The Woman on the Pier

by B P Walter

  * * *

  JESSICA MACLEOD: Cute pic.

  * * *

  MICHAEL KELLEY: Careful. I don’t want you getting the hots for my brother.

  * * *

  JESSICA MACLEOD: Don’t worry. I won’t. You sure he won’t see these chats?

  * * *

  MICHAEL KELLEY: I told you – he never uses it.

  * * *

  JESSICA MACLEOD: Why don’t you have your own account?

  * * *

  MICHAEL KELLEY: Never got round to it.

  * * *

  JESSICA MACLEOD: Come on, Evan. Tell me.

  * * *

  MICHAEL KELLEY: People at school. They can be dicks.

  * * *

  JESSICA MACLEOD: Like, bullying…?

  * * *

  MICHAEL KELLEY: Something like that. Prefer not to go into it. Kept putting sick stuff on my wall. Kept sending me messages saying awful things. I thought I’ve got enough awful things in my head without others chipping in.

  * * *

  JESSICA MACLEOD: Oh Evan. I’m sorry.

  I stare at the name. Four letters. They go through my mind, over and over. Sinking in. Evan. Evan Kelley. And then it starts to click. His face. Michael’s face. The confusion. The denial. My blind anger at him. Hitting him. Stopping him from existing, going about his life as if Jessica was nothing to him.

  But she was nothing to him. Because he didn’t know she existed.

  I got the wrong boy.

  I scream. One long, pain-filled scream.

  The woman in the window seat next to me instantly leaps up and hits her head on the luggage rack above us. The couple to my right back away, as if I’m about to draw out a weapon and launch some kind of attack. Within seconds, members of the cabin crew are swarming round me. I hear one of them finishing their conversation with a passenger abruptly, saying, ‘Excuse me, we’ve got a situation.’ That’s what I’ve become. A situation.

  The scream is turning into sobs and a young man in uniform is talking slowly and calmly to me. ‘I need to you breathe deeply. Listen to me, breathe deeply.’ I shake my head, but he carries on talking. ‘Can you tell me your name, madam?’

  ‘Caroline,’ I choke out.

  ‘OK, Caroline. Take a moment and then tell me why you’re upset. Are you scared of flying?’

  A plastic cup of water is produced by one of his colleagues and offered to me. I take it and sip the freezing-cold water like icy razors trickling down my throat.

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I mean, yes. That’s it. I… I’m not used to doing it alone.’ It seems like the most natural reason and I clutch onto it gratefully.

  ‘OK,’ he says again, his voice soothing and kind. ‘Well, while we’re waiting for the preparation for take-off, how about you come up to the front with me. You could even have a chat with the pilot, if you like?’

  I instantly feel panic surge in me. ‘I don’t need to talk to the pilot. Honestly. I’m going to be fine.’ I hand him back the empty cup and tuck my hands out of sight so he doesn’t see how much they are shaking. ‘I’m much better. Really.’

  He smiles and nods. ‘OK, Caroline. Remember, you can always press the button on the side of your seat and one of us will come to talk to you or get you anything you need.’

  I try to look thankful back and nod.

  He walks away towards the front of the aircraft and the woman who had been sitting next to me, and extricated herself during my outburst, shuffles back into her seat, eyeing me cautiously. ‘You all right now?’ she says, although it sounds more as if she’s asking, Are you going to do that again? rather than asking if I’m OK.

  ‘Yes. I just had a bit of a shock.’

  She gives me another wary glance, then settles back into the pages of Fifty Shades Darker.

  ‘To all our passengers, this is your pilot speaking. I’m pleased to tell you the fault has been corrected and we are now ready to begin our journey to the runway. We do apologise for the delay – rest assured we should be on our way shortly.’

  This announcement causes mutterings of ‘Typical’ and ‘About bloody time’. I just try and focus on my breathing, trying to keep it long and controlled, and not let my mind go back to Southend Pier and the body of Michael Kelley, lying lifeless on the ground in the rain.

