Undertow (17 page)

It’s not there. But I find something else. Something that makes me forget about the bills, and the money.

It’s at the bottom of a drawer. A grey cardboard file, with a single word on the cover, in blue-black ink, the
l
s in loops, alive. It says, “Will”.

Inside are more certificates, too many to hang on the walls, letters of commendation, school reports,
A
s and
B
s from English to Latin. No “Could do better”s. No “Not performing to the best of her ability”s that dotted mine and littered Cass’s.

I read the newspaper cuttings. Rowing competitions, rugby tournaments, and him, always him, his name in lights, his face black and white but coloured with pride.

Somehow, this flimsy cardboard contains him. This strong, substantial, incredible boy. Full of promise, of life.

Then I find it. The last cutting. No smiling headshot, no glowing headline. Instead, four short printed words shout out what I knew, and what I didn’t. “YOUNG RUGBY STAR DROWNS.”

I feel dizzy. Weak. As if the words have sent me spinning like a top. Because it wasn’t a disease, wasn’t a car crash. The things I’d wondered, imagined. He fell from the pier and drowned. And I remember that night, the first night with Danny. On the end of the boardwalk with Eva and Mercy. Remember Jake grabbing me, the water beneath us, and the story they told. About the undertow, about how it pulled you down, that you couldn’t fight it.

And then I know why Mum stays away. Why she’s so scared of even the swimming-pool. Because of this. Because it was the water that killed her brother.

ELEANOR

IT HAS
been two days when the policeman finally calls. Two days of hand-wringing silence and Carol fussing with sweet tea and sour gin
.

Roger answers the door; Eleanor’s legs are too weak, her voice long gone
.

The policeman is young, Eleanor thinks, too young to be the detective that his stripes proclaim. Too young to speak these words, to bear this news. Not much older than Will
.

He sits awkwardly on the wingback chair, waiting for the cup of tea that Carol insists on making before finally telling her what she has been expecting, dreading
.

“We’ve found a body,” he says
.

A body, not a boy. That is all he is now. Muscle and sinew and skin. Laid out on a slab in the same hospital that his father works in
.

They bury him a week later. Close the door to his room. Place the file in the drawer and push it shut. Ephemera. It is nothing. Not the essence of him. Just things
.

But his ghost. His ghost will haunt them for ever
.

BILLIE

I PHONE
in sick to work. Say I’ve got some viral thing. Debs swears. Says now she’s going to have to do a double-shift because Lisa’s still off. For a second I think I’ll change my mind. Because God knows we need the money. But I need this more.

Mum is still holding the cup of coffee, stone-cold now. As I walk in she looks up and I see the dark circles under her eyes. Heroin chic. Not.

“Where are you going?” Her voice is tinged with something. Worry? Panic?

“Just out.” It’s no use talking to her about it. Not with the way she is. She’ll only cry. Or worse.

She puts down the cup, stands suddenly, the chair clattering on the floor as she reaches to hold my arms in her white fingers. “With Danny?”

I can’t do this now. Can’t do the “Be careful, you’re only young, look what happened to me” thing.

“He’s just a friend,” I assure her. “OK?” I take her arms and put them down at her sides. “That’s all. A friend. You don’t need to worry. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“A friend,” she repeats. “OK.”

“I have to go, Mum,” I say. And I kiss her on the cheek, and leave her, wrapped in the quiet chaos of her own world.

But as I get to the door I realize I have no idea where I’m going or how to get there.

So I do what any damsel in distress does. Find a knight in shining armour.

“The cemetery,” he says. “Pensilva.”

I nod. Of course. “You know where it is?”

He breathes out heavily. “Yeah.”

“Is it weird to want to see him? See them?” I ask. “Like, wrong?”

“No.” Danny shakes his head. “It’s closure. Isn’t that what they call it?”

“Yeah.” And I see Martha in her mirrored skirts, putting on her fake German accent but meaning it anyway as she begged Mum to call Eleanor, to have it out with her. To get closure.

“Oh Billie, I’m so sorry,” he says.

“I knew he was dead,” I say. “It’s not like it was a surprise. But it’s made it real somehow. Made him real. Do you see?”

And he does. Of course he does.

He borrows Jake’s van and we drive there in silence. When we stop, get out onto the rain-soaked sand of the car park, he reaches for my hand, keeps it in his until we find them.

They’re side by side. Three of them. Eleanor, Roger and William. Like the Three Bears. Or Three Wise Monkeys. Speak no evil. Their lives and deaths etched in pink-brown quartz, flecked with silver scales. Like salmon, I think. And I try to smile, but instead the tears come, and they don’t stop. I kneel on the damp ground, my hands deep in the cold soil of the graves, and I cry for their loss, and for mine. For the memories we never shared, for the hours, days, weeks spent in our own worlds, when we could have been in each other’s.

I cry until the rain starts to drip its steady suffering, until Danny pulls me up and to him, tells me we need to go, that it’s late, that he has to get the van back.

“I don’t need to go, though,” he says, his lips warm against my neck. “I could come back with you. Or we could go out. Do something. Swim, even?”

But I don’t want the muffled weight of water pulling me under. I want clarity, light. I want to be up in the air. I want to fly. Want to feel drunk and dizzy and dazed and anything, anything but this. I tilt my head back, let Danny pull damp strands of hair away from my eyes.

“Take me to the fair,” I plead. “Will you? Will you take me to the fair?”

