Never Ending

by Martyn Bedford

  “He’s in the grounds,” Webb says. “This racket is a diversion.”

  On cue, the alarms all cut out at once, leaving a ringing silence that makes the night seem instantly darker and colder as well as shockingly quiet.

  “I’ve messaged Dr P.,” Webb tells Sumner, then turns to Zena and instructs her to return the residents to their bedrooms. The remaining staff are to grab torches from the utility room and form a search party. He points. “The last time CCTV picked him up he was heading for the Walk woods.”

  “I know where he’ll be,” Shiv says. She does know, with absolute certainty, the one place Mikey will have gone. And what he intends to do there.

  “Where?” Webb asks.

  “The lake.”

  Before anyone can stop her, Shiv starts running.

  In the lustre of a half-moon, everything is made of grey plastic. Lawn, grass, shrubs, flowers, trees – nothing looks real. It might be a park in a model village, with Shiv and those in pursuit shrunk to the size of toy figures. Her breath scorches her throat. Her feet, her legs, her entire body tingle as though with static electricity.

  Only once before in her life has she ever run so fast.

  How much of a head start did Mikey have? Not much. But long enough to be in the water by now.

  Webb catches up with her fifty metres or so before the lake. She expects him to grab her, make her stop, but he falls in alongside her, stride for stride, like this is a long-distance race and he doesn’t want to hit the front too soon.

  “How d’you know?” he asks, panting, the words fractured by his pounding feet.

  Because of Phoebe. Because of how his sister died. Because he tried to say goodbye to me yesterday evening and I didn’t listen.

  She doesn’t have to say anything though. Almost as Webb asks his question, the lake sweeps fully into view over the crest of the lawn and Mikey is plain to see, silhouetted in the spill of moonlight across the surface of the water.

  Webb slows as they near the gate, with its DANGER: DEEP WATER sign. “How did he get the other side of the fence?” he asks, pulling out a bunch of keys.

  Shiv doesn’t bother to dilute the sarcasm. “Maybe he climbed it?”

  The real question, though, is what Mikey’s doing.

  He’s turned away from them, walking along the shore – on all fours, it looks like – loading something into a bag, then continuing on his way, feet crunching and clicking on the shingle. More shadow than figure; Shiv could believe he’s a figment of her imagination. Another confabulation. For once, he isn’t wearing the jumpsuit but is all in black, with a hooded top that mostly obscures his face. If he has registered them, he gives no sign.

  “Mikey!” she shouts.

  He carries on with whatever he’s doing, with greater urgency.

  Assistant Webb is still searching through the keys for the right one. Sumner reaches them, gasping for breath. Before she can recover sufficiently to ask what’s going on, Webb finds the key to the gate and inserts it. At this moment, Mikey straightens up, hoists the bag – a small, black rucksack – onto his back and makes for the old wooden jetty. The rucksack looks heavy; with a lurch in her gut, Shiv knows why.

  “Stones,” she says.

  By the time Webb has swung the gate open with a metallic shriek, Mikey’s at the end of the jetty.

  “No one comes near me!” he shouts, turning to show his whitewashed features in profile. He aims a finger at them as though it was a pistol.

  They stop where they are, although Shiv can tell Webb is itching to go after him – can almost see him calculating the odds on reaching Mikey in time.

  “I’m going to him,” Shiv says.

  Webb puts out a hand to stop her. “I can’t let you do that.”

  “I’m the only one he’ll talk to.”

  “No way are you—”

  “She’s right,” Sumner says. “Let her go.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Clarence, if that boy goes in—”

  “He said no one,” Webb says. “That means you as well as us, Siobhan.”

  “So what do we do?” Shiv says. “Stand and watch?”

  Webb looks at them in turn. Shiv doesn’t wait to hear what he has to say, just pushes past him and through the gate.

  “Hey,” she says. Mikey doesn’t turn round.

  “One more step.” The warning is clear enough.

  Shiv is at the start of the jetty, her feet firmly on solid ground, the lake spread before her like so much spilled ink. She’s holding on tight to one of the lifebelt posts, the splintery wood biting into her palm.

