After You Die (17 page)

She was too big and too old to catch him, gave up in no time but he kept running, down a side street, then another, turning at random, following an instinct which made him run for longer than he needed to, only stopping finally when he turned his ankle on an uneven concrete slab.

She knew his name. She’d shouted it at him: ‘Nathan, stop!’

Rachel knew where he was, so the local police knew to look for him. Maybe she was already here, waiting for him, watching. Ready to snatch him off the street and bundle him into the back of a car.

The thought made his heart race and stomach tumble.

He needed to get away. Fast.

But not the train station. It wasn’t safe to go back there.

He went into a supermarket and locked himself in a toilet cubicle to count the money he’d stolen. The policewoman had spotted him as he was about to dump the handbag in a bin, the small pink purse already zipped into the pocket of his shorts. He felt ashamed for what he’d done but he needed money.

The woman was old, tiny and grey haired, too busy reading her newspaper to notice him coming up behind her. She looked like his nan.

Nathan counted the notes. Just over two hundred pounds and some change he’d use to buy food. No more stealing. Not unless he had to. The money would get him a bus ticket and a train ticket after that. He’d seen the bus station in the town centre and knew it would be busy soon with people heading home after work, kids leaving school. There were some in the supermarket already, shopping with their mums.

He squeezed his eyes closed.

His mum dragging him around Lidl, telling him no every time he asked for something. No, we can’t afford it. No, it’s bad for you. No, they’ll rot your teeth. What did I just fucking tell you? No!

His mum crying. Begging. Screaming.

Nathan’s hands curled into fists, screwing up the crisp banknotes. He pushed away the memories, tried to breathe around the stone in his throat, blank out the blood and the tears, the way his mother fell, the way Dawn’s dead eyes looked through him as he stood over her.

The door of the next cubicle slammed and Nathan snapped out of it. He stayed still, feeling unsafe suddenly, wanting to be alone again.

When the man was gone he separated his money into three small bundles and put them in different pockets, then sat down on the toilet lid and took out his phone. The battery showed sixty-one per cent, enough to get him home.

More messages waiting for him. The same people.

Julia wanting him to call her.

Rachel telling him to go to the train station and wait for her. ‘You’re safer with me.’

Caitlin had called a few minutes ago, texted before that:

The police are looking for you.

He knew that already. Didn’t know how she did.

Nathan deleted every message. It was as if none of them existed any more. Julia, Caitlin, Dawn; that life was gone. No going back. He looked at the last message from Dawn and deleted that too. As soon as he did it he regretted it. As if getting rid of her words made her even deader.

Don’t think about it.

A small voice asked him if he could go back. It was a weak voice, childish and scared, and he told it to shut up, snapping at the walls of the cubicle. It kept talking, though.

Couldn’t you call Rachel and explain everything? She doesn’t care what happened, she only wants one thing and as long as she gets that she can make everything else right again. She’ll save you. She wants to. And you want that too. You want to go home to Julia’s house. She doesn’t need to know about the rest. She’ll defend you, she’ll understand.

He was supposed to trust Rachel, her and only her, no matter what anyone else threatened or promised. She was the person who kept him safe, changed his name and his hair, took him to the other side of the country and gave him to Julia.

But if he could trust her why did she set the police on him? Why did she tell them who he was?

He wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, but she could?

She’d told him the police weren’t his friends. As if he was stupid. From the earliest time he could remember he’d known that and nothing in his life made him think differently. She told him not to answer questions, to use the lies she’d given him, and if a policeman ever tried to take him away he should run. Hide. Call her and she would fetch him. Wherever he was, she would come.

No.

Nathan’s phone blurred in front of his eyes and he tapped the screen with shaking fingers, pulled up the map to double-check where he was going. Then looked up which train he needed to get home and what the nearest station to get him there was. Doncaster. Fifteen miles. He found the bus timetables so he wouldn’t have to ask anyone at the station which one he needed.

