‘Where’s your phone?’ asks Kirsty.
She looks up, startled. ‘Why, Jade?’
‘Kirsty,’ she protests. ‘I’m Kirsty. We need to call an ambulance. He…’
‘And then what?’
‘I can’t just… We can’t just…’
She is wringing her hands like a little kid, hair plastered down over her forehead, middle-class-mum jeans-and-jersey uniform clinging to her body.
The decision goes snap in Amber’s head like the gears of a machine meshing into place.
‘You’re not thinking straight, Kirsty,’ she tells her. Imbues her voice with all the authority she can muster. ‘You need to leave.’
Kirsty reels as though she’s been slapped. ‘What?’
‘Go on. Go.’
Kirsty is dazed. Looks at Amber with empty eyes.
‘I can’t. I can’t. Look what I’ve done. Look! Look at him!’
Amber is surprised by how calm she feels, now her decision is made. ‘It’s not too late,’ she says. ‘If you go now, nobody need ever know. If I say it was me, they won’t even bother to ask.’
Kirsty’s mouth is open. She looks from Amber to Martin Bagshawe, his snores wetter and thicker and slower as the blood spreads across the weathered gloss paint. The first glimmers of sullen dawn are creeping through the clouds. The early shift will be up, soon, making their way to town with their mops and buckets and casks of bleach. ‘I-’
‘Don’t,’ says Amber. ‘Just go.’
They face each other in the silver light. Beneath their feet, the suck-and-drag of a turning tide, above their heads, the shriek of seagulls getting up to seek out the remnants of the night. Go, thinks Amber. Just go. If you wait much longer, I won’t be able to go through with this.
Kirsty looks like she’s going to cry. Takes three long breaths and wraps her arms around her body, as though her ribcage hurts. And then she turns on her heel and runs away along the boardwalk.
4.30 p.m.
There’s a crunch as Chloe’s head hits the hardened mud. Jade and Bel brace themselves for the howl to come. Instead, silence drills into their ears. Hot-day country silence, filled with lark-song, the shush of the breeze that stirs the treetops, the lackadaisical trickle of the stream across the meadow and, in the far distance, the laughter of their neighbours as they duck each other in the smooth-running Evenlode.
Each has the same thought: Oh God, I’m in trouble now.
Chloe lies still like a discarded doll, her head thrown back, her right hand at an impossible angle against her shoulderblade. She’s bleeding: from the nose, and from the split in her scalp: a slow brown ooze filled with lumpy snot and viscous, transparent matter. Her mouth is open. So are her big blue eyes.
‘Chloe?’ Bel is the first to speak. Her voice wavers, like she’s short of breath.
Chloe gives no reply. Just lies there and oozes.
‘She’s unconscious,’ announces Jade, though she’s only ever seen the state as a result of alcohol before, and the two look quite different.
Bel rushes to the gate, hurdles it and drops to the earth beside the body. ‘I don’t even know if she’s breathing,’ she says. ‘Oh God, Jade, I think she’s really hurt.’
Jade just stands there. Bel glares up at her and swipes at her leg with a dusty hand. ‘Jade!’ she shouts. ‘Help me!’
Jade becomes suddenly animated and throws herself down beside them, grabbing Chloe’s hand – the one on the ground, not the one that lies beneath her back – and presses a thumb over the inside of her wrist like she’s seen the medics do on General Hospital. She feels nothing, but she doesn’t know what she’s feeling for, and anyway the beating of her own heart drowns everything else out. ‘Chloe?’ she says. Then repeats the name in a louder voice, as though this will somehow make a difference. ‘Chloe?’
She searches her mind for other things she’s seen people do with the unconscious on the telly. ‘Cold water,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘If we throw water in her face, it’ll wake her up.’
Bel has no experience of unconsciousness. But the assertion has the ring of sense. Certainly, a faceful of cold water would wake her up if someone threw it at her.
‘We’ve nothing to carry it in,’ she says, looking over at the stream. It’s a couple of hundred yards; there will be no chance that a running child could bring more than a few damp drops in their cupped hands.
‘Well, we’ll take her to it, then’ says Jade. ‘Come on.’
Bel eyes the silent rag doll doubtfully. ‘I don’t want to touch her. Look. She’s all over blood.’
Jade surprises herself with how practical her responses are, how matter-of-fact. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘You take her legs. I’ll take the top.’
Bel still looks queasy. ‘Her arm. That arm looks… please don’t hurt her arm.’
‘I think the damage is already done,’ says Jade.
The field is full of thistles. Jade has Chloe under the shoulders, her head flopping groundwards; sees body fluids smear themselves on her skirt and thighs, feels the scratch as she walks backwards through the plants. I won’t forget this, she thinks. This is a day I will remember all my life. She catches her heel on a tussock, staggers and almost goes down. Chloe’s head bounces, rebounds off the ground. Jade shivers as she feels the horrid scalp bash itself against the front of her knickers.
‘Oh God, let her be all right,’ pants Bel. ‘D’you think she’s all right? We need to get a grown-up. A grown-up will know what to do.’
Jade almost drops her end of their burden. ‘Are you mad?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at her, Bel. Look at the state of her! They’ll put us in prison.’
Bel’s red face gets redder as she grasps the gravity of their situation. ‘But…’ she protests, ‘it was an accident. We’ll tell them. It was an accident.’
‘Yer, right,’ jeers Jade. ‘And they’ll believe us, yeah?’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘Because my name’s Jade Walker, for a start.’
‘But I-’ begins Bel.
‘But you nothing. You’re with me. Everybody in this village’s been saying it’s a wonder a Walker hasn’t killed anybody yet. No. We need to get her woken up, and then we need to work out what to do next.’
Chloe emits a sort of gurgling exhalation. The girls looks down, each filled with a surge of sudden optimism; see the blue lips, the rolling eyes, and feel it drain away. ‘C’mon,’ says Jade. ‘We can wake her up. I know we can.’
She lifts the shoulders once more, and Bel takes hold of the ankles. Now they are trying to jog with their burden, tussocks impeding their way, the sun harsh in Bel’s eyes. They reach the edge of the stream. Low, cliff-like banks and a gritty, shallow bottom. A few feet to their left a cattle-wallow; the bank broken down on either side and, in between, a wide pool deep enough for large wet noses to drink their fill without having to strain out mouthfuls of mud. Jade nods towards it and the girls turn up the bank.
The field has been stocked recently. The slope is slippery, the floor six inches deep with grey-brown mud, the air thick with flies and cow-pats. They lurch down the slide with their burden, and find themselves having to drag their feet from the mud as it sticks to their soles. Jade loses a shoe, mutters a curse beneath her heaving breath. Wrenches backwards and lands on her arse, up to her neck in the water.