The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  ‘Crippling, even!’ Jake performed a machine-assisted, wheezing form of a laugh.

  ‘And he also has outstanding medical and rescue bills to pay.’

  ‘And there are other things I need, too, like a properly adapted house to live in, a better chair, an adapted car. It’s extraordinary how possible an independent life would be for me if money were not the issue it is. I would almost be normal. And this – and I can see by the way your little pale eyes are narrowing that you have already guessed – is where you fit in, dear Emma. Beattie has been helping me to the best of her abilities, but she assures me she is nearly at the bottom of her relatively meagre wealth bucket. Though I see she is able to fly across the Atlantic and wear pretty smart clothes and stay in a pretty smart hotel.’

  Beattie tutted in exasperation.

  ‘But—’ Kate said, reason suddenly coming back to her, ‘your injuries are a result of your own actions. You are the person responsible for them.’

  ‘Really?’ Jake said, unsmiling. ‘Is that what you really think, Emma? Do you think people just throw themselves off bridges for no reason? Put yourself in my position. What would you have been feeling? Huh?’

  ‘But you were fucked up before we got up that cliff in Ikaria.’

  ‘Language, Emma. I thought you’d have learned some sort of restraint in all these years of being the fragrant Mrs Mark Barratt, the doting mother of the lovely aspiring actress Tilly.’

  At the mention of her daughter’s name, Kate felt a curd of anger rise inside her.

  ‘You tried to rape Beattie. You attacked her.’

  ‘Oh, this. I was completely wasted at the time,’ Jake said. ‘And she led me on.’

  ‘That’s not true, Emma!’ Beattie said.

  ‘She wanted it. She was jealous of you and me. She threw herself on me.’

  ‘No!’ Beattie roared.

  ‘I know what he did, Beattie,’ Kate said. ‘I remember how he hurt you.’

  ‘Did I deserve to die for kissing a girl who wanted it anyway?’

  ‘She didn’t. And it wasn’t just kissing.’

  ‘Where do you draw a line? At what point do you say I deserved to die? How many penetrations does it have to be?’

  ‘And there was the Australian.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You killed the Australian.’

  ‘I didn’t touch no Australian.’

  ‘So why did you have his passport?’

  ‘I found it, Emma. Don’t you ever find things? If you thought I’d killed him, why didn’t you ask me? Huh? Or do you believe in executing someone because you’ve put two and two together to make five?’

  ‘It was an accident!’ Kate said. ‘I didn’t mean you to fall.’

  ‘YOU PUSHED ME! You pushed me off the edge of a high cliff. What did you think was going to happen? Icarus’s daddy comes along on his waxy wings and whisks me to safety?’

  Kate put her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t want to go over all this again. Do you think I’ve just breezed through life? Living with the thought of having killed you?’

  ‘Oh, poor Emma. My heart bleeds.’

  Kate gripped the iPad. She wanted to fling it to the floor, as if doing so would get rid of him.

  ‘Just look at it this way, then, Ems. You pay me, you do your penance. It’s my gift to you. You can buy your way out of the hell you’ve created for yourself.’

  Kate closed her eyes and tried to still her heart. No one spoke for a while.

  ‘Hey, Emma?’ Jake said at last, his voice a singsong. ‘Whaddaya say?’

  She looked at him levelly. ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘I’ll let you know. Ta-ta, love, as I believe you say over there.’

  With no further warning, the screen went blank.

  The two women sat there in the silence, the grey, late afternoon light bleeding weakly around them. It felt to Kate like a tornado had just whirled through the house. So much so that when she looked up and away from the screen, she expected to see her surroundings as devastated as she felt inside.

  Instead, everything in her large, open-plan living area was still in its perfect, allotted place. The order she worked so hard to maintain still existed.

  But it looked all wrong now.

  She glanced at Beattie. ‘Is he serious?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m afraid he is.’

  ‘What has he taken from you?’

  ‘My savings. The life insurance pay-out from my husband’s death. Other stuff. Luckily, my kids are done with college, or I wouldn’t have anything left to see them through. I’ve given him everything I have. But still he says he needs more. He’s very persistent.’

