The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  As he lies there, dazed, blood at the corner of his mouth, Beattie jumps on top of him again, gripping him firmly with her thighs.

  So those were his true colours, revealed. While he played the lover boy with me, he attacked Beattie.

  What was that about?

  I’ve thought about it over and over and I’ve come to the conclusion that after we arrived on Ikaria he tipped over into some sort of psychosis. I don’t know what triggered it. Being too far from home? All the drinking and the pills? Or just some random chemical imbalance that happened to trigger itself at that exact moment, when it was most dangerous to all of us.

  For a second, I waver, watching him trapped there, bound on the dusty, rocky earth, blood mingling with spit around the gag where he has cut his lip or bitten his tongue. For a second, I feel pity. What if he is sick? If he can’t help himself?

  But then, as Beattie pulls the ouzo and Valium out of her bag, her dress rides up and I see the purple, blue and green bruises, the cross-hatching of scratches and cuts that almost entirely cover her left leg and, I know, her back and buttocks, too.

  He did that. And worse. A lot worse.

  We roll him onto his back. I kneel, jamming his head between my knees. He struggles to get free, but we have him now. He’s not going anywhere.

  Beattie pops ten Valium out of the blister pack. I undo the belt, prise the knickers out of his mouth and, by pinching his nose and forcing his chin down, hold his jaws open. Beattie throws the pills at the back of his throat in a way that reminds me of Mum worming the cats back home. Then she unscrews the bottle and fills his blooded mouth with ouzo. I force his jaw shut and we make him swallow. We keep on going until all the ouzo is used up, and Jake is groaning and retching.

  I fix the gag back on him, although it is hardly necessary. He is already nearly insensible with the dose of drugs and alcohol we have just dealt out to him.

  Throwing the bottle to one side where it smashes on the rocks, Beattie, all afire, rips his T-shirt, and tears it off him, past his bound arms. Then she scrambles to her feet and pulls off his trousers, leaving him completely naked.

  This hadn’t been in the plan, but it seems the right thing to do.

  His thin, muscular body looks deceptively beautiful in the sunlight, struggling on the ground out in front of me.

  His fear and his pain are more beautiful to me at that moment, though.

  Evil. That’s what it was. He was evil, not ill.

  I have to remember that.

  He tries to curl up to hide his withered penis.

  Perhaps he thought we were going to castrate him. I’m not saying that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind – it would have saved other women he might have come across.

  Beattie motions for me to get up. Then, pulling him by the hair, she tugs him to standing where he staggers, the blind drunkard of our making.

  It feels good, seeing him like that. Vulnerable, exposed, like I had been in Marseille, like Beattie was last night.

  ‘We’re going to play the Dangerous Game,’ Beattie says, launching into the next part of our plan. ‘Make you pay for what you did. We’re going to lead you on a little walk up here on this cliff. Right to the edge. Then you’re going to jump off.’

  Jake whimpers. He’s crying again, cowering, shaking his head. We have him.

  We weren’t planning to really make him jump over the edge.

  We just wanted to make him think he was jumping.

  That was my contribution to the plan, thanks to Miss Higgs who taught me King Lear for my A Level, who made us act out the scene where Edgar does the same thing to Gloucester.

  We wanted to give Jake, quite literally, the fright of his life. We reckoned he’d either collapse in terror, or, failing that, the ouzo and Valium would take him out long enough for us to get back to the cave, clear out all his and our own stuff and disappear on the midday ferry.

  That was the plan.

  Again, Jake whimpers, pleads.

  ‘Shut up, coward.’ Beattie nods to me. ‘Turn him.’

  I get hold of him and whirl him around four or five times.

  As he stands, swaying and dizzy, I pull out my penknife and rest the point on his back, at the base of his ribs.

  ‘If you don’t do as I say,’ I say to him. ‘I’m going to stick this knife in you.’

  He’s shaking his head like he’s trying to escape into another dimension.

  ‘Take a step,’ Beattie yells.

  ‘Do it.’ I jab the point so that it makes a tiny indent in his skin. A tiny nick.

