Everyone knows it was Georgia who ordered me to turn off the lights (she ‘tasked’ me, that was how she put it) – it was the only way they could stage the grand final undetected. OK, so with the pool lights on, she and Josh might have been able to slip under water without being seen, especially with that wall of balloons (the balloons were her idea, by the way, but she was happy for her mum to take the credit). But Eve would have stood out like a sore thumb crouching at the side, so it had to be dark. And it had to be that night, it was the season finale, and Georgia was going on holiday the next day so she’d get out of practice and then Josh would have an unfair advantage.
She didn’t admit it, she’s too cool for that, but I think she had another reason: she wanted to sabotage her mum’s perfect party, even if it was just in a secret way only we knew. She wanted to remember it for her triumph, not Lara’s.
So my ‘task’ was to sneak through the building to Reception, find the electrics cupboard behind the desk and shut down the underwater lights, go to the fire doors, wait for Eve’s signal (an owl hoot, pretty unoriginal), then go back in and turn the lights on again. It wasn’t so complicated and at least I didn’t have to go near the water.
Obviously I still had my doubts. I’m not that retarded. ‘Won’t someone come and try to fix it?’ I asked Georgia.
‘It’s only the pool lights,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking they might not even notice, they’ll all be so wasted, or they’ll think they’re set on a timer to go off at the end of the evening. It’s not like they’ll see it as some big emergency. And when the lights come back on again after five minutes they’ll assume it was a temporary power cut.’
‘The guests, yes,’ I said, faltering, because I didn’t want to argue with her. She didn’t like that. ‘But what about the staff? Won’t they know there’s no timer? Won’t it be their job to sort it out?’
Georgia looked at me like I was starting to bore her. ‘If you’re not going to do it, Molly, then just say and we’ll find someone who will.’
And so I agreed. I loved her then. I would have done anything she asked, even that.
On the night, there was a hitch.
‘We have a situation,’ Georgia told us, doing quote marks in the air with her fingers. Eve was ill and had been kept at home. She was their regular spotter: she knew when to get worried, when to pull them up and get them out.
‘You,’ Georgia said to me. ‘You can do both. Turn off the lights and come straight to the pool. Wedge open the fire doors so you can get back in. Then, as soon as we’ve finished, go back in and turn the lights on again.’
My mouth fell open like a fish. A fish that can’t swim.
‘Maybe we should postpone the whole thing,’ Josh said, noticing my horror, but Georgia gave him that look, like he’d really disappointed her by being lame, and he agreed: of course I should stand in for Eve. It wasn’t like I had to get into the water or even touch it. All I had to do was go to the edge of the pool, where they’d be waiting, give them the ready-steady-go and start the stopwatch.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Georgia said. I think she knew by then that the way I felt about her had changed, but with Eve out she needed me more than ever and couldn’t risk being too nasty to me. ‘It won’t be that dark,’ she added, coaxing now. ‘Plus you’ll have your phone. The main thing is the stopwatch. Not just his time when he comes up, but mine. I want to know to the hundredth of a second how long I’ve whipped him by.’
‘In your dreams,’ Josh said.
They were so desperate to win it was like they’d rather die than come up first.
‘What if …’ I hesitated ‘… what if you don’t come back up?’
They looked at one another and burst out laughing.
‘Of course we will. This isn’t The Virgin Suicides, Molly.’
‘It’s not the virgin anything,’ Josh added, and I blushed. They’d hinted at other times that they’d had sex together. They weren’t going out or anything, it wasn’t a big deal. Josh, Matt, Ethan, they all wanted Georgia.
‘Don’t look so nervous, Mollster,’ she told me. ‘You’ll give the game away. You know how paranoid your mum is.’
As soon as I was on my own I just wanted to cry. I couldn’t help it – it was completely different now I was going to have to go near the water. I tried to practise the steps, but Mum saw me, yelling like a lunatic for me to get back, which made the others come and find out what was going on.
‘What were you doing?’ Georgia said. ‘Do you want this to fail? Come and have a drink. You need something to calm you down.’
But there was no way I could sit with them drinking mocktails and listening to Georgia arguing with Matt because he wouldn’t get her the vodka she wanted. In the end she found someone else to get it. She said a shot gave her the edge she needed before she eviscerated Josh. She liked the word ‘eviscerate’.
I tried to talk to Mum, but she had that glittery look she’d had all summer, like she thought she was famous or something. Drunk, basically. I wished she wasn’t so wasted, that she would stop looking around and listen to me, but it wasn’t like I didn’t know why she was so jumpy. It was the same reason everyone was: Georgia.
God, I hated her by then.
I hated her because I’d discovered my dad was obsessed with her, just like they all were, even Mum.
She’s special.
She’s a beauty all right.
At least he admitted it: She’s destroying us.
He was right – even if Mum was too stupid to see why: she was destroying us. She was the maggot that was eating my apple from the inside. Something was going on between her and Dad and it was breaking up my family.
It was the Tuesday before the party that I realized. I’d been in Stoneborough the previous week, and before that I’d been deluded, just like everyone else.
It was something our neighbour Sarah said, though she didn’t know she had.