  The dead-of-night hush hangs over everything like an outcast spirit.

  Shiv is shaking. She focuses on Mikey, fixing her gaze on him, sitting right at the end of the jetty with his feet dangling in the water.

  “Is this what you were trying to tell me last night? Is this what you were planning all along?” No reply. She’s conscious of Webb and Sumner creeping closer to the jetty, watching. “Can I sit with you, Mikey? I won’t do anything.”

  He doesn’t say no; doesn’t warn or threaten either.

  It isn’t the sea, she reminds herself. No rocks, no waves – no sudden surge to sweep her off her feet, or dash her against a cliff, or drag her down into the swirling depths. The water is perfectly calm. In the moonlight, it might not even be water but a second silvery-charcoal sky unfurled beneath the one above.

  There. Her first step. Her second.

  She has to pause a moment. Mikey sits a little straighter, a little stiffer, that’s all. The water moves though. Laps at the shore, slaps the posts that support the jetty, with its aged, gappy planks. She tells herself it’s a gentle sound: a whispering breeze in the treetops; the trickle of a tap filling a basin. It isn’t a sound to be scared of.

  Shiv’s breathing slows. Her heartbeat steadies.

  One painstaking step at a time, testing each board like a tightrope walker – eyes on Mikey all the while – she makes her way to the end. Tentatively, she sits down beside him – not too close. Cross-legged. No way is she letting her feet hang over the edge like his.

  “Don’t think you’ll stop me,” Mikey says.

  “Have I tried to stop you doing anything before?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Mikey.” This is Webb, closer still.

  “Tell him to shut the hell up! Tell him to get back. Tell him!”

  Shiv doesn’t need to relay the warning to Webb – Mikey screamed it so loudly he startled the waterfowl in their night-time roosts; a squabbling of unseen ducks, coots and geese that might be the lake itself protesting at being woken up.

  She waits for their noise to subside; gives Mikey time to calm down.

  “Did you hear what Sumner called him just now?” Her voice is low.

  Mikey sniffs, swallows. “What?”

  “Clarence.” Shiv laughs. “How has he kept that a secret for so long?”

  She can’t see his face for the hood but senses him trying not to show that he finds Webb’s name funny. He shifts his stone-filled rucksack into a more comfortable position. The water is up to his shins, setting up eddies with the motion of his feet.

  “This is where they went,” he says.

  “Where who went?” She has one hand palm-down on each knee; braced, trying to stop shivering.

  “Feebs. Declan.”

  Shiv finds her eyes drawn to the water, as though her brother and Mikey’s sister might suddenly break the surface. “Not here.”

  “Same thing.”

  She imagines a vast subterranean ocean connecting all the rivers, lakes, seas of the world – an underwater afterlife for the drowned. Is this where Mikey believes he’ll go when the lake takes him? To be reunited with Phoebe? She doesn’t think so, given the things he’s said before and the way his mind works. His sister drowned because of him; his punishment should fit the crime. That’s what this is.

  “We’re the same, you and me,” Mikey says.

&n
bsp; Shiv wants to disagree, to say that Dec didn’t drown like Phoebe, but that’s not true. At the inquest, the pathologist said the presence of water in the lungs suggested her brother was still breathing as he entered the sea. The injuries from the crash and the fall down the cliff “would almost certainly have proved fatal” but he was still just about alive while Shiv stood on that rock, giving him up for dead.

  She has lived with that knowledge.

  “We’re not the same,” she says, even so.

  Mikey turns to look at her. His hood makes a ghostly oval of his face. “It’s why you stopped eating,” he says. “And all the stuff you did before – breaking things. In here –” he raises a hand and presses his fingers against her forehead, as though giving her a blessing – “you can’t ever forgive yourself.”

  He lowers his hand but the impression of his fingertips on her skin remains.

  I can’t ever forgive myself. She told Dr Pollard exactly that. “I can’t ever forgive myself. Can’t ever hate myself enough, no matter how hard I try.”

  “How do you measure self-hatred?” the woman asked.

