Now – 7th March
You’re supposed to wake up innocent.
When you’ve done something bad you’re supposed to get a few seconds’ grace, where the morning feels new and clean, before reality rears up and slaps you around the face.
I’ve never been so lucky. No morning serenity for me. Probably because I never seem to dream, not in any coherent way. It’s always just been colours and sensations; I blame the acid I did. And the mushrooms and the weed and the Ecstasy I was too old for by then that I took anyway. All of that stuff and the prescription pills I’m on now, because no woman hits sixty complication-free.
This morning there’s a shadow hanging over me when I come around in the fast-starting fashion I’ve begun every weekday with for the last five years. Ever since the builders moved in. Eight a.m. on the dot. The drilling starts. The boring. Piles being driven into the sludgy Thames-side earth because if you built anything on here without ramming in a hundred feet of reinforced concrete first, it’d fall over.
They say.
Funny, this place wasn’t so carefully constructed and it’s still standing after six decades. The same as me. Crumbling through ill-use and neglect but, miraculously, both of us remain.
The piling shakes the whole site. I’m sure it’s the reason the fissure in the ceiling over my bed is getting wider, dusting my sheets with plaster. Before the builders rolled on to the site it was a hairline crack; now I could fit my fingers in there and wiggle them around in the void. The whole building is shifting and sliding, destabilised by the vibrations.
One day the front of the place is going to collapse. Leaving us all exposed in our flats like the world’s grimmest doll’s house. Most rooms abandoned and sad and the little figures inside so forlorn. We’ve been played with too much. We’re almost broken.
Six of us left. Almost three hundred gone.
And one more resident this morning than there was last night. Lying at the bottom of the lift shaft.
Poor Ella.
She probably hates me this morning. I don’t feel so great about myself, but the right thing is never the easy thing. It would have been easy to call the police and sit there, watching him cool and stiffen as we waited for them to arrive. They wouldn’t have believed us. The scene was too neat, no signs of a struggle. Even if we’d staged it better, if I’d punched Ella in the face and smeared her blood on his fist, they would have concocted a narrative to make it her fault.
Because Ella Riordan is a scalp too big for any copper to lose.
It’s not vanity to say I’d be a nice bonus for them as well.
When I sit up a muscle in my shoulder screams and I collapse again, waiting for the pain to ease. It feels like a tear. I’ve shredded something moving that huge, dead weight.
He was bigger than he looked. Solid in the way some apparently slim men are, all the muscle lean and hard rather than bulky. He must have been twelve stone, easily, maybe thirteen, and cumbersome as we manoeuvred him along the corridor towards the lift.
Ella took his legs; I didn’t want her to hold his head, thought that such close proximity to the wound might tip her over the edge. She was hardly breathing as we struggled along with him. All the colour drained from her face, her eyes wide and bulging, but she kept moving and I’d never been prouder of her than I was at that moment.
Now it all feels sick and unreal to me. How we approached his body like an awkward sofa to be twisted and turned through a slightly too narrow doorway, dealt with him as if he was nothing more than a logistical challenge. I know we needed to behave that way – self-preservation, I suppose, emotional insulation against the fundamental horror of what we were doing. You have to make your enemy less than human.
You have to call him enemy rather than victim.
And at the time I had no problem doing that. He attacked Ella; he got what he deserved. And I had – still have – no qualms about helping her hide his body.
Maybe the guilt will come later.
This morning I have the fear instead. Percolating through my bloodstream, carrying the gnawing dread into every atom of my being, making me feel sick beyond my stomach, driving the sensation into my face and fingertips and sending it crawling across my scalp. I am wrapped in fear now, wearing it like a second skin.
Because he’s going to be discovered, sooner or later. Even in the dead of winter in a draughty building where the condensation ices over on the inside of the windows, he’ll eventually begin to smell. But there’s no reason for anyone to think it was murder.
I need to keep telling myself that.
I need to construct a narrative that I believe or I’m not going to be able to function, and if I can’t function then who’s going to pick Ella up?
Just an accident. Another drunk, stumbling into a lift shaft in a badly lit corridor. Blame the neglect of the council or the developers, who didn’t come and attend to the lift doors that were stuck half open or change the dead bulbs in the caged strip lights.
Isn’t that the most perfectly credible explanation?
