by Eva Dolan
Fifteen minutes after I arrived, they did. But it was no mass push. Just one young woman, small and pale with a shock of peroxide-white hair.
Ella said it was a panic attack that propelled her towards the cordon of riot shields and masked faces. That she didn’t remember making her move, still didn’t understand how she forced her way through them.
Mobile-phone footage surfaced after the event, showing her scrambling over the shoulders of the police, fear making her nimble. Her hand braced against a helmet, her foot came down hard on some big bastard’s shoulder, and she was out. Cheers went up, one of the riot police broke formation and went after her and that was when I made my own move.
My first shot caught the moment his baton struck the back of her knee. I saw her crumple. The sunlight flashing off his shield. I kept moving closer as she lay there, too new to this to even curl up into a protective ball. She possessed just enough survival instinct to throw her arm up as he went in for another blow and I captured the instant it landed, heard the crack of bone and the howl that broke out of her.
That was what made the image compelling enough to go viral – the freezing of the precise second that Ella Riordan lost her innocence.
I saw her through that and I’ll see her through this.
Gingerly I lift my throbbing shoulder from the mattress and it complains but not so much that I need to lie down again. I pull a navy fleece dressing gown on over my pyjamas, slip my feet into fur-lined boots as quickly as I can, before the cold floor can leach out any more of my body heat.
In the kitchen, I make a cup of coffee, think about taking it back to bed and talk myself out of it. It’s too easy to hide and hope things fix themselves. They never do and time doesn’t heal, it just degrades and festers and complicates. If I act like everything’s normal I might be able to fool myself that it is. At the very least I can fool other people. Witnesses. Because that’s what my friends and neighbours have become overnight. Witnesses to my behaviour after the fact.
And I don’t think I could fool them, not today. I’m not ready yet to put on a brave and innocent face.
Maybe I could go back to bed again.
No. I go to my desk and check my emails while my coffee cools, like a normal person. A former student inviting me to a gallery show in Whitechapel next month – I RSVP, knowing I might be in no position to attend once the time comes, but he’s a talented young man and I want him to feel he still has my support. There’s an offer of some supply work at UEA, maternity cover, very last minute, and I turn it down even though I need the money.
Money’s something I try not to think about too often, even though it’s a constant and pressing need, worse now than ever before, and I was never affluent, not even during the brief double-income period of my marriage. He had his vices just like I had mine and they clashed in the most destructive way. While he wanted to buy himself happy, I wanted to give my money away and we both believed that behaviour signalled a deep-seated lack of self-esteem in the other. Once you’ve seen how your life partner tries to stave off their own sense of worthlessness there’s no going back. Because if they don’t value themselves, how can you value them?
If I’d stayed on track after the divorce, worked five days a week and all those long evenings of marking and lesson planning like my old friends did, I’d probably be comfortably off now. Mortgage-free and embracing approaching retirement, maybe with a little place in France or a long-anticipated world tour booked.
But that was never me.
It only took one long, rainy night around the fire at Greenham Common to make me realise how little I cared about financial security, how small and selfish an aim it was in a world with so much going wrong in it. Returning home afterwards, dirty and tired but invigorated, only to find him purring over a new lawn mower he’d bought while I was away, that was the final break. I couldn’t be with a man like that.
Instead I’ve had thirty years of supply teaching and cover jobs, which has allowed me to focus on more important ends and has left me with a virtually worthless pension. My only income beyond that are the ever-decreasing monthly payments from the photo agency who pimp me out, and dwindling royalties from my earlier career. It was the right choice. I’ve never doubted that for a moment.
And I hate that he’s snuck up on me right now. That old life I rejected. Him. Who I never think about from one year to the next, coming at me because I’m so scared that any memory is safer to linger in than the ones from last night.
I need to get out of this flat.
Stand up, move, resist the fear.
I dress in jeans and a heavy black jumper and my tatty parka, put on flat boots and fingerless gloves: camouflage-wear. Some days it feels good to be noticed but not when I’m working. Before I leave the flat I stow my laptop under a pile of old magazines, drag a box of even older books in front of it.
Since the flats started to empty out, the break-ins have increased. Opportunists too stupid to realise none of us have anything worth stealing, junkies looking for somewhere to lay low, kids who just want to smash shit up.
Every time I leave I expect to come home to devastation.
It nearly broke the Moores. By the end they weren’t leaving at all. Holed up protecting their family photos and the collection of china she inherited from her mother, made paranoid by the noises this place produces at night, the sound of the wind coming through the broken windows and the doors sucked at and slammed. The voices. The laughter. The footsteps in the hallways.
He was probably one of them. The man Ella killed.
As I approach the lift, my feet slow and I find I can’t walk past it.
All of the lift doors are permanently shut now, except for on the top floor. The car itself is stuck halfway between ground level and first and that’s where he is, on the roof of it, lying across whatever bulky mechanisms make the thing rise and fall.
At the stairwell, I go up rather than down, to the top floor where only one resident remains and he’s always out at this time of morning, taking his daily run along the river. Ella has been sleeping in another flat up here, but she went home with a friend last night.
