they go? They never go out.

  I need to talk to them. Not to tell them – just to hear their voices.

  Don’t they know that?

  Emma James: all alone in a big, scary world.

  KATE

  2013

  ‘Hiya,’ Tilly said, coming up behind Kate, who was hovering on the threshold of Martha’s bedroom, deciding what she was going to say.

  With her own space too full of her own mess – jumbled piles of clean and dirty clothes, used cotton-wool balls, bathwater-crinkled magazines – Tilly had been using her sister’s bed to sort out her packing for her fast-encroaching trip. Despite her more sensible conscious mind telling her not to be so stupid, Kate couldn’t bat away the gut reaction that this was a desecration of her dead daughter’s room.

  But it was something of a consolation to see that Tilly had adopted her own method of packing: laying all one might need neatly on a bed, then gradually editing. Although Kate rarely went abroad – a fear of flying meant that the African field trip for Martha’s Wish was the only time she had done so in decades – she always used the technique to pack for Mark’s business trips. Had she any women friends, she would have hesitated to admit it in front of them, but she took enormous pleasure in getting his beauti
ful shirts pressed into tissue for travel, making sure his Italian leather washbag was well-stocked, ensuring he had the right number of clean socks and underwear, with an extra pair of each just for luck.

  That, and looking after the house and the family were the least she could do, given the second stab at life he had unwittingly granted her.

  Even so, irritation at Tilly thrummed inside her, curdling the non-fat yoghurt that had been her lunch. Seeing her dead daughter’s space taken over like that – even by her living offspring – hit her in the stomach like a woodcutter’s axe. Particularly because, laid out on the bed like some photograph of a soldier’s kit in an army recruitment booklet, were the tools Tilly was amassing for what – again, despite her rational self – Kate couldn’t help seeing as her defection.

  Tilly would know all this, of course, so when she came up behind her mother in the doorway, she tried to win her round with a remorselessly bouncing enthusiasm.

  ‘Look,’ she said, steering Kate into the room that recently, on separate occasions, both she and Mark had respectively accused her of preserving in aspic and amber.

  Kate’s shoulders stiffened. There had always been an unspoken rule that nothing must be touched here, that the books that Martha had alphabetised in their shelves would remain untouched except for their quarterly dusting, that the drawers would retain their neatly folded and arranged contents, that the pink sheepskin throw would remain smoothed down on the bed where she died under home hospice care.

  It had been eight years now, and of course Kate had found a place for her loss, had housed it so that she could carry on living. But still sometimes, like a deeply lodged piece of shrapnel shifting and tearing flesh, the unbearable fact of it would come back to visit her.

  Kate saw the preservation of this room as a sticking plaster for those moments. It proved to her that her youngest daughter had existed, that she had been a force in this world.

  Little Martha had been the tidy one; the one who took after Kate in that respect – although Kate had never been entirely sure which of her own personality traits were inherent and which she had adopted as a means of survival.

  ‘It’s not as if we need the space,’ she had once argued to Mark when he broached the subject of, as he put it, ‘repurposing’ Martha’s bedroom.

  ‘It could be a yoga room for you,’ he said.

  ‘But I’ve got the mezzanine. And it’s on the girls’ floor.’

  ‘Well, a living room, then, for Tills.’

  ‘I don’t want her living in a different room to us.’

  He had looked exasperated. But he would never win.

  So, as Kate surveyed the piles of going-away gear on the bed, she wondered if Tilly’s rule-flouting might even be a tactic, agreed between father and daughter. Some sort of cod-therapeutic strategy to force her past what they saw as her tardy inability to surrender the room to the present.

  But Kate thought she had done very well, considering, what with the charity and everything. Wasn’t she entitled to this one indulgence, this shrine to her daughter?

  Tilly brushed brightly past her and threw her a slim, olive-green package from the bed. ‘One point five kilos,’ she said. ‘Fast and easy to pitch, with exceptional wind-resistance should I get caught up in the Meltemi or the Mistral.’

  Meltemi. Mistral.

  Kate turned the tiny tent over in her hand, marvelling despite herself at its lightness. ‘You’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘And look at this.’ Tilly tossed over what Kate took to be a pouched-up cagoule. ‘Ultra-compact sleeping bag.’

  Kate gave it a squeeze. ‘Very nice. Tents and sleeping bags used to take up half a rucksack.’

  ‘Like you’d know,’ Tilly snorted, rolling her eyes.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You “didn’t have the luxury” of going off backpacking, did you?’

  Kate looked at her daughter, who had just – knowingly, perhaps – tested the limit of her sense of humour. She didn’t know how to react. Should she upbraid her privileged daughter for mocking her unlucky upbringing story where her parents were taken in a car crash when she was seventeen, leaving her to fend for herself?

  But, seeing Tilly stand there, looking as if she wished she could unsay what she had just let out, Kate didn’t have the heart.

  And could she really tell her daughter off for poking fun at something she thought was true but which, in fact, was a dog-old lie?

  No.

