The moon was fat and settled in the sky, but every so often, tangles of black traced across its surface, and I lost the figure in front of me. He was a sketch in the distance. A slight movement against the black. I tried to be sure of my feet, to trail my hand through the weeds and grass on my left, but all I could hear was the river, waiting for me to fall. And so I did what I’d always done when I was nervous, even as a child. I counted. I started by counting my breaths, but they were too fast, and I couldn’t find one from another, so I counted my steps instead. I tried to match them to Ronnie’s. Listening for his boots in the distance. The only problem was, I was so busy counting, I didn’t notice he’d slowed down, and before I knew it, he was so close, I could almost touch him. I could smell the beer and the leather of his boots, and the sound of his breathing seemed to fill my whole head. He was leaning forward, his hands on his legs, vomiting on to the riverbank.
When he’d finished, he stood and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. He was off guard. Disorientated. Light-headed perhaps. It was right at that moment, just as he lifted his head, that I pushed him. It’s strange, because there are some things you do in life, and they don’t seem to have any thought fastened to them at all. It was only at that moment, I decided to do it. I only followed Ronnie to give him a piece of my mind, to tell him exactly what I thought of him, but as I stood on the riverbank, it felt as though pushing him in was all I was ever meant to do. There are some moments in life that just seem to happen. The falling was slow at first, like a plate finding the edge of a table or a child beginning to walk. I could have reached out to him then, in the darkness. I could have stopped it, but there was an inevitability. A certainty. The feeling that this was all meant to happen, and to try to stop it would have been pointless. I whispered. I whispered to him, as he fell. ‘Don’t think I’m going to help you.’ And then I shouted it. I shouted it with all the breath I could find in my lungs.
‘Don’t think I’m going to help you!’
I heard him. I heard him cry out as he hit the water, and I heard the river open its arms. It was the silence, though, the silence after he’d disappeared that was the loudest. I waited in the space where he had stood only a moment before, and I listened. I stood there for a few minutes, being sure, and then I ran. I ran along the side of the water and back to the bridge, and however I managed it without falling in myself, I’ll never know. Luck. God. Destiny. All of the things we thank when we have nowhere else to put our gratitude. When I reached the road, I held on to the walls of the bridge, and wondered if I would ever be able to find my breath again. The town felt as if it had been waiting for me to return from wherever I had just been. I could even hear people in the distance. Laughter and goodbyes, and conversation. Someone from the dance, perhaps. Someone who hadn’t just stood on a riverbank and watched a man drown.
I could have found the voices. I could have shouted for help. I could have hammered on the first door I came to. I could have done any of these things, but I chose not to. I’ve spent the last sixty years trying to find the path I took to arrive at that choice, and I don’t suppose, lying here in the dark, I will ever find it now. But it has never stopped me from looking. It has never stopped me from remembering the person I thought I was, and trying to bring her back again.
FLORENCE
They didn’t say anything as I was telling the story. Jack just closed his eyes, as though he needed everything else to go away, so he could concentrate on the words.
‘I was so sure it was Ronnie,’ I said.
Jack reached out. His hand was knotted with age. ‘We all act in the heat of the moment,’ he said. ‘No one is blameless.’
‘I took someone’s life,’ I said. ‘I killed Gabriel Price.’
‘But you thought it was Ronnie.’ Elsie looked across at me.
‘It doesn’t make it any better, though, does it? That it wasn’t the life I meant to take?’
Jack still rested his hand on mine. ‘It could happen to any one of us, Florence, given a set of circumstances.’
‘But no one deserves to die, do they?’ I said.
‘Did you mean to kill him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course I didn’t. I just wanted to hurt him, like he’d hurt Elsie.’ I looked over at her. ‘Like he’d hurt all of us.’
‘Then there is your answer,’ he said.
‘You’ve got to find forgiveness, Florence,’ said Elsie. ‘You find it so easily for other people, why do you struggle so much to find it for yourself?’
‘But I should tell someone. I should tell the police. I’m a bad person. I’m flawed. Damaged.’
‘Of course you are.’
I looked at him.
‘We all are. Every one of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines.’
‘We do?’ I said.
‘Of course we do. However else would all the light get in?’
I could see Elsie smiling at us.
‘You can’t define yourself by a single moment.’ Jack held my hand very tightly. I could feel him shaking. ‘That moment doesn’t make you who you are.’
‘Then what does?’ I said.
‘Oh, Florence. Everything else,’ he said. ‘Everything else.’
MISS AMBROSE
Anthea Ambrose sat in the Japanese Garden, staring at her fingernails. They’d been much longer before her weekend in Whitby. Miss Ambrose had always imagined she’d have a job where there would be room for nice fingernails, where she would write with a fountain pen, instead of a crushed Biro. Where she would have an office made entirely of glass and chrome, and where she’d keep a spare pair of heels in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. The interview she’d missed was for a job like that. Perhaps she should call them. Perhaps they might have another vacancy right now.
‘Vacancy for what?’ said Jack.
She hadn’t realised Jack was standing right in front of her, and she hadn’t realised the words had come out.
‘A job,’ she said. ‘I missed an interview a few years ago, because of an incident here, and I was just thinking it might not be too late to try again.’
He sat on the bench next to her. ‘Do you want to try again? Perhaps you missed it for a reason.’
‘Do you really believe in all that fate nonsense?’
‘I believe in long seconds,’ he said. ‘Perhaps whoever stopped you from going to that interview was just helping you to write your story.’
Her confusion seemed to amuse him. ‘It’s something Florence believes in,’ he said. ‘A long second is when the clock hesitates, just for a moment. Just long enough to give you the extra time you need to make the right decision.’
‘Have you seen these long seconds?’ she said.
Jack sat back in the seat. His coat was worn at the sleeves and she could see a thread on one of the buttons. She must speak to Chris. Sort him out a new one. Old people didn’t always realise they needed these things. She’d done it. On a course.
‘There was a long second,’ he said. ‘During the war. I watched a soldier once, leaving the battlefield. Older man who’d reached the end of his tether. He turned and started walking, and he just didn’t stop.’
‘He was a deserter?’
‘There was a lot of it. More than people think. Men suffocated by fear. It’s hard to imagine terror like that, unless you’ve lived alongside it.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I followed. Ran until I caught up with him.’
‘Did you report him?’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I talked to him instead. He was terrified. The exhaustion and the lack of food, weather beating down on you. Killing everywhere. You couldn’t find a place to look where there wasn’t death in your eye-line. He missed his children. He called them his piano keyboard, although I’ve no idea why.’
‘What happened?’
‘I persuaded him to return. You wouldn’t think I’d have managed it, a young whipper-snapper like me, but eventually we both walked back together, and neither of us ever said another word about it.’
Miss Ambrose shook her head. ‘You were lucky to make it home,’ she said.
‘I nearly didn’t. There was one night …’
He hesitated and Miss Ambrose looked away to build him an escape route, but after a moment, he carried on.
‘… one night, we’d been under fire for hours. We didn’t think it would ever end. It was the noise, more than anything. There was no space. No silence. We thought we could just stay put. Sit it out. But then we had instructions to move.’
‘What happened?’
‘We had to do it, of course. No choice. But it was the landmines, the place was rife with them. Imagine walking across a field, not knowing if the next step you took would be your last, and all you can hear is the sound of your own breath and the shells rattling down on you. We were almost at the other side, nearly made it, when the chap to my left pushed me to one side. He must have seen it coming.’