The Drowning (5 page)

Mum brushed crumbs from the lunch table into her hand. Beads of perspiration hung on her chin and slithered down her neck.

“This heat is killing me.” She glanced at Jenna. “Are you going to Porthmeor Beach?”

“Yes.” Jenna stood up. “I’m meeting—”

“Take Benjie with you, please. I can’t have him under my feet all afternoon and it’s much too hot and stuffy for him upstairs. He was off sick from school for the whole of the week before last, and I hardly had a minute to look after him.”

“But Mum—”

“Don’t argue with me. I’ve been up since five o’clock. We’ve been run off our feet since the minute we opened the door. Kindly pull your weight when I ask you to.”

“I don’t want to go,” Benjie said quietly. “I’m perfectly all right in my room with Klunk and Splat.”

“You’ve been up there all morning, sweetheart, it’s not good for you. Go and change into your swimming trunks.” Mum glared at Jenna. “Just keep an eye on him, would you? If that’s not
too
much to ask.”

“OK, if you insist,” Jenna said irritably, Mum’s bad temper beginning to rub off on her. “Stop making such a fuss.”

“By the way,” Mum was still glaring at her. “When I went to pay the milkman this morning, there was some money missing from my purse.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” Jenna said furiously.

Benjie scraped his chair back from the table and vanished upstairs.

“Oh?” Mum raised her eyebrows. “So who else took it, I’d like to know?”

“I had
nothing
to do with it. I wouldn’t go
near
your—”

Mum shrugged. “I can’t be bothered to argue,” she said. “I really can’t.”

“Come on then, Benjamin Pascoe.” Jenna smiled at him. “What have you got there?”

“My book of crossword puzzles.” Benjie wore his dark blue swimming trunks and a floppy blue-and-whitestriped T-shirt. “Can’t we do something else? I don’t
want
to go to the beach.”

They stood together in the doorway of the Cockleshell. Crowds swarmed down the Digey towards the beach, carrying surfboards and swimming gear, pushing impatiently past each other.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

He stared down at his toes, wiggling them in his open sandals. “It’s too hot and noisy . . . There are too many people . . . Really big kids . . . They scare me.”

“Don’t be daft, Benjie. There’s nothing to be frightened of. The sea will be calm and flat as anything. You can have a great swim, splash about, cool off in the water.”

He muttered, “Don’t
like
swimming.”

“Why not?”

He looked up at her. “Because I have to take my glasses off and then I can’t see anything.”

Startled, Jenna said, “Surely you can see
something.”

His round grey eyes stared into hers. “Not a lot . . . not enough.”

“Has your sight got worse?”

He hesitated. “Don’t know . . . Maybe . . . A bit . . .”

“Have you told Mum?”

“No. She’ll go ballistic.”

“Benjie, if your sight’s getting worse, you must
tell
someone. Otherwise—”

“If I don’t keep my glasses on, I could get lost.”

Jenna gave him a hug. “We’ll stick together on the beach. You don’t have to swim if you don’t want to.”

“Mum said I did.”

“Well, she’s not going to know, is she?” Jenna’s patience started to evaporate in the heat. “Look,Benjie,don’t make a song and dance about it. I’ll swim too. We’ll put your glasses somewhere nice and safe, and I’ll come into the water with you.”

He clutched her hand more tightly. “Promise?”

“I promise. I won’t let you out of my sight.” She ruffled his hair. “Come on, Benjie. Imogen and Morvah will be wondering where I am.”

Jenna and Benjie stood for a moment looking out over the great arc of Porthmeor Beach: to their left, the sweep of headland called Man’s Head; to their right, the enormous craggy promontory of the Island, the deep rock pools beneath it.

Jenna spotted Imogen and Morvah. They had commandeered a right-hand corner of the beach where a clutch of dark rocks provided shelter, a smidgen of privacy, and space to gossip without being overheard.

Jenna pulled Benjie through the crowds towards them.

“Hi, Jenn! Thought you weren’t coming . . . Why is Benjie with you? . . . Here, Jenn, sit here . . . How did the exam go? You
are
a glutton for punishment . . . Are you coming to Denzil’s party tonight?”

Jenna settled herself beside them. Benjie sat down on the sand a little way apart and quickly immersed himself in a crossword puzzle. Jenna described the details of the exam, her relief now that the work was over. Then she spread herself on her towel and looked about her.

The beach was thick with bodies in various stages of undress.

“There must be five thousand people here . . . and at least five hundred in the sea.”

“Are you going to swim?” Imogen asked.

“In a while,” Jenna said slowly. She turned on to her stomach, spread out her arms. The heat of early afternoon had scorched the sand beneath her fingers. “I’ll go for a swim with Benjie in a while.”

The sounds of Porthmeor drifted into her ears: shrieks of delight from the swimmers, the splash of surfboards, a plane purring overhead, laughter from a group nearby, a mother scolding her child, the soft thud of feet pulling their way through mounds of dry sand.

She felt tired . . . so tired . . . All that work, all those exams were over . . . Now she could let herself relax . . . flop . . . even sleep . . .

She closed her eyes . . .

She dreamt she was in a terrible hurry to catch the train to London at St Erth. She just caught it as it pulled out of the station.

The baking-hot carriage was entirely empty, but she could not decide where to sit. Suddenly the carriage became the ground-floor studio at the Academy. The Head of Dance stood in the middle of the room, wearing a scarlet bikini.

She read out a list of names, but Jenna’s was not among them.

Jenna cried, “But you’ve forgotten me, you haven’t said my name . . .”

People on the beach were shouting.

Jenna woke with a start, her shoulders burning.

She sat up.

