by Ali Cronin
Without pause, Ash reeled them off. ‘Round-the-world trip, perform at Glastonbury, write novel, have sex with girl, get married, have children, have general anaesthetic, fly plane, learn to cook.’
I mulled over those for a minute. Sex with a girl? Interesting. General anaesthetic? Weird, but I could sort of see her thinking. I rubbed my eye. ‘You want to get married and have children?’
Ash smirked. ‘I knew you’d pick up on that.’ Her expression was light, but her mouth was tense. This list business was obviously no joke, then. I altered my expression accordingly.
‘I can’t help what I want, can I?’ she said. We walked in silence for a few seconds. ‘It’s like …’ She stopped. ‘Do you believe in God?’
I shrugged. ‘Dunno. I suppose so.’
‘Well, I’ve thought about it a lot,’ she said. ‘It’d be nice to believe in heaven and all that, but I don’t. I can’t … It’s the same with the marriage-and-children thing. I’d rather not want them, but I do.’
I smiled at her. ‘Blimey, you’ve really thought this through.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘“Blimey”?’
‘Piss off.’
Ash chuckled and resumed her joyful skipping, while I trudged along behind her and mulled over what I’d have on my list. I knew what’d be at number one, anyway.
‘So what happens now?’ I asked, as we walked across the beach. The lunchtime downpour had turned the sand heavy and dark, and the sea was metal-grey and choppy. It looked about as inviting as you’d imagine. Ash was stepping out of her jeans and pulling her jumper over her head, revealing her plain black swimming costume underneath. She jumped up and down on the spot.
‘You sit here and marvel while I conquer the waves, obviously.’ She shivered, laughing giddily. Her excitement was infectious. My stomach felt tense, like waiting for exam results.
‘Go on, then,’ I said, laughing. ‘Swim like the wind!’
‘WHOOOOOO!’ Ash threw her arms in the air and ran into the waves, the echo of her call twisting and bobbing on the air currents. She swam hard for a few metres then turned and waved. I waved back, then laid my coat on the wet sand and sat down, putting Ashley’s coat round my shoulders for warmth. There were a few surfers further along the water, but I couldn’t see any boats. I shivered. I couldn’t think of anything worse than strapping myself to a surfboard and throwing myself to the freezing waves, although that’s more or less what Ashley had done – minus the surfboard. The mentalist.
She was ploughing up and down parallel with the shoreline now. I could just make her out. Visibility was pretty rubbish. The horizon seemed really close, and the sea and sky kind of merged in a drizzly haze. I pulled out my ponytail elastic, tried to smooth back the hair that the wind had whipped into a tangled frenzy, and put the elastic back in, tight as I could. My gaze wandered along the shore. It took me a few seconds to find Ashley this time. She was swimming on her back now, I thought. I could just make out her arms slicing through the water. Then she stopped.
I stood up and walked to the water’s edge. Was she looking this way? I waved, but she didn’t wave back. Why wasn’t she swimming any more? Squinting, I tried to work out what she was doing. I saw her face, small and pale above the water, and then it disappeared under the surface, before bobbing up again. Something in the angle of her head made me feel nervous, like she was struggling to keep her mouth and nose above water. Suddenly a poem we’d studied in English popped into my head. It was about a swimming man waving at onlookers on the beach. Only he wasn’t waving.
I must have thought something – made some kind of decision – but I can’t remember doing either of those things. My memory of it is that I just instinctively tore off Ashley’s coat, waded out until the sea was deep enough and dived in. The shock of the freezing water made me gasp, but I kept thinking of something I’d read somewhere: the average person drowns in under a minute.
It felt surreal to be in the sea in my clothes, my nose full of the same salty, seaweedy smell as every seaside holiday I’d ever been on. It was like a bad dream. It was almost like I was watching myself, although the cold and the waves were real enough. The current pulled heavy at my legs, my sodden jeans weighing me down. It felt like I was dragging sandbags behind me – my legs must have been next to useless, and in fact afterwards my arms ached for days – but fear pushed me forward. As I got closer I could see Ashley’s eyes wide and unseeing and her mouth twisted with pain as she fought with something under the surface while simultaneously trying to keep her mouth above water. Every time the water swelled she swallowed a mouthful and retched. Telling myself not to panic, there aren’t any sharks in Devon, I swam up to her, the waves strong but not overpowering. Ash hadn’t seen me, and in the few seconds it took me to reach her, the waves pulling me back slightly with each forward stroke, I quite clearly saw her give up. She closed her eyes – and I shouted – but she was already sinking beneath the swell. I lunged towards her and grabbed her shoulder. By some miracle I caught hold of the strap of her swimming costume. I yanked it and pulled her up enough so I could get my hand in her armpit, then I hauled her head above the surface.
