The Beach Hut (12 page)

The showdown came one Saturday afternoon. The problem with Ambleside was there was nothing to do at the weekends. A relentless drizzle was falling, leaving a school full of pupils sluggish and dopey with boredom.

A group of girls made toast on the landing outside the dormitory. Eating was their only distraction. They huddled round the toaster with a loaf of sliced white bread, waiting impatiently. A slab of butter stolen from the kitchen gradually became studded with crumbs.

‘Bet you can’t walk from one end of the banister to the other,’ Tracey said to Lindsay, a thickset creature who had often been at the mercy of her cruel tongue.

Lindsay looked trapped. If she bottled out she would look like the loser that Tracey had always taken her for. If she took the challenge, this was the ideal opportunity for her to prove herself. Her eyes darted from one onlooker to the next, desperately hoping for someone to tell Tracey not to be ridiculous. They were on the fourth floor. If you looked over the banister you could see down four flights of stone steps to the reception hall below.

‘It’s only about eight foot. Just like walking on the balance beam in the gym.’

Tracey was smirking. She was out for blood today. They’d lost at netball, of which she was captain, and the evening stretched ahead of them with nothing to do. Watching Lindsay squirm was her idea of entertainment.

‘Leave it, Tracey.’ Fiona stuck her knife in the Marmite and began to spread it.

‘No,’ said Lindsay. ‘I’ll do it.’

There was a horrified silence.

‘You don’t have to,’ said Fiona, taking a bite of her toast.

‘Course she doesn’t,’ said Tracey. ‘She’ll just prove she’s a spineless wimp.’

‘I can do it,’ Lindsay insisted. ‘Like you say, it’s only like the balance beam. How hard can it be?’

Several pairs of eyes surveyed her doubtfully. Lindsay was no gymnast. She was hardly light on her feet, had no sense of balance.

Fiona put her toast down and stepped forward.

‘I’ll do it first, if you like,’ she offered. ‘Prove it’s easy.’

She recognised the delicacy of the situation. If she pulled rank and told Tracey to back off, Lindsay was going to come out of it badly. This was her chance to prove herself once and for all, and get some respect. But Fiona wanted to show her a bit of solidarity. If she took the fear out of the dare, then maybe Lindsay could manage it without mishap.

She could feel Tracey’s eyes on her as she scrambled onto the banister. Tracey knew the power axis had subtly shifted towards Fiona, and that everyone was praying Lindsay would prove herself.

Fiona knew she could do it. She used the wall to steady herself while she adjusted her balance. She looked firmly ahead to the newel post at the end. Barely seven feet. Of course, it was harder than the balance beam in the gym, because the banister wasn’t flat, but slightly domed, and the wood was more slippery, slick with furniture polish.

She held her arms out and walked, slowly, deliberately. When she got to the end she leant down and one of the other girls held her hands so she could jump.

‘There,’ said Tracey triumphantly to Lindsay. ‘Easy. Your turn now.’

The rest of the girls looked at each other awkwardly. It was all very well Fiona doing it, but Lindsay was a different matter. They watched as she assessed her challenge.

She clambered on using a chair. She clung onto the wall longer than Fiona had, edging her feet round. Scarcely anyone breathed. Fiona began to chew on her thumbnail. It had been easy, she couldn’t deny that, but if Lindsay did lose her balance she wouldn’t have a chance. She cast a glance at Tracey, whose eyes were gleaming with relish. She was enjoying every second of Lindsay’s discomfort. What turned someone into such a sadist?

Lindsay began to walk. No one spoke as she planted one slightly pudgy foot in front of the other, arms stretched out. For a moment she seemed as graceful as Fiona had been, sure and confident.

Halfway across, she hesitated. There was a collective gasp as she began to sway. Lindsay shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them and carried on, but she seemed to have lost her nerve. Her eyes grew wide as her panic built. She was three-quarters of the way across. Fiona could sense her terror. Instinctively, she put her hand out so Lindsay could grab it, so she could help her down.

