The Jump (2 page)

She tried to shout between breaths as she sprinted towards him.

‘Wait.’

Gulping in air.

‘Stop.’

He was fifty yards away, still looking down, rocking backwards and forwards, his elbows bending and straightening as his fingers gripped the grey metal behind his back.

Thirty yards.

‘Hold on,’ Ellie shouted.

The traffic noise was all around her, seeping into her, pervading everything. She didn’t know if he hadn’t heard or was just ignoring her.

Fifteen yards.

‘Stop.’

His body jerked and he turned his head towards her. His face was crumpled and tears were streaming down his cheeks, snot from his nose. He was taller than Logan, maybe a couple of years older, but he had the same hair flick covering his eyes. The breeze blew his hair about, swirling around them both. He wore a blue-and-grey-striped hoodie, jeans, Adidas, standard teenage stuff. Logan had similar clothes in his room right now, washed, put away forever.

‘Logan?’

She didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t even realise it came from her mouth until it was out. She knew it wasn’t him, crazy to even think it.

He looked confused. His breath was catching in his chest from the crying, his body shaking with the bridge as a truck hammered past. Ellie turned and stared at the road. No one would pull over. The drivers probably hadn’t noticed anything, and even if they did it was madness to stop in the middle of a duel carriageway when you were travelling at sixty miles an hour. And anyway, there was no way to get from the road to the footpath of the bridge without climbing across the gap between, where the cables stretched to the top of the support tower. You had a pretty good chance of killing yourself doing that.

She glanced at the CCTV cameras, then looked both ways along the path. No sign of the yellow van. It took five minutes, if they were even watching the monitors.

It was down to her.

‘Don’t do this,’ she said.

He shook his head, then stared at the water past the rail bridge, the firth widening to the sea.

‘No,’ Ellie said. ‘Turn round. Look at me.’

He didn’t turn. He began rocking forward and back, as if geeing himself up for a dive into a swimming pool.

‘Please turn round and talk to me.’

Ellie knew all about this now. She’d spent night after night looking up suicide-prevention techniques online, official strategies on SAMH and Choose Life websites, anecdotal stuff on message boards from people who had tried and failed, as well as people who had been talked out of it. All of it, that mass of loneliness and distress, boiled down to one thing. Get them talking. Engage. Be there, and help them to reconsider.

‘Please,’ she said.

She took three steps closer. He was only a few feet away now, shoulders shaking, legs jittery. He was thin, like Logan, gangly, as if his bones didn’t quite fit together yet. His clothes were too baggy, hanging off him. She stared at his hands on the railing. She prayed for those hands to hold on, as if they were separate from his willpower, his decision making. He had long, thin fingers and slender wrists.

Another step closer. She could almost touch him.

‘My son did this,’ she said. She tried to speak calmly but she wanted to be heard over the rage of the traffic. ‘Six months ago. Don’t do it. You think this is the only way, that you’re never going to feel better, but you’re wrong. We can get help. Think about your mum. Your family.’

His left hand came off the railing. She reached out towards him. He swung round to face her and grabbed hold of the railing again, this time with his back to the water, away from the drop.

She put her hands on his hands. Her spindly little bones dwarfed by his. He was a foot taller than her, around six feet, maybe seventeen years old, close to being a man. Closer than Logan was ever going to get. He had a beautiful face, smudged by tears and confusion. Big brown eyes, some thin stubble across his chin and lip.

Ellie rubbed her hands up and down his on the railing.

‘Come over to this side,’ she said.

His chest was heaving as he tried to get his breath back, tried to compose himself. Ellie knew from all those suicide videos that nothing was predictable, nothing made any sense in the face of this moment. She moved her hands up to his wrists and held on tight. If he went over, she would go too.

‘Please, just come back to me.’

He avoided looking at her, turned to stare both ways along the bridge, then down at his feet. Ellie followed his gaze and felt vertigo, the huge drop a few inches behind him. Seeing what Logan must’ve seen just before he jumped. It took real bottle, that’s what she’d come to understand. Her son had a lot of guts. This wasn’t a coward’s way out, this wasn’t pills or wrists or whatever. This was brave and strong and she was perversely proud to have produced such an independent human being from her own tiny body.

She reached up and stroked this boy’s cheek, then held his jaw so that he had to look in her eyes. He could’ve pulled away, he was strong enough, but he didn’t.

‘Come back to me,’ she said.

The railing between them was four feet high. He could swing his leg over and it was done, but there was no way Ellie could pull him back if he didn’t want to. It was his choice.

