Accidents Happen (41 page)

He wasn’t joking.

‘Four times!’ Jago exclaimed, making her jump. He laughed at her reaction. ‘Sorry, I’m completely wired. The adrenalin just . . .’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘Whoo! Sorry, I’ve hardly slept. I’m completely high on it. Addicted. Do you know what I mean?’

Kate let her head fall helplessly. She knew exactly what he meant. It was how it had been for her the first week she’d jumped, too. Weakly, she shook it. ‘Jago. Please tell me you don’t think that I . . .’

There was a loud beep behind them. She looked in her mirror to see a lorry approaching from behind.

‘You’d better, um . . .’ Jago said, jerking his head towards the opening to the airfield.

With no choice, Kate took off her handbrake and turned into the long driveway. Before she could pull in again, a minibus appeared from behind the lorry, and followed her up the narrow drive, forcing her to continue towards the airfield.

Jago perched on his seat, like a schoolboy who’d done something naughty and got away with it.

‘OK, listen. I know you’re mad, but it’s going to be amazing.’

Was he mad? ‘I’m not jumping, Jago,’ Kate said resolutely, as they bumped along the driveway into a half-full car park. She swung round in front of three brown hangars, and put her foot on the brake hard, without turning off the engine.

Jago kept tapping his fingers.

Ten small two-seater aircraft, their wings like flattened rabbit ears across their little mousey noses, sat in the grass airfield beyond the fence, signposted to keep spectators OUT. A group of grinning charity jumpers stood lined up on the other side in matching T-shirts, having a photo taken.

Hang on. Kate swivelled around. She knew this place. This was where she had done her refresher course five years ago, with Hugo and Jack in tow.

This was real. Not a joke.

Jago leaned over carefully, put the car in neutral, pulled on the handbrake for her and turned off the key.

‘Kate. Come here,’ he said gently. She was so shaken, she let him, yet keeping her body rigid in protest as he wrapped his arms around her. ‘Right, listen. First of all, I’m doing it with you. And, second, it’s incredibly safe. We did all that stuff on Sunday about how to deal with line twists and cell-end problems, and you know yourself that even if the main parachute did malfunction, you have a reserve. Kate, you know all this. I mean, how many times have you jumped – twenty?’

Kate kept her eyes on the floor of the car, shaking her head gently.

‘Twenty-six.’

‘Shit. Have you really? Well, there you go.’

Panic pulsed through her at the thought of what he was asking. ‘No,’ she exclaimed. She jerked out of Jago’s arms, pushing them aside. ‘I’m not doing it. There’s no way.’

But he wouldn’t let her go. He grabbed her hands again. ‘Listen. You’re not doing a free fall from 12,000 feet like you used to. This is just a little static-line jump from 3,500 feet. A piece of piss for someone who’s done free fall. All you have to do is jump, let the static line pull out your chute for you, then enjoy it.’

She looked past Jago’s shoulder to the canteen garden, where she saw a man and woman doing the ‘pre-jump dance’ she recognized from New Zealand, sucking too fast on their cigarettes, turning randomly one way, then the other, as they waited for their jump, grinning at each other manically.

She felt Jago’s eyes on her. ‘Come on, Kate. Step Five.
Face the Final Fear
.’

‘Jago, it’s just not that simple,’ she said, her shocked brain desperately looking for a way out. ‘I can’t just jump. I don’t have my licence.’

He sat back. ‘OK, well, don’t be mad but I gave them your details and they found it on the international register.’ She stared. He was serious about this. ‘As long as you match the online photo, and you show them a bankcard or something. And they want you to do a half-day refresher course one-to-one with an instructor, too.’

A droning noise approached. Kate saw the nine-seat Islander far above them. A little figure appeared mid-air. There was a burst of yellow in the bright blue sky as the static line from the plane pulled out a parachute. She watched the tiny figure wriggling for a moment then relax back into the jump.

Right at that moment, Kate had a flashback to New Zealand so powerful she almost gasped.

She was up there, thousands of feet up in the sky.

Hearing the loud drone of the propellers dropping away into silence.

Feeling the wind whistling on her face.

Her limbs losing all resistance.

