Submersion (16 page)

My great-aunt and –uncle eventually returned to me, looking a little bothered. I noticed a small cut leaking across the top of Uncle Jimmy’s left hand.
Caught it on some fuse wire,
he explained later, when I pestered him over it. Aunt Penny had a new mark on her neck too, a darker pink than her skin; finger shaped. I didn’t ask about this, but I did wonder what had gone on between the two of them. What had I missed whilst drawn into my fantasy shop world?

‘All fixed,’ Uncle Jimmy announced, with restrained cheer. ‘All safe.’ And in that moment, I decided to chance something.

‘Can I go up there now, then?’ I asked, but my aunt cut in, before he could answer.

‘Haven’t time today, Billy, but maybe next time?’

‘Next time? Can I come again?’

Not expecting this level of enthusiasm, Aunt Penny’s confidence withered a little.

‘Oh, I’m sure,’ she said, directing me towards my protective suit and mask, collapsed bodiless near the door way. ‘We’ll see.’

I took the cue to get ready to depart and pulled on my outdoor clothing. I stopped asking about going back to the shop. Whilst my aunt and uncle’s behaviour appeared a little odd, I didn’t want to appear rude and have that reported back to Mother.

When Mother turned up at her usual time that day, Aunt Penny left me at the stinky, steel lift, letting me descend to the waterlogged ground floor on my own and nothing further was said.

I did have a further question I wanted to ask, however I kept this for Mother, posing it as she rowed us home on that fourth evening.

‘Why don’t they live in the flat above the shop?’

‘Sorry?’ she asked, as my question came from nowhere.

So, I explained where I had been that day.

‘It’s not safe, Billy, and you are not to go there again,’ she said, which wasn’t quite an answer to my question. ‘You promise me?’

I did and we both spent the remainder of our journey home in distracted silence.

On the Monday, I returned to school. This wasn’t at my mother’s insistence. On the Friday evening, we’d found a letter deposited in our post box, enquiring about my prolonged absence and setting out the expectation that I would return immediately, unless Mother could provide
reasons and supporting evidence
to keep me away for longer.

In the old days, before the flooding, the postman would push our letters through our front doors, landing on what Grandad Ronan referred to as a
door mat,
which seemed an odd concept to me, as he described these mats as being placed on the floor, not your door. However, residents had acted quickly and all houses had little containers attached to their exterior walls, like miniature post boxes, high enough to avoid the water, low enough for the postman to reach. At Aunt Agnes’ house, it was Elinor’s job to check the post and she did this with a great sense of importance when I was around, making a fuss as she unlocked it and surveyed each item inside. At home, this was Mother’s job and the key to the box was kept
out of harm’s way,
which was where all keys to locked doors were kept in our house.

Along with the letter from the school, there was another letter, the envelope small and handwritten, but Mother quickly stowed the second one away, frowning in dislike at my curiosity.

That evening, I spied her at the kitchen table, scribing two replies – one I would take with me when I returned to St Patrick’s; the second sealed and posted in private. It would be a long time before I uncovered the secret behind that latter chain of correspondence.

Monday and school.

The rains had stopped by then, as had any related panic about a rise in water levels. The authorities had sent some people out in the latest government-issue protective gear to measure any impact, which was standard after a long spell of rain. But I overheard Mother tell Aunt Penny that no changes had been reported.

So, my ride to school wasn’t hampered or slowed down by the wet.

Like my cousin, I wasn’t taken all the way to school by my mother – I was dropped at a speedboat point. Not the same as Elinor’s, but it was echoed in design and history. The first day back after Elinor had gone missing had left Mother feeling anxious all day, yet she didn’t have the time or energy to row me all the way there in our small, wooden boat. It was the same this time, only her fears were amplified by the echo of my submersion in the river road and subsequent convalescence.

‘I will be fine,’ I told her, finding the firm, adult voice I had used the day we had left Aunt Agnes’, after their row and the cherry pie from Great-Aunt Penny.

As I waited on the wooden platform for the next speedboat to arrive, I found myself surrounded by curiosity and temporary friendship. Like I said before, I didn’t have a huge amount of friends at school, not really. Yet, Elinor’s disappearance and now my long absence had meant people were interested.

‘Where you been, Billy?’

‘Has your cousin turned up yet?’

‘Have they found her body yet?’

‘Was it eaten up by something in the water?’