  Falteringly, he takes a small step towards the edge of the cliff, which is about ten yards away from us.

  ‘Another,’ I shout.

  We keep on at him. About three yards away from the edge, we tell him to stop.

  ‘Can you feel the wind?’ Beattie cries. ‘Can you smell the sea beneath you?’

  A flock of seabirds wheels right over our heads, screaming at the rushing air.

  ‘I’m going to count to three,’ I tell him. ‘And you’re going to jump. If you don’t, we’re going to push you.’

  And this is where our plan goes wrong.

  Somehow, Jake manages to free his hands from the guy rope. Without warning, he turns and rams into Beattie, sending her flying backwards, away from the edge. Then he rips off his blindfold, tugs the gag from his mouth and wheels round in my direction, his eyes like cold, blue fire, his mouth a bloody hole.

  It all happens too quickly. I think he’s going to attack me, so I rush at him first and push him away from me, back up towards the cliff edge. Unsteady on his feet because of what we’ve tipped down his throat, he tumbles and trips backwards. Disoriented, thinking he’s falling over the edge of the cliff, he lets out a muffled scream and his body totters, half falling, half running in strange, almost comical backwards steps.

  But it isn’t funny at all.

  ‘Jake!’ I scream and run towards him, trying to grab him. But, because he is naked, there is nothing to hold on to.

  He’s still stumbling, upwards and backwards towards the actual edge of the cliff.

  And then he stumbles beyond it.

  Time hangs still. He hovers, suspended over nothingness, his face awful, full of the realisation of what has happened, what is about to happen. This is a picture I know I will remember all my life. Then I blink. When I open my eyes, he is no longer there. He’s disappeared beneath the craggy lip of the bluff.

  I don’t know what to do. I’m rooted to my spot. I pray that perhaps some bird, or some freakish gust of wind has somehow scooped him up and saved him.

  He deserved to suffer for what he did. Really suffer. But he didn’t deserve to die.

  No one deserves to die.

  Beattie scrambles to her feet, and looks at me, her mouth open in shock and disbelief.

  The wind howls around our ears, blowing grit into our eyes as we creep towards the cliff edge.

  We look down. The white of the stony shore and the reflected sunlight shooting up from the boiling sea into our eyes makes it hard to see at first.

  I think for a moment that he isn’t down there, that somehow it has been an awful dream, a fevered hallucination. That none of it has happened at all.

  But then the dazzles clear from my eyes and reveal him to me: splatted on a flat white rock, all the way down on the shore, his legs splayed at strange angles, one arm pinned under his body, bent at a horrible angle. I can’t tell if it is blood pooling around his head or if it’s his hair. Perhaps it’s both.

  I try to imagine he’s sunbathing, but even through half-closed eyes it doesn’t look like that.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I ask Beattie, who is just staring down at him, her face drained of all colour, her teeth working away at her lip.

  She sits back on her heels, shields her eyes from the sun and looks straight at me. I notice there are tears rolling down her cheeks.

  ‘Is he dead?’ I ask, the full horror of what we have done hitting me as if I, too, h
ave tumbled over the edge. ‘Have we killed him?’

  Beattie is sobbing now. Her face contorted, her eyes shut, she nods.

  I reach for her, to try to comfort her, but she pulls away, scrabbling to her feet and running down the slope, away from the edge of the cliff, towards the tree, which she grabs on to as if it were the only thing holding her to the earth.

  I take one last look at Jake and watch as a giant wave comes out of nowhere and washes his body from the ledge, and into the sea.

  He is gone.

  ‘What do we do now, Beattie?’ I scream into the wind. ‘WHAT DO WE DO NOW?’

  She hunches into the tree as if she’s trying to bury herself in its branches. For a second I think Beattie, the girl with the plans, the girl I have come to rely on, has no idea what to do next.

  But by the time I reach her, she’s still grasping the tree, but she is able to look at me, her eyes terrible, her mouth a gash in her face.

