The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  She drew herself up to her full five feet and one inch, smiled with as much confidence as she could muster and looked levelly at them. She was, she told herself, the wife of Mark Barratt, wealthy hedge-fund manager. She was the Face of Kindness – not that she was recognisable as such in her current rain-bedraggled manifestation.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. ‘I have some items I would like to – um – lodge with you for a short while.’

  Her inner pep talk must have worked, because one of the men leaned his elbows on the counter behind the glass screen and smiled. ‘Welcome to Mayfair Advances.’

  When Kate opened the jewellery box and he had sight of the contents, his entire body language changed from formal to fluid.

  ‘Please,’ he said, rising to unlock the door that allowed access behind the security barriers. ‘Come to our back room. It is far more comfortable.’

  So on an unbelievably squishy white leather sofa and with a glass of mint tea, Kate sat sweating as the man – who had introduced himself as Ali – leaned over a desk peering at her beautiful jewellery through a jeweller’s loupe.

  At one point, Kate’s phone beeped with a message. It was Jake. So he had her mobile number. Of course.

  How’s it going, Ems? You have 20 hrs.

  She switched off the phone and put it at the bottom of her bag.

  Ali logged each piece of jewellery on a computer and, when he was finished, sent the results to print.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing her the printout. ‘This is what we can advance you.’

  Kate looked at the sheet of paper. Without her glasses, the figures were like ants crawling all over the page. She screwed her eyes up tight and looked again, holding it away from her so that she could read it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw how much they were willing to pay out for all of her beautiful things, all of her memories, part of her soul, if such a thing existed. ‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds?’

  Ali smiled and nodded. ‘Is very lovely jewellery.’

  It was two million less than she had hoped. Two million less than she needed to keep her daughter safe.

  ‘You can’t advance more?’

  Ali made an apologetic face and shrugged. Kate had never been good at haggling. Even now, even now, when the stakes were so high, she couldn’t bring herself to argue. Without the time to shop around, she had no alternative other than to agree. She would think of something. On top of the money from her credit cards, it meant that Jake could at least have another million pounds or one point five million dollars. That might put him off for a little longer while she worked something else out.

  The disappointments continued to pile up: she had hoped that the payment could be made directly into Jake’s bank, but Mayfair Advances’ policy was only to pay into bank accounts where ID was available, so she had to direct it to her own. It was tempting fate, putting another mystery sum through her joint bank account with Mark, but she had no choice.

  As soon as Ali had transferred the sum and given Kate printed confirmation, she ran out of the shop and hailed another cab to take her to her bank. She had pawned all her best jewellery and had three months to come up with the money to buy it back, plus another thirty-five thousand pounds interest. Perhaps she should have felt lighter because she was another million on the way to paying Jake off, but instead a weight sat on her chest as heavy as a coffin.

  With the Mayfair Advances money transferred successfully into Jake’s account – something that was, despite her dishevelled appearance, easy to achieve, because her bank already knew his account number and why she was paying into it – Kate stumbled out onto the wet, grey street.

  The rain had been so persistent that the drains had backed up in the street outside and were pumping swelling lakes up onto the pavements. Some side streets looked more like rivers than roads. Kate stood there among all the water, empty, emptied out. It was four in the afternoon and she was as hungry as a wolf. Smelling chicken, she turned and spied a Nando’s across the road.

  She stumbled into the restaurant, asked to be seated near the back, facing out, and ordered a double chicken burger and chips and a bottle of the house red. She ate silently, hardly looking up from her meal. Halfway through – so much food took her a long time to eat, and needed a lot of washing down – she ordered another bottle of wine.

  ‘Are you sure, honey?’ her waitress asked, shaking her black, glossy curls like a schoolteacher. The term of endearment reminded Kate of Beattie, and she wondered briefly if she would be worrying where she had got to. The moment passed.

  ‘I am completely sure,’ she said, facing up to the waitress, trying not to slur.

