If time hadn’t been kind to Beattie, it had been positively brutal to Jake.
It was what Tilly would call a ‘selfie’ taken with a webcam, and it showed a fleshy body, barely contained by the camera frame, spilling over the edges of what appeared to be a wheelchair; a great bald bullet head held at either side by a padded support; a mouth lolling open in the middle of a vast beard, purple lips parted by a loose tongue.
‘I thought you said he could walk,’ Kate said.
‘He could after the accident we caused him,’ Beattie said.
After her years of wrangling with the fact, Kate could have argued Beattie’s use of the word accident. But she let it go.
‘But that was just the beginning of his story. He hasn’t had a lucky life.’
‘So it seems,’ Kate said, looking again at the screen. ‘But are we sure this is really Jake? It doesn’t look like him.’
‘Emma, he was twenty-one when we thought he died.’
Kate mentally corrected this to when we thought we killed him.
‘He’s mid-fifties now. People change. But look.’ Beattie swiped the screen until the photograph closed up on the man’s sharp blue eyes. ‘No one I have ever met since has eyes like this. Not this colour. Not that look. There’s no way anyone could fake those eyes. Tell me that’s not Jake.’
Kate peered at the screen. Much as she wanted all of this to be some elaborate hoax, Beattie was right. Looking into those irises was like stepping back in time. She even experienced a ghost of the thrill she remembered from when she was eighteen, immersing herself in that blue, believing herself to be in love with the person behind them.
And was he still there, that boy, somewhere inside? Or had she played a part in ripping him to pieces – not physically, as she had once thought, but psychologically? What was he like, the man in there?
‘And there’s this,’ Beattie said, scrolling to the next photograph, in which Jake displayed his right forearm to the webcam, showing the Triskelion tattoo. Instinctively, Kate put her hand to her own ink. There was no doubt. This was Jake. Or what remained of Jake.
‘It’s him, believe me,’ Beattie said. She shivered again and looked away from the image. ‘I wish it wasn’t, but it is.’
‘What is he doing, Beattie?’ Kate asked. ‘What does he want?’
‘He calls it reparation. He wants his life back.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s bled me dry, and now he says it’s your turn.’
‘What?’
Beattie’s iPad screen changed, and the jaunty sound of an incoming Skype call – familiar to Kate because it was how she kept in touch with Mark when he was away on business – was accompanied by another onscreen photo of the obese bald man in the wheelchair.
‘What’s this?’ Kate said, her eyes shimmering with horror.
Beattie passed a hand over her face. ‘I’m sorry, Emma. I don’t want you to think I’ve led him to you. He found you himself and would’ve let you know far more brutally. I came to warn you so that you’re ready for him. Imagine if this all just came out of the blue.’ She thrust the screen into Kate’s hands and moved quickly off the sofa, onto an armchair opposite.
‘What do I do?’ Kate said. ‘What do I do?’
‘You have to answer. If you don’t, we’ll both be in trouble.’
‘What?’
‘Please,’ Beattie said, her voice tiny, strangled in the back of her throat. ‘He made me come to you.’
Kate froze, holding the screen away from her body as if it carried some terrible disease.
‘Please answer, Kate,’ Beattie said.
Kate looked at Beattie once more. She seemed to have shrunk into the big armchair, where she looked almost childlike. Her white shirt gaped a little at the front to reveal the stain of a bruise on her chest. The skin around it looked fragile, delicate, old.
Kate took a deep breath and pressed the reply button.
Two
‘Click the video on,’ a wheezing male voice said from the darkness of the Skype window.
Kate stabbed at the screen and there he was.
Jake_1959.
Looking directly at her.
‘Well, hello there, Emma.’
The connection was bad. His image was blurred and broken, his mouth seemingly unable to keep up with his words, like a badly synched film. This was not entirely unhelpful for Kate; it eased what she was witnessing from horror story to actual, live fact.
‘Hello, Jake.’
‘Is that all I get? My tiny Em, my little girl, my true, true love. The One.’
Had he thought that too?