  ‘It’s all over,’ she says. ‘You pushed him over.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to, I—’

  I don’t know exactly what I am saying or what I mean at this point.

  ‘You did it for me?’ she asks.

  ‘I – I –’ My brain feels like scrambled eggs, I don’t know what happened, what I did or why I did it.

  Beattie steps forward and puts her arms around me, tight, like a vice. She takes my breath away. She kisses me, full on the mouth. Then she steps backwards, away, and points towards the road.

  I’m scared; I don’t know what she’s doing.

  ‘Get out of here fast, Emma,’ she says. ‘Cover your tracks.’

  ‘But . . .’ I say, reaching out towards her.

  ‘Go. This never happened. We never met. We’ll never, ever see each other again.’

  She turns to me like a tiger, her forcefulness making her seem twice the size of me.

  ‘Get out of here,’ she yells. ‘GO.’

  I stand there dumbfounded, shaking my head. But she launches herself at me, her fists flailing. ‘We should never have met. You have to get out of here before . . .’

  ‘What? Before what?’

  ‘Go, Emma. Go. This is your last chance. Go away and forget we ever met. Forget about Beattie, forget about Jake.’

  She slaps me hard round the face and, reeling, my eyes stinging, in shock, I stumble away.

  I have got away. But I will never, ever be able to forget.

  PART THREE

  AFTER

  2013

  One

  Mark told Kate she was to do nothing for a week when she got back from hospital. She complied for the first day, which she spent lying in bed, bolstered by pillows, gazing up at grey nothingness through the glass atrium and listening to the distant rumble of the city.

  But as the concussion and shock receded, the details of her meeting with Beattie bored into her brain.

  Somewhere in the world, Jake still existed. She had been certain she had killed him, but somehow, by some freak chance, he had survived.

  What was she supposed to make of all that?

  All the lies she had told, all the people and prospects and hopes she had turned her back on. And he wasn’t dead.

  She had no idea whether to rejoice or to weep.

  Tilly came and went that first day, tiptoeing in with cups of tea and pieces of fruit and toast to tempt her. But mostly she was left alone. She didn’t see Mark. Although it was a Saturday, he was at the office as usual.

  Sophie PR sent over a big bunch of lilies, unaware of Kate’s problem with cut flowers. With the delivery came a little note – Sophie’s words but written in the looping hand of a young florist – saying that she would be writing the Kate Reports blog posts until she was ‘up and firing on all cylinders again’.

  Kate wondered when that might be, but was grateful that one more source of guilt had been lifted from her shoulders.

  The next day – Sunday – she couldn’t bear it any longer. As soon as Mark and Tilly were both out – he to Surrey to play golf with a client, she to serve those chips to those National Theatre actors – she pulled out the Starbucks napkin with Beattie’s phone number on it and called her.

  ‘I was so worried about you, Emma,’ Beattie said, a little breathless, as if she had run for the phone. Or perhaps it was just the catch of a smoker’s throat. Behind her voice, Kate heard the sound of traffic.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Kate picked her holey stone up from her bedside table and ran her thumb over its smooth edges as she spoke.

  ‘Oh honey. It’s hard to take in, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I know exactly what you’re going through. I was the same when I found out.’

  ‘What happened? You said he’s on to us. What does that mean?’

  ‘Look,’ Beattie said, ‘I can’t talk about it here. What do you say I come by and perhaps I can show you?’

  ‘Show me?’ Kate hesitated. Was it wise to bring Beattie into her house? To mix the oil of her past with the water of her present? But then, as far as Mark was concerned, she was an old school friend. In any case, he wouldn’t be back at least until supper time, and Tilly was on a long shift, so she and Beattie would have the whole afternoon to themselves.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Can you come now?’

  ‘Can I make you a coffee?’ Kate showed Beattie into her kitchen.

  ‘Thanks.’ Beattie turned around, taking in the space. ‘What a beautiful home you have, Emma.’

  ‘Can you try to call me Kate?’

  ‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. It’s just I’ve thought of you as Emma all these years.’

