Do Me No Harm

by Julie Corbin

  We’re on the bridge now, less than twenty yards away from them. Kirsty’s wearing a black leather jacket and biker boots – a tough and uncompromising look. And I see that Sean’s right. She’s carrying a handgun.

  But what frightens me more is the position that Tess has taken up. As Sean brings the car to a stop beside Robbie and Mark, I’m horrified to see that Tess has climbed up on to the handrail. She’s sitting on the rail, facing inwards, her flipflops kicked off and her hands in her lap. All that’s preventing her from falling backwards are her toes, which curl into the vertical rails, the muscles in her feet keeping her still and safe. There’s over a hundred-metre drop behind her and yet she’s staring straight ahead with an almost blank expression, as if she’s watching a boring programme on television.

  I’m out of the car before Sean has the chance to stop me. I step between the two boys and Kirsty and see her eyes widen before she says, ‘Dr Somers! Well, what do you know?’

  ‘Mum!’ Robbie shouts. I don’t turn around but my peripheral vision catches every movement. Sean has hold of the boys and is pulling them away from me.

  ‘This is about you and me, Kirsty,’ I say, looking only at her. ‘I’m here now. So let everyone else go.’

  ‘Mum! I’m not leaving you!’

  The uniformed policemen have followed us on to the bridge and I hear Sean commanding the boys to go with them so that they can be taken to safety. Robbie calls out to me again but I ignore him. Now that Robbie and Mark are out of danger, a liquid relief fills all the empty spaces inside me. All I need to do is get Tess to safety and then it’ll just be Kirsty and me, and we can go all the way back to the beginning of the story, to the woman I admitted to hospital and the newborn baby I thought was dead.

  Keeping my eyes on Kirsty, I speak to Tess. ‘Whatever hold she has on you, Tess, it stops right here and right now. It’s me she wants.’ I risk a quick glance in Tess’s direction. The wind has lifted her hair off her shoulders and it’s streaming back behind her. ‘Please come down.’ I don’t move towards her but I do hold out my hand and Kirsty raises the gun. Since he passed the boys back to the uniformed officers, Sean has been behind me, and now he tries to step in front of me, but my arm automatically bangs across his chest. ‘Don’t!’ My eyes are focused on Kirsty again. ‘Please let me handle this.’

  I sense his reluctance but still he moves back behind me, whispering, ‘Keep her talking.’

  She’s still pointing the gun at the centre of my chest. I’ve never even seen a handgun before and I’ve no idea what make or calibre it is. When I was growing up, my father used a rifle. He shot foxes and rats, and when we were old enough, he taught my three brothers and me how to shoot. Aiming accurately is harder than people think. You have to know the gun and you have to have a steady hand and a certain aptitude for it.

  Still, Kirsty is only six or seven feet away from me and is unlikely to miss from this distance. Plus, I already know that preparation is important to her. She could have anticipated this moment, practised for it until she knew she had it right.

  A slow smile is spreading across her face. She’s sure of her ground. Whatever she’s threatened Tess with, it’s going to take more than a request from me for her to get down. It’s as if she’s under Kirsty’s spell and only Kirsty can release her.

  ‘Why don’t you let Tess go, Kirsty?’ I say. ‘This has got nothing to do with her.’

  ‘She’s my insurance policy.’ She lowers the gun. ‘While I have her, I know you’ll stay put.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ I throw my arms out in surrender. ‘I’m as keen to end this as you are. So what do you suggest we do?’

  ‘Well . . . my original plan was to have your son sitting on the handrail, ready to fall, but hey?’ She laughs. ‘You’re here now. Either you go over the edge or –’ she throws her head sideways towards Tess – ‘she does.’ Her stare is challenging. ‘So what’s it to be?’

  ‘I saw the story in the Edinburgh Courier.’ I put my hands together in the prayer position. ‘I didn’t know she was going to take that slant. I swear to you, I didn’t.’

  ‘My mother’s death has become another reason for you to be classed as a superstar.’

  ‘Let me get in touch with them. I can call them. I’ll demand to be given a right to reply.’

  ‘It’s too late. Look at all this . . .’ She gestures around us. ‘Traffic stopped, police involved. Whatever way it goes, I’m heading to prison.’

