Текст книги "The Jump"

Автор книги: Doug Johnstone

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The Jump

Doug Johnstone

In memory of

Gayle Edington

and

Mark Smith

A salute at the threshold of the North Sea of my mind,

And a nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide,

And I swim

‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’,

Frightened Rabbit

1

There were widows and orphans, but why wasn’t there a word for a parent who lost a child? Because it was too awful to contemplate, too terrible to give a name.

The thought buzzed in Ellie’s brain, just as it had every day for the last few months, as she stood on the shore at the Binks, a rocky wart sticking out into the Firth of Forth. To her left was the road bridge, a concrete javelin suspended across the river from two giant supports. Beyond that she could see the yellow cranes working on the new bridge foundations, emerging from the water like sleepy krakens. In the other direction, past the low harbour wall and the Craigs, was the more famous rail bridge, the rusty red squeezebox of criss-crossed struts, with the smudge of the BP tanker berth lurking behind.

The road bridge loomed over her, as always. She and Ben should’ve moved away from South Queensferry after it happened, made a clean break. But she was secretly glad they hadn’t, she liked the constant reminder, the open sore that she couldn’t help touching. Besides, she could never leave Logan behind.

Thirty yards back was the house she shared with Ben. Just Ben. It wasn’t a home any more, not without Logan. Grey-stone terrace, two bedrooms, though they didn’t need the second bedroom now. She hadn’t been able to clear away Logan’s stuff yet.

Every day at the shore the light was different. Today it felt like the start of autumn, sharpness in the bluster of wind from upriver sweeping into the wider firth, high feathery clouds making the light somehow milky.

She looked at the distance from the centre of the road bridge down to the choppy surface of the water. Forty-five metres. She knew that from a leaflet she picked up at the bridge visitor centre. Not so far, you might think, but it was easily enough to kill you if you jumped. It was the method of suicide with the highest success rate. 97 per cent died. She wondered if Logan knew that before he jumped. If he’d Googled it, found the surest way. She’d checked his laptop browser history sometime after, when she briefly emerged from the blackness, but there was nothing unusual on there. Maybe he looked it up on his phone. It was still in his pocket when they recovered the body, but broken, obviously.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Counted to six. Opened them again and looked at the bridge. Imagined his body falling through the air. She’d watched hundreds of videos of people committing suicide this way since Logan jumped, amazing how many attempts had been caught on film. Mostly it looked peaceful, somehow casual. Just a simple step off a ledge, a tiny splash of white spray on entry. But she knew the truth was different. You could reach seventy miles per hour. Hitting the water was like hitting a pavement, legs pulverised, spine collapsed, internal organs crushed, arms wrenched from sockets.

She wished for that oblivion. Less often than she used to, but still every hour, every day.

Ben had identified Logan’s body. She wondered over and over if that was a mistake. She couldn’t really remember the events of that day, just the call at her desk, the frantic drive across Edinburgh, then people she didn’t know telling her things she couldn’t understand. Her fifteen-year-old son was dead. He’d jumped from the bridge.

A maintenance worker saw it, radioed in to control. The coastguard called the safety boat from the bridge-works at Port Edgar to go fish the body out. Not even worth scrambling an official sea search. He was only ten minutes in the water. Not that time mattered, of course, he was dead on entry, body smashed by the laws of physics.

Back at Port Edgar someone in the coastguard office recognised Logan as Ben’s boy. Ellie felt sorry for the man, suddenly given the burden of that information. He called Ben, who sprinted the short distance along Shore Road to the marina and confirmed what they all knew.

Ellie felt excluded. By the time she’d got through traffic, Logan had been taken away. At first she thought it was a horrible joke, the sickest prank imaginable. But the look on the men’s faces, on Ben’s face, made the truth clear.

No note.

No previous attempts.

No cries for help.

No overdoses or slashed wrists.

No self-harming or mood swings or depression, no trouble at school, no bullying they could uncover.

He’d been quiet, but then he’d always been quiet and thoughtful, a good boy, never ran with the gang of loud, obnoxious kids at school. Preferred his own imagination, books and games to macho bluster or petty squabbling. He was respectful, polite.

And now he was dead.

It was unbearable.

She closed her eyes again and listened. The same two things she always heard when she stood here. The thin shush of waves on the shore and the rumbling thrum of traffic on the bridge, commuters, delivery drivers, people heading north or south to visit loved ones, friends and family. Mums and dads. Sons and daughters.

She opened her eyes and took her phone out of her pocket. Her finger hovered over the Videos icon. She was trying hard not to look at that any more. She had the footage from the CCTV camera on the bridge. It had taken two months of pestering John, the security guard, to get it. Pleading, crying, threatening to sue, offering money. Once she went up to the control booth drunk and tried to unzip his trousers, getting on her knees and grabbing at his crotch. He gripped her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. Looked at her with kindness and told her to get help. She cried all the way home.

