The Jump (6 page)

She put the key in the door and steeled herself.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ she called.

No answer. But he was in, she knew it. She wandered through the rooms downstairs but he wasn’t there. She went upstairs and stopped at the door to Logan’s room. Felt the urge to go in but resisted. Felt the itch to check his Facebook, but didn’t. She stroked the lettering on his door again, another ritual, touch wood for luck.

She walked to her and Ben’s bedroom and stood at the open doorway. Ben was under the covers, laptop open on his knees, creases across his forehead as he frowned in the light from the screen.

‘Hey, honey,’ he said without looking up.

‘Hey.’ She walked over to the dresser and opened the jar of Neutrogena, rubbed some into her hands then the skin under her eyes. ‘How was the flyering earlier?’

‘OK, I suppose.’ He looked up from the screen. ‘Where have you been? It’s late.’

She looked at her reflection in the mirror. ‘Just out for a walk. You know.’

He nodded. She often went for long walks, especially in the evening. It was part of the whole thing, the swimming and the other rituals, the physical act helped to empty her mind. She preferred it at night as well, fewer prying eyes, fewer accusations. She liked to think of herself as shrouded by the darkness, letting the essence of it soak into her bones as she drifted through it, osmosis transferring blackness from her to the night and back again, two porous entities combining.

Ben glanced down at the screen then back at her. ‘I think I’ll go out in the boat tomorrow.’

Ellie rubbed her hands together, letting the last of the cream soak in. Her skin was so dry these days, as if the world’s moisture couldn’t get any purchase in her body.

‘Oh yeah?’ she said, putting the lid back on the jar. ‘You haven’t been out for a while, why now?’

Ben pointed at the laptop. ‘I want to go and check out the new bridge foundations again.’

‘Why?’ Ellie said.

‘Been talking to this guy online, says he has evidence they’re using chemicals in the concrete process that release toxins into the atmosphere. Stuff that causes depression, hallucinations, all sorts.’

Ellie sighed. ‘Who is this guy, and how would he know?’

‘Calls himself Truthteller21, says he got sacked by the company for asking too many questions.’

Ellie turned round to face him. ‘Really? Come on, Ben.’

‘I know, a pinch of salt and all that, but he sounds like he knows his stuff.’

‘For God’s sake, you say that about all of them. Every bampot on the internet, every conspiracy nut and lunatic loner convinced the world is out to get them.’

Ben stared at her. ‘Like me, you mean.’

Ellie rubbed at the skin below her eyes. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘I believe all this shit, so that makes me as much of a nutjob as them.’

‘I just don’t think it’s very realistic to believe a respectable company, commissioned by the government under all the strict health and safety checks, is pumping chemicals into the sky that are making people suicidal, that’s all.’

Ben shook his head. ‘Of course not, that’s what they want you to think.’

‘Oh come on, listen to yourself.’

‘The bigger the lie, the easier it is to make people swallow it,’ Ben said. ‘I’m telling you, it’s right under our noses and nobody is doing anything about it.’

Ellie took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I don’t know if going out in the boat tomorrow is such a good idea, the forecast said it’s going to be blowy. Up to thirty knots out on the firth.’

‘I hadn’t heard that.’

‘In the morning, anyway, maybe it’ll ease off in the afternoon.’

He could check online, of course, and he would, so she didn’t know why she bothered saying it. She just had to make sure she got Sam out of the boat before Ben was up and about tomorrow.

She stood up and went over to the bed, sat down next to him, nodded at the half dozen open browsers on the laptop screen.

‘Did you find out any more about the thing up the road, the cop that got attacked?’

He brought Twitter up and began searching. ‘A little bit. Nothing new in the mainstream, obviously, but quite a lot of chat on social media. The guy’s name is McKenna, do you know him?’

Ellie shook her head. It was a fair enough question, it often felt like people in a small town all knew each other.

‘He has two kids at the high school, an older boy and a younger girl.’

Ben meant older and younger than Logan. It was an instinctive thing to say, something Ellie found herself doing all the time, but it was redundant now. Logan was never going to age so the comparison was irrelevant. But it was a thing they had together, her and Ben, a frame of reference only the two of them understood.

Ben was clicking and scrolling. ‘The interesting thing is that the son is missing. He’s seventeen, so he’s within his rights to do what he likes, I guess, but it looks pretty suspicious, vanishing from a crime scene where your own dad has been stabbed.’

‘The cop was stabbed?’ Ellie said.

‘Didn’t I say that already?’

‘Is he going to be OK?’

