by Celia Rees
He’s holding the gun up to my head now. She glances sideways and back again. Rob has taken this way past anything that she had planned. He’s hijacked the whole mad scheme and then outmanoeuvred her with all the skill of a grand master. She’s silent, like she has no answers. He’s left her with nowhere to go.
Her tears have dried on her face. Her jaw is rigid; a small muscle jumps in her cheek. She’s driving smoothly now, with more confidence, but her knuckles are white where she’s gripping the wheel. Her apparent indifference is masking her anger. She is fighting to keep her fury under control.
‘Rob!’ I twist round. We are nearing the town now, minutes away from the multi-storey car park. Up there, he’ll have the whole town in front of him, not just the school. Precinct, ring road, you name it. I know he’s beyond reasoning, but I have to try. I figure he won’t shoot me, not here, not now, not in a street full of cars and people. ‘You can’t –’
I don’t get to finish the sentence.
‘I told you to shut the fuck up!’
He hits me across the side of the head hard with the barrel of the gun. I see double, can’t hear for the ringing in my ears and feel the liquid trickle beginning to flow through my hair. I touch my forehead. My hands come away red with blood.
Caro turns to look at me, automatically lifting her foot from the accelerator as she does so.
‘Don’t stop the car,’ he snarls at her. We’re driving through the centre of town, towards the bridge over the river. There are plenty of people about, getting off buses, walking up from the station, coming out of cafes clutching lattes. ‘Keep driving or he gets it – you, too, and anyone else around.’
For a second, I think that she is going to disobey him. Her eyes go wide with shock at the sight of the blood trickling down my face. The car is in danger of stalling. I hold my hands out, fingers spread, sticky and red.
‘This is real, Caro! How much more are you going to spill?’
‘There’s tissues in the glove compartment,’ is all she says. She accelerates, eyes looking ahead, her mask back in place.
‘You’re mad, you know that!’
‘I told you not to say that.’ He taps me with the gun again, but gently this time, almost a caress. ‘But maybe I am, little brother, maybe I am. Runs in the family.’
We’re approaching the bridge now. They haven’t finished working on it; the traffic is still single lane with temporary traffic lights across it. We get there just as the lights are changing. Caro slows right down, as if she is about to stop.
‘There’s only one thing left to do.’ She breathes the words so quietly that only I can hear. Then she says: ‘Get out of the car,’ her voice low and deliberate. She says it again, loud and insistent, screaming the words in my ear. ‘GET OUT OF THE CAR!’
I’ve got the door open and dive sideways, out of his line of fire. She speeds up, jumping the temporary lights which have just turned back to red. She has the long bridge to herself. She puts her foot down, the car picks up speed. Workmen turn, alerted by the roar of the engine, the squeal of tyres on tarmac. Then halfway across, just before the point where the stone parapet is replaced by a temporary barrier, she swerves hard to the left. The car mounts the pavement – workmen are shouting, scrambling to get out of the way. I hear the wooden barrier splintering, then a splashing roar as the car hits the river nose first and goes straight down.
For a moment there is silence, the only sound the lapping slop of the displaced water. Time seems to slow, then stop altogether so everyone is frozen in the moment looking towards the source of this extraordinary event, this disturbance to their lives. Then it all speeds up again and people are running, shouting for help, racing to the bridge. I scramble to my feet and I’m running, too.
I don’t know what I expect to see as I get to the parapet. Maybe that she’ll emerge. She’s a good swimmer after all, a strong swimmer. Water is her element. She told me that. She will get out, people do escape from those situations. She will wriggle out and swim up to the surface. She will emerge from the water like a river mermaid – a nixie, a lorelei. She will appear any second. She has to survive. The prospect of her death does not seem a possibility. He’ll come up after her. He’s a born survivor. I cannot think of his death, either. He’s been through a war – how could this kill him?
The seconds stretch to a minute, two. People hang over the bridge, line the bank, attracted by the drama, the spectacle. Unable to do anything, they lean forwards, straining towards the patch of disturbed water, point and gesture in a flutter of helpless hands. Time ticks by. The disturbance in the water has dissipated; the river resumes its flow.