The journey scared him and he tried not to think about all the things that could go wrong – getting stopped at the bus, Rachel catching up with him – what would be waiting for him when he arrived in Liverpool. But he’d come this far and he wasn’t going to turn around now.

His phone rang. Caitlin.

For a second he thought about answering. He wanted to hear a friendly voice and he wanted to let her know he was safe so she could tell Julia. He knew she’d be upset with him, angry even, and he wanted to ask her about Holly but he didn’t too, because he was scared what she’d say.

Thinking about Holly made him feel sick again.

He switched his phone off. No more looking at it. No more messages. Those people had never been his friends. They might have liked the boy Rachel told him to be but they wouldn’t like the one he really was.

Nathan left the toilets and went into the supermarket, trying to act like he belonged there, trying to blend in. It was easier now, more kids about. He got some sandwiches from the fridge and a Coke, took some chocolate bars. The security guard by the door was watching him.

He walked further into the shop, heading for the clothes. Picked up a beanie. The guard was following him now and he wanted to drop everything and run but he knew he might not make it to the door.

The man didn’t know who he was. He just thought he was a shoplifter.

Nathan walked back to the tills with the man behind him, his radio squawking, and waited in a short queue, holding his things to his chest. When his turn came the woman behind the counter smiled at him and asked him how he was today. He mumbled a reply and she kept the smile in place as she scanned the items, putting them in a bag for him.

‘Are you going to wear this now?’ she asked. ‘It’s getting cold out.’

‘Yeah. Ta.’

Her smile was gone and she was looking at him funnily as he pulled on the grey beanie.

‘Where’s your mum, love?’

She’s dead. Dead and burnt and scattered.

He swallowed, couldn’t meet her eye. ‘She’s in the car.’

Fumbling, he brought out the money and she frowned at the crumpled purple notes but didn’t say anything more and he held his breath all the way out of the shop, expecting the security guard to come after him.

Outside, he walked fast towards the bus station in the town centre, lots of people on the pavements, lots of cars on the road, enough of them to get lost in. He tugged the beanie lower to hide his face, then pulled his hood up over it.

At the bus station he discovered he needed to go in and buy a ticket but he got through that smoothly and followed the man in the booth’s directions. The bus was waiting, a few passengers on it already and it seemed too easy, just climb up three steps and take a seat near the back, hunker down low and don’t make eye contact with anyone.

Wait.

Wait some more.

It couldn’t be this easy.

Then the bus was full and the driver was making his announcement and suddenly they were moving, heading out of the town and onto the motorway, taking him closer to home and all the people who knew who he really was.

He tried not to think about that. Ate his chocolate and his sandwiches, washed them down with the Coke. Right away he felt sick, all that food going into his empty stomach so quickly, feeding the gnawing fear that always lived there.

He wished he still had the knife. Knew he was going to need it when he got home.

Ferreira poured a cup of coffee and rolled a cigarette she didn’t smoke, but held unlit between her fingertips as she went back to the beginning. Holly’s very first blog post, written on 22 March 2014.

The doctors say I’ll never walk again. They say I’ll never be able to move my arms or feed myself or piss without this stupid catheter.

And I say, ‘Fuck you, doctors. You don’t know me.’

I’ve run the half-marathon in one hour, forty. I’ve pushed my body – this body you tell me is my prison – through fatigue and pain and beyond every boundary set for it.

I will not be trapped by it.

I will not be dictated to by it.

I will recover.

Just you watch me.

That was Holly Prentice six months after she fell from a cliff face thanks to an improperly secured guide rope, and broke her back on the jagged rocks below, wild and defiant, convinced she’d prove everyone wrong. Ferreira felt her eyes sting as she read the words a second time, hearing them in her own voice because she didn’t know how Holly sounded beyond a quick ‘hello’, imagining the immense courage the girl had within her.

