The Drowning Ground (32 page)

More water entered my mouth. I tried to cough it out, but only another larger mouthful of water slipped down my throat and pushed its way into my lungs. I twisted my head from side to side, aware, but only faintly, that I was screaming.

I reached forward, not caring now what I touched or tore in the darkness. My fingers dug into something very soft. With my other hand I grabbed at the rock, straining with every muscle. But none of it was any use. The mud's clutching resistance held me ever more tightly at the bottom of the well. I became dimly conscious of some sound coming from far above me. A suppressed yell or scream. The single orange light from above had gone. There was a sudden tightness in my throat, and a coldness coursed through my entire body. Numbing fear. My back emitted a single shudder in a spasm and then went limp. I struggled weakly, and for a few moments my hands reached for the narrow sides of the well.

There were a few more moments of a desperate and wild panic. Then, unspectacularly, it ended. My head tilted back. My heart rate slowed. My mouth opened. My eyes rolled back, glassy and empty. The blood rushed from my limbs towards my chest. And the burning searing pain in my whole body seemed to ease. My head began to loll forward, and then my arms drifted to my sides. I fell backwards so that my back bumped and rested against the ancient walls of the well. A moment of languid peace.

It came to me then with perfect clarity that I had never made it out of the Ford Falcon at all. I was still there, dying in Buenos Aires all those years ago. All the rest of it – my other life in England – had been an elaborate illusion. The illusion of a drowning man. I was still in the car, trapped with the other men. Soon my body would roll twisting into the brown waters of the river delta. It would float and be carried along, drifting ever outwards to the sea.

And I knew something else. I had found her at last. Not Gail Foster or Elise Pennington. They had never existed. They were just illusions that I had tried to grasp as the water filled my lungs and the current of the river began to take me away from the diminishing lights of the Ford Falcon. Pilar, I thought. Pilar. It's you Pilar, isn't it? I knew I would find you. But what have they done to you? Your poor face. What have those animals gone and done to you? I wanted to reach out and touch her face in the darkness before me one last time. I tried to lift my arms. But now they were as heavy as lead. And when I tried to move closer, the mud around my feet caressed my toes and held me, while the pounding of the water subsided into a murmur. Oh, Pilar, I thought, you've been down here all this time and I never knew it. But how could I have known?

And in that moment I remembered her. I remembered the smell of her hair. With my hand outstretched, I touched the base of her neck with the very tips of my fingers. Her skin was stone cold, but I didn't care. I had found her.

47

Buenos Aires, January 1982

We never knew how
los militares
had found out where we were staying, but I hadn't expected them to come for me so quickly, and my brother and I had both been in a kind of daze since Pilar had disappeared. I had been asleep when I heard that loud, unmistakable banging on my front door. I had run bounding down the stairs towards the back porch, but one of them was waiting for me with his shotgun raised lazily at my chest.

He ordered me to go back to the house and unlatch the front door, where his partner was waiting for us. My brother thankfully had been out somewhere. They pushed me inside. A stifling Buenos Aires morning. Thunder and lightning rumbling far off in the distance. But no rain and no relief from the remorseless heat. Fans blowing everywhere in that strange chintzy old house.

The two men were similarly dressed in a near-parody of a civilian uniform. Shirts a little open at the chest and out-of-date slightly flared trousers. One of them, the bigger of the two, was wearing a thin leather jacket. It was the meticulously polished shoes that gave them away – that, and the shotguns hanging by their sides. They pushed their way in, asked if I was alone, then looked around the house. Obviously, they were casing it for later, when they or other members of their battalion would come back and steal everything inside it. I did not recognize them. But no doubt the blond man
el rubio,
along with his companions, was eagerly waiting for me somewhere and had sent these two to come and get me.

They seemed to be experts at it, and both appeared bored by the whole routine. The smaller one poured himself a drink from a decanter on the table, draped himself on the sofa in the darkened living room, placed his shotgun on the wooden floor and closed his eyes. The other one followed me while I went upstairs to fetch my identity card.

