by Amy Lloyd
‘I want to go home,’ Luke says. ‘Where’s my mum?’
‘Luke,’ Sean says. ‘Listen to this.’ Sean stamps his feet on the floor and the sound bounces off the walls. ‘Hello!’ Sean says. The walls say, Oh, oh, oh. Luke laughs. I stamp my feet, too; I shout. Luke laughs and stamps his good leg; his laughter bounces off the walls. I hate Sean because he makes Luke smile and I don’t. I stick my foot out and Luke trips over it and starts crying again.
‘Shhh,’ I say. ‘You’re OK! Aren’t you, Lukey?’
‘I want my mum,’ Luke says.
‘We should go back. Now,’ Sean says. We turn around to go back the way we came when we hear rattling from behind us. We all turn to look at the other side of the tunnel and that’s when we see Mr Sampson pushing his trolley full of rubbish.
‘Hurry up,’ I say to Luke, pulling him. He falls again and this time he won’t get up.
‘Let’s run,’ I say to Sean.
‘We can’t just leave him!’
Mr Sampson’s trolley rattles closer and closer to us. I try and pull Luke up but he stays on the floor. I drag him but I’m not strong enough to drag him far.
Mr Sampson rolls his trolley right to us and stops to look at Luke on the ground. Even in the middle of summer Mr Sampson is wearing his long, thick brown coat. Mr Sampson makes noises but I don’t know what he’s saying. Luke starts to look afraid of Mr Sampson now that he’s up close. I notice that one side of the old man’s face droops lower than the other.
‘We’re taking him home,’ Sean says.
Mr Sampson makes more noises. He points a long knobbly finger at Luke and then at me; then he waves it back and forth like he’s telling me off. He smells of cigarettes and damp. As he talks, bits of spit come out of his mouth and I can see his horrible pink gums where his teeth should be.
Then Mr Sampson bends down and says something to Luke. Luke turns his head away and starts to cry. Mr Sampson curls his scary hand around Luke’s arm and tries to lift him up. Luke cries out, and his little car clatters to the floor.
‘Leave him alone!’ I say. I grab Luke’s other arm and pull him. Mr Sampson spits and talks some more and Sean keeps telling him that we’re looking after him and he’s fine with us. Eventually Mr Sampson lets go of Luke’s arm and starts to roll his trolley away. He looks back over his shoulder. His wrinkly forehead wrinkles more; he sighs like he’s sad and rattles away. I pick up the little red car and put it in my pocket.
‘We need to take him home,’ Sean says again.
‘We can’t go now. Mr Sampson might be waiting for us.’
‘No!’ Luke says.
‘Don’t worry, we won’t let him scare you again,’ I say. Luke stands up and this time he holds his hand out to me so I can take it. It’s wet because he’s been wiping his tears and his nose with it but he holds my hand tight and it feels as though he is starting to like me and that is suddenly very important.
‘Show us that place you were talking about before,’ I say to Sean. ‘The place with the swimming pool.’
‘Not now. It’s too far. Luke’s mum is going to be crazy by now.’
‘I want to see the swimming pool,’ Luke says.
‘Let’s just take him there and then we’ll come straight back, OK?’
‘What are we going to say when he tells his mum we took him to the pool? It’s stupid. We have to go back.’
‘Please!’ Luke says.
‘Luke, you can keep it a secret if we take you there, can’t you? You can’t ever tell anyone because if you do then we can’t be friends any more.’
Luke nods.
‘Do you promise?’ I ask.
‘Promise,’ Luke says.
Sean sighs and looks both ways down the tunnel.
‘We need to be quick,’ he says. ‘We can’t stay long and then we have to go back. And if we see anyone we have to go straight back, OK?’
So we follow Sean. We follow him through the tunnel and down a lane and under the pigeon bridge where the floor is covered in bird poo and in the dark corners of the bridge, beneath the railway, the pigeons all coo softly like ghosts. I nearly tread on a dead bird, a baby fallen from the nest. The other birds have started to eat it, picking it apart. Its little beak is open like a silent scream.
