AS WE WALK the last short stretch back to the Mill, I try not to let Luc’s words get inside my head, but I can’t help it. Every step is like an echo of that night, seventeen years ago. Sometimes what happened then seems like something done in another place, another time, which has nothing to do with me. But now, stumbling across the marsh, I know that is not true. My feet remember that night, even if I have tried to forget, and my skin crawls with the memory of the hot summer stickiness.
The weather was just the same, the insects still buzzing in the peat, the warm air a strange contrast to the chilly moonlight as we stumbled over stiles and ditches, our phones casting a ghostly glow over our faces as we checked and checked again for another message from Kate, one that would tell us what was going on. But there was nothing – just that first, anguished text: I need you.
I had been ready for bed when it came through, brushing my hair in the light of Fatima’s reading lamp as she ploughed through her trigonometry homework.
The beep beep! shattered the quiet of the our little room, and Fatima’s head came up.
‘Was that yours or mine?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I picked up my phone. ‘Mine, it’s from Kate.’
‘She’s texted me too,’ Fatima said, perplexed, and then, as she opened the text, I heard her indrawn breath at the same time as mine.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked. But we both knew. They were the same words I had texted the day my father phoned and told me that my mother’s cancer had metastasised, and that it was now a matter of when, not if.
The same words Thea had texted when she had cut herself too deeply by accident, and the blood wouldn’t stop flowing.
When Fatima’s mother’s jeep crashed on a remote country road in a dangerous rural area, when Kate had trodden on a rusty nail, coming back one night from breaking out of bounds … each time those three little words, and the others had come, to comfort, to help, to pick up the pieces as best we could. And each time it had been OK, or as OK as it could be – Fatima’s mother had turned up safe and well the next day. Thea had gone to A&E, armed with some story or other to cover up what she had done. Kate had limped back, held up between us, and we had bathed the scratch with TCP and hoped for the best.
We could solve anything, between us. We felt invincible. Only my mother, dying by slow degrees in a London hospital, remained like a distant reminder that sometimes not everything would be OK.
Where are you? I texted back, and as I was waiting for an answer, we both heard the sound of running footsteps on the spiral stairs above, and Thea burst into the room.
‘Did you get it?’ she panted. I nodded.
‘Where is she?’ Fatima asked.
‘She’s at the Mill. Something’s happened – I asked what, but she hasn’t replied.’
I hurried back into my clothes and we climbed out of the window and set out across the marsh.
Kate was waiting for us when we arrived at the Mill, standing on the little gangway that led across the water, her arms wrapped around herself, and I knew from her face, before she even spoke, that there was something very, very wrong.
She was bone white, her eyes red with crying, and her face was streaked with the drying salt of tears.
Thea began to run as we caught sight of her, Fatima and I jogging after her, and Kate stumbled across the narrow gap of water, her breath hitching in her throat as she tried to say, ‘It – it – it’s Dad.’
Kate was alone when she found him. She hadn’t invited the rest of us that weekend, making an excuse when Thea suggested coming over, and Luc was out with his friends from Hampton’s Lee. When Kate arrived at the Mill, bag in hand, she thought at first Ambrose was out too, but he was not. He was sitting on the jetty, slumped in his chair, a wine bottle on his lap, and a note in his hand, and at first she couldn’t believe that he was really gone. She dragged him back into the Mill, tried mouth-to-mouth, and only after God knows how long begging and pleading, and trying to get his heart to start again did she break down, and begin to realise the hugeness of what had just happened.
‘I’m at peace with my decision,’ the note read, and he did look at peace – his expression tranquil, his head flung back for all the world like a man taking an afternoon nap. ‘I love you …’
The letters trailed almost into incoherence at the end.
‘But – but, why, and how?’ Fatima kept asking. Kate didn’t answer. She was crouched on the floor, staring at her father’s body as though, if she looked at it for long enough, she would begin to understand what had happened, while Fatima paced the room behind her, and I sat on the sofa, my hand on Kate’s back, trying without words to convey everything that I didn’t know how to express.
She didn’t move – she and Ambrose the still, hunched centre of our restless panic, but I had the sense that it was only because she had cried herself into numbness and despair before we arrived.
It was Thea who picked up the object lying on the kitchen table.
‘What’s this doing here?’
Kate didn’t answer, but I looked up, to see Thea holding something that looked like an old biscuit tin, covered with a delicate floral pattern. It was oddly familiar, and after a moment I realised where I’d seen it before – it was usually on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser, tucked away, almost out of sight.
There was a padlock on the lid, but the thin metal clasp had been wrenched open, as if by someone too distraught to bother with a key, and there was no resistance when Thea opened it. Inside was what looked like a jumble of medical equipment wrapped in an old leather strap, and lying on top was a crumpled up piece of cling film, with traces of powder still clinging to the folds; powder that stuck to Thea’s fingers as she touched the plastic wrap.
