Submersion Read online

  ‘We suspected that’s where you might be – they called round and we’ve been trying him on his telephone all day. Couldn’t get through.’

  ‘The line has water damage,’ I commented, feeling I needed to contribute something to the drama. Then, the obvious question left my lips. ‘Did the police think we took her?’

  Ronan shook his head.

  ‘They don’t think she was taken, Tristan. They know she wasn’t taken by anyone. You see, there’s been an accident. A tragic accident. You aren’t to blame yourself.’

  ‘Blame my-. Christ, Ronan, what happened?’ A key word he used caught in my throat as I repeated it: ‘Tragic – is she dead?’

  Ronan looked to the floor and nodded, but he wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘And what accident? Why would I blame myself?’

  It was then that he looked up at me, his grey-blue eyes magnified with tears.

  ‘The police were after you both,’ he told me. ‘After you and Jessie.’

  Within five minutes, I was back in the boat.

  ‘Is he going to the police?’ Aunt Penny asked Ronan, as I descended the stairs.

  ‘No,’ he told her, before following me. ‘We’re going to the scene. Get Jimmy to try Jessie’s number again and, if you can get through, tell him to meet us there. There’s water damage on his line, apparently.’

  Whatever Aunt Penny replied with, I didn’t hear. I was in the boat, ready to row, waiting whilst Ronan put on his protective gear.

  ‘Ready,’ he told me, finally stepping in and rocking the wooden vessel.

  The area surrounding the speedboat stop felt very different at night. It was still, abandoned. Not just the water, but the buildings around us. Nobody lived here and nobody passed through, not in the dark, and you sensed the cold isolation. The lack of humanity there gave me a chill.

  Jessie was already there when we arrived; living further away was no disadvantage when you had your own speedboat. As well as the lights on his boat, his torch beam gave him away. As we rowed closer, he flashed the beam towards us, momentarily blinding us. When we finally drew up against him, he was visibly relieved to see us.

  ‘Just had to check you weren’t the authorities,’ he said, his words projecting an outer organised calm. His eyes betrayed his inner turmoil. He continued speaking, his voice given a further clinical, emotionless edge as it vibrated through the gas mask over his mouth and nose. ‘Was it like this when you left her?’

  To ensure I didn’t miss an inch of the scene, Jessie ran his torch beam over the area where the makeshift speedboat pick-up stop had been constructed. The platform was gone. Washed away, had been Ronan’s words back at the house; had been the police’s words before him; the words of a higher authority before that, I suspected. Washed away. ‘How?’ had been my question. How had it simply washed away? It was secure; a firmly welded construction, the wooden planks that formed its floor treated to avoid rot.

  ‘Even the bolts holding it to that old shop front were treated with anti-rust,’ Jessie voiced, his breath jutting out of the face mask like smoke, as it hit the cold night.

  You see, he had expert insight to the merits of this particular piece of work – Jessie and I had been responsible for its initial build several years back, one of our earliest jobs together.

  ‘Who knows what’s in this water,’ Ronan added, hoping to reassure us, I guess, but Jessie just shook his head. ‘Shall we carry on, get to the police station before they come out for you both again?’

  ‘It’s not the water,’ Jessie responded, shaking his head, running his torch over the scene again. He stopped on one particular spot. ‘Look.’ He illuminated one of the brackets, still attached to the boarded up shop front.

  ‘What are we looking at Jessie,’ I asked, wanting him to specify his point, sensing unease and impatience creeping across Ronan’s face.

  ‘I replaced them last week. Did a job with Bobby,’ he explained, moving the beam to another bracket. ‘So, no Ronan, it’s not the water. Look closer.’

  We continued to stare. There was no sign of decay, it was true; no rusting, no ageing at all.

  ‘Jess, let’s go. Let’s talk to the police. It was an accident,’ Ronan pleaded. ‘They just said they needed to talk to you both. Asked us to call them as soon as we got hold of you, so you’re putting us in an awkward position.’

  Even through the dark and the obscurity of the gas mark, I could see the fiery glare Jessie shot Ronan.

  ‘There was nothing wrong with the work we did here,’ Jessie told him, matter-of-fact, a hint of hiss and spit in his tone. ‘I asked you to look and I don’t believe you have.’ He swung the torch back at the brackets, one at a time, and then swung it back at Ronan, lighting up his face as if in an interrogation. ‘Those brackets have been tampered with. Look again, Ronan. They were not worn away, or even torn away. They’ve been cut. The platform was sabotaged, and whoever did it is no professional. Or they are pretty certain they can place the blame elsewhere, because no honest police investigation is going to conclude anything else.’

  ‘Honest police investigation?’ Ronan uttered, trying to comprehend the wider implication.

  ‘We need to find her,’ Jessie said, just to me, but Ronan’s senses had perked up and, whilst he missed the obvious visual cues, he caught the auditory ones as they were formed.

  ‘Find her? Elinor? In this darkness?’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ I replied, knowing exactly what Jessie meant. Knowing exactly what he had concluded.

  For a moment, I thought back to what Ronan had told me as I’d rowed us to the scene of this crime. It was torn apart, he had said. It was just a wash of planks and scaffolding. It had come loose. A speedboat arrived to find just that. She was gone. Drowned, Tristan. They said Elinor had drowned.

