I cupped my hands around my mouth. ‘Voulez-vous l’aide?’ I called out in clumsy French. Do you want any help? My voice just about made it across the water. The little boy turned to call to someone inside and a moment later, as the prow of their narrow boat nosed into the lock, a man – their father – came out, carrying the windlasses. ‘Ah oui, Madam, s’il vous plaît,’ he called back, then switched to English. ‘Thank you.’ Everyone spoke good English here.
The man jumped lightly from the boat, landing with a little grunt on the neat grass beside us. Now I could see the woman – his wife – in the stern, her face tanned, her hair caught up in a red bandana, pulsing the motor in reverse, skilfully slowing the boat as it eased into the lock’s tight hug. The little girl ducked through the low doors in the front and a moment or two later she appeared at the other end, next to her mother, the boat rocking from her movements running through. I heard the babble of their voices, the stream of French too fast for me to translate.
The father, the husband, held out a windlass to us and Abigail took it, her arm dipping from the unexpected weight.
‘Got it?’ I said, and she nodded.
‘You will take this side?’ the man said and we agreed and he headed across the thin metal bridge.
In the narrow space of the lock, the engine churned.
Jess had survived that night: two broken arms and a wrenched ankle but the train had missed her and she had survived. When I went to visit her in hospital, she didn’t seem to bear me or Abigail any ill will. In fact she said something that seemed strange at the time, but maybe not so much now. ‘Maybe it had to happen,’ she’d said.
Lillian’s email said Jess had changed a lot since that night: she went out all the time now, came home late, hung around with a whole new set of teens. The way Lillian wrote it, I could tell she was worried; in how I read it, Jess had simply grown up. She and Abigail still kept in contact: Snapchat messages and the odd phone call here and there. I knew how sorry Abigail was for what had happened that night; I knew that Jess had forgiven her, a hundred times over. But Jess was discharged from hospital and it was as though that night on the bridge had seperated them from each other, somehow. There was a space between them now, their lives reaching in different directions, these two cousins who had once been so entwined. I could only hope the two of them would always remain friends, always love each other. But now I could see too that perhaps they had always needed this space. Perhaps only like this could they become their own selves, true to all the differences between them.
As for me, sometimes I missed Lillian with a wrenching pain. Other times I couldn’t imagine how I’d lived under her influence so long. Sometimes it felt as though after that terrible accident on the bridge, our family had been broken into pieces. And then I’d wonder if we hadn’t had to break up to survive, find new ways of reconfiguring ourselves.
‘All right,’ I said to Abigail. ‘First, help me close the lower gates.’
I gave the man on the opposite bank a wave and together we three tugged the heavy downstream gates closed. Now the boat was secured in the staircase of the lock. It sat centre and snug, ready to ascend.
At the other end, I showed Abigail how to fit the windlass to the crank that would open the release panels upstream. Her first efforts were stiff, awkward, but I could see she was determined to do it. Opposite us, the smiling husband kept pace. Slowly, stately, the boat began to rise, the water climbing the dark, glistening walls. The little boy reached out a hand to touch the slick sides and his mother called out sharply to warn him back. Water rushed in through the panels we’d opened above and I signalled across to the father. ‘You can go back on board. We can do the rest from here.’ The boat was high enough now for him to step straight onto.
‘Here,’ I said to Abigail. ‘You stand ready to push on this one while I do the other.’ I crossed the ringing metal bridge and took up my position on the other side. I leaned my weight against the lever, testing it for give. Not yet. If you pushed too early, nothing would move, but once the waters balanced and equalized on either side, the upstream gates would open as easily as yawning. On the barge, the woman turned the engine up, fighting the currents. ‘Thank you!’ she shouted up in English. ‘So helpful that you know what to do.’
Abigail straightened. ‘Yes,’ she shouted back. ‘She does. She’s my mum.’
I couldn’t move then. I could hardly keep breathing. She must have known all she was saying with that one simple statement. I felt shaky from the knowledge of what was there between us, the wide sluice of hope her words had let in. She was answering a question I’d been lost in for weeks. I am your mother, but will you have me? After everything I’ve done and everything I haven’t?
I pushed again against the opening lever and felt it give a nudge beneath me. I braced myself. When we were done with this – if she could do it – I would cross the bridge back to her. I would put my arms round her, no holds barred.
‘Abigail?’
But now she was unmoving; she stood there staring into the water, lost in her own thoughts. Above the revving of the engine, the woman shouted up, ‘Vous êtes capable?’
Can you do it?
For one awful second I thought she might turn and run, abandoning the boat and the family and everything. Then she lifted her chin and pushed up her sleeves. ‘I’m ready, Mum.’
Copying me, she set herself against the weight. From either side we pushed in tandem, the gates giving, easing through the water. We went on pushing together, like that, until the lock stood open, and the little family sailed through.
Acknowledgements
Writing and publishing a book tends to involve a lot of ‘flailing’, but I would have flailed a lot more without the help and support of the following people. Early on, Debi Alper and Emma Darwin gave me much-needed belief in this book and essential tools to turn my word-slew into a novel. Thank you particularly, Debi, for your continued guidance throughout this journey.
In 2016, Writing East Midlands awarded me a place on their mentorship scheme and I am extremely grateful to Aimee Wilkinson and Henderson Mullin for the opportunity. My huge thanks to mentor Judith Allnatt for reading my manuscript so many times and teaching me so many of the cornerstones of the novel form. Through WEM I also met my wonderful writing friend A.M. Dassu; Az, I am so proud of our joint successes and thank you a million times for all the hand-holding you have done.
I would have been lost without my brilliant and beady-eyed Lincolnshire critique partners: Anita Yorke, Cynthia Goalby and Pete Warwick. Warm regards go too to the Lindum Scribes writing group who chivvied me along on so much of my early writing journey. Thank you to my other writing comrades in real life and online, especially my fellow writers on the Word Cloud and Den of Writers. Special thanks to Laure Van Rensburg, Hilary Taylor, Amanda Berriman and Danielle Simpson who have inspired and supported me in equal measure; and particularly to my friend and writing ‘midwife’ Jennifer Meyer who taught me how to write with my heart as well as my head. A shout-out goes to Tim Grahl and Shawn Coyne whose storygrid.com podcasts taught me everything I know about genre and the essentials of story structure. I am also immensely grateful to ex-police detective Stuart Gibbon who was so generous with his time and expertise in helping me with the police-y aspects of this book. All the errors and liberties in the story are mine (including the conspicuous absence of a Family Liaison Officer). Thank you to fellow writer Jane Shufflebotham for help with the French setting and language elements of the book.
None of this would have happened without the input and support of my incredible agent Sarah Hornsley. Sarah, thank you for taking a punt on this book when it was a 90,000-word mess and supporting me through every stage of the journey since then. You are the best cheerleader a writer could have in their corner, and thank you so much for being in mine. I am also hugely grateful to my editor Charlotte Mursell for pouncing on this book with such voracious enthusiasm, and continuing to refine it into a work that I am so proud of. Tha
nks as well to the rest of the team at HQ for making me so feel so welcome and supported at HarperCollins.
Thank you to my family for all their love and support. In particular, to my parents, Brian and Claire, for instilling in me such an unassailable love of reading (plus helping me with my plot holes); love and special thanks to Katherine East who, as my older sister, turned out to be the best first reader ever; and to my cousin Caroline Hesslegrave for getting me started on this writing malarkey in the first place.
Finally and above all, my deepest love and gratitude to Dan, my husband and best friend. Thank you for being my teammate every step of the way.
About the Publisher
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