Relaxing like never before.

Falling into the void.

Utter euphoria descending.

Flying like a bird.

And, all of a sudden, unbelievably, Kate wanted that feeling again.

Jago pulled her to him again, and this time she did not resist.

She had
loved
it.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered.

Jago murmured in her ear. ‘Listen, you were going to do it after your parents died. This time it’s even more important. You need to restart your life, Kate. You said yourself, Jack needs you.’

She watched the jumper gracefully turn in a semicircle back towards the white arrow on the landing field.

Could
she do that again?

Jago carried on. ‘And for us, too. Let’s make it the start of how we plan to go on. Having fun together.’

She let him move even closer and nuzzle into her ear. He kissed her cheek, once, twice, three times, playfully. For a second, she thought of Jack and the way they used to show their love to each other so unabashedly when he was a toddler, and how she wanted that again. She imagined telling Jack she had jumped out of a plane today. Seeing the pride in his eyes as he told his friends. His mum was not weird and anxious. She was fun and brave.

‘What are you asking me? We jump once and it’s over?’

Jago’s eyes shone with delight as he realized she was considering it. ‘Once and it’s over. Then we head straight back to Balliol and lock ourselves in my room for the rest of the weekend.’

His words reached inside her and unlocked a door. She felt the anxiety rush out of her, and turned and met his lips full on. The waves that had started in her kitchen last Saturday when he kissed her pulsed back through her body.

As Jago kissed her, she thought of what he’d done for her. He’d faced his own fears up in that plane, to help her return to life. He was giving her a chance to jump back into the real world, faster than she’d ever imagined, and he was going to do it with her.

‘OK,’ she whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jack ran around Nana’s garden, kicking his ball, realizing that he was going to do something bad. He didn’t normally do bad things, but today he didn’t care.

Aunt Saskia said they would tell Mum about Jago Martin tomorrow. He wanted to tell her now.

‘Jack, darling?’ He heard Nana shout from the house. ‘It’s nearly twelve. Could you pop to the village for some bread, darling?’

He ran in and found Nana at the Aga, where she was making soup.

‘Of course, Nana.’

‘Good boy.’ She turned to find him some money. Aunt Sass was still at the computer, looking a bit lost in her head, like Mum did sometimes. ‘And can you get Granddad his newspaper, and another pint of milk?’

‘Sure,’ Jack said, grabbing the money and Rosie’s lead. Rosie leaped up at him and pawed at his leg.

To his relief, Aunt Sass didn’t even look up. Jack shouted, ‘Bye,’ and ran out, through the garden gate onto the river path and set off past the boats, with Rosie pulling ahead. He rubbed his stomach, realizing to his surprise that the cramp was gone.

‘I’m going to look after her, Dad,’ he said under his breath.

He waited till he was out of sight of Granddad’s house, then took his mobile from his pocket and pressed his mum’s number. Would she be pleased with him, or cross?

It went straight to voicemail.

He took a long breath.

‘. . . Mum. It’s Jack. Don’t be angry with me, but there’s something wrong with that man Jago Martin. I’ve got his book and all the numbers are wrong in it. He’s stolen bits from other books on Amazon and made then into a book with his name on it and he’s pretending it’s his. Don’t be angry at me, but he’s weird. Sorry, Mum . . .’

Back at the house, Saskia got up, feeling nauseous. She picked up Jago Martin’s book.

‘You OK, darling?’ Helen called from the Aga.

Saskia looked at her guiltily. Helen had been so upset about the divorce, so embarrassed about all the gifts that had been given by family and friends and hardly used. If she ever found out that Saskia had brought it upon herself, that she had caused this so foolishly . . .

‘Uhuh,’ Saskia lied, then walked into the sitting room and shut the door. She picked up the phone and rang Kate’s number.

‘. . . Kate, it’s me. You have to ring me back straight away. Fuck, I don’t know where you are or how to tell you this but that guy Jago Martin . . .’

She spoke for another whole minute before putting the phone down.

She sat staring at Jago Martin’s photo in the book, hoping to God she was right, because, if not, this would really be the end of her and Kate for good.

