The Swimming Pool (32 page)

Home, I think. I can do nothing to help Georgia and now is no time to plead my case – or Ed's – to her parents. I should not have brought myself here, without invitation, without welcome. I've neglected Molly and I've implied a level of guilt on Ed's part that I don't actually believe and all because …

I'm filled with shame to admit that, whatever my justifications, I came here at least partly because I am still,
still
, determined to be a part of the Channings' world. Even when they no longer want me, even now I know they
never
wanted me, not as I'd thought.

I retrace my route around the side of the building to the main road, and all at once the details are acute, significant: the black flecks of dirt on the double yellow lines, the running engines of the stationary ambulances, a trio of staff in flat, wide shoes, coming off shift, checking their phones. One right turn, and the Emergency Department looms, its sign huge, white on red, and more red painted in criss-crosses on the grey of the road.

The fresh sun in the sky.

I
watch as an ambulance approaches, its siren shutting off before it enters the bay. I didn't see the vehicle that took Georgia away last night. She was the last out of the water and the first to be removed: the unconscious one, the true emergency. All my attention had been on Molly, on calming her distress, on persuading the paramedics that she should be allowed to come home, that we should avoid further attacks of mania at the hospital.

My Mazda is where I left it, lonely on its yellow line, ordinary, reliable, symbolic of all I want and need. As I open the driver's door I continue to watch the emergency bay: the ambulance has pulled up and already has its rear doors open, its ramp lowered. There is a sense of calm as the trolley comes wheeling down, smooth and virtually silent, not clattering in the way I'd expect, not surrounded immediately by receiving staff calling out urgent questions. I catch no more than a sliver of the arriving patient – plastic mask and tubes obscure all clues to gender or age – but I understand, with the deepest humanity I possess, that this is someone's sister, mother, uncle, son; this is another family ravaged and reconfigured, just like Georgia's. And this family's enemies will not celebrate.

I settle in the driver's seat, ready for my future, grateful for it. Inexplicably superstitious, I'm unable to start the engine until I know the arriving patient is safely inside the hospital so I watch the trolley's short journey into the building. The sunlight on the arriving
party is so clean and whole that I can't help but be optimistic, even certain, of full recovery for the poor stricken person. Not like last night, when Georgia was removed from the lido, when the light was blue and thin and wretched.

No, it's not like last night at all.

Because now I see who steps out of the ambulance next.

‘It was only supposed to be a scare,' I told Mel, with bravado, as we strolled to the newsagent's for a final ice cream. We would pay for it, too, not steal it from the chiller cabinet as we had many times before, scuttling from the premises in stitches. Today we would do the right thing.

‘Just a laugh,' she agreed. ‘At least she had her swimming costume on. That's more than some of them.'

We knew by then that Nessie hadn't drowned; we weren't murderers. That she'd somehow clawed herself out of the pond and made her way back through the darkening woods. Word had come this morning via a neighbour that she'd got into trouble swimming on her own and had arrived home extremely distressed. It had already been agreed that next summer an adult should supervise the kids at the pond – either that or forbid them to go there.

‘Do you think her mum called the police?' I asked Mel.

‘Doesn't sound like it. Think we'd know by now if she had.' Mel mimed her wrists being locked into handcuffs.

‘What
about her hair? How d'you think she explained that?'

‘No idea. She must have said she wanted it like that.'

‘I wonder if she told her mum it was us.'

Mel just shrugged.

I mustered a chuckle, but it was a hollow one. I knew it had been wrong. I knew it had been cruel. Even our idle pace as we headed for our treat was disrespectful, as if we were sauntering to a graveside or the wreckage of an accident purely to pass the time. ‘Should we at least get our stories straight? In case the police come?'

‘Just say we left the pond before her and didn't see a thing. Besides,' Mel added, ‘you're going home this afternoon, what do you care?'

I cared. I cared enough to have lain sleepless in my bed the previous night, skin slick, nightie damp; I cared enough that the farewell dinner my grandmother had cooked sat indigestible in my stomach. It was not just the last day of summer as far as I was concerned, it was the last day of for ever, the day I stopped breathing easy.

‘Come round and say goodbye before you go,' Mel said, when we'd finished our ice creams. She touched my hair, let her fingers rest in it, her thumb brushing my earlobe.