She lay in the bed she couldn’t get out of and wrote that post, while the friends she’d been climbing with continued living just as before, the same petty concerns and petty hopes dwarfed by what she was dealing with.

Did they keep in touch? she wondered. Did they care at all?

She made a note to check Holly’s Facebook page later, see if releasing her name on the local news this evening provoked a response.

Zigic was in his office changing into a suit, while the press officer hovered around the door, eyes averted, telling him what to say. As if he hadn’t done it a hundred times before.

Ferreira scrolled up through the next few posts, weeks between them and slowly the defiance was wavering. Holly expected a quick recovery but she soon found out how accurate the doctors’ dire prognoses were.

Two months on and there was a photograph of her new electric wheelchair, Holly sitting in it, strapped around the chest to keep her upright, arms secured and only her hand on the joystick control able to move. She was smiling but it looked forced.

Four months and there were no more links to half-marathons she was planning to run the next year or surfing destinations she idly fantasised about going to when she recovered. The reality was sinking in.

There were no negative comments either, Ferreira noticed with a vague sense of irritation. These were the posts she expected to see them on, the ones where Holly looked vulnerable. A sick mind, bent on upsetting her, should have targeted her when she was at her weakest but they hadn’t.

Unless Gibson was in charge of her security settings at that point and they’d all got snagged by the filter and deleted. It was better for Holly that way but didn’t help her identify a pattern or an aggressor.

Autumn 2014 was very quiet and Ferreira wondered what Holly was doing for the six weeks she ignored her blog. Had she found a better distraction or was she too exhausted by fighting against her disability to bother with it?

Ferreira knew how tiring it was to keep acting strong when all your body wanted was to be perfectly still. She’d given in to it a few times during her recovery, spent a week straight rewatching the old
Buffy
DVDs she’d been addicted to when she was at school, losing herself in the familiar world of Sunnydale High. Wasted days on end lying in bed just staring at the ceiling with the same Mogwai playlist on repeat for hours.

The torpor sucked you down so easily if you let it. Mid-October the posts started again and the tone was different, less personal and more political. Holly returning with a piece about the government agreeing to give their MPs a free vote on a scheduled assisted-suicide bill. She was in favour of the bill but didn’t think it went far enough. She wanted Dignitas-style clinics in the UK where anyone of sound mind could be helped to a civilised and painless death whether they were terminally ill or not.

She didn’t mention her own situation in the post but the commentators did.

Somewhere along the way her security settings must have been adjusted and now, mixed in with the relatively even-tempered responses and the voices of outright support, there were curses and threats. People telling her she would go to hell, that she was a traitor to her kind, asking if she was too stupid to realise how the vulnerable would be bullied into committing suicide to save their families the trouble of caring for them.

The anonymous accounts were even worse.

Are you still alive?

People like you are a burden, you should be made to kill yourself
.

Just do it already. Stop bitching and DIE
.

Ferreira blew out a slow breath, leaned back from the screen to see where Zigic was, wanting him to look at this, but he wasn’t in the office. Across the desk Wahlia was deep in thought, brow furrowed, fingertips massaging his neck.

She went back to the blog.

Holly had answered the comments where a reasonable response was possible and ignored the rest, but the anonymous voices carried on their own conversations, escalating and goading her, and Ferreira wondered why she let that happen. It was her blog, her space, she could have shut them down whenever she wanted, so why let it continue?

She scrolled on, found antagonism and vitriol following every post Holly wrote now, obscure profile images, different IDs. But could it all be the same person? she wondered. Some sad, sick bastard talking to himself, spinning a conversation to make her think there was a whole chorus of vicious dissent out there?

I’ve got a hammer if you want to end it. LOL
.

You won’t even need to hold her down.:-)

Yeah, no fun is it? Killing some bitch who can’t fight back
.

Can you talk Hol? Will you scream for me?

‘Fucking hell,’ Ferreira said, whispered it at the screen, wishing she could get her hands on these people. This person.