‘Why didn’t you tell me what happened…?’ I start and then I realise how accusing that sounds and how Mrs Zas would be giving me one of her You’re better than that, Feather looks. ‘I mean, please tell me what happened, Mum.’
‘You know what happened.’ Her voice is small. ‘The whole world knows what happened.’
‘The article?’
She doesn’t move but I know that’s what she’s talking about.
‘The article is a bunch of lies written by a stranger,’ I say. ‘I want to hear it from you, Mum.’ I take her hand. ‘I want to hear your story.’
Dad stirs in his chair. He rubs his eyes and stands up.
‘Feather…’ His voice is groggy. He looks from me to Mum. ‘I’ll leave you.’ He heads towards the door.
‘No…’ Mum starts. ‘Please stay, George.’
Dad comes over to Mum and kisses her cheek. ‘I think you two need some time to talk.’ And then he comes over to me and takes my face in his hands and kisses my forehead. ‘I’m glad you came home, Feather.’
And with that, he leaves.
When Dad’s gone, Mum closes her eyes. I can feel it in my bones, the sadness and tiredness she’s been carrying around with her all these years.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ Mum says, her eyes still closed.
I take her hand again. ‘It was my birthday… it was Willingdon Day…’
She nods and then she pulls out a photograph from under her pillow and holds it out to me.
It’s one of those ‘no clouds in the sky’ days. So bright it’s hard to keep your eyes open. The Lido’s the exact same blue as the sky, like they’ve bled into each other.
There are more people in Willingdon Park than I’ve ever seen in the village at any one time. It’s like, at this moment, in this photo, our sleepy little village is the most alive place in the world.
In a corner of the Lido, there’s a BBQ. I spot Dad with his blue-and-white chef’s apron, his cheeks flushed. He’s grinning and holding tongs in the air, making crab hands to entertain the children around him.
Bits of the photo are blurry, where kids are jumping and splashing into the Lido. There are toddlers with armbands and older kids with inflatable mattresses and beach balls. An old lady is doing laps at the far end. A man, about her age, sits on the edge of the Lido with a newspaper on his lap. He’s wearing a grey, short-sleeved shirt – and a dog collar. His eyes keep flitting from the newspaper to the woman in the pool, as though he’s scared the old woman’s going to disappear.
Two small boys, who must be about three, are chasing each other close to the edge. Both blond, the same height, the same build and skin tone. Like twins.
You can’t see the sun, it’s too high in the sky, but you know it’s there because it’s touching everything: throwing stars onto the surface of the Lido; lighting up the eyes of the mums and babies in the paddling pool; bouncing off every blade of grass, every flower.
The sun casts a halo around Mum’s head: she looks like she’s just flown down from the sky.
She’s running, wearing a yellow T-shirt over her swimming costume with LIFESAVER printed in red letters across the front. Her body looks strong: her toned arms swing to the rhythm of her running, the muscles in her legs push up against her skin. And she’s stretching out her hands, her mouth open.
I follow the trajectory of her gaze.
In a corner of the photo there’s a little girl. Not much hair. Wobbly on her feet. Chubby thighs and knees. A pointy party hat sits off centre on her head and she’s trailing a balloon behind her. As I look at the little girl, this is all I can think: she’s too young to be on her own, too young to be running towards the park gate. That’s why Mum’s going after her.
I take a breath. Blink. And the photo expands.
All the figures stay frozen, except the two blond boys chasing each other around the Lido.
They’re screaming and laughing. And one of them grabs the other’s T-shirt, and the other one spins round and pulls away and the first one throws himself forward, his arms outstretched.
A moment later, one little boy pushes the other into the Lido.
No one hears the crack of the little boy’s head on the paving stones.
No one sees the little boy’s body fall limply into the water.
No one hears him sink through the water.
Not a single person notices.
Not the grown-ups sitting around the park in their picnic baskets.
Not the children splashing in the pool.
Not Dad, pink-cheeked and laughing behind the BBQ.
Not Steph, lying on her towel, sunbathing, chatting away to a woman her age just a few inches from where the boy fell.
And definitely not Mum, who’s running and shouting now, her eyes fixed on me.
‘So it was my fault,’ I say.
Mum’s eyes fly open. ‘No!’
‘If it hadn’t been my birthday… if you hadn’t been busy looking after me… if—’
‘It would have happened anyway.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because children don’t just die.’ She gulps. ‘There’s a reason Max left us, I have to believe that. And if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine. It was my job to look after Max.’
‘What about Dad? And Steph? They were there too.’
Mum holds out her hand to make me go quiet. ‘It was my job, Feather. I was his mum.’
She looks down at the photo and I know she’s staring at the two boys, at Max and Clay.
‘Clay pushed Max in…’ I say.
Mum nods slowly.
‘Does he remember that?’
Mum nods again.
‘And he blames himself?’
Mum doesn’t answer, she just stares out of the window.
I think about what Clay said the first time we spoke, about how there’s always a trigger for our behaviour, something which turns us into the people we are today.
If Clay’s known all these years that he pushed Max into the pool, and that he died because of it, no wonder he went off the rails.