  Beattie stood up, turned her back to Kate, and pulled her blouse up and over her head.

  Her arms bore the tell-tale dots where hands had grabbed and wrenched them, and purple, blue and yellowing bruises patterned her pale fleshy back from where her waistband dug in, to the points where her bra straps cut into her shoulders. She turned, and Kate gasped. The word MURDERER had been carved into the soft flesh of her belly, denting and ridging where it was healing into scar tissue.

  ‘They done me over good, huh?’ Beattie said, pulling her top back on.

  ‘They?’

  ‘He puts his one good arm to good use. He’s turned his programming skills to big-time hacking, so he’s got this network of people round the world he can call on, people who owe him favours. Some of them aren’t too friendly. Some of them see no problem in jumping on a middle-aged woman to teach her a lesson. I knew he had them watching me – they don’t have to worry about me going to the police, after all, do they? But then I missed a payment – because I just didn’t have the money – and he set them on me.’

  ‘How did he find you?’

  Beattie sat next to Kate on the sofa. ‘Once he decided he wanted to track me down, it took him three hours. Just three hours, after thirty-three years. Like you, just in case, I’d changed my name—’

  ‘To Claire McCormack?’

  ‘Claire Cohen, actually. McCormack is Ed’s name. Was. Yep, I changed my name. But the paper trail is there for anyone with the skills to get at it. Easy for someone like him. The funny thing is that I live in San Francisco, forty minutes from his apartment. We could have bumped into each other on the street anytime. Had he been able to get out. But you truly disappeared, didn’t you? Went to great pains to change your identity.’

  Kate frowned. ‘Yes, but how—’

  ‘Jake told me. He set out to find us both, but drew a blank with you. He wasted no time in pointing out that you were clearly far cleverer than me.’

  ‘I came back and didn’t contact anyone.’ The words felt strange in Kate’s mouth: this was the first time she had uttered them out loud. ‘I couldn’t go on being Emma James. She didn’t deserve her bright future. So she just disappeared. As far as everyone except you and Jake knows, she never returned from Greece. Her parents never knowingly saw or heard from her again, her university place went unfilled. She became one of the missing.’

  ‘No way,’ Beattie said.

  Kate nodded. ‘What really happened was that I hitched up to Calais, stowed away in a lorry at the docks, went straight to London, slept on the streets for a bit then landed up at a squat. I got a job in a pub, a cash job, under a made-up name – it was easy back in those days before everything was on computers. It didn’t take too long, moving in the circles I found myself in, to connect with someone who could sell me an identity for the money I had left over from Greece. A dead girl, a baby, who died shortly after birth a year before I was born. Katherine Brown. I had her National Insurance number, a new passport, everything. There is no paper at all linking me to Emma James. Nothing.’

  ‘Wow,’ Beattie said. ‘You were way more resourceful than I would ever have given you credit for back then.’

  Kate tried not to feel stung by this. ‘I think the idea that I was a murderer sort of knocked the naivety out of me.’

  ‘And what do they kn
ow about you? Your husband and daughter?’

  ‘They think my parents were killed in a car crash when I was seventeen and that I had to give up school and go out and get a job.’

  ‘How long have you kept that story up?’

  ‘Mark and I will have been together thirty years this year. Married for twenty-five of them.’

  ‘Like me and Ed. We met just a little before you and Mark did.’

  ‘We all need someone we can lean on, I suppose.’

  ‘Especially us, eh?’ Beattie took Kate’s hand. ‘Oh Emma. It’s so good to see you again. If it hadn’t been for that photograph of you and those cute little African girls, we’d never have met again. I’m sorry, though, that I brought Jake with me. I wouldn’t have chosen to force all this on you. Not for all the world.’

  Kate shook her head. That damn photograph. Her greatest wish was always that Martha hadn’t died. The thought stabbed her unawares every day. But for the first time, it formed for a different reason. If Martha were still alive, Martha’s Wish would not exist. Therefore that photograph wouldn’t be a thing in the world. And with no photograph, Jake wouldn’t have found her and she wouldn’t have to be here now, having her past rubbed in her face like a festering old rag.

