The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  As Miles and I stare at each other, it seems to me that a shadow lifts. For the first time we see one another not as new acquaintances and not as old enemies, or even as adults who were once children, together for a summer, but as the parents of two girls who are friends.

  ‘Save her for me,’ he says, speaking in a new voice, a gruff and desperate one, and he looks at me as if he honestly believes I have the power to effect a miracle. ‘Save her for Lara.’

  I flush. He knows about us. Everything worth knowing, he’s known. I inch my hand towards his and I say, ‘I’ll try.’

  But his hand withdraws as mine approaches, the shadow resettles and all at once he’s on his feet, he’s snarling. ‘Try what, Pock-face? You can’t save her. You can’t even save yourself.’

  37

  Sunday, 30 August – eleven hours earlier

  In the dark, unclothed and defenceless, I was both frighteningly close to and mercifully removed from the human clamour, audible only with each split-second plunge in the alarm siren. Trembling badly, stubbing a toe on the stone, I staggered back to the hut, my nostrils finding the lingering body heat of the Channings, the scent of my own terror. I stepped into my underwear, and then the dress, damp from the day’s pool water on the floor. I heard the tear of fabric as I rushed and lost balance.

  My thoughts were in uproar, my mind strained to the brink of endurance. Had that really happened? Had I been inches from tumbling nude into the park, a wretch, a savage? Did the Channings really hate me – me, Natalie Steele, wife of Ed, mother of Molly, middle-aged teacher and Elm Hill stalwart? When the alarm stopped screaming, would they come back for me and finish what they’d started?

  It was only when I was outside again and tripping in unstrapped sandals towards the crowd that my thoughts re-ordered themselves, the crucial phrases fighting through the self-obsession: Something’s happening … Emergency …

  Molly! Where’s Molly?

  Then: She’s with Ed. Ed, who an hour ago I’d battled and mocked and disrespected and for what?

  ‘What’s going on?’ I’d reached the edge of the mêlée, yelled my questions to the first person I came to. ‘Why is the alarm on? Why have the lights gone out?’ I pulled at the nearest arm, a man’s, claiming his attention.

  ‘There was a boy in the water.’ His eyes registered my dishevelment. We didn’t know each other. ‘They’ve just pulled him out.’

  A boy? Everett? Hadn’t we just heard him calling? Had he been in the water at the time? While his mother attacked another adult, had he broken from the multitude and stumbled into the blue?

  ‘But the pool’s out of bounds,’ I said, a redundant observation since most of the party guests had spilled from the café terrace into the pool area; those who hadn’t watched from railings as if from a ship’s prow. A breeze had picked up, the balloons straining at their ties.

  Then, startlingly close, I saw Angie crouching on the ground, her gingham skirt spread out on the stone, and in front of her, lying on his back in his swim shorts, bare chest heaving, not Everett but Josh. Then Stephen stepped forward, white and bulky, and blocked my view.

  ‘Is that Josh?’

  ‘You know him?’ The man next to me nodded, grave, almost remorseful.

  ‘Is he unconscious?’

  ‘No, he was speaking just now. He looked alert.’

  ‘Has someone called for help?’

  Yes. An ambulance was on its way.

  That was when I saw Everett, clinging to Miles and sobbing into his stomach, and Lara, too, her hands gripping Matt’s shoulders, her mouth moving fast, screaming at him, and my brain, overloaded, scrambled, assumed they were upset about Josh, Lara for some reason blaming Matt for his having been in the water. I must have imagined being in the hut with them, I thought. Like I’d imagined Stephen wanting to harm me. I had some sort of death wish, a morbid desire to be victimized. Guilt messes with your brain. Don’t say anything to anyone, I warned myself. You’re the crazy one. You need psychiatric help.

  ‘But Josh is an amazing swimmer,’ I heard myself protesting to my new companion. ‘I don’t understand how he could have got into trouble.’

  And now a nearby woman was telling us something through the din; I could not lip-read and held my ear to her mouth. ‘There was someone else in the water,’ she repeated, ‘so maybe he got dragged under.’

