Lark

by Anthony McGowan

  I tried to scrunch myself up, hiding from the snow. I needed to keep whatever warmth I had left wrapped up inside me. But my leg hurt too much to bend it. It was about then that I first thought I might really die there, freezing to death in the wet snow before Kenny found someone and brought them back to me.

  That’s when I started to yell. I suppose it was stupid for us not to have done it earlier. Another walker might have been on the path by the stream. But now I think I did it more as a cry of fear and rage at what was happening. I began by screaming “HELP! HELP!” but soon the words changed into a raw sound, an animal screech. I poured not just the pain and fear of now into my yells, but all the bad things that had happened in my life. My mum leaving us, my dad falling apart, me having to look after Kenny. The days I went to school hungry – properly hungry – because I gave Kenny the one slice of bread we had left. The days I went to school dirty because there was no hot water, and no one would sit next to me. The days when other kids at school made fun of me because my trousers were halfway up my legs.

  And I screamed because Sarah didn’t want to go out with me any more.

  Sarah was my first ever girlfriend. I’d never kissed anyone before her. Never even touched another girl. Sarah was dark and pretty and clever, and she said five funny things for every one funny thing I could think of. She shouldn’t ever really have gone out with me in the first place. It was all mixed up with her brother, who was my mortal enemy. But even he turned out to be all right in the end. And me and Sarah had three months together, and they were the best three months of my life. Everything was OK. My dad was good – mainly because of Jenny, who put all the things back in our lives that we’d been missing. Even Kenny was finding his way in the world. He loved his special school and the mates he had there. So what if his best friend thought he was Dr Who?

  And then there was my mum. It was only last year that we found out what had happened to her and where she’d gone. She flipped when me and Kenny were small. Kenny was a lot to handle. So was our dad. Maybe so was I. Mum got depressed, went a bit mad. Left. For years we thought she didn’t love us, didn’t even think about us. Now we knew that she had a new life in Canada, but she’d never forgotten us. She’d invited us to go there and stay for the holidays, but we didn’t have the money for that, so she was coming to us. I was still angry with Mum. Still filled up with feelings that no one could put a name to. But one of those feelings was love. So for the first time ever my life wasn’t shit.

  And then …

  And then Sarah told me that she just wanted to be friends. We were in Starbucks, where we’d had our first ever date.

  “I think you’re really nice,” Sarah said. I knew straight away that everything was wrong. She said some other things, but the blood was beating in my ears and I couldn’t take it in. My hands were on the table, balled up into fists. I remember her putting her hand on top of mine. The feel of it – cool and dry. And her perfect nails, not like my bitten stumps.

  “What did I do?” I said, or something like that. Meaning, What did I do wrong?

  “Nothing,” Sarah said.

  “Then why?”

  “There’s not always a good reason why. Sometimes it just is.”

  I couldn’t look at her. I stared at my fists. She took her hand off them. In the three months we’d been going out, I’d got better at talking about my feelings. But now that was all over.

  “I hate you,” I said.

  “No you don’t,” Sarah said.

  Then no one said anything for a while, and when I looked up, she was gone.

  Fourteen

  Could I have fallen asleep down here? No, not quite asleep. But in a weird trance – remembering and thinking. Not properly asleep. It was too cold to sleep.

  I’d been lying on a slab of rock a few centimetres above the level of the stream and back from it, out of the spray. But something looked different now. Felt different. Sounded different. The water was closer. No, not just closer. I was in it. Almost.

  I didn’t understand. In my daze, had I rolled towards the water? No, that wasn’t it. I hadn’t moved. Couldn’t move. The river had. It was growing. All this rain and snow. And here in the gorge, the river had nowhere to go but up. I tried to drag myself back from the edge. There was still half a metre of dry stone under the cliff. Getting there hurt so much I screamed again, higher than last time. The scream rasped at my throat with its claws. It felt as if someone was pulling a great bramble bush out of me.

