The Long Fall (4 page)

Tilly turned to face her. ‘Mum. Calm down. It’s all sorted. I’m flying out on the tenth of April.’

‘But that’s two weeks’ time! Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

‘Two and a half. And I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d kick off like this. Look: it’s been a shit spring so far. I want to find some sunshine. I’ll be staying a week in Athens, then I’ll travel around and play it by ear.’

‘How long will you be gone?’

‘I’m aiming to be back in September.’

‘You can’t last six months on two thousand pounds!’ Kate said, her voice rising another octave.

‘Chill pill, Mum! I’ll just have to earn some money while I’m out there then, won’t I? I’ll pick up some bar work or pick tomatoes or something.’

‘And take the jobs from Greek people who really need them?’ Kate said. She looked to Mark, who was busy keying something into his iPhone, chewing his lip. He had a lot of American clients, so evenings tended to be very busy. He was not available, at any rate, to give her any kind of support.

‘It might not be Greece, though. I’m planning to wend my way back up through Europe as the weather gets warmer. Croatia, Italy, France.’

‘France!’ Kate’s hand went to her chest.

‘Yes, France. Heading west to Marseille and then up.’

Speechless, Kate cut her soufflé into tiny pieces.

‘I don’t know what your problem is, Kate,’ Mark said, finally surfacing from his screen. ‘At least it’s only Europe. At least she’s not heading off to bloody Cambodia or Ghana or something.’

‘I’d hoped that if you had to go away, you’d go and stay with Uncle Julian in Brooklyn again,’ Kate said to Tilly. ‘He was looking forward to taking you to all the Broadway shows.’

She glanced at Mark, whose lips had almost imperceptibly pursed at the mention of his brother. Like many men raised in boarding schools, he had enormous difficulty with the notion of homosexuality, connecting it only with the abuse that had been meted out to him by the older boys. His opera singer brother’s coming out was therefore a source of submerged personal conflict for him. It had been far simpler for their father – he had simply cut Julian out of his life and will.

‘Muuum,’ Tilly said, sighing, her good nature nearly exhausted. ‘Two grand is hardly going to last me ten minutes in New York. And really, I want to have adventures on my own, not go and stay with my dad’s nice cosy brother.’

‘On your own?’ Kate said, dropping her fork. Despite the comfortable ambient temperature of the restaurant, she could feel a sweat breaking out at the base of her spine. ‘You’re going
on your own
?’

‘People do travel on their own, you know. I’ve thought it all through. I’m going to be like Orwell, or Laurie Lee, or Hemingway or Byron – stepping out there to meet the world. If you’re on your own, you’re freer, more open to new experience.’

‘But they’re all men, Tills,’ Kate said, reaching out to grasp her daughter’s hand, to give her one of the few pieces of wisdom she had picked up on her own travels that she dared share with her. ‘It’s different for men.’

‘Mother!’ Tilly tried to defuse the tension building between them by putting her other hand to her chest like a character in a Restoration drama. ‘I’m shocked to hear that coming from a woman of the twenty-first century!’

‘And those men were writing a long time ago. It’s a much more dangerous world these days.’

‘Yep, we haven’t got the Somme, the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Civil War . . .’

‘You know what I mean.’ Kate wiped her free hand across her forehead. The conversation was making her feel quite dizzy – as if everything were spiralling out of her control, like when Martha was ill, or before, when—

She shook her head to dispel the thought.

‘But you’ve hardly been anywhere on your own, darling,’ she said, holding her daughter’s hand as if she were a balloon in danger of floating away. She tried to sound reasonable. ‘Not outside London.’

Mark looked up again from his iPhone. ‘All the more reason for her to give it a go.’

Kate looked at him aghast. He should be taking her side, shouldn’t he? Did he
want
Tilly to go away?

‘Yes. And I’m eighteen now,’ Tilly chipped in. ‘I could join the army now if I wanted.’

‘But you don’t want to do that, right?’ Kate said quickly.

Tilly and Mark looked at each other, then burst into laughter.

‘Look,’ Tilly said, when she and her father had finally regained their composure. She touched Kate’s shoulder, as if she were the mother appeasing the daughter. ‘Didn’t you want to have adventures when you were my age?’

Feeling bones tense beneath her fingers, Tilly instantly withdrew her hand and put it over her mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she said, as the air around their table seemed to drop in temperature.

Kate narrowed her eyes at her. ‘I didn’t have the luxury,’ she said, quietly. ‘Did I?’

‘Sorry,’ Tilly said again, closing her eyes.

‘Excuse me.’ Aware that she might be going to pass out, Kate bent to pick up her handbag.

‘Are you all right?’ Mark asked, touching her arm as she shakily got up.

She breathed out then smiled at him as if she were steady as a rock. ‘I’m fine. I just need the loo.’

She hurried across the dining room and got down the stairs to the toilets as quickly as she could manage without creating a stir.

And when she was there, she knelt over the toilet, stuck her finger down her throat and allowed herself the comfort of throwing up all the very little she had eaten.

EMMA

23 July 1980, 9 p.m. Marseille. Youth Hostel.

Today is the worst day of my life.

Something worse than anything I ever thought would happen to me has happened.

To me. The bright girl with the brilliant future.

To me. The fucking stupid girl.

I’m on my own in the youth hostel girls’ dorm. The laughter of Hans the warden and the German boys in the big hall downstairs jumbles with the Jimi Hendrix, echoing up the stone stairs and travelling down the corridors to tangle in my ears.

