by Edward Hogan
I looked at the leftover pancake on his plate. It was like a blotchy roll of fat. I picked it up and ate it in one go, just so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Thankfully, Dad stopped talking for a second.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” he said.
“Don’t you?” I said, looking at his empty beer glass.
He followed my gaze. “Oh. I appear to be without a drink. Waiter! Another of your finest, if you please.”
He always used this ridiculous posh voice when he was on the ale. I could see why people might punch him in the nose.
It was getting dark now. I looked out the big windows at the lake, which held a little of the moonlight on its surface. The water was lapping over the sand. I followed the ripples out into the middle of the lake and thought I saw a disturbance there, a figure cutting the surface of the water, gliding toward the bank in the distance.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I’d had hallucinations at school, just before I’d lost it. They’d given me a “little break” then. But now I was on holiday. Where did they send you when you flipped out on holiday?
Out on the lake, I was pleased to see that the water had stopped rippling, and there were no figures on the horizon. Thank God, I thought.
The Pancake House was converting itself into a winter beach café. People were sitting outside at tables under big outdoor heaters, trying to pretend it was summer but smoking to keep warm. Inside, a group of men and women mingled at the bar. Dad looked over at them, nodding his head to the music, not quite getting the rhythm.
“Dad, I’ve got a headache,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” He looked pleased. “Well, you should go home, Daniel. I mean, to the cabin. You don’t want to be hanging around here with your old man. Not if you’ve got a headache.”
“Are you staying, then?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ll just stay for another of their finest. A little nightcap. You’ve got to, um, you know . . .”
“Cut loose?”
“Aye, that’s it. Cut loose.”
I stood up from the table, and so did Dad. We walked in opposite directions — him toward the bar, me toward the door.
“Oh, Dad,” I said.
“Yes, Daniel.” He turned, sipped from his drink.
“Don’t drown,” I said.
He laughed. “I shan’t be going in the lake,” he said.
I nodded to his beer. “I’m not talking about the lake,” I said.
Outside, the air was cool and crisp, autumnal. I unlocked my bike from the stand. None of the drinkers outside seemed to notice that it was a woman’s bike. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe nobody was looking.
I could see the bike path as I walked my Shopper along the beach. The bicycles had dynamos, which meant that when you pedaled, your light came on. The dynamos made a clicking sound, like grasshoppers. Each of the cabins had two little posts on the lawn, with a lamp inside. These were the only sources of light. With the clicking of the dynamos, the weird white lamps, and the cyclists sweeping their beams across the forest, it looked like an underwater planet.
I glanced back out to the lake. My eye was drawn up to the higher branches of a tree, where I saw a figure lying along a bough, wearing a bright-red top with the hood up, and with one leg hanging down. It was the girl from the road. I shook my head and turned to the people sitting outside the Pancake House. They were talking and smoking, looking at each other. They hadn’t seen the figure. Maybe I hadn’t seen it, really.
I took a deep breath and looked back out to the tree. The distant figure was still there. I closed my eyes and turned away.
Back at the cabin, I opened the TV cupboard and turned on the set. There were lots of satellite channels, but most of them were showing sports, so I turned it off again. For a moment, I thought I saw shapes on the blank screen. I thought I could see that tree out by the lake, with the figure sitting in it like a leopard. I rubbed my face. I’m just tired, I thought. I shut the doors of the cupboard.
I listened carefully to the silence in the cabin. I listened until the silence fell away and revealed the noise of Chrissy, Tash, and their friends laughing in the yard next door. Their barbecue must have been winding down. I could smell the charred food. Beyond those sounds, I could hear the forest, its rhythms and night murmurs. I could almost feel it pressing in on the cabin.
I went to bed and lay awake for a while, thinking about what had happened back home, with my mum. Thinking about time. When they tell a story, a lot of people say, “I don’t know where to start.” I know what they mean.
I could start at two p.m. on the fourth of September. The day after the first day back at school. I was at home watching TV. Our house shares a sheltered entrance with the liquor store next door. It’s like a little corridor. The liquor store put a security camera by the entrance, and, weirdly, if you go to the second AV channel on our TV, it links up to the camera. I used to switch it on sometimes when I heard people downstairs. The problem is, you can’t leave it on too long because it burns the image onto the screen. I don’t know why. It’s a technical thing. Our TV was pretty good. A nice Samsung, quite new.
At two p.m. on the fourth of September, I heard a noise downstairs. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I wasn’t in the mood for lots of questions about why I was home from school. So I hit AV2 on the remote to see who it was. It was Mum. She was just inside the alleyway by the entrance. And she was kissing a man. I recognized him. It was Dr. Greggs, our local GP. The kiss was a passionate one; he had his hand inside her coat, around her waist. All this was happening in black-and-white, on our telly. I was paralyzed and only managed to snap out of it when I heard a sizzling noise coming from the TV. I switched it off and went up to my room. Thankfully Mum came in alone, and by the time she realized I was in the house, she was more concerned about the nosebleed that had forced me to come home from school.
