Chapter 30 #2
‘You took the SIM card out of it,’ Euan shouts. He turns away, scrubs his hands over his face, trying to regain control of his emotions. His shoulders heave. ‘It’s fucking useless!’
‘No, I didn’t. Why would I do that?’ Leo examines his phone.
‘We’re idiots,’ Euan groans. ‘Didn’t even look at the phone until we were most of the way down the track, and by then it was too late. No SIM, no network. It bloody says it on the screen, but we didn’t check. You gave us the phone, Leo. Why didn’t you tell us? Why did you take the SIM out?’
‘I didn’t,’ Leo repeats, more forcefully. He stares at his screen. ‘It was fine, I’m sure of it …’
Euan tugs off his jacket and chucks it over the back of a chair where it drips on the floor. Becca doesn’t say anything, but I see her eyes drift to the water puddling beneath his coat.
‘Let me see.’ I need to see it for myself. Leo wordlessly hands me his phone, and I study the screen, read the words No SIM in the top corner. ‘Shit.’
Silence falls. We sit for a long moment in disbelief.
Leo keeps pressing buttons on his phone as if he can somehow coax it back to life.
Becca surreptitiously grabs a piece of newspaper and places it beneath Euan’s dripping jacket, holds out a hand for Jameson’s coat and leaves the room to hang it up.
Jameson rests his arm across the back of my chair and shifts towards me.
I feel the chill of his skin through his top.
Euan reaches for the wine bottle and pours himself a glass which he downs in one.
Kimmy begins to tidy up the game – playtime is over.
When Becca comes back into the room, her jaw is set. ‘Right. If someone is playing silly buggers then they need to come clean. If this is some elaborate joke, or set-up, it’s sick.’ She looks around the room, her eyes resting on each of us in turn.
‘We need to look for the missing phones,’ Euan says. He stretches out a hand to her. Becca returns to his side, and their fingers link together, finding some sort of solidarity on the other side of Becca’s misstep.
This is bigger than some stupid, drunken kiss, and they realise it, holding together instead of peeling apart.
Kimmy tilts her head. ‘Look where?’
He shrugs. ‘Everywhere.’
‘What was the road like?’ I ask Jameson. I don’t want to think about the phones. Especially Alex’s phone. ‘Did you reach the main gates?’
‘It’s unbelievable out there,’ Jameson says, shaking his head. ‘Armageddon.’
Euan says, ‘It took the best part of an hour to cover a mile. No one’s getting through until there’s a thaw.’
Becca won’t let up. ‘We need to look for the phones now.’
‘Jameson and I are knackered and you lot have been drinking on an empty stomach,’ Euan says. ‘Let me just heat something up.’
*
I don’t even hesitate when Jameson taps my arm and jerks his head towards the door.
We go upstairs to the library, where Jameson builds a fire and holds a match to the paper, watching as it catches the kindling piled in a pyramid.
We sit on the floor before the flames, shoulder-to-shoulder.
I can’t imagine eating, but despite my tortured thoughts my stomach growls. I’ll eat whatever Euan is preparing.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say, ‘how the SIM card could just fall out of Leo’s phone—’
‘It couldn’t,’ Jameson says. ‘Not without someone taking it out. You need one of those little tools, or a paperclip or something. It’s not possible for it to just fall out.’
‘Leo?’ I say, and Jameson shrugs.
I didn’t do it – there’s no gaping passage of time, no blurred memories. I didn’t have Leo’s phone in my hand at any point, I’m sure of that …
Am I though?
I’m not sure of anything anymore.
Every time I think I’ve absolved myself, something makes me doubt again.
The muddy carpet, my wet leggings, Alex’s phone, the bloody bow tie …
I half expect that were I to go upstairs right now I’d find Leo’s SIM card stashed somewhere in my bedroom …
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Jameson says. ‘I was so sure what happened to Alex was an accident … But our phones are gone and now Leo’s has been tampered with, I just don’t get it.’
My head is spinning again with too many thoughts.
Jameson puts his arm around me, and I lean my head on his shoulder.
I wish this were happening between us in any other way, at any other time.
I feel him looking at me and turn my head.
His eyes are all I see, and I let myself get lost in them.
He leans towards me, or perhaps we both do.
Gazes dart: eyes to lips and back again.
His hand moves to my jawline, fingertip touches so tender. His lips brush mine, soft, warm and perfect. I close my eyes and start to sink, but something jolts me from the moment, makes me pull away.
A pounding heartbeat – the reminder that I cannot trust myself, that I don’t know my own mind anymore. That Alex is dead and we’re trapped here.
I can’t do this with Jameson. Not with everything hanging over me.
I pull away from him, run out of the library and along the long gallery with the dead gazes of the paintings following me. A fresh surge of memory assaults me as I’m nearing the stairs and I have to pause, my hand on the banister for balance. West Sands tugs me back again, a relentless tide.
I’m standing on the highest point of the dunes at the end of the beach, gazing down at the swelling channel of water that joins river to sea.
Dawn is a pale line separating sea from sky and the clouds are choppy overhead.
I feel the sensation of eyes on me again, and this time when I turn I see the shape of someone, before an arm snaking round me, the press of a body behind mine.
A hand slips over my mouth suppressing my scream and a voice whispers in my ear.
Ssh …