You Against Me

Seventeen

Ellie sat on the harbour wall watching the boats bob up and down and listening to the rigging wires sing. She was cold and bored, because although the tide was going out and revealing the beach, nothing else was happening. The bloke fishing on the end of the jetty hadn’t caught a single thing in the last ten minutes, the sun wasn’t coming out and the mist wasn’t clearing.

The odd thing about it was that somewhere up there, the weather was fine. The sun was simply trapped behind a cobwebbed sky. Only a mile or two down the coast, the day was probably blazing. Perhaps Tom was enjoying a sunny game of golf with Freddie, or sitting in the clubhouse with a pint of cold cider in his hand.

She was still furious with him for leaving her in the middle of nowhere with only a fiver. There wasn’t a bus for hours and maybe he’d known that. He’d definitely known there was no way she was going to tell their parents he’d dumped her, because she’d get a massive bollocking for bunking school if she did.

She’d start walking back into town in a minute. It couldn’t be more than three miles and she thought she remembered the way. She’d wander round the shops, or maybe go to the library until school was out, then go to the gate and see if any of the girls in her year wanted to hang out. It was about time she had some friends. Maybe she’d even tell them about the river and the gatecrasher to make herself seem more interesting. They might not believe her of course, because no one believed her when she said she’d kissed Danny at the Christmas party. Sometimes she even wondered herself if any of the good things that happened to her were true, because they seemed fleeting compared to the bad things.

Even her amazing plan had gone wrong. She’d thought of it almost as soon as Tom had dumped her, and had immediately put it into action – the gatecrasher had said he worked in a pub by the harbour; well, then she would find him and spend the rest of the day sitting at the bar chatting to him.

The first pub she tried was the White Horse and it was full of old men clutching pints. They turned round en masse to stare at her when she opened the door, and although she managed to stutter that she was looking for someone who worked there, they all laughed at her, because the man behind the bar was about a hundred years old and was the only employee.

In the Earl of Mowbray, she was braver, even made it to the bar to ask if a boy worked there. She described him – dark, tall, about eighteen. The barman gave her a lewd smile and said, ‘Won’t I do, darling?’

She blushed furiously, and again she was laughed at.

‘What’s his name then, love?’ the barman said as she made her way back to the door. And Ellie realized that she still didn’t know, and the whole enterprise suddenly seemed ridiculous and humiliating. She’d wanted to walk in and see his smile, to sit down with him and have a drink. She’d imagined he’d give her a lift home, that they’d arrange to meet later. This day had seemed such a gift, but it was turning out to be worse than school.

She stood up to collect her bag, but was distracted by a sudden movement down on the jetty. The fisherman was unhooking his rod from its tripod and he must’ve caught something big, because the whole line was bending. Ellie leaned right over the harbour wall to see better.

And there, through the mist and cloud, a fish shimmered silver against the sky before crashing at the man’s feet. He bent down and grabbed it round the neck before it could slip back into the water. With his other hand he reached blindly down next to him and brought up a large stone.

Ellie leaned forward. He was going to kill it. Weren’t you supposed to chuck them back in?

The man lifted the stone above his head and, without even hesitating, smashed it down so hard that the fish’s head caved in. Even from where Ellie was standing, she could see its brains ooze onto the jetty.

She was stunned. One minute the fish had been thrashing and wild, gasping in air. And now it was dead. For the first time, the man looked up and noticed her.

‘Mackerel,’ he shouted.

Like knowing its name made a difference. She pretended she hadn’t heard because she didn’t want to have a conversation with a psychopathic fish-killer. She kept an eye on him while he put the fish in a bucket, then retied his line and whipped it back out to sea. Only when he sat down on his little seat, took out a lunchbox and unwrapped a sandwich did she stop watching him.

She sat back down on the wall for a second and wondered what would happen next. Maybe she’d plummet into the sea and get hypothermia. Or maybe psycho-man would creep up behind her and bash her on the head with his stone. Or maybe she’d be overcome by a vegetarian fury and creep up on him instead and kick him off the end of the jetty. Maybe she’d do something even braver than that – like steal a boat and sail to Scandinavia.

It began to amuse her. It was like that film Sliding Doors, where the tube doors closed on Gwyneth Paltrow. In one version of the story, she caught the train, met a lovely bloke called James and got home to find her boyfriend, Gerry, in bed with another woman. In the second version, she missed the train and ended up getting mugged.

Ellie had choices, didn’t she? Loads of them. Today, she’d expected to go to school, yet ended up at the harbour. Later, she’d go home and her parents would ask about her day and she could lie or tell the truth. Which course of action she chose would make an entirely different set of events occur.

That’s why Tom was mad at her – she could choose, and he couldn’t. She could agree to be his witness and say she saw nothing, or she could refuse. Maybe he was right and the police would question her again. They might even force her to go to court, but she didn’t have to open her mouth and say anything. How could they make her? What could they do?

She got up from the wall, determined. Here she was feeling sorry for herself, when all the time she had this amazing ability to decide what happened next. Well, she wasn’t giving up looking for the gatecrasher then, because he’d texted her five times, which meant he was keen, and over there was the tourist information office, and how many pubs could there be?

If she didn’t find him, time would have passed and then she’d get the bus home. If she did find him, she’d swish her hair about and lick her lips slowly and say, Well, hi, fancy meeting you here. Boys fell for that stuff.