Kate swallowed, hard. He could only speak between in-breaths. Protruding from the beard that covered most of his features, a tube led from the base of his throat to some machine that whirred and pulsed beyond the reach of the webcam. Under the Yankees baseball cap that shielded the hair-free part of his face, a small microphone partially blocked Kate’s view of his mouth.
That mouth that once had touched her own lips.
She tried to conceal the shudder that ran through her body.
It was cowardly and selfish, she knew, but she would have preferred to look at his rotting cadaver, dug up from the grave, rather than this.
Although, of course, had he died, he would be nothing but dust now.
Was he more than that here?
Kate put the vicious thought from her mind. Of course he was. He had aged; he was disabled. But he was alive. And that had to be a good thing, surely?
He lifted his right hand from the mouse, levering the forearm up from the elbow into a modified greeting wave. On the underside of his arm, as fresh as the day it was scarred into his skin, was the Triskelion – the matching part of the three of them: Jake, Beattie, Emma.
‘What happened to you, Jake?’
‘Didn’t you hear?’ he said. ‘I got pushed over a cliff by my gal and left for dead.’
Kate looked down at her lap.
‘LOOK AT ME,’ Jake roared suddenly. ‘LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE DONE WITH ME and tell me WHAT YOU’VE GOT TO SAY.’
The delay between his words and his image made him appear still to be talking after he had stopped. In another situation it would have been amusing.
She lifted her eyes to meet his. He had tilted his head slightly – it appeared he had a very little movement up and down – and there they were, out from the shadows of the baseball cap, those blue, blue eyes, like a cat’s, like an Ikarian rock pool. It was the first time she had looked into them since he had charged her on the cliff top.
She couldn’t say for sure, but, under the mike and the beard, he seemed to be smiling. Behind him she noticed a dark wall covered in American football posters and pennants. It looked like a schoolboy’s bedroom, rather than that of a grown man.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said. ‘I’m really sorry.’ The moment the words left her lips she knew they were utterly, pitifully, inadequate.
He laughed. Or at least she thought the wheezing, choking sound he made was laughter. ‘I bet you are. Real sorry. Sorry I’m still here?’
She covered her eyes. ‘No, no. That’s not what I mean.’
There was a pause as the machine whirred. It seemed he could only use the out-breath to speak. Everything was unfolding excruciatingly slowly, like some nightmare that you know is going to last through until the alarm goes.
‘So which part of it are you sorry for? Pushing me off a cliff and killing me?’
Kate sat there and waited for the whirr, hiss and in-breath.
‘Or not realising that you hadn’t actually succeeded, and leaving me for dead?’
‘I’m sorry for all of it,’ she said, her voice as small as she felt.
‘SAY IT PROPERLY. Sorry for WHAT?’
‘I’m sorry for pushing you off the cliff.’
‘And thinking you’d killed me? SAY IT.’
‘And thinking I’d killed you.’
‘AND LEAVING ME FOR DEAD?’
> ‘And leaving you for dead.’
‘And leaving me for dead. On eight, fifteen, eighty, in Ikaria, Greece.’
‘Yes.’
Jake wheezed with laughter. ‘Engraved on your mind, no doubt. As it is on mine. Good girl. Say that S word again.’
‘What?’
‘The S word, Emma.’
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s it. And again.’
‘Sorry.’
‘More.’
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.’
‘Ah. Sweet music.’
There was a long pause while Jake’s machine whirred and buzzed.
Then, finally, he spoke.
‘Apology not accepted.’
Kate looked away.
‘So then, little Em. Or should I say “Face of Kindness”? That’s a nasty little cut you got there on your head. How many stitches?’
‘Seven.’ She put her hand up to her forehead. The wine mixed with the hospital-prescribed painkillers had numbed the pain. But it still felt tight, and immobile.
‘I see you never took up eating, then? Or is something eating at you instead? I so hope you’re not ill. I’d hate anything to happen to you now we’ve just met up again.’
‘I’m not ill.’
‘No cancer or nothing?’