‘Ashley!’ I barked, hardly recognizing my own voice. ‘Open your eyes.’ She did as she was told, and stared at me dully. I trod water and offered a short prayer of thanks that she was beyond fighting. It was using all my strength just to hold her up. ‘It’s OK. You’re OK,’ I shouted. ‘Just roll on to your back. I’ll do the rest.’ She ignored me, closing her eyes again. ‘NO!’ I tried to shake her but the water made it impossible. It was like a nightmare. ‘Ash, please, just DO IT,’ I implored, whimpering with frustration and fear. I swam behind her and tried to use my natural buoyancy to push her body back on top of the water. Still she didn’t respond, so I quickly pulled one hand away from where I was supporting her shoulders and yanked her hair, hard. Her head jerked, and she at last got the message, leaning her head back so the rest of her followed.
I started for shore, holding on to her with one hand and paddling with the other, dredging up memories from when I was ten and had to swim in pyjamas for my life-saving badge. I thought I should talk to her to tell her it was OK, but I didn’t have the strength. She was too exhausted to do anything but comply anyway. I muttered the same words with each stroke, like a mantra to get me to shore. Less than a minute. Less than a minute. Part of me noticed that Ashley was feeling heavier and less responsive, but it almost seemed irrelevant now. Less than a minute. Less than a minute. Less than a …
‘Sarah, I’m coming!’ Jack’s voice. I dared to look round. The shore was closer than I thought. I tentatively lowered my leg, ready to summon enough strength to lift it back up if the water was still too deep. I almost cried when my toe touched sand. Jack was with me in seconds. Grunting with effort, he lifted Ashley up out of the water and waded into shore. Her head lolled horribly and her hands flopped loosely by her sides. Jack dropped to his knees at the water’s edge and laid her on the sand, taking a second to pull her arms and legs straight so she was flat on her back. I watched, mute with terror.
‘Get my coat – and take your wet clothes off.’ His voice was steady. I half crawled, half ran across the wet sand to his coat and thrust it at him. He took his phone out of a pocket and handed it to me. ‘Call an ambulance.’ Then he quickly rubbed Ashley down with his coat before turning it over and covering her from the waist down. I was shaking so much I dropped the phone. Swearing, I scrabbled for it then closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing in, breathing out as I pressed the Emergency Call button. When I opened my eyes Jack was bent over Ash, giving her mouth to mouth.
‘An ambulance is on its way. I’ll stay on the line,’ said the call handler. I felt almost calm. For now at least, I was just about in control.
‘He’s doing CPR,’ I said, in answer to the handler’s question. ‘He’s trained. He’s a lifeguard at the swimming pool.’ My chest shuddered with grief and fear and pride as I watched Jack, the sweat patches spreading acr
oss his back as he breathed for our friend, forced her to stay alive.
The call handler said something. ‘They say to tell you you’re doing a really good job,’ I told Jack. He nodded slightly. He was checking her pulse again.
There was a rushing in my head, but I could hear the waves continuing to break on to the shore, and Jack’s breathing, and the call handler’s occasional words.
And then Ashley convulsed, her eyes springing open, and Jack was suddenly animated. He pushed her on to her side and she retched, tears spilling as her body strained to get rid of the seawater and God knows what else. The coughing was raw and horrible, but she was breathing.
When he was sure there was no more to come, Jack carefully placed her in the recovery position. Then he sat back on his haunches, dropped his chin into his chest and cried.
I ended the 999 call. According to Jack’s phone it had lasted exactly two minutes.
As the ambulance arrived I realized for the first time that I was shivering uncontrollably.