  ‘No, they’re both out,’ a new voice said. ‘They’ve got her out as well. I saw that a minute ago.’

  Her, I thought. Molly. Molly.

  Two things happened then: lights came on – dim, back-up lights, not the underwater ones or those in the café – and the alarm stopped. Into the sudden silence, into our ringing ears, a voice boomed: ‘There’s someone still in there!’

  And, as if animated by the new light, there was an instant collective spinning as parents gripped children tighter or pulled them backwards; others screamed names and the air shook with the collision of a hundred individual fears.

  ‘Molly!’ Mine was a howl, not a call, obliterated at once by the frantic sound of another parent wailing:

  ‘Has anyone seen her? Where is she? Georgia!’

  Lara.

  ‘Matt,’ a voice was yelling, or maybe ‘Nat’, but I couldn’t tell because I was mesmerized by the sudden sight of Miles kicking off his shoes and preparing to leap into the water.

  ‘Don’t jump,’ someone told him. ‘You might hurt her!’

  And hands seized him from the edge just as others pulled a girl from the pool, a girl in a swimsuit, her slender limbs limp, long hair glued to her neck and back, the same shade as her skin. Lara screamed, a sound lost in the bedlam of people rushing forwards to assist or tumbling backwards to create space, until the girl and her rescuers were settled at the side of the water. The liquid streamed from her, silver in the light, and she looked … she looked lifeless.

  It was Georgia. My legs buckled. Only in sinking to my knees did a gap appear in the throng that allowed me to make out a third figure, another girl, this one prone but clearly conscious, soaked and spluttering, speaking to the man who cradled her. Ed.

  I tore to their side, my mouth open but my vocal cords disabled.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Ed cried. ‘Did you not hear me shouting for you?’ His face was disfigured with fright and something close to hatred.

  ‘I couldn’t hear anything over the alarm. Was she in the water as well?’

  ‘Of course she was – look at her!’

  ‘Darling, darling, are you OK?’

  Molly’s eyes were open and moving and she was breathing well, but at the sight of me she burst into sobs, which caused coughing, streams of water and phlegm gushing from her mouth and nose. Unlike Josh and Georgia, she was fully clothed. I could make no sense of this.

  ‘What was she doing in there?’ I asked Ed.

  ‘I have no idea, but once she was in, this dress must have dragged her down. Look how heavy the skirt is! She won’t let me take it off. Can you find a towel or something dry I can wrap her in? Ask Liam or one of the staff. Help, will you? Look how she’s shivering!’

  But hands were helping ahead of mine, bringing towels and emergency equipment. Shoved aside, I began to feel lightheaded again, recognized the whisper that would become a roar, once more losing the strength in my legs.

  Ed lunged to break my fall, mad with exasperation. ‘Stop it, Nat. Seriously, you need to hold it together. For once, hold it together!’

  And I did, not just for Molly but also for him, for all of us: I pulled myself back from the brink and, in doing so, experienced the profound conviction that I would never go over it. I never would forsake myself and fall out of reach, not as long as I remained this girl’s parent.

  So, when she grew hysterical, as she now did, it was not from having been infected by me. It was because she could see Georgia. Propped against Ed, she could see as well as we could the blue light flashing through the glass walls of Reception, casting a sickly glow on all our faces but especially on
Georgia’s as she was borne through emergency exits, strapped to the gurney to keep her from falling.

  It was a long time since I’d seen Molly hysterical like this. She thrashed and raved and howled, a creature from Purgatory, a devil from my own imagination.

  38

  Monday, 31 August, 10 a.m.

  Home, I think. I can do nothing to help Georgia and now is no time to plead my case – or Ed’s – to her parents. I should not have brought myself here, without invitation, without welcome. I’ve neglected Molly and I’ve implied a level of guilt on Ed’s part that I don’t actually believe and all because …

  I’m filled with shame to admit that, whatever my justifications, I came here at least partly because I am still, still, determined to be a part of the Channings’ world. Even when they no longer want me, even now I know they never wanted me, not as I’d thought.