  We encounter further troubles in Dubai when they can’t get the tunnel that connects the aircraft to the terminal to fit onto the plane. A horde of stressed travellers berate a harassed-looking flight attendant as she explains to them the problem will be fixed as soon as possible. The problem isn’t fixed and in the end we have to make our way down a staircase and out into the heat and walk the short distance to the doors of the airport. The temperature, after weeks of chilly rain in England, and the over-zealous air conditioning of the flight, is an assault on the senses. My skin feels as if it’s reforming, recalibrating, trying to cope with the sudden change. I try to fish around in my bag for my sunglasses, but someone behind me pushes and tuts, so I give up and use my hand to shield my eyes.

  Inside the airport, I go and get a coffee. Over the past hours I’ve tried to focus on reading, but my mind won’t behave. At some points, when I had a short nap, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe it was all just a dream. Maybe today’s the day I left Alec in Kent, before the pier, before the crash, before I met Michael Kelley. I told him I was going to Australia on the phone, when he was angry about me leaving without telling him. And now I’m doing just that. Perhaps everything that occurred in the middle was just a nightmare, triggered by grief. It isn’t the case. I know that. I just wish it was.

  The stopover in Dubai takes four hours, and I spend most of it sitting, staring into space, punctuated by occasional attempts to distract myself by looking in the shops. I browse the paperback fiction, nearly all of it imported from the UK. I can’t find anything I want and drift over to the chairs. I look around at the passengers sitting near me. I wonder how they would react if I told them everything that was on my mind right now. How many would sympathise or condemn me if I laid out everything that had happened? About my Jessica. About my strange breakdown, running off to Southend. And my terrible, terrible mistake that has culminated in the death of an innocent, damaged boy. My mind involuntarily flicks back to his body, lying there still and lifeless on the floor of the pier. Was he dead? Could there, perhaps, be a chance he could still be alive? I consider doing a trawl of news sites, trying to discover something definitive, but I know that’s beyond me. Even typing the words into Google would jeopardise whatever equilibrium I’ve managed to maintain since my outburst on the plane. It takes me a while to realise the strange tapping sound that has started to pull me out of my daydream is the noise of my own tears, falling onto the pages of the book in front of me.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The Mother

  May. Three months after the attack.

  ‘You are fucking kidding me, right?’

  My mother’s harsh Australian croak of a voice hits me down the phone line like a bullet.

  ‘I thought it would be nice to see you,’ I say, holding the phone close to my ear. I’m standing by luggage collection – it’s the quietest part of the arrivals area of Perth Airport, with most people now finished collecting their bags and making their happy, though clearly exhausted, way to their hotels.

  ‘Why the fuck are you bothering, Caroline? Really. What’s brought this on?’

  I feel anger beginning to bubble up inside me. ‘Ah, you see, your granddaughter’s been murdered by a world-famous terrorist organisation,’ I say through clenched teeth. ‘Thought maybe that would justify a meet-up. Maybe I was wrong.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. That happened months ago and you didn’t even want me to come to the funeral.’

  ‘You never met her,’ I say, trying to stop myself crying. ‘So why would you want to see her coffin? You didn’t care enough about her to see her when she was living, so why the hell would you care about her death?’

  A small, ba
lding man with a lime-green suitcase is hovering by the luggage conveyor belt and glances over at me. I stare back at him until he can’t hold my gaze any more and turns away.

  ‘May I remind you,’ my mother says in a slow-talking, are-you-fucking-thick-or-something voice that I know only too well from my childhood, ‘that it was you that phoned me today – I don’t want you bringing all your baggage to my doorstep. It was you who washed your hands of me, and now you’re trying to make out like I’m some kind of wicked witch of the fucking west.’

  ‘I’m at Perth Airport,’ I say, ignoring her diatribe. ‘Can you come and get me?’