‘Maybe I should come over there to you,’ she said.

He looked surprised, shook his head.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said.

His voice was deeper than Logan’s, but still somehow not fully formed.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Come over. So we can talk.’

He took a large breath then released it. Looked up and down the bridge again. Then shifted his weight and lifted his leg so that his foot was on top of the railing. She had to move backwards to make room for him, but she held on to his wrists. With a flex of muscle he was up then over, the same movement Logan did in the CCTV footage only in reverse, from the bad side to the good. From death to life.

Ellie put her arms around him and felt him squirm. It was inappropriate but she didn’t care, she wanted to hold on to him and never let him go. The size of him towering over her was comforting. She hadn’t felt that strange sensation in months, the weird dislocation of touching a teenage boy already taller than you, marvelling at the physical presence of the thing you’d created, something that was no longer part of you at all, completely alien.

She was still holding him, and she felt his arms go round her. She began crying. He took hold of her shoulders and prised himself away.

She wiped at her tears and looked up to see him doing the same. She laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He shook his head.

Behind him, Ellie could see the orange flashing light on the maintenance van as it approached.

‘What’s your name?’ she said.

He took a long time to answer. He was trembling. ‘Sam.’

She noticed a dark stain on his jeans where he’d wet himself.

‘Will I take you home?’ she said.

He shook his head, panic on his face.

She rubbed his arm. ‘It’s all right, you can come back to my house, we’ll get you sorted, OK?’

He thought about it then nodded.

The van arrived and Gerry got out. ‘Everything all right, Ellie?’

She put on a smile. ‘Fine, Gerry, thanks.’

‘Got a call from the office, is all.’

‘It’s OK, really.’

Gerry looked undecided. He couldn’t leave them standing here on the bridge in case of a change of heart, she understood that.

‘We’re just heading home,’ she said.

She guided Sam away, back towards the south end of the bridge.

Gerry scratched at his beard and called after her. ‘If you’re sure you don’t need any help?’

She looked at Sam, his hair flicked across his face, and turned back.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got him.’

She had her arm around his waist as they walked, trying to help him put one foot in front of the other as if he was an injured passenger being led away from a car crash.

‘We’ll get you sorted,’ she said, rubbing his side.

He didn’t react, kept his head down, feet plodding on like he was in a trance.

She’d forgotten about the awkwardness of teenage boys.

The rumble and judder of traffic continued to swamp the pair of them, hundreds of people driving to their destinations regardless of Ellie and Sam’s little drama. It must’ve been the same when Logan jumped. Did anyone driving across the bridge that day even realise something had happened? Hundreds of cars must’ve passed Logan as he walked towards the middle of the bridge. Dozens more in the few moments he stood there. And yet more as he climbed over and stepped off.

But the drivers’ eyes would’ve been on the road ahead. People only realised something happened if the bridge got closed to traffic, and they never did that. One incident Ellie remembered from a long time ago was when someone, instead of jumping off the bridge, climbed the suspension cables and threatened to jump off. They had to close the bridge that day. In the end the guy never jumped, and he was charged with breach of the peace when he clambered down. Road users were furious. The same kind of people who tut on a train when someone jumps in front of it, because they’re going to be five minutes late for a meeting.

Twenty people kill themselves by jumping off the Forth Road Bridge every year. They were about to celebrate the bridge’s fiftieth anniversary soon. That added up to a thousand people. But it only rarely made the news, partly because it wasn’t deemed newsworthy, partly because journalists had guidelines about reporting suicide. If you made a big deal about it in the papers you got lots of copycat deaths. Imagine sitting at home reading about someone killing themselves and thinking, oh yeah, that’s what I want to do.

Ellie looked at Sam. Maybe that’s what he’d done. Maybe he knew Logan, or had heard about Logan jumping, and thought he would do the same. Or maybe there was another kid who’d jumped off more recently, a friend of Sam’s. She knew that in South Queensferry, in the shadow of the bridge, there was a higher suicide rate than elsewhere. Experts put it down to simple opportunity. People saw the bridge every day out their windows, on their way to work or school, and thought, why not?

They were at the end of the bridge now. Sam began crying again, staring at his hands as if he might find the answer to life there. Ellie wanted to tell him it wasn’t that easy, there were no answers.

‘I’ll take care of you,’ she said.

They stepped off the bridge and the vibration under their feet stopped, though the rumble of traffic noise was still everywhere.

