“Does your mother know they’re here?”
“That’s none of your business, Jake,” said Stella.
“It will be if one falls in,” said Jake in a worried voice.
Stella just laughed at him.
They sat for long hours on the pier and held their fishing rods, and had pointless, pleasant conversations. They caught four mackerel—pretty small ones, but still; also, something Jake thought might be a pollack and a very ugly thing they didn’t know the name of and threw back. The younger children played running-up-and-down-and-not-falling-in, all except for Joey, who seemed quite happy to sit quietly by Stella’s side as long as Stella let her hold the rod from time to time.
There was a lot to be said for being an only child, Jake thought, watching the others running up and down.
Then he remembered. There was this huge thing in his life, so huge that he couldn’t even keep it in his head. He wasn’t an only child anymore. He wondered what the daisies did on cool days like this. Snoozed, perhaps. Which was probably what Daisy was doing right now. Babies really were not all that terribly interesting.
And then one fell in.
There was a yelp, and a splash, and everyone rushed to the edge and pointed.
Jake didn’t stop to think. He leaped in after the child. Fully clothed. He didn’t even stop to take off his runners.
The water was freezing, black and cold and deep, deep, and hitting it was like being punched hard in the chest by huge, swaying punchbags of ice. Jake was a strong swimmer, but he shivered as he sank into the blackness and his body filled with cold. He came up, gasping painfully for air, and opened his streaming eyes. It hurt to open his eyes, and it hurt to keep them closed. He blinked and gasped and pushed his salt-dank hair back off his forehead with the flat of his hand. For a moment, everything seemed out of focus, blurred. He couldn’t think why he was so cold, he couldn’t imagine what he was doing in this freezing sea, everything was indistinct, as if he were miles away from everything around him, on some different plane of reality. Everything was fractured, disjointed, swirling colors and shapes sped away from him, distant, shrieking snatches of sound spun around him, and nothing made sense.
He felt himself being dragged down by the weight of … by the weight of what? He tread water desperately and examined himself, panic-stricken, and found he was dressed, dressed and streaming, and his feet felt like sinkers. He was—he kicked the backs of his shins, could he be? yes, he was—wearing shoes. His mouth was full of salt, and with every breath his chest was seared with pain.
Suddenly the world coalesced around him, rifts of sound and streaks of light rushing together to form suddenly recognizable images of the world again, and he knew where he was and why. It could only have been for a moment that he had been “gone”, but in that time, the child—oh, no, the child!—could have drowned.
Jake flailed out desperately, in another wave of panic, beginning to feel himself slipping out of reality again, into a dreamy, bubbling, slow-motion world where images crazed and cracked and dispersed, where his senses seemed to lose contact with his brain.
Afterwards, he could piece it together only dimly. He must somehow have registered the small pale-haired head, only feet away from him in the water, his brain must have clocked it and sent him swimming in the right direction, but he had no awareness of what he was doing. He was aware only of pain and endlessly passing time. He found that he was swimming, apparently purposefully, apparently in a particular direction, and he followed himself, so to speak, swimming on in the direction that he seemed to have mapped out for himself. Swimming strenuously, it was as if he was scooping up the whole bay in his arms with every stroke, and shifting it forcibly aside, to make room for his body, and then with the next stroke, he embraced the whole black bay again.
Something whizzed over his head and landed with a resounding plop a few feet in front of him, like a messenger from the real world. Jake looked at it for a moment, swimming gingerly towards it, not recognizing it, and then he twigged. It was a lifebelt. He thought something incoherent, but he must have done something sensible, because the next thing he could remember, afterwards, was swimming back towards the pier, dragging something behind him, and when he looked over his shoulder to check, it was indeed a small child, somehow affixed to a lifebelt that he had no memory of attaching to it. It must be dead, Jake remembered thinking. If it were alive, it would be screeching and resisting.
