‘I’m trying to finish my book,’ she says again, ‘and, frankly, I’d rather do that than come down to the river to entertain you.’
Why doesn’t he just give up? Let it go? Treat it as the joke it should always have been? But he doesn’t. To his everlasting shame he plays his trump card. ‘You’re scared to do it, aren’t you? I’d drive it if I was at the house. It’s not such a big deal. I’ll drive it back if you like.’
She says nothing. He continues his assault. Plays on her pride. The girl who is never afraid, who is defined by her fearlessness; who cannot resist a challenge.
She listens to him in silence. Then suddenly, switching into French and using that voice she sometimes uses which makes it hard to judge whether she is being serious or ironic, she says, ‘Mais oui, pourquoi pas?’ and immediately hangs up.
He believes she will come and he is happy; she was just being lazy, wanting to read her book. Such is his confidence in his twin sister that he foresees no danger in the enterprise. There is almost nothing that she cannot accomplish successfully. He waits impatiently, then decides he will cycle up the lane and perhaps meet her halfway. Maybe he will drive the van down the last part of the lane himself. He arrives at the crossroads and waits. The traffic is passing at speed, coming around the tight corner in the way it always does, which means you have to be quick and decisive when crossing – but they have done it many times before. Then he sees her: the blue Renault van with the kayak on its roof arriving at the crossroads. He gives her a wave which she acknowledges with a brief smile and a few fingers raised from the steering wheel. She waits for a lapse in the traffic.
Now the picture becomes jerky; a gap appears in the traffic, the Renault leaps forward at the same time as a white truck appears from around the corner. It shouldn’t matter. Fran will be well across by the time the truck reaches her. But to his horror he sees that the Renault is stationary in the middle of the main road. His brain calculates the distance and angles. There is room for the truck to go behind her. All will be well. But it isn’t. At the last minute, the truck swings across the road as if to pass in front of Fran, and at exactly that moment the Renault leaps forward for the second time.
There is noise, far too much noise, and he hears a scream he recognises – his own voice. He tries to move into the road but is forced to retreat as another car narrowly misses the tangled wreck of the Renault wedged underneath the overturned truck. Soon other cars have stopped and he is kneeling, looking into the space where Fran should be. What is left of her body is folded in on itself at impossible angles. Bone protrudes from where an arm should be, raw and bloody.
Later, he is there when they cut her out and lay her mangled body onto a stretcher. An airbag has protected her face: except for a trickle of dried blood from her nose, it appears undamaged. Her mouth is half open and the expression is one of mild surprise. Tubes are put into her body. An oxygen mask over her face. By some extraordinary miracle it seems she is still alive. A germ of hope begins to take hold but it is soon snuffed out. Someone tells him she is dead.
Lying on his back and gazing at the ceiling, but seeing only the memories parading before him, Jake told his story to Leah; without embellishment but unsparing of himself. ‘And you see,’ he said, ‘within the family, Marianne was blamed because she had been asked by Claire to “keep an eye on the twins”, which was ridiculous given our age – and hers. Several times I have tried to tell her this – tell her that it was all my fault – but she just won’t listen.
‘The point, though,’ and now Jake raised his voice. ‘The point is that I asked Fran to come. I summoned her; I provoked her into doing a foolish and illegal act, and what’s worse, I never told anyone – not my parents, not the French police, though they could have seen from her phone that I had called her a few minutes earlier – but then no one asked. You see, it was so much in her character to do something reckless that no one thought to blame me. And all the time I said nothing. I didn’t even tell anyone I had seen the crash. I said I had arrived after it had happened. I’ve lived with this ever since. I’ve known that if I hadn’t used those words – made that foolish suggestion, urged her to do it – she would still be alive today. By my own stupidity and selfishness, I killed the person I loved best in the world.’
For a while they both lay there in silence, Leah seeming unsure how to respond to the weight of his confession. Then she said, ‘It was an accident, Jake – you can’t go on blaming yourself.’
Jake sat up, pushing back the duvet. ‘Oh, but I can, Leah,’ he almost shouted, ‘and I do. Don’t you see? We are not talking wings of a butterfly here – this is direct cause and effect. She died because of me – because on a fine August afternoon in rural France, her stupid brother, in a moment of ennui, without much thought, asked his sister – urged her, dared her even, a girl who had never been afraid of anything in her life – dared her to drive down to the river; to drive a car she had never driven before in a foreign country when she barely knew the rudiments of how to drive at all – he sent her on this frolic to her death, to her final and everlasting oblivion. Because he was bored.’
Dammed up and contained for years, the sluice gate had now opened and the words poured from Jake as if he had been practising this speech for half a lifetime. Perhaps sensing the depth of his pain, Leah moved closer to him, nestling her head on his shoulder and running a hand down his chest. ‘I don’t blame you and nor would she. You have to let her go. It’s nearly ten years. She’s gone, Jake – you’ve got me now.’
Whether it was Leah’s touch – or her words – or something inside him which triggered the response, Jake couldn’t afterwards be sure, but without warning he turned towards Leah and rolled on top of her.
‘Jake?’ she said.
He said nothing – pushing her legs apart with his knees.
‘Hang on…’
Ignoring her incipient protest, and without words or preliminaries he shoved at her clumsily and hard, entered her, and thrust forcefully until he reached his climax.
After he had rolled away, they both lay still for several minutes, before Leah whispered, ‘I feel as if I’ve just been raped.’
Jake said nothing. He was too confused by his own actions to know how to respond.
‘Jeez, Jake,’ she said, now sitting up in bed. ‘What the shit was all that about? Were you fucking me or your beloved sister? What’s with all this aggression? I don’t get it.’
Jake put his arms out and pulled her close to him. She allowed herself to be drawn towards him, though her body remained tense. Hugging her tightly, and pressing her face into his neck, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry. Christ, Leah, I’m so sorry.’
Part IV
’tis not so difficult to die.
29
It started in the way it always did, wriggling under the wire, sliding on the ice, the freezing water, the struggling boy, but this time she is the one being pulled down; there is water in her mouth, in her throat, she tries to cough but there is no air to breathe, only icy water in her windpipe and paralysis in her chest. With all her strength, she fights to get to the surface, she fights to get to the air, but it’s impossible, something is clinging to her legs, pulling her down.
Slowly at first, but with ever increasing speed, she is falling; no longer in the water she is plunging through the air – only there is still no air to breathe – her lungs are screaming but she cannot take a breath. She is hurtling down through a deep crevasse; the walls press closer and closer but never quite touch her body. On and on she falls into the dark abyss and she knows what is going to happen; she will reach the bottom and her body will shatter like an egg dropped from a great height – and what was once the perfect form of life will be no more than a dark stain on the earth floor, and then the world will come to an end. In one moment of terrifying finality it will all be as if it had never been. Unimaginable oblivion.