The Jump (5 page)

Back on the pier she stared at the old crane perched at the end of the quay, all rust and flaky paint. She turned to take in the marina. Decay everywhere. Port Edgar was going to the dogs and it was only going to get worse with the closure of the sailing school. Ben had worked there for seven years and they were shutting it down. The council said they would try to get him something else but that was just talk, they couldn’t afford to keep on staff, and besides, there wasn’t anywhere else on the east coast that taught sailing through local authorities.

She looked at the Porpoise. She was a rickety old thing, and they might have to sell her soon anyway. With Ben out of a job and her still signed off long-term sick from Marine Scotland they couldn’t justify it. The government’s enthusiasm for renewables meant that her research into the effect on marine life was bulletproof for now, but she couldn’t imagine ever going back to work. Sitting in that office, having meetings, taking minutes, working on action plans, giving presentations – it was meaningless now. Logan’s death had robbed her of any confidence that she knew what she was doing, so how could she sit there and tell others how to do their jobs? She had an appraisal meeting with HR coming up, assessing her fitness to return to work. She wasn’t fit, they would likely cut her loose, then she and Ben would be in much deeper water. Or maybe she would have to pretend to be capable, keep them afloat. Neither option held any appeal.

Beyond the boats and the breakwater, giant yellow cranes sat on barges in the water. The new bridge supports were just breaking the surface of the Forth. Work had been carried out underwater for months, structures being built unseen by anyone. She couldn’t imagine what the engineering involved, the scale of it eluded her. She tried to picture the finished bridge arching away into the night, but couldn’t. She wondered if the new bridge would help the marina, if Port Edgar would get a new lease of life from its proximity, but she couldn’t see how.

She wondered if Sam would take the pills, if they would work.

She walked to the end of the pier clutching the plastic bag of Sam’s clothes in both hands. She’d thrown a handful of stones from the Binks into the bag and she felt the heft of it now. She checked the knot in the top was firm, then looked back along the pier. No one in sight. She narrowed her eyes looking for CCTV, but the only camera was down at the entrance to the berths, pointing at the gate. She heaved the plastic bag with both hands and watched as it landed in the water then sank, dragged to the bottom by the ballast inside. She watched the ripples where the bag had been then turned away.

She looked at her phone, flicked to the picture of Libby. Zoomed in closer and she could make out spots beneath the foundation on the girl’s skin. She tried to imagine having a daughter, a female companion, but nothing came into her head. She wondered about those women on television who said their mums were their best friends. Had she been best friends with Logan? It never felt like it. She was always too much of a mother for that, too protective. And anyway, he didn’t live beyond the stroppy teen years so she would never know if they could’ve been grown-up friends. She liked to think so, imagined them going to gigs together, or out for a meal. Or maybe the three of them out for dinner, her and Ben proud parents, him keen to head off to meet his mates and go clubbing, her and Ben sharing a knowing, worn smile, this is what we made, between us, this one good thing.

Thinking like this was destroying her. Or maybe it had already destroyed her.

She walked down the pier, past the coastguard hut and the tumbledown storage buildings, cracked windowpanes, weeds tangled in drainpipes, crumbling brickwork.

She stopped at a memorial stone, wreaths of poppies round it. It was the one thing in this place that was well kept. She’d walked past it many times and never paid much attention. She read it now. It was a remembrance stone for the Navy’s minesweeping service that had trained here during the Second World War, erected by the Algerines Association, whoever they were. At least somebody cared, it was obviously looked after. Across the top of the granite stone was a line:

‘Let there be a way through the water.’

She stared at it for a long time, then turned and walked to Shore Road, heading towards town. She went the front way this time, past the police station then past her own house. The downstairs lights were on, so Ben was back. She’d been right to get Sam out of there when she did.

She kept walking, past the Binks then the harbour, along the old High Street, charity shops and pubs, cobbles underfoot. She was striding by the time she got to the long stretch of seafront where the shows pitched up a couple of times a year, cars parked up there now, a middle-aged couple sitting in one eating bags of chips and staring at the view. That could’ve been her and Ben if things had worked out differently.

She thought of everything they’d been through together, more than twenty years. They met as students at Edinburgh Uni, both doing marine biology and ecology. They hadn’t hit it off initially, took three years of circling each other, dating others, before they got it together.

They had so much in common. Both from small coastal towns, her North Berwick, him Anstruther, both in love with the sea. Keen sailors and swimmers, as much at home on the water or in it as they were on land. He was almost a year older, born at the tail end of ’69, a running joke between them that he was a child of the sixties, an old hippy, while she belonged to the brave new world of punk.

Ellie had stayed on at uni after her degree, the offer of a PhD too good to ignore, while Ben scrabbled around doing the usual shit – pub jobs, office temp work, slowly getting a foot in the door with the marina and the sailing school, helping out in his spare time until they offered him shifts covering for other tutors. After her PhD, a lack of jobs for Ellie, no Scottish government then, no renewables programme, the only jobs in her field in London, a place so remote she could hardly imagine it.

