The Drowning (21 page)

“Take me back to the hospital room,” I want to say, “the place they took me after the lake — warm and clean and bright.”

“I’m here, Carl. I’m right here for you. I’ll help you.”

“But I hear him, Mum. He talks to me. I see him, too.”

“You and me both, Carl. I see him everywhere.”

“No, you don’t understand …”

She sighs. “I see him in the bath, when he was a tot. Could never get him to go in, and then when he did, couldn’t get him to come out. Bloody terror. I see him in the kitchen eating stuff straight out of the can. I see him on the sofa, next to me, watching those films, pretending he’s not scared. He’s still here, Carl, isn’t he? He always will be.”

My heart sinks. It’s not the same.

“You remember him, that’s all,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, “like you do. It’s normal. It’s okay. You’re okay. Come here.”

She pulls me toward her and puts her arms around me. I let myself be drawn in, not hugging her back, but not resisting.

“It’s going to be all right,” she says. “It’s going to be all right.”

I close my eyes and I see his face, his eyes wide open, and the zipper passing up and over, sealing him in. I try to sit up, but Mum’s holding tight.

“I’ve gotta go, Mum. I can’t stay here.”

I can’t break away from her, and now I can feel her body shaking.

“Don’t leave me,” she says. “Please, Carl, don’t leave me. We’ll be all right. I promise we will.”

She’s crying, sobbing into my neck.

There’s a knock at the door.

Below us, Debs opens the door and starts talking to someone. Odd words and phrases drift up the stairs.

“Hit her … stark naked … completely wild … brother at the lake … safety …” Debs must have called the police after all.

Mum’s rocking us both now, side to side.

“You’re all I’ve got left. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Carl.”

“Miss Adams?”

Someone’s calling up. Mum stops rocking.

“Miss Adams?”

She takes a deep breath. “Just a minute!” she shouts down.

She gives me one last squeeze, then lets go. She wipes her face on her sleeve and takes a couple more breaths.

“You don’t want to leave really, do you?”

Yes, yes, a million times yes.

“I dunno. I can’t sleep in there, Mum. I just can’t do it.”

“How about the sofa?”

I shrug.

“Just hang on until the funeral. We’ll get through this together. We will, Carl. I promise. Okay?”

She makes her way downstairs. I bring my knees up inside my pink skirt and rest my head on them, listening as she tries to do an impression of someone normal. Asking the cops to come in, saying, “Isn’t the rain shocking?” and “Can I get you some tea?”

The front door closes again and the voices get quieter, more muffled, as they all move into the living room. Suddenly exhausted, I tune out, letting their conversation become noise, not words, a background murmur that’s strangely soothing.

After ten minutes or so, Mum comes upstairs. She kneels next to me.

“They want to talk to you, check that you’re okay. You should get dressed.”

“I’m all right like this.”

The bathrobe’s like a comforting blanket. I’m dry and warm now. I don’t mind if I never take it off.

“I don’t think so.” She glances at the jumble sale of clothing trailing along the landing and then goes into her room. She reappears with some jeans and a T-shirt.

“Whose — ?”

“Don’t ask,” she says. “I couldn’t find any underpants.”

I take the clothes from her. I stand up and turn my back as I step into the jeans and pull them up. They’re a couple of sizes too big and I can’t help shuddering as I think about mum’s weird record when it comes to boyfriends. I slip the bathrobe off and dive into the T-shirt. I look down at the illustration on the front, turning my head sideways to make out the writing: “Surfers do it standing up.”

I look back at Mum.

She makes a face. “Sorry,” she says, and I know she’s not just apologizing for this shitty shirt. In spite of everything, I find myself smiling, feel a laugh tickling at the back of my throat.

“Jesus, Mum,” I say.

“I know.”

I bend forward and turn the bottom of the legs up, folding each hem twice until they skim the top of my feet.

“You okay now? You ready?” she asks.

“Yeah. Okay.”