‘Molly, I was just telling your mum I saw your friend when you were away at your grandma’s. The pretty one, Georgia. Poor thing, having to have so much tutoring. It didn’t exist in my day, you know, or at least not that I’d ever heard. But every day she came. In her holidays! And so good-tempered about it, gave me a huge smile when I bumped into her on the stairs. Asked me if I needed any help with Inky while you were away.’
I looked at her, trying to work her out. She’s old, sure, but she’s not dumb. ‘Georgia came every day?’ I said.
‘Yes, on her bike. I saw her from my window. I hardly saw your mum at all. She was out most of the time.’
Every day. Georgia was only supposed to come on Wednesdays and Saturdays. And Sarah had ‘just’ told my mum this as well, but Mum was so self-obsessed she hadn’t even picked up on the clue.
Actually, maybe Sarah did know what she was saying. Maybe I was her messenger.
At the party, I knew for sure. Mum and Dad were splitting up. I heard it with my own ears – and he was leaving her. That was the crazy unfair part.
We’ve been married for sixteen years, Mum said. We have a daughter together.
We’re agreed, then? Dad said. After tonight, it’s over?
It doesn’t seem like I have a choice, Mum said, and she sounded so sad and defeated, like her heart was breaking on the spot.
Everything was going to change. I would go with her to live in a new flat, probably change schools as well. She would get even more insanely protective than she already was. My life would be a misery.
Maybe that was when I had the idea that I could do what Georgia was asking, but I could do it in a different way. If I could get her to leave my dad alone, he wouldn’t leave my mum.
The mad thing is that it was Dad who almost got in the way. Just as I was about to enter the security code – Georgia wheedled it out of lover-boy, of course – and sneak through the building to Reception, he stopped me and said it was time to light the candles on Mum’s cake and it might be nice if I c
arried it in, not him.
In case she threw it in his face, I thought. ‘Can we do it in ten minutes?’ I asked, and he said fine, he didn’t know where she was anyway.
‘I’ve lost her,’ he said, and he looked so worried, as if he might be regretting what he’d done.
I felt sorry for him then. He just needed some help in making the right decision, in making things all right again.
It was easy to find the light switch and to push open the fire doors to the pool area. It was much darker than I’d expected – they must have dimmed the lights in the café at the same time – because I could hear people laughing about how spooky it was, but I had measured the steps and I knew where Georgia would be and, anyway, as I got closer my eyes adjusted. I could see their heads above the surface of the water a few metres apart. I had my phone in my hand with the stopwatch app open.
‘Say when you’re ready,’ I whispered.
‘We’re ready,’ Josh said.
‘May the best bitch win,’ Georgia said, and I thought, Yeah.
‘Three, two, one, go,’ I said, and I hit ‘Start’. They dipped under, perfectly synchronized. They trusted me, I was the judge, and that made me feel powerful.
But I didn’t watch the ticking digits. I put the phone in my bag and took my bag off my shoulder and pushed it to the side. I could make out Georgia’s hair floating just under the surface and I leaned over and put my hands into the pool. It wasn’t like putting my hands in the basin in the bathroom at home, the water felt big and greedy and sucking, like it had no bottom to it. Then I put my forearms in.
She must have detected motion, the push of water, but she remained still. Maybe she thought it was Josh moving towards her or even surfacing already, or maybe pretending to surface so that she would be deceived and come up first – they had all these strategies and ploys and double bluffs. I imagined the competitive twitch of her face as she considered these possibilities.
I reached towards the top of her head and placed my hands on it. I didn’t push it down, I just didn’t let it push back up. I didn’t let it move to the side either and when it tried to duck lower, out of my way, I gripped it by the hair.
I’m taller than her, stronger than her, I thought.
She’s like a sprite compared to Molls.
Someone like Georgia Channing isn’t going to befriend Molly for no reason, is she?
If you’re not going to do it, then we’ll find someone who will …
Suddenly something lashed at my arm and gripped it, pulled at it. I struggled and lost my balance and then I was freezing cold all over, though my brain didn’t know at first if I was hot or cold. I swear it didn’t even know I was in the water. But I was. The whole of me was in the water. It was like being in catacombs, in sea caves, wallowing and swallowing, filling and sucking and sinking.
I reached for something solid and I grabbed a body part that might have been a leg. Then the leg kicked from my grip and I had no awareness of anything. I was a yolk suspended in white, inside the shell. There was no way out, the shell could not be cracked from the inside.
I opened my eyes and there was nothing to see. It was like I’d read when people fall through ice and they can’t find the hole, or when they get buried in an avalanche and they don’t know which way is up. Then there were hands that weren’t Georgia’s, hands on me from above, lifting me.
‘She’s breathing. Someone get her parents. What’s your name, love?’
‘Is she unconscious?’ It was Matt – I recognized his voice. ‘It’s Molly – Jesus. Get the fib, someone, quick!’
‘I’m here, I’m alive,’ I said, and the words were made of liquid, making me cough. My chest hurt so much.
‘She’s conscious, thank God.’
