The Long Fall (20 page)

22

15 August 1980, 11 p.m. Ikarian Sea. Ferry.

This part is so hard to write. I’ve had to down another beer to get to it. On my way back I chucked my Swiss Army knife and my evil eye into the sea. I’d forgotten they were still in my pockets. Fat lot of good either of them did me, really.

On the top of the cliff is one lone tree. Some sort of oak, I think. As it was growing, the wind must have pushed the trunk down and away from its roots. It looks like a giant hand clawing the earth.

I stop and look around. We’re on the highest point along the coast. Churned by the wind, which has blown fiercely all morning, the sea heaves and froths what must be a hundred feet below us, crashing onto a rocky shore strewn with fallen chunks from the cliff we’re standing on. The islands in the hazy distance hover like an expectant audience. A fishing boat, a tiny blue-and-white speck riding the distant waves, is the only sign of any other human presence.

We’re on the cliff. But Beattie isn’t here.

A cold panic sets in on me. Have I got the wrong point? Have I brought Jake up here to end up alone with him? What kind of danger have I put myself in?

Jake hands me the water bottle, which I take, keeping him at arm’s length.

Where the hell is Beattie?

I drink, hand the water back to him and he takes a swig, tipping his head back.

As he removes the bottle from his mouth and wipes his lips, Beattie steps out from behind the tree. She stands and glares at him, her big bag slung over one shoulder. I know that in it is the equipment we have prepared.

At the sight of her he jolts and drops the bottle. Caught by a gust of wind, it flies off the edge of the cliff.

‘Hi, Jake.’ Beattie’s eyes shine like go lights.

‘Easy, Beattie,’ Jake says, stepping in front of me, holding his hands out. I poise myself, ready to spring should he jump her.

Her eyes on mine, Beattie reaches into her bag.

This is my signal. I leap forward and push him as she rushes towards him. Totally taken by surprise, he has no time to struggle. Making the most of his confusion, I grab his arms, and Beattie swiftly ties them together behind his back, tightly winding my tent guy rope round and round his wrists.

‘What the FUCK are you doing?’ Jake says, struggling to get free, but it’s too late. We have him. Beattie kicks the back of his knees, making him buckle to the ground.

With extraordinary strength she pushes him forward and he smashes face-first to the ground. She pulls my PLO scarf from her bag and throws it to me. While she sits on him, straddling his back, I tie it securely over his eyes, knotting it up in his hair.

‘What are you doing, Emma?’ he screams at me.

I kick him. Just like The French Shit did me. Hard. He deserves it.

He deserved
that
, anyway.

‘I know what you did to Beattie,’ I shout above the roar of the wind.

‘What?’ Jake says. As if he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

‘You think you can just take what you want and get away with it,’ I yell. ‘I saw what you did to her. You bastard.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Emma?’ he says. ‘Beattie? What the fuck?’

‘Rapist,’ Beattie says, pulling his hair. ‘Creep.’

‘What? No!’ Jake says. ‘Emma, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t touch Beattie. She—’

‘SHUT UP!’ I yell at him and kick him again.

It feels so good, like I’m getting back at my own attacker as well as Beattie’s. It also feels great – at this point – that the two of us, two tiny, scrap-haired girls, have overpowered this tall, violent boy.

‘So you’re going to blame it on your victim, then, Jake?’ I tell him. ‘She provoked you, did she? Was her dress too short or her top too low?’

My throat is still sore from the shouting I did up there on that cliff.

Jake struggles underneath Beattie. I think he’s crying behind my scarf.

The thought of that makes me feel very good. I want him to suffer so much.

‘Please, Emma. Please believe me. I didn’t do it. I didn’t touch her. You have to believe me, she’s lying—’

‘HA!’ Beattie says, looking at me. ‘Denial. What did I say he was going to do?’

‘And what about the Australian?’ I say. ‘The boy you killed in Athens?’

‘I DIDN’T TOUCH HIM,’ Jake shouts.

‘I SAW you touch him. I SAW you beat him up.’

He turns his head towards me, trying to look at me underneath our makeshift blindfold. ‘But you didn’t see me kill him, because I didn’t fucking kill him, Em. You have to believe me.’

‘Shut UP.’ I kick him again. I don’t believe him. Why would I? He’s lied and lied and lied.

Beattie hands me the knickers – her soiled knickers from the night before, and pulls his head up by his hair as I stuff them in his mouth and tie them in place with a belt of Beattie’s.

‘Like that, do you? My underwear in your disgusting mouth. Pervert,’ Beattie shrieks into his ear.

Then Jake suddenly bucks, throwing Beattie off him. His hands still tied behind his back, he scrambles to his feet. Turning, he charges blindly at her with a muffled roar, his head down. She jumps easily out of the way and trips him up. Unable to save himself with his hands, he topples forward onto the ground, slamming his chin on a rock.

As he lies there, dazed, blood at the corner of his mouth, Beattie jumps on top of him again, gripping him firmly with her thighs.

So those were his true colours, revealed. While he played the lover boy with me, he attacked Beattie.

What was that about?

I’ve thought about it over and over and I’ve come to the conclusion that after we arrived on Ikaria he tipped over into some sort of psychosis. I don’t know what triggered it. Being too far from home? All the drinking and the pills? Or just some random chemical imbalance that happened to trigger itself at that exact moment, when it was most dangerous to all of us.

For a second, I waver, watching him trapped there, bound on the dusty, rocky earth, blood mingling with spit around the gag where he has cut his lip or bitten his tongue. For a second, I feel pity. What if he
is
sick? If he can’t help himself?

But then, as Beattie pulls the ouzo and Valium out of her bag, her dress rides up and I see the purple, blue and green bruises, the cross-hatching of scratches and cuts that almost entirely cover her left leg and, I know, her back and buttocks, too.