‘No.’ She had actually expected something of the sort to happen to her over the years, but, in spite of everything, her body had remained defiantly healthy.
‘Oh, I’m so glad. Life’s treating you good, then. Apart from the knock on the head.’
Kate closed her eyes.
‘Hey. Don’t feel guilty. We can’t all have the luck.’
Silently, out of shot of the iPad camera, Beattie edged forward and poured two more glasses of wine. Kate nodded her thanks to her.
‘Is that my little Bea playing barmaid?’ Jake said, suddenly. ‘Hey honey!’
Beattie recoiled in disgust and put her hands over her ears.
‘Show her me,’ Jake said.
As Kate trained the iPad on her, Beattie straightened herself out and put a weak smile on her face. ‘Hi, Jake,’ she said.
‘Oh, hello there. Lovely to see you again. I hope you’re faring well after your – ah – accident.’
Beattie reached inside her shirt and rubbed her collarbone. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘What?’ Kate said.
‘Oh, didn’t she tell you?’ Jake said. ‘Put me back so I can see you now, Em. I’ve had enough of looking at that. My, you’ve aged so much prettier than her. Mind you, you always had one over her in the looks department. Yeah. So poor old Beattie here had a slight incident with some guys who appear to have been following her around. Huh, Beattie?’
Beattie got up and moved over to the window, where she stood, looking out, hugging herself and rubbing the back of her neck. For the first time, Kate noticed that she was limping.
‘What did you do to her?’ she asked Jake.
‘Me? Do I look like I can do ANYTHING to ANYONE?’
Kate looked at him as he drew more oxygen from his machine.
‘What happened to you, Jake? After – after Ikaria?’
‘I survived. Clearly.’
‘But I thought you could walk again, after the hospital and everything.’
‘After the hospital. But not after everything, honey. Beattie, I’m surprised you haven’t told Emma here my whole story yet.’
‘I thought I’d leave it to you,’ Beattie said, without turning round.
‘I don’t feel like it. You tell it.’
Beattie stayed where she was, her eyes fixed on the world beyond the window.
‘BEATTIE. LET HER KNOW,’ Jake said. Kate couldn’t work out if it was anger or the breathing machine behind his sudden outbursts.
Beattie turned and looked at Kate. Her face was as white as the wall behind her.
‘Come and sit by her so I can see both of you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to talk behind a body’s back?’
Beattie and Kate looked at each other. Like a schoolgirl called before the headmaster, Beattie did as she was told.
‘Tell her then, Beattie. It’s quite a story, you see, Kate, and my speech comes a little slow, as you have probably gathered.’
‘So.’ Beattie held her hands in her lap as if she were praying. ‘So, Jake was in hospital in Athens for two years.’
‘Two years, one month and six days,’ Jake corrected her.
‘And then he got out and he stayed on in Greece.’
‘I don’t go back home because, as you may remember, I have no ID, no passport, nothing. By the time I come out of the coma which saw me as good as dead for SIX MONTHS AND TWO DAYS, no one has any idea who I am. Not even me, to start with. I don’t even know I’m American. I have no language. The upside of all this is that in this no man’s land state I find it easy to learn Greek. Itan efkolo na matho Ellinika. It helps me understand my physiotherapist’s instructions so that gradually, painfully, I can learn to walk again. Proceed, Beattie.’
Kate looked at Beattie, who was clearly finding this equally hard to listen to. It was like being in court, or at the gates of hell, being made to account not only for your crimes, but also for their consequences. Over decades.
‘So, he got a job,’ Beattie started to say.
‘As a humble plongeur in some two-bit tourist taverna,’ Jake added.
‘Then he fell in with this, like, group of Americans, some, um, sect.’
‘You call it that,’ Jake said. ‘But I call it The Fellowship. They saved me. They were the saviour of me. Unlike some people.’ He bared his teeth at Kate in a cold grin.
‘They were sort of Buddhists. He learned forgiveness.’
‘HA!’ came the breathy voice from the iPad.
‘And they brought him back to the States.’