In the end she wore him down and he gave her the footage. Strictly against policy but maybe he realised she needed it to cling to. So now she carried it around with her, her boy’s last moments. A grainy image of him walking to the middle of the bridge, the highest point in the gentle curve of the road, looking out for a few moments, elbows on the railing, flicking his hair out of his eyes like he always did, then climbing over in an agile movement, not looking around or down. A step forward, one step, and he was gone.

She didn’t press Videos. Instead she opened Facebook, checked his page. No one had posted anything since last night. Had his friends forgotten him already? In the blur of their busy lives, was he just a memory now?

She typed quickly.

Miss you so much it hurts every moment.

Wish I could have you back.

Mum xxx

She flicked through the pictures of him, snapshots from old parties or muckabouts in the park. One of him with his arm around Jackson, another of him looking shyly at Kayleigh amongst a group outside the chip shop. He had a thing for her, but nothing ever happened that Ellie knew of. Just one of an infinity of missed chances. She felt vertigo at the thought of her son’s non-existent future, all the possibilities branching off into fog. It was a familiar feeling and she was comforted by it. The sickness in her stomach, the dizziness, these had become more reliable to her than breathing in the last few months.

She went back to Logan’s profile page.

Refresh.

Refresh.

Refresh.

Nothing. Of course. No likes for her comment. Why would anyone like it?

She put her phone back in her pocket and picked up two stones from the beach. She put one in her pocket and felt the heft of the other in her palm, the solidity of the earth it had once been a part of. She hurled it as hard as she could into the water, yanking her shoulder and elbow in the process.

She was weak these days. She’d lost weight in the last six months, and she didn’t have a lot to lose in the first place. But eating seemed irrelevant. She was wasting away, on hunger strike against the oblivion of the universe, refusing to take part in the basic chemical process of converting food into energy.

She rubbed at her throwing arm, felt the raw skin. Pushed her sleeve up to examine the tattoo. It was a decent likeness of the bridge, not perfect, but good enough. Still scabby and sore. She liked that period best, when the tattoos hurt. It was her seventh in six months, up her arms, across her back, down her sides. All connected to Logan and the firth. The road bridge, his name, his dates, the rail bridge, a boat and an island. A porpoise arching up her leg. She used to call Logan her little porpoise when he was a toddler, after they saw one together from the Binks, its snubnose pushing through the wash.

Ellie knew the tattoos were compulsive but she didn’t care. Ben never said anything. He had his own strategy to get him through, they didn’t judge each other for coping however they could.

She scratched at her scabby arm, gazed at the water and thought about what lay under the surface. Junk, sunken boats, dead bodies, the ones they never recover. All of it hidden in hundreds of millions of tons of water. Imagine if the seas of the world dried up, what treasures we would find.

She looked at the bridge again. Tried to think about breathing. In and out, in and out. She turned to walk up there.

‘I’m coming,’ she said.

2

It felt good to be moving. That’s something she’d learned over the last six months, physical exercise was a way of keeping the worst of it at bay.

She strode up Rose Lane away from the Binks and the waterfront, on to Hopetoun Road then left, away from Shore Road and up the hill. After a few minutes the road went under the approach to the bridge, colossal concrete legs supporting the thunder of traffic overhead. She turned left again up the steep access road, feeling the gradient, pushing her legs into it, enjoying the strain on her calves and thighs.

For the first two months after Logan died she did nothing. She took the pills they gave her, cried in her sleep and awake, puked most things she tried to eat, and thought about killing herself. She sat in the house or on the beach, staring at the bridge, wishing she was dead.

Then one day she went in the water.

A paddle at first, just to feel the waves on her toes, to touch the body of water that had killed her son. Then she stripped off and dived in, right there on the Binks. The cold of the firth was shocking, but she embraced it. It was the first time she’d felt alive since it happened. She’d been a strong swimmer before, capable and determined, with solid technique, but she’d grown soft in her time away from the water, and she struggled. That was good, though.

She swam east along the coast, round the harbour, the old town of South Queensferry on her right. Her breathing was heavy, pressure on her lungs, her arms and legs stinging with cold and tiredness, her mind empty of everything except trying to keep going. But her heart was raging with power, she could feel it trying to escape her chest.

She headed back into shore at Hawes Pier, where the tourist boats left for Inchcolm Island. She was gasping for air, bent over in just her bra and pants, a drookit skeleton of a thing, her pallid flesh slick and oily from the dirty water of the firth. The tourists on the pier gawped at her, a monster from the deep, as they sat licking their ice creams.

She walked back along the town’s main street, dripping and shivering, everyone pretending to ignore her. Maybe some knew what had happened to Logan. None of them wanted to get involved with a crazy woman, half-naked and shaking. She began to feel like she was slipping into death again, so she started running, bare feet slapping the pavement, dodging round mothers with buggies, old couples taking in the sea air. She wanted to stop and scream at them all that it wasn’t worth it, that all the love in the world would die when their loved ones died. But she didn’t, she just kept running and running.