For the next few days, I was rigid with fear. We were sitting there, in the living room, watching TV, and over the top of the moving pictures, I could see the scorched image of my mum and Dr. Greggs kissing. Nobody else seemed to notice. I suppose you had to be looking for it in the first place, but it was clear to me. I could see the shadow of their kiss over Match of the Day, over the six o’clock news, over kissing couples in the films my mum watched. It was driving me mad.
Eventually, at about three o’clock one morning — when any old thing seems like a good idea — I woke up, got dressed, unplugged the TV, and walked out of the house with it. It was frosty and calm on the street. I was going to throw it in the brook and fake a break-in. I thought everything would be OK; I thought I was going to get away with it. But Mum had heard me close the door, and she opened the upstairs window. “Daniel?” she called down.
“Yes, Mum,” I said.
“Are you awake?”
“I don’t know,” I said, resting the TV on my thigh.
“Come on back in the house, love,” she said.
I shook my head. Mum leaned back inside the curtains, and I could hear her coming down. I could still see the picture branded on the TV screen, her shape the color of milky coffee, with a dark orange outline. Him, too. Greggs. Greggs, who had rubbed my neck in a circular motion when I had a suspected throat infection. Greggs, with his warm hands. Mum arrived at the door, smiling, in her dressing gown. “Come on, love,” she said.
I walked back toward the house and dropped the television, screen first, onto the little wall of our front garden, denting and crumpling the screen. I made it look like an accident.
For a while, my parents were so distracted by my behavior that they didn’t have time to think about anything else. They whispered about what might be wrong with me and sent me to the doctor (not Greggs) to talk about sleeping patterns and the need for exercise and fresh air. They sent me to a school counselor, who asked me about friendship groups and the pressure of schoolwork and issues of sexuality. It was easy to pretend that I was upset about such things.
Dad pick
ed me up from school one day and pulled over on the way home. I was expecting more of the same questions. Perhaps a talk about how it was perfectly OK to get pleasure from my own body, or that people were often a little plump during their teens.
“Did you see your mother with another man?” he asked.
He looked at me when he said it. I could feel him reading my features. And I knew they were telling him a story. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t even say anything, but my face told him everything he needed to know. I hated him for looking at me like that. Hated myself for not being able to control how I looked. Hated how easy it was. Mum was gone by the next day.
But you could start that story earlier. You could start it from my nosebleed in history class, which meant I had to go home. Or you could start with the boys reading back the letter I sent to Lauren Harket over the summer holidays, which caused me to give myself the nosebleed. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that, either. I’d worked out that if I used a nasal spray for hay fever at five times the recommended dose, a crust formed in my nostril, and when I picked that crust — bang — there’s your bloody nose and a free pass to get out of school. So you might start the story from there.
Then again, why would anyone spend months preparing their nose so they can make it bleed whenever they want to? I certainly didn’t have hay fever in September. Maybe it was because the boys who had read the Lauren Harket letter in high-pitched voices had also, a few months before, used Photoshop to put my head on the body of a toddler from a nappy advert, and a naked model from a website called BigBeautifulWomen.com. And maybe they had done that because, just after Easter, Sarah-Jane Kennedy had called me “toddlerbody” after seeing me at the swimming pool, and someone had offered to buy me a bikini top.
And why stop with me? I can remember Mum and Dad talking in the living room back on Valentine’s Day. “Let’s have a dance, Richard,” she said to Dad. “We used to dance all the time.”
He hadn’t wanted to, but she convinced him. They tripped over a stray sofa cushion, and Mum fell awkwardly. Three days later, she went to see Dr. Greggs. It was the first time she’d been to the doctor since we’d moved to the area. I don’t need to tell you what happened next.
And Mum said that the problems with Dad started a long, long time ago.
So:
• the sofa cushion
• the TV
• the Photoshop pictures and the chair I threw at the boy who had made them
• the security camera
• the Lauren Harket letter
• the hay-fever medicine, which smelled of flowers and reminded me of summer even in the sludge of October
I didn’t. Know. Where. To start. People always said to me, “You can’t do anything about it now.” But when I looked back at all the little things that led to me destroying my family, I didn’t know if I could have done anything about it then, either. It doesn’t make it any easier, being powerless.
I woke early. It must have been the noise of Dad going to bed. I could hear muffled voices. I was still dressed, so I got up and walked through to the “living area.” It was a mess. There were beer bottles on the table, and the contents of Dad’s rucksack — his swim shorts, his towel, his shaving bag — were strewn across the floor. The muffled voices were coming from the TV. Dad had tried to watch the Sex Channel, but it was scrambled. I could just make out the bodies behind the gray fuzz and hear their fake cries of pleasure. They sounded angry. I looked closer at the television and saw Dad’s dusty footprint spread across the edge of the screen. It was five a.m.
I walked out into the forest. The little lights were still shining from the lawns, and they looked like sprites between the trees. The sky was like the metal hull of a great ship. It was so quiet, I could hear the generator from the Tropical Dome and the street sweepers somewhere, cleaning up nature.
