Fellside Read online

  Paula just nodded. She’d married an upheaval, and he was home right then on an extended visit.

  “Well then,” said Dr Carter with an expansive shrug. “You should be thankful that Jess is able to play these conflicts out in her mind rather than in reality. This night world of hers seems to be a place of turbulence and confusion – an internalisation of those same forces as they appear in her daily life. The imagination is a plastic power, Mrs Moulson. A shaping power. We make the things we need. And then when we don’t need them any more, we set them aside. All you have to do is to let that happen.”

  In other words, Jess was off the hook. She went home, got into bed and pulled the covers up over her head.

  She trained herself out of dreaming, because every time she dreamed, she woke up in a panic. It was a sad time. For one thing, she remembered missing Tish very badly. But more dreams meant more sessions with Dr Carter, more interrogations, more time being smiled at. For months she woke up four or five times a night, dragging herself from the Other Place by main force.

  Then she didn’t have to any more. The dreams stopped coming. She slept with her head under the covers all the way into her teens, woke up remembering nothing. And the angels…

  The angels went away and didn’t come back. Tish didn’t come back either. Maybe they all just got tired of waiting for Jess to come out and play. She could barely remember now what her nightly journeys had been like. They had been very real to her at the time, she knew that much. But she’d forgotten almost all of this. She remembered Tish, but mainly as a story she’d been told about herself rather than an actual presence. She’d been very young, after all. When you’re a kid, pretty much anything can heal over and leave no scar.

  Aunt Brenda changed the subject. “You were in the papers every day,” she said. “They were coming out with terrible things about you, Jess. Some of these people who call themselves reporters…”

  She went off on a rant about journalistic ethics, which Jess knew was intended as a show of solidarity. The substantive point – Alex – couldn’t be contested, but it was some comfort to know that her aunt was on her side and wanted to lift her mood.

  Finally Brenda put her hand on Jess’s arm. “It was the drugs,” she said. “It wasn’t you. You’re not capable of hurting people, Jess. Not on purpose.”

  But Jess knew she was. Everyone was. It was basic human kit.

  “I’ll come and see you,” Brenda promised. “Up there. It’s a long way, but I’ll come.”

  “No, you won’t,” Jess said. “You’re not even to try until you’re better. But I’d love it if you could write.”

  “Of course I will. Every week. And as soon as I’m up to making the trip, you’ll see me there. No arguments.”

  They embraced and Brenda left, trying not to let Jess see that she was crying.

  I’ve let her down so badly, Jess thought. There were never very many people who were willing to think well of me, and I smacked them all in the face.

  It felt right then as though that was what she’d been doing all her life.

  6

  Jess went to sleep still thinking about those old nightwalks, those dead angels. Perhaps that was why, for the first time since her childhood excursions, she dreamed. Real dreams, not bodiless whispers. Dreams where she walked and moved, saw and did things.

  In the most coherent of the dreams, she was lying right there in the remand cell when her phone started to ring. She looked around for the phone but couldn’t find it. She was dimly aware, even in the dream, that her phone was with the rest of her effects in a police lockbox somewhere. It seemed logical, all the same, that it should be trying to make its way back to her.

  But she didn’t find it in the bed, or on the table, or in the locker (without a lock or even a door) where prisoners were meant to stow their meagre belongings. So she went looking elsewhere. She opened the door of the cell and stepped out – into the lobby of her flat in Muswell Hill.

  She climbed the stairs to her own landing, which was dominated by a huge, ugly mirror mounted on the wall directly across from her door. She could see that she was casting no reflection in the mirror, which she took to mean that this was a temporary visit. She wasn’t coming home to live just yet.

  (It burned down. Didn’t it burn down?)

  Alex Beech was sitting on the next flight of stairs, in his usual spot. He looked the way he had when she saw him last – or at least, the last time she could remember seeing him. Wearing an Arsenal T-shirt that was too big for him, most likely a hand-me-down, and a pair of denim shorts out of which his spindly legs protruded like the two halves of a wishbone.

  Jess plopped herself down next to him and they sat in slightly uneasy silence for a little while. Not perfect silence: the ringing of the phone continued from somewhere very nearby, muted but distinct.

  “I’m sorry,” Jess said at last. “I’m so sorry, Alex.”

  Alex didn’t answer, or look at her.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she ventured again. She put a hand on his arm. Or she tried to. Her fingers slid right through him as though he wasn’t there.

  That was when she realised – with dream logic that came to her fully formed – that she was dead. It wasn’t Alex who was burned up in the fire: it was her. And he was still waiting there for her, would wait always, but she would never come.

  And that was why her phone was ringing, she suddenly knew. She had told him he could call her. He was doing that right now. If she could find the phone, she could pick up and they could talk, at least. And maybe he could tell her the way back so she could come to him.

  She left the boy’s side and went into her flat. The door was standing open, the hallway empty. She always left her phone on the bedside table when she slept, and death was a lot like sleep. It seemed that it even came complete with dreams. The ringing got louder and she knew she’d guessed correctly.

