She went back to Logan’s profile page.

Refresh.

Refresh.

Refresh.

Nothing. Of course. No likes for her comment. Why would anyone like it?

She put her phone back in her pocket and picked up two stones from the beach. She put one in her pocket and felt the heft of the other in her palm, the solidity of the earth it had once been a part of. She hurled it as hard as she could into the water, yanking her shoulder and elbow in the process.

She was weak these days. She’d lost weight in the last six months, and she didn’t have a lot to lose in the first place. But eating seemed irrelevant. She was wasting away, on hunger strike against the oblivion of the universe, refusing to take part in the basic chemical process of converting food into energy.

She rubbed at her throwing arm, felt the raw skin. Pushed her sleeve up to examine the tattoo. It was a decent likeness of the bridge, not perfect, but good enough. Still scabby and sore. She liked that period best, when the tattoos hurt. It was her seventh in six months, up her arms, across her back, down her sides. All connected to Logan and the firth. The road bridge, his name, his dates, the rail bridge, a boat and an island. A porpoise arching up her leg. She used to call Logan her little porpoise when he was a toddler, after they saw one together from the Binks, its snubnose pushing through the wash.

Ellie knew the tattoos were compulsive but she didn’t care. Ben never said anything. He had his own strategy to get him through, they didn’t judge each other for coping however they could.

She scratched at her scabby arm, gazed at the water and thought about what lay under the surface. Junk, sunken boats, dead bodies, the ones they never recover. All of it hidden in hundreds of millions of tons of water. Imagine if the seas of the world dried up, what treasures we would find.

She looked at the bridge again. Tried to think about breathing. In and out, in and out. She turned to walk up there.

‘I’m coming,’ she said.

2

It felt good to be moving. That’s something she’d learned over the last six months, physical exercise was a way of keeping the worst of it at bay.

She strode up Rose Lane away from the Binks and the waterfront, on to Hopetoun Road then left, away from Shore Road and up the hill. After a few minutes the road went under the approach to the bridge, colossal concrete legs supporting the thunder of traffic overhead. She turned left again up the steep access road, feeling the gradient, pushing her legs into it, enjoying the strain on her calves and thighs.

For the first two months after Logan died she did nothing. She took the pills they gave her, cried in her sleep and awake, puked most things she tried to eat, and thought about killing herself. She sat in the house or on the beach, staring at the bridge, wishing she was dead.

Then one day she went in the water.

A paddle at first, just to feel the waves on her toes, to touch the body of water that had killed her son. Then she stripped off and dived in, right there on the Binks. The cold of the firth was shocking, but she embraced it. It was the first time she’d felt alive since it happened. She’d been a strong swimmer before, capable and determined, with solid technique, but she’d grown soft in her time away from the water, and she struggled. That was good, though.

She swam east along the coast, round the harbour, the old town of South Queensferry on her right. Her breathing was heavy, pressure on her lungs, her arms and legs stinging with cold and tiredness, her mind empty of everything except trying to keep going. But her heart was raging with power, she could feel it trying to escape her chest.

She headed back into shore at Hawes Pier, where the tourist boats left for Inchcolm Island. She was gasping for air, bent over in just her bra and pants, a drookit skeleton of a thing, her pallid flesh slick and oily from the dirty water of the firth. The tourists on the pier gawped at her, a monster from the deep, as they sat licking their ice creams.

She walked back along the town’s main street, dripping and shivering, everyone pretending to ignore her. Maybe some knew what had happened to Logan. None of them wanted to get involved with a crazy woman, half-naked and shaking. She began to feel like she was slipping into death again, so she started running, bare feet slapping the pavement, dodging round mothers with buggies, old couples taking in the sea air. She wanted to stop and scream at them all that it wasn’t worth it, that all the love in the world would die when their loved ones died. But she didn’t, she just kept running and running.

And then she was back where she started, at the Binks, her little pile of clothes like a deflated human being, crumpled on the pebbles.

She was at the top of the access road now. She U-turned on to the approach to the bridge. A maintenance van was parked by the visitor centre, and she recognised the man inside. Gerry. She’d spoken to him often, he was nearly pension age, had kids and grandkids, and he knew about Logan. He’d stopped to chat to her on the bridge several times over the months. The day after her swim along the firth she came up to the bridge, and had done so every day since. It was company policy for bridge employees to engage in conversation with anyone lingering on the bridge. The staff had all done suicide prevention training as standard procedure.

So when she’d stopped at the place Logan had jumped from, in the middle of the bridge, it was only a few minutes until the little yellow van came out to see her. Not that five minutes was quick enough to save Logan, who was up and over the railing in thirty seconds. She didn’t blame the bridge staff, she didn’t blame Logan. She only ever blamed herself.

Since that day it had become a familiar routine. Go down to the waterfront, stare out to sea, look at the bridge, imagine it all, churn it around. Sometimes go for a swim, depending how dead she felt. Then head up to the bridge and chew it over again from up there. It probably hurt more than it helped but Ellie didn’t care, the methodical repetition of it gave her something to hold on to.

She turned away from Gerry’s sad smile before he could open the van window and speak to her. She didn’t feel like engaging with him today. She walked along the bridge approach. As always she was amazed by the roar of the traffic, the brazen exposure to the elements up here, the scale of this massive intrusion into nature.

She looked at the warning signs, like she did every day.

PERSONS UNDER 14 MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT

Logan was fifteen, so that wasn’t a problem. Had he wanted to do it for years, but waited to make sure he obeyed the law? Stupid, stupid.

IT IS AN OFFENCE TO THROW OBJECTS FROM THE BRIDGE

Did that include yourself? She knew now that suicide itself wasn’t a crime in Scotland, but if you fucked it up and lived you could get done for breach of the peace. Imagine the indignity of that, not only had you failed to die but you’d turned yourself into a criminal in the process.

Ellie stroked the smooth stone in her pocket, the second one she lifted from the Binks. She’d done this every day too, taken something from the shore, brought it up and dropped it over. She didn’t know why, just needed to do it. What were they going to do, arrest her?

WARNING

LOW RAILINGS WITH WIDE GAPS

YOUNG CHILDREN MUST BE CLOSELY SUPERVISED

AT ALL TIMES

How young was young? Had she supervised Logan closely enough? Every day as a parent you had to strike a balance between protection and independence. The first walk to school alone, the first sleepover, staying out after dark. That loss of control over your child was a terrifying slow death. At some point you have to let them grow up, that’s what they say about teenagers. But what if they choose not to grow up at all?