  I retrace my route around the side of the building to the main road, and all at once the details are acute, significant: the black flecks of dirt on the double yellow lines, the running engines of the stationary ambulances, a trio of staff in flat, wide shoes, coming off shift, checking their phones. One right turn, and the Emergency Department looms, its sign huge, white on red, and more red painted in criss-crosses on the grey of the road.

  The fresh sun in the sky.

  I watch as an ambulance approaches, its siren shutting off before it enters the bay. I didn’t see the vehicle that took Georgia away last night. She was the last out of the water and the first to be removed: the unconscious one, the true emergency. All my attention had been on Molly, on calming her distress, on persuading the paramedics that she should be allowed to come home, that we should avoid further attacks of mania at the hospital.

  My Mazda is where I left it, lonely on its yellow line, ordinary, reliable, symbolic of all I want and need. As I open the driver’s door I continue to watch the emergency bay: the ambulance has pulled up and already has its rear doors open, its ramp lowered. There is a sense of calm as the trolley comes wheeling down, smooth and virtually silent, not clattering in the way I’d expect, not surrounded immediately by receiving staff calling out urgent questions. I catch no more than a sliver of the arriving patient – plastic mask and tubes obscure all clues to gender or age – but I understand, with the deepest humanity I possess, that this is someone’s sister, mother, uncle, son; this is another family ravaged and reconfigured, just like Georgia’s. And this family’s enemies will not celebrate.

  I settle in the driver’s seat, ready for my future, grateful for it. Inexplicably superstitious, I’m unable to start the engine until I know the arriving patient is safely inside the hospital so I watch the trolley’s short journey into the building. The sunlight on the arriving party is so clean and whole that I can’t help but be optimistic, even certain, of full recovery for the poor stricken person. Not like last night, when Georgia was removed from the lido, when the light was blue and thin and wretched.

  No, it’s not like last night at all.

  Because now I see who steps out of the ambulance next.

  39

  Stoneborough, August 1985

  ‘It was only supposed to be a scare,’ I told Mel, with bravado, as we strolled to the newsagent’s for a final ice cream. We would pay for it, too, not steal it from the chiller cabinet as we had many times before, scuttling from the premises in stitches. Today we would do the right thing.

  ‘Just a laugh,’ she agreed. ‘At least she had her swimming costume on. That’s more than some of them.’

  We knew by then that Nessie hadn’t drowned; we weren’t murderers. That she’d somehow clawed herself out of the pond and made her way back through the darkening woods. Word had come this morning via a neighbour that she’d got into trouble swimming on her own and had arrived home extremely distressed. It had already been agreed that next summer an adult should supervise the kids at the pond – either that or forbid them to go there.

  ‘Do you think her mum called the police?’ I asked Mel.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like it. Think we’d know by now if she had.’ Mel mimed her wrists being locked into handcuffs.

  ‘What about her hair? How d’you think she explained that?’

  ‘No idea. She must have said she wanted it like that.’

  ‘I wonder if she told her mum it was us.’

  Mel just shrugged.

  I mustered a chuckle, but it was a hollow one. I knew it had been wrong. I knew it had been cruel. Even our idle pace as we headed for our treat was disrespectful, as if we were sauntering to a graveside or the wreckage of an accident purely to pass the time. ‘Should we at least get our stories straight? In case the police come?’

  ‘Just say we left the pond before her and didn’t see a thing. Besides,’ Mel added, ‘you’re going home this afternoon, what do you care?’

  I cared. I cared enough to have lain sleepless in my bed the previous night, skin slick, nightie damp; I cared enough that the farewell dinner my grandmother had cooked sat indigestible in my stomach. It was not just the last day of summer as far as I was concerned, it was the last day of for ever, the day I stopped breathing easy.

  ‘Come round and say goodbye before you go,’ Mel said, when we’d finished our ice creams. She touched my hair, let her fingers rest in it, her thumb brushing my earlobe.