  ‘What’s this?’ Kate said instead, picking up a packet of pills from the bed. The writing was too small for her to read without her glasses.

  Pills and Greece. The idea – or memory, rather – gave her a dun feeling in the pit of her stomach. This whole bloody business was stirring up sediment she thought she had packed down many years ago.

  ‘Water purifier tablets,’ Tilly said.

  ‘Will you need them in Greece?’ Kate asked. ‘Surely they have mains water everywhere now?’

  ‘I’m planning on straying off the beaten track, though.’

  Kate tried to stem the image this added to those already swirling inside her. ‘Not too far, though, I hope,’ she said, smiling thinly. She put the tablets down and picked up a Swiss Army penknife, feeling its familiar weight in her hand.

  ‘I had one of these, once.’

  ‘That’s for the corkscrew, only, of course,’ Tilly said. ‘But there’s also a screwdriver, and the blade will be useful for cutting up tomatoes and stuff.’

  ‘While you stroll along some deserted mountain path, off the beaten track.’

  ‘That’ll be me.’ Tilly smiled and took Kate’s hand. ‘I’m going to find the real Greece that most travellers don’t ever get to see. An authentic way of life that’s disappearing in Europe.’

  Kate put the penknife back with the other gear on Martha’s bed. She looked at her daughter – so clear, so determined, so sensible compared to how she herself had been.

  She shook her head and smiled. ‘Just take care, Tills, won’t you?’

  Tilly leaped forward and hugged her so forcefully that she nearly knocked her over.

  ‘I knew you’d come round, Mum!’

  Kate rested her head on her daughter’s shoulder and closed her eyes, breathing in her scent of clean washing, and apple shampoo, and all things good.

  Of course Tilly would be fine. It was absurd to think otherwise.

  EMMA

  1 August 1980, 2 a.m. Athens. Peta Inn roof.

  At last things are beginning to look up!

  Went to a bar tonight with Ena, this girl from the bunk below me. She’s about twenty, and Australian too, like poor drug-addled Mick on the bunk to my right. She’s a bit of a hippy, although she said she thought my Sid Vicious hair’s pretty cool. Amazingly, she’s been here for two whole weeks (don’t know how anyone could bear that), so she knows the ropes. The only place she says you can escape the heat is the National Gardens, where you can spend the hot midday hours under the trees. But if you fall asleep, the guards come and wake you by prodding you with a stick.

  She also told me that you can buy speed and Valium at the chemists here, and that you can’t buy Rizlas because they grow tobacco in Greece and apparently people would just raid the fields and roll their own if they had papers.

  I’m not sure if I believe that – I reckon it’s more to do with discouraging dope smoking – Let’s Go says that if you get caught with cannabis in Greece you are in really big trouble. Not that I’m in any danger of that. It just makes me fall asleep. It’s a stupid person’s drug. But speed, now then, that’s a different matter! I’m a speed queen, not a dope fiend.

  Before I left home, I even thought about bringing a couple of baggies of sulphate with me to keep me going, but I didn’t fancy getting caught at customs. Poor old Mum was so amazed that I could stay up all night doing my A Level revision! And it helped me get through those awful, boring Ripon parties with the vomiting boys and the crying girls.

  Stop writing abo
ut that now, Em! All that life is dead to you. You’ve only got your brilliant future to look forward to.

  You have to remember that. ALL the bad stuff is in the past: Dull Ripon, The French Shit, all that. Don’t dwell.

  Back to the good stuff: Ena!!!

  She’s told me not to buy Marlboro when I run out of papers, because they’re too expensive. What I need to get is Karelia, which are twenty drachs a packet: crazy cheap. She gave me one of hers and it was rough, like smoking sandpaper, but I could get used to it, I suppose.

  After our third Amstel, she held out her hand and slipped me four little pills. Valium, she said. Mixed with the alcohol ‘it really kicks the buzz up’.

  Sounded good to me.

  So, here it is for the record: If you drink three bottles of Amstel, take four Valium, then chase it down with another bottle, then yes, your buzz is kicked. It’s like being really, really stoned – the silly part of being drunk is heightened, but you also feel chilled and slowed down somehow. Like you just don’t care.

  (You have to get it right, though, Ena says. A little too much of either pills or booze and you end up dead.)

  Not caring is good for me right now. It’s also a pretty effective method of pain control. My bruises and cuts and the dull ache between my legs are but whispers of their former selves.

  Me and Ena stayed at the bar talking on and on until it closed. She’s a reader too, and we riffed on Hermann Hesse and Emily Brontë and D.H. Lawrence. I can’t remember what, really. I was pretty wrecked by the time we left.

  A creepy man came up to us and said, ‘Hello, baby,’ to Ena. She just told him to fuck right off out of her face. I’m going to do that next time!

  Although I was tempted, I didn’t mention Marseille and The French Shit. I’m not going to shout out about how I am a victim, how I let all that happen to me. It’s not a good image to put out to someone when you first meet them. It’s too heavy. And I don’t want to keep on reliving it.