Into the Water

LAUREN

For Lauren’s thirty-second birthday, in a week’s time, they would go to Craster. Just her and Sean, because Patrick would be working. “It’s my favourite place in all the world,” she told her son. “There’s a castle, and a beautiful beach, and sometimes you can see seals on the rocks. And after we’ve been to the beach and the castle, we’ll go to the smokehouse and eat kippers on brown bread. Heaven.”

Sean wrinkled his nose. “I think I’d rather go to London,” he announced, “to see the Tower. And have ice creams.”

His mother laughed and said, “OK then, perhaps we could do that instead.”

In the end, they didn’t do either.

It was November, the days short and bitter, and Lauren was distracted. She was aware that she was acting different, but couldn’t seem to stop. She found herself sitting at the breakfast table with her family and all of a sudden her skin would flush, her face would burn, and she would have to turn away to hide it. She turned away when her husband came to kiss her, too—the movement of her head was almost involuntary, beyond her control, so that his lips brushed her cheek or the corner of her mouth.

Three days before her birthday, there was a storm. It built all day, a vicious wind ripping down the valley, white horses riding the breadth of the pool. At night the storm broke, the river pushing at its banks, trees felled along its length. The rain came down in sheets, the whole world underwater.

Lauren’s husband and son slept like babies, but Lauren was awake. In the study downstairs, she sat at her husband’s desk, a bottle of his favoured Scotch at her elbow. She drank a glass and tore a sheet of paper from a notebook. She drank another glass, and another, and the page remained blank. She couldn’t even decide on a form of address—“dear” seemed dismissive and “dearest” a lie. With the bottle almost empty and the page still unmarked, she walked out into the storm.

Her blood thick with drink and grief and anger, she made her way to the pool. The village was empty, hatches battened down. Unseen and undisturbed, she clambered and slipped through mud to the cliff. She waited. She waited for someone to come, she prayed that the man she had fallen in love with might miraculously somehow know, might somehow sense her despair and come to save her from herself. But the voice she heard, calling her name in panicked desperation, was not the one she wanted to hear.

And so boldly she stepped up to the precipice and, eyes wide open, pitched herself forward.

There was no way she could have seen him, no way she could have known that her boy was down there, behind the tree line.

No way she could have known that he had been woken by his father’s shouts and the sound of the front door slamming, that he had got up and run downstairs and out into the storm, his feet bare and his skinny limbs covered only by the thinnest cotton.

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 backseat, 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, I don’t understand 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?