by Rachel Ward
The air is hot and thick. It feels like the oxygen has been squeezed out of it. My room is like a sauna, the walls themselves sweating and sighing. On my desk, the salad Mum brought is already looking wilted and tired.
I don’t even try to go to sleep. I strip off and put on some clean pants and a vest top, and sit on my bed, on top of the covers. I don’t look at my phone. I don’t open my laptop. I sit and stare into space and wait for this horrible day to be over.
The room grows dark around me and still I sit and stare. My eyes start playing tricks on me, seeing colours in the darkness that aren’t there. Voices from the street outside sound like they’re drifting in from another planet. The people they belong to are aliens – people with ordinary lives, with friends who are all still alive and families who don’t have secrets. They’ve never been scared of their own dad. They’re not like me.
The phone vibrates, buzzing over and over again.
The screen flares into life as I unlock it and check my inbox.
Milton.
My imaginary boyfriend.
What does he want?
Nic, you okay?
Yeh. Kind of.
Sorry about Christie. That sucks so bad.
Thnx.
I think I’ve found the rubber ducky.
?
Click this link.
I open it. It’s from a news site, from seventeen years ago. No photos, only text.
LOCAL BOY: DEATH BY MISADVENTURE
Kingsleigh boy, Robert ‘Rob’ Adams, aged 17, died after an outing to a local beauty spot went tragically wrong. An inquest into his death, on 24th September 2013, heard that he had gone swimming in the Imperial Park lake after school with his younger brother, Carl, and their friend, Neisha Gupta. Ignoring warning signs, the three had been in the lake for a few minutes when they got caught in a violent rainstorm. Carl and Neisha managed to make their way out of the lake, but the body of Robert was found soon afterwards. He had drowned. Mr Oliver Townsend, the coroner, ruled that it was death by misadventure.
I read it twice, then again.
There was a brother.
My dad had a brother.
A brother who drowned.
EIGHTEEN
I read the article again. Of course Dad’s terrified of water. His brother drowned. And Mum was there too. They were both in it together – this trauma, this terrible, terrible thing.
No wonder he’s paranoid about water.
Another message from Milton: What do you think?
Explains a lot.
Mm. I reckon.
Why secret tho?
Sad I guess. Too sad.
I put my phone down and lean back again. My eyes are filling up, big fat tears threatening to spill out. Poor Dad. He’s lived with this all this time, and it obviously hasn’t got any easier. And why should it? How can you possibly cope with losing the person you’ve shared your childhood with? And it all hurt too much to talk about. Wow.
My phone pings again. I lean over.
More links here.
I’m not sure I need any more. This is it, isn’t it? This explains everything. I’ve been thinking that my dad’s going mad, and in a way he has, but he’s going mad with grief, a grief he hasn’t been able to get over for seventeen years.
I look at the clock. Two forty-three. God, I must have fallen asleep. I’m tired, but not sleepy. I scroll back up to a previous message: More links here. Won’t do any harm to look. They might help me to understand Dad’s story, his experience.
I click on the top one. It’s another news article, this time from a few months earlier, a report of the drowning itself. There are pictures this time, the sort of photos that get taken at school – you know, headshots of kids with slicked-down hair and uncertain smiles. One of them’s obviously Mum: Neisha Gupta at sixteen. She was beautiful. Smooth black hair, almond-shaped eyes, with a hint of sparkle in them.
The other picture is of two boys: brothers, one a couple of years younger than the other. I look from one to the other and back again. They both look like my dad – the same blue-grey eyes, sloped down at the outside edges, the same square jawline. The younger one is looking to one side of the camera, unsure of himself. The other one, the older boy, is staring straight at the lens. There’s something about his expression – he’s kind of cocky, like he’s winding the photographer up. I’m looking at Dad’s brother. Robert ‘Rob’ Adams, the uncle I never knew.
Except that I do know him.
I’ve seen his face before. I saw it today.
