The Blame Game

by C. J. Cooke

  Before long we are eyeballing the bank of cumulonimbus that looks like a fluffy white quilt from above.

  ‘How far until the bottom?’ Theo shouts.

  ‘Too much fog,’ Luke says. ‘I’ll try throwing something and we’ll listen to the drop.’

  He chucks a rock down. I don’t hear it land.

  ‘That’s more than a hundred-foot drop,’ Theo observes.

  ‘It probably landed in a bush,’ Luke says dismissively. He says something else, but we don’t hear it, because right then rocks come chucking down, hundreds of them, as though the mountain is disintegrating. Helen screams, and we all grip on to the rockface as tight as we can, keeping our bodies flat to stone as the rocks plunge down around us like rain.

  Suddenly the rope jerks wildly, and in an instant I see Luke peel away from the cliff and fall down, down. It happens so fast, my legs and arms smashing against the rock. Theo manages to loop his end of the rope around a tree that is jutting out of the rock, holding us all fast and saving our lives. But with a horrifying jolt, the rope lashes upwards, slamming us all against the jagged angles of the cliff again as the rocks continue to fall.

  After a moment, the dust settles.

  Everything is still. I open my eyes. Nothing I see makes sense.

  ‘Luke?’ Theo shouts. ‘Luke!’

  It takes me a moment to realise that I’m hanging upside down. My helmet is barely hanging on, the blood rushing to my head. I see cloud, then Helen, clinging to the rope for dear life, whimpering, and above her Theo, latched on to the escarpment, star-shaped.

  I arc my head and glance down. Luke is there. Why is he beneath me? It doesn’t make sense. Just a moment before he was at the top of the rope. Now he’s upside down, like me, his neck arched and his arms flung backwards, like a puppet dangling from a string.

  He isn’t moving.

  ‘Someone help!’ Helen shouts. ‘Help us!’

  I try to gather my senses, but just then rocks start hurtling down again, infrequent but too close for comfort. I can see that Luke is still harnessed to the rope but the anchors have come away from the rock. They are visible at the end of the rope, caught against his harness. They’ve clearly detached from the rock and pulled Luke down the rockface.

  The only thing keeping all four of us from plunging to our deaths is Theo, hanging on to the rope above.

  ‘Theo!’ I yell. ‘Have you anchored us?’

  ‘Just about,’ he answers in a tight voice. ‘I can only hold this for so long. Any ideas?’

  Helen is shouting about her fingers. She’s been hurt.

  ‘Helen! Are you OK?’ Theo shouts, and I arch my head back.

  ‘My hand,’ she gasps. ‘I think my hand is broken!’

  ‘Keep against the wall,’ Theo shouts then. ‘I can hear rumbling!’

  The rope is swaying dangerously, the weight of Luke’s body beneath us clearly too much.

  ‘Luke!’ I shout. ‘Luke, are you with us?’

  I need him to wake up and grip the rock. He gives a low moan. When he spins around again I see his helmet is missing. It must have been knocked off in the rock fall.

  ‘Theo, we need to create another anchor,’ I say. ‘Can you do that from your end?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Helen, how are you doing?’ I say, giving a thumbs up.

  She nods, but is holding on grimly to her hand.

  ‘Luke?’ she shouts. ‘Tell us you’re alright!’

  ‘Luke, are you OK?’ Theo yells. Nothing.

  ‘I think he’s taken a hit to the head,’ I say. ‘I can’t see his helm …’

  I don’t finish my sentence. The rope drops again, making us all scream. The tree that Theo looped the rope around is beginning to peel away from the rock.

  ‘I can’t hold it!’ Theo shouts. I shout at Luke to wake up, but he doesn’t stir. Theo is screaming about not being able to create an anchor in time, he is trying so hard but can’t, the weight beneath him is too much. The rope drops again, and this time I know it is all over. I crane my neck to look up at Helen one last time. One last look before we all fall.

  She locks eyes with me. ‘Cut it!’ she pleads in a tear-stricken voice. ‘Cut the rope!’