  But, of course, Martha’s death was part of Kate’s payment for that past. It was what she truly believed. An eye for an eye.

  So wasn’t all this inevitable, preordained?

  The equivocating thoughts rolled on, knotting into an unsolvable tangle. Without that past, the past that saw the resurrection of tragic, dead baby Katherine Brown, there would have been no Martha, no Tilly, no Kate. And would she wish that all away now? To do so would be like murder all over again.

  She got up, opened another bottle and poured Beattie and herself another glass of wine. It was too much to take in.

  ‘But if it weren’t for finding you, Kate,’ Beattie said, ‘I don’t know what Jake would have done to me. I doubt if I’d still be standing. His finding you has saved my life. And probably my daughters’ lives too – he knows where they are and what their movements are.’ Kate saw her eyes flick over to the kitchen, to the photograph of her family.

  ‘He’d use Tilly to get at me, wouldn’t he?’ Kate said, her throat tightening. Beattie pressed her lips together and nodded. ‘He’s truly scary, isn’t he?’

  ‘I have nothing left to give,’ Beattie said. ‘But still he wants more.’

  Kate watched her as she sat back, drank her wine and took in the tall, beautiful windows, the acres of white floor dotted with expensive Italian furniture, crowned at the far end by an epic, glossy kitchen. She saw her eyes lingering on the artworks, the costly splashes of colour on the towering white walls of a room that had once been the assembly hall for three hundred primary school children. Entirely Mark’s thing, the pieces included a Jeff Koons, an Isa Genzken, a Dan Colen, a Tracey Emin, and a Damien Hirst spot painting. And these were only a small part of the story, too. Kate was aware of this. In pride of place in the bedroom hung a small orange and red study by Rothko. She didn’t much care for the pieces – her art appreciation stopped with the Impressionists – but Mark said they were excellent investments.

  She knew what Beattie was thinking as she took it all in.

  But instead of remarking on all the opulence, her old friend turned to her and smiled weakly. ‘At least we’re not murderers, then.’

  ‘We? It was me who pushed him,’ Kate said.

  ‘But I would have, had I got there first.’

  ‘That’s not the point. I pushed him, and all these years I thought I had killed him.’

  ‘But you didn’t!’

  ‘No. But look what I did.’

  ‘We did, Emma. It was both of us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought we were such a gang back then, the three of us.’

  Kate nodded, unconsciously touching her tattoo. ‘We were friends for life, remember?’

  ‘Not a day has passed when I don’t wish it had turned out differently,’ Beattie said. ‘I ask myself was it something I did? Did I give him an idea I was leading him on? I know you liked him. But I had no idea how he felt about you. He told me about it when he first found me again. I know one thing, though: his attack on me wasn’t about love. It was something darker – anger? Hate? I don’t know what I did to provoke that, but—’

  ‘Stop this. It wasn’t your fault, Beattie.’ Kate hugged herself on the sofa. ‘And nothing happened between me and Jake. Not really. I didn’t want to spoil what we had, the three of us, edge you out. You were far more important to me than that.’

  Beattie took her hand. There were tears in her eyes. ‘But if he felt like that about you –’ she nodded towards the iPad – ‘what did he call you – “my true, true love”? Then why did he do that to me? Why did he attack me? To scare me off?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘I suppose we never really knew him.’

  Beattie sighed and looked at her. ‘I never trusted him back then, you know. Not really.’

  ‘No,’ Kate said. Though she had trusted him herself beyond all reason. Beyond all the signs that she should not have. She had trusted him blindly, stupidly, until it was too late.

  But perhaps he would say the same of her.

  Weren’t they both as bad as each other?

  Three

  Pleading exhaustion, Kate managed to get Beattie out of the house soon after they finished the second bottle of wine.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Beattie said on the doorstep. ‘You rest up now. You look so pale.’