*  *  *

Later, when they’ve all gone and Debbie’s taken herself off “for a soak” in the bath, Mum makes a bed for me on the sofa. She’s slept there often enough, or rather fallen unconscious and stayed there, but this is different. She takes the back cushions off and fetches a pillow and my sleeping bag. When I see it, I get a choking feeling. Even across the room I can smell the mustiness. The zipper catches the light and I hear the noise of the other zipper, the one that sealed him in, and the panic rises up in me, along with the contents of my stomach.

“I can’t, Mum,” I say. “Not the sleeping bag.”

She purses her lips, but she doesn’t say anything. She takes it upstairs and comes back again with a sheet and a couple of blankets.

“Better?”

“Yeah.”

“I should get you a duvet,” Mum says. “They had them in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago. Only a fiver. But it was a fiver I didn’t have. Well, I would’ve needed a tenner, because there were two of you …” She lapses into silence. Then, “God, Carl, how are we going to do this?”

I deliberately choose to misunderstand her; I don’t want to talk about big stuff, not now.

“Just spread the sheet out on the sofa and I’ll have the blankets on top.”

She looks confused for a moment.

“Yeah … right. Okay.”

She shakes out the sheet and starts tucking it in.

“We’re going to see him tomorrow,” she says.

“What?”

“Me and Debbie. We’re going to view his … Visit the … We’re going to say good-bye to him at the Chapel of Rest.”

I pretend to be doing something to the pillow.

“You should come. It’s the right thing to do, Carl. We’ve always done it in my family. It helps.”

The hairs are standing up on the back of my neck at the thought of seeing him again, seeing his body how I last saw it.

She’s laid the blankets on top of the sheet, tucked them in at the back and the sides. I put the pillow at one end and it looks like a proper bed.

“Will you be all right here?”

“Yeah, I think so.” To be honest, it looks a lot nicer than where I usually sleep.

“I’ll go up, then,” she says. “I’m done in. I bet Debs will crash, too, after her bath. She won’t bother you.”

“Does she have to stay here?” I ask, feeling guilty as I say it.

“It’s only a couple of days. I know she’s a pain, but she’s trying to help. She’ll go after the funeral.”

“Then it’ll just be you and me here.”

“Here … or somewhere.”

“What?”

“I rang the housing people. They said they know about the mold. It’s not just us. The rain’s been so bad lately. They don’t seem to know what to do. It’s the whole block. The roof needs fixing, all sorts of stuff. They might even move us.”

The rain’s pelting down, battering against the window, with no let-up.

“Would you mind if we went somewhere else?” Mum asks.

“I dunno. No, I don’t think so.”

“Don’t want to stay for the memories?”

Memories. God, too many memories.

She doesn’t wait for an answer, but starts heading for the stairs.

“Mum,” I call after her. She pauses. “I’m a bit cold. Can I have your bathrobe, just for tonight?”

She starts to say something and then she stops herself. “Yes,” she says, with the trace of a smile. “I’ll bring it down.”

Later, with the soft cotton next to my skin and the blankets drawn up under my chin, I listen to the wind and rain battering against the window. They can’t reach me here, and neither can Rob. Tonight, I’m safe.

I think of Neisha and I wonder if she’s lying in bed listening, too. What happened between us today doesn’t seem real. To get so close, to feel her warmth healing me, making everything seem better, and then to break apart so violently. To hear her shouting that she hates me. My stomach flips when I remember her voice, the look in her eyes. But there’s
a hint of another feeling, too. A small sensation that I’ve won something.

I couldn’t bear to push her away, but it happened anyway, and it’s the best thing I could have done. Because she’ll stay away from me now. She’ll stay away from me and Rob. And he won’t be able to hurt her. It’s shitty but it’s true. The more she hates me, the safer she’ll be.

It doesn’t matter if I grow old and lonely without her. It doesn’t matter if I never have sex. It doesn’t matter if the voices in my head drive me over the edge. If I can keep Neisha safe, it will all be worth it.