  Silence greets this. Then she starts up again: ‘You’re fucking what? I thought you were phoning from England. You’re actually in the country, right now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Some spitting, tutting sound fills my ears, then she says, ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to put you up?’

  ‘Well, yes, actually I was, but I can get a hotel instead. Actually, you’re right, that would probably be best.’

  ‘You won’t get any argument from me on that front. Must be nice, being a multimillionaire from making pornographic TV shows.’

  This is too much for me. ‘They’re not pornographic!’ I shriek into the phone. The man with the green suitcase has now been joined by a woman, presumably his partner, and they both jump at this. ‘What?’ I say to them, my arms wide, as if daring them to a fight. They scurry away, the woman turning to get a good look at me before they turn the corner.

  I put the phone back to my ear. My mother’s still ranting.

  ‘Oh I did watch a couple. I know you think I don’t, but no, I thought fair’s fair, she’s gone and made a go of it. They come on the telly here, on that BBC First channel. Apparently they call graphic depictions of oral sex high-brow drama these days.’ She says the word ‘drama’ like it’s a new-fangled fad.

  ‘There are no graphic depictions of anything like that. And anyway, I can’t talk about this now. I need to sleep. I guess I’ll get a taxi to you and then work out a hotel from there.’

  My mother doesn’t try to argue further. ‘Fine. You know the address?’

  ‘Of course I know the bloody address, I lived there for—’

  The line goes dead. She’s cut me off.

  Sighing and wincing as I try to pick up my bag with my bad arm, I start to walk slowly towards the main exit and contemplate whether they’ll accept card or insist on me paying with the Australian dollars I haven’t had time to get.

  Most of the taxis have either a ‘CARDS ACCEPTED’ sticker or a Visa logo on them, and within minutes I’m in the car, windows down, staring out at the sweeping mass of Perth. The sun’s warm, but there’s quite a breeze in the air – like a slightly cold summer’s day in England, although it’s almost midwinter here.

  The traffic is light and the journey only takes an hour. Gradually, the streets start to become suburban and familiar to me. Small rows of shops start to trigger memories I thought I’d long forgotten. Memories of drinking milkshakes in a small café called ‘Cole’s Caff’, still there after all this time. Memories of long, drawn-out days of reading books in the town library so as to avoid going home. A second-hand car sales centre, looking more or less identical to how it was before, just with different cars. It used to be staffed by a young guy I’d fancied named Brave. Ridiculous name, I’d thought. Who names their child Brave? He’d have been in his early twenties back then, which means he must be heading towards fifty. What was he doing now, I wondered. Did he have a family?

  And what about the kindly old librarian, Mrs Harl, who’d felt sorry for me on those sunny Saturdays when I was tucked inside the library in a dark, quiet corner, away from the heat and the summer fun and, crucially, my parents? She used to bring me ice-cold Diet Cokes from the fridge in their staffroom. What age did she reach before she died? Or Reg Price, the slightly creepy but harmless caretaker who’d lock the big library doors behind me when I had to leave for the day and go back to my uncomfortable home life. He’d been a strange man, frequently to be seen muttering to himself between the bookshelves, probably single-handedly responsible for ensuring the place was often deserted, local mothers with young kids uneasy about being around him. ‘There’s no harm in him,’ Mrs Harl had said, and told me how he’d joined some weird English cult when he was a young man, which had made him go ‘just a tad loopy’, and he’d never been the same since he’d come back to Perth. I’d nodded at this and decided to always be kind to Reg. He was an outsider, someone who never really fitted into the town he called home. I knew how he felt.

  Now, returning after all these years, it seems both incredible and oddly comforting that the place has continued to trundle along without me. Some things changing, some lives coming to an end, but everything largely staying the same.

