The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  Stop. ‘Tell me from the beginning,’ I say to Ed, and his need to articulate his agony triumphs over his anger towards me.

  He looks as if he has aged ten years since last night.

  ‘It was getting too late for her to still be sleeping, so I shook her, just gently, but she wasn’t waking. Her breathing sounded weird.’

  When did I last check on her breathing? Before I left, at 8 a.m. It was normal when I left, I’m sure of it. ‘You said she was fine. On the phone, when we spoke, you said –’

  ‘I know what I said, but I talked to Liam after you, and when I went back in to check on her, she was different. Something must have happened.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been choking on something?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t dramatic like that, like the airways were blocked. It was more like wheezing, like she was struggling to get the right amount of air but was getting some. When the paramedics came they gave her oxygen straight away.’

  On the borders of his anger there is guilt and there is also grief. Don’t grieve, I think, believe.

  ‘What did the doctors ask you just now? I couldn’t follow.’

  ‘It was about the pool temperature last night, who was supervising, how long she was in the water. The same stuff as before.’

  I can’t remember the questions from last night. Ed handled them while I held Molly, subdued her, reassured her she was in safe hands – ours.

  ‘They said it will help that they’ve already done tests on Georgia,’ he adds. ‘You can get diseases from chemicals in the pool, chemical pneumonitis, did they call it?’

  ‘I should warn Angie, in case Josh is at risk as well.’

  ‘No, he didn’t inhale any water. He got himself out. He was conscious and lucid.’ Ed breathes deeply. ‘Thank God, otherwise there would have been nobody left to raise the alarm.’

  Nobody left: the words make me shudder.

  ‘What happened in the ambulance? Did she come around?’

  ‘No. Her oxygen levels were low, she had the mask on.’ His voice cracks. ‘They said she needed a ventilator, a hundred per cent oxygen. They talked about stuff to do with airway pressure, I don’t know what exactly. I didn’t want to ask questions and distract them. We got here so quickly – there was hardly any traffic.’

  I nod. ‘I don’t understand – last night, how did the paramedics not anticipate this? This relapse.’

  Relapse is a safe word, it is not catastrophic, but Ed isn’t buying it. His fury rises again, his jaw clenched as he replies: ‘Maybe they did, but you were so adamant we were taking her home. They probably didn’t get a full picture of her condition – no wonder they wanted to take her to A & E. But you insisted.’

  History repeats itself; again I am to blame. I’ve made the wrong decision. I’m responsible for the lapse of judgement.

  But history is not quite repeating. I wish it were. Because the first time I did take her straight to hospital and she was discharged within a few hours. The first time she was cleared, just as Harriet was, just as the vast majority of people in pool accidents are.

  ‘She was conscious,’ I say helplessly. ‘Last night, I thought that meant she was OK. Like Josh. When did she stop sleeping and go into a coma? Is that what this is?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nat.’

  ‘She must have damage to her lungs. We need to look this up online. What was that disease you just said?’ My hand is in my bag, fishing for my phone, but Ed stops me, snatches the phone with unexpected force.

  ‘No. I’m not listening to your cyberchondria. I’ve had years of this and I’m not having it now. Wait till the doctors come and tell us what’s going on. Then we’ll look up what needs to be looked up.’

  Cyberchondria; years of this. His words chill me – because there is truth in them. For so long I have obsessively informed myself when there has been nothing new to know yet I’ve allowed us to be fatally casual when something has gone terribly wrong. Letting her sleep herself into a coma while congratulating myself on having evaded medical care. Leaving her, leaving her, so I could stalk a family I hardly know, a woman who only pretended to like me. I told myself this morning I was here to protect Ed, to ensure the Channings’ silence, but was that truly my motivation?

  ‘How long before they let us see her, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ed says. ‘It’ll depend on how she responds. Once they’ve got her all hooked up to what she needs and done the tests I’m sure they’ll let us go in. We have to wait.’

