Water Born (11 page)

SEVENTEEN

‘
I
brought you some food, a little bit of salad.' Mum's voice, right outside my door.

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘I'd leave it on the floor here, but I don't trust Misty not to have a go at it.'

Sigh.

‘Okay, just bring it in.'

She comes into the room, carrying a tray. ‘I'll put it on your desk, shall I? I know you probably won't feel like it, but it's here if you do. You should at least drink something. It's lemonade, not . . .'

‘ . . . not water?'

She nods. ‘I'm sorry,' she says.

‘What for?'

‘Just now. Your dad losing it. Not telling you the
truth earlier.'

Without Dad here, the heat's gone out of the argument. Mum's apology reaches out to me and I can't be angry with her.

‘Sit down, Mum.'

She sits on the end of the bed. My phone pings. It's been going crazy with people reacting to the news about Christie.

‘You've got a text,' she says.

‘Yeah, I know.'

‘You can look at it, I don't mind.'

‘No, it's okay. There's loads of them.' I click the phone into silent mode and put it down.

‘About Christie?'

‘Yeah. No one can believe it.'

‘I'm so sorry. It's very rare for someone to die of water intoxication. She was very unlucky.'

‘Water what?'

‘Water intoxication. That's what she had. We haven't had a case at the hospital as long as I've worked there. It's very unusual.'

‘Her mum said that her brain had swollen.'

‘Yes, when you drink too much it can affect your internal organs. Sometimes you can't recover.'

But she'd woken up. She was getting better.

I can't deal with this on my own. I've got to tell someone.

‘I did it, Mum. I killed her.'

She looks up sharply, searches my eyes. ‘What?'

‘She woke up at the end, when I was visiting, and she
asked for some water and I gave her a sip.'

‘A sip wouldn't have killed her, baby girl. It wasn't your fault.'

‘No, you don't understand. She choked on it. She choked to death.'

She closes her eyes for a moment, then leans forward and takes my hands in hers.

‘It was an accident, then, Nic. You didn't kill her.'

‘I shouldn't have given her anything. Why didn't I wait for the nurses?'

‘Ideally you shouldn't, but you said she asked for it . . .'

‘She did. Her lips were so dry. I thought I was helping . . .'

She shuffles up the bed towards me and holds me again, stroking my hair. ‘It's okay. It's okay. Ssh . . .'

‘What's going to happen?'

‘About Christie?'

‘About everything. Christie. Dad and that boy with the water pistol. Swimming. Us. Everything.'

‘Ssh. You can't worry about everything all at once. It'll be okay.'

‘Dad's not okay.'

‘No. But he heard today that the boy's family isn't pressing charges. The police just gave him an official warning. It'll be on his record for a while, but that's all.'

‘What's going on, Mum?'

‘It's his OCD thing. It's got out of control. I'll make him get help, see a doctor. You don't need to worry about it, that's my job.' She sits back a little. ‘You've had a terrible shock. Just get through today, and then tomorrow, and the
next day. Take it gently. It'll be all right . . . what's that?'

She's looking at the silver chain round my neck. I put my hand to my chest, covering the lump under my T-shirt.

‘Just a necklace.'

‘You don't wear jewellery, not every day. What is it?'

I keep my hand in place. If she sees it, she'll know I've been going through her things.

‘Nothing special.'

But I'm colouring up.

‘It
is
special, isn't it? Has someone given it to you? Are you seeing someone?'

‘No!' I try to laugh it off, but it sounds so fake that it has the opposite effect. Her eyes widen with delight. Her mouth forms an O. She leans towards me.

‘You've got a boyfriend! Why didn't you tell me?'

Maybe this is my Get Out of Jail card.

‘I just . . . it's just early days, you know.'

‘Who is it?'

God, who is it? Quick, Nic, think quickly. Mum's staring, shiny-eyed, waiting.

‘You don't know him.'

‘Okay, so what's his name? Where did you meet him?'

So many questions.

‘He's just a boy, Mum, okay? I don't want to give you all the juicy details in case it's nothing.'

‘Just his name, then.' She's relentless, and it strikes me that she's been waiting for this moment for a while, like she sees it as a mother-daughter rite-of-passage thing. I get a little twinge of guilt that this longed-for day is nothing but fiction.