Nothing made sense, only the cold and the rush of the water in his ears and the painful gulping sensation in his chest. That was himself, breathing, he realized. He had no idea where he was going, but he seemed to be aware of Stella. He couldn’t see or hear her, but he had the sensation of swimming towards her and gradually he began to focus again and now he could actually see and hear her, on the pier presumably, dancing and waving frantically, pointing to something. He followed the line of her pointing arm. He couldn’t see what she was pointing toward, but he swam in the direction she pointed in anyway.
Oh joy! A steel ladder was set into the side of the pier, the bottom of it disappearing under the surface of the water. A man—a man?—was clinging to the ladder, his arms reaching out to Jake. “Come on, lad,” came a voice, “you’re doing great, almost there. Pass her up to me. And thanks, oh, thanks, thanks, thank you.”
Then came another medley of sensations, sinking, bobbing up again, spluttering, losing control, catching onto something solid, the feeling of something slippery and lithe and cold being wrenched from his grasp, and then the sensation of being hauled, hauled, yanked, and winched, or so it seemed, up and out of the water and onto solid ground.
He had never felt so heavy in all his life. His clothes and hair and shoes were full of seawater, which weighed him down, but that wasn’t the reason. It was being back on dry land after the weightlessness of swimming. He lay on his back and closed his eyes. He could feel hands yanking his shoes off, people breathing on his face, something hot being pressed against his lips. He pushed it away. All he wanted to do was sleep.
CHAPTER
19
“I’m sorry,” said Jake, when he woke up.
He was warm. All over. Even his toes felt rosy.
“What do you mean?” asked Stella. Her face was close to his. “What do you mean, you’re sorry?”
“About your little sister,” Jake said. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Stella turned her head and looked around.
“No,” she said. “Definitely not. All my sisters are here, and they are all very much alive. Thank goodness. My mother will have my life as it is.”
Jake’s heart leaped.
Then it sank.
“Well, your brother, then. For goodness’ sake, Stella, I didn’t have time to check whether it was male or female! I did think it was a girl, though.”
“My brother? Fergal’s at home with my parents. I told you that before,” Stella said.
Jake processed this information. The brother was at home—there was only one, it seemed; and the sisters were all alive.
“Well, that’s good,” Jake said, pleased. “Will she make a full recovery?”
“Who?” asked Stella in a puzzled voice.
“Whatever her name is,” said Jake. Really, this conversation was wearing him out. “Your sister.” It hurt his chest to talk.
“Which sister, Jake?”
“How would I know?” Jake snapped. “Whichever one fell in.” It was such an effort to talk. It was as if his upper and lower jaws belonged to two different faces, neither of them his.
Stella laughed.
“Oh, lordy,” she said, and laughed again. “Oh, hi-cockalorum, cockalee!”
Jake closed his eyes. He couldn’t cope with it. And where had she got that cackling expression from?
“Jake,” Stella said, and she touched his cheekbone lightly with her finger. “Jake, can you hear me?”
Jake kept his eyes closed, but he nodded.
“Jake, it wasn’t my sister who fel
l in. I told you, they don’t fall in. It was some other child. Nuala Something. Her silly parents let her wander off, and she just wandered a bit too far. But she’s fine. Thanks to you. She’s only a teeny tiny, and she was so young, she didn’t even know to panic, which is why you were able to rescue her without being pulled down yourself.”
Jake couldn’t listen any longer. He wondered if Stella had bought the ice creams for the younger children, but he didn’t really want to think about ice cream. It made his face ache to think about anything cold. He closed his eyes again and drifted off into a grateful sleep.
CHAPTER
20
When he woke up the next time, his mother was there.
“Well, if it isn’t the hero!” she said, when she saw his eyelids flutter open.
Jake grinned. “I thought it was Stella’s sister,” he croaked. His throat felt as if he had been eating brambles.
“I know,” said his mum, “but I suppose you would have jumped in anyway, even if you’d known it was just some other nipper.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Jake. “I suppose.”
