She shakes her head impatiently and heads out into the park.
The rain has died off and the park smells of damp and doughnuts. Over the babel, beyond the howls from the rollercoaster, Amber can dimly hear the crash and drag of the sea. She walks and pauses, only half aware of the surging crowd, and considers her options. She has been in Whitmouth for years, but has never ridden its famous roller coaster. She was too poor to afford the entrance fee when she first arrived here, and lately familiarity has rendered her almost immune to its existence, beyond the need to scrape and scrub its surfaces clear of chewing-gum.
She shakes her head, like a horse under attack by a fly. It’s not work-time yet. She refuses to allow herself to think about work until her shift begins. It’s intruded enough on her day already and, as days go, anyone would say that it had been a bad one. It was a mistake, facing Jade, thinking she was ever going to get a resolution; she knows that. She sets out to the head of the queue.
The roller coaster is always staffed by teenagers and early-twenty-somethings, a crew employed on the basis of their looks. It’s Funnland’s most prominent attraction, and policy dictates that the showpiece ride should have the showpiece staff. They even dress differently from the rest of the park staff: jewel-like in wasp-yellow Bermuda shorts and skin-tight scarlet T-shirts with the ride’s EXXPLODE!! logo scrawled across the front. She knows them all, of course. Two are the offspring of her own staff and one, a girl called Helen, lives four doors down on Tennyson Way, and is on her way to Manchester Uni and the big wide world in the autumn.
Helen’s on the gate now. Undoes the staff barrier and lets Amber through. ‘Hi, Mrs Gordon,’ she says. ‘How are you?’
‘Good, thanks,’ lies Amber.
‘Is there something up?’ asks Helen with polite concern. Amber is always amused, the way this girl talks to adults as though they were teachers, in an era when even teachers don’t get talked to like teachers. ‘Do we need to suspend?’
‘No, no,’ says Amber. ‘Nothing like that. It just suddenly hit me that I’ve been working here six years and I’ve never once ridden this thing.’
‘Ooh,’ says Helen, and laughs. ‘Ooh, how funny. I rode it about six times a day, the first week I was here.’
‘Yes. Of course, I’m not here when it’s working, most of the time.’
‘No,’ says Helen. ‘I guess not. Anyway. Let’s sort that out.’
She waves a hand at the front boarding gate, where four people – the winners of the queuing system – stand proudly awaiting the next train. ‘Get yourself in the line for car one and you can get on the ride after next.’
Amber quails slightly at the thought of being at the front. Her natural comfort zone would be better served by having some other cars, rather than clear air, in front of her. But she knows she’s being honoured, and concedes. As she takes her place, she is rewarded with the silent, baleful scrutiny the British reserve for queue jumpers.
The train pulls in and the queuers close ranks, as though they expect her to push in. Amber stands back to preserve their blood pressure, turns away and surveys the park.
On the far side of the concourse, the staff gate opens and a knot of people steps through. She recognises one of them as Suzanne Oddie, and sees that she is surrounded by the deep blue and health-and-safety yellow of what can only be police uniforms. She doesn’t think much of it. There have been police in and out of the park since the murder, and there’s the odd copper in here every day, even in the quiet times. She moves to the front of the gate as a new wave of riders is let through from the main queue, sees a sea of disappointed faces as they catch sight of her standing there. There’s hardly ever just one single seat taken on a row. People like to ride in pairs: courage in numbers.
What’s Jade doing now? she wonders. Did she find our little tea as disturbing as I did? My God. I had no idea. All this time I’d thought she’d be like me: trained by fear, squashed by shame, ducking out of harm’s way, keeping her head down. And now I know that everything was different for her, I’ll never be able to forget it. I’ve let the genie out of the bottle. It won’t go back.
It’s not fair. It’s not bloody fair.
A train thunders overhead and her skin tingles with the change of air pressure. It’s been designed that way so that the screams from above will raise adrenalin levels. With three trains on the circuit, you hear this twice while you’re queuing, and, whatever your rational brain tells you, your lizard brain is primed, by the time the safety bars clamp down, to believe that it faces danger. For Amber, accustomed to waiting in the dark for the sound of approaching footsteps, to striving never to attract attention, it’s a disturbing sound. She wants to turn tail and flee. But her train is rumbling to a stop and the passengers behind her are bunching to board, and she knows it’s too late. As the riders before her detrain on to the far platform, she steps with wobbly ankles into the pod and takes her seat.
Shit, what am I doing? she asks herself. This is a crazy, stupid thing. It’s more like punishment than pleasure. But maybe that’s exactly why I’m doing it. I feel bad, so now I’m beating myself up. I’m doing what I was trained to do. After all, in a place like Blackdown Hills, the best they hoped for was that we’d own the blame and learn to take our punishment.
The harness comes down, clunks into place. Pin-down. The people next to her breathe, laugh and throw each other anticipation-filled looks. Amber grips the padded shoulder bars and closes her eyes. Gulps. I hate things like this. That’s the real reason I never go on them. Every other reason is just an excuse. Over and over in my life, I’ve felt like I was falling out of control. There’s no way I’d volunteer to feel like that for fun.
‘Hold tight, here we go,’ bellows the automated announcer, and the wheels lock into place on the track. Oh shit, thinks Amber. There’s nothing I can do to stop it now.
She remembers her first night at Blackdown Hills. Still screaming after the sentence, her throat hoarse but her voice carrying on unbidden. The shower, half cold, the ache of medicated soap, the empty, falling blackness. My mum. She wasn’t even there in court. They hate me. I am their disgrace. She remembers black night through the bars on the windows, the falling silence as she walked, late and damp and frightened, into the mess hall for the first time. Hard, speculating eyes turning to check out the notorious newcomer. Officer Hills pushing her forward by an arm, no sympathy in her demeanour.
They reach the crest of the first climb. There is nothing between her and the track, clear air before the plunge. The train creeps forward, gathers momentum and clunks violently to a halt, throwing her forward against the restraints. She is hanging face-down, a hundred feet of drop before her. She feels her stomach lurch. The woman next to her starts to cackle nervously.
Lying awake. It was at Blackdown Hills that she learned not to sleep. After lights-out was the feral time, when girl gangs stalked the corridors and misfits wept with fear. Bel Oldacre, awake in the dark, ready to claw her way through the walls as, night after night, she listened to the click and scritch of metal as people tried the lock on her barricaded door. Sometimes a muffled cry or the sound of a chase invaded the darkness. They knew who she was. Of course they did. How many twelve-year-olds who talked like the Queen were there in the country’s institutions?
I can’t go back there. It would kill me.
The train lets go. Her heart bounces off her spine and the woman next door lets out a howl of joy and terror. The drizzle hanging in the air is a million pinpricks. She realises that she has bared her teeth in fear. The track disappears in front of her; all she sees is emptiness and, impossibly far away but looming at ever-increasing velocity, the million stones of Whitmouth beach.