Then marriage, a move to South Queensferry, the small seaside town that was theirs together. Ellie got a job working at Deep Sea World across in North Queensferry. She was stupidly over-qualified but she got to work with animals all day, getting into the tank to feed the sharks in front of gawping children, letting them handle starfish and crabs, making sure the rest of the fish were fed and cared for.

A string of miscarriages, six in three years. That seemed startling but it wasn’t so uncommon, she was on the statistical curve, not exceptional, just had to deal with it. After the first one she and Ben performed a little ceremony, a remembrance thing, and gave the baby a name, Stuart. They got the idea from some website and while it seemed new-age nonsense at first, it helped. But successive miscarriages numbed them, each dead foetus mocked the sincerity and sombreness of that first time with Stuart, and they didn’t give the others names. In Ellie’s mind they just piled up like the death toll of a tsunami only worse, a nameless horde of dead babies, mocking her inability to carry a child in her womb like the billions of women before her.

Then Logan came along.

No one could blame her for being over-protective. Seventh time lucky. Neither she nor Ben ever mentioned the others, not once they had their hands full with nappy changing and colic and six feeds a night and Logan’s hernia that had to be operated on, just a normal procedure they said, it happened to a lot of boys. They were lost in the fog of fatigue for a while but gradually found themselves again, discovered themselves as a family.

When Logan was around three, once Ellie felt ready, they tried again for another. Two quick miscarriages then a trip to a specialist who told them to cut their losses and count their blessings. Something had happened to Ellie’s insides giving birth to Logan. It was incredibly unlikely she could hold on to an embryo long enough, and she might kill herself trying.

So Ben got the snip and they settled down as a trio, the three stooges, the three musketeers, all that. They joked that the best things always came in threes anyway, happy just to have each other.

Ellie walked past the boarded up Two Bridges restaurant. There was a rumble up ahead then a train thudded out over the rail bridge heading north across the water. As the clack-clack faded Ellie strode past a bistro then the motorbike shop and the Hawes Inn, a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, their most famous customer, on the chalkboard outside.

She crossed the road at Hawes Pier. The Maid of the Forth bobbed in the water, waiting to scoot tourists to Inchcolm Island tomorrow. Ellie had set off from this pier six years ago on a sponsored swim, back when she was really fit, when she was at her best. A team of eight of them in dry suits, the middle of summer, the most benign conditions possible, and still it nearly broke her. It wasn’t the distance, not much more than one and a half miles, but the height of the waves, a tidal range of over six metres to compete with. They had to alert coastguard and the harbourmaster beforehand, check for shipping traffic. But it had been worth it, the eight of them raising twenty thousand for the Sick Kids, and she was immortal for a brief moment afterwards. Staggering up the slipway at North Queensferry, hands on knees, she felt a mix of immense tiredness and overpowering adrenalin, bone-weary but unable to sleep until the small hours of the morning. It felt like she’d achieved something useful, and the glow of it had stayed with her for weeks.

She was directly under the rail bridge now, passing the huge stone legs supporting millions of tons of red steel. She wanted to feel the shudder of a train overhead, but none came.

It was only once she reached the lock-ups that she realised she didn’t have a clue what to do if she found Libby. There were six garages in a row, all in darkness, no street lights here. She went to the first one, listened. Silence. She tried to open the corrugated door but it was locked. She knocked on the door, which rattled in its fitting.

‘Hello?’

She went along the row doing the same, listening, trying the lock, knocking, but if Libby was in one of the later ones she would’ve heard Ellie coming, and would surely stay quiet.

After shaking the last door handle Ellie stood looking out to sea. The lights of the rail bridge stretched into the gloom over the Forth, like the promise of a brighter tomorrow. The sound of the waves, the salty smell, so familiar to her.

She unlocked her phone and opened Facebook. Checked out Logan’s page. A heart and three kisses from a girl called Melissa. A picture of the two of them together, in what looked like her bedroom. Ellie didn’t recognise her. How could your son be friends with a girl you’ve never heard of? How could he spend time in a teenage girl’s bedroom and you not know about it?

She typed in Sam McKenna, three mutual friends, apparently. She clicked through but it was no one direct, always once removed. That was the problem with Facebook, one you had a few hundred friends you were connected to the whole world, we’re all intertwined now, whether we like it or not.

She looked at Sam’s profile, not much there. Logan’s was the same, none of the kids cared about filling in their lives because they hadn’t lived much yet.