‘The chat is that he’ll be fine. You can’t keep anything a secret from the collective consciousness, can you? Insiders at the police station and the hospital have already put everything out there.’

‘So everyone thinks it was the son who did it?’

Ben shook his head. ‘There are quite a lot of rumours that this McKenna guy was into something dubious.’

‘Like what?’

‘Normal police crap. Backhanders from criminals, payoffs from drug dealers, a protection racket. I don’t know. Could be anything. Word is he has a big gambling problem. Some are saying he’s had affairs, so it could be tied up with that.’

Ellie let out a breath. ‘The internet is such a scurrilous bastard.’

Ben smiled. ‘You get a lot of bullshit, but that’s the price you pay for the truth to come out as well.’

Ellie looked at him. ‘You believe that, don’t you?’

He turned to her. ‘Of course.’

She put out a hand and touched the rough stubble of his cheek. So different from Logan’s soft skin, from Sam’s. She tried to remember what Ben’s skin had felt like the first time she touched it. She sometimes thought the two of them were aliens inhabiting these worn out bodies they had become. In just a blink of time they’d gone from tight-skinned, giggling sex maniacs to saggy, toughened bags of bones.

Ben looked confused at her touch, as if the very idea of his wife stroking his cheek was weird. She pulled his head towards her and kissed him on the mouth, thinking how different it was from the touch of Sam’s lips earlier. This was the man she loved, she still loved him, they just had to find a way back to that.

She kept kissing him, felt his surprise as her tongue explored his mouth. This is what kids did, not a couple in their forties eroded by life. She pulled him close, stroked her hands along his arms and chest. This was her man, still. She felt his hand on her breast and leaned into it. She reached inside the duvet and pushed against his body, rubbed at the crotch of his shorts and felt him harden. She pushed the laptop to the side and wriggled out her jeans and pants, then pulled the covers off and sat on top of him. She was already wet and he slid in. Years of practice, knowing exactly which movements got them there quickest. She moved up and down as he whispered under his breath, looking up at her. She liked that, the look in his eyes, still hungry for her after all these years. She closed her eyes and focussed on the feeling in her groin, but Sam’s face appeared in her mind, his skinny cheekbones, his lithe body as he got changed earlier in Logan’s room. She opened her eyes again, felt Ben push into her and come inside her, then felt a swell through her own body, spreading through her as she ground her pelvis against his, her legs trembling as she slumped forward and hugged Ben, running her hands through his hair, reminding herself all the time that this was her husband, this was the man she’d promised to love and honour forever.

‘It’s been a while,’ he whispered in her ear, breathless.

‘Shhh.’

‘That’s the first time since . . .’

She kissed him. She didn’t want him to end that sentence.

Back at the Binks. She cradled a black coffee in her hands, shoulders hunched against the breeze. The sun was crawling into the sky behind the rail bridge, columns of light stretching upriver. Traffic was still light on the road bridge but the noise was there all the same, the never-ending rush of it.

She’d dreamed of Logan again. She knew dreams meant nothing, and she hated hearing other people talk about their own, people’s subconscious activities were never as profound as they thought they were. In fact, the subconscious was a pretty blunt instrument. So she dreamed of Logan, big deal, what did that tell you? That she was heartbroken about her dead son. How did that help her in everyday life?

She looked down at her bare feet. She’d come out here to put her feet in the water, wanted to feel her body intermingle with it, feel the force of the waves, the tidal power, the immense connectivity of it all.

She climbed down to the beach, careful not to spill her coffee. Tensed her toes against the tiny stones and shells under her feet. She walked into the water lapping at the shore, held her breath for a moment against the cold. Wiggled her ankles and kicked a stone at the water’s edge. A few more steps, nothing crazy, just up to her pyjama shorts. But as she moved deeper into the water she felt the urge to throw her coffee mug away and dive under the surface. She poured the coffee into the sea, watched the brown liquid swirl and disappear as it was diluted. Then she dropped the mug and watched it weave its way to the bottom then nestle in the sand.

She looked out over the Forth to North Queensferry. People over there just waking up, getting ready for work, hurrying the kids along so they weren’t late for school. The stuff of life.

She stretched her arms in front of her, put her hands together and dived into the wash, kicking with her legs, pushing the water away with every stroke of her hands, feeling the tension and stretch of the muscles in her arms and legs. The cold hammered at her chest, tried to push the air from her lungs with the shock, but she resisted. A few strokes underwater, shoulder blades flexing, breath held, then she surfaced, already some distance from the shore.