  I don’t have time to think. I don’t have time to do anything but act on instinct. Luke is badly injured, and I see a bright splash of blood on his forehead. He won’t wake in time to find a grip in the rock. This is the only way we can survive, the one chance we have to make it.

  I quickly filch the Stanley knife from the thigh pocket in my trousers. I pause as I press the blade against the rope.

  ‘Luke, please! Wake up!’

  Nothing.

  I slice the knife against the fibres of the rope. In an instant it snaps, whipping upward as the weight beneath me slips into shadow.

  There is no scream from Luke, only a rushing sound as he plunges downward. A series of sickening thuds as his body hits the side of the cliff on the way down.

  ‘No!’ Theo screams. ‘No no no no no!’

  For a long time, we hang there in the fist of horror, in harrowing stillness.

  The storm passes.

  The rain stops.

  The sun comes out.

  Somehow we manage to descend to an outcrop where Theo launches himself at me and punches me to the ground, almost knocking me off the edge. Helen screams at him to stop, but I don’t want him to. I want him to push me off. I sent Luke to his death.

  I killed him.

  ‘Michael had no choice!’ she tells Theo. ‘We all would have died!’

  Theo doesn’t respond. He’s hysterical. Tears roll down his face and his lips curl into an expression I’ve never witnessed before. He howls terrible anguished cries that bounce off the indifferent rockface, the quiet, watchful peaks. His cries penetrate me, entering my bloodstream, braiding my DNA.

  Changing me for ever.

  We follow a path.

  We don’t stop for food or water.

  We don’t speak.

  Theo cries.

  I am numb, completely in shock. Helen is sobbing.

  When we finally convince her to take off her glove, it’s clear that her right hand has been crushed by the rockfall, her fingers already blue and grossly swollen, the bones shattered.

  We reach a refuge, raise the alarm about Luke.

  A medic attends to Helen’s hand, bandaging it to the size of a boxing glove. A mountain rescue unit is sent by helicopter, and for a whole evening and night we live in a supernatural, fatigue-induced hope that maybe, just maybe, Luke will appear in the doorway of the hut. He will beat the living daylights out of me for cutting the rope, but that will be fine because he’ll be alive, and we’ll all have a beer and joke about it being the most epic climb ever.

  The rescue team arrives back in the helicopter and the three of us bail out into the night in a shared vision of the helicopter door flinging open to reveal Luke with perhaps an arm in a sling and a cheers-for-dumping-me look.

  But instead we watch in a gut-wrenching silence as the men in helmets and boiler suits pull a stretcher out, a body covered loosely by a weighted blanket.

  Theo goes ballistic. He races at it, tears the blanket off. In the garish white light of the rescue hut’s emergency light I see Luke’s body. Not Luke at all. No sign whatsoever of the larger-than-life glow he emitted, but a mushed-up skull and face, his arms and legs stiff. Helen falls to her knees and cries without sound. Theo has to be pulled off him.

  They hand us cups of watery tea, ask again what happened. ‘For the gendarme,’ they say, pens and paper in hand.

  Helen manages to answer when Theo and I stay silent.

  ‘Rocks came tumbling down. They hit my hand. We … we think they hit Luke’s head.’

  Theo breaks down again in horrible, anguished sobs. He sounds pitiful, like a little boy.

  They nod, say they have to phone Luke’s parents.

  Theo is the one who breaks the news to them.

  I get on a
plane without saying goodbye to Helen or Theo.

  I land at Heathrow, then barricade myself in a shoddy motel for a week with enough vodka for the Red Army.

  Somehow I survive.

  But I don’t sleep.

  I find myself on a bridge looking down at a river a few weeks later and realise I have a choice. I can die, which would be a relief from the emotions that besiege me. Or I can do something worthwhile with the life that has somehow been given back to me. It could easily have been me at bottom of that rope.

  A split-second decision has changed the entire course of my life, and ended Luke’s.

  40

  Michael

  6th September 2017

  The hotel room is tiny, a segment of loft with a sloping roof and a small window overlooking rooftops and blue sea. Yellow wallpaper, an old-fashioned dressing table, half-shut blinds throwing a ribcage of light on the wooden floor. A leaflet on the table says ‘Hôtel de Côte Fleurie.’

