by Sam Hepburn
‘Pull,’ I begged. ‘Please, Dan. Pull your foot.’
I heard him groan. The sound wasn’t human. As I heaved on his leg a tiny spasm twitched through his muscles.
‘Again, Dan. Pull. I’ll count to three. One, two, three!’
I wrenched hard. He let out another animal groan and, with a muffled clank of falling chain, his foot jerked free. I jammed the rail into my belt, tied the arms of my hoodie under his armpits and used it to lug his slack, slippery weight over the scrap. I had no bearings now. I just knew the door at the far end was nearer and I kept on hauling him, praying that we were moving in the right direction. He was a dead weight and he kept sliding under the water as I slapped frantically at the clammy walls. I let out a cry when I found the steps to the far door. I strained to get him up halfway, held the knotted hoodie with one hand, wrenched the bolt back with the other and kicked and kicked until the door burst open. Thin red darkness poured through the gap, diluting the dank blackness inside. Gasping and panting, I grappled him up the last two steps and collapsed beside him on the metal deck. He was barely breathing. He didn’t respond when I shook him and his damp skin felt like frozen rubber. Had I saved him from drowning, just to let him die of cold?
My eyes slid to the distant outline of Meadowview. I didn’t care that the police had forbidden me to go there. If I could just get him to our flat, at least I could warm him and dry him. But I knew I could never drag him that far and I felt my last reserves of hope and strength draining away. My leg throbbed with pain, my knuckles were raw and bloody, and the whole world seemed to be tipping and spinning. I let my head drop back against the wall and closed my eyes, numb with exhaustion and defeat.
‘No!’ I forced my eyes open. ‘You can’t give up. Not now.’ My voice sounded so frail and cracked I didn’t even think it was mine. Still dazed and nauseous, I pulled myself up, telling myself there had to be a way. I gazed round frantically and saw it as a hump at first, a black blob rising above the junk on the roof of the barge. Slowly, it took on the shape of the little upturned boat and, when I looked back and saw the lowering outline of Meadowview framed between the metal struts of the crane, the fragments of an idea began to come together through the fug in my head. Could I get the boy into the boat? Could I drag him down the canal like a child with a toy?
Holding tightly to the boat’s dangling rope, I tottered along the walkway and pushed the plastic hull as hard as I could. The sinking barge was so low in the water the boat didn’t have far to fall before it hit the surface with a rocking splash. I slithered on to the deck, lashed the rope to the base of the crane and ran my fingers up the struts, feeling the mechanism for cogs and winches. The boy groaned. I stopped and turned. In the distance headlights fanned and narrowed as a car pulled on to the waste ground. I felt a surge of joy. People. I could run to them, they would help me. Relief turned to panic. Who would come to this deserted place so late at night? More boys with their girlfriends? Or was it the freckled man, checking to see that the boy was dead? I couldn’t take that chance.
Although the crane was stiff and rusted, I strained with all my might and managed to swing the boom around so the head hung directly above the boy. Heaving hard on the handle, I lowered the dangling hook and jammed it under his belt. I grasped the handle with both hands and heaved again. The cogs grumbled and my muscles burned, sending sharp stabbing pains through my stomach and arms as I winched him up from the deck, his limp body twisting in the air and water dripping off him like a drowned corpse. I swung the boom back again and turned the handle to lower him into the boat. He crumpled into the bottom, face down, limbs bent awkwardly. I pulled the boat closer and dropped my feet over the side, tipping it sharply and nearly plunging us both into the water. Struggling to keep balanced, I knelt down and grappled the iron hook from his belt. Footsteps sounded on the towpath, coming closer. I threw myself down beside him and we lay in the darkness, silent as shadows. The distant scrape of gravel gave way to the closer squelch of mud. The footsteps halted. A thin torch beam flashed through the darkness. I felt for the bent rail I’d stuck through my belt and gripped it tightly in my hand.
‘Look at that. Going down fast. What a tragedy.’ The freckled man’s voice was sneering.
