BACK IN BECKFORD, I stopped the car on the bridge, climbed down the mossy steps and walked along the river path. It was early afternoon, the air was cooling and the breeze was getting up. Not a perfect day for a swim, but I’d been waiting so long and I wanted to be there, with you. It was the only way now that I could get close to you, the only thing I had left.
I took off my shoes and stood in jeans and T-shirt on the bank. I started to walk forward, one foot after the other. I closed my eyes, gasping as my feet sank into the cool mud, but I didn’t stop. I kept going, and when the water closed over my head, I realized through my terror that it did feel good. It did.
MARK
Blood seeped through the bandage wrapped around Mark’s hand. He’d not done a very good job of patching it up, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop himself from gripping the steering wheel too tightly. His jaw ached and a bright, startling pain pulsed behind his eyes. The vise was back again, clamped around his temples; he could feel the blood squeezing through the veins in his head, could almost hear his skull begin to crack. Twice he’d had to stop the car at the side of the road to throw up.
He had no idea where to run. He’d started off by driving north, back towards Edinburgh, but halfway there he changed his mind. Would they expect him to go that way? Would there be roadblocks at the entrance to the city, torchlight shone in his face, rough hands dragging him from the car, quiet voices telling him there’s worse to come than this? Far worse. He turned back and took a different route. He couldn’t think with his head splitting like this. He needed to stop, to breathe, to plan. He turned off the main road and drove towards the coast.
Everything he’d feared was coming to pass. He saw his future unravelling before him and he played it over and over in his mind: the police at the door, the journalists screaming questions at him as he was dragged, head covered with a blanket, to a car. Windows repaired, just to be smashed again. Vile insults on the walls, excrement through the letter box. The trial. Oh God, the trial. The look on his parents’ faces as Lena levelled her accusations, the questions the court would ask: when and where and how many times? The shame. The conviction. Prison. Everything he’d warned Katie about, everything he’d told her he would face. He wouldn’t survive it. He’d told her that he wouldn’t survive it.
• • •
THAT FRIDAY EVENING IN JUNE, he hadn’t been expecting her. She was supposed to be going to a birthday party, something she couldn’t get out of. He remembered opening the door, feeling the rush of pleasure he always got from looking at her, before he had time to process the look on her face. Anxious, suspicious. He’d been seen that afternoon, speaking to Nel Abbott in the school car park. What had they been talking about? Why was he speaking to Nel at all?
“I was seen? By whom?” He was amused, thought she was jealous.
Katie turned away, rubbing her hand against the back of her neck, the way she did whenever she felt nervous or self-conscious. “K? What’s the matter?”
“She knows,” Katie said quietly, without looking at him, and the ground fell away, pitching him into nothingness. He grabbed hold of her arm, twisting her round to face him. “I think Nel Abbott knows.”
And then it all came tumbling out, all the things she’d lied about, the things she’d been hiding from him. Lena had known for months, Katie’s brother, too.
“Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ, Katie, how could you not tell me? How could you . . . Jesus!” He’d never yelled at her before, he could see how frightened she was, how terrified and upset, and yet he couldn’t stop himself. “Do you understand what they’ll do to me? Do you fucking understand what it is like to go to prison as a sex offender?”
“You’re not!” she cried.
He grabbed her again (he felt hot, even now, with the shame of it). “But I am! That’s exactly what I am. That is what you’ve made me.”
He told her to leave, but she refused. She begged, pleaded. She swore to him that Lena would never talk. Lena would never say anything to anyone about it. Lena loves me, she would never hurt me. She’d persuaded Josh that it was over, that nothing had ever actually happened, that he had nothing to worry about, that if he did say something all it would do was break their parents’ hearts. But Nel?
“I’m not even sure if she does know,” Katie told him. “Lena said she might have overheard something . . .” She tailed off, and he could tell by the cut of her gaze that she was lying. He couldn’t believe her, couldn’t believe anything she said. This beautiful girl, who had entranced him, bewitched him, couldn’t be trusted.