Then we are out the other side of the bridge and into the light again. The roads are quiet. Little insects fly above our heads and I can hear crickets in the field. There is no one around except us, like we are the only people left on the earth.
Sean leads us to a big rusty pair of gates and pushes one back so that we can squeeze in. Luke needs help so I let him lean on my shoulder as he goes through.
Inside looks like a secret garden. Plants have grown through the buildings, in through cracks in the wood and out through the broken windows. I imagine vines slithering to my legs like snakes, wrapping themselves around my ankles and dragging me under the ground.
At the centre of it all is the swimming pool. It’s empty, like Sean said it would be. A big white basin in the ground. Sean and I stand on the edge of the pool and look down. It’s high, even at the shallow end, and in the sticky summer air I can imagine diving into the cool water, the sun shining off the surface as though I’m swimming in diamonds. Not like the pool in the leisure centre in summer, the way it seems even hotter than outside, like swimming in old bathwater.
‘How come they closed this place?’ I ask Sean, who knows everything.
‘My dad said it cost too much to keep going. He says if rich people used it then it would still be open but because it’s just us the council don’t care.’
I think about this. I think about what he means by ‘just us’. Does he mean normal people? Or is the opposite of rich something else. Does it mean we are poor?
‘Luke,’ I say. ‘Come here.’
Luke will not come closer to the edge of the pool.
‘I said: Come here!’ I grab his hand and pull him hard towards me. Luke starts crying again and I feel bad but also annoyed because I haven’t done anything wrong this whole time and he still doesn’t like me.
‘Be gentle with him,’ Sean says. ‘We should be getting back now. This was a really stupid idea. Let’s just get him home and forget about it.’
‘Can I come over yours after?’ I ask.
Sean looks at his feet; he puts his hands in the pockets of his shorts. ‘Nah, my dad’s been in a bad mood lately, so I’d better not have anyone over.’
‘I want my mum,’ Luke says, his lip shaking and watery snot dripping from his nose.
‘You can stay over my Auntie Fay’s if you want,’ I say. ‘She won’t mind.’
Sean looks past my head, somewhere else. ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘That’s OK. I think I’m going to play computer games. It’s too hot at your Auntie Fay’s.’
It’s always too hot in Sean’s flat but I don’t say it.
‘I want to stay longer,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to go home yet.’
‘Fine,’ Sean says. ‘You’re on your own then.’
As he walks away he looks back and I know he is expecting me to follow but I don’t. I hold Luke’s hand tight, maybe too tight, and pull him to me.
‘Come and hug me, Luke. Let’s be friends and not fight.’
But Luke won’t hug me. He pulls away, trying to follow Sean, so I pull him back harder. Luke turns and slaps me. It’s a weak slap and it doesn’t hurt but it makes me sad and so I shout at him.
‘No, Luke! Naughty! We don’t slap!’
To show him we don’t slap I slap him back. It is maybe a bit too hard. His cry makes me feel worse so I slap him again.
‘We don’t cry!’ I say. ‘Babies cry.’
Luke stops pulling and instead tries to push me. I almost fall off the edge of the pool.
‘Naughty Luke!’ I say. ‘We don’t push!’
I push him back and he pushes me again.
‘We don’t fight!’ I say. When my hand hits his arm it makes a loud slap and my palm stings. Luke cries h
arder and tries to slap me back but instead his nails catch my skin and leave scratches on my arm.
‘Ow! Naughty! We don’t scratch!’ I scratch him back and the place where I slapped him turns red with white scratches down the middle. Luke lunges forward and grabs me again, this time he tries to bite me but just leaves a wet patch of spit on my skin. I hold his hand and bring it to my mouth.
‘We don’t bite!’ I say. His skin tastes like sun block and salt.
Luke doesn’t stop hurting me.
‘We don’t pinch,’ I say. We don’t slap. We don’t kick. We don’t hit. We don’t spit. We don’t scratch. We don’t push. We don’t stamp. We don’t fight. We don’t kick. We don’t punch. We don’t bite. We don’t scream.
‘We don’t push!’