We’ll need a story for the time Ella was away from the party, but that can wait. Today’s going to be tough enough on her. I’ll let her work through the worst of the shock before I bring it up. Work through it myself, too, because I’m no good to her like this, shivering under my duvet and grinding my teeth, the tension on a time delay.
How we managed to return to the party after that I’ll never know. Adrenaline, I guess, and necessity. You can make your body do amazing things with that combination, they say. We smiled and laughed and made small talk with people and every now and again – too often, probably – we made eye contact with each other, wordlessly checking, desperate for reassurance that we were doing okay, and I remember how manic she looked and I must have looked the same. But the only person who might have noticed was Carol and she’d already left. Most of Ella’s friends were drunk or a little high and I don’t think they realised how edgy she was under the hyper attitude she’d struck to cover it up.
It bodes well for when the police come. I’m trying to take some comfort from that, because her composure is by no means a given and so much is riding on how we both react to those first tentative enquiries. I’m an old hand, of course, and Ella’s been on the receiving end of their attention before. Nothing as serious as this, but she’s learned the drill.
The photograph hangs on the gallery wall in my living room. Only my best shots go up there, the ones that would be called iconic; miners’ wives breaching the gates at Orgreave, women linking arms around the perimeter of RAF Greenham Common, burning cars overturned during the Brixton Rising, bloodstained banners and felled police.
And Ella.
May 2016, student and faculty members out on the streets of Camden to protest against the introduction of zero-hours contracts for lecturers. After UCL and Exeter, it was one peaceful protest too far for the police, who decided to make an example of this group, stamp down hard in the hope of staving off another summer riot season. Those kids weren’t going to smash up shops and nick trainers, anyone could see that. They were soft, naïve, allowed themselves to be kettled, because at heart they still believed the police existed to protect people like them.
Afterwards the Met branded Ella a ringleader, but she wasn’t.
She would become one, later.
Their doing.
And mine.
I wasn’t going to go along. I’d done the others, got some decent shots, sold a couple for a pittance. There was no real drama at the earlier ones and no reason to think the St Luke’s sit-in would be any different. Two hours into the kettling I got a call from a lecturer I knew from way back, stuck at the centre of the sweating, increasingly agitated group, saying things were about to kick off.
Fifteen minutes after I arrived, they did. But it was no mass push. Just one young woman, small and pale with a shock of peroxide-white hair.
Ella said it was a panic attack that propelled her towards the cordon of riot shields and masked faces. That she didn’t remember making her move, still didn’t understand how she forced her way through them.
Mobile-phone footage surfaced after the event, showing her scrambling over the shoulders of the police, fear making her nimble. Her hand braced against a helmet, her foot came down hard on some big bastard’s shoulder, and she was out. Cheers went up, one of the riot police broke formation and went after her and that was when I made my own move.
My first shot caught the moment his baton struck the back of her knee. I saw her crumple. The sunlight flashing off his shield. I kept moving closer as she lay there, too new to this to even curl up into a protective ball. She possessed just enough survival instinct to throw her arm up as he went in for another blow and I captured the instant it landed, heard the crack of bone and the howl that broke out of her.
That was what made the image compelling enough to go viral – the freezing of the precise second that Ella Riordan lost her innocence.
I saw her through that and I’ll see her through this.
Gingerly I lift my throbbing shoulder from the mattress and it complains but not so much that I need to lie down again. I pull a navy fleece dressing gown on over my pyjamas, slip my feet into fur-lined boots as quickly as I can, before the cold floor can leach out any more of my body heat.
In the kitchen, I make a cup of coffee, think about taking it back to bed and talk myself out of it. It’s too easy to hide and hope things fix themselves. They never do and time doesn’t heal, it just degrades and festers and complicates. If I act like everything’s normal I might be able to fool myself that it is. At the very least I can fool other people. Witnesses. Because that’s what my friends and neighbours have become overnight. Witnesses to my behaviour after the fact.
And I don’t think I could fool them, not today. I’m not ready yet to put on a brave and innocent face.
Maybe I could go back to bed again.
No. I go to my desk and check my emails while my coffee cools, like a normal person. A former student inviting me to a gallery show in Whitechapel next month – I RSVP, knowing I might be in no position to attend once the time comes, but he’s a talented young man and I want him to feel he still has my support. There’s an offer of some supply work at UEA, maternity cover, very last minute, and I turn it down even though I need the money.