  There is no window here. I look again at the yellow and the grey. Focus on the yellow. Waiting has a different definition from any I’ve known or imagined before. Five minutes is an hour. An hour will be a day. And life, without her, will never end.

  I begin sobbing, tears stinging my hot, raw skin.

  ‘Crying won’t help,’ says Ed, neither cruel nor comforting.

  It’s incredible now to imagine I found the atmosphere between us difficult in Molly’s bedroom. That was swinging in hammocks in a sunny meadow compared to this. This is like we’re in a sealed room that’s filling with gas and all it will take to ignite it is a single word from either of us.

  I blow my nose, compose myself. At any moment news will come and I must be calm for Molly. I did it last night and I’ll do it again.

  ‘Where is Georgia, anyway?’ Ed asks. ‘Is she in this unit as well? Where are Miles and Lara?’

  ‘They’re on the fourth floor in Critical Care. We won’t bump into them down here.’

  Will Molly be moved up there? I wonder. She might already be there for all we know, side by side with the girl who tried to save her.

  ‘Why weren’t we with her?’ Ed groans, as much to himself as to me. ‘At the lido, after the band. Why weren’t we watching?’

  ‘Because she’s not a small child,’ I tell him. ‘Because we’re constantly being advised to let her find her own way.’ I speak with new urgency: ‘We have to agree that no one is to blame for her falling in. It was a horrific accident. None of us could have seen her, not with the power out. When I saw her by the water earlier, it was still light, but later it was so dark, even before the blackout –’

  He interrupts me. ‘You saw her there earlier?’ His voice is thick with blame, so much blame the room hums with it. ‘When, exactly?’

  ‘Before you arrived,’ I say, stretching the truth. ‘She was on her own. I thought she was testing herself, maybe doing some sort of exercise for Bryony.’

  ‘You called her away, though?’

  ‘Of course I did. She promised she wouldn’t do it again. The pool was out of bounds, we all knew that.’

  We’re being a bit naughty, going off limits …

  Inside me I feel a tremor, its source more complex than remorse.

  ‘You should have told me this last night,’ Ed says.

  ‘I’m telling you now. The point is, maybe she was trying something similar when she fell. With the underwater lights, she would have been fine, but to be plunged into blackness …’ My body language opens in direct appeal. ‘A power cut, Ed, it was the worst kind of bad luck, but that’s what it was. Whatever random thing caused the lights to fail, that’s to blame, not us, not the Channings.’

  But Ed is just staring into thin air, distracted, tormented. ‘Liam,’ he murmurs.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘When he called me, just before …’ His voice breaks and I think, Just before he discovered our girl half dead in her bed … For all his denouncing of me, he’s torturing himself because he should have stayed by her bedside, forgone the second call.

  ‘What did Liam say?’

  Ed lets out a groan, crushes my phone tighter in his fist. ‘He’d looked at the CCTV footage of the camera at the shallow end.’

  ‘And? Does it show her falling in?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing of what happened in the water, it was too dark without the underwater lights, but there was an emergency light on above the exit by Reception and there’s just en
ough illumination to show the kids getting into the pool, before the blackout. Georgia and Josh, I mean.’ His gaze locks mine. ‘It’s not like everyone thinks, Nat. They didn’t get in because Molly fell in. They’d planned to go in all along. The clothes in the changing hut were theirs. It was the one at the end nearest the main entrance.’

  My brow creases as I reshape the story. ‘All right, then. So if they planned to go in the water that must mean Molly went with them to watch, hang out. But when the lights failed … Did Liam not see her on the film at all, then?’

  ‘Yes, this is what I’m coming to. Georgia and Josh had just gone in down the steps, then Molly came through the door and walked towards the edge of the pool. After that, all three move out of range of the emergency light and he can’t see them, not without being able to enhance the visuals in some way.’