  The woman rolled her eyes and stalked off, her unfeasibly large and lifted rump straining against the polyester of her uniform.

  The second bottle was placed at Kate’s side without the flourish that had accompanied the first. Kate doubted that, had she been a man, she would have received the same cool-handed treatment.

  Later, after downing a gooey caramel cheesecake, Kate wobbled out onto the street. It was the tail end of rush hour. Weary office workers – the ones that stayed on late – formed the dregs of a throng around the tube station. Drunk on wine, sugar and carbohydrates, Kate stumbled dangerously out into the road and hailed a cab.

  Nineteen

  She let herself into the house and ran up to the kitchen, her feet out of control due to the wine, her mouth still ringing from the extra hot dressing she had chosen for the burger, her stomach in rebellion against the largest amount of food it had ever seen.

  Beattie was sitting on the sofa, very still, very upright. A bucket lay on its side on the shiny white floor in a pool of dirty water, its mop toppled over to one side. Even in her befuddled state, Kate registered that this looked odd.

  ‘Hey, Beattie, sorry,’ Kate said, trying to think up an excuse for having spent such an inordinately long time on a trip to the dry cleaners. ‘I got delayed, there was this terrible accident on the bridge: a bus and a taxi, and—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ Beattie said, cutting across her. Kate focused her blurry gaze on her face and saw that her eyes were red, her cheeks blotched. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Beattie went on.

  Black dots shot through Kate’s vision. ‘Tilly?’ she blurted, standing there swaying in the kitchen doorway. Her full stomach seemed to help her stay conscious through the shock, through the dreaded fact that, in her drunken state, she already knew to be true. ‘Something’s happened to Tilly, hasn’t it?’

  Beattie just cupped her hands in front of her mouth and shook her head slightly.

  Kate couldn’t work out whether this meant that it wasn’t to do with Tilly, or that whatever had happened to her was so awful she couldn’t bring herself to say what it was.

  Then she noticed the suitcase, overcoat and briefcase sitting on the kitchen floor to her right.

  ‘Mark’s back?’ she said, her mind reeling. ‘But he should be in New York for another two days. Where is he?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ Beattie said, looking at the ceiling.

  Her heart pounding, Kate tore up to the bedroom. ‘Mark?’ she cried. ‘Mark? What’s happened to Tilly?’

  He wasn’t there. But the bedroom appeared to have been ransacked – Kate’s drawers were emptied, their contents strewn across the room; the mattress had been flung back from the bed and the safe stood open, displaying its emptiness to the room.

  ‘Mark?’ she cried, stumbling up the steps to the mezzanine yoga room. But he wasn’t there, either.

  She darted out onto the landing. ‘Mark!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs, breaking her voice, cracking her throat.

  ‘I’m up here,’ he said into the silence above her.

  Kate grabbed the banister rail to steady herself. Otherwise she might have fallen down the stairs.

  Mark was up in her office.

  She scrabbled up the curving staircase and burst through the door. He was sitting at her computer with the financial agg
regator application open in front of him. He swung round in the office chair and fixed his eyes on hers.

  She hardly recognised him. The laughter lines had been wiped from his face. His expression was entirely cold and neutral. He looked at her as if she, too, were some sort of stranger.

  A dark, fiery sensation roared somewhere deep inside her. For a disorienting second, she believed it to be overwhelming sexual desire. But then she realised it was terror. Sheer terror.

  She had been found out.

  But still a hopeful voice bleated inside her: But by how much?

  ‘Where has all my money gone?’ Mark said, his voice like ice.

  ‘I – I moved it into the offshore account . . .’

  He held up his hand. ‘That’s pathetic, Kate. Do you think I can’t call our bank to find out that you sent it to someone called Stephen Smith? And the seven hundred and fifty thousand you sent the same way today? Which, I find out when I look in our safe, you must have raised from selling all my presents to you, all my tokens of love.’

