“Wake up, Nicky,” he cried. “Wake up now!”

  And then a man and a woman in green clothes lifted me onto a trolley and wheeled me to the ambulance.

  Twenty-two

  I wasn’t really with it in the ambulance. Kenny was in there with me. They’d wrapped him up in one of those silver blankets, so he looked like a giant turkey, ready to go in the oven. His hair was lank and filthy, and his face was streaked with mud. I suppose I looked worse. I saw that Kenny had the bloody fishing rod. I could have laughed, but it might have killed me.

  I tried to work out what had happened.

  Speaking was hard. My chest hurt, and my throat was raw from puking.

  “Was it you, Kenny?” I managed. “Did you drag me out?”

  “I helped the man,” Kenny said. “He got me out first, but I was OK. I had hold of the bouncy castle. I fixed the puncture really good. Then he went and got you. He had to swim a bit, and he pulled your hair.”

  “Man?” I said. “What man?”

  “That man. From the other day. That weirdo. I don’t think he’s a baddy. I didn’t know you could get weirdos who are goodies, but you can.”

  “Don’t talk, son,” the ambulance man said. “There was a lot of water in you. I think you’ve got a bit of hypothermia as well. Bloody cold out there, to go for a swim.” He was one of those men who’ve gone a bit bald and so they shave all their hair off to hide it. When he laughed you could see he had one of his teeth missing round the side, and I wondered why he didn’t get a false one or something, because that looked way worse than being a bit bald.

  He asked Kenny some stuff, but I don’t know if he got much sense out of him, except that my dad worked at the hospital, but not the one we were going to.

  Then we were at the hospital and they wheeled me to a room. Not a real room, just a cubicle with curtains across it, and Kenny came as well.

  We were only in there five minutes when a nurse came to see us. She had a quick check of Kenny and said, “You’re right as rain, aren’t you, love?” And Kenny blushed, because she was quite young, and she looked nice.

  Then she took the blankets off me and touched my arms and legs, to make sure nothing was bust. She asked me if I’d bashed my head, and I said no. I was shivering like a jelly in an earthquake, but apart from that I was OK.

  Then she took my hand.

  “What’s this here, love?” she asked. I looked down and saw that my fist was clamped around something complicated, slick and heavy. I opened my hand and saw that it was Mick Bowen’s gold Rolex.

  “Oh, it’s your watch,” the nurse said. “Don’t lose that. It’s a nice one.”

  I don’t think she’d taken in what it was. It was still filthy from the pond and at first glance, like that, it maybe looked like a cheap knock-off.

  “I’d put it on if I were you,” she said. “If you leave it down in here, someone’ll nick it!”

  Then she was out of there. Kenny came over and stared at the watch.

  “Is that it?” he said. “I never thought it was real.”

  I was still lying down – I felt too weak to sit up. I brought the watch close to my face and looked at the back. There it was, Bowen’s name, engraved in fancy writing.

  It felt lovely, almost alive in my fingers. The way the strap moved, the heavy golden links flowed like a lizard over my hands. The face of the watch was an intense blue, darker than a blue sky, more like the flash of blue you see on a mallard’s wing.

  I thought about how nice it would be to keep this thing for ever. To have it as my secret. To take it out in the night and hold it, breathing in its golden magic.

  Then I thought about how I could sell it, and the things that we could buy with the money. We could buy peace and happiness and the end of worry.

  And then I thought about the body in the lake. And I thought about the wife of Mick Bowen. And I thought about his son, Jez Bowen, who was a bully and a thug, and cruel with it. But I guessed that his dad loved him, the way that my dad loved me. And Jez probably loved his dad as well, as much as I loved mine.

  “Can I hold it?” Kenny asked.

  I gave it to him, and he held it and stroked it the same way I had done.

  “I’m going to give it to Jez,” I said.

  Kenny looked at me. I thought he’d be angry or annoyed, or just not get it.

  But he got it.

  “Yeah.”

  “And I don’t want to tell the police about it,” I said. “I mean about how Jez’s dad was in the lake. Not till I’ve told Jez.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Kenny said.

  “So let’s just tell Dad that we went for the—”

  “Fishing rod,” he said. “I know. We did. I got it.”

  Just then my dad came in, with Jenny close behind him. He kissed Kenny, and hugged me, and called me an idiot, and he said if I ever did anything that stupid again he’d … well, he didn’t know what he’d do. Then Kenny said it was his fault for losing the rod, and that I was only trying to stop him from getting into trouble. And when Kenny said that I felt proud and ashamed at the same time, because I couldn’t ever remember Kenny telling a white lie before. He always told the truth, and sometimes he told fibs when he thought he was in for a big telling-off. But this was a lie he told to save me.

  And then I told my dad about the man who’d saved us, me and Kenny both.

  “We thought he was a weirdo or something,” I said. “He shouted at us one time, and I thought he wanted to hurt us … But then, well, I don’t know why he was there, but we’d fallen off our raft, and I thought Kenny …”

  And then I started to cry, and I thought I’d never stop.

  But I did, in the end, and I finished the story. My dad asked me more about the man, then he looked thoughtful, but he didn’t say much else.