‘Is that why Clay and Eleanor left the village?’ I ask.
‘I never blamed her,’ Mum says. ‘But after what happened, Eleanor couldn’t look at me in the eye any more. We were such good friends, the boys had grown up together…’ Mum’s voice chokes up. ‘She felt it wasn’t fair, that she got to keep her son and that I didn’t. That it was her son who’d pushed Max into the water. That she should have been supervising them.’
I take a breath. ‘Do you blame them? Clay and Eleanor?’
I wonder whether that’s why Clay’s mum went all religious. Maybe it was her way of making sense of it all.
‘No. Like I said, I blame myself.’
I lean my head against Mum’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I say. ‘For going on about swimming and water all this time. I didn’t understand…’
‘You didn’t understand because I didn’t tell you, Feather. There’s nothing to be sorry about.’
‘And you still came…? Yesterday, at the pool? You came to watch me swim, despite everything?’
‘I should have come earlier, Feather.’
I wait for a beat. ‘Did you leave because it made you think about Max?’
‘In part. I was tired from the journey, too. And I thought you were still upset with me, that you might not be happy to have me there.’
‘So you came even though you knew I might not see you?’
She nods.
‘Did you ever like swimming, Mum? I mean, before everything happened with Max?’
She stares out through the crack in the curtains and I’m worried I’ve said the wrong thing.
‘Yes, I loved swimming.’
‘So it’s true? You ran the Baby Dippers Club? You taught people how to swim…?’
‘Yes. And I did the lifesaving training. And I spent my summers telling parents and children to be careful, that water is a beautiful thing bu
t that it can be dangerous too.’ She stops and catches her breath. ‘And then, when Max fell into the water, there wasn’t a single thing I could do to save him.’
There are things in the history of human beings that just don’t make sense, that just aren’t fair. That’s what Miss Pierce, my History teacher, says. Things that feel so wrong they make you want to jump up and down and scream at the sky. Mum must have felt like that.
‘It shouldn’t have happened, Mum.’
‘No, it shouldn’t.’
I swing my legs up onto the bed and press my head into her shoulder. I feel her arms folding around me.
‘And it wasn’t your fault.’
Mum doesn’t say anything.
‘I’m tired, Feather,’ she says. ‘So tired.’
‘I know.’
I sit up and stroke her hair.
‘I’ll stay here until you’re asleep, Mum.’
She closes her eyes and soon starts to nod off.
I watch the muscles in her face relaxing and listen to her breath going deeper and then I kiss her on the cheek, take the photograph from her hands and slip out of the room.
Dad’s sitting at the kitchen table, holding a cup of tea. His hands are all crooked and calloused from his work. There’s a scar on his thumb. Your father’s hands tell the story of his life, Mum once said. I think about Mum’s big hulk of a body and how it tells the story of how she’s locked herself inside this secret for thirteen years. And I think of Clay’s body, all the bones pushing through his skin. And then I think of my body, how small I am, how maybe I’m like that because I lost someone too and didn’t want to grow up without him.
I go and grab a mug and use the water from the kettle to make myself a cup of tea too.
‘You had a good talk with your mum?’ Dad asks.
I nod and sit beside him.
‘It’s because of Max that Mum stopped leaving the house, isn’t it? It’s because of him that she started eating so much?’
‘She tried so hard at first,’ Dad says. ‘So hard.’
‘Tried hard to do what?’
‘To get used to Max no longer being there. To avoid having to face people from the village, who she felt judged her for what happened.’
‘Judged her?’ I ask.
‘For not looking after her little boy.’
‘But no one would have thought that. Everyone understands that you can’t watch a kid every second. That horrible accidents happen all the time.’
‘You’re right, Feather. People didn’t judge her. But she believed they did. Guilt isn’t a rational thing. It deceives us into thinking all kind of things that aren’t true.’
I cup my hands around my mug and let the warmth seep into my fingers.
‘But you didn’t blame her, Dad, did you? You understood.’
‘Yes, I understood.’
And that’s why he went along with Mum’s eating. Because he knew that she blamed herself. And he knew that it was his fault too. And that eating and staying inside was the only way Mum found to cope.
‘Is Max the reason Mum hates hospitals?’
Dad nods.
‘So he didn’t die right away?’
Dad’s quiet for a moment and then says, ‘He died at the pool. It only took a few seconds. But they took him to the hospital to do tests. Your mother and I spent the night there.’
‘Was I with you?’
Dad nods. ‘Mum wouldn’t let you out of her sight.’
I think back to something Dad said a few moments ago.
‘When did Mum stop trying?’
He looks at me and furrows his brow.
‘You said that she tried, at first, to get used to things after Max left?’
‘We had a meeting with Rev Cootes.’
My mind spins back to a few weeks ago, to Mum standing on Rev Cootes’s doorstep, yelling and flapping her hands.
‘What kind of meeting?’
‘We were planning Max’s funeral. Me and Mum – and you, you were there too. You’d just turned one.’ Dad looks down into his tea. ‘And Steph. Steph was there for moral support.’
‘What happened?’
