‘Or that it’s worth staying alive because you never know what’s going to happen next.’
‘Or that,’ I conceded.
Still, later, I find myself staring at the black water of the Serpentine. I don’t have to push myself too hard to wonder at the woman’s state of mind before she jumped. This time, Charles wouldn’t be here to pull me back in. You must have something to live for, I always say at the shop, and I have always had Charles, but on a day like today when everyone you love is so far away, when the sky is so white and heavy it almost touches the ground and the water is dark and magnetic, you do wonder. Maybe when I’ve gone to the police, I’ll feel better. Perhaps Caroline will forgive me, perhaps this black cloud of despair will shift.
When I get back, the dealer is sitting out in the communal garden with one of his buddies, a small toothless man wearing a Father Christmas hat. The dealer’s dog, jaunty in a tinsel collar, runs over to sniff my feet.
‘Happy Christmas, Franny!’ says the dealer.
‘Happy Christmas to you,’ I reply, glad I’ve been able to say the words, in person, to someone today.
‘Want one of these?’ He waves a spliff at me.
I look at it – I’ve only smoked once or twice before, and never marijuana. Tobacco tends to make me cough – I’ve never really seen the point of it, but today, well, I do see the point – or, at least, I see the point of doing something different.
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘What do I owe you?’
‘Nah.’ He looks affronted. ‘I wouldn’t charge today. Anyway’—he grins—‘it so happens I’ve come into some money.’
In the flat, as I smoke, Branwell adopts the body language of a judgemental prefect. He essentially folds his arms in a goody-goody manner and gives me a look as if to say, ‘Let’s see how this pans out.’
As it happens, it pans out rather well. I realise I’m not the first person to discover this, but Christmas is vastly improved by being mildly out of it. Perhaps everything is better when you’re stoned. I can’t believe I’ve missed out on this pleasure for so long. I chuckle my way through Christmas in Connecticut – and then turn my attention to the food. Ah, the food! I heat up my turkey-for-one and gobble it down, and then I eat Ellie’s salmon because she hasn’t answered any of my messages, so why not? Then I start on a few of the treats I got for Rose, like pigs-in-blankets – I bet they don’t have those in France.
The only thing I don’t bother with is the Christmas pudding because I can’t face the palaver of lighting it on my own. It does make you realise, doing it like this, how much of Christmas is performance. I can suit myself. It’s liberating.
I sit spooning Ellie’s brandy butter straight from the pot, thinking, Take that, SIS. I’m having a wonderful time without you. Wonderful!
I consider catching the Queen’s speech but decide against it and switch over to watch HMS Pinafore instead and, before long, find myself leaping around the room singing along with Little Buttercup.
Look at me, I taunt Ellie in my head. I couldn’t do this with you here. I’m actually having a lovely time.
The neighbour on my right bangs loudly on the wall and then my phone rings. Ellie, I think. Charles. Ellie. Ellie. Ellie.
I dive for the phone while desperately trying to mute Pinafore at the same time.
‘Fran?’
It’s Meilin, I realise, my chest sharp with disappointment.
‘Have you seen?’
‘Seen what?’
‘The news?’
‘No, I was having a bit of a jolly to Pinafore.’
‘You’d better turn over now.’ Her voice is quiet and serious.
My stomach drops. ‘Is it Ellie?’
The picture on the television comes into focus. It’s a picture of Tom Bates under the headline ‘Brit found dead’.
‘It’s Tom,’ says Meilin. ‘He drowned.’
I sink into my armchair. What I can feel pulsing through my veins – though I mustn’t say it – is relief.
It’s not Ellie. Just Tom Bates. Horrible Tom Bates. Whose face made me feel so sick that I scratched it out of my team photo.
‘How dreadful,’ I say at last. ‘His poor family.’
‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ says Meilin.
‘Yes, awful,’ I parrot, trying to work out what they’re saying on the news. There’s a reporter on a bridge, a river stretching behind her.