One hundred and thirty-five photos. She swiped through them, barely stopping to register. Gangs of mates hanging around the seafront, at school, in each other’s houses. Holiday photos. She slowed down at those, checking out his sister in a few of them, his mum and dad. Jack and Alison. They weren’t tagged in the pictures, so maybe they hadn’t succumbed to social media. Ellie tried to remember a time before she’d been on Facebook, but struggled. Just another crutch now.

She looked closer at the holiday pictures, flicking back and forth, then stopped at one that must’ve been taken by Sam. Libby and her mum and dad standing on a Scottish beach somewhere. Ellie zoomed in. What could you tell from the look on a face in a photograph? She stared at Libby, large-framed glasses on her face, a cluster of spots in the space between her eyebrows, those eyebrows brown but her hair tied in a blonde bun, so she was old enough to be dying her hair.

She clicked on Libby’s tag and went through to her page. Two hundred and four pictures. Swipe, swipe, swipe. The most recent ones all moody, fish-faced selfies, in a bathroom or bedroom, wearing make-up in a haphazard way, always trying to look older, more sexual, hand on hip, chin out, the universal teenage pose for social media. Ellie wondered where they learned it. At that age Ellie had been a bumbling, childish mess, painfully shy, no social skills. She could never have imagined posting pictures of herself in a tight dress for everyone to see, opening herself up to so much hurtful spite, psychological damage. What was the obsession with being connected?

She flicked back to Logan’s page and posted quickly.

She clicked ‘like’ on Melissa’s comment then turned away from the sea and back into town.

The street looked normal. No flashing lights, no police cars, no news reporters hanging around. Ellie didn’t know what she was expecting, but maybe in the back of her mind she thought there would be a fuss, a sign that something out of the ordinary had happened here. But of course that’s not how it worked. Someone gets stabbed, taken to hospital, the police ask around then leave. That absence seemed the most obscene thing. When Logan died she wanted people to stay around forever, fussing about it, collecting information, seeking answers. As soon as they were all gone and she was alone in the house with Ben she thought she would die. She wanted to die. As long as other people were there, distracting her, she could keep breathing.

As she walked down Inchcolm Terrace she thought about being here earlier today, touching the front door, seeing Sam’s dad on the floor, running out the back door.

She approached Sam’s house making sure to keep her pace steady, one foot in front of the other. She walked past it, only glancing at the house casually, as if it was any old place. The lights were on all over the house, curtains closed. She pictured Sam’s mum sitting with her head in her hands. A large brandy at her side, maybe. How much did she know? Where did she think Sam was?

Ellie walked past two more houses until she was at one with no lights on. Without breaking stride she turned up the path, round the side of the house into the back garden. Over the wall, into a crouching run across the neighbours’ grass, then over the low fence into the McKennas’ place.

Lights were on at the back of the house, the kitchen where Ellie had been earlier. She pictured her fingerprints on the patio door. A movement inside the kitchen made her shift back into the shadow of an elm tree. Alison, a tousle of dark hair, hoodie and joggers, her face crumpled with worry. She held a large wine glass loosely by the stem, dregs of red in the bottom. She stood at the sink and stared out the window, then grabbed a wine bottle and filled her glass up, took a big swig.

Alison turned and Ellie saw Libby come into the kitchen. She was wearing an oversized Aran jumper and checked jammy trousers. Alison spoke but Libby ignored her, opening the fridge and taking out a can of Diet Coke. Alison moved towards her, spoke again. Libby closed the fridge and left the room without making eye contact. The silent treatment, not even a hard stare. Alison rubbed at her forehead and took another slug from her glass.

Ellie had seen enough.

She left over the back wall, landing in the same street she’d been in earlier, the approach road to the bridge just over the embankment. She began walking home past the bridge visitor centre, through the tour-bus car park. She stopped to watch the traffic on the bridge. It took on a different character at night, more lonely and somehow ominous, as if each vehicle carried an individual’s fragile hopes with it, people striving to get somewhere. The street light near her buzzed and she felt a thrumming energy through her body.

She checked the local news apps on her phone. No updates on Jack McKenna that she could find. She wondered about Twitter, if there might be more stuff on there. She should set up an account, get Ben to show her how it worked.

She headed down the access road, felt her heart sink as the traffic noise receded. All those people zipping overhead, trundling along in their metal bubbles, connected through the concrete and steel of the bridge.

She gave up checking her phone as she reached the bottom of the hill. Stood at the junction and looked both ways. To her left was Shore Road, the marina at the end. To her right were her home and the police station.

She had a thought and checked her watch. 9.45 p.m. Not so late it would seem weird. She walked to the police station, its blue-and-white chequered sign a beacon outside. The station was a jumble of low stone boxes, anonymous except for the sign and the bright blue handrail by the wheelchair ramp outside. A small half-barrel of flowers sat beneath the noticeboard at the front door and two cop cars were parked outside the garage alongside.