There’s nobody around to see me creep towards the open door of the lift.
The gap is less than three feet wide and I remember how we struggled with his unwieldy bulk. Ella pushed his legs through first while I took the full force of his weight. And then we shimmied him through the rest of the way, one arm each, our knees pushing into his shoulders until finally he fell.
I lean against the door and immediately step back, seeing the mess of handprints which must be ours. With the cuff of my jumper I wipe them away in circles, top to bottom, over and again. Because I know our fingerprints, if they were lifted, would contain minuscule traces of his blood.
Part of me is that logical still.
The rest, when I tentatively put my head through the gap, is not so composed.
I peer down into the darkness and think I can see his light-coloured combats. When I switch my phone to the torch app and direct it down towards his body I can’t make out his face but he doesn’t seem as shattered as I expected. His limbs aren’t weirdly twisted; his neck appears to be straight still.
Something clangs down there and I step back swiftly. There’s the sudden clenching sensation of being caught looking at something you’re not supposed to see. Like shame. My cheeks flush with it.
I hurry back to my flat and lock the door behind me, aware that I’m breathing heavily, the torch still lit in my hand, shining on the wall of photographs, picking out the one of Ella, on her back, trying to save herself from another blow.
She can’t know about this. If she finds out there’s even a tiny chance he’s still alive down there, she’ll want to call the fire brigade and ambulance.
I kick off my boots and leave my parka where it drops on the floor, crawl into my still-warm bed and pull the covers up over my face, turning and curling into a ball.
It won’t have been the light from my phone that made him
stir.
There isn’t enough of him left in there to think I’d come to save him.
There can’t be.
Ella
Then – 1st March
There it was, predictably, a few seconds after she slipped into an empty seat near the window. The feeling of eyes on her.
Ella hated using public transport. Always had but even more so now that she’d graduated from generic female to be stared at just because to a specific, occasionally recognisable female to be photographed and tweeted/instagrammed/whatever while she sat on the bus or stood on the Tube.
She fought the urge to hunch down lower in the hard seat, not wanting to give whoever was watching her the satisfaction of knowing she felt uncomfortable.
It didn’t make her feel any safer, though. So far she’d been lucky and the hate she’d faced had been contained online, aside from the odd aggressive heckler at an event. And at those there would always be someone nearby to shield her if they crossed the line from throwing insults to physical intimidation. But Ella knew it was only a matter of time before one of her critics cornered her.
And then what would she do?
Her father had raised her to stand up for herself, trained her to find an opponent’s softest spots, hammer their weakness until they were laid out flat at her feet. Because he knew better than anyone how dangerous the world was for girls and he wouldn’t send her into it ill-equipped.
You couldn’t do that, though, not in her position. Better to be the bloodied and defiant victim than defend yourself and let your enemies paint you as the aggressor. Even if it went against all her instincts and principles.
Ella shook herself out of the thought. This was happening more often lately: she’d convince herself she was being followed or bugged or that the person trying to be her new best friend had some dark, ulterior motive. It was natural, she knew that. She’d been warned how this business twisted your perceptions and that some of the time you were actually right so it was always best to assume the worst.
You couldn’t publicly slam the police without picking up more attention from them. You couldn’t attack major developers and their corrupt friends in local government and expect them not to retaliate. Surveillance was a given, she’d been told. Accept it and ignore it. Unless you’re meeting someone you need to protect.
Like today.
The Tube would be pulling into Tottenham Court Road station within the minute. She needed to know if she was being followed. Start to work out how best to lose them.
Ella dragged her rucksack on to her shoulder and stood up, making a quick sweep of the carriage as she started towards the doors. Four people. An elderly couple in matching trench coats. A suited young woman engrossed in a paperback and, next to her, a man in a leather bomber jacket and wool hat, hiding behind a paper. Not reading it, actively hiding behind it.
The couple gathered up their bags and umbrellas, the woman steadier on her feet than her husband, who she held under the arm, supporting him as they shuffled out of their seats. They were blocking Ella’s view of the man, but they were shielding her too, and when the train stopped and the doors opened she bolted for the escalator, weaving through the sparse post-commuter crowd, running up the steps until she was stopped by a family laden down with luggage, two small boys attached to their father’s wrist by springy leads, the mother with a baby in a sling across her chest.
Turning to check behind her, she saw no sign of the man and relaxed a little. She smiled at one of the boys, who looked blankly at her and began to chew on the bright orange lead that tethered him to his father.
A fine rain hit her face as she emerged on to the street and she pulled the hood of her parka over her head, rounded her shoulders and started down Charing Cross Road. She skirted slow-moving shoppers and tourists, ducking under their umbrellas to stay hidden, until she slipped into Foyles and quickly made her way to the glass lift, feeling, as the doors slid shut, that she was finally free of her unseen, possibly unreal, pursuer.