It’s the face of the boy in the pool.
NINETEEN
I stare at the face on the screen. This isn’t right. It can’t be.
The caption: Carl Adams, 15 (left) and Robert ‘Rob’ Adams, 17 (right)
Dad and his brother. A brother who died in 2013.
My uncle.
Who looks like – who is, surely – the boy who visits me underwater.
That’s insane – it doesn’t make any sense. He died seventeen years ago.
It must be someone that looks like him – maybe a relative, a distant cousin or someone, maybe even his son. That’s what my brain is saying, trying to find a logical explanation. But my heart is telling me something different. I know – I’ve known all along, haven’t I? – that this boy isn’t like anyone else.
He died before I was born.
He exists underwater.
He’s not . . . mortal.
He’s something else. An echo of the person he used to be.
My phone blinks off into energy-saving mode. I touch the screen to wake it up, then reach forward and let my thumb trace the shape of his face. The blue-grey eyes stare back at me.
I’m scared now, but also it feels like things are slotting into place. He knew me, didn’t he? He used my name when I hadn’t told it to him. There was a reason that he found me, not the other girls in the pool. There’s a connection. It’s starting to make sense in a crazy, screwed-up sort of way.
Maybe I shouldn’t feel scared. Maybe I should feel lucky.
We don’t have a printer – I don’t know anyone who does – but I wish we did. I’d love to print out Rob’s picture. Instead, I save the image to my gallery. He’ll be there now, whenever I need him.
Sometime, somehow, I’ve got to have the ‘I know you had a brother’ conversation with Dad. But can I ever tell him that I’ve seen him, that he talks to me?
Should I tell Milton about it? How much should I say?
I’m not sure I can tell anyone, say any of this out loud.
I check the clock again. Three-fifty. I need to be up in a couple of hours’ time – Saturday morning swimming. Will it even be happening, after what happened to Christie?
My eyelids are feeling heavy. I put my phone on standby and slide down the pillows. I close my eyes, and now, instead of Christie, all I see is the photo from 2013. Blue-grey eyes. Slicked-down hair that’s still a bit of a mess. And that look, a kind of Well? What are you going to do about it? look.
Rob Adams. My uncle. Somehow frozen in time, as a seventeen-year-old boy.
He’s out there somewhere. He’s waiting for me in the water.
TWENTY
Early morning. First light making a pale oblong of the window at the end of the pool. A hush in this rectangular space. A moment of peace.
Training was cancelled. None of the other girls are here. And so I can just swim, do the thing that I love, feel normal for a while.
Unbelievably, Harry is at the lifeguard post. He’s slumped in the chair, staring across the pool. I stop near the bottom of the ladder.
‘What are you doing here?’ I say.
He looks down at me, and there’s no light, no spark. He could be looking at something on the bottom of his shoe.
‘Couldn’t sit at home any longer looking at the walls.’
‘She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she?’
He nods. ‘She was the best.’
I thought I could handle this, but I�
�m stung.
‘Gee, thanks,’ I say.
‘What?’
I look round. No one else is here.
‘What about us?’ I hiss.
‘What do you mean?’ He looks genuinely confused. ‘There was no “us”.’
‘All the phone stuff. The photos.’
I can see the truth dawning on him. Maybe now I’ll get an apology, or maybe he’ll express some guilt over doing the dirty on Christie.
‘Oh, that. That was nothing. Everyone does that.’
‘I don’t believe you. It wasn’t nothing to me.’
He smiles and shakes his head.
‘It’s time somebody grew up. Some people . . .’
‘It wasn’t nothing! And I had no idea you were seeing Christie. I’d never have—’
‘Oh, come on. Everyone knew. Christie couldn’t keep a secret to save her life . . .’ He stops, realising what he’s said, then continues: ‘She was the real deal. She was awesome.’
His eyes glaze over and although he’s looking in my direction, I know he can’t see me. He’s seeing Christie, hearing her voice, remembering . . .