‘Careful!’ Fatima yelped. ‘You don’t know what that is – it could be poison. Wash your hands, quick.’
But then Kate spoke, from her position on the floor. She didn’t look up, but spoke into her hunched knees, almost as if she were talking to her father, stretched out on the rug in front of her.
‘It’s not poison,’ she said. ‘It’s heroin.’
‘Ambrose?’ Fatima said incredulously. ‘He – he was a heroin addict?’
I understood her disbelief. Addicts were people lying in alleyways, characters in Trainspotting. Not Ambrose, with his laughter and his red wine, and his wild creativity.
But something in her words had struck a chord – a phrase written above his painting desk, in his studio on the top floor, words that I’d seen so often but never tried to understand. You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.
And they suddenly made sense.
Why hadn’t I asked him what they meant? Because I was young? Because I was selfish and self-absorbed, still at an age where only my own problems mattered?
‘He was clean,’ I said huskily. ‘Right, Kate?’
Kate nodded. She didn’t look away from her father, her eyes stayed fixed on his gentle, sleeping face, but when I came and sat beside her, she reached for my hand, and her voice was so low that it was hard to hear her.
‘He took it at university but I think it only got out of control after my mother died. But he got clean when I was still a baby – he’s been clean for as long as I can remember.’
‘Then why …’ Fatima began uncertainly. She trailed off, but her gaze went to the box on the table, and Kate knew what she meant.
‘I think …’ she spoke slowly, like someone trying hard to make themselves understand. ‘I think it was some kind of test … He tried to explain it to me once. It wasn’t enough just to keep it out of the house. He had to wake up every day and make a choice to stay – to stay c-clean for m-me.’
Her voice shook, and broke on the last word, and I put my arms around her, turning my face away from the sight of Ambrose lying sprawled peacefully on the rug, his olive skin pale as beeswax.
Why? I wanted to ask. Why?
But somehow I couldn’t say the words.
‘Oh my God,’ Fatima said. She sank down on the sofa arm, and her face was grey. I knew she was probably thinking, as I was, of the last time we’d seen Ambrose, his long legs stretched out at the table in front of the Mill’s windows, smiling as he sketched us playing in the water. It was only a week ago, and yet there had been nothing wrong. No hint of what was to come. ‘He’s dead,’ she said slowly, as if she were trying to make herself believe it. ‘He’s really dead.’
With those words, the reality of the situation seemed to sink in to all of us, and I felt a shiver of cold run from my neck, all the way down my back, prickling at the skin, as if my body was trying to keep me here, now, in the present.
Fatima put her hands to her face and swayed visibly, and for a moment I thought she was about to pass out.
‘Why?’ she asked again, her voice choked. ‘Why would he do this?’
I felt Kate flinch beside me, as if Fatima’s questions were blows striking home.
‘She doesn’t know,’ I said angrily. ‘None of us do. Stop asking, OK?’
‘I think we all need a drink,’ Thea said abruptly, and she opened the bottle of whiskey Ambrose kept on the kitchen table and poured herself a tumblerful, gulping it down.
‘Kate?’
Kate hesitated, and then nodded, and Thea poured three more glasses, and topped up her own. I wouldn’t have chosen to drink, I wanted a cigarette more, but somehow when I raised the glass to my lips, I found myself gulping down the harsh spirit, feeling it burn acidly in my throat, and – somehow – it took the edge off what was happening, blurring the reality of Ambrose lying there on the rug, in front of us – dead.
‘What are we going to do?’ Fatima asked at last when the glasses were empty. The colour had come back into her face a little. She put the glass down, rattling slightly against the table as her hand shook. ‘Do we phone the police, or the ambulance …?’
‘Neither,’ Kate said, and her voice was hard. There was a shocked silence, and I knew my own face must be showing the same uncomprehending blankness that I saw reflected in the others.
‘What?’ Thea said at last. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t tell anyone,’ Kate said doggedly. She poured another glass and choked it back. ‘Don’t you get it? I’ve been sitting here since I found him trying to think of a way out of this, but if anyone knows he’s dead –’ She stopped, and put her hands to her stomach as if she had been stabbed, and were trying to staunch a terrible wound, but then she seemed to force herself on. ‘I can’t let anyone find out.’ Her voice was mechanical, almost as if she had been rehearsing these words, repeating them to herself over and over. ‘I can’t. If they find out he’s dead before I’m sixteen, I’ll be taken away, taken into care. I can’t lose my home, not on top of – on top of –’
She broke off, unable to finish, and I had the impression of someone holding themselves together with a great effort, someone who might snap and break down at any moment. But she didn’t need to say it, we knew what she meant.