  ‘Maybe Molly was trying to persuade them to get out. Then she got too close to the edge and was disorientated in the dark and overbalanced?’

  My poor girl, how it must have felt, swallowed blind by the monster she’d spent most of her young life escaping.

  I continue, picturing it clearly: ‘Still, thank God the other two were already in the water. Imagine if they’d still been changing and she’d fallen in first. In the dark they wouldn’t have seen where she was, would have been much slower to react. What are the chances? A power cut right at the moment a non-swimmer gets too close to the water? It’s like an act of God.’

  An act of a vengeful God. A punishment not of the daughter, but of the mother.

  ‘I don’t think so, Nat,’ Ed says. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s not the only footage Liam looked at. He also checked the camera in Reception. That’s where all the electrics are, behind the front desk.’

  He pauses. The hum of blame is quieter now.

  ‘It wasn’t a power cut, like we all assumed. He thinks someone deliberately turned off the lights.’

  ‘Deliberately?’ I’m knocked sideways. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  But the narrative is writing itself in parallel, the answer clear and true: to create darkness, to conceal the trespasses of a friend, two friends.

  Ed goes on: ‘The light wasn’t great, but he’s fairly sure he recognizes the person who turned off the power.’

  ‘Who?’

  And I hear the suck of his breath before he says what scarcely needs to be said.

  ‘It was Molly.’

  41

  The only positive effect of Ed’s revelation is that a full ten seconds pass when I’m not thinking of Molly being pumped artificially with air and fed fluids and nutrients directly into her bloodstream. I’m not thinking about cuffs and pads and IV lines and drains. I’m not thinking of what happens when the machinery stops, whether her body can remember how to do it all alone.

  No, I’m thinking now about a thirteen-year-old girl who intentionally plunged an event into darkness and put herself and others in mortal danger. Two minors were voluntarily in the water, yes, but there were other, much younger children at the party, never more than a railing away from deep water. Without light, the risks increased incalculably.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ I ask at last. Why would a lifelong aquaphobic remove the crutch of light and move willingly towards water? And then I answer before Ed can: ‘Because Georgia asked her to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s always a friend, Ed, always. In a year or two it will be a boy, but now, it’s a girl.’

  He’s not about to argue the validity of my statement. He teaches teenage girls so he knows theoretically how the hive works, but he doesn’t know, as I do, how it feels to be in it. ‘But why would Georgia ask her to do that?’

  ‘So they could swim unseen, Josh and her. Like you say, they had their swimming kit with them. They’d planned it in advance.’

  ‘But why? It makes no sense,’ Ed says.

  ‘Only because it went wrong. But if we can figure out what they were expecting to happen …’ My pulse stutters as a possibility presents itself, a possibility I cannot share with Ed: if Georgia was willing to lie about him to the police for her parents – assuming she has even been made aware of that particular scheme – then was she also willing to stage a diversion while they dealt their punishment to their primary victim?

  But, no, the party itself was the diversion, and I cannot believe Lara would allow her daughter to put herself at physical risk.

  I retrieve Molly’s phone from my bag and seat myself closer to Ed’s side. ‘Let me show you her recent messages. You see all these numbers? I thought they might be the times of Georgia’s and Josh’s laps in the pool. In which case, maybe last night was a race. They wanted to do it when the pool was empty. Most of the time it’s too packed to get two free lanes.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Ed says. ‘What about all those balloons?’

  ‘They were tied to the dividers. The lanes themselves were clear. If anything, the balloons would have been useful camouflage.’

  ‘But why last night? Why not just do it first thing in the morning? The pool can’t be heaving all the time. And why turn off the lights? How long does it take to race up and down? They’d have been able to do it with the lights on before anyone reacted fast enough to haul them out.’

  He’s right. By the time the offenders were spotted they’d be shaking themselves off, rejoining the party. Darkness wouldn’t have been crucial.