‘It’s just …’ She hesitates. ‘They’re not sure if it was an accident …’
She’s holding something back. It’s irritating – that and not being able to make out what the anchor is saying. My head is still foggy. I’m trying to play catch-up. The bridge on the television is as pretty as a postcard. The reporter points at padlocks latched to the railings behind her. They’re scrawled with love notes – Carol Colin; N & J 4Ever – those sorts of things.
I realise where I’ve seen padlocks like that before – on Ellie’s Facebook page when she first got to Paris. That’s what Meilin is not saying. Why she sounds so strange. Tom has died in France. Where Ellie is.
The screen has changed again now; the camera is panning over the river. ‘Drowned in the Seine,’ a new headline reads.
I remember then, with appalling clarity, Dickie’s face as he glanced over his shoulder before he fell. As if he’d spotted someone he’d once loved. Someone he’d hurt.
‘First Dickie and now him,’ I say. My voice sounds strange and formal. I barely recognise it. ‘What a terrible coincidence.’
43
Like Dickie, Tom had been drinking. He was last seen alive in the small hours of Christmas Eve in a bar in the Marais, a trendy district by the river, the news reports inform me. He left alone and staggered back to his hotel in a bad state, but never made it. Yesterday a family on a festive stroll spotted his body floating in the water.
Tom and Dickie both fell to their deaths. I wonder if Tom’s fall took him by surprise. A hand to the chest propelling him into the icy river. I wonder how long it took; if he died with his eyes open. Perhaps he was forced to look at himself and what he’d done.
I need to speak to Ellie. It’s the only thing that will calm my racing heart. No matter what happened between us, I need my sister to reassure me she’s still in Tignes. That she’s nowhere near Paris. That she and Rose are safe. I don’t have her number but I look up her apartment block on the internet and find a phone number for the concierge team there. I dial it immediately. A harried-sounding woman picks up, and my GCSE French abandons me.
‘Ellie Knight?’ I say desperately. ‘Can I speak to her?’
I don’t catch what she says in reply and, after repeating it several times, she hangs up.
I message Ellie instead. Have you seen the news about Tom Bates? I need to talk to you immediately, Ellie. Please.
I am begging now. It’s too clear in my mind, too easy to imagine: Ellie in the corner of a bar, having dyed her hair, perhaps, or wearing a wig, or maybe just doing the kind of thing I used to when I followed Charles – a hat pulled down low, a scarf around her face. Maybe she didn’t have to make much of an effort to disguise herself because Tom wasn’t looking for women our age.
Did she watch as Tom poured beer after beer down his thick throat? See the way he approached those young girls with a teasing touch, a clammy hand? Did she pick up something sharp then just to see what it felt like?
After messaging her, I stare at the screen for a long time, my fists clenched, panic a fluttering bird in my chest.
I call Charles and then try Caroline. Neither picks up. I glance at the clock – it’s just past four – they’ll be sitting down for Christmas lunch. I imagine them in the dining room with wine-red walls or, less formally, in the conservatory overlooking the lake. Cracker hats and candlelight. I think of something catching fire – a paper hat, a lock of Fiona’s hair – how it could all go up in flames. Their safe cosy haven. I wish them ill, I realise. It frightens me when my mind turns this way.
Next, I try Meilin.
I don’t know what else to do. I need to speak to someone. I can’t be left with these thoughts alone. She’s a little breathless when she answers.
‘I’m scared,’ I say. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know who to tell. It’s too much.’
‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘It will be OK.’
The words remind me of Mother, sitting by my bed stroking my hair when I’d got myself in a state.
‘I’m sorry I blamed you for telling Caroline.’ My words spill out quickly, nervously. ‘If you say you didn’t, I believe you.’
‘I didn’t,’ she assures me. ‘Like I said before.’
‘I’ve got a lot of things wrong.’
‘Well,’ Meilin sighs, ‘to err is human.’
‘Ellie could be the one who told Caroline,’ I say. ‘I thought of that later. She knew I was there.’
Meilin pauses for a long time. ‘Are you sure she wasn’t there herself?’
‘Of course not,’ I snap. ‘What are you saying?’
But I know what she’s saying. There it is again: the flash of white-blonde curls I saw on the platform. She could have been there; it could have been her.