  As soon as she was alone again, Kate climbed up to her office, got down on her hands and knees, pulled aside the rug in the middle of the floor and prised open the floorboard that only she knew was loose. Reaching in, she pulled out two notebooks – ancient, tattered, dog-eared, kept unread for thirty-three years. She held them in her hands for minutes, looking at them, daring herself to open them.

  But she couldn’t bring herself even to lift one front cover. She couldn’t face meeting Emma James again. She was gone, and that was the end of it.

  Ashamed at her cowardice, and feeling as if she was burying some sort of deadly landmine, she tucked the notebooks back into their hiding place, replaced the floorboard, and straightened the richly embroidered kelim on top.

  She crept down the stairs to her bed and lay huddled there, drifting in between sleep and a horrible awareness of what was going on in her waking world.

  Mark texted to say that he was taking his client out for dinner because, having thrashed him at golf, he wanted to smooth the waters. Mark was like that: it was why he was so successful.

  She was glad to be alone.

  For the first time ever, she had told someone else what really happened to her after Ikaria. She drew her knees to her chest and curled up tightly, her surroundings looming over her, outscaling her.

  Had Emma James been told when she was a child lying in her tiny room at the front of her parents’ Ripon council house that one day she would have a bedroom like this, with a vast, vaulted glass ceiling and the Rothko on the wall – not that she would have heard of Rothko back then – she would have just laughed in disbelief, dismissed it as fairy tales.

  Katherine Brown, that catch-all, everywoman name, had opened the door to this world. As Kate, she met Mark when she was twenty-one. Not all that long in the great scheme of things after she had left Emma, Jake and Beattie behind. But back then it seemed like a lifetime, because in a way it was.

  Fed up of the squats, pubs and intoxicant diet of cheap Red Leb, rollups and synthetic lager that constituted her life post-Ikaria, Kate Brown had scrubbed herself up and applied for a job as a secretary at a City bank. She already had the skills – her mother had insisted on her taking a typing and shorthand class in case ‘the exams and that’ didn’t work out – but she knew that, with a little grooming, her looks would help her out as well.

  Mark had been her boss. He wasn’t like the other – frankly obnoxi
ous – young men at the bank. He didn’t bray and brag and try to weasel his way into her knickers. Best of all, he was moved by her terrible family tragedy story. To lose both parents at once like that: his eyes misted. A Cambridge man, he was exactly the kind of boy she would have set her sights on had she been able to take up her university place.

  At one point, shortly after landing the job at the bank, she slipped into a library and looked at the Cambridge University English prospectus. All she actually seemed to be missing out on by not going there was a hell of a lot of medieval literature. She convinced herself that she wouldn’t really have enjoyed that.

  Mostly, though, she was far too busy to stop and think about what she had given up. She had to lose the vestiges of her accent, develop and maintain a credible backstory, work out what constituted good taste for those for whom money wasn’t an issue.

  Mark helped enormously. He saw her as his own personal project. He took to saving poor, tiny, orphaned Kate as heartily as she had since taken to rescuing girls like little Mariam and Bintu.

  Three weeks after she started working for him, he asked her to see Cyrano de Bergerac with him at the Barbican and, as she stood talking to him in the interval over the glasses of champagne he had paid for, she realised that he could offer her the life she wanted – and needed – to help her out of the hole she found herself in.

  A self-eradicated girl, she saw that he had the means to help her to be someone again. His money and ambition and clear devotion to her would make this far easier to achieve than it would have been without him.

  Without him.

  If those last two days hadn’t happened in Ikaria, she would still have been Emma James. Would she have got together with Jake? Would he then have kept his looks? He had been the most beautiful boy.

  But no longer, except, possibly, those eyes. Time and cruelty were thieves of everything in the end.

  Perhaps she would have been better suited to learning Anglo Saxon and frolicking around with Beowulf. But who was to say? Turning back the clock was not an option. She believed there was only one chance at life, and she had made a complete, almighty cock-up of it. A cock-up that seemed to want to keep on cocking up.