Read The Long Fall for Free Online

the Clash, the Police, and The Damned.
    She could picture Tilly now, lying on her big, red, velvet sledge of a bed, reading and letting the music swirl around her. Even if she wasn’t going to come down, it was good to know she was so close.
    She picked up the bottle and glass, padded across the surgically clean glossy white floor of the vast, open-plan living space and turned on the TV, aiming to find something easy and mindless to take her brain away from what she had already tagged Tilly’s Bombshell.
    The whole business reminded Kate of when, shortly after Martha had been taken away from them, Tilly had gone crazy over animals and started begging for a cat. It seemed that the more Kate argued that her own allergies rendered owning anything other than a hamster out of the question, the more her daughter claimed she needed one. In the same way Tilly had chosen, of all the nations in the world, the three places which, were allergies to countries a possibility, would have made her mother very ill indeed.
    France and Italy would make breathing difficult, but, bad as they were, they were mere staging posts on the way to anaphylactic-shock-inducing Greece, scene of the most terrible thing Kate had ever done.
    If only she could tell Tilly. But it was out of the question.
    As the TV came to life, Kate was confronted by the reverse of the brain massage she was seeking: that damn Face of Kindness image, this time framing an item on Newsnight about girls and schooling in West Africa. No doubt this was Sophie’s work, to ‘keep up the momentum’.
    Kate passed her hand over her eyes. She had consented to do only one TV interview to coincide with the photo winning the prize. Initially, she had felt guilty about her reticence to parade herself everywhere, but relief now far outweighed all that.
    Nevertheless, something niggled inside her: a sense of things falling out of her control. She had never intended to become what the newsreader was describing on the voiceover to the image as the founder and figurehead of Martha’s Wish. She had only ever wanted to balance out the bad she had done in the world with a little good, working behind the scenes and turning the awful (Martha’s death) into the wonderful (schools for girls). But Sophie said she was needed to add personality to the brand.
    ‘Like Bob Geldof and Band Aid,’ she had said.
    After a discussion about the merits or otherwise of the photograph – including a coruscating contribution from a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a striking young woman with beaded plaits tied up in a Kente cloth, who accused Kate of being little else than a twenty-first-century imperial invader – the programme moved on to an item about a polar bear in a provincial zoo who was displaying bipolar disorder symptoms. Kate flicked off the volume, stretched out on the vast sofa, hugged a cushion to herself, and settled back for the next item: footage of bloody riots in one of the West African countries where Martha’s Wish was building schools for girls.
    She watched a young man being pushed over, his head being stamped on by a soldier who couldn’t have been much older than fourteen. The camera lingered, for just one second, on the blood pooling around the man on the ground’s hair, then it jolted up again to rejoin the fray.
    The world was such a dangerous place. Couldn’t Tilly just be satisfied with staying in her velvet room with her books and her Sondheim?
    Kate closed her eyes.

EMMA
     
    26 July 1980, 1 p.m. Somewhere between Marseille and Nice. Train.
     
    I’ve escaped.
    I’m done with France.
    It’s been three days and I haven’t felt like writing. So, along with my body and brain, that bastard’s fucked that up for me as well.
    I’m not going to let him win, though. So here are my words.
    Thought seriously about going home and forgetting all about this travelling on my own bollocks. But I can’t. Not after all the talking I did, all the arguing with