I was wearing a River Plate football shirt. The big man seemed to approve. He closed the door. Suddenly he started talking about some of the players. He was very knowledgeable. The identity card should have been easy, as you had to carry it wherever you went, but I just couldn't find it in a house that was still unfamiliar to me. I rummaged everywhere for it. But it just wasn't in the room. All the while I could sense the man's mood darkening. I was running out of places to look for it. I searched once again in a drawer by the bed, muttering, and heard a few bounding heavy steps and then felt a savage kick at my side that was so hard that it sent me into a sprawling heap on the floor.

I managed to pick myself up and finally found it in a drawer in a small table on the landing. He let me put on some trousers over my boxer shorts and then we went downstairs. In the living room the decanter looked half empty and the smaller man was fast asleep. The big man reached into his leather jacket, pulled out some plastic cord, tied my hands tightly together in front of me and then placed one of my brother's sweaters over my hands.

He shook the other man awake. The small man grumbled, swore and picked up the shotgun. They led me into the street and shut the door behind them. I gazed up, wondering if I should call out for help. But the fear was already so great that I found that part of me had completely succumbed to their will. They hadn't even done anything to me. Yet I was, in seconds, already acting the role of the prisoner. It was as if I were shrinking.

They'd left the ignition on in the car and I heard the throaty rumble of the Ford Falcon before I even saw it. The polished metal grille shone out between the large oblong orange lights, and the Falcon's engine rumbled greedily as we approached. The car was clean and as impeccable as the soldiers' polished shoes.

The small man got in the car first. I was led to the back. The streets were dark. No one about at all. What happened to me after this was of absolutely no interest to the men now sitting in the front of the car. These two soldiers in civilian uniform were just one small cog in a much larger machine that lay unseen all around the city. Somewhere my name was written out in black type along with an address. A docket perhaps or a file lying on a desk. Perhaps just a name on a long list.

As I sat in the back, all I could think about was the ad that they had run all summer in the cinemas and on the TV. An excited slightly effeminate male voice repeated a slogan. It banged idiotically in my head. ‘Ford Ford Falcon. Falcon Falcon Ford. Ford Ford Falcon. Falcon Falcon Ford. Ford Ford Falcon. Falcon Falcon Ford. Ford Ford Falcon…'

The images of the ad played out in my mind in almost minute detail. A child sleeping peacefully in the back. Silence! Four smiley faces at a petrol pump. Economic! A beautiful woman in a fur coat. Air conditioning! A disco packed with more sexy women. A tape deck! ‘Four speakers!' A magician in a top hat popped open the boot. Hundreds of white rabbits and doves. The rabbits spilled out and flopped around on the floor. The doves flew out. Plenty of room!

It was dark down there in the back of the Ford Falcon. I knew that. And they were big too. Falcons had been a favourite with Argentinian middle-class families because they rarely broke down, were cheap and had a nice big boot. They were a favourite with the military police for exactly the same reasons. But the military always painted theirs a signature shimmering green.
Los Falcons Verdes
– a phrase that had quickly become synonymous with terror, torture and death.

48

Suddenly a lot of things seemed to happen at once. There was commotion around me. A muffled, dripping echo. I felt something tugging hard at a point just below my elbow. It lost purchase, then grabbed harder beneath my armpit, and this time it didn't let go. Seconds later, I felt myself rising. The mud shifted at my feet and then, almost with a reluctant sigh, the mud let go. I surged forward, gaining speed, and was being dragged, scrambling, through the water and towards the end of a tunnel that seemed to have no end.

*   *   *

After a shower, I warmed up back in the trailer and drank two hot cups of very sweet tea in front of the heater, while Rose showered and got changed in a small annexe. When my teeth stopped chattering in my head to the extent that I could actually talk, I phoned the station and called it in. Rose came back just as I put the phone down.

He gave me a long, critical look before he closed the door behind him and shook his head. He walked over to the kettle and put it on. He still seemed rather resentful and put out that he had been forced to save my life.

