Then I remembered the kiss again, the feel of his saliva drying on my mouth as I ran away from the car. How could Chloe stand it? Was there something wrong with me because I didn’t like it? When I turned the corner onto my street I was dawdling, thinking about tea, hoping and not hoping that it was chips because of the things Chloe had said about the pimples on my forehead, and my school skirt, which was bunched around my waist and rubbing. I put my hand inside my coat and pulled the elasticated fabric away from my skin. When I was in the toilet that afternoon, I’d seen the red scrunch marks the waistband had left on my belly. They looked like the teeth of a zip, right around my middle. I was thinking about what it would be like if people really had zips around their middles. That was making me think of kangaroos, and wonder about situations where it would be useful to cut yourself in two halves. I frowned at my own stupid thoughts and pulled my fingers away from the damp skin of my waist. I saw the police car in front of my house. I stopped in the middle of the pavement then stepped quickly sideways. The dangling parts of the privet hedge bent against my shoulder and poked the side of my face.
I stared at the police car. It had come and parked right outside my house like Carl had said it would. Two of them in there sitting on my mother’s three-piece suite in creaking, not quite comfortable uniforms, and Barbara so flustered she hadn’t even had the chance to ‘clear Donald away’.
I was in trouble. The biggest trouble I’d ever been in, in my whole life. I wondered how they’d found Wilson. I imagined the noise as they cracked off the ice on the top of the pond, and towed it in jagged heaps onto the bank. There’d be doctors, and examinations. They’d know he’d been smoking because of his lungs or his mouth – some remnant of the nicotine in his blood or on his cold fingers. So they’d have searched and found those fag-ends and my fingerprints and spit will have been all over them, and that means they’d know I was there. They’d come to my house in a car to take me away. I edged closer to the hedge, smelling cat piss and privet and trembling.
As I got near I tried to peer inside the police car without turning my face towards it. Ideally, I needed to look like someone who was examining the numbers on the houses, trying to find a certain address, because I didn’t live there at all. I knocked more privet away from my face but my hands were shaking so I stuffed them into my pockets.
My phone was in my pocket. I rubbed my fingers over the buttons and then pulled it out to look at it. I watched the car, which looked empty, and dialled Chloe’s number. It rang three or four times then went through to the answer machine.
I knew what that meant. I’d been there, plenty of times, when Chloe’s phone had rung and she’d wanted to teach Carl a lesson for not taking her out or taking her home too early or ignoring her or not holding her hand in front of his friends. What she did, when she was in a mood like that, was let it ring three or four times just so he knew that she’d heard it. Then she’d press the red button that meant ‘busy’ and diverted the call to the answering service. That meant she was with her phone and she just didn’t want to talk to him. Carl knew all this, and it pissed him off. It wasn’t like when she had her phone in the bottom of her bag in her bedroom: then it would ring and ring and ring until the machine cut in automatically. It was totally different.
Chloe knew that I knew all about this too, because I’d been there when Carl had complained about it and I’d watched Chloe winking and chucking her hair about and telling me that Carl was clingy and needy and paranoid and he should just grow up and stop pestering her all the time. Carl hadn’t caught onto this, because most of the time it worked and he was especially nice to her for a few days afterwards. There would be presents. It must have worked, or she wouldn’t have done it so much.
I pressed the call button on my phone again, but I didn’t hold it to my ear. I pretended I was looking up and down the street, waiting for someone, and listened as the faraway sound of the answer machine cut in after just one ring.
‘It’s me,’ I said, after her stupid message. I coughed into the phone.
‘The police are here. At my house right now. It’s about Wilson. You need to get hold of Carl and do something. I didn’t mean to send him out onto the pond. I wasn’t the one chasing him. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen his football. Fuck it, Chloe. Ring me back, will you?’
I felt like throwing the phone away, but I didn’t. I flipped open the top of my bag and poked it into the bottom in case the police wanted me to empty out my pockets in front of Barbara. I didn’t have any fags, but I threw my lighter over the wall of next door’s garden. I was going to go in there and tell them about Carl having sex with Chloe under-age. I was going to tell them about Carl chasing Wilson. I was going to say that I wanted to stop it, but I was too scared to, and that I had wanted to ring the number on the posters, but they hadn’t let me. I was going to tell them I was frightened, and then show them the place in the bushes where Carl had jumped through to run after Wilson, who I hadn’t seen again.
I am sure that is what I would have said.
Inside the house, Barbara was sitting on the couch and she was wearing her slippers. That was a bad sign because it meant the police hadn’t rung and made an appointment, but had just turned up. On the hoof. That was one of Donald’s sayings. It means the same as ‘on spec’, which was one of Barbara’s sayings. The brown slippers made me scared. ‘On spec’ meant an emergency. They might have had the flashing lights on.
No one looked up when I went in. There were two police officers. The man was standing by the kitchen door with his hands in front of his privates, like he was standing in a parade. He just stood there, pretending he was looking out of the window but really just looking at the folds in the net curtains. I knew that because I knew no one could see anything through them: they were covered in flowers and leaves and butterflies and were about an inch thick. Barbara was paranoid about her privacy being invaded.