Ellie ushered Sam round the corner on to the access road. As they headed downhill the noise reduced, leaving an oppressive murmur, the crows from earlier cawing and flapping in the tops of the trees.

‘I live down at the Binks,’ Ellie said.

It was awkward to keep walking with her arm round his waist as they headed downhill, so she removed it and took his hand in hers. He let her. It felt odd, the slope pushing them forwards, holding hands as if they were a couple, this half-boy, half-man towering over her, her hand engulfed in his like she was the child. But she felt a thrill, too, an electricity running from his touch through her hand and up her arm.

For a moment she considered what it would look like if they met anyone she knew. She was twice as old as him, and he was far too old to be holding hands with his mum. Not that she was his mother of course.

At the bottom of the hill she pointed right. ‘This way. It’s not far.’

He walked in the direction she indicated. She wondered what was going through his mind. What had driven him up there today? What was so awful in his life that he couldn’t see any alternative? She was used to the wondering. The lack of answers burned as much today as it did the first day, and it would burn just as ferociously on her deathbed. At least with Sam she had a chance of finding an answer.

‘You OK?’

He shook his head.

‘Let’s get you home,’ she said.

‘Try these on.’

She held up a pair of Logan’s jeans. Dark green, skinny fit. She remembered when he brought them home, one of the first things she’d let him buy for himself, on a trip into Edinburgh shopping with mates. Just one of a million little independences, all the ways in which children grow into their own lives, away from their parents.

Sam was a couple of inches taller than Logan, but they were both thin and bony, the jeans would still fit.

Sam sat on Logan’s bed, his hands over his lap to hide the wet stain on the front of his trousers. Ellie hadn’t mentioned it but the offer of trousers meant he knew that she knew. She was thrilled they shared a secret, only the two of them knew what just happened on the bridge, it connected them forever, no matter what came next.

Sam’s eyes darted round the room as he took the jeans and held them like ancient relics.

Ellie looked round the room too. It wasn’t a shrine, she wasn’t insane, thinking Logan would come back one day and slot back into his old life, she just couldn’t bring herself to clear his things out. His plain blue bedspread, nondescript after a childhood of cartoon characters on there. His music posters, Frightened Rabbit, Chvrches, Haim, Lorde. She was glad about that, strong female figures among them, talented, independent women, no R&B idiots in bikinis. His PS3 and Xbox and iPod and laptop sat in a corner, his neatly ordered bookshelf full of zombie stories and graphic novels.

And this new boy sitting amongst it all.

She realised he was waiting for her to leave so he could get changed.

‘Oh sorry,’ she said, turning her back. ‘I won’t look.’

She felt him hesitate then heard him begin to untie his trainers. She looked at the television on the dresser. She could see his shape reflected in the black glass as he peeled his damp jeans off. She realised something and opened the drawer in front of her, pulled out a pair of Logan’s underwear. He preferred trunks, tighter than boxers but not as skimpy as briefs. Without turning, she held them out behind her back.

‘Here, you’ll need these.’

She felt him take the trunks, and caught a little of his deodorant smell. Not exactly the same as Logan’s, but in the same ballpark, and too much of it, like all teenage boys. Probably Lynx, that’s what they all wore because of the ads with the half-naked girls all over the guys who used it.

She looked back at the television. Saw Sam slip off his shorts, his back to her, pale buttocks in the glass of the screen. He wiped at his crotch and legs with his scrunched up shorts, then pulled on Logan’s underwear, stumbling to get his foot in the first hole, yanking them up, pulling the jeans over them. Ellie squinted as she watched him in the glass, imagining Logan.

She turned round. ‘Sorted?’

He nodded, looked at his clothes on the floor. Ellie picked them up without a fuss and rolled them up in a ball in her hands. ‘I’ll get these in the wash.’

Sam shook his head. ‘You don’t have to.’

‘It’s no problem.’ She moved to the door. She wanted to ask him so much, but didn’t want to scare him away. ‘Come on, I’ll put the kettle on.’

She went downstairs, heard his footfall behind her as she turned into the kitchen. She threw the jeans and shorts into the washing machine, poured some liquid in and switched it on. The machine shuddered as she took the kettle to the sink and filled it. When she turned back he was standing in the doorway. She pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, nodded at it.

‘Sit down, love.’

He took the seat and picked at his fingernails.

She switched on the kettle, came over and sat next to him.

‘Want to tell me what that was about, on the bridge?’

‘No.’