‘Do you want me to check inside?’ the other man asked.
‘No, I’ll do it. Give us the torch.’
I closed my eyes, listening to the clank of his feet on the far deck and the scrape of the opening door. A moment of quiet then the door creaked shut.
‘What did I tell you? He’s totally submerged.’
Their fading footsteps did nothing to calm my fear. It would take them at least fifteen minutes to get back to their car and I didn’t dare move until I was sure they weren’t coming back. I was cold and weary but the silence and the gentle sway of the boat were so soothing that after a while I drifted into a numb, exhausted sleep. Strange dreams came; I was falling spreadeagled from a rooftop and Behrouz was reaching from a window, grasping the tips of my outstretched fingers, calling out, ‘Hold on, sis,’ as strong winds tried to suck me away. A sharp gust broke his grip and the last thing I saw as I was whisked into nothingness was the look of defeat on his face.
I sat up, blinking into the dark. The black bulk of the barge seemed further away. I tugged on the rope. It felt slack. Horrified, I pulled harder and brought the whole dripping length of it into the boat. My hurried knot had come free. We were in the middle of the canal, drifting with the pull of the water.
DAN
‘Wake up!’ Trent was hissing at me, slapping my face, only his voice was blurring, echoing, melting into a softer sound. ‘Wake up!’
Not a bloke. Not Trent. Who, then? My head was throbbing. I was shivering, feeling sick, heavy and confused. It was a girl, someone I knew . . . Aliya. They’d got her too, Trent and the other man. The one who kicked me when I fell. ‘Leave her alone.’ My voice was slurred, like my tongue had come loose.
‘Dan. Please. I don’t know about boats. I’ve never been in one before.’
Boats? What was she on about? I tried to sit up. Lights swilled round my head and liquid lead flooded my veins, weighing me down. It was terrifying not being able to move. She was pulling my shoulders. Turning me over. When I finally got my eyes open, I was staring up at a patch of dark, swaying sky. A boat. We were on one. Me and Aliya. That explained the moving sky but not much else. Like how we’d got there. Or why she was leaning over the side, nearly tipping us over.
I chewed my cheek to get the saliva going and managed to wheeze out ‘What . . . you . . . doing?’
‘There’s a branch in the water. I’m trying to catch it with the rope.’
‘Why?’
‘There are no oars.’
I tried to focus. No oars. That was bad . . . But all I wanted to do was curl up and give in to the drowsiness. She prodded my arm. ‘Stay awake! The water comes nearly to the top. We are too heavy. You have to tell me how to steer.’
The terror in her voice cut through the wooziness and I struggled towards the bit of my brain that was still working. ‘Swim . . . can you . . . swim?’
‘No. Can you?’
Not in the state I was in. My brain might be struggling back into action but my body still felt boneless and detached. All I could move was my head and if the boat sank, I’d sink with it. Like a lump of concrete. I pushed that thought away. She reached out again, lunging with the rope. The boat lurched with her. ‘Nooo! . . . mid . . . middle. Sit . . . middle.’
She shifted back from the edge and kept flinging the rope. The boat was threshing about and I was cursing Trent and whatever it was he’d doped me with and praying we weren’t going to capsize.
‘Got it!’ Water splattered all over me as she hauled the dripping branch into the boat.
In a dazed, groggy way I’d been hoping for something big and paddle-shaped, not a spindly stem with a few twigs on the end.
‘What do I do?’
‘Stick it . . . in . . . water . . .
push . . . back.’
I could tell from the way the sky was spinning that we were turning in a slow, wobbly circle.
‘No . . . one . . . side . . . other . . . side.’
The lurching and swaying wasn’t exactly reassuring, but she dug in with steadier strokes, got into a bit of a rhythm and after a while the sky started moving in a straighter line. I had no idea where we were or what was happening, so the judder of the bow bumping against something hard was a relief till she reached up too quickly and nearly tipped us over.