Chapter 36
I stay, staring down at the place, while emergency services arrive and the police begin questioning witnesses, wanting to know if anyone knew the identity of the occupants of the vehicle. I have a weird sense of shame, as though I’ve failed them. I lacked the power to stop them. I didn’t have their guts, their courage. I couldn’t live with either of them, or die like them. I am alive, I survived. I feel relief and guilt in equal measure and find I am crying, sobbing, and the tears will not stop. I see someone in the crowd point me out to a young policewoman. She comes over and asks me gently, ‘What happened to you? Were you involved in the accident?’
I nod, unable to speak.
‘Did you see what happened? Did you know the driver?’
I nod again, tell her my brother was also in the car. Tell her there is something else that they have to know.
She leads me by the arm to her senior officer. There’s an inflatable recovery boat being brought down to the water, police divers checking their equipment. I have to stop them, warn them about the bomb. I think they won’t believe me, but they take my warning seriously. The whole thing escalates from tragic accident to terrorist incident in an instant. Work is halted, the whole area is cordoned off, bomb disposal arrive. Divers are sent down. The car is brought up, it stands, shrouded in a white tent, the occupants still inside it, while experts work to defuse the bomb.
A paramedic sees to my cut, cleans me up, then I’m taken to the police station and questioned for a long time. I stick to my story that Caro was a hostage, we were both innocents with no idea what Rob was planning. No one will ever know for sure what sent them plunging into the river, but everyone believes that it was Caro, that she chose to sacrifice her own life to save others. It has turned her into a heroine.
Chapter 37
I’ve put my words and theirs together. If there is any kind of explanation, then it is here. Rob posted his video diary on the Net. He’s a hero to some people. It got a lot of hits before it was taken down. Caro’s mother returned the rucksack that I’d left at her house. Caro’s notebook was inside it, tied with red ribbon. On the cover, it says:
For You
I grieve for them every day, but really it isn’t that simple. I’m angry with them for doing what they did, leaving early, leaving me to go on alone, and it’d be dishonest of me if I didn’t admit to a little part of me that is thankful that they are no longer here to throw my life into turmoil, or to hurt me any more.
Writing this has made these feelings easier to understand and to endure. What you can’t change, you got to live with, that’s what Grandpa used to say. I’ll be living with this for the rest of my life. But at least I’ll have a life. I’m ready now to say goodbye. The urn is heavy, heavier than you’d think, but a small container for a full-grown man. I take it down to the river. I choose to go in the very early morning, near dawn. I’m on the bridge, at the place where they went over, where the stone is paler. The light is soft. There’s mist above the water. Down towards the weir, the river is rippling gold with the rising sun. I lean on the new stone of the parapet for a moment, looking down at the place where the water is still in shadow. I open the canister, tip it slowly and watch the ash drift in the slight breeze that always blows here, watch as the fragments fall and scatter, dimpling and dusting the dark surface.
In the lit
tle garden next to the bridge, I picked some roses. For her. Red and white and the palest yellow. She said, ‘I don’t do love,’ but I think maybe she did. I let the petals flutter down to spread across the river, mingling with the ashes, to be taken by the restless current, borne away down the stream.
Also by Celia Rees
Witch Child
Sorceress
Pirates!
Sovay
The Fool’s Girl
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in February 2012 by
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP
This electronic edition published in February 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Celia Rees 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
The publishers are grateful to the following for permission
to reproduce copyright material:
Lines from ‘My Brother’s Vespa’, Selected Poems, by Peter Sansom © 2010, published by Carcanet Press
Lines from ‘Pirate Jenny’, The Threepenny Opera, by Bertolt Brecht,
translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, Methuen Drama,
an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, translation copyright © 1979 Brecht Heirs,
original work entitled Die Dreigroschenoper © 1928 Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag,
renewed 1968 by Helene Brecht-Weigel
Whilst every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and
to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material, the
publisher apologises for any omissions in the above list and
would be grateful if notified of any corrections
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408821442
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Also by Celia Rees
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Also by Celia Rees