The Jump (8 page)

Ellie was back on the bypass when her phone pinged with a text. She was in the outside lane passing an IKEA lorry as she lifted the phone from the passenger seat and looked at it. Sam. She unlocked the phone and read it.

Her stomach fluttered as she glanced up. A Toyota in front of her braked sharply and Ellie did likewise, pushing her foot hard on the pedal. The seat belt cut into her chest as she was pushed forward by her own momentum. She was only a couple of feet from the car in front, her right leg straight, stamping on the brake, when the Toyota’s brake lights went off and it pulled away. The IKEA lorry hammered alongside her, then it edged ahead, its lane clear.

She pulled into the slow lane behind the lorry and set a steady pace fifty feet behind. She still had her phone in her left hand. She texted with her thumb, looking up to the road then back at the screen.

She pressed send. The IKEA lorry turned off at Straiton and she pushed forward into the gap. She still had the phone in her hand when it rang. She looked at the screen – Ben. She breathed a couple of times then pressed answer.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hey, where are you? You were gone when I woke up.’

‘Just out and about,’ Ellie said.

She’d caught up with a Tesco van in front. Kept her distance, but then two cars slid in between them from the slip road. She eased off the accelerator.

‘Sounds mysterious,’ Ben said.

‘Just shopping,’ Ellie said.

‘Are you driving?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll keep it quick then. I’m going out in the boat, wondered if you wanted to come, I could use an able seawoman.’

Ellie noticed her speed had gone up and took her foot off the pedal. Her right hand was tight on the steering wheel, her left gripping the phone. Her ear was warm with the phone pressed against it.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ she said, her voice level.

‘I checked the weather reports,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t know what you were on about last night, conditions are perfect.’

‘Must’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘So you want to come out? Clear our heads?’

Ellie had to brake as another truck came in from the next slip road. ‘OK, when I get back.’

‘How long are you going to be?’ Ben said. ‘Don’t want to hit the turning tide.’

‘An hour, maybe.’

‘That long? What are you shopping for?’

‘Bits and bobs.’

‘Fine,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll go down to the Porpoise, get her ready for action.’

A string of brake lights up ahead, Ellie too close to the car in front, had to brake hard.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

Doubt in his voice.

‘Just wait for me at the house, yeah? I want to go over to the marina with you.’

‘But I could be getting her shipshape.’

‘Just please wait for me at home. Promise.’

Silence for a second. The cars in front were speeding up again. This traffic was shit, same as always on the bypass.

‘What’s going on, Ellie?’ Ben said.

Ellie’s ear burned. Her hands were sweaty and the tremor in her stomach was spreading to her chest. She imagined pushing the accelerator to the floor and crunching into the car in front.

‘Just please promise,’ she said.

Maybe he heard something in her voice, a desperation.

‘I promise,’ he said.

‘Thanks, I’ll be home soon.’

‘Take it easy,’ Ben said.

She hung up and threw the phone on the seat. She indicated and slipped into the fast lane.

Port Edgar was busier than earlier, old men tinkering, some more-serious crews busying themselves on the decks of the bigger racers. She scurried along the pontoon, nodding at the folk she knew, and clambered on to the Porpoise, then down below.

Sam was sitting at the table in the middle of the room, checking his phone and sniffling, wiping his nose with his sleeve.

Ellie was halfway across the room, arms wide, about to hug him when he looked up and shrank away from her. Of course, too intimate, stupid thing to do. This boy wasn’t hers, she had to get a grip. She changed her body shape at the last second, dropping an arm and rubbing his shoulder, a gesture of reassurance.

She sat down next to him, their legs touching on the narrow bench. Sam was still wearing Logan’s clothes. Couldn’t he have picked up some of his own stuff when he was at the house seeing Libby? Maybe he didn’t get the chance.

‘How are you?’ Ellie said.

He put his phone down and shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

He began sniffing again, tears in his eyes. Ellie put a hand on his thigh.

‘I’ll take care of everything,’ she said.

‘How?’ Sam had a confrontational look on his face. ‘You said that yesterday, and I believed you, but this isn’t yesterday any more. How can you fix things?’

This was too soon for Ellie, she didn’t have an answer.

‘I wish you hadn’t found me yesterday,’ Sam said. ‘I wish I’d jumped.’

Ellie moved her hand to his cheek and turned his face toward her.

‘Don’t ever fucking say that again.’

That shocked him. As if women in their forties weren’t supposed to swear, weren’t allowed to care deeply about things, care so much they would do anything to make everything right.

‘I went to see your dad in hospital,’ she said.