Slowly and painfully I twisted my head. We were near the bridge. In the eerie blue glow from the strip lights under its tiled arch I could see she was holding on to the side of an old houseboat, grabbing the dangling tyres they were using as bumpers and pulling us along, hand over hand, towards an empty strip of the canal side. She looped the rope over a mooring post. As she pulled herself on to the bank her foot kicked out and the boat shot away from the edge.
‘Get . . . me . . . out,’ I groaned, imagining the loop slipping free, leaving me floating helplessly in the dark until I got drowned or swept out to sea.
She crouched down and whispered, ‘Wait there.’
‘Nooo!’ I called after her. ‘Don’t leave me!’ She didn’t look back and when it came to the waiting part, I didn’t have much choice. I lay there totally helpless, trying to ward off the panic by concentrating on my muscles, working to get some feeling back into the bits that mattered. After a while, agonizing pins and needles started jabbing my hands and feet and the space from my knees to my neck began to feel like melting rubber, which was an improvement on total numbness. But no way was I ever going to be able to get out of that boat on my own. I was more than worried. Where was she?
A lifetime later I heard footsteps echoing off the walls of the bridge and another noise, a faint metallic grinding. Don’t let it be Trent. Please don’t let it be Trent. I caught a smell, like a pack of rats had curled up and died, only whatever this was it was still alive, because the stench was coming nearer. I craned my head and saw an old wino staggering towards me. With his long white hair, straggly beard and skeletal face, he looked like Gandalf’s corpse, and his mangy white dog didn’t look much healthier. With any luck he’d be too drunk to see me. He lurched closer. Next thing I know, the stink’s so bad I think I’m going to choke, his ratty beard’s brushing my face and there’s a huge pair of filthy hands grabbing me under my arms, smashing my head against the side of the boat, scraping it up the concrete edge of the canal and smacking me down on the towpath. If it hadn’t been for the foul stink from his trainers and his dog drooling in my eye, I’d probably have passed out again.
‘There you go, missy,’ he said, as if he was the postman delivering a parcel.
The creaking got louder. Aliya’s voice came out of the gloom and her feet appeared behind a supermarket trolley. ‘Please help him on to this,’ she said.
The wino grunted and got hold of me again, hugging me to his stinking coat so tightly my battered ribs screamed with pain. Before I could find the breath to yell, he’d flung me face down over the handle of the trolley, with my head and arms slumped over the wire seat you stick kids in. When I turned my head, Aliya was slipping something into his hand.
‘I will bring back your trolley,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
‘Mind you do, missy,’ he said. Through the metal mesh I saw him stagger off, dangling her silver watch in his grubby fingers and watching it glitter in the light.
ALIYA
I walked backwards, pulling the trolley by the front end with the boy flopped forward over the handle at the back, dragging his feet behind him. The path was muddy, the little wheels squeaked and wobbled and I was so exhausted it took us nearly half an hour to heave and shuffle the fifty metres to Meadowview. The stink of urine, the filthy words on the walls and the broken glass in the stairwell brought back all the confusion and sinking hope of the night we’d arrived. I gazed at the steep flight of concrete stairs. I hadn’t even thought how I’d get the boy up to the ninth floor. He murmured. ‘Wassappening?’ I gave the lift button a half-hearted jab, astonished when the mechanism whirred and clanked and the doors juddered open, flooding us with harsh green light. The police must have had it mended so they wouldn’t have to trudge up and down nine flights of stairs. The police. I swung round, frightened that the freckled man would be standing there, waiting to snatch us both. I shunted the trolley into the lift and quickly pressed the button.
The boy said blearily, ‘You can’t . . . come here . . . you’re banned.’
This time it was me who shrugged. ‘Where else can we go?’
The lift shuddered to a halt. I took a moment to look at him. He was bruised, wet, bloodied and shivering. He lifted his head a little and murmured, ‘I hate this place.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
The police had mended the lights on the landing as well. They blinked on as we stepped out of the lift, throwing pools of dull yellow light across the scarred concrete floor, picking out the cracks and bumps that shook the trolley and made the wheels clatter. For the first time ever I was glad the other flats on this floor were empty.