HET

HET CALLS
home. Two weeks after they find Will’s body in the water. Two days after they find Tom’s
.

She swore to Martha that she wouldn’t, that she didn’t care what they thought of her. And it was true, of him. But her mother… She thinks of her in that house with him, remembers her sitting at the dressing-table, the veins in her throat taut with worry, with sadness. Feels the life inside her. Filling her with hope. Hope she wants to share, has to share, despite everything that has gone before
.

“Mother?” she says, carefully, quietly
.

“Het? Oh Het.”

She can hear relief flood her mother’s voice in the space of three words. But then she hears something else. The clatter of a receiver being dropped, and then a rasp of heavy breath as it is picked up again. Breath that smells of whiskey and Hamlets
.

“They’re dead,” the voice says. “Do you hear me? Dead.”

Het feels the ground give way underneath her. She sinks into a beanbag, sending tiny pearls of polystyrene skittering across the floorboards
.

“Who—? Who is dead?” she asks
.

“Your brother. And that boy. He killed him. Hit Jonty. Killed Will. Pushed him off the pier. Jonty saw it. Saw it all.”

Het can’t keep it down. She bolts to the bathroom and heaves up a string of vomit and with it a great screaming cry of pain
.

When she picks up the receiver again she hears a click and then the dialling tone. It is the last time she will ever speak to them
.

BILLIE

I WANT
to be taken away. And the fair is another world. Swarming and bright and loud; the music pumping so hard I can feel it in my chest. Half real, half fantasy. Or freak show. Where hard white sugar can be spun into soft pink peaks, where you can watch yourself morph from a giant into Rumpelstiltskin, and where you can lose yourself in the crowds and the smell and the noise.

And I do. I ride rockets and the octopus and the waltzers, trying to lose me, lose Will, lose Eleanor and all of them, to spin and speed them out of me.

We’re stumbling off the cakewalk, giddy with it, when Danny stops suddenly, letting go of my hand so that I pitch forward and knock into some girl in a hoodie who swears as Cherry Coke sloshes over her hand and gives me a hard-as-nails, hard-as-Cass stare.

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” I turn to Danny. But he’s not looking at me. He’s staring at this guy on the goldfish stall. This tall, dark man, who has Danny’s eyes, and height, and that slow, lazy smile.

And it hits me like a slew of rainwater. Cold and shocking. Waking me from the dream I’m trying to find my way back to. Because I know in that second who he is. He is Danny’s father. An overgrown version of the boy at my side, a hall-of-mirrors man, talking the talk, swapping gold coins for darts, without taking his eyes off Danny for a second.

I reach for Danny’s arm, hold it, run my hand down to his.

“We should go,” he says.

I don’t get it. “Don’t you want to, I don’t know … say hello?”

Danny shakes his head. “Not now.”

And then I do. I get it. That nothing’s ever easy. Families are never easy. Not mine with no dad, no money and Mum on another planet. Not Danny’s with his mum gone to a cosy new semi-detached life and this half-stranger riding in for a few weeks a year like some cowboy. Not Cass’s. Not Eva’s. No one’s.

“Let’s go to yours,” I say.

As we walk away, out of this Neverland, I glance over my shoulder, catch him watching us through the crowd. He’s got this look on his face. This “Who are you, kid?” look. The same look I got from Eva. From Debs. From the guy in the Internet café. But for once it doesn’t freak me out. Or piss me off. Because I know who I am. Who I want to be. Tonight, at least.

I want to be Danny’s.

We’re in his bedroom. Eva and Jake next door, arguing over something and nothing.

“He was never my dad,” Danny says, his fingers tracing a pattern on the duvet, his eyes watching the fast movements. “Not really. Not like he changed a nappy when he was here. Or sent a birthday card when he wasn’t. Just a bloke, really. A bloke who slept with my mum.” I touch his face, and his eyes flick up and meet mine. “We’re the same,” he says. “You and me.”

“The same,” I repeat.

He looks at me, into me. And as we kiss, I know it is true. That I am him. He is me. We are each other.

“Stay,” he says. And I could, I think. Could stay in this little room, with the sea outside the window and the curtains that don’t close and the half-hearted two-bar heater. Could fall asleep, with his chin against my shoulder, his arms round mine, our bodies locked like a Chinese puzzle. But…

“I can’t,” I say. “Mum.”

“Not that,” he says. “I mean here, in Seaton. Don’t go. Ever.”

“But what about college?” I ask. “I thought—”

“It can wait. Until you can go. Until—”

And I kiss him my answer. Because I am surer than ever. That I want to be here. In this rain-sodden granite-grey dead-end town. I don’t want to go back to London. Don’t want to spend another Saturday night standing outside Magic City with a bottle of Breezer in my hand and Cass’s borrowed shoes pinching my toes and her laugh digging at my heart.

I want to stay. I want to be with him. For ever.

HET

“HAVE YOU
…? I mean, have you done this before?”

Het shakes her head, and drops it, half proud that at nineteen she is a virgin. Despite Jonty’s pushing insistence. Despite the pleas and the threats. Half ashamed that she has no idea what to do. And that he does. She knows that there have been others. Kelly. Maybe that other girl too. She remembers the glittered lettering on the back of her top. Debs. That was it
.

Tom lifts her chin, places his fingers against her cheek. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “None of it, none of what’s gone before.”

Then he pulls her gently to him, and kisses her
.