Kate Pullinger - Landing Gear

Jack heard his dad come through the front door, but he stayed in his room for a moment longer. He needed to figure out what to do. Ten kids had been arrested for drugs offences. Five kids. Twenty. The others were busy turning each other in. The police had a big list of kids they were picking up from their houses and taking in for questioning. David McDonald was dead. Ruby was not responding to his texts and he was too afraid of being—what, he wasn’t sure: implicated?—to contact anyone else he knew had been at the party.

He closed his laptop, pulled himself together. Best to pretend nothing had happened. He’d go downstairs and say hello to his long-lost father.

Jack entered the kitchen in time to see his mother slap his father across the face.

Emily rode her bicycle up the sleepy, tree-lined street on Sunday morning. It was a picture-book southwest London suburban street with big, white, substantial houses, both terraced and detached, with front gardens and footpaths and artfully overgrown hedges, wisteria coming into flower. There was a preponderance of hybrid and electric cars parked along the street. Emily thought the whole neighbourhood smelled better than where she lived, as though every room had its own subtly scented candle, every kitchen its own cappuccino machine. She spotted the house number and cycled past slowly. She paused at the end of the row of houses before turning around to cycle back.

Her skills as a researcher had come into their own as Emily parsed the posts and pages of Crazeeharree. It hadn’t taken long: Crazeeharree wasn’t particularly adept at hiding her identity. She was Facebook friends with a handful of Emily’s friends. In fact, Crazeeharree had only one friend who wasn’t also a friend of Emily’s—Harriet Smith. Emily had sat back in her chair and looked at the screen. “There you are,” she said. “Gotcha.” Harriet Smith. She clicked. Telephone number. Place of work. Home address. She even knew Harriet’s voice—her dad had had the radio tuned to that station permanently. The thought of her father and his radio had made Emily’s pulse dip and she’d slumped farther into her seat.

“How am I supposed to keep going without you?” she’d said out loud. “I was looking forward to being annoyed by having to take care of you when you were old.”

She cycled slowly back up the street, toward the house. The front door opened, and a woman she knew straight away was Harriet walked out. The woman moved swiftly into the road without looking in either direction, straight over to her car. She did not look happy; she was clutching her handbag across her chest as though it was a shield. Her face was red, as though she was angry, as though she’d been crying. Emily held back, out of mirror range, she hoped, one foot on the ground for balance. Harriet started the car, pulled out and drove away quickly.

Emily stood rigid, one foot on the ground, the other on a pedal. It was her. Emily knew it.

Marriage is such a fragile thing, Harriet thought. What is it? Two wedding bands and an engagement ring. A set of vows, made in front of whomever you want, wherever you want. After that, an accumulation of years. An accumulation of experiences, disappointments and ambitions, failed and achieved. A house or flat, a bed. Sex. Children, if you’re so inclined, if you’re lucky. Christmas and New Year’s and a few other holidays. But mostly just years. Years and years. And stuff and things.

What will happen if this marriage breaks down? What have we got to show for it, besides our stuff and our things?

After Harriet slapped Michael and saw Jack standing there in the door of the kitchen, she put on her coat, picked up her bag and walked out of the house. She got in her car, drove across the river and strode out along the Thames riverpath.

Tough on women, good for men, isn’t that what the sociologists say about marriage? What to do, what to do? What to say? Michael had made her happy. Michael showed up when Harriet had given up on the idea of love: she was too old, too cynical, too busy for all that. She was twenty-eight. The idea of being twenty-eight almost made her smile: young, but not so young, really. She was doing well at work then, with her own little flat, her own little car, her own friends. She’d got over it, the thing that had happened, the thing that made her feel different from other people. She’d cut herself off from her own family, but she’d overcome that as well. She was fine.

Then Michael came along. They’d been together less than a year when she got pregnant. He was so sure of everything, he calculated the risk involved and made the necessary arrangements. He proposed to her, and gave her a big, fat diamond engagement ring. She was shocked by how much she loved that ring. She was shocked by how happy that ring made her feel. A few swift months, fourteen years ago: they bought their house, got married and Jack was born—bang bang bang. And ever since then they’d been… accumulating.

And now he’d trashed everything. It was as though he’d opened the door of the house and thrown all their possessions into the street. It had never occurred to her that Michael might be unfaithful. It had never occurred to her that he was anything less than completely trustworthy.

Life was split open. Harriet’s past pushed through the crack. There were things that she regretted. Now was the time to act.

She spotted a bench farther up the path. When she reached it, she sat down and took a long look at the Thames. The tide was coming in high and the river flowed past Harriet in the wrong direction, heading inland instead of out to sea. She got out her phone and opened up Facebook to Emily’s page. She couldn’t contact her—not yet. She wasn’t ready. But there was someone else she could try.

She did a quick search and found him: George Sigo. Most of his information was private, for friends only. She was sure it was him, though; like many people their age, he used an old photo of himself in his profile. The photo was from around the time Harriet knew him, maybe even a bit before. A young George Sigo, 1986. The year Emily was born. Harriet wrote a brief message and pressed her finger lightly on the touchscreen. Easy.

On Monday morning, Jack was up and dressed and ready for school early. His parents were up as well, getting ready for work. They bumped around each other in the kitchen in a way that Jack thought was oddly normal, despite what had happened the day before. Jack’s mum had hit his dad. What the fuck? His dad seemed okay, but no one had ever hit anyone in Jack’s house. And then, after Jack’s mum hit his dad, she went out and stayed out all day. His dad spent the afternoon doing laundry and cooking. When his mum came in, she said she wasn’t feeling great and went upstairs to lie down. Jack and his dad ate dinner together and tried to converse, but Jack’s head was too full of unmentionables—his parents’ row, of course, which he did not want to talk about, but mainly David McDonald, and Ruby—he still hadn’t heard from Ruby. David McDonald was dead, and Jack did not want to have to tell his father he’d been at the party. Luckily for Jack, he wasn’t asking questions.

There was the problem of the bag of weed. He’d given the tablets to Ruby and had left the party with the bag of weed. Jack had to get rid of it. If the rumours were correct and the police were questioning everyone who had been to the party… his name might well be on some list somewhere. And the police might arrive, and they might search the house, and then what would happen? Jack pictured police officers rooting around his bedroom. If they found the drugs, maybe he’d be accused of dealing. They’d do their forensic thing on it and discover there’d been other drugs in the bag, and that maybe David McDonald had taken those missing drugs, and that maybe that was what had killed him. And that Jack was, in fact, responsible for his death.