I grew aware of a horrible noise, an alarm, and everyone was shouting. I wasn’t shocked into remorse or anything like that. I don’t remember even thinking Georgia might still be in the water, let alone caring. What I felt when I lay by the pool was not I wish I hadn’t done that, but I hope I’ve done enough.
My breath was coming back and I was feeling very cold.
Then Dad was there, gentle and serious and steady. He had to speak close to my ear because of the alarm. ‘You’re all right, sweetheart. You’re going to be fine. We need to get you out of these wet clothes.’
‘Don’t leave,’ I said, my voice all wet and bubbly.
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Not that, I mean … Georgia.’
And he looked at me and I could see he got it. He knew I knew. Then he pretended he didn’t. ‘Don’t worry about the others,’ he said. ‘They’ve got their own parents with them. Let’s try and get you dry, shall we? Help is on its way.’
Then the alarm stopped and the lights came on and Mum was there. I thought she was going to go mental but she was fine, she was great. She said I would go to sleep that night and in the morning I wouldn’t remember a thing about it. Her voice was really calm, like Bryony’s. Then I heard the ambulance sirens and I saw Georgia on the stretcher and remembered what I’d done. There was the most terrible screaming, I felt like I was being crushed by the sound of it, and then they said it was me, it was me who was screaming.
‘I want to go home,’ I said, and I kept repeating it and repeating it, like I was the alarm now, and they said to stop, please stop, they would sort it out.
‘She needs to be with just us,’ Mum said. ‘Josh is being allowed home. I’ll insist she is too.’
They took us in a kind of ambulance car and I felt better when I was in my bedroom, just me and Mum and Dad. And then I woke up and they weren’t there and it turned out I was in a ward at Trinity Hospital, and the pain in my chest and throat was so bad I started crying.
No wonder I felt like I was in a film. It kept cutting from place to place, face to face, like someone was editing my story for me, telling me which lines to say. It was like it wasn’t real, even though I knew it must be.
I have never been questioned by the police or any of the authorities; Mum and Dad protected me from that.
They’ve asked me, of course. Question after question, angle upon angle.
Why did I need to follow Georgia and Josh to the water’s edge? Couldn’t I have operated the stopwatch from a safer distance?
‘I couldn’t see their heads well enough. It was darker than I expected.’
Didn’t you realize you’d turned off all the lights?
‘No, I made a mistake.’ (True.)
Did you slip?
‘I think so.’ (In a way.)
Were you trying to stop them? Mum said.
Were you worried one of them had got into difficulties? Dad said.
What were you doing? What were you thinking? Do you have any idea what could have happened?
I think quite enough did happen, the other says. It was sometimes hard to tell who they were accusing, me or one another.
And then, after days or weeks or months, they stopped asking. They’d been advised by one of their experts to lay off.
Sometimes I think Mum knows, or has at least guessed that it didn’t happen the way everyone’s agreed it did. She’s been bad herself. She knows the feeling when you’re not in charge of yourself, when you’re possessed by something wild and vicious and headlong. When the right way to act is completely ignored; it’s just some meek, lame voice you pretend you can’t hear.
Georgia’s forgotten it, I’m sure of that. Or else she’s decided not to tell. Just like she’s decided not to contact my dad since she moved away. I know that for sure because Izzy’s brother helped me hack into Dad’s email and there was nothing from her, not even from last summer. He’s erased her, like she never existed.
Of course, Dad and I haven’t ever discussed what they did together. It wasn’t like I actually saw anything, so he would only deny it anyway. But when you know, you know (that’s one of Bryony’s sayings). I think Georgia’s mum knew too. I saw her watching my dad watching Georgia at the party and there was
a flicker in her face that looked like understanding, like she wasn’t noticing any more that he looked like that old actor. She was way better at reading people than my mum, way better at spotting clues.
Sometimes, I think of Elm Hill last summer as the Cluedo board, the new one Dad hates so much, where you don’t go to the cellar to make your accusation but to a bright-blue swimming pool at the centre of the board.
Of course, the game’s exactly the same, either way: before you can make your way to the middle, you have to work out who the villain is.
Unless you’re prepared to risk your hand and guess.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the team at Michael Joseph/Penguin for their expertise and dedication, in particular to Maxine Hitchcock, Kimberley Atkins, Eve Hall, Francesca Russell, Claire Bush, Sophie Elletson, Lee Motley. And to Hazel Orme for an impressively eagle-eyed copyedit.
Heartfelt thanks to all at Curtis Brown who’ve supported this novel (and its writer) with such commitment and energy: Sheila Crowley, Becky Ritchie, Abbie Greaves, Luke Speed, Alice Lutyens, Johanna Devereaux, Claire Nozieres. Also Deborah Schneider at Gelfman Schneider in NYC.
A big thank you to Lily Johnston for her very helpful research and to Tara Fisher-Harris at Brockwell Lido in south London for answering my many questions. (For the record, Brockwell Lido is in no way a model for Elm Hill Lido but is instead quite exemplary in its running.)
Lara Channing’s book is Poolside With Slim Aarons (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2007). The film she loves is La Piscine, directed in 1969 by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Mermaid on Mulberry Street is of course fictitious.
THE BEGINNING
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The Swimming Pool Page 34