‘It’s a strange coincidence – both of them dying like that, so close together; you said it yourself.’ Meilin sounds weary.
For a long time, I stare into my lap. For all her steeliness and athleticism, Ellie is a tender person: gentle, empathetic. The idea of her pushing people to their deaths is fantastical. Ridiculous. But, and this is the only thought that catches me in its grip, Dickie Graham and Tom Bates weren’t just people.
‘Would it be possible,’ I begin, ‘I mean I know it’s a big ask, but could I come to yours? I don’t want to be alone.’
She pauses. ‘You can’t, I’m sorry.’ Her voice is warm but firm. ‘I have someone here.’
‘Oh.’
Her colleague, of course. Even Meilin has someone to spend Christmas with.
‘Let’s talk tomorrow,’ she says.
‘Please don’t say anything to anyone about Ellie. Not yet.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ she says reproachfully. ‘But, Fran, you really should get hold of her.’
After she’s hung up, I decide I need some fresh air to clear my head. A walk around the block. I fetch my coat and open the door and the rush of air disturbs a light dusting of white powder just outside, where the mat would be if I had one: icing sugar with a footprint in the centre.
44
This time, though, the sight doesn’t make me feel loved. It makes me feel uneasy. It makes me feel frightened. I tiptoe to the staircase as if I might disturb the air somehow. There’s only one person who knows about the Father Christmas footprint.
‘Ellie,’ I call down the empty steps. ‘Was that you?’
But when I hear the words echo down the stairs, I feel vulnerable and foolish, as if she – if indeed it is her – is taunting me. I return to the safety of the flat and stand in the hallway for a few moments, unsure what to do with myself. Then, almost without thinking, I find myself climbing upstairs to Ellie’s room and doing something I’ve never done before: I get into her bed and pull the covers up to my chin. I stare at the pattern of the dark sky through her Velux window and concentrate very hard on sending a message to Ellie: Stop hiding, come home.
I realise I’ve never had a firm grip on where she is – that I’ve never quite been able to keep up with her, ever since we were children. She was always a faster runner, a stronger swimmer, better at hiding.
I close my eyes and think.
Perhaps Tom drank until the others in the bar began to shift away from him – the women, with imperceptible movements, nudging away from his touch, the men rolling their eyes.
Perhaps it was then he felt he’d outstayed his welcome, that he decided to go back to his hotel. And Ellie, hiding in the corner of the bar, followed him out into the night.
Perhaps it didn’t take much as he staggered across the bridge, unwitting, unknowing. Two hands to his chest. A sharp push. Him squirming in the water, her staring down at him, unsmiling. A reversal of the last time.
Perhaps, I think, lying in her bed, shivering with cold, even though I’m under the duvet, if I’d known what she was going to do – that that was her plan all along – I would have done it with her.
Ellie only told me once. It was almost a year after we left Chesterfield. I was miserable. We both were. I’d been finishing my A-levels in a sixth-form college, where the set texts were different and no one talked to me. Withdrawing into myself, I didn’t speak, unless I had to, for the rest of the year.
Ellie didn’t say much, either. She had begun speaking again in our last days at Chesterfield after weeks of silence, but she kept her words to a minimum. She’d started dancing – something Mother was pleased about – taking classes in the evening, working in a coffee shop during the day. Though Mother home-schooled her for a while, she failed her GCSEs and didn’t want to take her studies any further.
Our mother never got over what happened to Ellie at school. I caught her looking at my sister in a different way in the years afterwards: watchful, attentive. In her last night with us, when I woke in my chair beside her bed to hear her ragged breath in the darkness, Mother gripped my hand. I wanted to get Ellie – I’d promised I’d wake her if there was any change – but before I did, Mother said in a weak voice, ‘You must look after your sister.’ I said to her I did, that I always would, but Mother wouldn’t let go of my hand. ‘You must promise,’ she said. ‘She’s not as strong as she seems.’ It was only after I’d reassured her a couple of times that she let me stand up and fetch Ellie.