  And now I felt a whole new type of fear. The water was going to continue to rise in the gorge. I couldn’t escape, not with my messed‑up legs. The river was going to creep up and take me in its cold arms and pull me into its black guts.

  I’d had a terror of drowning ever since I was small. I don’t know what set it off. Maybe I got out of my depth at the swimming pool. Maybe Dad had got drunk when I was a baby and dropped me in the bath. Whatever it was, it was a memory too bad to bring back. I used to imagine how drowning would feel – the panic as you take in your first lungful of water, trying to scream and call for help.

  But then I read something in the library about drowning. It said that the way we imagine a drowning never really happens. The person doesn’t splash and cry out and go down and then up and then down and up a few more times. It’s silent, calm. You take in a lungful of water, and then that’s it. Down you go, no struggling, nothing. Smooth. And that made me even more scared of it, not less.

  But I was being stupid and letting my thoughts get muddy with panic. Kenny would be at the road by now. Help was on its way. What would it be? A helicopter? I hoped it would be a helicopter. They’d send down a man with a stretcher and they’d winch me up. I’d be able to see the river, the gorge, the whole mountain, Yorkshire, England, the world, as I spun slowly round. A great story to tell everyone. I’d tell my dad, and Sarah, and then my mum. Everyone at school. I’d be famous. There’d be a special assembly. The head teacher would go on about what a hero I was. I’d go up on the stage in the hall, looking shy and embarrassed while everyone clapped and cheered. “Modest, isn’t he?” I’d hear someone say. I’d get a medal. What was that one they gave you for bravery when you weren’t in the army? The George Cross, that was it. Stupid name. Who’s called George these days? It must have been after some king. And what brave things did kings ever do? Well, maybe they were brave in the olden days, riding into battle. But not now. How is it brave to sit in a palace or to go and open a new leisure centre? They have someone to put the toothpaste on their toothbrush, my dad said. Someone to wipe their arse for them. Maybe they might slice a finger off when they were cutting a ribbon. Or get an ankle bitten by a corgi. A yapping corgi. Yap, yap, yap.

  Yapping.

  I opened my eyes.

  Fifteen

  The water was even closer, and the roar of it was louder than ever. The stream really had changed into a raging torrent now. But that wasn’t what I’d heard.

  Barking.

  Tina.

  She was there. Here, I mean. Tina was trying to shake off the wet. Or was she shivering?

  For a second I thought it meant that the rescuers were coming. Not winching down from a helicopter but doing the sensible thing and walking along the river. Maybe Kenny would be with them. I shouted out, “Hey! Here! Kenny!”

  But it didn’t feel … right. There’d have been noise. Lights – yeah, they’d have torches. And why would they send Tina ahead of them?

  No, this was something else. Something bad. Tina was here because something had gone wrong. I shouldn’t have sent Kenny off on his own. I didn’t know what lay past the bend in the river. It could be anything. A waterfall. Proper rapids. Or just a big flat area of water, reaching from wall to wall of the gorge.

  I had to go and help. Had to get to Kenny.

  But my bloody stupid useless legs.

  Tina came close to me. She was whimpering and shivering. She scrunched herself next to me, trying to get warm.

  “What’s happene
d, girl?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  I wanted to lie here under the shelter of the rock. Lie and wait for the rescuers to come.

  But they weren’t coming. Kenny needed me. I had to be the rescuer.

  My leg. I remembered something from the telly, where a guy got dropped in the jungle and told you how to survive. One of those programmes where they act like they’re alone, even if they’ve got a massive film crew with them. And they go off every night to stay in a Premier Inn and eat at Nando’s. Nando’s … Wish I hadn’t thought of that. It’s warm in Nando’s. Food …

  Stop it, Nicky. Come back. Focus.

  On the programme there was a thing about fixing a broken leg. Something about a splint. But then, if you didn’t have a splint, something else you could do. What was it? Yes, tie one leg to the other one. Use the other leg as the splint. With your belt. Yes, that was the way.