‘His name . . .' I say. My mind is grappling for a name. Something. Anything. I've got a big, blank space in my head where my quick-wittedness should be right now, coming up with something plausible.

‘It's . . . it's Milton.'

The word is out before I've got a chance to stop it. I clap my hand to my mouth, covering the lower half of my face, but it's too late. The stable door is wide open, the imaginary horse has bolted and is kicking up a dust trail in my face.

Mum's face is frozen, then a little frown appears.

‘Milton?' she says. ‘You mean the same as Milton two-doors-down?'

‘Yes . . . the same.' In for a penny. ‘Same name. Same person.' I screw up my face, waiting for her reaction.

‘Milton?' she says again, and now her hand has gone up to her mouth, but a smile is escaping round the edges.

At the same moment, my phone pings again. We both look at it. Mum's smile gets even wider.

‘Look, it's a secret, okay? And we've only just started, so don't say anything, okay? Not to Dad, or anyone.'

Behind her hand she nods.

‘You can stop smiling now, it's not a big deal.'

She lowers her hand and tries to pull a straight face. ‘Nic,' she says. ‘Do you want to talk about anything?'

I look at her, then I get what she means: ‘anything' equals ‘sex'.

‘No! No. Shuttup. Ewww. We've only just started seeing each other . . .'

‘Does he know about Christie?'

‘I dunno. I haven't told him yet . . .'

‘Might be easier to talk to him. It might help.'

‘Okay. Secret, remember?'

‘I won't tell,' she says. ‘Promise.' Then she leans across the gap between us and kisses my forehead, before getting up and leaving the room.

I lean back against my pillows. God, what a mess. Everything's a mess. But Mum's right – I can't sort it all out by sitting here worrying. I close my eyes, but all I can see is Christie's face. The panic in her eyes as she started to choke. Oh, God.

Sweat's dripping down my front, soaking my T-shirt. The air in the room is cloyingly hot. I walk over to the window to see if I can wedge it open a bit further. As I push the handle, my legs press against the radiator and I gasp. It's on, red hot against my bare skin. No wonder this room feels like a furnace.

I crouch down and turn the valve round until it's completely closed. What the hell's the heating doing on anyway?

On the bed, my phone vibrates. I pick it up and scroll through the messages. There are so many, I don't know where to start. Most were sent within the last hour or so, as people heard about Christie. I scroll back through them all, to the one from Harry that came through when I was at the hospital.

Surprise, surprise, he hasn't sent anything since. He must know by now. What's he feeling? The lying, cheating snake. I can't think about him now without feeling sick. What did I ever see in him?

The air is hot and thick. It feels like the oxygen has been squeezed out of it. My room is like a sauna, the walls themselves sweating and sighing. On my desk, the salad Mum brought is already looking wilted and tired.

I don't even try to go to sleep. I strip off and put on some clean pants and a vest top, and sit on my bed, on top of the covers. I don't look at my phone. I don't open my laptop. I sit and stare into space and wait for this horrible day to be over.

The room grows dark around me and still I sit and stare. My eyes start playing tricks on me, seeing colours in the darkness that aren't there. Voices from the street outside sound like they're drifting in from another planet. The people they belong to are aliens – people with ordinary lives, with friends who are all still alive and families who don't have secrets. They've never been scared of their own dad. They're not like me.

The phone vibrates, buzzing over and over again.

The screen flares into life as I unlock it and check my inbox.

Milton.

My imaginary boyfriend.

What does he want?

Nic, you okay?

Yeh. Kind of
.

Sorry about Christie. That sucks so bad
.

Thnx
.

I think I've found the rubber ducky
.

?

Click this link
.

I open it. It's from a news site, from seventeen years ago. No photos, only text.

LOCAL BOY: DEATH BY MISADVENTURE

Kingsleigh boy, Robert ‘Rob' Adams, aged 17, died after an outing to a local beauty spot went tragically wrong. An inquest into his death, on 24th September 2013, heard that he had gone swimming in the Imperial Park lake after school with his younger brother, Carl, and their friend, Neisha Gupta. Ignoring warning signs, the three had been in the lake for a few minutes when they got caught in a violent rainstorm. Carl and Neisha managed to make their way out of the lake, but the body of Robert was found soon afterwards. He had drowned. Mr Oliver Townsend, the coroner, ruled that it was death by misadventure
.