This time Luke’s foot slips off the edge of the pool. I watch him fall. His body which seemed feather-light falls like a brick. He doesn’t have much time to scream before he hits the ground. I hear the back of his head crack against the bottom of the pool. His eyes are open; he blinks once, twice.
‘Luke? I’m sorry, Luke. I didn’t mean to push you. Luke, please say something.’
Luke says nothing. His eyes move in his head but don’t look at anything.
‘What have you done?’ Sean asks me. I jump. I hadn’t even noticed he was there.
‘We had an accident,’ I say.
‘You pushed him,’ Sean says. ‘I saw you do it!’
‘No you didn’t!’ I say. ‘I didn’t do anything! He fell over!’
I look at Luke. A halo of red is forming on the white basin beneath his head. His eyes stare terribly at something in the distance, like he is seeing something we can’t.
‘Please,’ I say to Sean. ‘It was an accident.’
47
Her: Now
I squeeze Iris against me as tight as I can without crushing her. My hand moves to her head. I must protect her head. I close my eyes, waiting for the crunch of my skull as it hits the concrete. Instead I feel a hand clutch the sleeve of my hoodie, feel the force of being pulled back on to solid ground. I fall sideways, my shoulder curling painfully underneath me. Iris cries out in shock but the sound is muffled by her face pressed into my T-shirt.
‘Fucking hell,’ Sean is saying, over and over again. Then, ‘Are you OK? Is the baby OK?’
I loosen my grip and she cries louder and louder but it sounds beautiful because it isn’t the silence of someone whose skull has cracked against the floor.
‘I think so,’ I say.
Sean bends and scoops Iris from my arms. I let him. Sean holds her like he’s done it before, bounces her, soothes her.
‘She’s all right,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you? Yeah, you’re absolutely fine.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. It doesn’t seem like enough. ‘It was my fault,’ I add.
‘You just missed your step, that’s all.’
‘No, I mean, Luke. I remember. I think I always remembered but I tried so hard to forget. It was me. I did it. You tried to lie for me.’
‘I shouldn’t have. If I’d just told the truth then …’
We don’t need to say it. All those lies, how they made everything worse. That’s what they talk about in all the books, the articles, the BBC documentaries. The lies, the deception.
That day, when we left Luke his eyes were still open. Every now and then a slow blink. What did we think? That someone would find him, help him? The horrible truth is I don’t think we thought of Luke much at all. Those eyes scared me too much. So lifelike but without life, without understanding. Luke had gone, slipped out of the fault line in his fragile skull.
I tell Sean everything now. The things we never talked about. All the things we should have done differently, or that others might have done. The total darkness of those two days between Luke’s disappearance and when the police found his body. The shock as my hand touched the cool metal of the red car in the pocket of my shorts and how it seemed to beat like a tell-tale heart from beneath my drawers.
How sure we had been that Mr Sampson would report us to the police. We weren’t to know that there was no electricity inside his house, that he lived in such solitude that until he himself was arrested he had no idea a boy had even been taken.
How the police hadn’t believed it could really be us. Only after we’d been caught breaking into Mr Sampson’s house did they truly accept that we had lied and by then we had already ruined more lives. All those lies toppling like dominoes, taking down Mr Sampson, the people who had defended us, our families or what was left of them, ourselves.
The only way to feel better is to tell the truth, my mum said. But she was the only person I could tell the truth to, who would have forgiven me, who would still have loved me.
Sean and I sit and talk, our legs hanging over the edge of the pool. Iris sleeps in his arms.
‘You need to call her,’ Sean says. ‘The sooner you call, the better it will be for you.’
‘I’m scared,’ I tell him. ‘She will hate me.’
‘She won’t hate you, Petal. She loves you. Why else would she move around the country for you?’
‘What if I’m really a sociopath?’ I ask. ‘How am I supposed to tell?’
‘You’re not a sociopath. The opposite. Why would you think that?’
‘It’s what people say.’
‘Don’t you ever talk to Isherwood about this stuff?’