I eased away. ‘I don't like it when you do that.' Seeing I had offended her, I tried to make amends: ‘I'll write. As soon as I get home. Will you write back?'

Another shrug, different this time, as if she had no other way of expressing to me that a letter would not be enough for her, that I'd missed the point.

The
police had still not come by the time my father arrived to collect me. He hadn't left us; my parents weren't getting divorced. I wonder sometimes how much keener the joy would have been when I answered the door had there not been the overwhelming dread that the man on the other side was in uniform.

‘Can we go?' I kept asking him, refusing to notice my grandparents' bafflement, their hurt expressions. ‘Please can we go?'

I wrote to Mel, as I'd promised. I wrote three times before I received a reply. She told me that a day or two after I'd left she and her parents had received a visit from Nessie's parents. The basic message was that the police would not be involved on the condition that Mel confess her crime and apologize. When she tried to deny it, she was threatened with a dredging of the pond for the weapon and quickly caved in. Though she had protected me – she had a rogue's honour, Mel – and I was grateful for that, it was in reality little more than a stay of execution, for Nessie would, of course, have been able to name me with ease. (Who of life's victims is not familiar with the identities of her tormentors? It is only the tormentors who let the names go.) And yet I heard nothing from my grandparents of any equivalent visit or any request for my permanent address.

Unlike Mel, I was a coward as well as a criminal.

I waited days, weeks, months, for the rap at the door. I watched the phone on the kitchen wall until my eyes grew sore and scratchy, until I could turn away and still
see its ringleted cord coiling back on itself like a tail. Had Nessie's parents tricked Mel into confessing only to take their grievance to the police after all?

The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales was ten, I discovered from a law book in the library, and from what I could understand there was no statute of limitations. Which meant they could at any time change their minds; the police could at any time pursue me.

Which meant I could never stop waiting. I could never stop waiting for the worst thing in the world to catch up with me.

To have done to me what I had done to her.

Even as I watch, the pictures appear two-dimensional – his outline is flattened, the colours tinged with yellow – and my response feels artificial, a cinematic likeness of my fear.

You're tired
, I remind myself.
You haven't slept. You've been imagining things lately; this whole summer, you've been misconstruing people, encounters, conversations. Blink and look again
.

I blink. I look again. I see his retreating figure, his deft, almost dancing steps as he hurries to catch up with the trolley. Only then do I abandon the car and tear back towards the building; only then do I raise my voice to yell his name: ‘Ed!'

He turns in a jerking frantic way, his face exactly as it was last night at the pool: terrified and furious. ‘Nat, I've phoned you about a hundred times! Where the hell have you been?'

‘Please, what's wrong? What's happened to her?'

I sprint to reach the still-rolling trolley. Her face is masked in plastic, sealed inside, eyes closed. The smudge of mascara is still visible on palest cheek, her lips bluish white. Where is blood, where is the life? I reach to touch her arm: she is warm and solid. Alive.

The
innermost part of me convulses and I swallow vomit.

‘She didn't wake up,' Ed says.

In a windowless, strip-lit zone a team is waiting, information exchanged between ambulance staff and receiving team. What I catch destroys me: a drop in oxygen levels, ICU, ventilation, intubation. Ed is being questioned, details he has already addressed at least once, I gather, from his growing impatience. The person in charge is a consultant emergency paediatrician, who is on his way down; he won't be able to speak to us now but will find us as soon as he is able to comment on an outcome.

Outcome: a terrible word, sparking memory of a line I've read that flitted below the surface when I spoke to Lara:
Victims who arrive in the Emergency Department comatose have significantly poorer outcomes …

Georgia was, and now so is Molly.

I've lost track of our route through the building. A corridor has opened into a larger space, like a passing place on a busy single-track road, and we're asked to wait here on our own. The walls are the sun-yellow of hope, the furniture the storm-cloud-grey of fear. Is this where they put the people to whom they expect to have to give bad news? The worst news of all?

Stop
. ‘Tell me from the beginning,' I say to Ed, and his need to articulate his agony triumphs over his anger towards me.

He looks as if he has aged ten years since last night.

‘It
was getting too late for her to still be sleeping, so I shook her, just gently, but she wasn't waking. Her breathing sounded weird.'