  “By how much you don’t want to wake up each morning. By how much you go to sleep at night wishing tomorrow wouldn’t come – wishing you didn’t have to live another single day with what you’ve done.”

  “Sounds to me like you have more than enough self-hatred, Siobhan.”

  “But that’s the point. I do wake up. Every morning, I wake up.”

  Not wanting to live with what you’ve done – is that the same as wanting to die? For Mikey, yes. For her, though?

  Gazing out at the surface of the water, Shiv imagines standing up and one–two–three leaping into the water. The lake erupts, exploding in her eyes, nose, mouth. Cold. Stunningly, breathtakingly cold. She’s tumbling into pitch-black turbulence, thrashing uselessly, a whirl of bubbles scouring her face. Up and down have no meaning, there is only water, engulfing her – simultaneously pushing her away and sucking her in, repelling her but refusing to let her go.

  Is this how it was for you, Dec?

  Down. Down. Down.Her lungs are ready to burst.

  This is it, then. Her repentance, her atonement: offering the thousands of days she has yet to live in payment for the thousands she took from him.

  She stops resisting the lake and lets herself spin wherever it takes her. Nothing to fear. It’s not even water but feathers, she imagines – a sea of black down, soft and warm enough to sleep on. Shiv shuts her eyes. When she wakes she’ll be afloat on her back in the pool in Kyritos.

  Declan will be there, in his red swimming shorts, sitting cross-legged on the end of the springboard. Grinning. Ready to splat her with the yellow tennis ball.

  He opens his mouth. No.

  What?

  No, he repeats.

  Dec, I’m com—

  But her brother stands, retraces his steps along the board and walks away from the poolside, bouncing the ball on the flagstones as he goes. Thud–catch–thud–catch–thud–catch. Even when he’s lost from view, Shiv still hears it, like the thump of her heart and the thrum of her pulse in her ears. Slowing. Fading. Stop—

  She opens her mouth to call him back and her lungs fill with water.

  It becomes darker all of a sudden and Shiv glances up to see a scrap of cloud crossing in front of the half-moon, looking for all the world like an X-ray of a lung. The wooden boards are hard and cold beneath her.

  “I used to have this dream,” she tells Mikey, “where I dive into the sea and swim out to Dec and manage to drag him onto the rocks. I’m pumping the water out of him, giving him mouth-to-mouth, thumping his chest to get his heart going.” Her voice breaks. “But he’s just lying there. Just … dead.”

  Mikey isn’t listening.

  He’s staring straight ahead, at the water – placid and dark, utterly indifferent to them. Not his river, but it’ll do. That’s what he’s thinking, for sure. Now the moment is finally here his intensity comes off him like an aura.

  “What if this isn’t it?” Shiv says.

  Mikey gives her a sidelong look. “What?”

  “What if this isn’t your punishment?”

  He goes on looking at her, his face etched in shadows, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of the rucksack. “You said you wouldn’t try to stop me.”

  “Just suppose the price you have to pay isn’t dying but living?”

  “That don’t even mean nothing.”

  “’Cos that’s my punishment. Every day for the rest of my life, I have to live with what happened – with what I did.”

  Beside her, the boy rises to his feet, carefully, balancing himself, adjusting the shoulder straps. He straightens up, toes at the very edge, like a diver on a board. Out of the corner of her eye, Shiv’s aware of movement: Webb and Sumner, edging closer to the jetty. The security guy is with them.

  Another figure, too: Dr Pollard.

  Not now. Please not now. One word, one sudden move, and he’ll jump and that rucksack will take him straight to the bottom.

  They stop. They remain silent. Shiv exhales.

  “I came to this clinic,” she says, “wanting them to teach me how to do it – live with what I did to Dec.” She keeps her voice even, not wanting to show any sign that he has unnerved her by standing up. Or to alert him to what’s happening behind them. “I guess I wanted them to take away the guilt and the loss. The pain. The blame.”

  Mikey ignores her. Stays perfectly still.

  “Without all of that,” she goes on, “I could get on with my life. I could live.”

  “Don’t talk to me. I don’t want—”

  “But I can’t get rid of it, can I? That’s the real punishment, Mikey: Declan is dead … and I’m not.”