They bought wine and cooked up some
moules
and invited me to eat with them.

But I can’t.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

I can’t believe it really.

To make sure it actually happened, I’m going to write it all down, even though it’s going to hurt, every detail I can remember.

So, after my late lunch and a stretch out on the beach, I get the bus back up from town and take the pretty, grassy footpath that runs from the bus stop to the youth hostel, between the high stone wall of the old chateau and the high metal-fenced boundary of another large property. It’s quiet, late afternoon, still light. The wind has dropped and the sky sings with blue.

I’m happy.

I was happy.

A thickset man is up about a hundred yards ahead of me, walking in the same direction. I think nothing of it. I only even frown slightly when he reaches the end of the path, turns and starts walking back towards me.

I think perhaps he’s forgotten something. As he gets closer, I notice he’s got sunglasses on and this red cotton scarf tied around the lower part of his face, like a cowboy. I look away, keep moving. But I wrap the strap of my day bag around my hand, ready to swipe if I need to.

Even then I think I’m being stupid. I still have the chance to turn and run, but I don’t do it.

You see, I thought at the time that it would have been insulting. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. Just because he was a thickset man with a scarf over his face didn’t necessarily mean he was going to be a danger to me.

But.

Just as I’m moving over to the side of the narrow lane to make space for him to pass, he grabs me. He’s strong, and at least three times my size. I try to swing at him with my bag, but he just catches it in his big fist. He looks at me, his eyes full of hate.

Why
hate
?

But it chills me, tells me I’m in trouble.

Please, I say in French. Please.

Putain
, he says.

He seizes my shoulders and forces me to the ground. I try to push him away, but he’s too much for me.

He shoves me against the bottom of the drystone wall, pulls up my top and rips away my underwear.

It was so easy to get at me. I was wearing my jeans skirt and a vest top.

But it was hot. What was I supposed to wear?

Please, I say again. I’m a virgin.
Je suis vierge
.

I am.

I was.

There wasn’t a boy worth it in Ripon.

And now look what’s gone and happened.

What a waste.

He jams his hand over my mouth, forcing my head back over a stone. Just a little push further and he’ll break my neck. Then, with a great shove, so
quickly
, he breaks into me and, just for a second, it feels as if my soul is forced out of my body.

It’s fast, brutal, short.

It hurts so much. In every possible way.

I try to imagine I’m somewhere else. Still on the town beach I lay on after lunch, drinking in the sunshine. I strain to hear the kiss of the waves on the shore, instead of the slapping of his fat belly against my bare chest while he humps and grunts and shoves, one arm supporting his upper body on my ribs while the other pins my hands above my head, nearly snapping my bones.

The worst is the smell of him. Even after the shower I took when I got back here, it still sticks in my nostrils – old wine, Gauloises, stale sweat like old garlic. Something of fish.

Then, somewhere – oh hope! – I hear a siren. A police car, I think, come to save me. It’s getting closer.

It puts him off. Swearing, he pulls his filthy dick out of me, then suddenly, shockingly, brings his knee up sharply between my legs. I think I scream, but all that comes out is a hiss of exhaled shock. Then, standing over me, he quickly kicks me hard in my stomach. Just to cap off the pain and the insult and the humiliation.

Putain
.

He pulls off his scarf and spits on my face, big glob of hot, rancid gob.

The siren is so loud, for a moment that’s all there is. But then it moves away, it’s going past the end of the alley. It’s not stopping, it’s off to save someone else, somewhere else.

This is it, then, I think. I’m not saved. He’ll kill me now.

Or worse.

I lie still, eyes shut, prepared to die.

But nothing happens.

Like a bad dream, he’s gone.

I wait there as long as it takes for my soul and my body to find each other again. Squashed into the angle between the wall and the footpath, I watch the sun filter through the waving grasses above me. A line of poetry repeats over and over in my brain like some sort of madness,
Glory be to God for dappled things
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’. I learned it off by heart for my A Level.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, but at some point I was finally able to pick myself up. I pulled out my scarf and wrapped it round my shoulders to cover the grazes and cuts and gouges in my flesh. Somehow, I got myself back to the youth hostel, where Hans the warden and the German boys greeted me as if nothing had happened, because, of course, for them that was how it was.

I managed to smile and say a few inane words while I picked up my rucksack from the luggage store. I excused myself, saying I didn’t feel too well, that I thought I’d eaten some bad fish at lunch. Perhaps it was because the light’s poor in the big hall, but they didn’t notice my knees and legs, which were cut and bloody. It saved me some awkward questions, anyway.

I scrubbed at myself under the scalding shower until I was raw. I wanted to sluice him away, wash him down the squatting toilet at the end of the cubicle, which, disgustingly, serves as a drain for the shower.

But still I feel dirty.

I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of him.

It hurts so much everywhere. After my shower I looked between my legs with my make-up mirror, angling it so it caught the light. I’ve never done that before, so I’ve nothing to go on, but I look as sore as I feel.

A right bloody mess.

Soiled.

How dare he do this to me?

The worst thing, though, is that I let it happen to me.

I was stupid.

I’m a young woman on her own and I take a little footpath shortcut when I could have walked the long way round on the safe main road.

I was moronic to be wearing just a little skirt and a vest top, even though it’s one of the hottest days of an early summer heat wave.

I was an idiot not to turn back when I saw him walking towards me from the other end of the alleyway.

It’s all my fault.

I don’t know what to do.