  Sean steps forward again. ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Get back!’ She points the gun at him. ‘I will shoot you.’

  He moves a couple of baby steps backwards, his hands in the air. ‘Let’s keep it calm,’ he says.

  ‘It’s make-your-mind-up time, Dr Somers.’ She tilts a defiant chin towards me, and points the gun at my chest again. ‘You or Tess?’

  Her body is standing firm; her legs are slightly apart, her feet planted firmly on the tarmac. I don’t want to push her into firing the gun. I don’t want to die and I don’t want Tess to die either, and somewhere in the space between Kirsty’s threat and my own fear, I find a moment of peace. I glance up at the bluebell-coloured sky and take a deep breath, then allow my eyes to slide down the horizon and meet Tess’s. She’s no longer bored and distant. She’s focusing on me with an intensity that matches Kirsty’s. She’s trying to tell me something. Her eyes flick to the gun, then to me, and she mouths the message again, her lips exaggerating each syllable.

  I get it. I know what Tess is saying and it propels me forward at once. My feet are moving but I’m not aware of the pavement beneath them.

  Kirsty and Sean call out at the same time –

  ‘No!’ shouts Sean.

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ screams Kirsty.

  The gun fires but I don’t stop; I’m heading towards Tess who’s smiling at me. There’s no despair in her eyes, only a slight hesitation, a shallow in-breath and then . . .

  Seconds are concrete units of time, always identical, regardless of how much we need to shorten or lengthen them. I want this to be a Hollywood moment, where I s-p-r-i-n-t and r-e-a-c-h, just catching Tess’s ankles in my grip, holding her there until O’Reilly’s by my side and helps me pull her back on to the bridge.

  But real life is seldom so accommodating and, although I run the short distance between us, using my longest, fastest strides, nothing happens in slow motion.

  In real time, her feet let go of the railings.

  – I’m three metres away . . .

  She tips backwards.

  – two metres . . .

  Her legs fly up.

  I reach the rail and grab for her but my hands miss her ankles by a metre or more.

  My arms should be rubber. I throw them over the barrier but my gesture is useless, Tess is accelerating away from me faster than I can blink. She has a small, hopeful spectre of a smile on her face that tells me she isn’t afraid, and then her body twists in the air and she hits the sea with the whipcrack sound of a life being taken.

  ‘Help her!’ I scream. ‘Do something!’

  There’s movement all around me. One of the uniformed officers takes hold of my shoulders and pulls me away from the railing. ‘The coastguard’s boat is already on the water. The girl will be picked up straight away,’ he tells me.

  ‘Her name is Tess.’ Desolation surges inside me. ‘Her name is Tess Williamson. She’s sixteen.’ My eyes move past him and find Kirsty. Sean has her face down on the ground and is cautioning her.

  ‘You bitch.’ I fall down on my knees beside her, take a handful of her hair and jerk her head back.

  ‘Olivia!’

  Sean tries to prise my fingers away but I hang on tight and lock my eyes with Kirsty’s. ‘It should be you down there.’

  Sean is standing over me, one foot on Kirsty’s back, both his arms underneath mine, pulling me upwards but before he has spun me away from her I spit in her face.

  ‘Olivia!’ He gives my shoulders an urgent shake.
‘Enough!’ I step away and wipe the back of my hand over my mouth as a shudder of fear and anger arc through my chest.

  ‘Mum, Mum!’ Robbie is running towards me and then his arms around me and he’s crying into my neck. ‘When I heard the gun go off, I thought she had shot you.’

  ‘The gun isn’t real,’ I say. ‘It’s a good imitation, most likely a theatre prop. Tess told me it was a fake just before she . . .’ I shudder again and Robbie hugs me tighter.

  At the entrance to the bridge, police cars are gathering in force and there’s the high-pitched sound of the advance response unit arriving – but they’re too bloody late. I think about Tess, down below, in the water. The horror of her fall. The horror of the sea when it made contact with her body.