Our front door was a splintered mess. The police had nailed a criss-cross of planks across what was left of it and covered it in yellow tape, with the words CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS printed on it in thick black letters. It made me angry.
It wasn’t a crime scene. This dingy, dirty, rundown flat that no one else wanted to live in was the nearest thing my family had to a home. I used the rail from the barge to slash away the tape. Then I jammed the tip of it under the edges of the boards, wrenching hard to lever out the nails. It was a good feeling when the last nail sprang free and the final board swung loose. I left the trolley in the hall and helped the boy into the living room. He shambled forward, leaning against me like an old man. When I tried to manoeuvre him around the gaping hole where the police had ripped up the floorboards, he tripped and turned. Our eyes met and held for the beat of a heart. I pushed him away and let him fall on to the couch.
‘How did you . . . find me?’ His voice was slow and rasping, like rocks being dragged over rocks.
‘I went to Hamidi’s house.’
He groaned and rubbed his head, as if that still didn’t make any sense. ‘My mum . . . she’ll be going mental. I got to . . . phone her.’
‘It’s all right. They texted her. They said you were staying with a friend.’
I fetched him the blanket from my bed and switched on the electric fire. The single bar didn’t give off much heat, but we sat on the floor, just me and the boy, comforted by the orange glow and the smell of hot dust, hardly daring to believe we were alive. He gave me a slack, lopsided smile. Anger flowed in and filled the spaces left by panic. How dare he smile at me! This boy was not my friend. He was my betrayer. But I would wait until he was better before I confronted him.
I jumped up and went to the kitchen to search for food. The police had taken all the tins and packets and left nothing except a bowl of leftover rice and banjaan in the fridge. The meal I’d made for Behrouz. The meal he’d never come home to eat. That was four days ago, in another lifetime. I tipped it into a saucepan and left it to warm while I went to find Behrouz’s charger and plug in my phone. I ached to be clean. I went to the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. The burners lit with a whump, then went out. I had no coins for the gas meter. So I washed in cold water, rinsed out my clothes and hung them in front of the oven to dry.
Then I opened my backpack and took out Behrouz’s gun. I had retrieved it from the depths of the Margaretta on my way to get help from that old tramp. For a moment I held it in my hand. A deadly reminder of how far my life in England had departed from my dreams. I slipped it into my backpack and ate half the banjaan standing up. The boy had fallen asleep without eating his, and for the next few hours he slept and I stood by the window wrapped in a blanket, gazing out at the lights glittering bright across this city that had once promised my family refuge. I did n
ot look at the strip of darkness where the barge called The Three Brothers was sinking slowly to the bottom of the canal.
DAN
My mind was floating. Disconnected. I was shivering and sweating. Freezing, burning up, then turning numb, and after a while I must have fallen asleep, because I was opening my eyes, and there was grey light coming through the windows and someone was standing over me, tapping my cheek. Tap, tap, tap, like they were flicking switches, turning my senses back on. I started hearing the traffic outside, feeling the slimy wetness of my clothes, smelling a foul stink that made me want to throw up and remembering the horror of thinking I was going to die. I looked down. My wet clothes were black with slime. I had on one trainer. The other foot was bare, swollen up and crusted with blood. When I tried to move, it felt as if my joints had been injected with ground glass. Slowly the outline of a girl came into focus. Aliya. She was holding out a cup of something steaming.
‘Green tea. It’s all there is.’ She dumped it on the floor next to an untouched bowl of some aubergine stuff she must have given me last night and stood there rubbing her arms.
‘Can we turn the fire back on?’ My throat was raw and the words came out slowly.
‘The meter just ran out.’
She looked terrible. I bet I looked worse. At least she’d had a chance to clean herself up a bit.
‘Thanks for saving my life,’ I said. I s’pose I’d expected her to blush or smile. Instead her face turned hard and an angry muscle tweaked her cheek.