A line from a song came into her head, like it did every time she swam in the firth. That band Logan liked, Frightened Rabbit, Scottish guys singing in their own accents. That had been unthinkable when she was a teenager, there were no Scottish voices in rock music. The line was ‘swim until you can’t see land’. A lovely idea. Impossible here, though, surrounded on both sides, you’d have to go a dozen miles out into open sea. Suicidal.

She breathed deeply and ducked under the surface. A few long strokes, enjoying the purity of the movement, at one with the ocean and the currents, the seals and the crabs, gliding through this world as if she belonged.

She came up for air. Treaded water as she looked back to shore.

She was not suicidal, not today. Today she had things to do, people to help.

She took a mouthful of seawater and swallowed, the saltiness burning her throat, and imagined grains of Logan’s ashes slipping silently through her stomach lining into her bloodstream.

She looked at her house, small from here, like something made of Lego. She turned to the road bridge. The same feeling. She imagined a giant child building all this in their playroom, the town, the bridge, the boats in the marina, all of it. A three-year-old god in charge of their lives. But she knew that wasn’t true. No fate, no destiny. We were all in charge of our own lives, for better or worse.

She swam back to shore.

Ellie checked her watch as she stepped on to the bridge. Still only quarter past eight. Ben wouldn’t surface for a couple of hours yet, he always stayed up into the small hours with his little gang of internet-conspiracy buddies.

She’d gone back to the house to strip, towel off and change, throwing her sodden jammies in the machine. She thought about Sam’s clothes, the jeans she’d washed but then dumped in the sea along with the bloodstained top and hoodie. The forensic trails that we left behind all the time, a frightening concept, no chance of living on earth without trace thanks to modern science. Was it so hard to just disappear? The trick was to have no one looking for you, at least not in the right place, then it was easy.

The rumble of trucks and vans as they thudded past was like a hug to her. The shudder of the walkway under her feet was as comforting as old slippers. She strode along the bridge, immersed in the noise, revelling in the anonymity, the wind flicking at her hair. She walked past the first security camera and wondered about the footage from yesterday. Did they have anything of Sam and her? Had anyone in the control room put together the boy on the bridge and the missing boy from the police officer’s house? The trick was to have no one looking for you, that’s how you disappear.

She was close to the middle of the bridge now. She’d walked along the east side, the same as yesterday, the same as every day, the side Logan jumped from. That meant she couldn’t see the marina from here, over to the west. She presumed Sam was still asleep, two of those pills were usually good for twelve hours, she knew from experience.

She got to the spot and stopped, just like every day before. Except this wasn’t the same, Ellie felt different. She thought about Sam, here on the bridge yesterday, almost catatonic at her house, nervous and distraught later, then finally sleeping below deck on the Porpoise. She thought about seeing his sister and mum through the kitchen window. She thought about stepping round the pool of blood on the floor as it spread out from Jack McKenna’s stomach. Had Sam’s mum cleaned up yet?

Ellie leaned over the railing and looked down. Light from the sun scudded off the ripples in the water, blinding her for a moment. She raised a hand to shield her eyes and thought she saw something down there, a dark shape shifting through the water. Could be a seal, a basking shark, a piece of junk, anything. A porpoise, maybe, in its element, living only for the moment.

She leaned back, gazed out past the rail bridge and thought of Logan. Pictured him standing in the hall of their house, thirteen years old, playing with his hair and peering at the mirror, the smell of Lynx wafting into Ellie’s nose as she watched from the kitchen doorway. He was going out on his first date, at least the first that she knew about, with a girl called Maddie. Going to the cinema then Pizza Hut up the road. Logan was trying to pretend it wasn’t a big deal, shrugging his shoulders and avoiding Ellie’s gaze, but she knew different, could tell straight away that he liked her. She worried, of course, he was her baby, going into the world to get his heart broken a hundred times by a hundred different girls. Or maybe he was out there breaking hearts himself, either way it was horrible to think about. She didn’t mind the physical stuff so much, the idea of him doing things with girls. They’d had the talk a long time before, he knew all about being safe, even at thirteen. It was the emotional stuff. He wasn’t a typical boy, full of bravado and bluster. He was soft and kind and cared about what people felt. That was better, of course, she was proud that she and Ben had raised such a caring person, but it also left him open to hurt. By girls, by other boys, by the world. And she couldn’t do anything to protect him, that was the worst of it. She just had to be there and cuddle him when it went wrong. Except she never got that chance.

She thought again of Sam in the boat, closed her eyes and held tight to the railing, the tremor in it carrying up her arms. She had to save Sam. She still didn’t know how, but she would save him.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for this second chance.’