The Drowning (27 page)

I
open my eyes. There’s stuff in my mouth. I turn my head and spit.

There’s a face just a few feet from mine, looking sideways. Hair plastered onto her forehead. Full lips slightly apart. Warm, honey-colored skin. Eyes closed, stubby eyelashes clumped with water.

The face is moving, rocking backward and forward, pivoting on the back of the head where it touches the ground.

The movement stops.

A man leans over her. He tilts her head back and lifts her chin. Then he pinches her nose and leans farther over and kisses her. He pulls away, takes a deep breath, and kisses her again.

I feel sick. He’s violating her. Neisha, my girl. Right in front of me.

“Get off!” I shout, but it’s only in my head. My lips don’t move. All I can do is watch.

He stops and sits back on his heels. Now he bunches up his hands, puts one on top of the other, and presses them onto the middle of her chest, pushing so hard that her whole body moves, her head rocking backward and forward again.

He’s trying to save her.

He’s sweating with the effort. The sun’s beating down and steam rises up from the wet ground around me, but I can only feel the warmth on my face, prickling my wet skin. I look down. I’m covered with a layer of coats.

Someone squeezes my hand.

“What’s your name, son?” A woman’s voice.

I can’t remember. I can only remember the girl’s name. My girl’s name. Neisha. I turn my head back to her.

“Don’t worry,” the woman says, squeezing my hand again. “The ambulance will be here soon. It’s going to be all right.”

Neisha’s head rocks backward and forward. Her eyes are closed.

“It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

I
’ve never been to a funeral before.

There are more people here than I thought there’d be, but as we wait for it to start all I can think about is the people who aren’t here.

I sit at the front with Mum and Auntie Debbie. I’ve come straight from the hospital in some clothes the social worker there found for me. It’s not cold here, but I’m shivering and sweating. The cuts on my legs and shoulder have started to go bad. They’ve given me some antibiotics, but I guess they haven’t kicked in yet. I wipe my face with a hankie.

“You all right?” Mum says. She’s looking like death herself.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s just —”

I stop. The double doors are opening. The coffin’s coming in. A shiny wooden box, carried by six blokes in dark suits.

Mum starts to cry.

“I can’t do this. I can’t —”

I start to put my arm around her, but on the other side Debbie’s already got her, holding her tight, pulling her away from me. And so I sit, on my own, and watch them carry him in.

The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up.

I’m scared. Scared of this place, the way everything’s happening
around us, like a well-oiled machine. The end of the line, it’s happening and we can’t stop it.

I’m thinking that it could have been me inside that box. First at the lake, and then at Neisha’s house. I’ve come close. Really close. And one day it
will
be me. And maybe that’s what I’m scared of. The end. My end. There’s no escape.

The service starts and I follow what everyone else does, turning around to check when to sit and when to stand. Not singing, not praying. Just watching and listening. Letting it happen. We’re getting toward the end. I’ve been told what to expect. A curtain will come across. Unseen, the coffin will slide away.

One of the teachers from school walks to the front and starts talking about Rob. School? Are you shitting me? He hated school and school hated him. He was hardly ever there. The teacher’s struggling to find something good to say. Words like
lively
and
spirited
spew out of his mouth. Code words. Everybody knows.

There are a few murmurs of agreement as he makes his way back to his seat. Someone says, “Well done.”

The priest thanks him and invites us to pray.

And suddenly I know this isn’t right. This service, these people, these words have nothing to do with him.

I find myself walking to the front. I put my hand on the coffin, let it rest there. Then I turn and face the others. Heads that were bowed are looking up now, and the movement ripples down the church. The whole place is quiet. Watching me. Waiting.

“My brother’s in here,” I say.

In the front row, Mum’s stopped crying. She and Debbie are looking at me, openmouthed. A couple of rows behind I spot Harry, sitting near the teacher from school and a couple of cops. The rest of the place is packed with kids my age, kids that were never our friends.

I want to tell them everything. The truth. The story of our lives. How it was always me and him, right from the beginning. The beatings we got. The way he looked after me. The adventures we had. The trouble we caused. I want to tell them about Iris and her dog. I want to tell them about Neisha, the girl who changed everything.

I want to tell them about the water, how it took him and how it tried to take me and Neisha. I want to tell them about sounds and smells and sights and pain. I want to tell them about holes in your skull where your eyes should be, marks left by mud that won’t wash off. I want to tell them about going mad, so mad you’re terrified of a dripping tap. I want to tell them that sometimes the dead don’t go quietly. How someone you love can be the person you’re most scared of.

I look at their faces. They never really knew Rob. They don’t know what happened. Nobody does, except Rob and Neisha and me.

Rob’s dead. Neisha’s still in the hospital.

I could tell them, tell them everything. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Or I could keep my trap shut.

Let it go. Let him go.

“My brother,” I find myself saying, my voice breaking. He tried to kill me, he hated me, but it wasn’t always like that. He was the one who wiped my mouth when I was sick. He was the one who slept on the other side of the room, night after night, whose breathing I fell asleep to, whose face I woke up to.

“Good night, Rob.”

My words echo in this space and I strain to hear the reply —
Good night, Cee.
But it doesn’t come. I stand, listening. Lost.