I walk towards the deep end with his words ringing in my ears.
That was nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I don’t want to cry. What right have I got? Christie’s dead. All that’s happened to me is some waste-of-space boy has hurt my feelings. He’s not worth crying over. I wipe my arm across my eyes, stand at the edge of the pool, look at the perfect flat water, and dive.
I stretch my body, reaching forward through shades of turquoise. Light filtering through the water. A dark blue highway of tiles between me and the other end.
He’s there, beside me. The boy called Rob. He doesn’t seem to be moving his arms and legs, yet he swims alongside me, keeping pace, his pale body parallel to mine. He’s so close I could almost touch him.
Rob.
You know my name.
I know who you are.
Was. That was a long time ago.
Seventeen years. So why are you here now? What do you want?
I’ve been looking for you. I’ve been playing our game, Nicola. Hide-and-seek. Remember?
I don’t know what he’s talking about. Hide-and-seek?
I found you before, and then I lost you. Someone took you away from me. I’ve been looking ever since.
What do you want?
I want what’s mine. I want what’s owing.
His face looms nearer. I can see the pores on his skin, the spots and sores, the streaks of mud.
I don’t understand.
Just swim. You belong in the water, Nicola. You belong here with me.
I shouldn’t have come here this morning. It feels wrong now, trying to carry on as if nothing has happened. Disrespectful to Christie. And if I hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have seen Harry. And I wouldn’t be talking with my dead uncle. He wouldn’t be in my face. Close. Too close.
I want to get out.
You’re upset.
I think . . . I think I’ve made a mistake.
This is your place, Nicola. The water is yours.
I shouldn’t have come here today.
Give me those feelings. Give them to me.
Trust me, you don’t want them.
Trust me, I do.
I need to breathe.
Who’s upset you? Give me their names.
Harry. Mum. Dad.
There’s a noise in my ear, a breath, a hiss.
Forget them. You’re better than all of them. The best. Just breathe. And swim. Give yourself to the water.
I break the surface, take a long breath in and dip under again. And the more I swim, the better I feel. My limbs feel longer and stronger. There’s power in my shoulders and hips.
I cut through the water, lap after lap. Everything else falls away. There’s only the physical movement of arms and legs and neck. The rhythm of breathing. Break the surface, breathe in. Under again, push the air out, long and slow.
I swim until the pool starts to fill up with the early-morning casual swimmers: old women and men who have already been awake for hours, walking in the shallows or breast-stroking ponderously to the deep end; hairy-backed men in too-small trunks and nose clips; professional amateurs who line up a water bottle and a couple of floats at the end of a lane. I don’t let any of them put me off. I just plough up and down, hardly feeling my body any more, numb through repetition.
Rob is still with me, but I can’t see him. He’s quiet now, but I know he’s here.
I pause at the deep end, holding on to the side, pushing my goggles on to my forehead. I glance up at the clock. It says eight-forty. That can’t be right. I screw up my eyes and look again. I’ve been swimming for more than two hours! Now that I’ve stopped my limbs feel heavy in the water. My fingers are pale and corrugated. It’s time to get out.
It takes a couple of attempts to pull myself on to the side. I’m just starting to wonder if I’m going to make it when I manage to get the balance of my weight over the lip and I haul my legs out.
Harry’s a few metres away, pulling in the lane marker. He’d seen me struggling but didn’t offer to help. At the other end the second lifeguard, Jake, is unhooking his end and pulling ropes too. Rope is coiling around Harry’s feet. I have to walk past him, or walk the other way round three sides of the pool, and that would look stupid.
The hypnotic calm that I found in the water evaporates. I don’t know what to say, what to do. Perhaps I can just get past without saying anything.
‘Hey, Nic,’ he says when I get close enough for him to talk softly without anyone else hearing. ‘What we said earlier. We should just forget about it, yeah?’