  Twenty-three

  They made me stay in hospital that night. I was fine, but they said they had to keep an eye on me. I quite liked it. They have really comfy beds in hospital, but the food’s crap.

  There were old people in the beds on either side of me, and one of them cracked jokes all night. “There were these two TV aerials on a roof, and they got married. The wedding was shite, but the reception was brilliant!” That sort of thing. But the one on the other side of me was dying, so he didn’t have a great sense of humour.

  I was OK the next day, and Dad and Kenny and Jenny came to collect me. There was also a surprise waiting for me outside the door of the ward. It was the man, the man from the Bacon Pond.

  “This is Mr McGilligan,” my dad said. “You’ve probably got something to say to him, I reckon.”

  The man smiled. He didn’t look like he was used to it. Smiling, or talking to people for that matter.

  “Thanks,” I said, but then Kenny barged past me and hugged the man.

  “Aye, well,” the man said, and not much more.

  “The paper’ll be after you, you know,” my dad said, and the man sort of smiled again.

  “I bloody hope not.”

  Jenny asked him to come round one day for his tea, and he said he would. Then we shook hands like grown-ups, even Kenny, and said goodbye.

  Because of what had happened I got the front seat in the car, and it was funny to see Dad and Kenny in the back, with their knees up around their ears.

  “I worked out who that man is,” my dad said. “I was at school with him. We called him Mog back then. He was all right to begin with, but something went wrong with his life, and he turned into a bit of a recluse. Lost touch with his mates. Never really settled. I always got the feeling something terrible happened to him, but I never knew what it was. Sometimes life just gets too much for you. Anyway, I went to see him last night, and I think helping you two might be the thing that … I don’t know, brings him back from the edge. You never know.”

  Even though my dad was talking about this man, Mog, or whatever his name was, I sensed that there was something else going on as well. I could tell from the way Jenny was driving. She looked nervous, and she kept looking at my dad in her rear-view mirror.

  There was something … wrong. No, wrong’s not the right word. I mean more that things weren’t normal. Something had happened. Not me and Kenny and the pond. Something else. Something that had to do with Dad and Jenny, as well as me and Kenny.

  I don’t know why, but the trip in the car tired me out. I just about got up the stairs without my dad carrying me. I lay on my bed and my dad tucked me in, and I went to sleep until the afternoon. When I came downstairs Dad and Jenny were in the kitchen, and Kenny was watching the telly.

  We chatted for a bit, and I told them I was OK. Then Dad said, “Yesterday I went back to the old house.”

  He stopped then, as if he didn’t know what to say next.

  “Go on,” Jenny said. Not because she didn’t know what was coming, I thought, but because she did know.

  “I don’t know if you remember the old house,” Dad said. “It was nice. Bigger than this. The garden was … It had a nice garden.”

  “The swing,” Kenny said. He’d come in and was listening like it was a sport.

  Dad smiled. “Aye, that’s right. The swing in the tree. That’s not there any more. Well, the tree is, but not the swing. This old couple bought it.”

  “The swing?” Kenny said.

  “No, son, the house,” my dad said. “Our old house. Well, they were quite old then. Really old now. But they’re still with it. Not, not gone in the head or anything.”

  I sensed that my dad was waffling a bit because what was coming up was hard for him to say. I had no idea what he was getting at. No, that isn’t true. I knew it must be something to do with my mum, and what I’d said, yesterday.

  Yesterday? It seemed more like a hundred years ago.

  “They remembered me, they did,” Dad went on. “Surprising, that. Well, I suppose it might have been because of the trouble. The thing is, Nicky … Kenny … The thing is, your mum, she had some problems. She wasn’t quite right, after, well, after she had you two. She had this bad thing called post-natal depression. It made her a bit mad. And I wasn’t as much help to her as I should have been. I didn’t really know what was going on.

  “Anyway, she left. Just went off one day. We’d had rows and what-not, but I didn’t think she was going to go like that. I sort of went to pieces a bit then, too. I didn’t pay the mortgage on the house, and the bank took it back. That’s how come we had to move. I didn’t leave the new people with an address for us. And I never … I never thought to get in touch with them. I mean, why would I?”

  My dad stared into space for a few seconds. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.

  “I probably could have found your mum,” he went on, sadly, “if I’d really tried. But it wouldn’t have been easy. The thing is, your mum didn’t have much family. She never knew her dad, and her mum – your granny – she died a long time ago. She had a sister, but she was in Canada. Anyway, I wasn’t right in my head either, like I said. You lads know that. Not till Jenny here came along and sorted me out.”

  Jenny put her hand on his arm and smiled at him. He put his hand on top of hers. But he still looked sad.

  “So I went there yesterday,” he said. “After what you said, Nicky, I went to the old house. And it was hard. We were happy there, a lot of the time. So when I rang their bell, I was crying, tears falling off my face. They must have thought I was a nutter. Surprised they didn’t call the police on me.

  “But they didn’t. They invited me in for some tea, after I told them who I was. Because, you see, they had some … things. Part of me knew they might. And they did.”

