I’d usually have found a place to be alone and hide everything – but I didn’t want to move in case the feeling went away. It was the village that caused that. It was that smell.
I could tell you I was upset about Dad, but it wouldn’t be true… not completely. It was those feelings of the life I’d lost.
At the sentencing, my solicitor talked about ‘genuine remorse’ and it always stuck with me. He said: ‘She has genuine remorse for what happened’ and it felt like one of those things a lawyer would say. I bet everyone has ‘genuine remorse’ because it makes their sentences shorter. Except, I was actually broken by it.
Properly broken.
I could barely dress myself, or get out of bed. I wasn’t eating. I had to be reminded to drink. People would whisper about me and wonder if I was planning to kill myself.
And, as I sat outside that café, all I could think about was how younger me had walked through this village, had drunk the tea and eaten the fish. How she’d never have been able to guess the person I’d become.
So, yeah, I cried for myself.
Julius: I don’t think I visited the village once on that trip. Why would I?
Emma: We went to the island so often that it would have been impossible not to pick up a little of the local dialect. I’m not saying I’m bilingual, but I do know the odd word and sentence, plus I can generally get the gist of what someone means.
I was sitting at that table and there were these two men standing near the café door talking to each other. I heard the word ‘beach’ and ‘fall’, plus what I thought was the word ‘British’. I turned around and asked the man who was talking if he was the person who’d found Dad on the beach.
He only knew a few words of English, but we managed to figure it out through a mixture of the two languages.
I told him I was staying at the hotel and that my dad had fallen the night before. He came across and held my hand. He knew the word for ‘sorry’ and kept saying it, before the café owner had to help us piece together the next bit.
He was saying a word that sounded like ‘smock’. I’m probably pronouncing it wrong. The owner was saying ‘fall’, ‘fall’ – and I didn’t get it. I felt like such an idiot because what he was trying to say was that the man hadn’t just found my dad on the beach, he’d seen him fall.
Julius: Sometimes Emma hears what she wants to hear.
Emma: The man said he was walking on the beach and heard a noise from up on the cliffs. It was dark by then, so he didn’t realise what was happening. He saw a shadow and thought it might have been a tree branch falling. It was only when he got closer that he realised it was a person… that it was Dad.
He said he’d already talked to Jin about it that morning because he was sure the noise he’d heard from the cliff wasn’t just a voice. He said it was voices…
Chapter Seven
THE STUPID SENSE OF ENVY
Emma: I can’t remember how I felt when I was walking up the hill from the village. I’ve been on that beach and, when it’s quiet, it’s almost as if it absorbs all the noises from around and above. You can hear boats from the other side of the island, or chatter drifting from the village. Perhaps he had heard voices from above – but that wasn’t proof Dad was with someone.
It also wasn’t proof that he was alone.
Claire: It was sometime on the morning after Geoff fell that I went for a walk on my own. I didn’t know the layout of the island but ended up on the beach underneath the cliff. I was following one of the paths at the side of the hotel, wondering where it went. I’d not necessarily planned to be there.
The main thing I remember is how noisy it was down there. It was this little cove that seemed like it was sheltered by the cliff. You’d think it would be this peaceful postcard, but, instead, it was like all the sounds from the island converged there. There were birds chirping and car engines rumbling. There was nobody anywhere near me, but it felt like I was in a crowd. Then,