‘I—’
‘No one needs to know about it. Like, it wasn’t anything anyway, was it?’
I’m too tired to take any more hurt. I take a step to one side, but he’s not done yet.
‘So those pictures. You’re gonna delete them, right?’
‘Oh, yeah. Because you wouldn’t want anyone seeing them, would you? You wouldn’t want anyone knowing what a two-timing loser you are.’
He’s looking at me with undisguised disgust now.
‘Do you want your pictures on the internet? Do you want me to tweet them? Have everybody know what a little whore you are?’
Behind him the water is a choppy mid-blue, stirred up by all those arms and legs. But I can only see red. A red mist of embarrassment and humiliation and fury.
He’s the whore. Give him to me.
Rob’s voice is in my head.
Without thinking I raise both hands quickly and shove them into Harry’s chest. Hard.
And life switches into slow motion. Harry’s top half reels away from me. Arms flailing, he takes a step back to try and regain his balance. His back foot is on the edge of the pool. He teeters on the brink for a second or two, his face contorting into a series of comic-book expressions. He seems to be recovering himself. His arms stop wind-milling, and he’s still upright – more or less stable – when his feet get whipped from under him. I see him suspended in mid-air, and then his legs hit the water and his head smacks against the tiled edge of the pool.
The noise isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard. I’ve seen acts of violence on TV and in films, of course, but in real life the sight of it, the sound, is more shocking than you can ever imagine. A rifle shot? A watermelon dropped from a top window? I don’t know what to compare it to, but I know I’ll never forget it.
He’s flopped face-down in the water now. Blood fans out from the wound on his head, like red smoke in the water. His body is surrounded by a tangle of blue rope and orange floats – all in a sea of red.
There are screams from other swimmers. I hear a shout from the far end of the pool. Jake’s running round the edge. He dives in halfway along the side, just as I come to my senses and jump into the water next to Harry.
I grab hold of him under his armpits and turn him over. His eyes are open. His mouth is, too. Oh, God.
I pull him up to the side. I can move his body in the water, but out of it, he’s too heavy for me to lift. The blood makes him slippery. Blood all down his face. Blood on my hands. Blood pulsing out of him.
Jake’s here. ‘’S’okay, I’ll take over now.’ He heaves Harry’s body up towards the reaching hands on the edge. They pull Harry clear of the water and lay him down. I stare as someone puts their hand on his neck, then leans their head on his chest.
‘Is he breathing?’ Jake asks.
I turn to look at him, and I’m transfixed by his hands. Why is he wearing gloves? He wasn’t wearing them a minute ago. And then his hands find the water and the gloves dissolve. Not gloves, blood. And I look at my hands, resting on the edge of the pool, and I’ve got red gloves too.
Jake’s looking at me now.
‘What the hell happened just then?’ he says.
But all I can think of is the blood, the blood on my hands, and then everything goes black and I slip under the surface.
TWENTY-ONE
There are hands on me: behind my neck, under my arms, at my waist and my hips. I’m lifted clear and laid flat on my back on the cold, hard tiles. Someone puts something under my feet, lifting my legs up.
‘Her eyes are flickering.’
‘She’s okay. Just a faint. Give her some space.’
I turn over on my side, bringing my legs up as I cough the water out of my windpipe.
Faces looking down on me, shifting in and out of focus. Strangers, Jake and . . . Dad?
I can only have been out for a matter of seconds. I remember it all: Harry falling and cutting his head open. The blood.
I turn my head and Harry’s there, lying flat out a few metres away. Someone’s found a first-aid kit and is holding a thick pad of white wadding to his head. A dark stain is showing through the layers. His eyes are closed.
‘Is he—?’ I say.
‘What, love?’ Dad scrunches up his face and leans closer.
‘Is he okay?’
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ Dad says. He strokes my forehead, over and over. Does he mean the ambulance is on its way for me or Harry? I don’t want to be taken off anywhere.