He stared at her. ‘Why?’

‘I was looking for you.’

‘I went there but I didn’t go in. I couldn’t. How is he?’

‘He’s going to live.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

Ellie nodded. ‘I told him to leave you and Libby alone.’

Sam shook his head. ‘It won’t make any difference.’

‘I think it will.’

‘You don’t know him,’ Sam said. ‘He won’t be scared of you.’

‘He should be.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

Ellie looked round the cabin then got up, walked to the doorway. ‘We can’t stay here, it’s not safe.’

Sam followed her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘My husband is coming, he wants to go out in the boat. We have to move you.’

‘Where to?’

‘I know somewhere.’

Ellie pulled open a drawer and yanked out a baseball cap. Black, no logo, not memorable. She handed it to him. ‘Put this on.’ She went to the forward cabin and folded up the bed sheets and covers, pulled a kitbag from underneath the bed and stuffed the lot inside. Pulled the cord tight and slung it over her shoulder.

‘Come on.’ She walked past him and put her foot on the first step of the ladder.

Sam put the cap on and followed her above deck.

Ellie stood surveying the scene. Most of the berths were occupied, half a dozen boats with people working on deck between them and the quayside. She looked out to sea, had a faint shudder as she took in the road bridge. The sound of the traffic was soothing from this distance, a soft murmur.

She turned to Sam and pulled his cap down, hiding his face as much as possible.

‘Walk next to me and don’t talk to anyone.’

She jumped off deck on to the pontoon and held a side rail till Sam had done the same, then they walked at a clip along the rocking pontoon. Ellie nodded at anyone who acknowledged her, tried to keep her eyes facing front. No point trying to make a story up, no need to stop and explain, that would just get them in deeper water.

She breathed easier when they were up the stairs and on to the pier. She put a hand on Sam’s elbow and hurried him as they walked away from the main boat sheds, past a handful of old keelboats on raised platforms, and up towards an abandoned warehouse. Its brick walls were crumbling. The corrugated iron roof was red with rust, thin patches where the metal had almost been eaten away.

Ellie glanced over her shoulder then walked to the back of the building, where the glass of the windows had been put in. She picked up a stick and pushed out the remaining shards in one window frame, then threw the kitbag through and clambered inside, Sam following.

Ellie knew this place. She’d come exploring here with Logan one time. Nothing much to see, lots of pigeon shit and rotten stonework, but it was dry inside. Ellie dumped the kitbag in a corner then turned to Sam, who’d taken his cap off and was looking around.

‘It’s only for a few hours,’ Ellie said.

Sam nodded, scuffed his shoe in the dust.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ Ellie said, then she left through the same window.

She prayed no one said anything. She was walking back along the pontoon towards the Porpoise, this time with Ben at her side, only half an hour after she’d been going the other way with Sam.

Ellie had placed herself at the side where more people were on deck, so she could ward them off, prevent Ben from stopping and chatting. She nodded and waved and turned away each time, Ben giving her a funny look.

‘Are you OK?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

He looked at the sky then out to the Forth. ‘Perfect day for it.’

They climbed on board. Ben began sorting through the rigging, checking ropes and sails.

Ellie went straight below and had a quick check to see if there was any sign that Sam had been here. She couldn’t see anything.

She poked her head back up from the cabin. Ben was loosening off the boom ties, inspecting the main sail, going through the checklist, assessing the electrics and GPS. Beyond him, Ellie could see the warehouse where she’d left Sam. She’d driven straight home, met Ben in the kitchen in front of the laptop. He’d asked about her shopping, she said she was trying on clothes, couldn’t find the right sizes. It wasn’t like her, she wasn’t a fussy shopper, or much of a shopper at all, but he accepted it.

Ben wanted to head out to the new bridge foundations. This stupid idea that they were using some chemical in the building process that somehow caused depression, hallucinations and suicide. She had a quick look at his evidence, making air quotes in her mind around that word. It was garbage. He’d gone on about the technical stuff of building, using engineering and construction lingo like caissons, piles and cofferdams, and she hadn’t really followed, especially when he got on to the dubious chemistry of the theory.

But she was here now and going out sailing with him, partly to show him how ridiculous he was being. She pointed out that if they went to the new foundations and came back without suffering hallucinations or feeling suicidal, that would surely be proof he was talking rubbish. Well, not feeling any more suicidal than usual. But he would find a way round that, reasoned argument didn’t hold sway, it always came down to ‘that’s what they want you to think’.