  I eased away. ‘I don’t like it when you do that.’ Seeing I had offended her, I tried to make amends: ‘I’ll write. As soon as I get home. Will you write back?’

  Another shrug, different this time, as if she had no other way of expressing to me that a letter would not be enough for her, that I’d missed the point.

  The police had still not come by the time my father arrived to collect me. He hadn’t left us; my parents weren’t getting divorced. I wonder sometimes how much keener the joy would have been when I answered the door had there not been the overwhelming dread that the man on the other side was in uniform.

  ‘Can we go?’ I kept asking him, refusing to notice my grandparents’ bafflement, their hurt expressions. ‘Please can we go?’

  I wrote to Mel, as I’d promised. I wrote three times before I received a reply. She told me that a day or two after I’d left she and her parents had received a visit from Nessie’s parents. The basic message was that the police would not be involved on the condition that Mel confess her crime and apologize. When she tried to deny it, she was threatened with a dredging of the pond for the weapon and quickly caved in. Though she had protected me – she had a rogue’s honour, Mel – and I was grateful for that, it was in reality little more than a stay of execution, for Nessie would, of course, have been able to name me with ease. (Who of life’s victims is not familiar with the identities of her tormentors? It is only the tormentors who let the names go.) And yet I heard nothing from my grandparents of any equivalent visit or any request for my permanent address.

  Unlike Mel, I was a coward as well as a criminal.

  I waited days, weeks, months, for the rap at the door. I watched the phone on the kitchen wall until my eyes grew sore and scratchy, until I could turn away and still see its ringleted cord coiling back on itself like a tail. Had Nessie’s parents tricked Mel into confessing only to take their grievance to the police after all?

  The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales was ten, I discovered from a law book in the library, and from what I could understand there was no statute of limitations. Which meant they could at any time change their minds; the police could at any time pursue me.

  Which meant I could never stop waiting. I could never stop waiting for the worst thing in the world to catch up with me.

  To have done to me what I had done to her.

  40

  Monday, 31 August, 10 a.m.

  Even as I watch, the pictures appear two-dimensional – his outline is flattened, the colours tinged with yellow – and my response feels artificial, a cinematic likeness of my fear.

  You’re tired, I remind myself. You haven’t slept. You’ve been
imagining things lately; this whole summer, you’ve been misconstruing people, encounters, conversations. Blink and look again.

  I blink. I look again. I see his retreating figure, his deft, almost dancing steps as he hurries to catch up with the trolley. Only then do I abandon the car and tear back towards the building; only then do I raise my voice to yell his name: ‘Ed!’

  He turns in a jerking frantic way, his face exactly as it was last night at the pool: terrified and furious. ‘Nat, I’ve phoned you about a hundred times! Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Please, what’s wrong? What’s happened to her?’

  I sprint to reach the still-rolling trolley. Her face is masked in plastic, sealed inside, eyes closed. The smudge of mascara is still visible on palest cheek, her lips bluish white. Where is blood, where is the life? I reach to touch her arm: she is warm and solid. Alive.

  The innermost part of me convulses and I swallow vomit.

  ‘She didn’t wake up,’ Ed says.

  In a windowless, strip-lit zone a team is waiting, information exchanged between ambulance staff and receiving team. What I catch destroys me: a drop in oxygen levels, ICU, ventilation, intubation. Ed is being questioned, details he has already addressed at least once, I gather, from his growing impatience. The person in charge is a consultant emergency paediatrician, who is on his way down; he won’t be able to speak to us now but will find us as soon as he is able to comment on an outcome.

  Outcome: a terrible word, sparking memory of a line I’ve read that flitted below the surface when I spoke to Lara: Victims who arrive in the Emergency Department comatose have significantly poorer outcomes …

  Georgia was, and now so is Molly.

  I’ve lost track of our route through the building. A corridor has opened into a larger space, like a passing place on a busy single-track road, and we’re asked to wait here on our own. The walls are the sun-yellow of hope, the furniture the storm-cloud-grey of fear. Is this where they put the people to whom they expect to have to give bad news? The worst news of all?