I took the Shopper out toward the lake, its dynamo clicking away as I pedaled. The mist was heavy above the water. The Pancake House looked menacing now that it was empty. Inside, the stools were upside down on the tables. I noticed for the first time the green filth at the base of the white walls. Good, I thought.
I stood on the edge of the “beach” and watched thin ripples break on the sand. The water in the lake was too dark for a reflection, too cloudy. Suddenly I felt exposed out there. I felt as though I was being watched. So I took the bike off-road into the trees and rode alongside the lake.
I heard a noise from the water. It was a gliding sound so similar to the rhythm of my cycling that for a while I didn’t even register it. But then I stopped the bike and looked out. It was difficult to see through the trees, but there was a figure cutting beneath the surface of the lake. I saw the way the water dragged behind the swimmer like the train of a long dress. I waited for the figure to come up for air. It took a long time, but eventually, she did. She.
It was the girl.
They say all people look the same in the water, but I now knew that wasn’t true. At the local pool back home, they taught us to swim fast, to race, our arms thrashing and legs turning up white spume, while we took desperate gulps of air. But this girl swam like she was asleep. Even from that distance, I could see that her eyes were half open when she came up to breathe, and she barely parted her lips before sinking back into the brunt, her body rippling like the water. She did a front crawl with this slow, familiar rhythm.
One. And.
Two. And.
Three. And.
A waltz. Her arms were strong and long and came over her head with such silent grace, I could barely hear them slipping back under. She was wearing a black swimsuit. My mouth was dry. I was too far away to see the details of her face when it finally emerged again.
Without really thinking, I carefully lowered the bike to the ground and crept a little farther toward the bank, walking alongside her route. I followed her like that for five minutes, watching the steam from her body and the steam from the water rise up into the mist. She was the only smooth thing in that foggy world.
I saw some clothes in a sandy clearing on the bank and tucked myself in behind a tree, getting so close that the bark grazed my cheek.
She began to make her way toward the bank, and without a stumble, she was on her feet, walking through the shallows, shedding the water, smoothing back her hair. Her shoulders and hips were broad, and the swimsuit shone like oily sealskin.
She picked up the red top from the ground, and I knew she was the figure I had seen in the tree the night before. I was surprised to see her zip the hoodie straight over her wet self. She shuffled into a short jean skirt. Denim. It felt like I hadn’t seen denim for years.
I was about twenty meters away now, and I looked back at the Shopper, which was out of sight in the undergrowth. The girl walked up the bank a little way and sat down with her back against a tree. I was still hidden from her. She stared out onto the water, and so did I. It rocked slightly with the memory of her body. She sighed, and I thought it was a sigh of peace and satisfaction. “I suppose,” she said into the air, “it might be awkward if you came out now.”
I looked around, desperately hoping she was talking to someone — anyone — else. She carried on. “I mean, you could pretend to be doing bark rubbings or looking for your lost dog or something, but I think we both know what’s going on.”
She aimed a sly glance over her shoulder, in my direction. “Come on,” she said. “Out you come.”
I stepped out from behind the tree, my pulse slamming so hard, it rocked my vision. She turned to look at me. I couldn’t say anything.
“The thing is,” she said. “You can go online and very easily be looking at fully naked women within two minutes, with no trees to obscure the view.”
I shrugged. “We’re in a Comfort Plus cabin,” I said. “It’s all my dad could afford. No Wi-Fi.”
She laughed and smoothed her hair back. “That wasn’t really my point,” she said.
“I thought you might be . . . in danger, in the water,
” I said.
“No, you didn’t,” she said, looking out onto the lake again. She was right. I’d never seen anyone look less in danger.
Her face was sharp and angular, the skin cold and white. There was a faint rim of green around her right eye. I couldn’t tell if it was eye shadow or a fading bruise. She wore one of those big digital G-Shock watches, with underwater capacity. She looked me up and down. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Daniel.”
She stood up. “Right, then, Daniel. Get ’em off,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“Come on. Chop-chop.” She motioned up and down with her finger.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Your clothes, Daniel. Take them off. You’ve had a good look at me, now let’s have a gander at you. Strip.”
There were lots of reasons why I didn’t want to do that. One of them was that I had a raging hard-on. “I can’t,” I said.
“Don’t make me come over there and do it for you,” she said. This did not help matters.
“Really,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Do it. Otherwise it’s not fair. You’ve seen me in my swimsuit.”
I was trembling as I pulled off my sweatshirt. She looked away. The steam was still rising off her shoulders and the drenched curls of her hair. I could see faint red marks on her left leg, a rash from the water, maybe.
I couldn’t take my T-shirt off. I kept thinking about school, about the pictures. Toddlerbody. For a horrible moment, I thought I was going to cry. She must have sensed my hesitation because she turned to look at me again. “Oh, God,” she said. “I was only messing around. You don’t have to. Sorry.”
I picked up my sweatshirt and pulled it back on. I was angry.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she said.
I shook my head.
“It’s nice, that T-shirt,” she said quietly. It was just a light-blue T-shirt, nothing special. “It looks good on you.”