The other one was a woman and she was sitting in the armchair that no one ever sat in because you couldn’t see the telly very well from it. It was much cleaner than the settee. The arms were almost spotless. She was leaning forward and trying to touch Barbara, maybe pat her knee or her hand. She couldn’t because the space between the chairs was too wide – on purpose – because there was a stain on the carpet that the single chair was covering. Her hand dangled like a fish in the air, flapping with concern, and I thought about angler fish and Donald and my chest started to hurt.
I’d planned to say something like ‘Here I am!’, but instead I went in and onto the carpet without taking my shoes off. I knew already that it wouldn’t matter. That this was the start of a time when things like shoes would stop mattering altogether. That the idea they had ever mattered was going to become funny. I closed the door behind me quietly and went to sit next to Barbara. Donald wasn’t there. Wasn’t clattering in the kitchen or shuffling around the landing. Wasn’t building something embarrassing in the garden. Wasn’t cutting pictures out of the TV guide, or trying to programme the video recorder. The radio in his room was silent.
There must have been a privet leaf on the shoulder of my coat. A waxy, pee-smelling oval shape that dropped from my jacket onto the carpet. I looked at it every now and again while the policewoman told me what she had already told Barbara. Barbara, whose face looked like a tent with the guy-ropes cut, sat very quietly. She pulled at a thread in the hem of her skirt. It snapped off and she started at it then wound it round and round her index finger until the tip of the nail turned black.
One morning after this I woke early. It was still almost dark and there were no sounds outside. The house felt heavy. My hair was wet with sweat and stuck to my neck, and I knew I was supposed to be crying. I got up and looked out of the window. It was still frosty outside. The trees in the garden didn’t have buds on them yet, but they had lumps on the stems that were going to turn into buds soon. I wondered if it hurt the trees to have the buds slit the bark open, like it hurts women to get babies out, even though it’s natural.
I was supposed to stop eating and brushing my hair and I was not supposed to be wanting to go out to the shed and smoke a cigarette and maybe go into town and see if the new tape I wanted was out in HMV yet. I was not supposed to be glad that I didn’t have to go to school. Maybe they’d announced it at school. I wiped condensation off the window with the sleeve of my pyjamas and shuddered. I imagined the silence in the class, and Shanks’s serious voice. Now everyone will know that Donald was soft. Chloe didn’t call.
I looked at the garden and wondered if it hurt to drown. The day before, I’d gone into the bathroom and run a sink full of water. I had put my head into the water and opened my eyes and looked at the black plug and the chain with the bubbles on it. I had tried to breathe in some of the water. Not so that I died, but because I wanted to know if getting water down the back of your nose and into your lungs was painful. My lungs wouldn’t let me do it. I coughed, and my eyes stung and streamed.
Now, I thought. Now while the house is quiet I will get out of my bed and try it again. Just so I know. But before I could move I heard Barbara getting up, heard the shower go, and the plastic rustle of the curtain. I lay down and thought about Donald’s hair waving in the water and blue light starting to glow from the ends of his fingers and toes. I thought about his hands resting on the mud.
I could only imagine two kinds of water. Bright blue, clear and tropical water with orange and yellow fish in it. Hawaii water, like the pictures in Donald’s books. And the other kind – the water at home kind, which was not as good and must have been disappointing to him if he hadn’t expected it. Black water with flashing jellyfish throbbing through it like glow-in-the-dark party condoms. Flasher – which is also the name of Donald’s favourite kind of fish, a little thing that pretends to be a leaf by floating sideways, and frightens predators by turning its lights on and off whenever they come near.
Some time later I was standing on a kitchen chair having the hem of an old black skirt taken down. Barbara knelt on the lino and I saw the stripe of grey at her hairline where her roots were coming through. She pinned without touching me and I asked about what it meant when they say someone is going to be buried at sea.
Barbara didn’t answer me. It wasn’t because her mouth was full of pins; she looked at me and then put the pins in her mouth. It was exactly the same as Chloe pretending she was too busy to answer the phone.
‘Other side,’ she said, and motioned for me to turn around.
We went to a garden outside a crematorium. The neighbours were there. Uncle Ron came late and missed most of the words. He wore a navy blue pinstriped suit and a shirt that was ironed perfectly. He looked smart and fat. Barbara asked him if he had a woman, and would he like to bring her to the house for the sandwiches afterwards. He hugged her and gave her an envelope. She wouldn’t take it off him. At the time I thought it was cards – we’d had lots of cards through the post – but now I think he was trying to give her money towards the funeral. She shook her head and he didn’t protest, but put the envelope in the back pocket of his trousers and didn’t mention it again.
It was a windy day and when it was time to shake out the container into the little sloping garden, the grey powder flew back at us into our eyes and mouths.
‘Jesus,’ Uncle Ron said, under his breath, and rubbed his face. My mother blinked and did not flinch. I licked it off my lips and tried to catch some of it to put in my pocket. I didn’t like the garden: I wanted to put Donald somewhere better. Somewhere near water.