And now, tucked up in my makeshift bed, with thoughts of Neisha in my head, I’ve got some of that warmth back. It’s not the same as holding her, kissing her, but it will have to do.

The sound of water on glass starts lulling me off to sleep. The room’s softly dark, but as I close my eyes it seems like the top corner where the wall meets the ceiling is darker than the rest, that there’s a patch that wasn’t there when Mum turned the light off. I tell myself I’m imagining it. I’m warm and dry and sleepy.

I close my eyes and pull my blankets up a bit farther.

Night, Cee.

My eyes are open again. In a flash, I’m bathed in a cold sweat.

It’s going to be another long night.

T
he rain doesn’t let up all night. And neither does Rob. Every time I get to the edge of sleep, he’s there. A word in my ear. The sound of his breath.

You’re running out of time, little brother.

At one point the blankets start slipping off and I jerk into consciousness. Was it him? Did he move them? And all the while, I’m thinking about the dark patch in the corner — thinking of it creeping toward me, stinking silently.

You’re running out of time, cowardly bastard.

His voice is like a tap dripping. A noise repeated over and over again. He’s only whispering, but my mind turns it into something bigger, until each word is a hammer blow, and when he’s quiet I’m listening, cowering, anticipating the next strike. And beneath it all, mixed up in it, the kitchen tap is dripping — no, it’s more than a drip, it’s running now. And the pipe in the wall is gurgling — the tap in the bathroom upstairs must be running, too.

Eventually I crawl into the kitchen and slump onto one of the chairs. I fold my arms on the table and rest my head on them. The rain’s still hammering at the window, but that doesn’t bother me too much. What gets me is the kitchen tap. And the more I try to tune it out, the more my mind focuses on it.

I get up and go over to the sink. I wrench the tap around until it won’t move any more, but the water keeps coming. Jesus Christ! It’s only a tap. Surely I can turn the bloody thing off. I try again, almost expecting it to shear off in my hands.

I grab a dish towel from the back of one of the chairs and put it in the sink. And the sound’s almost gone, just a dull, damp suggestion of a noise.

Back at the kitchen table I get my head down again. I’m so tired, I don’t think anything’s going to stop me from sleeping now. I can’t hear his voice anymore. I can’t smell him. I pull the collar of the bathrobe farther up and close my eyes.

But the water soon saturates the cloth. The sound that was muffled grows louder and louder. Water falling on wet cloth.

Time’s up.

I sit up.

“For God’s sake, Rob, leave me alone. You’re dead. You’re dead. I’ve seen you dead.”

My voice is the voice I’ve used during fifteen years of bickering and fighting, pleading and teasing. The voice I use when I talk to my brother. But the words are crazy. They’re not words I ever thought I’d say. If anyone else heard them, if there was anyone here except him and me, they’d be backing away quickly now or calling the men in white coats.

“Who are you talking to?”

I swivel around.

Mum’s in the doorway.

“No one. I dunno, Mum. Him. Rob. He’s here. He’s still here.”

“He’s not here. Not like that,” she says. “There’s no one here but you and me.”

“But he is. It’s the tap and the rain and the mold and everything. It’s him. It’s him, Mum.”

She doesn’t back away or reach for her phone. She steps forward and strokes my hair.

“Shh,” she says. “That’s enough, now. It’s not real, Carl. It’s not real. You’re coming with us tomorrow — well, later today now. It’ll help. I promise.”

“What time is it now?”

“Half past four. You been asleep?”

“No.”

She strokes my hair again. “Me neither. Shall I put the kettle on?”

“Whatever.”

“We could see what’s on the telly.”

“I can’t … I can’t sit in there,” I say. “The thing, the damp — it’s coming down the wall.”

“Really?”

She flicks the living room light on and curses.

“This place,” she says. “You wouldn’t house a pig here.” She turns the light off again and walks back into the kitchen. “Let’s try the radio.”

There’s some sort of mushy music on. Mum turns the volume right down while she makes us both a cup of tea.