Ellie wondered about hallucinations. What if she was hallucinating this whole thing? What if there was no boy on the bridge, no body in the kitchen at Inchcolm Terrace, no little sister and drunk mother? Maybe the grief had finally got to her.

She went to the bin and opened it. The evidence of Sam’s presence, a Wispa wrapper and a banana skin.

He was real. This was real.

Ben poked his head in as she closed the bin lid.

‘Ready to cast off?’ he said.

‘Sure.’

Up on deck, he pointed to the stern. ‘Want to take the tiller, steer us out?’

He yanked the starter cord on the outboard and it rattled and thrummed. Ellie unlocked the tiller and throttled a little in reverse, just to get a feel for the power under her hand. Ben scurried portside and began unhooking the mooring lines, wrapping them round the cleats, keeping everything in place. He jumped on to the pontoon and untied the final rope, threw it on to the boat and scuttled back on deck, pushing away from the edge as he did so.

The bow moved to starboard and Ellie corrected for it. The boat alongside theirs was an expensive SEPA motorboat, it wouldn’t do to leave a dent in their hull.

The boat edged away from the berth into the shallow water behind. When it was clear of the pontoon Ellie switched to dead slow forward and headed towards the breakwater.

They picked up speed and headed past the low wall at the entrance to the harbour. Ben ducked into a storage box and pulled out two life jackets. He strapped one on and threw the other to Ellie. She caught it and put it on. It was standard practice to wear a life jacket, compulsory for sailing school and some races, but she didn’t know how much use it would be. She could swim better without it. When she was fit she could swim back to shore in calm weather long before a coastguard boat would make it out to rescue them if the Porpoise capsized.

Not that there would be any capsizing today, conditions were calm.

Ben undid the final hooks on the boom.

‘Coming round,’ he shouted.

Ellie was nowhere near the arm, standing at the stern, but it was good practice to shout it out. If it came round and someone was standing in the middle of the deck they’d be over the side of the boat with concussion before anyone knew what’d happened. She’d seen it once before, not on the Porpoise, but a racing boat she and Ben had crewed years ago. Some novice with a sickly pallour stood up at the wrong time as half a ton of plastic and metal came swinging, the full sail whipping the arm as the boat changed tack. He took the brunt of it on his shoulders rather than his skull, which was just as well. They fished him out the water after barely a minute, but had to return to dry land because of a broken collarbone. The rest of the crew were furious at missing a day’s racing, and the kid never appeared on the boat again.

The water today was royal blue. The colour of the sky always made a big difference, the sea mirroring what was above. On a dreich day the water was a mucky grey-brown, but today it was clearer.

The main sail was unfurled now and they tacked into the breeze. Ellie cut the engine. They would sail for a bit out to the bridge foundations, then pull the sail in once they were there, easier to control the boat that way.

Ben looked at the cofferdam around the nearest of the new bridge legs. There were three foundations stretching across the firth, one near each shore and a third one splitting the gap between them in the middle of the Forth. They’d had to remove a historic lighthouse from Beamer Rock in the middle of the waterway so they could build the foundation there. For almost two hundred years it had marked the way to Rosyth and upriver, and they’d carefully taken it down then blown the rock up to make way for twenty-first-century engineering.

As they got closer to the foundation Ellie felt the presence of it. In today’s world everything seemed smaller, more contained, lives played out in front of computer screens, the scale of everything diminishing. But this was gargantuan, human endeavour writ large, millions of tons of material shaped into an object that would be seen for miles, seen from airplanes, that would serve an actual, physical purpose. It made Ellie feel connected to the world, this harnessing of nature, even though nature could never really be harnessed, you just had to look at the billions of gallons of water under their hull to know that.

They sailed on for a while, Ellie staring at the cofferdam and the two crane-barges alongside. They passed the yellow navigation buoys that had appeared recently, a thin attempt to keep unwelcome visitors at bay. As they got closer the size of the thing became overwhelming, even though it was hardly even out the water yet. Ellie tried to imagine what it would be like when the bridge was finished.

She’d had a few close encounters with large ships in the past, but never right alongside. The girth of the oil tankers downriver was staggering. They filled up at the terminal on the other side of the rail bridge, and she and Ben had come within a hundred feet once or twice, close enough to know they would crush you in a second and not even notice.

She felt a throbbing through her body. She turned. Ben had pressed ignition and was locking the boom arm, furling the sail up.

She unlocked the tiller and aimed for the bridge leg, the propeller churning the wash at the stern. She looked back to shore but the old warehouse was tiny now, just a red dot in the distance, almost hidden against a backdrop of trees. It was amazing how little time it took on the water before you got that perspective, the insignificance of everything on shore. That was one of the things she loved about sailing, leaving the land and all the problems waiting there.