  ‘I – I set the account up in an assumed name.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Kate. The money went out of our cash accounts before I even told you we were in trouble. And as for the money you’ve stolen from Martha’s Wish . . .’

  Kate gasped.

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know I knew about that? I’m sorry. You see, late last night UK time, Patience rang me. She wanted to double-check the ethical credentials of the “investment opportunity” I had apparently planned for the surplus. I don’t know: perhaps she smelled a rat. You can imagine what a situation her phone call put me into – and all while I’m failing to sweet-talk Manhattan dickheads into letting me keep their money. I had to pretend I knew what she was talking about, spin some bullshit tale about how marvellously ethical this mythical fund is.’

  Kate closed her eyes.

  Mark was silent. Then he breathed in and spoke. The rhythm of it reminded her horribly of Jake.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at? Do you know what would happen if it got out that you’ve embezzled funds from Martha’s Wish? Do you want to totally ruin me? CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT YOU HAVE PUT ME THROUGH?’

  ‘I – I –’ Kate stood in the middle of her office, her mouth opening and closing like that of a fish pulled out of water.

  She wanted to go to him and coax the old Mark back, to let him take her and comfort her so that she could cry onto his broad chest and be protected from the world.

  He moved towards her, sniffing at her like a tiger might its prey. ‘You stink of shit food and cheap wine.’ He looked at her, one side of his upper lip raised in disgust. ‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Kate said, trying to keep the slackness out of her voice. Her ears were ringing so loudly with alarm and alcohol that she could hardly hear herself speak. ‘I just had one glass.’

  ‘More lies,’ he said. ‘And here’s something.’ In one swift movement, he grabbed her arm and pulled up the sleeve of her jumper, exposing her Triskelion tattoo. ‘When I got in, Claire was cleaning the floor. Very nice of her to do that for you while you were out. She had her sleeves rolled up.’

  He was hurting her arm, gripping it so tightly that she knew he would leave bruises.

  ‘The money was puzzling enough. But this completely mystified me. Why would two school friends who allegedly haven’t seen each other since they were seventeen have the same weird tattoo in the same place? And how strange that these two women should “just by chance” bump into each other just before all my money disappears from my bank accounts.’

  Our money, Kate found the clarity in her whirling mind to think. Our bank accounts.

  But she didn’t dare correct him out loud.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ he said, moving so close that she could feel the heat of his breath. ‘Shall I? I think you and Claire have a thing.’

  ‘What?’ Kate spluttered. The idea was so absurd that she nearly laughed.

  ‘That’s what I think. You were never at school together. I don’t know and I don’t care where you met, but what I think is that you’re planning to leave me for her, but you thought that, just to add extra pain to my life, you’d clean me out before you disappeared.’

  ‘But it’s not true!’

  ‘I nearly caught you at it the other day when I came in for that awful fried dinner she cooked, didn’t I?’

  ‘NO!’

  Mark waved his hands in the air. ‘“Sorry, Mark. I was having a liddle moment and Kate was looking after me.” I’ll BET YOU WERE LOOKING AFTER HER.’

  ‘This is crazy, Mark, I—’

  Mark loomed over her, yelling now, the tendons standing out on his neck. ‘Is it? Is it? Dear little Claire loves you so much she had a little tattoo done, just like yours, “Honey”.’

  Kate shook her head in frustration. The room spun around her as if she were on a roundabout in its centre.

  ‘Well what, then? Why did you start moving money away before you knew I was in trouble? Why have you STOLEN from Martha’s Wish? Desecrated our daughter’s memory? Money that was safe from any threat of my business collapsing? Why have you sold the most precious things I gave you? Why have you both got the same tattoo?’ He let go of her, grabbed a notebook from her desk and threw it on the floor between them. ‘And what’s this?’ he said, pointing at the words in front of her.