It was over, he told her, watching her face crumple, disentangling himself as she tried to wrap her arms around him, pushing her away, gently at first and then more firmly. “No, listen, listen to me! I cannot see you any longer, not like this. Not ever, do you understand? It is over. It never happened. There is nothing between us—there was never anything between us.”
“Please don’t say that, Mark, please.” She was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe, and his heart broke. “Please don’t say that. I love you . . .”
He felt himself weaken, he let her hold him, he let her kiss him, he felt his resolve subside. She pressed herself into him and he had a sudden clear image of another pressing against him, and not just one but several: male bodies pressing against his beaten, broken, violated body. He saw this and pushed her violently away.
“No! No! Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You have ruined my life, do you understand that? When this gets out—when that bitch tells the police, and she will tell the police—my life will be over. Do you know what they do to men like me in prison? You know, don’t you? Do you think I’ll survive that? I won’t. My life will be over.” He saw the fear and hurt in her face and still he said, “And it will be down to you.”
When they pulled her body from the pool, Mark punished himself. For days, he could barely get out of bed, and yet he had to face the world, he had to go to school, to look at her empty chair, to face the grief of her friends and her parents and show none of his own. He, the one who loved her most, was not permitted to grieve for her the way she deserved. He wasn’t permitted to grieve the way he deserved to, because although he punished himself for what he had said to her in anger, he kn
ew that this wasn’t really his fault. None of it was his fault—how could it be? Who could control who they fell in love with?
• • •
MARK HEARD A THUMP and jumped, swerving out into the middle of the road, overcorrecting back again and skidding on to the gravelled verge. He checked the rearview mirror. He thought he’d hit something, but there was nothing there, nothing but empty tarmac. He took a deep breath and squeezed the wheel again, wincing as it pressed into the wound on his hand. He switched on the radio, turned it up as loud as it would go.
He still had no idea what he was going to do with Lena. His first idea had been to drive north to Edinburgh, dump the car in a car park and then get the ferry to the Continent. They’d find her soon enough. Well, they’d find her eventually. He might feel terrible, but he had to keep reminding himself that this was not his fault. She came at him, not the other way round. And when he tried to fight her off, fend her off, she just came at him again and again, shouting and clawing, talons drawn. He had fallen, sprawling on the kitchen floor, his carry-on bag skidding away from him across the tiles. And from it fell, as though directed by a deity with a sick sense of humour, the bracelet. The bracelet he’d been carrying around since he took it from Helen Townsend’s desk, this thing that held a power he hadn’t yet figured out how to wield, out it came, skittering across the floor between them.
Lena looked at it as though it were an alien thing. It might as well have been glowing green kryptonite from the expression on her face. And then confusion passed and she was upon him again, only this time she had the kitchen scissors in her hand and she was swinging hard at him, at his face, at his neck, swinging like she meant it. He raised his hands in self-defence and she sliced one of them open. It throbbed now, angrily, in time with his racing heartbeat.
Thump, thump, thump. He checked the rearview again—no one behind him—and jammed his foot on the brake. There was a sickening, satisfying thud as her body slammed into metal, and all was quiet again.
He pulled the car over to the side of the road again, not to be sick this time, but to weep. For himself, for his ruined life. He cried racking sobs of frustration and despair; he beat his right hand against the steering wheel again and again and again, until it hurt as much as the left one.
Katie was fifteen years and two months old the first time they slept together. Another ten months and she would have been legal. They would have been untouchable—legally, in any case. He’d have had to walk away from the job and some people might still have thrown stones, they’d still have called him names, but he could have lived with that. They could have lived with it. Ten fucking months! They should have waited. He should have insisted they wait. Katie was the one in a hurry, Katie was the one who couldn’t stay away, Katie was the one who forced the issue, who wanted to make him hers, undeniably. And now she was gone, and he was the one who was going to pay for it.