I try to think. ‘No,’ I say eventually. ‘I don’t ask her things like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m scared she won’t want to help me any more if she finds out there’s something wrong with me.’
‘Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you saw someone else for a while. This is stuff you need to talk about.’
‘Did you talk about it?’
Sean is silent. We bang our heels against the side of the pool. I imagine a different life, a different time, where our bare feet rest in cold, clear water. Instead we stare into the space, nothing.
‘You should call her,’ Sean says again. I nod.
‘You can go. You don’t want to get into trouble.’
Sean doesn’t go anywhere. He bounces Iris on his knee and pretends he hasn’t heard me.
‘I’m not going to do anything to her,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘I know. But what about after you’ve called? I don’t want you to do anything stupid.’
I try not to look at him. ‘I just don’t think I can do it any more,’ I say. ‘I’m so tired.’
I imagine jumping. For a few seconds I would know what it was like to fly. The jagged rocks at the coastline, the foam of the waves as they crash.
‘One thing at a time,’ Sean says. ‘That’s all you have to do.’ Sean reaches with his free hand and I knit my fingers with his. ‘Call her.’
I turn on the phone and notifications flood in. I take a deep breath and press Dr Isherwood’s name on the screen. She answers immediately.
‘Hello?’ Her voice is cracking, pained, terrified. It splits me open. ‘Where are you? Have you got Iris? Is she safe?’
‘Iris is OK,’ I manage. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Can you tell me where you are? Please stay on the phone!’
Dr Isherwood is panicking and I don’t have time to answer one question before she starts asking the next. I let go of Sean’s hand so I can wipe the tears out of my eyes. I do my best to explain, though I can’t, even I don’t understand what has happened. I start talking about Luke and how I remembered what happened, how being here brought it all back to me.
‘You’re still there? Stay there! The police will help you. We understand! We all understand!’
Dr Isherwood isn’t listening. I try to tell her that I pushed Luke, that I lied, that all those lies have filled me up and weighed me down and now I want to tell the truth but she just won’t stop interrupting, talking about Iris, talking about the police and how I need to stay calm.
‘Listen to me!’ I hear myself scream. ‘W
hy won’t anybody listen to me?’
Sirens. It is impossible to tell which direction they come from. I drop the phone.
‘Go!’ I tell Sean. Iris twists and seems to be reaching for me. Sean hands her over. ‘Get out!’
‘I’ll stay,’ he says.
‘No! Please! I don’t want to ruin your life again. Just go!’
I scream against the sirens, to let them know where I am. Iris screams with me. Sean runs, looking back over his shoulder, hesitating, but he runs.
48
Him: Now
I spent months wondering if running was the right thing to do. Leaving her felt like leaving a piece of myself there and at first I didn’t know how I was going to go on. I had to read about all the untrue and fucked-up assumptions people made about her and why she did what she did. It was painful not to be able to tell her that they were wrong, that I knew she was a good person.
They were months where I stagnated, suddenly not sure what to live for. The guilt of leaving her to face the consequences by herself when I knew I’d had a part in it. She only did what she did because of me.
Then I realised that I had only made things worse. Maybe she pushed Luke but I made her lie. Everything that came after, that was my fault, too.
If I could speak to her I would tell her I was sorry. I would tell her that she has all the stuff inside her that makes people good. I would tell her she deserves to be loved and that it will happen, one day, when she lets it.
She didn’t want to ruin my life, she said, not again. So I get up and clean my flat because I owe it to her. I throw out my phone and stop dealing. I get a shitty job at Homebase with shitty pay because it’s honest and decent and actually, over time, I even start to like it. I like the smell of the wooden sheds in the garden section and the stupid names they give to shades of paint and the routine of getting up and wearing that fucking fleece in the winter.
I meet someone and instead of worrying about hiding who I was I show her who I can be. I take her for dinner and kiss her on her doorstep and meet her parents and even though she jokes that I’m her bit-of-rough I feel accepted and welcomed and warm in a way I haven’t since I was a small kid. Since her Auntie Fay let me stay over and I pretended to be asleep when she touched the top of my head and said goodnight.