  Sean has Kirsty handcuffed and is leading her to a police van, a slight, girlish figure who kicks and struggles and shouts obscenities, most of them directed towards me. I allow another couple of policemen to bundle Robbie and me into a police car and drive us to the entrance of the bridge where two paramedics come forward to check us over.

  ‘My son,’ I say. ‘Please look after him.’

  One paramedic takes Robbie to the ambulance while the other one places a foil blanket over my shoulders and clips it under my chin. I’m grateful that he doesn’t try to stop me when I walk over to the side and attempt to see down to the shore, but the angle of the land obscures the water’s edge. I see boats further out but they’re all moving either east or west. They must have Tess on the boat by now and be trying to save her.

  My stomach heaves and I vomit by the side of the road, emptying acid and what little food there was inside me on to the grass verge. Then I stand where I am. I don’t want to talk or move or speculate. I wait . . . and in that time I pray. Three people in almost fifty years have survived the fall. I remember that one of the three people who survived did so because he was wearing a rucksack, and the medics reckoned this had cushioned his entry into the water. Tess was wearing a simple summer dress but her body twisted halfway down. Is that good or bad?

  Please let her be miracle number four.

  But her chances of survival are less than one per cent. In fact, the likelihood that she’ll live through the ordeal is about one in three hundred.

  But there is a chance, I argue back. It’s a slim chance, but it’s still a chance.

  It’s almost fifteen minutes before O’Reilly comes over to me and by now, despite the foil blanket and the sun, I’m freezing cold and shivering. ‘Is she alive?’ I say.

  He shakes his head.

  That’s when the world grows black. I lose control of my bladder and my legs and it’s only O’Reilly catching me that prevents me from cracking my head on the road.

  20

  In my dreams there’s an alternative reality where I catch Tess’s ankles and hold on. She doesn’t shatter her pelvis, nor does she fracture her two femurs and her patellae. Her facial bones aren’t rearranged on impact with the water because she doesn’t fall in face first. She doesn’t fall into the water at all.

  In my dreams she’s smiling. She looks trouble-free and rested. She has the two family cats on her knee and she’s idly stroking their fur while she talks enthusiastically about the school play and how much she likes to work behind the scenes.

  I pray her mother has the comfort of such dreams because the reality is unbearable. Fourteen bones make up the face and they’re not built to absorb shock. Tess’s facial bones fracture into so many pieces that her face no longer exists. Without a structure for the flesh to wrap around, her face is loose and poorly defined – bruised, battered and unrecognisable.

  Her death feels like an obscenity. I spend the first couple of days asking myself why. Why did she take her own life? Why did she do it when she knew that the gun was a fake? Nobody needed to die that day, least of all Tess, who had nothing to do with Kirsty’s vendetta against me.

  And then Sean tells me that evidence recovered from Tess’s bedroom shows she was anticipating her suicide, and had been for three months, since one of her fellow pupils left Sanderson. It turns out that Tess never had a boyfriend, her prescription for the pill an attempt to fit in with the other girls at school. They spent evenings talking about their boyfriends, discussing first sex and all it entailed, and Tess wanted to be like them. In fact she’d had a relationship with another girl called Tilly Revere. Kirsty found out about it and threatened to expose them both. Tilly left the school but Tess’s parents, unaware of what was going on, insisted that Tess stay and complete the academic year. Tess was sure her parents would disapprove of any sexual relationship, but a same-sex one was completely outwith the bounds of what they would feel was ‘decent’. Kirsty continued to dangle the sword of disclosure over Tess’s head, and for a girl like Tess, already shy and lacking in self-confidence, the threats were too much to bear.

  The only small lining in an otherwise black cloud is that Tess had the forethought to record the instances of bullying – dates, times, what was said, what she had to do for Kirsty and the action Kirsty took against her, which proves invaluable when the police build a case against Kirsty.

  Tess’s funeral is attended by almost two hundred people. Her sisters arrive at the church with their parents. They are straighter-backed, thinner, prettier versions of Tess. They wear tight black tailored skirt suits and black silk shirts. They look stylishly attractive, in control of their emotions and their interactions with other mourners. This is in complete contrast to their parents, who appear hurriedly clothed and wear the stunned expression of people who have just survived a major incident. And when their protracted case of shock has evaporated, grief will seep in, molecule by molecule, until their skin is porous and everything – absolutely everything – will be a painful reminder of their daughter’s absence. Shopping, cleaning, driving in the car, watching TV, not watching TV, every meal, every cycle of the washing machine, every leaf that falls from every tree.