The cafe was bustling as usual. Waiting for her drink she studied the customers, wondering if the person she was expecting was here yet. She didn’t know what the woman looked like and wouldn’t usually go into a meeting with so little information, but Molly had introduced her and Ella trusted her ability to weed out all but the most reliable sources.
‘You were here last month,’ the guy behind the counter said, as he placed Ella’s green tea on the tray. ‘The Martin Sinclair event, right?’
She nodded. ‘Are you a fan of his?’
‘I don’t think he goes far enough.’
Ella found a table and sat down facing the stairs, checked on her Kickstarter page for the third time today. It was getting to be a nervous tic, worse than waiting for a message from a lover, more desperate and more thrilling when she saw that someone had taken the last £200 sponsorship – the most expensive package, strictly limited to twenty donors.
They were less than £300 short now, with a week to go, and she was sure they would hit the target before the deadline. A piece she’d written about online harassment was running tomorrow and that was bound to bring a few more people out in support, even if it was only the £10 e-books.
She tried not to think about all the work still to do and the rate it was piling up at. Copy to chase, more to edit, her own introduction stubbornly refusing to sparkle on the page.
‘Is anyone sitting here?’
‘I’m waiting for—’ She looked up and immediately scowled at the face smiling down at her. ‘I’m meeting a friend.’
Dylan pulled out the seat opposite. ‘I’ve only got an espresso; I’ll be gone in a minute.’
He snatched his hat off and ran his fingers through his greying hair, straightening it into some better shape; vain as ever. She should have recognised him on the Tube, but there was no reason for him to be there, except that he was following her and why would he do that?
Suddenly the neighbouring tables felt very close and she was sure the conversations had dimmed, the people angling their bodies to listen to what would be said here. Because it must be obvious, the thrum between them, the strings tying them together, knotted tighter than she could stand.
Ella sipped her tea, eyeing him across the rim of the cup, but he was concentrating on sugaring his coffee, looking around the cafe, like any normal person awkwardly sharing a table with a stranger.
Her contact was already running late, could be here any moment. Ella refused to let Dylan encroach on that. Knew exactly how he would behave, the charm bordering on obsequiousness he always pulled out for women. Women other than her.
‘You’ve been ignoring me,’ he said finally, leaning across the table in a pose that would look like fascination from a distance, until you got close enough to see the anger in his eyes and the hardness around his mouth.
‘I’ve been busy.’ She glanced up from her phone. ‘You can’t expect me to come running whenever it suits you.’
‘I understand how important your “work” is, Ella.’ Under the table his knee struck hers and she drew back sharply. ‘But it’s no excuse for leaving me hanging around waiting for you when you’ve got no intention of showing up.’
‘Pretty sure I texted you,’ she said, trying to lighten her tone.
‘Who are you meeting?’ Dylan asked, fingers steepled around his cup. Those fingers, which had twisted her hair and stroked her throat, dipped inside her and teased and kneaded and come out glistening to smear the taste of her across her open mouth.
He grinned at her, like he’d seen the images in her eyes. He was too good at this, could always read her.
‘Just a friend,’ she said.
‘A “friend”?’ His brows went up. ‘A work friend or a personal friend?’
She knew where this was going.
‘Work.’
‘Well, you’d better call them and cancel.’ He threw back his espresso, swiped his mobile off the table as he stood up and gave her the barest nod before he walked away, cutting conf
idently through the tables, moving aside with a smile to let a woman pass with a precariously loaded tray.
Ella watched him until he disappeared, knowing how perkily he would go down the stairs, how obscenely satisfied he must be with himself right now. She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, aiming for some small pool of calm. Then she saw it, peeking out from under his cup and saucer.
A slip of paper folded around a plastic keycard, a room number written on it. She saw the name of the hotel on the card and recognised it as one he’d taken her to before. A place he reserved for the times he sensed her dedication wavering. Last summer: an afternoon of sweltering sex and cooling showers and circular conversation, which turned into an argument, then a full-blown fight.
If she could have ended it that day she would have.
There was no walking away from him, though.
Ella tapped out a quick apology as she left Foyles, certain she would be able to draw the woman back into conversation. She hadn’t seemed particularly skittish, not like some of the people Ella dealt with, and Ella’s excuse had been a good one. If there was one thing she’d learned from Dylan, it was the art of lying to women.
She felt exposed as she turned on to Moor Street; too many people hanging around, eyeing everything, smokers outside the pubs and cafes, a taxi idling in front of the hotel’s discreet black entrance. More people in the courtyard when she went in, a man drinking a smoothie under the canopy, a woman vaping with her face turned to the sky, staring up at the glass walkways and wood cladding and all of that polished steel.
The room was on the second floor and Ella ran quickly up the spiral staircase, her fingers gliding through the raindrops beading the handrail, feeling her anger already becoming arousal and then anger again, at herself, for letting him manipulate her like this.
He was naked when she opened the door, didn’t even flinch, and she knew what he was doing, making this about sex so she wouldn’t challenge his behaviour. She resolved not to fall for it this time, even if her body was already reacting.
‘That was an important meeting you just wrecked,’ she said.