She never stopped worrying it might happen again. After Chesterfield, she made us attend a self-defence course taught by a short, bald man with a background in martial arts and a curiously calm demeanour for a person who spent most of his working day fighting. Ever since that class, I’ve looked at the world differently: keeping my eye out for items that could be used as weapons. A glass; a lamp; on one occasion, on the night bus home, when the driver was acting strangely and I was the sole passenger, one of those hammers strapped to the wall for breaking through the window. A tiny, bright orange thing, which looked like it could do some damage. If it came to it.
‘Do you know why women are so easy to overpower?’ he asked us once.
‘Because we’re not as fucking strong,’ Ellie said.
He overlooked her expletive with a benign smile. ‘Well, there is that,’ he said, ‘but, also, when you fight, you don’t fight to kill.’
One white winter morning, Ellie had climbed into bed with me and started talking. She must have guessed I was full of questions I’d never ask. That all I’d known was that Charles had carried her from the swimming pool, dripping wet, wrapped in a towel, to the staffroom in the boarding house.
Mother and Mrs Morgan closed the door, while Dickie hovered outside for a while. When I asked him what had happened he told me to fuck off with such vehemence I knew to leave it alone.
I sat outside the staffroom pretending to read a book. After an hour or so, Mother came out and told me to go to bed. Her face was puffy from crying.
‘I don’t know what Dickie had planned,’ Ellie said to me in bed that day. ‘I don’t imagine it was purely innocent fun. Maybe he was going to sneak up on me while I was swimming or showering.’
He’d never forgiven her for what had happened after the rugby match – and she’d given up trying to persuade him it had been nothing to do with her. Anyway, somewhere along the line, Dickie had mentioned his idea for revenge to Tom, perhaps forgetting, or unaware of, Tom’s role in Dickie’s debagging. The boys were always quicker to overlook each other’s crimes than those of the girls.
I think of Ellie swimming her lengths, goggles on, the sounds of the world beyond the pool muffled by her movement in the water, her immersion in her task. I’ve heard it said that that single-mindedness is a masculine trait, that women are better at multitasking, juggling, spreading their focus – but when I recall the
way Ellie trained, I’m not so sure.
Suddenly, a shadow fell across the water and she knew she wasn’t alone. She found her footing in the shallow end and saw Dickie and Tom were by the side of the pool, fully clothed. She scowled at them and said, ‘What are you doing?’
Dickie made a quip like, ‘We’ve come to rub you down.’ Something stupid like that. But while she was talking to Dickie, she kept an eye on Tom. He was so quiet you could never tell what he was thinking.
At first, when Tom stooped to unlace his shoes, Dickie started making jeering noises, ‘Ohh, look out, Tom’s coming to join you.’ That sort of thing.
Ellie didn’t like it. She should have just hauled herself out then, but she wasn’t thinking straight. She turned back and began to swim into the deep end. All the time, Dickie was dancing around on the side, ‘like a prick’, Ellie said, while Tom stripped methodically. He already had his swimming trunks on underneath.
Ellie was a fast swimmer – and because of her training she had a pretty good idea of how long it would take her to get to the steps in the deep end and, from there, out of the pool.
‘I almost made it,’ she said, the time she told me, her voice catching on the words. ‘But Tom headed me off by running along the side and jumping in.’
She felt his hand on her foot, like he was catching her in a game of tag. Dickie was still yelping and jeering at the side of the pool. Ellie darted away from Tom the first time, but the second time, just as she was in reaching distance of the steps, he got a firmer grip.
We’d all sometimes play-fight in the swimming pool, but this wasn’t that, said Ellie. Tom held her down until she thought her lungs were going to explode. Dickie’s noises changed from jeering, to bartering, to fear. She lost her goggles, the chlorine stung her eyes; at first there was the blue of the swimming pool, and then there was the yellow of the burning, and then it went black and she lost all sense of orientation, which way she was facing, whereabouts in the pool she was, even whether she was conscious or not. When the world went white, she felt certain she was going to die. And when you think you’re going to die, she said, you’ll do anything you can to survive. So she stopped fighting, and Tom let her breathe again, and he did what he wanted.
You and Me Page 19