I Found You (28 page)

The small figure on the beach called something out to them that got snatched away by the sea.

‘Dad!’ screamed Kirsty.

They both moved even faster now, and faster still as the figure on the beach headed towards them.

They were almost at the edge of the rocks when the figure clambered up and the light from his torch blinded them momentarily. At the familiar shape of his father behind the torch, Gray felt his heart slow down.

But Tony looked angry. ‘You two,’ he yelled, ‘Jesus Christ. You two. I’ve been . . .’ And then his gaze moved over them, taking in Kirsty’s bloodstained, sliced-open T-shirt, her expression of sheer terror and then he looked behind them and saw Mark appear and he roared, ‘
What have you done
?
What have you done?
’

Mark froze. He was about ten feet away. Everything stopped completely for a moment; even the sea fell silent below as the next wave slowly built up its bulk. Then suddenly Mark ran towards Kirsty, ran right at her, hooked his arm around her waist and before Gray or Tony had a chance to move, he had jumped with her into the wildly frothing surf, into the rocks and the darkness and the swirl of the sea.

‘No!’ screamed his dad.

‘Kirsty! Shit!’

And then they were both in the sea. The shock of it, the ice water against his sore body, the roar of the water closing over his head. Gray flailed around for something to hold on to. He heard his father’s voice close by and headed towards it. He was beckoning Gray. Gray followed him, using his legs to push himself along, his bad arm held close into his body. His father pointed east. Gray saw two small shapes, moving across the bay. Mark was swimming fast, taking Kirsty with him. ‘Come on!’ shouted his father.

‘My wrist is broken!’ he screamed out into the chaos. ‘I can’t swim!’

His dad was silent for a moment. ‘Get out!’ he roared. ‘Get out now!’

Gray stared helplessly at the shapes of Mark and Kirsty getting smaller and smaller. Then he watched his father begin a breakneck front crawl away from him, shrinking and shrinking until he could barely see him. He let the next wave deposit him against the rocks and crawled painfully, pitifully back on to a solid shelf where he lay on his back for a moment, unable to move. His heart hammered and jumped in his chest. His wrist throbbed and ached. He sat up and saw nothing. The distant figures had disappeared completely. He pulled himself painfully to his feet and scrambled awkwardly across the rocks until finally his feet found the solid floor of the beach and
he began to run. The beach was empty. From high up above he could hear the thud of music drifting down from the town. He heard high-pitched female laughter and a car screeching away. He turned and saw the lights of Kitty’s house behind him. But out at sea there was nothing.

‘Help!’ he screamed into the night air. ‘Help me!’

He ran and ran, shouting hopelessly as he went. Then suddenly he saw a shape crawling out of the surf. The shape landed heavily on the beach and lay for a moment, before pulling itself up. Gray picked up his pace and fell breathlessly on his knees by the side of his father.

‘Dad!’ he cried. ‘Where’s Kirsty? Dad!’

His dad said nothing. He rolled on to his side and brought his knees up to his chest. Then he rolled on to his back again and clutched his heart with his hands, kneading it. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he gasped. ‘Jesus Christ!’

Gray looked towards the sea. Large waves rolled in like unfurling carpets, spreading themselves as sparkling foam at his feet. The surface glittered and wriggled. An ocean liner sat on the horizon; a plane passed silently overhead. He stared desperately into the shifting shapes of the sea, aching for a sign of Kirsty.

‘Dad! Get up! Dad! Where is she? Where’s Kirsty?’

But his father was still clutching at his chest and now, Gray could see, his breathing was becoming more rather than less laboured. ‘Dad! Get up!’

He looked out to sea again, at the black nothingness, and then back at his father.

‘I . . . I can’t . . . breathe,’ his father panted. ‘My . . . heart.’

‘Oh Jesus.’ Gray pulled his hair back from his face and stamped at the sand. ‘Oh Jesus. Dad. Oh . . . fuck.’ He looked behind again at the tops of the buildings in town, scanning the promenade for people. He saw a couple, walking a dog, their arms hooped around each other. ‘Help!’ he screamed out. ‘Oh, fuck,
help me
!’ He knew even as he called out that it was hopeless, that they couldn’t hear him. The couple kept walking, oblivious to the scene on the beach. Gray sank to his feet and pulled his father into what seemed something like the recovery position he’d learned about in the Boy Scouts. But there was so little he could do with one hand. He pulled his father’s hands from his chest and started pounding at his heart with his left hand, counting the intervals under his breath. But it was pointless. CPR didn’t work with one hand. He turned and screamed again at the retreating backs of the couple on the prom. And then he began to cry. ‘Dad,’ he wailed, ‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it! Oh,
shit
. Dad, what shall I do? What shall I do?’