When did I last check on her breathing? Before I left, at 8 a.m. It was normal when I left, I'm sure of it. ‘You said she was fine. On the phone, when we spoke, you said –'

‘I know what I said, but I talked to Liam after you, and when I went back in to check on her, she was different. Something must have happened.'

‘She couldn't have been choking on something?'

‘No, it wasn't dramatic like that, like the airways were blocked. It was more like wheezing, like she was struggling to get the right amount of air but was getting some. When the paramedics came they gave her oxygen straight away.'

On the borders of his anger there is guilt and there is also grief. Don't grieve, I think,
believe
.

‘What did the doctors ask you just now? I couldn't follow.'

‘It was about the pool temperature last night, who was supervising, how long she was in the water. The same stuff as before.'

I can't remember the questions from last night. Ed handled them while I held Molly, subdued her, reassured her she was in safe hands – ours.

‘They said it will help that they've already done tests on Georgia,' he adds. ‘You can get diseases from chemicals in the pool, chemical pneumonitis, did they call it?'

‘I should warn Angie, in case Josh is at risk as well.'

‘No,
he didn't inhale any water. He got himself out. He was conscious and lucid.' Ed breathes deeply. ‘Thank God, otherwise there would have been nobody left to raise the alarm.'

Nobody left:
the words make me shudder.

‘What happened in the ambulance? Did she come around?'

‘No. Her oxygen levels were low, she had the mask on.' His voice cracks. ‘They said she needed a ventilator, a hundred per cent oxygen. They talked about stuff to do with airway pressure, I don't know what exactly. I didn't want to ask questions and distract them. We got here so quickly – there was hardly any traffic.'

I nod. ‘I don't understand – last night, how did the paramedics not anticipate this? This relapse.'

Relapse is a safe word, it is not catastrophic, but Ed isn't buying it. His fury rises again, his jaw clenched as he replies: ‘Maybe they did, but you were so adamant we were taking her home. They probably didn't get a full picture of her condition – no wonder they wanted to take her to A & E. But
you
insisted.'

History repeats itself; again I am to blame. I've made the wrong decision. I'm responsible for the lapse of judgement.

But history is not quite repeating. I wish it were. Because the first time I
did
take her straight to hospital and she was discharged within a few hours. The first time she was cleared, just as Harriet was, just as the vast majority of people in pool accidents are.

‘She
was conscious,' I say helplessly. ‘Last night, I thought that meant she was OK. Like Josh. When did she stop sleeping and go into a coma? Is that what this is?'

‘I don't know, Nat.'

‘She must have damage to her lungs. We need to look this up online. What was that disease you just said?' My hand is in my bag, fishing for my phone, but Ed stops me, snatches the phone with unexpected force.

‘No. I'm not listening to your cyberchondria. I've had years of this and I'm not having it now. Wait till the doctors come and tell us what's going on.
Then
we'll look up what needs to be looked up.'

Cyberchondria; years of this
. His words chill me – because there is truth in them. For so long I have obsessively informed myself when there has been nothing new to know yet I've allowed us to be fatally casual when something has gone terribly wrong. Letting her sleep herself into a coma while congratulating myself on having evaded medical care. Leaving her,
leaving her
, so I could stalk a family I hardly know, a woman who only pretended to like me. I told myself this morning I was here to protect Ed, to ensure the Channings' silence, but was that truly my motivation?

‘How long before they let us see her, do you think?'

‘I don't know,' Ed says. ‘It'll depend on how she responds. Once they've got her all hooked up to what she needs and done the tests I'm sure they'll let us go in. We have to wait.'

There
is no window here. I look again at the yellow and the grey.
Focus on the yellow.
Waiting has a different definition from any I've known or imagined before. Five minutes is an hour. An hour will be a day. And life, without her, will never end.

I begin sobbing, tears stinging my hot, raw skin.

‘Crying won't help,' says Ed, neither cruel nor comforting.

It's incredible now to imagine I found the atmosphere between us difficult in Molly's bedroom. That was swinging in hammocks in a sunny meadow compared to this. This is like we're in a sealed room that's filling with gas and all it will take to ignite it is a single word from either of us.

I blow my nose, compose myself. At any moment news will come and I must be calm for Molly. I did it last night and I'll do it again.