“You shouldn’t have done it, you know,” his mother said. “You should have called the lifeguard and thrown out a lifebelt. That’s what the other people on the pier did. And if you really needed to go in, you should have got your kit off first.”
“Yeah,” said Jake. “I suppose. I’m hot, Mum. I’m baking.”
“That’s because you’re wrapped in tinfoil,” his mother said, “and they have been reverse-hoovering you with hot air. Your temperature went way down. You were like a fish. You still are, I suppose. Baked fish!”
“What’s reverse-hoovering?”
“You know, like a hair dryer, blowing air out instead of sucking it in. It’s terribly interesting to watch.”
“You could write a poem about it,” Jake said faintly.
“Maybe I could.”
“My tummy hurts,” Jake said. His jaws both seemed to belong to him at this stage. That was a big improvement. But his stomach felt as if someone had walked over it in hobnailed boots.
“They had to get the seawater out,” his mother said.
Jake shuddered. “Don’t tell me any more,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
His mother’s hair was everywhere as usual. He put out his hand and fingered it lightly. His mother smiled at him and kissed him on the forehead, the way she used to do when he was a little boy.
He smiled back.
“Nuala’s mum and dad want to talk to you,” she whispered. “Do you think you’re up to it?”
“Who?”
“The little girl that you rescued, her parents. They’re dying to meet you and thank you. They think you’re wonderful. It was her dad who pulled her out of the water, out of your arms. He told me about it over and over again. He thinks you’re a star. He kept saying so. He’s very excitable, but I suppose you can understand.”
“Oh, so that’s why he said thanks,” Jake said. “Do I have to see them? What’ll I say?”
“I think you could let them do the talking,” Jake’s mother said.
“Are you sure she’s OK, Naomi, Noelle, whatever her name is?”
“Nuala,” said his mother. “Yes, they’ve wrapped her up like a baked fish too. She’s in another cubicle somewhere.”
“OK then,” said Jake. “Send in the fans.”
CHAPTER
21
“That’s my boy!” said Jake’s dad when they got home. He’d already heard the whole story of the rescue. Someone must have phoned him. “That’s my boy!”
It was the best thing his dad had ever said to him. It made Jake feel all shivery up and down, strange inside and shivery up and down.
“It was nothing,” he said, embarrassed.
But it was something. He knew that.
“That’s my boy,” said Dad again, with this huge beam across his face. “But I hope you never do it again! You … you might have drowned, Jake.”
His voice sounded cracked.
Jake felt shivery all over again.
You could get to like that shivery feeling, he thought. Quite different from the shivers you get from half-freezing to death in the sea.
But now all he wanted was to wash the salt out of his hair and off his skin, and then to sleep and sleep.
CHAPTER
22
Two cards came for Jake.
The first one was a get-well card, which he thought was odd, since he wasn’t sick, just a bit shaken. His mother made him go to bed in the afternoons for a couple of days, to “get your strength back,” but he wasn’t sick. He didn’t mind going to bed, though, because his mother had put a small television in his room, “just while you’re…,” and there was Wimbledon in the afternoons. It would have been better if the European championships had still been on, but now there was Wimbledon, which wasn’t as exciting but was much better than looking at the ceiling.
The card was from Mr. and Mrs. O’Halloran, “Nuala’s parents” it said in brackets, and inside it was a check for fifty euro “to buy yourself something nice, with our thanks.”
“That’s lovely,” Jake’s mum said. “We’ll put it in your savings account, till you decide what to do with it.”
Jake’s mum was very fond of putting money in his savings account. Anyone would think it was her savings account, the interest she took in it.
The other card was a postcard. It had a painting of a dead fish on the front, by somebody with a strange name beginning with van.” Jake’s mother said that meant the painter was Dutch. There were other things in the picture too, grapes and a tin plate and a jug of wine, but the main thing—the best thing—was the fish. Its skin shimmered with silvery lights and its head pointed magnificently.