He began crying again. Ellie was starting to see a pattern, periods of near catatonia, followed by tears. He was getting himself het up now, his breath catching, like a panic attack. His shoulders shook with it. She got up and put her hands on his neck muscles, felt the tension and knots beneath her fingers.

‘Hey, it’s all right,’ she said, almost a whisper. ‘Whatever’s the matter is outside that front door, OK? Nothing can hurt you in here, you’re safe now.’

It was a litany, under her breath, the tone reassuring more than the words. She meant it, though, she would take care of this boy, never let any harm come to him.

He began to calm down. She made green tea for them both, and got a couple of pills out a drawer. A sleeping pill and a mood stabiliser. She couldn’t remember the brand names. She brought the tea and the pills over to the table.

‘Take these,’ she said. ‘They’ll make you feel better.’

He frowned.

‘They work, trust me,’ she said.

He picked them up and took them, sipping at his tea to wash them down. She sipped from her own mug as she sat.

‘What’s your surname, Sam?’

He hesitated, looked out the kitchen window. They were at the back of the house, the view of the bridges, the massive lines of them framing the whole world, pointing their eyes towards North Queensferry on the opposite bank.

‘Look at me,’ Ellie said. ‘I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.’

‘McKenna,’ he said.

‘Do you go to the High School?’

‘Just finished.’

‘Sixth year?’

He nodded.

‘So you’re seventeen, eighteen?’

‘Seventeen.’

Two years ahead of Logan, then.

‘Did you know my son, Logan?’

Sam shook his head.

‘But you know what he did?’

He nodded. It was the talk of the school for weeks, maybe months. They had a memorial for him, some words at assembly from the head teacher. Ellie was invited but hadn’t gone, couldn’t stand having all that youthfulness and vitality in her face.

‘It’s not the answer, Sam.’

She took his hand but he pulled it away.

‘You don’t know,’ he said.

Ellie sighed. ‘You think I don’t? What I’ve been through with Logan?’

He fiddled with the zip on his hoodie, head down. He jumped like he’d got a fright, then pulled the zip up to the top, hands shaking, eyes wide.

Ellie thought she’d seen something.

She reached out to his hand on the zip. ‘What’s that?’

He brushed her hand away, but she put it back a second time and he didn’t resist. His eyes looked around for something to distract himself.

She peeled his fingers away and pulled the zip down, pushed the material aside. His blue T-shirt underneath had marks spattered across it. Dark stains.

‘Is that blood?’

His breathing was erratic again, his body shaking.

She tried to unzip the hoodie the whole way. ‘What is it, Sam? Are you hurt?’

He knocked her hand away, hard this time, and pulled the zip up.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, through stuttering breaths.

‘Then . . .’

She heard a noise. A car pulling into the driveway.

Ben was home. Ellie looked at Sam. She didn’t want to share him, not yet. It was their little secret, Sam and Ellie. And there was the bloodstain to think about.

She heard the car engine switch off.

‘Come on.’ She took Sam’s hand and yanked him out of his seat.

She pulled him up the stairs and into Logan’s room as she heard the front door open.

‘Hi, honey.’ Ben in the hallway.

She pushed Sam on to Logan’s bed. ‘Stay in here and keep quiet.’

She heard footsteps coming upstairs. She backed out of the room, closed the door and turned.

Ben was halfway up.

‘Hi,’ she said, keeping her voice level.

‘Hey.’ Ben looked at her, then beyond at Logan’s bedroom door. ‘What were you doing in there?’

‘Nothing.’ She walked downstairs past him. ‘Just putting something away.’

He followed her into the kitchen.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

‘Who’s that for?’

She turned. ‘What?’

He was pointing at the two mugs of green tea on the table.

‘You,’ she said. ‘The kettle boiled just as I heard you pull up.’

He frowned at her for a moment. She examined him. He hadn’t shaved in a week, the stubble greyer than it used to be, a white patch on the side of his chin that was never there before. He needed a haircut, messy at the sides, too long at the back. He looked tired, dark pouches under his eyes, hollow cheeks, and he seemed to be squinting into the light all the time. His checked shirt and jeans needed washed. She caught a little of his scent, the smell of nervous sweat. He always seemed to be nervous now, nervous about what shit life would deliver next. She knew that feeling well enough.

‘I can’t really stop,’ he said. He picked up Sam’s mug and took a sip. ‘I don’t know why you try to get me to drink this stuff, you know I can’t stand it.’

‘It’s supposed to relax you. Clean the system.’

‘I know what it’s supposed to do.’

She looked at him for a moment. ‘What are you up to?’