  I unbuckled my belt and slid it out from the loops. Even that small movement hurt like hell. I was afraid to touch the messed‑up leg, but I knew I had to do something so I could move. I felt down along my left leg carefully to find out where the break was. Everything above my knee was OK. I prodded at my knee. Sore, but that wasn’t the problem. I stretched and felt along the outside of my leg. Ten centimetres below my knee I came to it. A bulge, like an egg. Just touching it lightly wasn’t too bad. My leg didn’t seem to mind that. And, yeah, I know it’s stupid, but I was coming to think of my leg as something different from me – a separate being. Separate, but the same. The black sheep of the family. Something to be embarrassed about. The leg definitely had a brain. Or at least a mind. It thought things and felt things. It had views and opinions. And the leg’s main opinion was that it didn’t want me to move it.

  I knew the next bit was going to hurt. Hurt a lot. But now I wasn’t just doing it for me. Kenny needed me. He was up ahead somewhere, stuck and in trouble.

  I began to wrap the belt around my legs. The belt was an old one of my dad’s and way too long. I remembered him poking extra holes in it with one of the tools from his toolbox. Looked like a screwdriver but with a sharp point on the end, not a flat bit. What did he call it? An owl? No, an awl. My dad was good with tools. Told me my granddad was even better. He was an engineer in the mine. He kept the machinery turning. And my granddad had passed his knowledge down to my dad. But bits of it had been lost. Forgotten. And my dad had tried to show me things. How to measure and mark the wood before you start to drill. How screws were better than nails. How to keep your chisel sharp. But I never really listened. What would I have to pass on to my kids, if I ever had any? Changing a sodding lightbulb freaked me out.

  But these thoughts were all instead of the thing I was dreading. The thing I was putting off.

  Kenny. Kenny. Kenny.

  I reached the place where the egg grew from my leg. I lightly wrapped the belt around that, and then down as far as my ankle. My legs were now loosely tied together. But that was no good. I held my breath and tightened the belt. My scream filled the gorge, drowned the river, reached the sky, stretched out into space.

  But even as I screamed, I carried on tightening the belt to bind my two legs together.

  There was a weird taste in my mouth. I spat. Blood. What had I bitten? Tongue? Cheek? Or had the blood somehow come up from inside me?

  It didn’t matter now. The searing agony passed. I still had the loose end of the belt in my hand. The buckle end was clamped between my knees. I didn’t know what to do with the loose end. It wouldn’t reach back down to the buckle. I tucked it under and round one of the loops, and pulled it into a knot, as tightly as I could. More agony. But oddly, there was something “right” about this agony. The pain seemed to be saying, “Yes, this is the right thing to do,” like the last stab of pain when you pull out a splinter.

  I knotted the buckle end in the same way. Now my legs were tied tightly together. It felt … better. Terrible, but better.

  But the water was still rising. I felt the spray on my face. I glanced at Tina. She was shaking and looking as rotten as I felt.

  “Come on, girl,” I said, “walkies.” I’d have laughed at my own stupid joke if I’d had the breath.

  I began to crawl on my belly, like some stranded fish. Yeah, like an illustration I remembered seeing in a book about evolution. It was the first fish to pull itself out of the water, on its way to becoming an amphibian. That was evolution going forwards, but I felt I was going back, becoming that dull‑eyed, cold‑blooded animal. All that counted was crawling forward. The pain was nothing. I had to find Kenny.

  Tina limped by my side, her head low, still shivering and trembling. Like she was an omen of something terrible.

  Sixteen

  I followed the way Kenny had gone, along the broken rock and gravel by the side of the raging stream. It was properly dark now, and the snow was falling again. My ears were full of the roar of the water. Sometimes Tina was at my ear, sometimes she lagged behind.

  The river curved to the left, and I followed it round, digging my gloved fingers into the gravel to drag myself forwards. The river grew wider and the bank narrower with each metre. And then there was no bank at all, and I was dragging myself through shallow water.

  I was moving slowly, so slowly, but I still jarred my leg a couple of times on juts of rock. It was like I’d been hit with an iron bar, and I bellowed out my pain and rage and frustration.