‘No!’ Lindsay flinched away from her, not wanting her help, wanting to prove she could rise to the challenge. And in that moment, she lost her balance completely. One moment she was there, the next she was falling. All that could be heard was the sound of her body hitting the railings.

There was a moment of silence while all the girls looked at each other then rushed to look over the banisters. Four floors down Lindsay’s figure looked tiny and still. One girl began to scream. Another bolted for the head of the stairs, about to run for help, but Tracey blocked her path and looked over at Fiona.

‘You killed her,’ she said. ‘You got up there and showed her it could be done. She couldn’t back down after that. And if you hadn’t put your hand out, she’d never have fallen. You killed her.’

Fiona stepped back.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was your dare.’

Tracey looked round at the rest of the girls, who were frozen in fear.

‘None of you stopped her, did you? You were all happy to watch.’

The realisation that they were all to blame, that they were all complicit, swept through the assembled girls. Two began to weep.

‘It’s OK,’ Tracey assured them, taking control. ‘We say we found her up there. We say we tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t come down. If we all stick to our story, then none of us gets into trouble.’

She looked from one to another, her eyes boring into each individual. They all nodded. No one dared disagree. They were all too frightened of an investigation, and of being blamed. It would be all too easy for Tracey to point the finger. She was more than capable of implicating someone else to save her own skin.

From the ground floor, the sound of hysteria rose up through the stairwell.

 

The school did their best to cover up what they billed as a tragic accident. They held a simple but beautiful memorial service in the chapel, and Tracey, as the leading light of the speech and drama department, read a poem that left no one dry-eyed. The incident was never mentioned again amongst those who had been party to it.

And now Fiona wondered just how many of them thought back to it, and how often. She had never stopped blaming herself. She should have stepped in straight away and put a stop to the dare. She should never have tried to help Lindsay to stand up to Tracey. And she shouldn’t have unnerved her by holding out her hand. She was culpable three times over. The memory haunted her day and night - the vision of Lindsay’s poor body being battered by the railings on the way down, the hard, cold stone of the floor at the bottom. She could never share her guilt with anyone, but eventually she learnt to live with it. It was her punishment, her penance, and she would have to bear it for the rest of her life.

It was when she had her own children, however, that it became too much to bear. Now she fully understood the impact Lindsay’s death must have had on those who loved her, the terrible, awful grief of a parent who had lost a child. The horror built up inside her, and she lived in constant fear that somebody, one day, would do the same to one of her children. That justice would be done for Lindsay.

Over time, she began to realise that drink made it better. That a little glass of something dulled the pain, blotted out the gnawing rat-bite of her conscience. It was a wonderful solution. So, so easy. She worked out the perfect amount to keep the memories at bay, a blissful state of semi-oblivion.

Of course, she couldn’t control the dose for ever. Sometimes it took more to blot things out. And sometimes she wanted complete oblivion, angry that she was forced to live her life like this, resentful that she was living a lie, so she drank herself into a stupor. It was so hard, keeping the secret.

She wasn’t going to do it any more. As she unlocked the key to the hut, she looked around her. She wanted to come to this beach with her kids and enjoy its simple pleasures. She didn’t want to be held hostage by a bottle of wine. Time and again she had sat in her deckchair watching the children play, wondering if anyone would notice if she hoicked a bottle out of the cool-box. She longed to be free of the tyranny, and sit there making sandcastles, not noticing what the time was or even being aware that it had passed. She wanted to be happy.

 

She knew how to track down Tracey Pike. She had followed her progress carefully since leaving school, via an elaborate combination of the old school newsletter and Friends Reunited. Tracey wasn’t the type to keep quiet about her achievements. She was a hugely successful businesswoman, with three flashy boutiques in North London. Fiona had their numbers in her diary. When she phoned the second one and asked for Tracey, she was told to hold the line.

‘Tracey Pike.’ Her harsh tones sent a shiver down Fiona’s spine.

‘Tracey. It’s Fiona.’ There was a silence. She knew she didn’t have to elaborate or explain. Tracey knew exactly who she was, and why she was phoning. ‘We need to talk.’