He patted at the satchel over his shoulder. ‘More flyering.’ He pulled a leaflet out, handed it to her.

This was how Ben filled the void since Logan. While Ellie had resorted to physical routine to blot out the blackness, Ben had jumped straight down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole. It wasn’t Logan’s fault according to Ben, it couldn’t be, he was under some kind of external influence, something made him do it, no son of mine could ever think about taking his own life. Denial, obviously. He wasn’t stupid, though, deep down he must realise it was ridiculous, just as her swimming and running and walking to the bridge was a coping mechanism, nothing else.

So he buried himself deep into suicide conspiracies. He became an expert on cluster points, where you got a spate of suicides in one place, very often teenagers who all knew each other. There was a small town in Wales where dozens had done it within months of each other, and Ben knew all the stats for that place, comparing them to the numbers for South Queensferry. He spent countless hours on websites and online chatrooms, dabbling in stuff that even David Icke might baulk at. Satanic cults, mind-altering drugs, school vaccinations, food additives, computer games, side effects of prescription medication, washing powder, the signal from mobile-telephone masts causing depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

She looked at the leaflet in her hand. This was his latest crusade, the Queensferry Crossing, as it had been named. The new road bridge across the Forth was being built just to the west of the current one, hitting land right next to the marina where Ben had worked until recently. He’d stumbled across the idea on some crackpot website that either something in their internal communication network was sending signals into the ether that changed the wiring of kids’ brains, or there was something in the building materials giving off a gas that poisoned everyone’s minds. It was ridiculous, of course, and she’d told him so umpteen times, but he never heard. She understood, it was hard to hear the truth, that Logan just killed himself and there was no answer, no resolution. No comfort. Easier to believe that the government or building contractors or phone companies were to blame.

Ben’s leaflet had quotes from building trade ‘insiders’ confirming that dangerous, cheap non-EU chemicals were being used, and that there had been other clusters of suicides at major building projects using the same method in the Far East.

Ellie closed her eyes and tried to remember their wedding day. Tight-skinned and happy, the two of them waltzing in a small marquee, their lives ahead of them, Logan not even an idea then, let alone a dead one. All she could see was Sam standing on the bridge, his hands tight on the railing, his body swaying back and forth. Her eyes went to the ceiling. Logan’s room was directly above them, if Sam walked around they would likely hear him.

Ben took another sip of tea and made a face at the taste. ‘I really need to get going, deliver these.’

Ellie wondered what the neighbours thought of Ben’s steady stream of lunatic leaflets through their letterboxes. To begin with maybe there was some sympathy, he’d lost his son after all. But now, six months later, wasn’t it time to move on? But it was never time to move on, that’s what she’d come to realise.

‘Stay a minute.’ She went over to him and touched his arm. ‘Sit down. I feel like we haven’t talked in ages.’

‘If you’re going to go on about the leaflets, I don’t want to hear it.’

‘I won’t.’

He sat down, the same chair Sam had been in a few minutes before. Ellie listened for noise from upstairs, but there was nothing. The washing machine chugged away in the corner of the kitchen, throwing Sam’s trousers and pants around.

She knew she should tell Ben. Keeping it to herself could only push them apart. But she had to figure out what it all meant, had to understand the gift she’d been given first, before she could share it.

‘Remember when we saw that porpoise, when Logan was little,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I remember.’

‘He was three, I think?’

Ben nodded. ‘Three and a half.’

‘He kept saying “dolphink”, “dolphink”.’

‘Then you said, “No, it’s a porpoise”.’

Ellie laughed. ‘And then he wouldn’t stop saying “purpose”, “purpose”.’

They were both smiling now. Their little purpose. Ellie tried to think when she’d last seen Ben smile.

‘Our little porpoise,’ she said.

Ben sighed, the smile gone. ‘Yeah.’

Ellie looked up at the ceiling, then out at the Forth. ‘What if we got a second chance?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Imagine we got to live our lives over,’ Ellie said. ‘What would you do different?’

‘Don’t, Ellie.’

‘Go on.’

‘I can’t do this. I don’t want to hear you talk like this.’

‘But if we got a second chance?’

Ben stood up, knuckles on the table. ‘There are no second chances. You know that. Stop talking this way, please.’

She got up too, hands out, pleading. ‘What are we going to do, Ben? There’s no end to this, is there?’

He shrugged and headed for the door.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It never ends.’

She heard the front door open and close.

She breathed in and out a few times, trying to get the hang of it, then looked at the ceiling.