Ben had his phone out and was taking pictures with the zoom fully extended. The pictures would be fuzzy, what was he hoping to gain from this? Someone else to blame for Logan’s death? There was no one else to blame, and this was the worst of his excuses. Even the phone mast was better than this, and the school vaccinations or drug taking were far more likely.

Ben brought a gizmo out his pocket and held it up. A small red light flashed on the front as he looked at the digital display.

‘What’s that?’ Ellie shouted over the thrash of waves.

Ben waited a moment, taking a reading of some kind, then turned.

‘Measures air purity, amongst other things.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘There are websites.’

There are websites for everything, Ellie thought. That wasn’t the answer. None of this was the answer. She looked at the bridge leg. The cofferdam was fifty feet above sea level, the colour of rust. It was made of thick corrugated metal with a walkway round the top, a platform hanging over the side nearest them with four orange generators on it. Half a dozen men in hard hats and hi-vis jackets milled about on the walkway, and as the Porpoise got closer they all turned to watch.

Ellie waved to distract them from Ben taking pictures and holding the gizmo in the air. She was used to this, making excuses for her crazy husband. She knew what the guys on the cofferdam thought, wondering who this lunatic was, bringing his wife out to look at some anonymous piece of engineering. A nice, romantic day out.

A speedboat emerged from behind one of the barge-cranes and headed their way. The Porpoise was fifty yards from the cofferdam when Ellie cut the power, and the other boat continued straight for them. In the speedboat were two chunky guys in black waterproofs – bridge security. Ellie had seen them in Karinka’s before, private company logos on their jackets, crew-cut hair, chowing down on full Scottish breakfasts. Rumour had it they were ex-army and mercenaries, but they didn’t look like trained killers.

The guy at the bow of the speedboat had a loudhailer and was telling them not to get any closer.

‘No problem,’ Ellie shouted back, as Ben continued taking pictures. Was there a law against that? If so, what could the security guys do about it? If they really gave a shit they could follow them back to harbour and try to confiscate the phone, but by then Ben could’ve emailed the pictures to himself or posted them online.

‘Go round,’ Ben said, turning to her.

‘What?’

‘I want to see the other side.’

‘I’m sure it’s just the same as this side,’ Ellie said.

She started the engine and guided them round the south side, feeling the stares of the security guys as she steered. The guys in hard hats turned away and began chatting amongst themselves as the Porpoise did a slow circumnavigation. There was a big enough gap between the cofferdam and the barge for the Porpoise to slip through. Ellie looked at the crane above their heads and felt dizzy. It was lifting a grey concrete pipe across to the bridgeworks.

Ellie imagined the bridge collapsing on opening day. She’d seen footage of badly designed bridges, there was something about setting up resonances with the wind that could destroy a bridge in seconds if it got going. Did that still happen?

They were away from the crane now and round the other side, which was lower in the water. She could see inside because of the slope, pipe supports keeping the whole thing together, keeping the weight of the water out.

She heard shouts from the walkway and looked up to see two figures waving and pointing to the water next to the Porpoise. She looked and spotted a rock poking through the waves. She checked the depth gauge and it was almost at zero, stupid she hadn’t noticed earlier, she’d presumed the water was deep all the way round.

‘Hold on,’ she shouted at Ben, then swung the tiller hard to port to send the boat away from the rocks.

Ben was thrown to the deck with the sway of the boat as it pitched in the water. The hull was part way out the firth as they banked steeply, the other side of the deck almost under the surface. Ben was on the wrong side, hanging on. If they’d been sailing he should’ve been on the starboard side, feet over the edge for ballast and balance, arms wrapped around the guard rails. But as it was he was clinging on to the jib sheet for the smaller sail, and if they didn’t right themselves soon he’d be in the water.

Ellie kept turning the boat, leaning over the edge to see if she could spot rocks under the surface. She waited for the sound of ripping, the scream of stone through hull, but it didn’t come. She’d experienced it once before, a sickening lurch in her gut as her frame of reference got torn apart, but this time it didn’t happen and the Porpoise glided away past the outcrop.

Ellie straightened the steering and the boat righted itself. She turned and saw Ben holding the jib sheet, shaking his head and looking into the water.

‘You OK?’ Ellie said.

‘Lost my air monitor into the drink,’ he said.

It was a small price to pay for not being shipwrecked, but it was Ellie’s fault in the first place, she hadn’t checked the readings, hadn’t been watching things as closely as she should.