There was a party afterwards, in the house. People sitting on the arms of the chairs and standing in the kitchen. People behaved like they always do when a person dies – even though it only happens once or twice in your life, you see it so often on the soaps that you’re trained in what to expect and what to say and it comes natural. It’s easy.
Later, Uncle Ron slipped me a five-pound note and told me I could stay at his new flat if I wanted, in a few months, once he’d got things under control.
‘Any time, chickadee!’
This is what happened to Donald. He left the house at three in the morning with the tartan-patterned thermos and my old black PE bag. These are more or less facts, because it is a fact that those things were missing from the house and we never got them back.
He was wearing beige trousers, black wellington boots, a blue and grey cagoule and a brown jumper. He had the finished Secchi disks with him and some bamboo cane from the garden. Barbara’s bank statements showed that he stopped for petrol at Lancaster services and paid for it with their Switch card at 4.18 a.m.
The man who served him was twenty-three years old. His girlfriend was pregnant and he’d taken a temporary job doing the night shift at the petrol station to earn extra money. He worked in a betting shop during the day. He was so tired he had to telephone the garage to see if he’d had a shift on the night the police were asking him about. He didn’t remember Donald, or any of the other customers. He didn’t feel qualified to comment on Donald’s state of mind.
We didn’t feel qualified to comment either, but it should have been comforting to know that on that night Donald was not memorable. Perhaps Chris (I’ve given him that name – the police never told us) would have been more likely to remember a man who was muttering to himself, raving or weeping, or who seemed not to know what name to sign on his receipt. There was the implication, we thought, that by doing this investigation there was doubt about Donald’s intention. He hadn’t driven a car for years, they said, what was special about today?
I wanted to tell them about the Sea Eye – the deadline fast approaching, the last days of feverish typing and retyping, scribbling and research until late into the night. There were findings to write up, and evidence to collect: this was not an elaborate suicide note. When I began, Barbara looked at me and shook her head slightly. No, she was saying, we do not talk about those things outside of this family.
The boat had been propped in its metal trailer in Donald’s friend’s front garden in Morecambe. He crept onto the drive while it was still dark and took it away. Craig and his wife didn’t hear his feet on their gravelly drive, nor his engine as he towed it off. They didn’t report it stolen until eleven the next morning – long after they’d noticed it missing. They wanted to have a proper breakfast first. It wasn’t worth so much to them. Craig said they only kept it because Donald had promised, many times, to take it off their hands. He was planning to ‘work on Barbara’, although those words don’t sound like any I would have heard my father say.
This was a slightly dishonest thing for Donald to do and this part troubled me for a long time. It was an act that didn’t seem to belong to him, or what I knew about him. Sneaking out in the quiet grey of dawn to steal a boat that had been promised to him anyway.
‘If he’d have asked,’ Craig said to us one afternoon, ‘I’d have gone out with him. Took him wherever he wanted to go.’ He drank coffee in Barbara’s kitchen, leaning against the sink.
Things were different afterwards: there was no more anxiety about people turning up unannounced.
‘What was he after out there, do you know, love?’ Craig asked.
‘He just liked getting out and about,’ Barbara said, ‘and didn’t have a realistic understanding of his own capabilities. It was a night and day job, looking after him towards the end.’
‘You did what you could.’
Barbara murmured something, topped up his coffee and the man left, blame clinging to him like a thread. He was feeling responsible. Like a murderer, perhaps, even though he’d probably never raised a hand in anger in his life. You could kill someone without even touching them though. I knew that better than anyone.
Maybe Donald forgot the time, and expected his friends to be up and eating breakfast. He might have tried to knock on the door, and getting no answer, decided to take the boat anyway. Or maybe, practising what he wanted to say in the car on the way there, he grew suddenly shy and promised himself he’d make amends later. This trip had been
a long time in the planning. There were manuals in his room about outboards and currents, tide-tables and maps of the bay.
They found the holdall on Heysham beach a week or so later. In the bag there were jars and trays and empty ice-cream tubs with their lids tucked inside them. He’d been collecting for a while. There was a net. This was a scientific trip. He was researching. He wanted a specimen. I can only think it was the urgency of the approaching National Geographic deadline that prompted him to sneak out that morning – that, and his fear that the flasher would strike once again.
However he did it, he was out there. Say it was five in the morning, nearly six. Cold, and still dark. He parked at the very northern side of the bay – just before a golf course that would have been as deserted as the promenade at that time. He picked a good place. The buildings along the seafront are nursing homes, office space and an old church with plastic sheets bolted over the leaded glass in the windows. The car was parked haphazardly. He hadn’t driven in years, and I think he would have been excited.
He was happy on the water even though he’d timed the tides and forgotten about the winter mornings, the lack of sun and would have had to wait. It was a useless time for measuring the phototropic zone and he would have resigned himself to that and smiled at himself with his eyes closed. There are signs all along Marine Road from the Midland Hotel to Bolton-le-Sands and as far up along the coast as I’ve wandered. A litany of warnings: channels, treacherous tides, mud-flats, hidden rocky outcrops. He would have seen them.
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