  When she went into the bedroom, the phone was right there on the table. John was lying in the bed, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in a slow, shallow rhythm. The ringing didn’t wake him. The phone couldn’t reach into his sleep, his dreams, because it was only meant for Jess.

  She reached out to pick it up, but the skin on the back of her neck prickled. Someone was behind her.

  She turned slowly, and they were there. Thousands of them. Naked, with their arms at their sides. In order to accommodate them, the room had ceased to be a room. All that was left was the bed and the bedside table and the angle of two walls, standing now on a wide, flat foreshore that stretched as far as her eye could see.

  They were almost all women. The few men stood out by contrast. They all had their eyes closed. Their faces mostly wore similar expressions of blank indifference although a few looked sad or troubled. They were not watching Jess: they had no idea that she was there. In fact, she knew, each of them had no idea that any of the others were there. For all each of these women knew, she stood alone. Only Jess could see them all.

  As she had seen them when she was a child. Perhaps they had looked like angels to her then simply because they had no clothes on. The only naked bodies she remembered seeing as a little girl were those of Christian saints.

  The phone hadn’t stopped ringing all this time.

  It took an effort to turn her back on the silent assembly, but she did. She picked up.

  “Alex?”

  Just static on the line. No voice that Jess could make out, although the crackle and hiss rose and fell with the inflections of a voice.

  She tried again. “Alex?”

  There was a voice there, but it was so far down she could barely make it out. She closed her eyes. That was dangerous, given that the whole place might burst into flames at any moment, but it felt like it was vitally important to take this call.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  “Who’s there?” someone else asked at the other end of the line. Not an echo. She was almost able to identify the voice.

  “It’s Jess
,” she said. “What do you want?”

  The voice answered but the static spiked and peaked right over the words, drowning out most of them. She heard fire and lost and something that might have been a frame but was probably afraid.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” Jess said. She was still thinking that this might be Alex, although it didn’t sound like him. “I’m here if you need me. I’ll always be here.”

  “How?” the other voice whispered. The static had cleared, but the volume had dropped away with it to the limit of what she could hear.

  “How?” Jess repeated. “What do you mean?”

  “How…?”

  Then silence.

  Then, “How did…?”

  A storm of static, so abrupt it seemed that the ether was trying to snatch the words away before they reached her.

  But they did.

  “How did I get here?”

  The voice was hers. She was talking to herself. But that didn’t mean she had an answer.

  7

  How did I get here?

  It was impossible to say.

  Unless by hating something you straightaway started to turn into it. As though your hate was a sort of magnetic field, turning you around like a compass needle, dragging you into a new shape like iron filings.

  Jess’s father crashed and raged in the maze of her childhood memories like an intermittent minotaur. “Where’s my fucking coat? Did you take money out of my pocket? Did you hide my shoes? What’s the fucking kid looking at? Are you telling her lies about me?”

  Addiction. Addiction was the real monster here. And young Jess knew, watching her parents, that you could get addicted to anything. Barry Moulson was addicted to alcohol, and Paula Moulson née Ketterbridge was addicted to him. It didn’t matter how many times Baz turned up, took command of Paula’s pay packet, raided their pathetic savings, pawned the TV and then hit the road again. The next time he appeared, Paula’s arms would still be wide open.

  In school and then in college (maths and physics, combined honours), Jess steered a course as far away from all that bullshit as she could get.

  “You want to smoke some weed?”

  No.

  “Pop an E before we go into the club?”

  Actually, I don’t.

  “The sex will be way better if you snort some bloom.”

  Thanks but no thanks.

  The first sip, the first drag, the first pill… that might be all it would take. Better not to start than to start and never stop. “It’s okay,” her friend Kit said to her at the end of her first year at Durham. “Everyone thinks you’re a frigid prude, but they’re way too scared to say it out loud so it all balances out, you know?”

  But it got seriously unbalanced in year two. That was when her mother got sick. Not-ever-getting-better sick. Sick with cancer – first of the liver, then of the everything. Seriously? Barry floats his organs in sixty per cent proof, and Paula’s liver goes? Clearly there was no God, no justice, nobody at the switchboard. The universe was a badly written soap opera where every plot twist strained credibility just that little bit further.

  Jess went to her pastoral supervisor, explained the situation and dropped out of uni.

  “You don’t have to do this,” her mother protested. “I’m not an invalid, Jess!”

  But you will be, Jess thought. And in any case, their time together had become something that could be counted. That needed to be counted. She didn’t say any of that. What she said was, “Durham is six hours away, Mum, and the train ticket costs ninety quid even with a railcard. And I can pick up again from right where I was. I want to be with you, just until you’re all right again.”

  The huge lie making it impossible for Paula to protest against the smaller one. They hugged and cried, and nothing more was said.

  In fact it took three years for Paula to die. Four rounds of chemo, three operations, an endless drip-drip-drip of bad news followed by worse news followed by outright disasters. Jess had never regretted her decision. She was with her mother at the end and her being there made a difference. Everything Paula did – moving, talking, blinking, breathing – brought a little gasp of pain, but she didn’t die alone and she didn’t die afraid. She went into the dark with Jess holding her hand. Holding it so tightly that for hours afterwards it felt as though they were still touching. Still together.