  “What things, Dad?” I thought it, but Kenny spoke it.

  “Letters.”

  And then my dad reached under the kitchen table to a plastic bag and came back up again with his two big hands full of envelopes.

  He put them on the table, and it was like this programme I once saw about a fishing boat. The fishermen pulled up a net full of fish, then emptied them onto the deck, and when they spilled out there seemed so many more of them, millions …

  “I haven’t opened them,” Dad said. “They’re all addressed to you two. I think there’s two each a year, birthdays and Christmas, going by the dates. And they’re all from Canada. The old people in the house, they didn’t have our new address. But they kept them. Kept all of them. I thanked them as best I could. Wish I could have done more.”

  I looked at the pile of letters. Neat handwriting on the envelopes, and strange foreign stamps. And then I felt my head go funny. I tried really, really hard, but I couldn’t stay on the hard kitchen chair, and I fell on the floor and went to sleep.

  Twenty-four

  The Bowens lived in a big house just out of town. It wasn’t an old house, but it was made out of stone to make it look old. There was a wall around it, and a gate with spikes on top, and then a gravel path up to the door. It wasn’t like the door to a normal house, but more like the door to some other kind of building, a bank or a church.

  I rang the bell. It made an old-fashioned “ding-dong” sound.

  I didn’t know who would answer it. Jez Bowen lived there with his mum. He had a sister, but she was older and lived somewhere else. I didn’t know if they were rich enough to have servants. A butler or something.

  Jez opened the door.

  He was a big lad, lean and hard. The Bowens had money, but they weren’t posh. Jez was a thug, and he’d smash your face in if you got in his way or on his nerves. I’d got in his way and on his nerves a lot.

  His eyes widened when he saw me. He half smiled, and then the smile went away, and his hard face was back. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit scared.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  I’d thought of a story. It was a rubbish one, but it was the best I could do.

  “I was fishing up at the Bacon Pond,” I said.

  Jez laughed.

  “Why should I care what you were doing? Put it on effing Facebook.”

  “When I was there, I found something,” I said. “Well, caught it. My line got snagged, and when I got it reeled in, this was on it.”

  I held out the watch.

  Jez stared at it, his mouth open. The silence stretched out for what felt like ages.

  “It’s got your dad’s name on it,” I said at last, and I turned the watch around to show the writing on the back.

  Jez took the watch from my hand.

  “Never thought I’d see this again,” he said. I thought he was speaking more to himself than to me.

  “I think, I don’t know, but I think he might have been … in the water,” I said.

  Jez looked at me, as if he had no idea what I was on about.

  “Eh?”

  “I think I saw something,” I said. “Someone. In the pond. And your dad’s not … Maybe you should call the police.”

  Had Jez really not heard the rumours, the stories that his dad was dead? Could he not join up the dots?

  Then Jez started to laugh. At first it sounded like someone trying to make themselves laugh, and I thought it might be a kind of crying. But soon it was a proper laugh, and Jez was bent double, holding his guts like he’d just got a boot in them.

  I felt more stupid than ever, standing out there in the drizzle, with Jez laughing his head off. I should just have gone to the police and told all this to them.

  Jez wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  “I last saw this a year ago,” he said. “My dad told me to get rid of it. It’s got his name on it, and he was skipping bail, off out the country. He didn’t want nothing that could identify him. So I chucked it in the Bacon Pond. Only for a little nothing like you to fish it up again.”

  “Chucked it …?” I said. “But it’s a Rolex. Worth … loads.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jez said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “My dad used to get hundreds of these from China. It’s just a shitty knock-off. He used to scam people the whole time with it. ‘See how good they are,’ he’d say, ‘even I wear one, with me name on it and everything.’ He used to tell people that he had a man on the inside of the Rolex factory who smuggled them out to him. All bullshit. Like I said, Chinese knock-offs. Here, have it. Then sod off. Breathe a word of this to anyone, and I’ll tell them Russians who are after me dad that you know where he is. They’ll cut your knackers off and make you eat them. Then they’ll peel you like an orange, and every time you say you don’t know anything, they’ll slice off another strip. Now get lost before I start the job off for them.”

  And Jez Bowen slammed that heavy door in my face.

  Twenty-five

  I don’t want to talk much about my mum’s letters, except to say that she’d tried, for years, to get in touch. She thought that it was us that had rejected her. She was living in Canada, near her sister, and had a new life.

  We spoke to my mum on the phone. It was really hard. I don’t think Kenny understood what was happening. No, that’s not right. He understood it in a different way.

  It was hard for my dad, too. But Jenny was there to help, like she always was.

  We’re going to see my mum, in Canada, in the summer. Kenny’s excited about going on a plane. So am I.

  “You can watch films all the way,” Kenny said. “They bring you special food on a special plate with a different place for all the kinds of food.”

  It’s sort of a happy ending, I suppose. Except it isn’t an ending, but just a way of going on. The only endings are when you’re dead, at the bottom of the Bacon Pond.

  So what did I see in the water? Was there a body? Or was it just weeds and branches and rubbish, and my mind turned it into Mick Bowen?

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7