The priest takes my elbow, shows me back to my seat. He says the last prayer. The organ starts playing and the curtain glides silently around the coffin.

T
he first light sneaks through the gap in the curtains. It couldn’t cause me more pain if I were a vampire. It’s the start of the day I’ve been dreading for three months: moving day.

Neisha stirs in her sleep, shifting slightly. Her hand tenses and then relaxes against my chest. I pick it up and bring it to my lips, kissing her fingers one by one.

She opens her eyes and smiles.

“Hello,” she whispers.

“Hello,” I say back.

“What time is it?”

“Just after six.”

She groans.

“You’d better go. Dad’ll be up soon.”

“I don’t want to.” I hold her tighter.

“I know.” She puts her arms around me and snuggles in. We lie like that for a minute or so, then she wriggles free and starts to sit up.

“Carl,” she says, “you’ve really got to go.”

I don’t know how being caught here would make anything worse. She’s going, after all, moving a hundred miles away. New job for her dad. New house, new school, new friends, new life.

“Okay, okay,” I say. I slither out of bed and haul my jeans on over my boxers. Neisha stays where she is, drawing the covers up under her chin. I pad over to her window and peep out. It looks like the Arctic outside; it’s been cold for more than two weeks and there’s been another thick frost. The sky’s clear and the sun’s about to rise.

“Come with me,” I say.

“Carl,” she says, “you know I’m going. I
am
going today.”

“I know. Come with me now, just for a walk. It’s beautiful out there.”

She looks at me like I’ve gone mad, then she shrugs off the duvet and slides her feet out of bed and onto the floor. Her smooth, toffee-colored legs stretch right up to the hem of her T-shirt. The hint of her soft curves makes me want to fold her up in my arms again, lie down, and try to forget the world outside our single-bedded nest.

“Pass me that sweater,” she whispers, breaking into my fantasy. I do what she asks, and while she dresses I put the rest of my clothes on. We creep past her dad’s room. The flat is quiet and warm and empty. No clutter. Nothing personal. A temporary place, that’s all, a refuge after the flood.

We slip our shoes on and ease the front door open. The cold nearly takes my breath away.

I grab Neisha’s hand and we walk to the stairs. Everything is covered in a thick white layer of frost. It’s not ordinary frost. The grass, the trees, and the telephone wires are coated in spines of ice, a fringe of needles. It’s magical.

“Where are we going?” she asks, her breath ballooning in front of her.

“I dunno. Somewhere with trees; they’re amazing like this.”

“The park,” she says.

The grass crunches beneath our feet. We stop to look at a spider’s web, its perfect pattern highlighted in ice. More light seeps into the sky, but we can’t see the sun yet.

“I’ll never forget this,” Neisha says.

“Or me. Don’t forget me, will you?” I sound pathetic, needy, but I can’t help myself.

“Of course not.”

“Last night …” I start to say. I want to tell her that I didn’t sleep a wink, that I spent the whole time watching her, listening to her breathing. That I fell so far in love with her it was like falling into space. That it was the best night of my life.

“What?” she says.

“… nothing. You were snoring.”

“Shut up, I wasn’t.” She sounds offended, and for a moment I think I’ve blown it, but she’s smiling and she’s still holding my hand, and now she starts to lead me down the hill.

“No, I don’t think so, Neisha, not there.”

“Someone said it was frozen.”

“I dunno. I —”

“It’s all right,” she says.

Perhaps it is. Yesterday, at the inquest, it felt like we were being told it was over. Like that guy, the coroner, was writing
“The End” on the last page for us. It wasn’t “The End,” though, was it? It was “Death by Misadventure.”

An adventure that went wrong.

He said it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. The marks on Rob’s ankle showed he’d got caught up in something at the bottom of the lake — wire or reeds or something. That lake wasn’t safe for anyone. It could have happened to anybody.

Neisha’s still walking a little in front of me, leading me toward the lake. “It was a sort of ending, yesterday, wasn’t it?” she says, as if she’s reading my thoughts. “But now I want to say good-bye. Do it properly.”

*  *  *

The bushes crackle as we push our way through, and then we’re there, on the edge of the lake. It’s perfectly flat today — no waves or ripples, nothing lapping at the bank. We’re the only people here, but not the only life. Dotted about, in ones and twos and little groups, there are ducks and gulls standing on the ice, hunched and miserable.

“Come on,” Neisha says.

She inches down onto the ice.

“I don’t know,” I say again, but I’m there with her, by her side. There’s a surface layer of crystals and then solid ice below. We walk slowly forward. I’m studying the surface, looking for cracks, for I don’t know what. The ice isn’t all the same: There are darker patches, different shades of gray. I look harder. And
in my head, I can see him, Rob, his face pressed up against the underside of the ice, nose and mouth squashed sideways. I see his hands, palms pressing hard, trying to force his way out.

I stop walking.

“I can’t, Neisha. I can’t go any farther.”

A couple of steps ahead of me, she turns around. Her hand has slipped out of mine.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s frozen solid.”

I can’t help looking down, thinking of the water beneath the ice. The currents, the movement, the forces at work. They won’t be trapped there forever. They’ll find a way out.

“There are shadows under there … I wanna go back.”