  So no regrets, ever. But she couldn’t just pick up where she’d left off. This was the second time around so she wasn’t entitled to a student loan. She would have to save up the money for her tuition fees and her living expenses – a tall order when the economy was tanking. She got a job at Half the Sky, a feminist-slash-ecological bookshop on Caledonian Road, and started to put a little by.

  Broke her collarbone in an accident at the shop involving a stepladder.

  And made a brand-new friend.

  “This is about managing the pain,” the doctor told her. “Oxycodone is a very powerful analgesic, so it’s not to be abused. These are controlled-release tablets. You take them twice a day, and they sustain what we call a resting level of the drug in your system throughout the next twelve hours. We’ll review in a week’s time.”

  Where have you been all my life, oxycodone?

  Jess was in ecstasy. Some of that was not feeling the physical pain from her injury. The rest was not feeling anything else. There was an old ache inside her that forgot to ache when she was high.

  She lived on oxy and fresh air for three months. But then the prescription ran out and she crashed. It was impossible to hide, like a disfiguring illness. Like a bereavement. “I need your mind to be here as well as your body, Jess,” her boss, Susan, warned her. “No point turning up for work if you’re just going to sit there.”

  “You need me to fix you up?” her colleague Nicola asked. “Seriously, what do you need? I can get it.”

  Nicola Saunders was only at Half the Sky one day a week. The rest of the time she worked in the pharmacy of a private hospital. “You want oxy,” she assured Jess, “all you’ve got to do is ask. There’s no need to suffer.”

  There was no need to suffer. Money would buy her perfect happiness.

  “Not that I’m doing it for the money,” Nicola said. “I’m doing it for you.” She took the money anyway though, and her prices went up on a regular basis.

  “You want to try something stronger? Drop one of these just as the oxy kicks in – you won’t believe where it takes you.”

  Jess stuck to the devil she knew. “I don’t care about the thrill,” she told Nicola. “I’m just in a bad place right now, and it helps.”

  “Oh sure, I get that. It’s temporary relief, absolutely. It’s not, you know, a lifestyle thing. You can always stop.”

  And Jess knew she could. Any time. But somehow at the moment of decision she found herself popping a tab anyway. And the moment of decision was coming on her with a quickening tempo. In the aftermath of a fix, she felt a blissed-out calm. A few hours later she started to get ragged around the edges. Bad nerves gave way to irritation, and irritation was the tip of an iceberg that shelved off steeply towards gnawing anger for anything that was between her and her next hit.

  Barry’s voice came back to her. “Let’s open another bottle. The party’s just getting started. Come on, Paula, name me one single thing that looks better when you’re sober!”

  That was what gave her the strength, in the end, to kick the habit. She knew that dance so well. It had been part of her life for as long as she could remember, not constant, but refreshed and rediscovered whenever Daddy came calling.

  She fought her way out of the trough. Not cold turkey or anything like it. She eased off slowly over the space of a couple of months, buying the same amount of the drug from Nicola every week and measuring her progress by how much of each blister pack ended up in the bin.

  She got clean. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  Then at one of Nicola’s parties, she met John Street.

  And finally took
delivery of the disaster her whole life had been preparing her for.

  8

  Jess woke to find herself already sitting up, her heart hammering. The dream was gone, the normal world was back. But only up to a point.

  She knew that the normal world was a dream too. You could wake up from it any time you liked.

  They had taken her belt and her shoelaces. They had fastened a thick plastic cover over the light fitting so that she couldn’t smash it and expose the wires. They had fixed a camera to the ceiling of her cell so she could be monitored for her own good whenever the authorities saw fit.

  But there was one door they couldn’t lock. Their jurisdiction ended at the surface of her skin. As long as she could kill herself without any props, tools or external assistance, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to stop her.

  And she could, of course.

  It was basic human kit.

  PART TWO

  THE HARDEST TIME TO BE ALIVE

  9

  Fellside prison was a private entity, wholly owned by a security company that went by the name of N-fold. N-fold had only just climbed on board the correctional bandwagon, and its board of directors was very mindful of the PR implications of their latest prisoner. While the paperwork was still in process, they went into conclave with an extremely select and highly expensive group of human rights lawyers. This was two full weeks into Moulson’s hunger strike, which she’d started in the remand cells at Winstanley right after her conviction. The media had got wind of it two or three days in and made a mighty noise about it, embellishing their accounts with choice titbits which had to have come from one of the remand wing guards or trusties.

  Then on the morning of Moulson’s transfer from Winstanley, the directors sent their in-house expert up to the prison on a fast train out of King’s Cross to tell the governor, Save-Me Scratchwell, what his options were. She told him they were limited.

  “We’ve looked at this from a lot of different angles,” she explained. “And we’ve taken legal advice from top people in the field. We’ve decided to let Ms Moulson die. That’s going to be the most straightforward course and, from a legal point of view, the most easily defensible.”