  My heart aches for them. And underneath that ache, I feel angry. Angry at myself and all the other adults, every last one of us, who didn’t realise the seriousness of Tess’s state of mind. And I’m angry at a world that allows such futility.

  But mostly I’m angry at Kirsty for her sustained and wilful destruction of another girl’s life.

  Kirsty is being held in custody in the women’s prison outside Glasgow until her trial begins. Because of the evidence left by Tess, and corroborated by several girls at school, she is charged with culpable homicide and culpable and reckless conduct. She’s also charged with Robbie’s attempted murder and breaking and entering my home. Her defence counsel is already suggesting that some of the evidence is inadmissible, but Sean is convinced we have a good shot at proving all four charges.

  ‘She’ll be sentenced to six or seven years at the very least,’ he says.

  ‘Which means she could be out in four.’

  ‘Five, maybe,’ he says. ‘But honestly, Liv, bearing in mind the extent of her planning and the force of her behaviour, I think the judge will recommend she serves a full sentence.’

  I go back to work in the surgery immediately after Tess’s funeral. Everyone is sympathetic towards me apart from Leila. She is adamant she won’t forgive me – not ever. I didn’t make enough effort to talk to her and that put her son at risk. I understand her hurt feelings and let her rage at me, punctuating her anger with apologies until she dares me to apologise one more time.

  It takes only a week before she comes into my room, closes the door behind her and says, ‘Okay. I’m letting it go. I’m striking it out. It’s like it never happened. But if you ever . . .’ She stops, smooths her skirt down and takes a deep breath. ‘It’s gone.’

  Sean and I have become players in each other’s lives. It happens slowly. At first he tiptoes around me, careful not to intrude. I’m quieter and more serious than I’ve ever been because I find it difficult to recover from what happened on the bridge. I’m grateful that Robbie and Mark got through it unscathed – they were upset at
first but bounced back within a week or so – but I feel a lasting horror and shame at Tess’s death. Sean and I talk about it and I discover that he has his own demons to fight. She died in front of him too, and I know that he also wishes to relive those last few minutes and do it differently.

  ‘I should have realised that the gun was a fake,’ he says. ‘Then we could have got to Tess sooner.’

  ‘How could you know it was a fake? It was a good imitation, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was the perfect weight and size, an exact replica of a Glock.’ He shakes his head at this. ‘But still . . .’

  I take indefinite leave from the centre – the latest article in the Edinburgh Courier has done the centre no harm at all and a stream of new funding continues to flow into the centre’s bank account – because I want to spend my evenings with the children. Lauren has forgiven me and is back at home again, her scrapbook restored. ‘Dad’s flat makes me feel tense,’ she tells me. ‘Erika’s quite nice and everything, but it’s not like being here with you and Robbie.’

  Sean spends at least three of those evenings a week with us too. ‘I need bodies to practise my cooking on,’ he says, always arriving with a colourful selection of vegetables from his allotment. He makes beetroot salad with a raspberry vinegar dressing, sweet potato mash and a leek and cheese flan. All of it made with love and care and I’ve never eaten so much nor felt so deliciously spoilt.

  The children grow to enjoy his visits just as much as I do, and he’s considerate enough to cook his way around their likes and dislikes. Robbie pronounces him as ‘cool’ and Lauren think he’s ‘really easy to talk to and makes the best chicken salad ever’. Being with Sean is a revelation for me. He’s more sensitive than I expected. Not sensitive about himself, but sensitive to the world and people around him. He works in a boys’ club in one of the poorer housing estates on the outskirts of town. He plays football with them and has planted vegetables there too, already nurturing several of his helpers towards careers in gardening. He’s straightforward without being one-dimensional or dull, although when I meet his two daughters, Ailsa and Susie, for the first time, Ailsa says to me, ‘Dad can be very boring about his garden. In fact he can be very boring about a lot of things, but don’t give up on him, will you?’