  It takes a few moments for the images in my head to disperse, for Theo’s yells to stop ringing in my years. I can hear him so clearly, the timbre of his voice, the pain in his yells. No!

  After Luke’s death I dropped out of Oxford. I changed my last name, not out of a conscious attempt to hide but because every cell in my body was changed by the fall. Michael King died on Mont Blanc.

  I never contacted Theo again, or Luke’s parents. Years later, I woke from a cold sweat and realised that the right thing would have been to contact them, to offer condolences and, more importantly, the full story.

  Some years after that, I realised – much too late – that my silence suggested that I was guilty of something much worse. Something intentional, deliberate.

  That I had murdered him in cold blood.

  And sometimes, in my nightmares, I wonder whether I had. Whether some vile part of my subconscious wanted Helen enough to cut the rope and clear the path to her. Whether I had simply obeyed what she shouted in the darkness.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. As though at the far end of a corridor, I can see another image.

  A dreamscape.

  The door of flame.

  Its heat travels the length of the corridor, warming my face. I’m terrified to go near it and yet I am pulled there.

  I take a shower, standing for a long time under a hot jet of water against my forehead, blasting the fatigue that aches in my skull. Then I get changed, head downstairs for breakfast. The receptionist sees me, raises a hand.

  ‘Sir?’

  I approach the desk. ‘Yes?’

  She blushes. ‘We had a problem with your credit card. It was declined. Can you try another?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  I pull the wallet out of my back pocket, find an American Express card. Please God, let it work.

  She swipes it in the machine. Smiles. ‘It worked.’

  I try not to show my panic. The card isn’t mine. It’s only a matter of time before the police trace that transaction. I’m not planning on staying here for long.

  ‘Enjoy your breakfast,’ she says.

  ‘Merci.’

  Yesterday morning I watched the train pull away from the station at Gare du Nord. I went to the ticket office to see if they’d change my ticket to a later train, but it turns out my understanding of French is even worse than my spoken French, and although I had my phone there was no battery left to try and use Google translate. I was, as they say, up the creek without a paddle.

  I was starving, sore all over from the beating I took, and freezing cold. France is a hell of a lot colder than Belize so the clothes I’d changed into – a T-shirt and jeans with flipflops – weren’t useful. I sat down on a bench in the station, wondered what to do. I wanted to go home. I thought of Helen and the kids. If my phone had been working I’d have rung her then. The urge to speak to her, to tell her I love her, burned in me.

  I decided to go and hunt around the shops and stalls for a phone charger. I had four euros. Maybe I could get one for that, or haggle. I hobbled to a mall in the city, looked in all the shops. Phone chargers were around twenty euros. Right when I was actually considering stealing one – I’ve never stolen anything in my life, but desperate times – there was a big commotion at the entrance of the shop. Shouting, and a scuffle. I took a few steps up the aisle and saw a young girl with pink hair and a parka being searched by a security guard. The retail clerk seemed to be accusing her of stealing. The girl denied it loudly even as the security guard started digging stuff out of her pockets. Boxes of perfume, a couple of watches, a wallet.

  All of a sudden the girl burst out of the shop, running like the clappers. Reaching out to the window display she pulled a mannequin down with a clatter behind her to stop the security guard and retail clerk from catching up. A few other shoppers stood and gawped, and just then I spotted something on the ground. A leather wallet. One of the girl’s spoils. She must have dropped it during the chase.

  Quickly I scooped it up, walked quickly out of the mall. I headed to a supermarket and plucked a phone charger off a rack. Some food, a coat. A clean pair of socks. At the checkout I dug one of the credit cards out of the wallet and gave a charming, an Oscar-winning performance of ‘I can’t remember my pin’ by hand gestures. The sales clerk let me scribble a signature.

  It felt strangely exhilarating.

  And then I got a train to Normandy, found a hotel. Charged my phone. With huge trepidation I dialled Helen’s number. It rang and rang, went to voicemail. I hung up and climbed into bed. Cried myself to sleep.

