Simon Clark - The Fall

She plucked a length of white cotton from the black furry leg of the gorilla suit; almost idly, as if she’d just made an everyday decision like what to eat for lunch or what blouse to wear on a date.

‘I’ll be back in five minutes,’ she told Sue – which was a barefaced lie, of course. Then she went to find the rope.

The Range Rover started at the eighth attempt. ‘Thank the Lord for that,’ Zita said.

‘What else do we need to thank the Lord for?’ Sam Baker asked, pushing the mobile phone into the glove compartment. (When he’d tried dialling, out of curiosity, all he’d got were the clicks and hisses of static.)

In the back of the car Jud leaned forward. ‘At least there’s less electrical interference this time round.’

‘Is that a good sign or a bad sign?’ Sam asked. ‘Until we know what the hell’s happening we could keep rolling back through time until we reach Year Zero.’

‘That’s, hopefully, what we’re going to try and find out.’

Zita powered the car through the car park exit onto the track that led to the main highway.

A moment later they all felt a bump in the road. ‘The roadway was on two levels,’ Zita said. ‘I didn’t notice that before, did you?’

Sam shook his head. ‘The road surface is different, too; it’s pebbles that have been rolled into the road tar.’

‘So it looks like we’ve left the road of 1999 behind for the road of 1978.’ Jud Campbell looked through the back window. ‘See the grass? It’s far longer here, too.’

Zita glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘At least we’re starting to see the extent of the land area that’s made the jump with us.’

‘Roughly, my guess is it comprises the amphitheatre at the centre, the car park, visitors’ centre, a chunk of river, a few acres of grassland and a hundred yards or so of access road. As far as I can guess, the church lies just inside the affected area.’

They passed Lee Burton, who was marching hard along the road, head down, his expression set in determination. Sam didn’t suggest stopping to pick him up. No-one else did, either.

They joined the main road to town.

In the back, Jud said quietly, ‘This time I think we’re going to notice one or two changes.’

The driver never asked Nicole Wagner why she needed access to the luggage hold. He simply pushed a button on the dash, then went back to jabbing the pre-sets on the bus radio. The sound of the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’ filled the bus.

Inwardly Nicole was grinning as she climbed off the bus in her gorilla suit. The luggage-hold doors hissed open on their hydraulically-driven supports. There lay the orange nylon rope, neatly coiled on top of a suitcase.

That internal grin widened. At that moment she realised, in a disconnected this-doesn’t-affect-me kind of way, that it felt like she had a grinning clown locked away inside her head. The clown grinned and grinned behind his cherry-red nose. Of course, it wasn’t a real grin – it was only painted there as a mask to conceal the real expression of despair and helplessness beneath.

Right now, she acted on autopilot. Someone else pulled the strings that moved her arms as she picked up the coil of rope and walked slowly towards the trees.

This was the right thing.

She was certain of it. So what if the stress of recent events had triggered a self-destruct mechanism?

Putting her head through a noose was the simple and elegant solution to all her problems.

A tiny voice in the back of her head protested. Perhaps it was the shock of what had happened to her – the backward skip through time – that was to blame; maybe the shock had screwed up most of the people in the amphitheatre, too; they couldn’t think rationally; perhaps if she only took the time to have a coffee and think things through she wouldn’t take her own life.

But no…

The voice was too small and far too feeble.

In the distance now she could hear the Bee Gees song pumping from the bus. ‘Stayin’ Alive’? Wasn’t that an exquisite irony?

In the back of her head the clown’s grin grew wider and wider. He began to rock backwards and forwards, quivering with a manic laughter. The rope felt good and strong and thick in her hands. Now she only needed to find a tree with a branch sturdy enough to hold her weight.

William Bostock was arguing again with his wife of 30 years. They’d habitually yelled at each other at least once a day since their only daughter had run away from home ten years earlier. Not that the daughter’s story had turned into high melodrama. They had never tracked her down to a whorehouse where she cavorted furiously for the price of a heroin fix.

No, nothing that purple. Daughter Tina had run only as far as Pontefract, where she’d found work on a Woolworth’s check-out. Now she was married to a quantity surveyor and lived in a comfortable house overlooking the racecourse.

But her leaving had thrown William’s and Marion’s relationship out of kilter. There was some marital problem that neither could even identify, never mind resolve.

Instead they yelled.

Now William followed Marion away from the amphitheatre. He was a short, sturdy man in a cream polo shirt and polyester trousers; above his belt a beer belly blossomed (already heading for that fat-man fold-over that would in time obscure his privates when he looked down at himself). Lately, he’d begun to notice his own body odour or, to put it a little more plainly, his armpits stank of sweat: a sharp, stale smell that enveloped him in an aura of armpit stink. At first he found himself walking faster to outpace the smell. When he found that didn’t work he began to slosh huge amounts of aftershave onto his chest and armpits. Now stale-sweat smells mated with Superdrug Sport for Men to give birth to a truly potent odour that made people pause and look at him as he walked by in the street.

Marion Bostock was a short, plump woman of 50 with large breasts that had grown soft and pudding-like over the years. On her nose rested thick brown-rimmed glasses that gave her the look of an owl, or so William thought. An ever-staring, ever-judgemental owl that criticised everything he did.

The eyes were still huge as she snarled at him, ‘I told you I never wanted to come on this holiday, didn’t I? I knew – I just knew it would end in disaster.’

‘How the hell could I foresee this?’ he said, feeling his cheeks burn. ‘Rain, yes. Losing our suitcase, yes. But not this, you stupid woman.’

‘Stupid, am I?’

‘Of course you bloody well are. All you want to do is nag, nag, nag… It’s the only time you’re happy.’

‘The only time you’re happy is when you’re with your cronies with a drink inside you.’

‘Too bloody right.’

Instinctively they headed away from other people to where they could yell at each other in relative privacy. ‘And I haven’t forgotten you hit me on the bus, William Bostock. I’ll never forget that.’

‘Well, you were driving me—’

‘But to hit me? You do realise that’s the first time you’ve raised your hand to me?’

‘Marion, I—’

‘And it will be the last, d’you hear? The last!’

By this time they’d entered a clump of trees some way from the amphitheatre.

‘Oh, shut up,’ William said. ‘I’m sick of hearing you… day after day after—’

‘You’re sick of hearing me?’

‘Yes. Bloody sick.’

‘That’s rich.’

‘But true.’

‘I have to listen to you moan about work every time you come home.’

‘It’s a treadmill at that factory; it’s—’

‘You moan about it, you say you hate it.’ Her eyes flashed, passionate with anger. ‘But you never stop talking about it.’ With that she turned and walked briskly along the path through the woods, her soft, pudding-like breasts no doubt bouncing heavily up and down as she went, thought William bitterly, picturing the way they moved independently of her when she marched away angrily like that. Which was one of her favourite tricks.