She tried to imagine him for the twentieth time in a suit, with black gelled hair, and hoped that this wasn’t a horrible mistake. That last time she had seen this man, he really
had
been called Tony, and really
had
come from Essex.

CHAPTER FORTY

Kate couldn’t believe how quickly everything came back to her.

‘I’ll wait for you in the canteen,’ Jago had said when they arrived, after introducing her to her instructor, Calum, an ex-army man, and giving her a reassuring kiss.

‘Right, this should be a doddle for you, Kate,’ Calum said, ‘let’s go.’

At his request, she demonstrated flaring the parachute before hitting the ground, then pointed to the altimeter, her reserve chute handle and the slider, telling Calum what each was for. She pushed her riser straps apart and kicked to demonstrate how to remove a line twist, and mocked up reinflating the cell-ends with the steering lines. Five times, he made her jump from the dummy plane to check she knew the positions and how to breathe. He made her jump five times in a harness from a twenty-foot-high scaffolding rig to show she could land with her feet together and roll.

All through the morning, as Kate heard the planes droning above, and saw the jumpers pulling on their suits, she waited for the figures to come and scream at her

• 1 in 80,000 jumps will end in a 'serious incident'.

But she knew that that would most likely be because if she did something stupid, like not buckling up her chest strap.

• The chances of both chutes malfunctioning are 1 in a million.

And probably better than that here with qualified packers who checked and rechecked.

The figures came . . . and then they went, half-hearted, on their way again.

They had absolutely no control over her.

They would not stop her doing this.

And, even better, to her astonishment, she was
looking forward to it.

‘Right, you obviously know what you’re doing, Kate,’ Calum declared at the end of the morning. ‘We’ll have to get you to come back and jump with the club jumpers one day’

It was funny, she thought, this stranger’s perspective of her being a brave person.

‘That’s great that you can access my international licence online. Is that new?’ she said as they crossed the concrete area back to the canteen.

Calum frowned. ‘Can you? Never heard of that before. I thought you had to bring your licence and show it – but then I don’t work in the office . . .’

They shrugged at each other as he dropped her off beside Jago, who was sitting outside reading a newspaper at a table.

‘Right, you guys, we’ll jump at 1 p.m. – we’ll take the Islander up. It’ll be you and two others. I’ll give you a shout,’ Calum said, walking off to the canteen with a wave.

Jago gave him the thumbs-up and took Kate’s hand, beaming, as she sat down.

‘You did it! How was it?’

She saw him check his watch.

‘Good, actually.’ She sniffed, wiping her nose.

‘Seriously?’ He grinned.

She nodded. ‘How are you?’

‘Shitting myself,’ Jago said. The irony hit them both and they laughed.

Kate took the sip of his coffee that he offered. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

‘It’s amazing, honestly. I’m proud of you,’ Jago replied.

She reached out and took his hand, no longer self-conscious. ‘You know, I’d probably never have done this again, if you hadn’t made me. I just remembered today how much I loved it.’

He leaned over, kissed the side of her face, then stood up. To her surprise, she saw him check his watch again. He really was nervous. ‘Can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear you say that. Right. What do you want? Coffee?’

‘Thanks.’

Jago walked off to the canteen queue.

As she waited, Kate looked around the garden. Most tables were busy, dominated by an air of tension and excitement. She’d missed this. This world of people with adventurous purpose. The horse riding. Travelling with her friends. Skiing. Working at the parachute school in New Zealand. There had always been an element of it in her life till her parents died, and then Hugo.

She’d forgotten.

This was part of
who she was
. However crazy Jago’s methods, he’d really helped her. She was here. She was getting better.

Kate stretched back, feeling the sun on her face, watching an experienced-looking group of free-fallers walk towards a larger Caravan plane with the heroic gait of firemen or helicopter doctors. The club members that Calum had mentioned, she suspected. She saw the beginners at the tables around her watch the group with admiring glances.

That had been her once.

She thought about Calum’s offer.

Was Jago right? Could it be again?

There was a soft buzz in Kate’s bag. She pulled out her mobile, and saw that two voice messages had arrived when she’d been training with Calum: one from Jack, one from Saskia.