I don’t remember much of what happened immediately after that. Ashley and I were both taken to hospital, me with mild hypothermia, Ashley with, well, whatever you call the after-effects of nearly drowning. Jack stayed behind to find the others. Cass told me afterwards that he broke down in tears as soon as he started telling them what had happened, and for a few awful seconds they all thought one of us had died.
When I woke up there was none of that Where am I? stuff you read about. I knew instantly I was in hospital. Where else could I be? But even so it felt like I’d woken in a different dimension where it was night, but not night. The people in the five other beds in the room all seemed to be asleep, but the place was bathed in a kind of half-light and weird disembodied noises punctuated the silence. A sort of low-level humming and beeping, with the occasional squeak of shoes on shiny plastic floor.
‘Oh hello, you’re awake.’ A nurse was checking a clipboard that seemed to be attached to the foot of my bed. She came up beside me and took hold of my wrist to check my pulse. Her hand was cool and dry. I didn’t want her to let go.
‘What time is it?’ I asked, but it came out as a husky whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again.
‘Just gone three a.m.’ The nurse put a cuff on my arm and pressed a button on a digital monitor. The cuff inflated, squeezing my arm. The nurse made a note of the readout. ‘Your blood pressure’s one hundred and one over sixty-five.’ She gave me a brief but warm smile. ‘That’s good … How are you feeling?’
‘Uh, OK I think,’ I said, mentally checking myself over. ‘Just really tired.’
The nurse bundled the cuff up with the monitor and nodded. ‘Go back to sleep. Your parents are here, you can see them in the morning.’
Mum and Dad? I tried to sit up but the nurse touched my shoulder. ‘Not now, Sarah. Go back to sleep. They’ll be here when you wake up.’ I fell back down on the sheets. Sleep was creeping up from my toes like warm water. I clenched my fists. Not the best analogy.
‘Where’s my friend?’ I mumbled.
‘Look to your right.’
I turned my head just enough to see that Ashley was in the next bed, her dark hair fanned out on her pillow, the blankets rising and falling as she slept.
‘F’nn,’ I said, too sleepy to move my lips.
The nurse patted my shoulder. ‘You’re welcome.’
The next time I woke up it was to sunlight and noise. Opening my eyes a smidgen, I tried to look around without anyone noticing. It felt like I’d been sleeping in a shop window. People were milling about and I could hear the clink of cutlery. Breakfast time. My tummy growled and I heard gentle laughter. Mum! Turning towards the sound, I saw her knees by my pillow. I huddled against them and she placed her hand on my head.
‘Hi, Mum.’ I was glad my face was hidden. I didn’t trust myself not to burst into tears, which under the circumstances would have seemed embarrassingly melodramatic.
‘Hello, darling.’ Mum’s voice broke, and I hugged her knees tighter.
I shifted so she could see my face. ‘How long have you been sitting there?’
‘Well, visiting hours started at eight.’ She looked at her watch. ‘And it’s eight forty-two now.’
‘Have they told you what happened?’ An image of Ashley sinking under the water popped into my head. I swallowed and stretched my legs, flexing my toes against the stiff cotton of the sheet. Mum didn’t answer, and, when I turned to her she was crying, her fist against her mouth. My dad had his arm round her – I hadn’t noticed him before – and his eyes were brimming. Invisible hands squeezed my chest. Seeing my dad cry was the world flipped on its head. Like the time he’d shunted into the car in front and the driver stood in the street and yelled at him. I’d felt the same seeing my dad being told off as I did seeing him crying. It was wrong. I twisted my sheet. ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
Mum kind of snorted, her mouth twisting as it veered between laughing and crying. I knew how it felt. ‘Oh, Sarah, don’t be sorry. We’re so … so proud of you.’
My dad took my hand. ‘We’re just thinking about what could have happened.’
I kept my eyes on the sheet, pleating it between my fingers. ‘Well, don’t,’ I said quietly.
‘I know, Sooz, you’re right.’ (My dad calls me Sooz. Don’t ask.) ‘Just give us a minute to indulge it. We’ll be fine in a sec.’
I chewed my lip. They’d only had all bloody night to indulge it, but whatever. ‘Where’s Dan?’ I asked, for something to say while my parents were having their private what-if grief party.