“Hear you’ve been fishing for compliments, so here’s one: Well done!” was the message. There was a squiggly signature, but all Jake could make out were the initials: MK.
He got the shivery feeling again when he read it, only not as strongly as when his dad had said, “That’s my boy.”
“What sort of a fish is it?” asked Stella, when she came to visit.
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “Whiting maybe, they’re lovely and silvery. I wonder how she knew my address.”
“Who?”
“MK. Mrs. Kennedy. You know.”
“No, I don’t know any Mrs. Kennedys. And I don’t think people put M for Mrs. in their signatures.”
“It could be M for Maureen, though. Or Myra, or Miriam, or Molly, or Mairéad.”
“Do you mean our Mr. Kennedy next-door’s wife?” Stella asked. “I don’t think she’s called Mrs. Kennedy, though.”
“His mother,” said Jake. “The old lady with arthritis.”
“What makes you think it’s her?” Stella squinched up her eyes, but she couldn’t make anything more out of the signature than MK.
“Because she knows I want to be a fish painter.”
Stella didn’t look convinced.
“Well, make a better suggestion,” Jake said.
“Oh, you’re probably right,” said Stella. “Can I bring my sisters in? To meet you. I mean, formally. You’ve met them before, but you don’t even know their names, and you saved their lives. Sort of. At least, that’s what you thought you were doing. They’re thrilled. You’re their hero.”
“But I didn’t save their lives. I possibly saved the life of some other child called Naomi Something. And I’m not a hero. I didn’t even think. I wish…”
“Oh, do shut up, Jake, dear,” Stella said. “You’re blathering and rawmayshing. And it was Nuala Something.” She opened the get-well card again. “O’Halloran,” she added.
Jake wasn’t used to being called “dear.” Not even his mother ever called him that. He blushed.
“Where are they?” he said, banging on his pillows to fluff them up and cover his embarrassment.
“Outside the door, waiting.”
“They’re not making any n
oise.”
Stella assumed this meant yes. She opened the door, and in tumbled the nesty-haired quartet.
“This is Isobel,” Stella began. “Also known as Bella.”
“Hi, Isobel,” said Jake sheepishly. She was the tallest, next to Stella, and she was wearing a sparkly thing in her mussed hair. They all had mussed hair, except Stella, who had a ponytail today. It made her face seem even thinner than normal. Her cheeks were hollow.
“And this is Edel. Also known as Della.”
Jake laughed. “Stella, Bella, Della! Hi, Edel.”
Edel was the next in size. She gave a deep curtsy, holding out the corners of her bright green skirt. She wore a sparkly thing in her hair too—Jake could see when she bent her head—and she had a flower painted on the back of her hand, or perhaps it was a transfer.
“And this is Danielle,” said Stella.
“Let me guess,” said Jake. “Also known as Ella.”
“Wrong!” said Danielle. “Also known as Danny.” She tried to copy Edel’s curtsy, but she wasn’t very good at it, and anyway, it didn’t work so well with dungarees, which is what she was wearing.
“And the little one,” said Stella, “is Joanne.”
“Joanne!”
“Hi, Dake,” said Joanne.
“Also known as Joey,” Stella added.
“What happened to you?” asked Jake. “How come your name doesn’t match?”
Joanne was too shy to answer, so Stella said, “Oh, we just got bored with that idea, and anyway, Danielle wouldn’t play along, so we gave up on it.”
“What age are you, Joanne?” asked Jake, thinking that was the sort of thing adults usually asked children, and he was so much older than Joanne that he might as well be grown up.
“Theenahaff,” said Joanne, and beamed a big blue-eyed beam at him. “I go to pwayschoow.”
This was not the kind of information Jake had much experience of dealing with, but he rose to the occasion.
“That’s … that’s just terrific, Joanne,” he said. “Um … what a big girl you are!”
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