  As Kate reached for the coffee beans, she realised that, so successfully had she erased her early life from her conscious mind, she had hardly thought of Beattie at all until now. It was unsettling in the extreme to have everything back here, in her house, forced in front of her nose like this.

  ‘It’s just—’ She turned and smiled apologetically at Beattie. ‘No one in my life knows anything at all about what happened.’

  ‘No. I know. It’s the same for me. I’ll try.’ Beattie sighed, shivering a little and hugging herself, running her hands up and down her arms. Kate reminded herself that her former best friend had said she was desperate, and it had something to do with Jake. She had to face up to her responsibilities towards Beattie. Her selfish desire not to have her nice little boat rocked was neither here nor there.

  Beattie moved in front of the big family photograph on the kitchen wall. ‘Is this your little girl?’ she said, gently touching Martha’s face. ‘She was so pretty. I’m so sorry for you.’

  Wanting to avoid talking about Martha, Kate stopped what she was doing and turned to face Beattie.

  ‘I’m sorry, Beattie, but I don’t really understand why you’re here. You’ve told me Jake’s alive. But what of it? What do you need to warn me about?’

  Beattie looked to the floor.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Em— I mean Kate. I didn’t want to come in here and mess everything up. But I’m in such a state. I didn’t want him to get you unawares.’ She looked up and Kate saw tears in her eyes.

  ‘What do you mean, get me?’ Kate said, feeling the need to lean back against the kitchen counter. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jake’s alive, Kate.’

  ‘I know. You said. But isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t that mean we can live the rest of our lives more easily?’

  Beattie shook her head. ‘He’s alive. But he’s mad.’

  ‘Mad how?’

  ‘Mad furious.’

  Kate rubbed her temples. Of course. Of course he would be mad furious. She had tried to kill him. They had left him for dead. ‘But why now? After all these years?’

  ‘Do you have that coffee?’ Beattie said. ‘I need some help with this.’

  ‘How about this?’ Kate pulled a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge.

  Beattie raised an eyebrow and nodded.

  Old habits die hard.

  Kate fetch
ed two glasses.

  ‘I still can’t really believe it,’ she said, when they were sitting on the living-area sofa, each cradling a large glass of wine. For the first time in years she had a tingle-lipped craving for a cigarette.

  ‘It’s hard to take in, I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I feel like I need to see him.’

  ‘Of course you do. So you can believe it’s true.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you, Beattie, it’s just – he looked so dead.’

  ‘He’s told me the whole story.’

  ‘You’ve spoken with him?’

  ‘Oh yes. He tracked me down a while back. Likes to Skype me. He enjoyed telling me it all, watching me squirm. This fisherman rescued him, apparently,’ Beattie said. ‘And then he was flown to some god-awful hospital in Athens, where he stayed for two years. First they thought he’d never come round, then that he’d never walk again, but he proved them wrong on both counts.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’ The thought suddenly struck Kate that they could have saved him, had they not panicked and run away. The thought that they had had a choice back then, and they had chosen to abandon him.

  But, a tiny voice piped in her head, didn’t he deserve what he got?

  She tried to bat it away.

  ‘I know. It’s too weird, isn’t it?’ Beattie said. ‘You could come back home with me and we could visit with him, if you want. I’ve not met him face-to-face yet. I’ve not dared.’

  ‘No,’ Kate said quickly. She did not want to go ‘home’ with Beattie. The stories she’d have to tell Mark and Tilly, the preparations she’d have to make, the facing of people, the shock of the flight; then, oh horrors, the arrival and confrontation . . .

  ‘I’ve got some photos he emailed me, though,’ Beattie said. She pulled an iPad out of her handbag.

  Kate steeled herself, but nothing could prepare her for the shock of what she saw. Until that moment, whenever she thought of Jake – and where she had mostly managed to push the thought of Beattie from her mind, he had been a regular, unwelcome visitor both to her waking and sleeping hours – she pictured a tall, skinny boy with thick, curly dark hair. It was almost entirely the opposite of what she saw in the photograph.