‘Heard you nearly drowned?’

‘Is it true you found a dead dog?’

The last question came from Tilly Harrison, a tall, paper-thin girl, with equally thin, long brown hair, who was a year older than me. Tilly didn’t normally speak at all, let alone to me, so it must have taken a huge effort to break through the noise of the others. Tilly was also Monty Harrison’s niece.

The crowd around me broke up a little, giving a now blushing Tilly space.

‘Is it?’ she asked, a short echo of her previous question.

The others looked a little scared, but also fascinated and I could see the level of interest in me going up and up. But I thought for a minute about what I should say. See, Mother had given me quite a talk about this, and nearly everyone, bar Aunt Agnes, had a strong view.
You shouldn’t mention the dog,
was the general consensus.
People will get worked up about it
.
Worried over nothing.
And avoid drawing too much attention to the fact you were in the water, too.
Mother had been paranoid that some government agency was going to come round and interrogate me about what had happened. As if bumping into that dead puppy was somehow a grave offence. She also feared I’d be taken away, examined, tested, or worse - kept in quarantine and never returned.

Why would they do that?
I’d asked, but the only answer I’d got were cold, silent glares between her, Tristan and Aunt Agnes.

So, I took a moment or two to weigh up how to respond to Tilly Harrison’s question.

‘It was a log, not a dog,’ I told her and the crowd heaved with instant disappointment, before trickling away from me. ‘I did nearly drown, though,’ I added, but only Tilly was still listening at that point. She stared at me blankly for a minute or two, but then our speedboat arrived and she turned away, joining the queue to get on.

Our school was on top of a hill, surrounded – like everything else – by water. But it wasn’t like the water that had flooded our streets. It looked darker and, if you peered over the edge of the boat, you could see veins of green pond life growing in it. Dead trees, like wooden skeletons, were its landmarks. Rumours were that naughty pupils who were expelled ended up in the water, strangled up in dark green weeds. I’d also heard that Monty Harrison’s men had put a man in a concrete suit and let him sink to the bottom, but that didn’t make sense to me. Firstly, how could you wear a suit made of concrete, and secondly, Monty Harrison was the nice man that my mother secretly cleaned for.

‘It’s what happened,’ Davy Parker, a boy in my class, insisted.

The school itself was a large, red-bricked building and somehow it had survived against the dirt and decay that other buildings had suffered in the wake of the flooding. The windows were grubby and the paintwork flaky, but the bricks weren’t soiled with moss or algae like the ones we lived in. Inside, there was a grand hall in the centre of the building, where we ate lunch or gathered for big assemblies. Outside, the hill it sat upon was smothered in grass – the only area of grass I had a living memory of. We were allowed to play there on dry, sunny days and that was probably the very best thing about our school – it had grass.

Tristan told me that school in his day was very different to ours. He said there was a different system – you started off in one school and then, when you got older, you went on to another one, for older kids.

What else was different in your time?
I asked him, several times.

You don’t wanna know,
was the reply he generally gave, which was frustrating, because it was quite the opposite of that: I wanted to know a lot more.

But then I overheard Mother scolding him in private.

I don’t want you talking to him about those times, filling his little head with your nasty tales. He doesn’t need to know.

So, I stopped asking the questions. Maybe one day, when I was a little older, I could ask again and get the answers I craved for.

In any case, I had only ever been to one school and that was how it was going to stay. You started at St Patrick’s when you were five and stayed there until you were at least sixteen. We had been put in classes according to our ages, and there were two classes per age group, making up twenty-four classes altogether, plus two extra classes for those older children that stayed on until they were eighteen. Not everyone had to stay on; some left to get jobs and some simply left. But, all that had changed whilst I had been away from school, recovering. When I returned, we were in different classes, with a mix of ages.

I heard the adults discussing it one night at Aunt Agnes’, after Mother received a letter from the authorities. They thought I was in bed, asleep, but I had silently crept down the stairs. I was out of sight, but could just see Tristan, holding the letter in one hand.

‘They’ve been testing them all,’ I heard Aunt Agnes say. ‘I complained and, well, look where that got me.’ After that comment, there was silence for a bit. I kept listening, wondering if my aunt might cry, but nothing broke the quiet until Tristan spoke.

‘Looks as if they might be sorting them according to ability, putting the bright ones together.’