“Where . . . What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

“It’s OK.” Morvah put down her novel. “I’ve just been to find out. There was an accident off Man’s Head. Some guy was messing about on his own on a Lilo. He fell into the sea. Luckily, someone spotted him from the cliff path and raised the alarm.”

“Will he be OK?”

“The lifeguards are on to it.” Imogen rooted in her bag for a comb, started to tug it through her blonde curls. “They do an amazing job.”

Jenna touched her shoulders and winced. “I forgot to put on any suntan lotion.”

She looked across at the spot where she had last seen her brother. The book of crossword puzzles lay on its side. Sand around it had been trodden over several times.

“Where’s Benjie?”

Imogen said, “He’s playing with some friends.”

“What friends?”

“I don’t know, do I? Three or four of them came up to him, asked him to go and play. They’re over there, on the rocks, paddling around in the pools.”

“But I promised—”

“Don’t worry about him, Jenn. He’ll be OK. We can have more of a juicy chat without him.”

“Sure.” Jenna stood up fast.

Too fast.

The beach swayed slightly.

“Course he’ll be OK . . . Think I’ll just go and check.”

Jenna thrust her feet into her flip-flops, tied her towel around her waist and pushed her way through the clusters of bodies towards the rocks and their pools.

A group of children, none of whom she recognised, raced towards her, holding small bottles full of murky water.

They vanished into the crowd.

She began to pick her way over the rocks.

Benjie must be with the guys he went off with,just around the corner.

A man and a young boy fished for crabs, their trousers turned up to their knees. A woman swimmer lay panting on a boulder, her hair dripping, catching her breath for the next underwater venture. Above the rocks, sitting on a bench reading a newspaper, a silver-haired gentleman took the air and enjoyed a peaceful afternoon.

At Jenna’s feet, the sea devoured the edges of the rocks as the tide rose and the swell increased.

She called,“Benjie? Where are you?”

She stumbled on a limpet-covered rock. It badly grazed her heel. She swore under her breath.

“Benjie? Come back at once. Do you hear me? This minute. Come back to the beach, where I can keep an eye on you.”

A wave grumbled against the rocks. Spray showered Jenna’s burning shoulders, making her gasp. She struggled on, round the vast corner of craggy boulders, further and then further still.

The sea and the rocks played smilingly with each other, empty of humankind. Above them, the sky basked, endless, cloudless, impersonal.

Jenna shrieked Benjie’s name into the blue.

The murmurs of the sea thrummed into her ears.

No answer came.

Hurriedly, she slithered back over the rocks to the beach.

“Did you find him?” Imogen asked.

Morvah said, “Put your shirt back on. Your shoulders are bright red. And your heel’s bleeding. You need to—”

“What I need is to find Benjie!” Jenna snapped. “Could you help me search the beach? He can’t just have vanished into thin air.”

One of the lifeguards sat on his rescue buggy by the edge of the sea.

Jenna tugged at his shoulder. “I need your help. My little brother’s gone missing.”

He turned swiftly towards her. “When did you last see him?”

“My friends saw him about two hours ago, over by the Island.”

“Where have you looked?”

“All over the beach. Imogen and Morvah and I, we’ve asked hundreds of people. Nobody’s seen him. He should have stayed with me, but I fell asleep. I think he may have gone off to the rock pools with some friends.”

“Ah . . . Those pools can be very tricky. We can’t see them all from here.”

Jenna could taste sand in her mouth, feel its grit in her eyes and under her fingernails. “We can’t find him anywhere.”

The lifeguard spoke clearly and concisely into his two-way radio. Then he looked at Jenna. “My colleague at the Lifeguard Hut will put out a call for him through our megaphone.”

“Thank you.”

“Middle of July, height of the season . . . Happens all the time on a beach as crowded as this. I’m sure he’ll turn up . . .” He looked at her more closely. “What’s his name?”

Jenna’s cheeks and shoulders burnt, while her stomach clutched cold as ice.

“Benjamin Pascoe. Everyone calls him Benjie . . . Please, could you hurry . . . I’m really worried that something may have happened to him. My friends are still searching the beach, but if he was here we should have found him by now.”

“Climb on the buggy. I’ll run you back to the Lifeguard Hut and we can take it from there . . . You’ll need to give us a full description . . . How old your brother is, the colour of his hair, what he’s wearing. All the details you can.”

Calling Benjie Pascoe . . . Has anyone seen Benjie Pascoe? If there’s a Benjie Pascoe on the beach, would he please go immediately to the Lifeguard Hut at the top of the beach . . . Calling Benjie Pascoe . . . He’s eleven years old with fair hair and glasses . . . He’s wearing blue swimming trunks and a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt . . . If Benjie Pascoe is on the beach, please come at once to the Lifeguard Hut where your sister, Jenna, is waiting.

The second lifeguard’s confident husky voice made the crowds sit up and listen.

“Thank you,” Jenna muttered. Her teeth chattered with dread. She scanned the beach yet again, praying for the sight of Benjie’s fair hair, his sticking-out ears, his glasses, his T-shirt.

“How long do we wait before we . . . before you—”

“Couple of minutes. Usually they turn up pretty quickly.”

“And if they don’t?”

The lifeguards glanced at each other.

The second one said, “I think we’ll alert Falmouth Coastguard . . . We’ve just done that for the guy off Man’s Head . . . Luckily, we managed to rescue him in time . . .”

“What’ll the coastguard do?” Jenna asked, trying desperately to make her voice sound calm. The lifeguard’s dark brown eyes were full of sympathy.

“Ask the RNLI to relaunch the inshore lifeboat . . . and then to back it up with the offshore Mersey lifeboat.”