herself stumbling to her feet, dusting off her jeans and attempting an upright position.
‘Come on, we can’t come to the river and not swing. Who’s going to boost me?’
Karen had opened one eye lazily, looked at her and closed it again.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t go swimming with the amount you’ve had to drink.’
‘You’re wrong.’ Bea poked a finger in the direction of her friend, despite Karen not being able to see her. ‘That’s eating. You can’t go swimming until two hours after you’ve eaten. There’s no law on drinking.’
‘Karen’s right, Bea.’
But Bea wasn’t listening. She was already wrapping the rope around her wrist, wedging her foot against the tree to boost herself up. She’d grown taller since the last time she was there, slimmed down a bit too, and it was easier than she’d expected to pull herself on to the seat without any help. It wedged uncomfortably between her legs and the branch above groaned almost theatrically, but she’d consumed too much alcohol to notice, or maybe just too much to care. She kicked her legs against the tree, sending herself spinning out over the river, closing her eyes to stop the alcohol surging back up into her throat. When she opened them again, the world was a blur of green and brown, the trees, the bank, the river itself all merged together so completely that she couldn’t pick out what was what any more.
That was how her whole life felt, the days blurring into night, alcohol blurring the edges until every day seeped into the next, indistinguishable from the last. Even Karen and Eleanor didn’t know the extent of how much she’d been drinking, how her tutor had told her that if she came back in the same state she’d left in, then she might as well not bother.
The crack of the seat had sounded to Bea like a gunshot echoing out over the river. She was falling almost before she’d registered what was happening, the force of entry and the temperature of the water sucking the air from her lungs. Instinctively her legs kicked towards the surface and she pulled in gulps of air. Shock gave way to relief and she was about to wave to the two women screaming on the bank that she was okay when the current yanked her under.
Every time she’d thought about the incident since, it was with humour. She and Eleanor laughed – remember when you were so wasted you almost drowned in the river? – but Karen refused to talk about it ever again. Karen had never gone back to that stretch of the river after Eleanor had waded in to drag her friend on to the bank, pounded on her chest weeping until Bea had coughed up half of the river and half of her stomach contents at the same time. Maybe it was because she’d frozen – capable Karen frozen stiff in an emergency. She’d never been in the river all the time Bea had known her, but after that she treated it almost as an enemy, a physical being that had conspired to remove her friend from the world. In time, as they realised, they stopped talking about the episode in front of her.
Bea herself had been scared enough to spend a few days off the alcohol, and then it had seemed less necessary to get blasted every day. She’d gone back to university more or less sober and spent her Saturday nights catching up on what she’d missed the year before rather than searching for something she couldn’t put into words and trying to prove to herself that she was unaffected by her experience. She had allowed herself to heal. So in a way the river had been the third-best friend she’d ever had. It had saved her life once and maybe it would work again, she thought now as she pulled herself upright and launched herself into the water.
39
Karen
The café was practically empty when Karen arrived. She was surprised to find that she was first – normally the other two were already there, heads together conspiratorially, when she walked in. She ordered them a pot of tea and three slices of chocolate cake and pulled out her iPad to check if any emails had come through in the fifteen minutes since leaving the office. It might sound crazy, but she had to keep herself busy – unfilled time was thinking time, and she couldn’t bear too much of that. There was nothing new in