And then she was back where she started, at the Binks, her little pile of clothes like a deflated human being, crumpled on the pebbles.

She was at the top of the access road now. She U-turned on to the approach to the bridge. A maintenance van was parked by the visitor centre, and she recognised the man inside. Gerry. She’d spoken to him often, he was nearly pension age, had kids and grandkids, and he knew about Logan. He’d stopped to chat to her on the bridge several times over the months. The day after her swim along the firth she came up to the bridge, and had done so every day since. It was company policy for bridge employees to engage in conversation with anyone lingering on the bridge. The staff had all done suicide prevention training as standard procedure.

So when she’d stopped at the place Logan had jumped from, in the middle of the bridge, it was only a few minutes until the little yellow van came out to see her. Not that five minutes was quick enough to save Logan, who was up and over the railing in thirty seconds. She didn’t blame the bridge staff, she didn’t blame Logan. She only ever blamed herself.

Since that day it had become a familiar routine. Go down to the waterfront, stare out to sea, look at the bridge, imagine it all, churn it around. Sometimes go for a swim, depending how dead she felt. Then head up to the bridge and chew it over again from up there. It probably hurt more than it helped but Ellie didn’t care, the methodical repetition of it gave her something to hold on to.

She turned away from Gerry’s sad smile before he could open the van window and speak to her. She didn’t feel like engaging with him today. She walked along the bridge approach. As always she was amazed by the roar of the traffic, the brazen exposure to the elements up here, the scale of this massive intrusion into nature.

She looked at the warning signs, like she did every day.

PERSONS UNDER 14 MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT

Logan was fifteen, so that wasn’t a problem. Had he wanted to do it for years, but waited to make sure he obeyed the law? Stupid, stupid.

IT IS AN OFFENCE TO THROW OBJECTS FROM THE BRIDGE

Did that include yourself? She knew now that suicide itself wasn’t a crime in Scotland, but if you fucked it up and lived you could get done for breach of the peace. Imagine the indignity of that, not only had you failed to die but you’d turned yourself into a criminal in the process.

Ellie stroked the smooth stone in her pocket, the second one she lifted from the Binks. She’d done this every day too, taken something from the shore, brought it up and dropped it over. She didn’t know why, just needed to do it. What were they going to do, arrest her?

WARNING

LOW RAILINGS WITH WIDE GAPS

YOUNG CHILDREN MUST BE CLOSELY SUPERVISED

AT ALL TIMES

How young was young? Had she supervised Logan closely enough? Every day as a parent you had to strike a balance between protection and independence. The first walk to school alone, the first sleepover, staying out after dark. That loss of control over your child was a terrifying slow death. At some point you have to let them grow up, that’s what they say about teenagers. But what if they choose not to grow up at all?

She turned away from the Samaritans sign and looked out. The tops of birch trees planted down below were at the same height as the road she was on, crows nesting in the branches, cawing loudly, protecting their young.

She stepped on to the bridge and felt the comforting vibrations under her feet. Something she hadn’t really thought about before Logan jumped. She’d been across the bridge plenty of times but never really paid attention. Now, since the jump, her senses were sharpened, every observation acute, every thought poignant or profound. Like those people who had near-death experiences and found a new joy in the mundane nature of life. Except in her case it was the opposite, it had taken the suicide of her son to make her more attuned to the presence of death everywhere.

She placed a hand on the railing and felt the throb of the traffic. When a lorry went past, the road beneath her shook and swayed. It was terrifying and exhilarating. It was a suspension bridge, and only once you were on it did you realise what that meant, that it was suspended from its giant supports, millions of tons of it kept in position by thin steel cables. It swayed in the wind, shook with the traffic. One day it would come crashing down into the water and all this engineering brilliance would be lost.

She strode towards the centre of the bridge. The camber was large, another surprise to her tuned senses the first time up here after Logan. She walked past the SOS Crisis phone for drivers, the first set of CCTV cameras, then the traffic warning signs. She looked out across the expanse of water. North Queensferry huddled into the hillside on the opposite bank, the rail bridge sturdy and implacable over Inch Garvie, then back the way she’d come, her and Ben’s home nestled at the water’s edge between the older flats by the harbour and the new developments closer to the marina.

She stopped and looked up at the cabling, felt dizzy. Closed her eyes and leaned back against the railing, let the tremors overtake her body. She sensed two lorries raging past, her body shaking in unison with them. It felt good to be connected.

She opened her eyes and kept walking towards the middle of the bridge.

As the camber levelled off, she saw a figure up ahead. A teenage boy or a young man, tall and thin, standing where she was heading for, the centre of the bridge. For a moment, a tiny gasp of time, she thought it was Logan.

She took a few more steps then realised the person wasn’t on this side of the railing. He was already over it, standing on the thin metal ledge beyond, holding on to the railing behind his back, looking down at the water.

3

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.’