Into the Water(33)

Sean saw his father climbing into the car and screamed for his mother. Patrick turned, yelling at his son to go back into the house. He ran towards him, grabbing him roughly by the arm and yanking him off his feet, and tried to force him back into the house. But the boy begged, ‘Please, please, don’t leave me here.’

Patrick relented. He gathered the boy up and carried him to the car, securing him in the back seat, where Sean cowered, terrified and uncomprehending. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. They drove to the river. His father parked the car up on the bridge and said to him, ‘Wait. Wait here.’ But it was dark and the rain on the roof of the car sounded like bullets and Sean couldn’t escape the feeling that there was someone else in the car with him, he could hear their ragged breathing. So he got out and ran, tripping down the stone steps and falling in the mud on the path, blundering in the darkness and the rain towards the pool.

There was a story, later, at school, that he saw it – he was the boy who watched his mother jump to her death. It wasn’t true. He didn’t see anything. When he got to the pool, his father was already in the water, swimming out. He didn’t know what to do, so he went back and sat under the trees, his back to a stout trunk so that no one could sneak up on him.

It seemed as though he was there for a very long time. Thinking back, he wondered if he might even have fallen asleep, although with the darkness and the noise and the fear, that didn’t seem terribly likely. What he could remember was a woman coming – Jeannie, from the police station. She had a blanket and a torch and she took him back up to the bridge and gave him sweet tea to drink, and they waited there for his father.

Later, Jeannie drove him to her house and made him cheese on toast.

But there was no way Lauren could have known any of that.





Erin


LEAVING THE FUNERAL, I noticed how many people who had attended the service made their way over to say a few words to Sean Townsend’s father, a man I had been introduced to, incredibly briefly, as Patrick Townsend. There was much shaking of hands and doffing of caps, and all the while he stood there like a major general on parade, back straight and lip stiff.

‘Miserable bugger, isn’t he?’ I said to the uniform standing next to me. The PC turned and looked at me like I had just crawled out from under a rock.

‘Show some respect,’ he hissed, and turned his back on me.

‘Excuse me?’ I said, talking to the scruff of his neck.

‘He’s a highly decorated officer,’ the PC said. ‘And a widower. His wife died here, in this river.’ He turned again to face me and without a hint of deference to my position he sniffed, ‘So you ought to show some respect.’

I felt like a fucking idiot. But really, how was I supposed to know that the Sean in Nel Abbott’s story was the Sean in the police station? I didn’t know his parents’ names. Fuck’s sake. Nobody told me, and when I read through Nel Abbott’s work it wasn’t like I was paying that much attention to the details of a suicide that took place more than three decades ago. It didn’t seem overly pressing, under the circumstances.

Seriously: how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It’s like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head.

I drove back to the city after work – some of the others were going to the pub, but thanks to the Patrick Townsend faux pas I was wearing my outsider status a little more heavily than before. In any event, this case is over, isn’t it? No point hanging around.

I felt relieved, the way you do when you finally figure out what movie you’ve seen an actor in before, when something hazy that’s been bothering you suddenly snaps into focus. The DI’s strangeness – the watery eyes, the shaky hands, his disconnectedness – it all makes sense now. It makes sense if you know his history. His family has suffered almost exactly what Jules and Lena are suffering now – the same horror, the same shock. The same wondering why.

I reread Nel Abbott’s section on Lauren Townsend. It doesn’t tell much of a story. She was an unhappy wife, in love with another man. It talks of her distraction, her absence – maybe she was depressed? In the end, who knows? It’s not like this stuff is gospel, it’s just Nel Abbott’s version of history. It must take a strange sense of entitlement, I would have thought, to take someone else’s tragedy like that and write it as though it belonged to you.

Rereading it, the thing I don’t understand is how Sean could have stayed here. Even if he didn’t see her fall, he was there. What the fuck does that do to you? Still. He would have been small, I suppose. Six or seven? Kids can block it out, trauma like that. But the father? He walks by the river every day, I’ve seen him. Imagine that. Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day. I can’t credit it, couldn’t do it. But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?





PART TWO





TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST





Louise


LOUISE’S GRIEF WAS like the river: constant and ever-changing. It rippled, flooded, ebbed and flowed, some days cold and dark and deep, some days swift and blinding. Her guilt was liquid, too, it seeped through cracks when she tried to dam it out. She had good days and bad.