His father’s body was rigid and his hands had come back to his heart, which he scratched at as though he was trying to dig down under the very bone and pull it out. Gray jumped up and looked out to sea again.
Nothing. Then he turned, yet again, to look up at the prom. More people were walking by, late-night drinkers, arranged in groups, singing and shouting. ‘Help!’ he screamed. ‘Help us!’

His father had begun to wheeze now, pulling hard at the collar of his wet polo shirt.

He was dying, Gray suddenly knew. His father was dying and his sister had disappeared into the North Sea with a psychopath. And he couldn’t do anything, not one single thing about any of it.

He pulled his father’s head on to his lap and he caressed his forehead and he kissed his cheeks and he cradled him to his stomach and he looked out to the sea and up into the black, star-filled sky and behind him towards the oblivious town and he felt the life pouring out of his father, pouring so fast that he felt sick with it. ‘Oh no,’ he sobbed, ‘oh no, oh no, oh no. No, Dad. Not my dad. Not my dad. No, Dad. No. Please, Dad. Please. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’

And then a few seconds later he knew it was over. No time for last words of love or reassurance. No time for anything other than to catch the last few rasping breaths of the man who’d brought him up, to suck them in and hold on to them, like droplets of precious essence. Gray dropped his head on to his father’s chest and sobbed into his cold wet polo shirt. ‘Not my dad,’ he sobbed, ‘not my dad.’

He raised his head to the sky and he wailed at the moon.

Behind him the sea rolled in, the sea rolled out, waves fizzed upon the sand, but the dark water beyond remained empty.

‘He drowned?’ Lily asks the man called Frank. ‘Mark? He drowned?’

‘Yes,’ says Frank.

‘And this is him?’ Lily raps the pictures in the album with her manicured fingernails, impatiently. ‘This is the man you call Mark?’

Frank nods. But he doesn’t look convinced.

‘Well,’ says Lily, trying hard to keep the frustration from her tone, ‘this makes no sense. This cannot be Carl because I am married to Carl and he isn’t drowned!’

‘I think . . .’ The Frank man looks as though he is thinking about too many things, much too slowly. ‘I think I saw him. I saw him.’

‘Saw who?’ The Alice woman asks this. Lily looks at her through narrowed eyes, evaluating her. She has
something about her, something vital and proud. She makes Lily feel insecure in some way and that makes Lily feel like a cat with a dog, that she needs to show her that she is more vital and more proud.

‘Mark. Carl. This man.’ He waves vaguely at the wedding album. ‘I saw him. When I was with schoolchildren. I was with schoolchildren and he was there and I . . . I dropped my coffee. And it was him. He wasn’t dead.’

His face has lost even more colour and Alice touches him, touches him so softly that Lily thinks she must be in love with him.

‘When?’ Lily cuts in. ‘When did you see him?’

‘I don’t know.’ His hands are shaking. ‘It was recent, I think. I was wearing a shirt.’ His fingers feel the collar of his T-shirt. ‘And a jacket.’ He mimes rubbing a lapel. ‘I had a coffee. I was in the city. And he was there . . .’

Lily wants to slap him. Why is he being so vague? ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Please. I don’t want to know any more about coffee. Tell me what happened. How can my husband be one minute drowned in the sea and then the next alive in front of you?’

‘Maybe he has an identical twin,’ says the red-headed woman.

Lily is about to sigh but then stops. This might be something worth thinking about. That would mean Carl was not this murderous, awful-sounding man from twenty-odd years ago.

They all turn to look at Frank as though he might have an answer for them. But he is just sitting there looking pale and clammy.

‘Look,’ he says after a moment. ‘I understand how much you want to know what happened to your husband, but I’m just . . . I wish I could explain. It’s like I’m watching two movies concurrently. On a delay. So I’m unfurling it all in my head. Scene by scene. And some bits are blending together. And some bits are coming in the wrong order. And all of it feels too loud and too bright. I just . . .’

‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ says Alice, ‘get some air, maybe?’

‘No!’ cries Lily. ‘No. Please. No. Now – I need to know it now.’

The woman with the red hair has been distracted by the sound of her phone ringing. She grimaces at the number on the screen and says, ‘Who the hell is that?’

She looks as though she is not going to take the call but then she sighs, presses the screen and says, ‘Yes?’

Her phone conversation is clearly very interesting and she cups her hand over the phone a minute later and says, ‘It’s the journalist. From the
Ridinghouse Gazette
. The one who wrote the original article. The editor passed my number on to her. She’s really keen to meet up. Shall I tell her to come here?’

Alice and Frank look at each other and nod.

‘What journalist?’ says Lily.

The red-haired woman shushes her, rudely, and resumes her conversation. The journalist is coming here in half an hour apparently.

‘Who?’ says Lily. ‘Who is this woman?’

‘Her name is Lesley Wade. She wrote a story about Frank’s dad dying back in 1993. She says she knows more about the story, about what happened afterwards.’

Lily nods. Good, she thinks, a person with facts rather than a confused person making it up as he goes along. Why is this man, Frank, not in hospital?

Alice turns to Frank, caresses his hand and says, ‘What happened to Kirsty? Did she . . .?’

Frank’s eyes are shiny with tears. ‘I can’t see her coming out of the sea,’ he says, looking at her desperately. ‘I looked for her. But she didn’t come out of the sea. Kirsty isn’t there.’

Two Weeks Earlier

Travelling into London with eight fourteen-year-olds was a little like being a circus master. Gray could only assume that these children went on trains in their out-of-school lives, that they walked on pavements and past members of the public, that they saw advertising hoardings depicting scantily clad human beings, but in the context of a school trip it was as though they’d all just been released from a sensory-deprivation capsule. They touched things, they swung from poles, they shouted – oh, how they shouted. And these were his brightest students, the top stream, virtual genii in a couple of cases, on their way to the semi-finals of an inter-school maths competition being held at a university.

It was a windy, heavy-skied day, on the brink of rain. He had the remains of a hangover and longed to grab a coffee from one of the dozens of coffee shops they’d passed since they got off the train at Victoria. But he was chained to these children; he couldn’t afford to take his eye off them for a moment. Finally they approached the hall where the competition was being hosted. The grandeur of the place – towering domed ceiling glazed with stained glass, half-ton chandeliers, marble statues and burnished mahogany panelling – seemed to still the children as they entered. Gray registered them while they stood, quiet and awed. Then he herded them into their allocated section of a room filled with the territorial bristle and edge of children from different schools forced into close proximity. He set them all up with cups of water and practice papers and headed back to the registration desk. ‘Is it OK if I pop out for a minute or two, to grab a coffee?’

‘Is everyone in your group registered?’

‘Yes, they’re in the prep room.’

The registrar nodded and Gray fled.

The wind was wild now, sending sheets of newspaper and city dust into the air. He pulled his coat hard around him and headed in the direction of a Costa he’d seen on the way in. He ordered an extra-strong Americano and a chocolate muffin and it was as he left the shop and turned back towards the university building that he saw him.

His peripheral vision faded away into interference and his heart filled up with too much blood. The stale alcohol that he’d been trying to hold down all morning rose up his gullet and for a moment Gray thought he might be sick. He stood on the spot, his coffee in one hand, the muffin in the other, and he watched the man moving along the pavement opposite. He was still very slim, in a pink shirt with a striped tie and tight-fitting suit trousers. He looked cold and windswept, in need of a jacket or a coat. His hair was longer now – he’d kept it very short back then – and it was being blown out of shape. He seemed preoccupied by this and kept trying to pin it back with his fingers, only for it to be blown asunder again. Gray knew it was him by the angle of his jaw, the sharpness of his nose. He’d been a handsome boy and now he was a handsome man. A stranger passing him in the street might well think he was younger than his years, but Gray knew exactly how old he was. The last time he’d seen him he’d been a cocky, snake-hipped nineteen-year-old. Now he must have been pushing forty-one.