He Said/She Said(71)

I didn’t need to name her.

Kit blanched even further. ‘Why would she do that? That would be mad.’



That night, when Kit was asleep, I went on his laptop and read every word of jamiebalcomeisinnocent.co.uk. with a mounting sense of discomfort. In the last twenty-four hours Beth had shown herself to be duplicitous and vicious, and my previous certainty had been cut adrift. I read Antonia’s statement over and over again and Fiona Price’s bullseye rang in my ears. ‘You got carried away with the drama, didn’t you?’ What if I had not got carried away with Beth’s drama, but she with mine? Had Beth gone mad because Jamie raped her? Or had she said he raped her – or gone along with my assertion that he’d done it – because she was already mad?

Until that day I’d been thinking about the campaign in binary terms: either Jamie was in denial, or he was calling the world’s bluff. But now a third possibility was inescapable, and one in which I was horrifically culpable. What if Jamie was innocent?





Chapter 37





KIT

20 March 2015

Rain cover off. Rain cover on. Lens filter off. Lens filter on. Battery removed, checked and reinserted. Strap adjusted.

‘Would you stop fucking fiddling with your camera,’ says Richard.

‘Sorry.’ I set my hands back in my lap and resist the urge to drum my fingers on the window of the bus.

‘Sorry mate, I didn’t mean to snap,’ says Richard. ‘It’s just, you know.’ He gestures out of the window. The atmosphere in the bus as it wheezes up Húsareyn resembles the sky outside: dark and rumbling. The clouds are fast-moving but thick. Sheep dot the fields; here and there, black rocks jut through the tufty grass and heather. There’s a flash of colour on the horizon; three pink coaches, beetling up the neighbouring mountain. Instinctively I throw my hood up.

As we park at a tilt on a stony verge, I wonder what it’s like in London. It would be ironic if Laura gets a clear view of the partial while I’m stuck clouded out of totality.

We settle on the hillside, the toytown harbour spread below. It is relative wilderness here. There is enough space for all the parties to spread out. Rather than the huge crowd I’d feared, we are in clusters. Of the few lone figures yomping out across the uneven ground, none of them is her. I’m sure that even after all this time I’d be able to recognise her, even if only by the roll in her walk, the curve of her, so different to Laura.

I set up my camera tripod and fiddle with the settings, squatting to squint through the viewfinder.

‘I’m surprised you can see anything out of that hood,’ says Richard.

He’s right, it is obscuring my vision. But I’m not taking any chances.

Ten minutes before first contact, the sun peeps out from behind a lacework of clouds and then, as if startled by our cheering, retreats. 8.29, first contact, and it still hides. I keep my Mylar glasses on, but it’s only a gesture to potential. As the moon chews its way through the sun, only occasional glimpses of the shapes in the sky are available, and as totality approaches, the clouds thicken until the sun’s position above is hardly discernible.

My eyes keep travelling to a loose rock at my feet, sized halfway between a fist and a human head, and I think: this will do. If she looms from nowhere, this will do me just fine. I’m horrified at my own thought process. This is not me, I tell myself, this is not me; and then, she’s not here. She’s not here.

‘Who’s not here?’ says Richard. I didn’t realise I’d spoken out loud.

‘Is that a break in the cloud?’ I deflect, looking up at the impenetrable sky.

Disappointment momentarily crowds out thoughts of Beth, and it’s almost a pleasure to feel a different negative emotion. I decide instead to try to observe the other phenomena that come with the eclipse, the things you miss when you’re transfixed by the sun itself. I’ve always been so busy looking up that I’ve never observed the flowers closing, for example. But there’s nothing underfoot but rocks, scrubby vegetation and sheep shit.

Then the darkness comes. Without the countdown in the sky, it’s pure and instant. All the street lights in the town below come on, so quickly it’s like sparks igniting. Now, in the darkness, disappointment is replaced by the familiar thrill of totality. But this time it’s different. Suddenly, unexpectedly, fear pours down through the hole in the sky and I am overwhelmed with a little child’s terror of the night, only my monster is what Beth represents; she embodies all that I stand to lose. The air all around seems thick and sound muffled; at one point, I sense something behind me, and whip around from the camera, but there’s nothing there.

I keep the lens trained on the sky in the increasingly vain hope that something might happen, but I can’t focus on the clouds, only on the darkness around me and behind me. The mountainside holds its breath.

Maybe ten seconds after third contact, we see a crescent sun, but I can only release the shutter a handful of times before the clouds return. Then the black water in the bay is silver again, and it’s over. The post-eclipse world is flat and ordinary. There is no Beth, and even if there were, I’m not powerless against her. I see that now. The fears of a few seconds ago seem unfounded, as nightmares always do when the light comes back on.





Chapter 38