Paula Hawkins - Into the Water

He dislocated my shoulder knocking me against the wall, but it was what happened afterwards that stuck. He said he needed to teach me a lesson, so he took a filleting knife and cut cleanly across my wrist. It was a warning. ‘This is so you remember,’ he said. ‘So you never forget. If you do, it’ll be different next time. I’ll cut the other way.’ He placed the tip of the blade on my right wrist, at the base of my palm, and dragged its point slowly towards my elbow. ‘Like that. I don’t want to discuss this again, Sean. You know that. We’ve talked about it quite enough. We don’t mention your mother. What she did was shameful.’

He told me about the seventh circle of hell, where suicides are turned to thorny bushes and fed upon by Harpies. I asked him what a Harpy was and he said, your mother was one. It was confusing: was she the thorny bush, or was she the Harpy? I thought of the nightmare, of her in the car, reaching out to me, her mouth open and bloody drool dripping from her lips. I didn’t want her to feed upon me.

When my wrist healed, I found the scar very sensitive and quite useful. Whenever I found myself drifting, I would touch it, and most times, it brought me back to myself.

There was always a fault line there, in me, between my understanding of what I knew had happened, what I knew myself to be and my father to be, and the strange, slippery sense of wrongness. Like dinosaurs not being in the Bible, it was something that made no sense and yet I knew it had to be. It had to be, because I had been told these things were true, both Adam and Eve and brontosaurus. Over the years there were occasional shifts, and I felt the tremor of earth above the fault line, but the quake didn’t come until I met Nel.

Not at the beginning. At the beginning it was about her, about us together. She accepted, with some disappointment, the story I told her, the story I knew to be true. But after Katie died, Nel changed. Katie’s death made her different. She started talking to Nickie Sage more and more, and she no longer believed what I’d told her. Nickie’s story fitted so much better with Nel’s view of the Drowning Pool, the place she had conjured up, a place of persecuted women, outsiders and misfits fallen foul of patriarchal edicts, and my father was the embodiment of all that. She told me that she believed my father had killed my mother and the fault line widened; everything shifted, and the more it shifted, the more odd visions returned to me, as nightmares at first and then as memories.

She’ll bring you low , my father said when he found out about Nel and me. She did more than that. She unmade me. If I listened to her, if I believed her story, I was no longer the tragic son of a suicided mother and a decent family man, I was the son of a monster. More than that, worse than that: I was the boy who watched his mother die and said nothing. I was the boy, the teenager, the man who protected her killer, lived with her killer, and loved him.

I found that man a difficult man to be.

The night she died, we met at the cottage, as we had before. I lost myself. She wanted so much for me to get to the truth, she said it would release me from myself, from a life I didn’t want. But she was thinking of herself, too, of the things she had discovered and what it would mean for her, her work, her life, her place. That, more than anything: her place was no longer a suicide spot. It was a place to get rid of troublesome women.

We walked back towards the town together. We’d done it often before – since my father had discovered us at the cottage, I no longer parked the car outside, I left it in town instead. She was dizzy with drink and sex and renewed purpose. You need to remember it, she told me. You need to stand there and look at it and remember it, Sean. The way it happened. Now. At night.

It was raining, I told her. When she died, it was raining. It wasn’t clear like tonight. We should wait for the rain.

She didn’t want to wait.

We stood at the top of the cliff looking down. I didn’t see it from here, Nel, I said. I wasn’t here. I was in the trees below, I couldn’t see anything. She was on the edge of the cliff, her back to me.

Did she cry out? she asked me. When she fell, did you hear anything?

I closed my eyes and I saw her in the car, reaching out for me, and I wanted to get away from her. I shrank back, but she kept coming at me and I tried to push her away. With my hands in the small of Nel’s back, I pushed her away.

Acknowledgements

The source of this particular river is not all that easy to find, but my first thanks must go to Lizzy Kremer and Harriet Moore, providers of strange ideas and strong opinions, challenging reading lists and inexhaustible support.

Finding the source was one thing, following the river’s course quite another: thank you to my exceptional editors, Sarah Adams and Sarah McGrath, for helping me find my way. Thank you also to Frankie Gray, Kate Samano and Danya Kukafka for all their editorial support.

Thank you to Alison Barrow, without whose friendship and advice I might never have made it through the past couple of years.

For their support and encouragement, reading recommendations and brilliant ideas, thank you to Simon Lipskar, Larry Finlay, Geoff Kloske, Kristin Cochrane, Amy Black, Bill Scott-Kerr, Liz Hohenadel, Jynne Martin, Tracey Turriff, Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt and Mary Stone.

For their striking and beautiful jacket designs, thank you to Richard Ogle, Jaya Miceli and Helen Yentus.

Thank you to Alice Howe, Emma Jamison, Emily Randle, Camilla Dubini and Margaux Vialleron for all their work to ensure this book can be read in dozens of different languages.

Thank you to Markus Dohle, Madeleine McIntosh and Tom Weldon.

For professional insights, thank you to James Ellson, formerly of Greater Manchester Police, and Professor Sharon Cowan of the Edinburgh Law School – needless to say that any legal or procedural errors are entirely of my own making.

Thanks to the Rooke sisters of Windsor Close for a lifetime of friendship and inspiration.

Thanks to Mr Rigsby for all his advice and constructive criticism.

Thank you to Ben Maiden for keeping me grounded.

Thank you to my parents, Glynne and Tony, and to my brother Richard.

Thank you to each and every one of my long-suffering friends.

And thank you to Simon Davis, for everything.

About the Author

Paula Hawkinsworked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train , has been a global phenomenon, selling almost 20 million copies worldwide. Published in over forty languages, it has been a No.1 bestseller around the world and was a No.1 box-office-hit film starring Emily Blunt.

Into the Water is her second stand-alone thriller.