‘He stayed at Oscar’s last night. We came up with Ashley’s mum.’
The weirdness of my parents and Ashley’s mum being in the same car was temporarily eclipsed by my realization that I hadn’t even thought about Ash. I whipped round, coughing as I choked on my own anticipation. She was propped up on pillows, eating a bowl of cereal. She looked grey and tired, but otherwise pretty good, considering.
‘All right, life-saver,’ she said, without looking up from her breakfast. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
I beamed. Never had watching someone drip milk and Rice Krispies on to their chin given me so much pleasure. ‘How are you?’
She smiled. ‘Oh, all right.’ She looked at me and giggled, but then she hiccuped and her eyes filled with tears. I jumped up, took her bowl from her and put it on the bedside table, then got into bed beside her. Covering us both with the sheet, I said, ‘You’d better bloody be wearing knickers under that nightie.’
Ash squeezed the tears out of her eyes with the splayed fingers of one hand. ‘What, in case I decide to cross lesbo sex off my list?’
‘Exactly. I might be a good enough friend to watch you nearly drown yourself, but I draw the line at rudies.’
Ashley curled her hand around mine. Something had changed. The balance between us had shifted. I wasn’t yet sure if this was a good thing.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘Where’s your mum?’
‘Gone to the shop. She was doing my head in.’
‘Did you know she got a lift with my mum and dad?’ I glanced across at them. They were still there, watching me with half-smiles on their faces. Not too weird, then. I gave them a quick smile and turned back to Ashley. She widened her eyes but spoke quietly.
‘Yeah. Apparently your parents are a “lovely couple”.’ She did the speech marks thing, which seemed slightly unnecessary. Like, they are a lovely couple. ‘I suppose they think my mum’s a tanorexic try-hard,’ she whispered so they couldn’t hear.
‘What? No!’ I protested, but to be honest they probably did. In the end they just weren’t fake-tan-and-false-nails kind of people.
Ashley shrugged. ‘They’d be right.’
I shifted in the bed. This wasn’t how I’d imagined this conversation going. I suppose I’d secretly expected tearful thanks, heartfelt gratitude from her mum – maybe even a news reporter wanting my story. Moody Ashley was not in the script.
I eyed her as she bit off split
ends. I wanted to ask her what it felt like to believe she was going to die, or if she’d had any near-death visions, or if she remembered any of being rescued and having mouth-to-mouth, but I couldn’t. It’s like if you see someone with no hair and a headscarf, you don’t march up and say, ‘So what’s it like having cancer, then?’ I mean, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t insensitive to bring it up at all.
So in the end I settled for the boring but safe ‘How are you feeling?’
She smiled briefly. ‘Shit … But, y’know –’ she gave me lazy jazz hands – ‘alive.’
Later that day the others came to visit. Ashley had spent most of the morning sleeping while I’d dozed and flicked through a few magazines. Mum and Dad had gone to find a hotel and get some sleep, even though the nurses reckoned I’d be discharged that day. I’d felt strangely gutted when they left, but I was kind of too knackered to worry about it.
Anyway, when Cass, Donna, Rich, Ollie and Jack arrived they found me and Ashley sitting up in bed, troughing some surprisingly OK cheesy tomato pasta for lunch. They formed a circle round our beds, which was a bit weird but I suppose that’s how it’s done, the visiting-invalids thing. Ash had shot me a quick eyebrow-raise when they’d first come in. Like: Hmm, what’ll this be like? I knew how she felt. And they did all seem kind of nervous at first, taking it in turns to give us both hugs.
Rich teared up a bit, bless him, and even Donna, who held on to Ashley for ages, was a bit moist round the eye area when she pulled away. ‘Fuck’s sake, you’ll do anything for a bit of attention,’ she said, quickly brushing away the tears with the back of her hand.
Ash laughed, in a tired kind of way. ‘Yeah, I’m thinking of walking down the motorway next time.’
Then Donna threw herself at me. ‘And bless YOU, missus.’ I hugged her back, blushing but loving it. Who wouldn’t?
‘Yeah, you’re amazing, hon,’ said Cass, smiling at me. ‘We’re so proud of you.’
‘And Jack …’ I prompted, reaching out my hand to take his. ‘He’s the real life-saver.’