I read it twice, then again.

There was a brother.

My dad had a brother.

A brother who drowned.

EIGHTEEN

I
read the article again. Of
course
Dad's terrified of water. His brother drowned. And Mum was there too. They were both in it together – this trauma, this terrible, terrible thing.

No wonder he's paranoid about water.

Another message from Milton:
What do you think?

Explains a lot
.

Mm. I reckon
.

Why secret tho?

Sad I guess. Too sad
.

I put my phone down and lean back again. My eyes are filling up, big fat tears threatening to spill out. Poor Dad. He's lived with this all this time, and it obviously hasn't got any easier. And why should it? How can you possibly cope with losing the person you've shared your childhood
with? And it all hurt too much to talk about. Wow.

My phone pings again. I lean over.

More links here
.

I'm not sure I need any more. This is it, isn't it? This explains everything. I've been thinking that my dad's going mad, and in a way he has, but he's going mad with grief, a grief he hasn't been able to get over for seventeen years.

I look at the clock. Two forty-three. God, I must have fallen asleep. I'm tired, but not sleepy. I scroll back up to a previous message:
More links here
. Won't do any harm to look. They might help me to understand Dad's story, his experience.

I click on the top one. It's another news article, this time from a few months earlier, a report of the drowning itself. There are pictures this time, the sort of photos that get taken at school – you know, headshots of kids with slicked-down hair and uncertain smiles. One of them's obviously Mum: Neisha Gupta at sixteen. She was beautiful. Smooth black hair, almond-shaped eyes, with a hint of sparkle in them.

The other picture is of two boys: brothers, one a couple of years younger than the other. I look from one to the other and back again. They both look like my dad – the same blue-grey eyes, sloped down at the outside edges, the same square jawline. The younger one is looking to one side of the camera, unsure of himself. The other one, the older boy, is staring straight at the lens. There's something about his expression – he's kind of cocky, like he's winding the photographer up. I'm looking at Dad's
brother. Robert ‘Rob' Adams, the uncle I never knew.

Except that I do know him.

I've seen his face before. I saw it today.

It's the face of the boy in the pool.

NINETEEN

I
stare at the face on the screen. This isn't right. It can't be.

The caption:
Carl Adams, 15 (left) and Robert ‘Rob' Adams, 17 (right)

Dad and his brother. A brother who died in 2013.

My uncle.

Who looks like – who
is
, surely – the boy who visits me underwater.

That's insane – it doesn't make any sense. He died seventeen years ago.

It must be someone that looks like him – maybe a relative, a distant cousin or someone, maybe even his son. That's what my brain is saying, trying to find a logical explanation. But my heart is telling me something different. I know – I've known all along, haven't I? – that this boy isn't like anyone else.

He died before I was born.

He exists underwater.

He's not . . . mortal.

He's something else. An echo of the person he used to be.

My phone blinks off into energy-saving mode. I touch the screen to wake it up, then reach forward and let my thumb trace the shape of his face. The blue-grey eyes stare back at me.

I'm scared now, but also it feels like things are slotting into place. He knew me, didn't he? He used my name when I hadn't told it to him. There was a reason that he found
me
, not the other girls in the pool. There's a connection. It's starting to make sense in a crazy, screwed-up sort of way.

Maybe I shouldn't feel scared. Maybe I should feel lucky.

We don't have a printer – I don't know anyone who does – but I wish we did. I'd love to print out Rob's picture. Instead, I save the image to my gallery. He'll be there now, whenever I need him.

Sometime, somehow, I've got to have the ‘I know you had a brother' conversation with Dad. But can I ever tell him that I've seen him, that he talks to me?

Should I tell Milton about it? How much should I say?

I'm not sure I can tell anyone, say any of this out loud.

I check the clock again. Three-fifty. I need to be up in a couple of hours' time – Saturday morning swimming. Will it even be happening, after what happened to Christie?

My eyelids are feeling heavy. I put my phone on standby and slide down the pillows. I close my eyes, and now, instead of Christie, all I see is the photo from 2013. Blue-grey eyes. Slicked-down hair that's still a bit of a mess. And that look, a kind of
Well? What are you going to do about it?
look.

Rob Adams. My uncle. Somehow frozen in time, as a seventeen-year-old boy.

He's out there somewhere. He's waiting for me in the water.