She tried the door. Locked. Lights were on inside, though. She pressed the buzzer. A woman, younger than her, peered out from behind a desk and reached underneath with her hand. Ellie heard a buzz-click and pushed open the door. Her breath seemed to be narrowing her throat.

‘Can I help you?’

The policewoman had a copy of
Glamour
magazine in front of her and the look on her face said she didn’t like being taken away from it.

Ellie put on a smile. ‘Hi.’

The officer had a name badge pinned above her left breast. Lennon. She was in her mid-twenties, and Ellie thought of that line about police officers getting younger. Lennon was trying her best with the uniform, the shapeless blouse cinched at her waist to a tight skirt, her hair backcombed in a big bun like girls were always doing these days, subtle make-up, enough for a work situation but not so much to arouse comment. Her nails were impeccably matched to her make-up and her skin looked beautiful and soft. Ellie wanted to reach out and touch her cheek.

‘I love your nails,’ she said.

Lennon held them out and smiled. ‘Thanks. What can I do for you?’

‘I was just passing and I thought about that terrible thing that happened today, up the road. The police officer who got hurt.’

Lennon shook her head. ‘It was awful.’

‘Is the officer OK?’

‘Do you know him?’

Ellie tilted her head. ‘No, I was just concerned. I only live round the corner from here and thought I’d pop in and ask.’

Lennon sized her up. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Eleanor,’ Ellie said. ‘Eleanor Sharp.’

Her voice sounded ridiculous in her own ears, wobbly and neurotic. Her pulse roared in her head.

Lennon looked Ellie up and down. Ellie wondered what she saw, a middle-aged busybody sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong. She probably got ten of them every shift.

Lennon shook her head. ‘I can’t say anything, it’s an ongoing investigation.’

‘Can you at least tell me if he’s going to be OK?’

Lennon. ‘I’m really not at liberty to say.’

‘Is he still in hospital?’

Lennon’s gaze narrowed. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘Just wondered,’ Ellie said. What was she hoping to achieve here?

‘I can’t say any more, Ms . . .’

Ellie struggled to remember the name she gave. ‘Sharp.’

She turned to go, trying not to move too fast. ‘Well, I hope the officer is back home soon with his family. And I hope you find whoever was responsible.’

Lennon sat up straight. ‘Don’t worry, we will. We don’t muck around when it comes to one of our own.’

‘I’ll bet.’ Ellie was heading for the door.

Lennon stared after her. ‘Where did you say you lived, Ms Sharp?’

Ellie had the door open. ‘Just up the road. Anyway, thanks, sorry to be a bother.’

She turned and left without waiting to see if Lennon had anything else to say. She strode along Shore Road and got her phone out, Googled the number for ERI and called it.

‘Hello, could I speak to someone on the ward looking after Jack McKenna please.’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’ An older female voice.

‘It’s his wife, Alison.’

‘Do you know which ward it is?’

‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten. I was just there earlier, as well.’

‘It’s OK, dear, I’ll search the database.’ Ellie heard tapping on a keyboard. ‘It’s ICU, I’ll put you through.’

Hold music, classical and tinny.

‘Hello, ICU?’ A more serious woman’s voice.

‘Hi, sorry to bother you. This is Alison McKenna, I was in earlier seeing my husband Jack. I wondered if there had been any change?’

‘Just a minute.’

More hold music, a thin swell of strings and brass.

‘Hello?’ The woman was back. ‘Mrs McKenna, the doctor has been round and your husband has seen some improvement. Dr Evans said we’ll keep him in ICU tonight, then probably move him to G.I. tomorrow if he continues to get better.’

Ellie realised she’d been holding her breath. ‘Oh thank you, that’s great news. Thanks so much.’

‘No problem, happy to help.’

Ellie hung up. She knew Sam’s dad was alive, and that he was still in hospital.

She began jogging along the dark lane, past the legs of the bridge and the old sheds then into the marina, along the pier, punching in the numbers with sweaty hands, her breath heavy from running.

She felt the surface sway under her feet as she scooted over the pontoons to the Porpoise and climbed on board. She looked around, couldn’t see anyone else about, just the lights from the bridges and the cranes at the new foundations.

She headed below deck and saw the tiny table where she’d left the sleeping pills for Sam. They weren’t there. He was curled up in the single berth at the bow of the ship, squeezed into the space, the small fan heater whirring away on the floor, the duvet and blankets in a tussle over him. He was snoring but not like Ben did, not a big, throaty rasp, more like a gentle collapsing of air, a small animal at rest.

She wanted to wake him up. His sister was OK, back at home, his dad wasn’t dead, it wasn’t murder. She lay down on the bed facing him and stroked his head. He was so pretty. The small, stubby nose, his long eyelashes, the tightness of the skin across his cheeks. He looked peaceful. She leaned in and kissed him on the lips, just a touch of her skin on his, then pulled away and sighed.

She stared at him for a long time then got up and headed home.