  She looked down. She didn’t need to get any closer. There, in her own handwriting, was the list she had written the other night:

  • Plead with Jake

  • Expose Jake

  • Tell Mark

  • Kill self

  • Kill Jake

  ‘And do you know who I think Jake is? He’s Claire’s poor husband, isn’t he? Oh, “Ed this” and “Ed that”. It’s all so much bullshit, isn’t it?’

  ‘This is all wrong!’ Kate said, putting her hands over her ears and shaking her head so violently that she felt her brain move in her skull.

  ‘Bloody right it is.’

  ‘I can explain—’ Kate reached out to touch his arm and he flinched as if she had burned him.

  He closed his eyes and exhaled, as if trying to calm himself down. Then he moved back to her office chair, sat down and folded his arms. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Explain. It had better be good.’

  Kate put both her hands out, searching for walls to support herself. The circular room had none, and the windows were too far away and obstructed by sharp cacti. Could she explain? Could she? Where would she start? That the person she had presented to Mark all of their life together was a fiction? Unable to think, unable to prop herself up, she sank to her knees, put her hands flat on her thighs and looked down, like a medieval penitent.

  ‘I – I can’t.’

  Mark sat back in his chair. He was strangely calm now, as if his anger had been a storm that had swept right through him. ‘You won’t, you mean.’

  ‘No,’ she said, so quietly that she didn’t know if he heard it.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Kate,’ he said. ‘I’ve given you everything. I’ve shared everything I earn with you. You haven’t had to lift a finger to enjoy this very comfortable life I’ve allowed you. You’ve just sat there, looking all decorative with your expensive clothes and your fucking yoga and your delicate fucking sensibilities and your little hobby charity.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘NOT FAIR? NOT FAIR? I’ve put up with all your lunatic shit for far too long. All the agoraphobic, obsessive-compulsive cleaning, overprotective mothering, anorexic crap.’

  ‘What?’ Kate said, looking sharply up at him.

  ‘Yeah. I called you out, didn’t I? You don’t like that, do you? I’ve let you get away with murder in the last ten or so years. That little-girl-lost act was beginning to wear a bit thin with me, if you must know.

  ‘You are a monster, Kate. Monstrously selfish. Monstrously ungrateful. Have you looked at yourself recently? Y
ou’re a complete fucking mess. But then I suppose you don’t have to bother about how you look for old Claire, do you? I mean it’s not like she’s much of an oil painting, is she?’

  ‘For God’s sake, there’s nothing going on between me and B— Claire.’

  ‘You can age into a couple of unlovely old dykes together.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I mean, let’s face it, Kate, you’ve really been just going through the motions of being my wife, haven’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve never really enjoyed sex, have you?’

  ‘But I love you!’ From her kneeling position, she reached for his hands, but he jumped up and recoiled from her as if she had some infectious disease.

  ‘You have a fine way of showing it,’ he said.

  ‘Please, Mark, please.’ Kate put her forehead on the rug and wrapped her arms around her head. She could hear the floor creak as he paced up and down in front of the door. For one minute she thought about her journals, which were right underneath where she was kneeling. All she needed to do was lift the floorboard and show him the truth. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have the courage.

  After what seemed like her whole lifetime, his pacing stopped. She lifted her head to find him watching her.

  ‘I really don’t know what your problem is, Kate,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ve had some sort of breakdown. Perhaps you’ve gone a little crazy. But do you know what? With all your bullshit, I find I don’t really care. I’ve had enough of looking after you.

  ‘Here’s the thing. You’re going to repay the money you owe the charity, and you will pay me back every single penny you have stolen from me. After that, I want nothing more to do with you. You and your – whatever she is – can go off and do whatever the fuck you want.’

  ‘I can’t pay back the money,’ Kate said. She wanted the floor to rise up on either side of her and swallow her up. She wanted to disappear, to die.

  ‘You haven’t spent it already, have you?’

  ‘I can’t get the money back.’