‘And what about Billy?’ Great-Aunt Penny. ‘What does it say about him?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Mother confirmed, her voice thin, tired. ‘It doesn’t give any specific indication about him.’

I wondered if this letter and whatever it did or didn’t indicate had fueled Mother’s reluctance to let me go back to school, further prolonging my return.

On that first day back, I discovered that changes had occurred and I was now in the class of one Miss Cracker - a tall, frizzy-haired middle-aged lady who had the look of a toothbrush topped with wire-wool about her. She was just out of one of Tristan’s dark tales of the past. With her bad breath, frothing at the mouth and the unexpected buttons of phlegm she spat across the room whenever she spoke, she was ludicrous enough to be entertaining, but also a little sinister. It made you wonder why someone thought she’d be a good person for children to spend all day with.

In my new class, there were a few children from my previous one, including the aforementioned Davy Parker. There were also two girls I recognised from the first year, although I didn’t know their names. Apart from that, all the other children in the class were older. At least half were fifteen and sixteen year-olds. I recognised the three girls that were reportedly waiting with Elinor at her speedboat point, the day she went missing. They sat together in a row at the very back of the room. I made a mental note to get to know them, to find out what they remembered.

That first day, Tilly Harrison was also in Miss Cracker’s class. By the end of the week, however, she would have been moved down.

‘You children here,’ Miss Cracker spittled, pummeling the air and anyone in the front two rows with tiny bombs of mucus. (Again, I imagined what Tristan would make of our skinny, spitting teacher.) ‘You children here have been especially selected for my class. You all came out top in the tests we did. Yes, you have all been identified as our most academic children. So, expectations are high, children. You are expected to achieve in my class and nothing less!’ That last exclamation was accompanied by sudden bullet of sputum that landed on Davy Parker’s notebook. In our previous class together, this would have been followed by an ‘Urgh, Miss!’ and general laughter from the rest of the class. But Davy said nothing. There was just something about the spitting Miss Cracker that made us all take her very seriously indeed.

During break, Tilly Harrison sought me out again, catching me by my locker.

‘I know you lied earlier,’ she told me, matter of fact. ‘My Uncle Monty knows you found a dog.’

I shrugged; I’d been advised by people to keep silent on the matter, including Tristan whom I trusted more than anyone. So, I wasn’t going to commit to this fact if I could help it.

‘We can hang out if you like,’ Tilly added, and I wondered if this was less about the dog and more about the simple rules of friendship.

Before I could respond or even nod, the bell rang like a harsh alarm, signaling the end of our break and we made our way back urgently to Miss Cracker’s class.

When I excitedly broke the news to Mother that I was in the very top class, I didn’t get the response I expected at all. I thought she would be proud, excited and full of questions, but her reaction was quite the opposite.

‘Go to your room,’ she told me. Not like I’d done something wrong, but like someone had died, like I needed to give her respectful space.

I did as I was told, cutting through her bedroom and up the attic stairs to mine and she did something she very rarely did: she locked me in. I didn’t protest, but I felt uneasy. Her reaction was out of kilter with what I knew and saw; her behaviour unnervingly paranoid.

Later, I heard her on the phone in her bedroom, whispering to someone so I couldn’t hear. Later still, male voices filled the house. Voices that rose and fell, falling at the hushed, urgent request of my mother. I tried to listen in but they were in the living area, two flights of stairs away from me. I tried my door several times, just in case I had missed it being unlocked, but it was still secure. There was no way I would be able to sneak out and peer at whoever was visiting.

The ebb and flow of male voices continued for a good hour, before dissipating and then I only heard two voices, both that I recognised. One was Mother’s, the other Monty Harrison’s, her employer. For the most, their speech was still so quiet I couldn’t make out a word they exchanged. But when Mother became passionate about something, her voice rose dramatically and it was clear she was pleading with him.

‘Anything! Anything!’ was a single word I heard her repeat, followed by Monty’s raised volume.

‘I’ve told you, Esther, I’ll do what I can! That’s all I can promise.’

I couldn’t hear the rest, as he lowered his voice, just as quickly as it had risen. But I heard Mother expel a reluctant promise a few seconds later, and then the front door was locked and bolted. Monty Harrison had left. I expected Mother to come back up the stairs, but she stayed in the living area. I listened intently and imagined all sorts of noises through the dark, shifting shadows of the night. I was certain I could hear one sound clearly: sobbing.