He did that. And worse. A lot worse.

We roll him onto his back. I kneel, jamming his head between my knees. He struggles to get free, but we have him now. He’s not going anywhere.

Beattie pops ten Valium out of the blister pack. I undo the belt, prise the knickers out of his mouth and, by pinching his nose and forcing his chin down, hold his jaws open. Beattie throws the pills at the back of his throat in a way that reminds me of Mum worming the cats back home. Then she unscrews the bottle and fills his blooded mouth with ouzo. I force his jaw shut and we make him swallow. We keep on going until all the ouzo is used up, and Jake is groaning and retching.

I fix the gag back on him, although it is hardly necessary. He is already nearly insensible with the dose of drugs and alcohol we have just dealt out to him.

Throwing the bottle to one side where it smashes on the rocks, Beattie, all afire, rips his T-shirt, and tears it off him, past his bound arms. Then she scrambles to her feet and pulls off his trousers, leaving him completely naked.

This hadn’t been in the plan, but it seems the right thing to do.

His thin, muscular body looks deceptively beautiful in the sunlight, struggling on the ground out in front of me.

His fear and his pain are more beautiful to me at that moment, though.

Evil. That’s what it was. He was evil, not ill.

I have to remember that.

He tries to curl up to hide his withered penis.

Perhaps he thought we were going to castrate him. I’m not saying that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind – it would have saved other women he might have come across.

Beattie motions for me to get up. Then, pulling him by the hair, she tugs him to standing where he staggers, the blind drunkard of our making.

It feels good, seeing him like that. Vulnerable, exposed, like I had been in Marseille, like Beattie was last night.

‘We’re going to play the Dangerous Game,’ Beattie says, launching into the next part of our plan. ‘Make you pay for what you did. We’re going to lead you on a little walk up here on this cliff. Right to the edge. Then you’re going to jump off.’

Jake whimpers. He’s crying again, cowering, shaking his head. We have him.

We weren’t planning to
really
make him jump over the edge.

We just wanted to make him
think
he was jumping.

That was my contribution to the plan, thanks to Miss Higgs who taught me
King Lear
for my A Level, who made us act out the scene where Edgar does the same thing to Gloucester.

We wanted to give Jake, quite literally, the fright of his life. We reckoned he’d either collapse in terror, or, failing that, the ouzo and Valium would take him out long enough for us to get back to the cave, clear out all his and our own stuff and disappear on the midday ferry.

That was the plan.

Again, Jake whimpers, pleads.

‘Shut up,
coward
.’ Beattie nods to me. ‘Turn him.’

I get hold of him and whirl him around four or five times.

As he stands, swaying and dizzy, I pull out my penknife and rest the point on his back, at the base of his ribs.

‘If you don’t do as I say,’ I say to him. ‘I’m going to stick this knife in you.’

He’s shaking his head like he’s trying to escape into another dimension.

‘Take a step,’ Beattie yells.

‘Do it.’ I jab the point so that it makes a tiny indent in his skin. A tiny nick.

Falteringly, he takes a small step towards the edge of the cliff, which is about ten yards away from us.

‘Another,’ I shout.

We keep on at him. About three yards away from the edge, we tell him to stop.

‘Can you feel the wind?’ Beattie cries. ‘Can you smell the sea beneath you?’

A flock of seabirds wheels right over our heads, screaming at the rushing air.

‘I’m going to count to three,’ I tell him. ‘And you’re going to jump. If you don’t, we’re going to push you.’

And this is where our plan goes wrong.

Somehow, Jake manages to free his hands from the guy rope. Without warning, he turns and rams into Beattie, sending her flying backwards, away from the edge. Then he rips off his blindfold, tugs the gag from his mouth and wheels round in my direction, his eyes like cold, blue fire, his mouth a bloody hole.

It all happens too quickly. I think he’s going to attack me, so I rush at him first and push him away from me, back up towards the cliff edge. Unsteady on his feet because of what we’ve tipped down his throat, he tumbles and trips backwards. Disoriented, thinking he’s falling over the edge of the cliff, he lets out a muffled scream and his body totters, half falling, half running in strange, almost comical backwards steps.

But it isn’t funny at all.

‘Jake!’ I scream and run towards him, trying to grab him. But, because he is naked, there is nothing to hold on to.

He’s still stumbling, upwards and backwards towards the actual edge of the cliff.

And then he stumbles beyond it.

Time hangs still. He hovers, suspended over nothingness, his face awful, full of the realisation of what has happened, what is about to happen. This is a picture I know I will remember all my life. Then I blink. When I open my eyes, he is no longer there. He’s disappeared beneath the craggy lip of the bluff.

I don’t know what to do. I’m rooted to my spot. I pray that perhaps some bird, or some freakish gust of wind has somehow scooped him up and saved him.

He deserved to suffer for what he did. Really suffer. But he didn’t deserve to die.

No one
deserves
to
die
.

Beattie scrambles to her feet, and looks at me, her mouth open in shock and disbelief.

The wind howls around our ears, blowing grit into our eyes as we creep towards the cliff edge.

We look down. The white of the stony shore and the reflected sunlight shooting up from the boiling sea into our eyes makes it hard to see at first.

I think for a moment that he isn’t down there, that somehow it has been an awful dream, a fevered hallucination. That none of it has happened at all.

But then the dazzles clear from my eyes and reveal him to me: splatted on a flat white rock, all the way down on the shore, his legs splayed at strange angles, one arm pinned under his body, bent at a horrible angle. I can’t tell if it is blood pooling around his head or if it’s his hair. Perhaps it’s both.

I try to imagine he’s sunbathing, but even through half-closed eyes it doesn’t look like that.