‘Where is Georgia, anyway?' Ed asks. ‘Is she in this unit as well? Where are Miles and Lara?'

‘They're on the fourth floor in Critical Care. We won't bump into them down here.'

Will Molly be moved up there
? I wonder. She might already be there for all we know, side by side with the girl who tried to save her.

‘Why weren't we with her?' Ed groans, as much to himself as to me. ‘At the lido, after the band. Why weren't we watching?'

‘Because she's not a small child,' I tell him. ‘Because we're constantly being advised to let her find her own
way.' I speak with new urgency: ‘We have to agree that no one is to blame for her falling in. It was a horrific accident. None of us could have seen her, not with the power out. When I saw her by the water earlier, it was still light, but later it was so dark, even before the blackout –'

He interrupts me. ‘You saw her there earlier?' His voice is thick with blame, so much blame the room hums with it. ‘When, exactly?'

‘Before you arrived,' I say, stretching the truth. ‘She was on her own. I thought she was testing herself, maybe doing some sort of exercise for Bryony.'

‘You called her away, though?'

‘Of course I did. She promised she wouldn't do it again. The pool was out of bounds, we all knew that.'

We're being a bit naughty, going off limits …

Inside me I feel a tremor, its source more complex than remorse.

‘You should have told me this last night,' Ed says.

‘I'm telling you now. The point is, maybe she was trying something similar when she fell. With the underwater lights, she would have been fine, but to be plunged into blackness …' My body language opens in direct appeal. ‘A power cut, Ed, it was the worst kind of bad luck, but that's what it was. Whatever random thing caused the lights to fail,
that's
to blame, not us, not the Channings.'

But Ed is just staring into thin air, distracted, tormented. ‘Liam,' he murmurs.

‘What about him?'

‘When
he called me, just before …' His voice breaks and I think,
Just before he discovered our girl half dead in her bed …
For all his denouncing of me, he's torturing himself because he should have stayed by her bedside, forgone the second call.

‘What did Liam say?'

Ed lets out a groan, crushes my phone tighter in his fist. ‘He'd looked at the CCTV footage of the camera at the shallow end.'

‘And? Does it show her falling in?'

‘No, there's nothing of what happened in the water, it was too dark without the underwater lights, but there was an emergency light on above the exit by Reception and there's just enough illumination to show the kids getting into the pool, before the blackout. Georgia and Josh, I mean.' His gaze locks mine. ‘It's not like everyone thinks, Nat. They didn't get in because Molly fell in. They'd planned to go in all along. The clothes in the changing hut were theirs. It was the one at the end nearest the main entrance.'

My brow creases as I reshape the story. ‘All right, then. So if they planned to go in the water that must mean Molly went with them to watch, hang out. But when the lights failed … Did Liam not see her on the film at all, then?'

‘Yes, this is what I'm coming to. Georgia and Josh had just gone in down the steps, then Molly came through the door and walked towards the edge of the pool. After that, all three move out of range of the emergency light
and he can't see them, not without being able to enhance the visuals in some way.'

‘Maybe Molly was trying to persuade them to get out. Then she got too close to the edge and was disorientated in the dark and overbalanced?'

My poor girl, how it must have felt, swallowed blind by the monster she'd spent most of her young life escaping.

I continue, picturing it clearly: ‘Still, thank God the other two were already in the water. Imagine if they'd still been changing and she'd fallen in first. In the dark they wouldn't have seen where she was, would have been much slower to react. What are the chances? A power cut right at the moment a non-swimmer gets too close to the water? It's like an act of God.'

An act of a vengeful God. A punishment not of the daughter, but of the mother.

‘I don't think so, Nat,' Ed says. ‘There's something else.'

‘What?'

‘That's not the only footage Liam looked at. He also checked the camera in Reception. That's where all the electrics are, behind the front desk.'

He pauses. The hum of blame is quieter now.

‘It wasn't a power cut, like we all assumed. He thinks someone deliberately turned off the lights.'

‘Deliberately?' I'm knocked sideways. ‘Why would anyone do that?'

But
the narrative is writing itself in parallel, the answer clear and true: to create darkness, to conceal the trespasses of a friend, two friends.

Ed goes on: ‘The light wasn't great, but he's fairly sure he recognizes the person who turned off the power.'

‘Who?'