‘Yeah, I’d worked out by this time where I was from,’ Jake said. ‘The memory has this extraordinary ability to regenerate. Neural pathways can reform, reroute themselves. Find their way back home: remember. I remembered what had happened to me. WHAT YOU HAD DONE TO ME.’
‘They brought him back to live on a sort of ashram near San Francisco, where he found a wife and learned computer programming.’
‘You put it so baldly, dear Beattie.’ Jake cast his eye over Kate. ‘Where is the romance in this woman’s life? She has no soul, Emma. Not like you.’
Emma felt Beattie stiffen beside her.
‘It took me a while, Ems, TO LEARN TO TRUST PEOPLE AGAIN. But eventually I found my wife, a good woman. Marnie. She looked nothing like you, Emma. Perhaps that’s why I went for her. God knows I didn’t need any reminders. And, oh, the children. Didn’t you mention my kids yet, Beattie? This stunted dick, Emma, that you’d have left limply attached to a corpse, actually went on and created life. For a little while you could even say that from the outside I looked happy. I had a family, a community in the ashram in the Bay Area, a job. A damn good job, riding the digital revolution through the nineties.’
‘Good,’ Kate said. ‘That’s good.’ She just wanted to turn away, to run upstairs to her bed, pull the duvet over her head and sleep, like Mark had said she ought to. Could she rewind? Could she un-invite Beattie?
‘But, as you can see,’ Jake rolled his eyes as if showing her the room around him, ‘there wasn’t what you’d call a happy ending. Is there ever really, though? Doesn’t it always go messy in the end? No. All the chanting and dharma in the world couldn’t save me, could it, eh? Tell our Emma what happened, my little Bea.’
Beattie drew her hands up to the back of her neck and scratched, as if she were trying to rid herself of some parasite. ‘He had this anger inside of him—’
‘Oh, yes, the anger,’ Jake said. ‘And that was there because of what, Emma?’
Emma looked away from him. ‘Because of what we did to you.’
‘Correct. It was there because of what you have done to me. Proceed, Beattie.’
‘The anger wou
ldn’t go away.’
‘You BET it wouldn’t.’
‘When he had a bad time, he’d hit out at his wife.’
‘When he had a particularly bad time, he’d hit out at his wife Marnie and his children Zeb and Moon,’ Jake said. ‘He wasn’t proud of this. One night he broke Marnie’s nose and his little Moon’s arm.’
Kate felt a hot fat tear fall on her cheek.
‘Charges were pressed,’ Beattie went on. ‘He got four years. When he came out of jail, The Fellowship wanted nothing to do with him, and they’d disappeared his wife and children somewhere safe, away from him.’
‘I wasn’t happy.’
‘No,’ Kate said.
‘And so I tried to finish the job you started.’
‘What do you mean?’ She leaned forward so that her face was right up against the screen. She was finding it hard to breathe.
‘He jumped off a bridge,’ Beattie said.
‘Not any old bridge, Ems. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gateway. But not for me, it seemed. Once again, Emma, death turned me away. Perhaps it was because of unfinished business. Who knows? So that’s how come I end up like this. Bruised, bloody but unbowed. List my afflictions, Beattie, if you will.’
Beattie’s voice was now small and hard. Kate could see she was hating this, hating him. What had he done to her? How could he do anything, in the state he was in?
‘Jake is tetraplegic. He has mobility in his right arm, below the elbow, and limited movement in his neck. He needs assistance to breathe.’
Jake gargled on his tube by way of illustration.
‘He needs twenty-four-hour assistance for all his day-to-day living.’
‘That’s eating, shitting, pissing, that sort of thing,’ Jake chipped in. ‘Luckily the only sexual feelings I get are in my brain. But that’s sort of eclipsed now by anger and, what shall I call it? Oh yes. A burning sense of injustice, if that’s not too floral a way of putting it. And, Beattie, tell our mutual friend here about the financial side of things.’
Beattie looked at Kate. ‘Because his injuries are judged to be self-inflicted, he is not covered by his health insurance. He has high day-to-day care, medical and living expenses . . .’
The Long Fall Page 20