  Before I’ve managed to properly prepare myself, the Toyota Corolla is winding its way up the driveway to my mother’s house. The house I used to call home. And it’s changed. The front used to be a grand, impressive sight when you arrived via the long driveway, and part of me as a teenager enjoyed seeing friends’ faces as it came into view. We were more than just comfortable. We were wealthy. A family to talk about. Not that my parents socialised much with the neighbourhood. They made it clear when they bought it that they weren’t going to be chummy with the two eccentric sisters who lived next door (‘There’s something distinctly lesbian about those two…’) or the family of four opposite (‘Shifty-eyed, the lot of them’). But both my mother and father were quietly respected – even slightly feared – within our community. I’d see other mums and dads pointing at them if they bothered to turn up to a parents’ evening or school play: ‘It’s the Byrnes,’ they’d whisper and try not to stare. I think it’s because they had some strange charisma I’d never quite managed to suss out. And when my father died, my mother was no longer ‘Mrs Byrne’. She became ‘The Widow’.

  Rumours circulated like wildfire about how the accident happened – his fall into the deep cellar, severing both his spine and his neck when he hit the concrete floor below, caused great speculation. I even heard some of my teachers talking about it in the staffroom when they thought everyone had gone home. ‘The whole thing was deliberate. Everyone knew their marriage was, well, weird. And I think maybe she just snapped and decided to set it all up as an accident. And nobody could prove it wasn’t.’

  I’d actually enjoyed hearing that. Enjoyed this idea of my mother plotting to kill her bastard husband. Because, if that had been the case, maybe I would have liked her a bit more. At the time, I managed to convince myself that the rumours were false.

  But that was then.

  ‘What the hell has happened to the front of the house?’ It’s the first thing I say to the mother I haven’t seen for twenty years as she comes out onto the veranda to meet me.

  ‘Hello to you too,’ she says. Some mothers kiss their children and hug them after a long time away. She doesn’t. She folds her arms to make it quite clear there will be no physical contact.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, glancing her up and down, taking her in. She’s lost weight – quite remarkably so. She’d always been a little plump around her waist and neck. Now she is slim, almost wiry, like some old starving bird. Her long, once-blonde hair – our shared attribute – has gone grey, though in a chic Helen Mirren sort of way rather than looking as if she’s gone to seed.

  ‘We had a fire,’ she says, raising her eyes to the blackened wood and stone above her. ‘It stained most of the front.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say. In spite of everything, there’s a twinge of guilt inside me for not knowing. ‘Is the place safe to live in?’

  She tuts. ‘Course it’s safe. It will take more than a little chip-pan fire to bring this place to the ground.’

  She turns on her heel and walks back inside. I realise that the taxi driver is waiting patiently behind me in the car, avidly watching the odd reunion unfold. I tap my card on his machine, snatch up my bag and follow m
y mother inside.

  ‘Is that all you’ve brought with you?’ she says, glancing at my luggage. ‘Not staying long?’

  ‘I’m here for good.’

  She freezes and turns back to me. ‘For good?’ Although she’s speaking quietly – dangerously so – I swear I hear the chandelier above us tinkle slightly from the tension in her voice.

  ‘Yes. I’ve left Alec. I’m moving back to Australia.’

  She stares at me for what feels like a full minute and then shrugs. ‘I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did. What was the final straw?’

  I shrug back. ‘I don’t know. He was too Scottish.’

  ‘Isn’t that a racist remark? You always used to have a go at me for my “socially inconsiderate” language. Come on, I’m being serious, Caroline.’

  ‘Are you being serious? Because surely to most people it would be absolutely obvious why our marriage may have imploded. Something to do with me losing a CHILD. A child who was MURDERED.’ I shout the most emotive parts of the sentence, but my mother doesn’t blink. She just gives me one of her long stares again and then holds up a finger.

  ‘First warning,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ I spit back.

  ‘You heard,’ she comes closer to me now and I can smell her Chanel perfume. Christ, it takes me back.

  ‘If you’re staying here, even if it’s just for the night, I don’t want any hysterics. You were always prone to hysterics when you were a kid and I’d have hoped middle age would have knocked it out of you. If not, then any number of the local hotels are at your disposal. As I said, must be nice being able to splash out on luxuries like that.’