  Shiv stands up too. Slips a hand into his. He tries to pull free but she holds on.

  “Dec lives in here, now.” With her free hand she touches her forehead where Mikey pressed his fingers a few minutes ago. “And here.” She places the hand over her heart. “Same for you with Feebs,” she says quietly. “If you kill yourself, she can’t live there any more.”

  Mikey is trembling. Shuddering. He might be crying but she daren’t look. She stares straight ahead at the lake. Keeps his hand firmly in hers.

  “Let me go.” He tries to break her grip.

  She tightens it. “I’m not letting go, Mikey. If you go in, we both do.”

  “Let go.”

  “No.”

  Two realities open up in Shiv’s mind.

  In one, Mikey propels himself off the end of the jetty, taking her with him, the weight of the rucksack dragging them both down, hand in hand, to the depths.

  In the other, he doesn’t.

  Which is the true reality and which the false, Shiv doesn’t know yet. But she will wait right here with him until she finds out.

  Return to Kyritos

  They fly to a neighbouring island and transfer to Kyritos by boat to avoid the TV crews and photographers. To be on the safe side, Shiv wears a floppy hat and shades. Dad’s lawyer meets them at the dockside and drives them to a “safe” house: his uncle’s, in a village up the coast from the main town.

  These tactics will only delay her encounter with the press – they’ll be waiting for her on the steps of the courthouse tomorrow morning.

  “Is this where you usually stay?” Shiv asks.

  Dad shakes his head. “No, I stay in the town.”

  Of course. His isn’t the face they want to splash on their front pages and news bulletins. He isn’t the star witness.

  The lawyer is a little man, shorter than Shiv, with an unpronounceable name and dark hair on the backs of his hands. He spends the morning briefing them about the hearing: going over the questions Shiv’s likely to be asked, coaching her how to answer them. Just as importantly, how to present herself to the court.

  Both defendants admit driving while intoxicated, he explains – they couldn’t deny it, after their breath and blood tests the night of the acc
ident. That a young boy died as a result adds another layer of severity to the charges. But the pair deny they were racing. If the lawyer can nail them for that they’ll go down for a long time.

  Shiv is the prosecution’s emotional trump-card: a grief-stricken fifteen-year-old girl traumatized by her brother’s horrific death. If she stands in that witness box and says the right things, cries in the right places – paints a vivid picture of Declan’s last moments of life – the jury will believe her over the two in the dock.

  “I made them do it,” Shiv tells the lawyer, not for the first time.

  “That is not our case, Siobhan.”

  “It’s the truth though.”

  “Shall I tell you what is the truth?” he says. “They were the ones who rode the mopeds when they were drunk. The ones who raced with each other. It was one of them who lost control and crashed.”

  “But—”

  “They killed Declan. Not you.” He stares her down. Then, miming bags under his eyes, he says, “Stay up late tonight, yes? And no make-up tomorrow.”

  Yeah, and make sure to shave your hands, she doesn’t tell him.

  “He wanted Mum to testify as well,” Dad says, after the lawyer has gone. An extra tug at the jury’s heartstrings.

  Like that would happen.

  Her mother is improving, but she won’t be coming back to Kyritos any time this century – and certainly not for a court case she wanted nothing to do with.

  In the difficult silence that follows, Shiv wonders if Dad has begun to have doubts too. Before she went into the clinic, his quest for justice – for revenge, really – was an obsession. He wanted Joss and Nikos punished. Now that the trial is here, he seems uneasy. Like someone caught up in events he initiated but which have gathered their own momentum, sweeping him along. Dad used to tell the lawyer what to do; these days, it’s the other way round.

  After lunch, Shiv takes a nap beneath the deliciously cool draught of a ceiling fan in a bedroom that houses a small shrine to a haloed Greek saint. She sleeps for an hour.

  She sleeps a lot just lately. Nightmare free, mostly. In between sleeps, she has been eating the food Aunt Rosh piles up before her. That’s where the three of them are staying, now – back in England – while they’re waiting for the house sale to go through so they can start again in a place where Declan never lived.