  And then it was as if the volume knob on the river had been turned up all the way. I saw that I’d come to a waterfall. The water only fell a metre or so, but I was so close it sounded like all the toilets in the world flushing together. The bank took two steep steps down, and this was the worst part of the awful journey.

  I mean the worst in terms of physical pain.

  The real worst part was yet to come.

  I knew the steps were going to hurt. I bent my legs to try to keep the broken bone away from the rock, and I slithered down. The rock pulled up my jacket and jumper and shirt. It cut into my guts, scraping the skin off, and my face crunched into the slimy gravel at the bottom. But on I went.

  I don’t know how long it took me to drag myself around the bend in the river. But once I’d made it, filthy and cold and drenched, I wished I hadn’t.

  The river was different here.

  It didn’t surge and froth and shake its white fists at the sky. The river was gentle and slow. The snowflakes fell on its surface and floated for a while like tears on a face. It was the size of a big room, and the still water stretched out to the next bend in the river. I could hear another waterfall, out of my sight. This was just a calm section in between the rapids.

  The cliffs on each side were lower here – not the height of a house, but a bungalow. The water lapped right to the edge on each side. There was no bank for me to crawl along. I was on the last dry bit of bank.

  But that wasn’t what made the sick feeling surge up inside me. There was something else floating on the water along with the snowflakes.

  It was a hat.

  A Leeds United bobble hat.

  Seventeen

  I shouted out, “Kenny! Kenny!” as loud as I could. Stupidly, I aimed my shouts at the hat, as if he were walking along under the surface, with just the hat sticking up out of the water. Tina whined and barked and whined, and moved in a small circle.

  I tried to drag myself out there, but the water was too deep, soon up over my arms. The icy chill of it paralysed me, so I had to get back to my sliver of dry rock.

  I screamed out again with frustration and pain and loneliness. The images of what might have happened flowed through my brain, like I was watching a load of YouTube videos. Kenny making it this far, getting stuck, not wanting to come back without having completed his mission, trying to wade on. The water getting higher, freezing him. Up to his waist, his neck. Kenny stumbling, taking in that fatal mouthful of water – just as I’d imagined doing myself. Frozen and drowned.

  I tried to make better videos play. Kenny somehow skirt
ing this part of the river, making it down to the road. Kenny safe. Rescuers coming for me.

  I was shivering now, more than Tina. So cold I couldn’t think any more. The gloves were soaked, of course, so they didn’t do any good. I took them off and shoved my hands under my armpits. Tina was next to me again. I lay on my side, pulled my legs up and curled around her.

  I would have cried, I think, but it turns out you can reach a level of coldness where you can’t cry, no matter how sad you are. All you are is cold.

  I started to drift again. Memories from when we were small. My mum was there, but I don’t know if it was her as she really was or just something my mind invented, made up from mothers I’d seen on the telly or read about in books. She had old‑fashioned clothes – a dress with flowers on it, an apron. And her hair was tied up in a bun.

  Somewhere else, I remembered my dad staggering around drunk in the kitchen. “Where is it?” Dad was yelling. “Where is it?”

  Booze, I suppose he meant.

  And I remembered an argument. Mum and Dad screaming at each other. No, not at each other. My dad just slurring a few words; my mum’s voice like a machine gun firing icicles. Me and Kenny upstairs, listening on the landing. Then Kenny crying in bed, the pillow over his head. Me telling Kenny a story. Maybe it was the first story I ever told him. One I’d heard at school. What story? Hansel and Gretel. The trail of bread. The two children left in the forest … No, I wouldn’t have told him that one. I wasn’t that stupid. Maybe it was the Little Mermaid, as I’ve got a memory somewhere of Kenny murmuring, “Mermaid, mermaid …”

  Tina was cold next to me. She was a good dog. Well, she wasn’t clever and she didn’t do any tricks, but she loved Kenny. Good isn’t the same as clever.

  I tried to warm Tina up. Wrapped myself more tightly around her.