  ‘Besides, even in the dark they would have been heard, wouldn’t they?’ Ed says. ‘No one swims that quietly, unless they’re under water. Let’s see the rest of these messages.’

  The power is low: another few minutes and the phone will go dead. Another few minutes and the consultant will come to find us.

  We trawl through.

  Molly, you ready for your bit?

  Remember everything the nice man told us? #Schtum (This with an emoji of a face with a zipped mouth.)

  Yes. (The same emoji from Molly.)

  Eve, you’re all set, right? #TopSpotter

  Too freakin right. #YourLifeInMyHands

  ‘What’s this spotter business?’ Ed asks.

  ‘I don’t know. A lookout, maybe?’

  Head to head …

  Beauty v. the Beast …

  ‘You’re right, it’s definitely a race,’ he says. ‘Between Georgia and Josh. The times must be minutes and seconds.’ He scrolls back. ‘Two minutes fifty-one, two minutes twenty-nine. Does that sound about right?’

  I consider. ‘Depends on the distance. Two lengths would be a hundred metres, and I would have thought they could do that in under a minute. Maybe they race two hundred metres or even further. We might need to wait to ask Josh.’

  There is silence as we absorb the implication: not Georgia, not Molly, only Josh can be relied on for a witness statement.

  Ed is frowning. ‘It’s odd, but the times that get the best reactions are the slower times, not the faster ones. It’s like they’re counting down from something?’

  We both look up as our ears catch the sounds of doors opening and closing. Time suspends as we identify whether the footsteps – rapid, urgent – are coming towards us. They are not. Intuition tells me that the longer we wait, the better the news, but I can’t say why and I don’t share the instinct with Ed.

  And then suddenly I know. With sleep, I would have known sooner, but it would have saved us nothing. ‘I think the longer times are the better ones,’ I tell Ed. He said it himself: unless they’re under water … ‘I think they might have been having a breath-holding competition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You remember I told you about shallow-water blackout? It happens when you hold your breath for too long. Sometimes you need to, in a dive or for a length under water, but sometimes you do it as a challenge.’

  Other than that single complaint of Matt’s, I’ve never had any evidence that Josh and his mates were engaging in breath-holding games, and I’m not convinced I have the
evidence now. Why, then, do I feel so utterly certain?

  ‘I think the kids were competing to see who could hold their breath under water the longest. It’s very dangerous, which is why it’s banned at public pools. It’s banned at the lido, Matt told me.’

  I do not confess that he did so in direct reference to this very group – and I didn’t pass that detail on to Ed. I’d made my own decision that Georgia had had nothing to do with it. Then, last night, I let Molly be summoned to the side of the very boy who’d been reprimanded, because I’d feared she was going to ask to go home when I wanted to stay. I’d wanted to have my moment in the spotlight, a sad, middle-aged woman craving attention, missing desire. Alive to every glance and word from a friend, another woman.

  I feel nauseous.

  ‘Last night was the grand final,’ I tell Ed. ‘They knew they’d be seen with the underwater lights on so they got Molly to turn them off. Hence the tour with Matt. He must have shown them where the electrics are, the master switches.’ It is easy to imagine Georgia extracting from Matt – or any of the staff, frankly – the necessary security codes to gain access alone. ‘They must have been planning it for weeks.’

  But Ed is not convinced. ‘I don’t get it. Turning off the power was what made everyone take notice. If they wanted to do it secretly, they’d have been better leaving the power on and sneaking in. Or just turning off the underwater lights.’

  ‘Maybe that was the aim. Maybe Molly got it wrong, hit the wrong switch. She would have been very nervous, sneaking into Reception on her own.’

  My mind has come alive, releasing new facts, identifying clues. ‘When I saw her by the pool earlier, she was pacing. She must have been counting steps to help her later in the dark.’

  ‘I can’t believe she’d go along with something so obviously dangerous,’ Ed argues. ‘She’s never done anything remotely like this before.’