‘Mum snapped. Until then she’d been numb, in shock, I suppose. But that day, she got angry. Really angry. She stood up and started yelling—’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she didn’t want to say goodbye to Max. That she didn’t want to put her little boy in the cold ground. And that she didn’t want to sit in a church full of strangers blaming her for Max’s death.’
I see Mum standing in Rev Cootes’s kitchen, me in her arms, her cheeks flushed like they always are when she’s angry. And then I see the line of kids’ graves in St Mary’s Cemetery. And my mind focuses on the one without a name or a photo. It was right in front of me this whole time.
‘What happened then?’
‘Steph tried to calm Mum down but Mum pushed her away, stormed across The Green, walked into the cottage, to the lounge, drew the curtains and sat down on the sofa. She never left the house again.’
I pull out the photo from the day Max died and place it on the table in front of Dad.
‘Mum gave it to me,’ I say. ‘She wanted me to understand what happened.’
He picks up the photo and stares at it. His hands are shaking.
‘Who took the picture?’ I ask.
‘Allen,’ Dad said. ‘He was a junior reporter. He gave us a copy as a keepsake.’
‘He was already snooping around, all those years ago?’
‘He wasn’t snooping around, not then. He thought that local news mattered.’
I wonder what it was that changed him, that made him turn on the people he wrote about.
Dad’s shoulders start shaking. And then he starts sobbing, big, loud, heaving sobs.
‘Dad…?’
He shakes his head. ‘I should have taken better care of him… I should have seen it happen.’
His eyes are bloodshot, his face blotchy. He’s not even trying to keep the tears in any more.
For a moment, I listen to the quiet cottage and think about how different things would have been if Max was still living with us today. How maybe we’d be sharing a room. How maybe he’d play his music really loud upstairs, like Jake does. How we’d probably squabble over the bathroom in the mornings. How he’d find me annoying because I was his little sister. How we’d fight over loads of stupid things, because that’s what brothers and sisters do. But I’d love him, really, and I’d be happy to have a big brother. And Mum would be out saving the world and Dad’s business would be going really well and maybe Max would love swimming as much as I do. Maybe we’d go to the pool and swim together.
‘It’s not your fault, Dad. It’s no one’s fault.’
He keeps sobbing, his palms pressed into his hands.
‘Dad, it’s okay…’ I rub his back. ‘It’s going to be okay…’
And I don’t know whether what I’m saying is true, whether things are going to be okay, but I know this: I’m going to do everything I can to help Mum and Dad get through this. I’m going to do everything I can to make us a family again.
36
Later that night, when I’m about to go to bed, the doorbell rings. Mum’s already asleep, exhausted from the day, and Dad’s out on a plumbing job.
I know it’s him, like I’ve known it was him every single time he’s stood outside my front door for the last thirteen years of our lives.
‘Hi,’ Jake says, as I open the door. He gives me a crooked smile.
And without saying anything back, I step forward and put my arms around him and hold him tight.
The Lido is just a big muddy hole surrounded by piles of rubble, so we can’t climb in and sit on the tiles, like we usually do. Instead, we go and lie under a tree and look up at the sky. It’s a clear, warm night. Thousands of stars and a thin, fingernail moon.
‘Did you know?’ I ask him. ‘About Max?’
He doesn’t say anything for a while.
‘Jake?’
‘Yes… but I’ve only known for a few weeks.’
Every muscle in my body relaxes. So he hasn’t been lying to me all this time.
‘Steph told you?’ I ask.
‘No. It was Clay. Mum didn’t think it was fair for me to know before you did. She knew that it would mean me having to lie to you and she didn’t want that.’
For a second I feel sorry for Steph, how’s she’s been caught up in the middle of all this, how she’s tried to be a good friend to Mum and to me.
I look over to Jake, lying there beside me, staring at the sky.
‘Clay told you what happened on the day Max drowned?’
He nods. ‘He thinks his mum blames him. She’s never said that out loud but it’s his theory for why she’s so angry at him.’
I prop my head up on one elbow.
‘Do you love him?’
For a second, Jake doesn’t move. And then, very slowly, he nods again.
I lie back down, snuggle in closer to him and take his hand.
I realise that I’ve been so caught up in my own things that I haven’t been there for Jake through all of this. I want him to know that nothing’s changed, that I’m still his best friend. And that I want to understand.
‘You wrote him a Valentine’s card?’
It’s too dark to see but I can tell from Jake’s silence that he’s blushing.
‘I saw it,’ I say. ‘In his room.’
‘Yeah… that was me.’
‘Is that when it all started – between you two?’
‘It had been building up for a while, but I guess it made things concrete. Giving him the card was as much about me admitting my feelings to myself as it was about telling him how I felt.’
‘What about Amy?’ I ask. ‘And the other girls?’
‘I liked Amy – a lot. It wasn’t love, not even close, but I fancied her. I fancied all of them. And it felt like what was expected of me.’
‘What was expected?’
‘Kids our age go out with people…’
‘I don’t.’
‘You’re special, Feather,’ he says, squeezing my hand.
‘Hey!’
‘In a good way. You don’t go along with the crowd, not like the rest of us.’
‘Why didn’t you end it with her sooner? Once you’d worked out your feelings for Clay?’
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