Not on top of losing her only parent, her father.
‘It – it’s just a house –’ Fatima faltered, but Kate shook her head. The truth was it wasn’t just a house. It was Ambrose, from the paintings in his studio down to the red wine stains on the black boards. And it was Kate’s link to us. If she got sent away to some far-off foster home, she would lose everything. Not just her father, but us too, and Luc. She would have no one at all.
It seems … God, looking back, it seems not just stupid, but criminal. What were we thinking? But the answer was … we were thinking of Kate.
There was nothing we could do to bring Ambrose back, and even now when I weigh up the alternatives – foster care for Kate, and the Mill seized by the bank … even now, it makes a kind of sense. It was so unfair. And if we couldn’t help him, we could at least help Kate.
‘You can’t tell anyone he’s gone,’ Kate said again. Her voice was broken. ‘Please. Swear you won’t.’
We nodded, one by one, all of us. But Fatima’s brow was furrowed with worry.
‘So … what do we do?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘We can’t – we can’t just leave him here.’
‘We bury him,’ Kate said. There was a silence, the shock of her words slowly sinking in. I remember the cold of my hands, in spite of the heat of the night. I remember looking at Kate’s white, shuttered face and thinking, who are you?
But as she said the words, they seemed somehow to crystallise into the only possible course of action. What alternative did we have?
Now, looking back, I want to shake myself – the drunk, blinkered child that I was, swept along with a plan so stupid that it somehow seemed the only way out. What alternative did we have? Only a hundred different possibilities, all of them better than concealing a death and embarking on a lifetime of deceit and lies.
But none of them seemed like an option on that hot summer night, as Kate spoke those words, and we stood facing each other around Ambrose’s body.
‘Thea?’ Kate asked, and she nodded, uncertainly, and put her hands to her head.
‘It – it seems like it’s the only way.’
‘It can’t be,’ Fatima said, but she didn’t say it as if she believed it, she said it like someone trying to come to terms with something they know to be true, but can’t bear to accept. ‘It can’t be. There must be another way. Isn’t there something we could do? Raise some money?’
‘It’s not just the money though, is it?’ Thea said. She ran her hands through her hair. ‘Kate’s fifteen. They won’t let her live alone.’
‘But this is mad,’ Fatima said, and there was despair in her voice as she looked around the circle. ‘Please, Kate, please let me call the police.’
‘No,’ Kate said harshly. She turned to face Fatima, and there was a strange mix of pleading desperation, and reluctance in her face. ‘Look, I’m not asking you to help me if you feel you can’t, but please, please don’t tell the police. I’ll do it, I swear. I’ll report him missing. But not now.’
‘But he’s dead!’ Fatima sobbed out, and as she said the words something in Kate seemed to snap and she grabbed Fatima by the wrist, almost as if she was about to strike her.
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she cried, and the despair in her voice and face – I hope I never witness another human being go through that again. ‘That’s why this is the only – the only –’
For a moment I thought she might be about to lose control completely – and in a way it would have been a relief, to watch her scream and rail against what had happened, and the great hammer blow that had been struck against the security of her existence.
But whatever storm was passing through her, she reined it in with a great effort, and her face, when she let Fatima’s wrist drop, was calm.
‘Will you help me?’ she said.
And one by one, first Fatima, then Thea, and then last of all me, we nodded.
We were respectful, or as respectful as we could be. We wrapped the body in a groundsheet and carried it as far as we could, to a place where Ambrose had loved to sketch, a little headland a few hundred yards down the Reach, towards the sea, where the views were at their most beautiful, where the track petered out and no cars could drive, and where few people came, except the odd dog walker and the fishermen with their boats and lines.
There, among the reeds, we dug a hole, taking it in turns with the shovel until our arms ached and our backs screamed, and we tipped Ambrose in.
That was the worst part. No dignified lowering – we couldn’t. He was too heavy, even with four of us, and the hole was too deep and too narrow. The sound he made as he hit the wet, shaley bottom – it was like a kind of smack. I hear it still, sometimes, in my dreams.
He lay face down, completely still, and behind me I heard Kate give a kind of retching, choking sob, and she fell to her knees in the sand, burying her face in her hands.
‘Cover him up,’ Thea said, her voice hard. ‘Give me the shovel.’
Slap. The sound of wet sand flung into a makeshift grave. Slap. Slap.
And over it all, the shushing of the waves on the shore, and Kate’s dry terrible sobs, reminding us what we were doing.
At last the hole was full and the tide rose to cover the marks we’d made, smoothing over our muddied, troubled footprints, and the scar we had cut in the bank. And we stumbled back with the torn groundsheet in our arms, holding Kate between us, to begin the rest of our lives as they would be from now on, in the knowledge of what we had done.