Money’s something I try not to think about too often, even though it’s a constant and pressing need, worse now than ever before, and I was never affluent, not even during the brief double-income period of my marriage. He had his vices just like I had mine and they clashed in the most destructive way. While he wanted to buy himself happy, I wanted to give my money away and we both believed that behaviour signalled a deep-seated lack of self-esteem in the other. Once you’ve seen how your life partner tries to stave off their own sense of worthlessness there’s no going back. Because if they don’t value themselves, how can you value them?
If I’d stayed on track after the divorce, worked five days a week and all those long evenings of marking and lesson planning like my old friends did, I’d probably be comfortably off now. Mortgage-free and embracing approaching retirement, maybe with a little place in France or a long-anticipated world tour booked.
But that was never me.
It only took one long, rainy night around the fire at Greenham Common to make me realise how little I cared about financial security, how small and selfish an aim it was in a world with so much going wrong in it. Returning home afterwards, dirty and tired but invigorated, only to find him purring over a new lawn mower he’d bought while I was away, that was the final break. I couldn’t be with a man like that.
Instead I’ve had thirty years of supply teaching and cover jobs, which has allowed me to focus on more important ends and has left me with a virtually worthless pension. My only income beyond that are the ever-decreasing monthly payments from the photo agency who pimp me out, and dwindling royalties from my earlier career. It was the right choice. I’ve never doubted that for a moment.
And I hate that he’s snuck up on me right now. That old life I rejected. Him. Who I never think about from one year to the next, coming at me because I’m so scared that any memory is safer to linger in than the ones from last night.
I need to get out of this flat.
Stand up, move, resist the fear.
I dress in jeans and a heavy black jumper and my tatty parka, put on flat boots and fingerless gloves: camouflage-wear. Some days it feels good to be noticed but not when I’m working. Before I leave the flat I stow my laptop under a pile of old magazines, drag a box of even older books in front of it.
Since the flats started to empty out, the break-ins have increased. Opportunists too stupid to realise none of us have anything worth stealing, junkies looking for somewhere to lay low, kids who just want to smash shit up.
Every time I leave I expect to come home to devastation.
It nearly broke the Moores. By the end they weren’t leaving at all. Holed up protecting their family photos and the collection of china she inherited from her mother, made paranoid by the noises this place produces at night, the sound of the wind coming through the broken windows and the doors sucked at and slammed. The voices. The laughter. The footsteps in the hallways.
He was probably one of them. The man Ella killed.
As I approach the lift, my feet slow and I find I can’t walk past it.
All of the lift doors are permanently shut now, except for on the top floor. The car itself is stuck halfway between ground level and first and that’s where he is, on the roof of it, lying across whatever bulky mechanisms make the thing rise and fall.
At the stairwell, I go up rather than down, to the top floor where only one resident remains and he’s always out at this time of morning, taking his daily run along the river. Ella has been sleeping in another flat up here, but she went home with a friend last night.
There’s nobody around to see me creep towards the open door of the lift.
The gap is less than three feet wide and I remember how we struggled with his unwieldy bulk. Ella pushed his legs through first while I took the full force of his weight. And then we shimmied him through the rest of the way, one arm each, our knees pushing into his shoulders until finally he fell.
I lean against the door and immediately step back, seeing the mess of handprints which must be ours. With the cuff of my jumper I wipe them away in circles, top to bottom, over and again. Because I know our fingerprints, if they were lifted, would contain minuscule traces of his blood.
Part of me is that logical still.
The rest, when I tentatively put my head through the gap, is not so composed.
I peer down into the darkness and think I can see his light-coloured combats. When I switch my phone to the torch app and direct it down towards his body I can’t make out his face but he doesn’t seem as shattered as I expected. His limbs aren’t weirdly twisted; his neck appears to be straight still.
Something clangs down there and I step back swiftly. There’s the sudden clenching sensation of being caught looking at something you’re not supposed to see. Like shame. My cheeks flush with it.
I hurry back to my flat and lock the door behind me, aware that I’m breathing heavily, the torch still lit in my hand, shining on the wall of photographs, picking out the one of Ella, on her back, trying to save herself from another blow.
She can’t know about this. If she finds out there’s even a tiny chance he’s still alive down there, she’ll want to call the fire brigade and ambulance.
I kick off my boots and leave my parka where it drops on the floor, crawl into my still-warm bed and pull the covers up over my face, turning and curling into a ball.
It won’t have been the light from my phone that made him stir.
There isn’t enough of him left in there to think I’d come to save him.
There can’t be.