  After breakfast I use the guest computer in the front lobby to look up the address for Luke’s parents’ place. Google reveals nothing. I spend an hour thinking up different search terms and each one yields no results. The receptionist sees me swearing at the computer, approaches me tentatively.

  ‘Sir? Can I help?’

  I rub my eyes. ‘I’m looking for an address,’ I tell her, but then I fall wary. I don’t know who to trust. She’s young. About twenty. Sweet-faced, a soft pink cardigan, earrings in the shape of cupcakes. She puts me in mind of an older version of Saskia. My throat tightens.

  ‘Which address?’ she says. ‘You’re looking for a friend, maybe?’

  ‘Yes. An old friend. His name was – is – Theo Aucoin. His parents owned a big house that once belonged to Winston Churchill. I know it was in this area.’

  She thinks, then her face lights up. ‘Ah.’ She turns and heads back to the front desk, returns with a leaflet.

  ‘This house?’

  I look at the leaflet, spending a handful of seconds trying to find the house behind the castle before I work out that the castle is the damn house. Château du Seuil. An estate with forty acres, multiple outbuildings. A frigging lake.

  ‘They do tours during the day,’ she explains, showing me the price list.

  ‘I don’t think this is the place,’ I protest, but she nods, adamant. ‘Theo Aucoin? Your friend is called.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The Aucoin family have owned that house a long time. They still live there.’

  ‘But, the tours …’ It looks like a National Trust property, not a family home.

  ‘They live in the east wing,’ she says, nodding, emphatic. ‘Just a small section. The rest is public.’

  41

  Helen

  6th September 2017

  The letters sit inside my coat like beating hearts, alive and tormenting. Jeannie spies that I brought something down from the attic and I tell her it’s just tax stuff and insurance certificates that I managed to salvage from the filing cabinet. One lie after another, threaded together like a pearl choker.

  We head for the hospital. I’m aware that I’ve fallen silent but can’t manage to find mental space to drum up some small chat. I was never any good at pretending. Jeannie fills the silence with small talk about how we could set up a pop-up bookshop in the meantime to keep the business going, that she could look into funding to pay temporary staff. Perhaps we can even re-employ Mati
lda and Lucy, who both worked so passionately at the shop and had been devastated by the fire. Then, mid-sentence:

  ‘You don’t think it was either of them that started the fire, do you?’

  I stare at her. ‘What, Lucy? Matilda? They’re the loveliest girls you could meet. Why would they …?’

  She shakes her head, unable to finish her sentence, before signalling to turn on to the A1.

  ‘Word about town is it was malicious,’ she says. ‘What do you make of that?’

  I straighten. ‘“Word about town”?’

  ‘When I was collecting your mail at the Post Office the teller mentioned Sam Jennings,’ she says. ‘Do you know him? The retired fireman who lives around the corner from the shop?’

  The name is vaguely familiar.

  ‘Apparently he reckons it was malicious,’ she continues, clearly enjoying being the source of information. ‘She said he’d been down to have a look around, found V-shaped patterns.’

  ‘V-shaped patterns?’ I say. ‘What the hell does that mean? That a cult started the fire?’

  Her voice falters. ‘It’s about the seat of the fire or something like that. He said if you find V-shaped patterns you’ve located the source, and usually in an accidental fire they’re around an old heater or electrical socket or what have you. He said the patterns weren’t anywhere near a source like that. In his experience, that meant that someone started it with firelighters or ignition fuel.’

  ‘Well if Sam Jennings knows all this,’ I say, ‘what’s taking the insurance company so long?’

  ‘I had a look when we were inside,’ she says, turning into a narrow back alley that joins two main streets. ‘I didn’t see anything V-shaped. To be fair, the teller said Sam’s a sandwich short of a picnic so it could all be a pile of nonsense.’

  I can feel my skin turning cold, anxiety beginning to claim me. ‘The investigation has been going on for months. I’m starting to think it’ll never end.’

  She looks over at me, confused. ‘Didn’t you read the letters?’

  For a moment I think she’s referring to the letters held snug against my chest, infant-warm, and my heart drums in my ears.