‘Right.’ Fiona could sense the tension from two hundred miles. ‘I’ll come to you. Where are you?’ She obviously didn’t want Fiona anywhere near her perfect lifestyle. She didn’t want a skeleton tumbling out of the closet where she kept her designer dresses.

Fiona told her.

‘I’ll drive down tomorrow,’ Tracey told her crisply, and hung up.

 

She arrived at midday, dressed for St Tropez, not Everdene, in cropped denim jeans and towering espadrilles, a huge pair of Givenchy sunglasses holding back her hair, which had clearly undergone some drastic chemical process to make it straight. Her breasts were even larger than Fiona remembered. Her face was considerably less heavy of feature. Someone skilful had been at her with the knife.

She embraced Fiona like a long-lost friend rather than something rather nasty that had come out of the woodwork. That was Tracey’s way, to lull you into a false sense of security. Fiona’s stomach turned over, at the memory, the fear of what was to come, and the revulsion of her overpowering perfume. She knew she must look terrible by comparison, with her hair scraped back and no make-up, drawn with the effort of not drinking. Her head was pounding. She thought her body had probably gone into shock.

It was all she could do not to suggest they decamp to the pub.

Tracey didn’t bother with any niceties about how lovely the beach hut was. She lit a cigarette without asking if it was all right.

‘So,’ she blew out a plume of smoke. ‘What’s the score?’

‘I can’t keep quiet any more,’ Fiona told her. ‘I need to tell the truth.’

Tracey looked quizzical.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘It’s not going to bring her back.’

‘I can’t stand the guilt any longer. I’m not worried about ruining my life, but I’m ruining other people’s. My husband’s, my kids’.’ She took in a deep breath. ‘I’m an alcoholic, Tracey. I drink to forget. Every day I drink to wipe out the memory. Oh, I can function OK. Pillar of society, me. But I know everyone knows, and they know I know, and I know they know I know . . .’

She trailed off, exhausted. It was the first time she had said those words.
I’m an alcoholic
. And she was still here.

Tracey shrugged. Luckily, Fiona hadn’t expected sympathy.

‘We all deal with things differently, don’t we? I’m a workaholic. It’s all I do. Everything in my life is to do with my business. I don’t have a family.’ She gave a wintry smile. ‘This is the first day off I’ve had for six months. And that includes weekends. My staff are mystified. They know something must be up for me to be off. Either that or they think I’m away having something fixed.’ She stared at Fiona. Her eyes were still small. No surgeon could fix that. ‘So what difference do you think a confession’s going to make?’

Fiona steeled herself. She was going to have to be firm, because she knew Tracey would talk her out of it.

‘We killed Lindsay because we were too busy trying to prove to everyone who was in control. It was our bloody egos that put her up on that banister. And I can’t live with it any more. I need it out in the open, so I can deal with my guilt. So I can help the people I love, and who hopefully love me, understand why I am like I am.’

Tracey lit another cigarette. Fiona could see that although she was playing it cool, she was rattled.

‘I don’t see the point in dredging it all up. It’ll be a nightmare. The press’ll be all over it like a rash. It’s a great story. Bullying schoolgirls send pupil plummeting to her death and keep it quiet for twenty years? Then there’ll be the court case. If you didn’t drink before, you will after.’

Fiona shut her eyes.

‘And what about Lindsay’s family? How do you think they are going to feel, knowing we were toying with her just to prove who was top dog? That’s not exactly going to bring them any comfort, is it? You can’t pile misery onto someone else just to make yourself feel better.’

Fiona could feel tears welling up. She looked out towards the beach. A mother was walking along the sands with her toddler. He was determined not to hold her hand, plodding along stolidly. She remembered her two when they were that age. Just about . . . God, what wouldn’t she give to have those years all over again and do it properly.

‘So what do I do?’ She turned to Tracey pleadingly. ‘I can’t keep it quiet any longer. I can’t walk around with this terrible secret for the rest of my life.’

Tracey pulled her card out of her bag.

‘Go and see this bloke. He sorted my head out. He knows all about it. He’ll help you . . .’

Fiona looked at the card. Tracey Pike’s shrink? Is that what her life had come to? She must be desperate.