‘There's going to be quite a lot of people here fairly soon,' I said. ‘Would you mind taking them there? Back to the well?'

Rose shrugged. ‘Sure, why not? As long as I don't have to go in there again. What's down there anyway?' he said.

I didn't say anything straightaway. ‘You'll find out soon enough,' I said, looking at the stranger who had pulled me out of there and by some miracle had known what to do afterwards.

As if reading my mind, Rose said, ‘They make us do a course. First Aid. 'Elf 'n' safety. Thought it was a waste of time … at the time.' He let that hang in the air and shrugged before reaching for a cup. ‘Got us to practise on some dummy,' he said, looking at me. ‘You know that you weren't speaking English just now when I pulled you out of there?'

‘I wasn't?' I said, surprised.

‘Yeah. You were going on in Italian or something. French maybe.'

‘Spanish,' I said.

‘Spanish. Right. And you kept on repeating something – a word, a place, or something. Over and over. Pilah or Piluh or something like that. I was wondering what it meant.'

‘Pilar,' I said. ‘I was saying that, was I?'

‘Yes,' Rose said brightly. ‘That's it. Pilar.'

‘Well,' I said shortly. ‘It doesn't really mean anything. Pilar's not a place or even a word. It's a name.'

‘A girl's name?' Rose said, immediately interested.

‘Yes,' I said.

I took a deep breath. It was the first time I had heard myself saying the name out loud for years. I raised my cup closer to my lips. ‘So you'll be here when they come,' I said.

Rose nodded.

There was still some half-dissolved sugar in the bottom of the cup. I swigged it, licked my lips and placed the cup on the table. ‘Thank you,' I said.

‘Don't mention it. But you sure you'll be all right?'

‘Yes,' I said. But I still felt light-headed and weak, and my brain was pounding like the water against the ancient walls of the well. For a moment, I thought of what was down there and shivered. I looked across the brightly lit room, glad of the warmth and of the company, reluctant to leave all of a sudden. I made myself stand up.

I looked hard at the young man standing by the old kettle, feeling a bit sorry for him. He was wasted here in this dead-end job. Maybe, it was because he had saved my life, or maybe it was because I knew that I would probably never see him again, but I found myself saying in a very offhand way, ‘Actually, it almost happened to me before, you know.'

‘What, you got yourself stuck in a well before?' Rose said.

‘No, no. I nearly drowned before.'

‘You did?' Rose did not look all that surprised or interested.

‘Yes, it happened a very long time ago. There wasn't anyone back then to pull me out, like you did just now. So if you ever feel like ditching this job, you let me know. I can help you out on that. And thanks,' I said. ‘Thanks for pulling me out of there.'

My car was waiting for me on the tarmac near the trailer. I stared fixedly in front of me, trying to bring some memory of Pilar into the light as I walked. But I had buried all of it deeply, and over the years the memory, of its own accord and with a definite purpose, seemed to have burrowed itself even more deeply into my mind. So that now, when I actually wanted to think about her, I could not.

For a moment there was nothing there at all, and I stood helpless in the cold trying to remember her. Then finally a splinter of memory came to me. My hands began to tremble. An image of her stood sharp and clear in my mind: her profile against the setting sun.

I stood in the cold for a while, remembering. Then I moved quickly to the car, opened the door and sat inside. I simply could not bear to think about Pilar any more. There was no point in it, and it just made my mind roam in endless circles. And the conclusion was always the same. I would never know. No one would ever know what had happened to her.

The phone was ringing deep in my pocket. I had the feeling that it had been ringing for some time. Still in a daze, I reached for it and answered it.

‘Did you find them, sir?' Graves said.

‘What?' I said.

‘The girls, sir? Were they there where you thought they were? In that barn?'

‘Girls?' I said. I just couldn't understand what Graves was talking about. ‘Who?' I said stupidly.

‘Elise and Gail. Were they there? Did you find them?' Graves said impatiently.

‘I'm not sure. One of them maybe,' I said.

‘Do you want me to come over?' Graves said. ‘Where are you? I'm sorry but you sound awful.'