  But they haven’t got her body? I’d asked.

  She’s in the water, Ronan had replied, as if that was obvious, as if somehow I was blind or deaf to the facts. But I wasn’t.

  What about the other children?

  Ronan had shrugged at this question, a hint of puzzle in his furrowed brow.

  There were others waiting there. About three, I think, I’d told him.

  But he’d no prior knowledge of this; the police had only reported Elinor as missing. No other children had been mentioned by them.

  They must have left some other way, or maybe you were mistaken?

  But I knew that I wasn’t.

  Later, at the scene, Jessie and I made no attempt to correct Ronan’s belief that our girl was dead. I knew the older man well enough – he wouldn’t want to accept the truth of what I and Jessie concluded; wouldn’t want to comprehend the horror of what we suspected had returned.

  ‘Okay,’ I stated, thinking through the practicalities of our next steps, ‘I’ll go with Jessie to the police. Ronan, you can row back to Agnes’, tell them where we are.’

  ‘And then?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘Then we find her,’ I told him, my words lending the outcome certainty. We will find her, I told myself, and, for the first time, I felt myself go, felt wetness about my eyes.

  ‘Not in this dark, you won’t,’ Ronan stated, grabbing the oars of Papa H’s boat and then rowing himself back in the darkness. ‘I’ll see you back at the house. And you’re not to blame, either of you,’ he added, as if we still had any doubts; as if he hadn’t heard or seen a damn bit of the evidence in the brutal beam of Jessie’s torchlight.

  It was early hours when Jessie dropped me home and I was greeted by an unexpected welcome: our hermit neighbour, Papa H, was waiting on his front step for me. Dressed in his full protective gear, the significance of his appearance outside the confines of the outer walls of his house was not lost on me. He was waiting for news.

  ‘No charges,’ I informed him, quietly, once we were inside and stripped of our outdoor, government-issue protection. After a futile search for our missing girl in the darkness, Jessie and I had taken ourselves
to the police as requested.

  But that wasn’t what he was waiting to hear.

  ‘Tried to rap a charge on Jessie, discrediting his craftsmanship, but they couldn’t make it stick. Jessie puts in a good argument, you know.’

  Before us, Papa H placed two warm mugs of milky cocoa on the table in his living room – another extravagance I’d been privileged to that day.

  Jessie was our source, when it came to luxury goods. I didn’t know where he got his supplies, and didn’t usually ask, either – just grateful to have a share in whatever he could get his hands on. But it raised questions. Questions about what was out there, about a life that existed beyond our drowned surroundings. And, if Jessie had access to this other world through the contraband goods he got hold of, then there was a way in - and a way out. There was hope. But mainly, there were just questions.

  ‘Just a man who knows a man who knows a man,’ Jessie would say, if I ever enquired about his supplier, the nearest either of us got to an answer. Just a man hiding behind another man, hiding behind another man.

  Papa H’s red-rimmed brown eyes stared across at me; we were seated on opposite sides of the table. He didn’t say a word, just stared. And, eventually, what he’d been waiting patiently for occurred. Like a flood – like the unexpected, overwhelming wave of the flood the police suggested might have caused the accident – the tears and the sobbing were upon me, eradicating my composure, leaving my steady bones rattling. Papa H stayed where he was – offered no words initially, no comforting-yet-manly tap on the shoulder to reassure me. He understood water; he understood my own small flood must be let before we could move or speak.

  ‘I’m done,’ I told him after several minutes, wiping my face, shaking my head, as if the issue was a flea in my ear I needed to rattle out. I went to stand, but Papa H sensed the move was coming and made one of his own: a hand reached out across the table and clamped one of mine in place.

  ‘You think it’s started again, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘The taking?’

  I couldn’t look up, but I reluctantly nodded my head, confirming his assumption. He rushed a sigh out between his teeth, creating a hiss in the room. It made me think of gas being released, of poisonous gas and my eyes darted instantly to my protective mask which I had left in the corner of his room, near the door.

  ‘You must have hope,’ he said, as I stood and made my way to retrieve the mask and the other gear I must put on before I ventured outside again. ‘If the taking has started again – if – it’s not the end. You of all people know that, Tristan.’

  I looked up at him briefly, coldly. He nodded in receipt of this: this was not a subject of which we usually talked.

  ‘Just have hope,’ he paraphrased his own words and I finally left.

  Back to Agnes and what remained of her family.

  They stayed three more days – Jimmy, Penny, Esther, Billy and Ronan – somehow squeezing themselves into Agnes’ relatively small house, relegating me to the sofa in the process. I was happy to be demoted in status; it helped with my guilt. I was as certain as Jessie that the speedboat platform had been sabotaged in some way, but I was still responsible for its existence in the first place, still responsible for taking her there. During those three days, Jessie and I went out regularly searching for Elinor; Ronan and Uncle Jimmy conducted their own separate searches too. We took Jessie’s speedboat and searched for miles, regularly checking the route to school and beyond, going over the scene of the alleged accident several times, looking for clues.

  Yet, it would get us nowhere. The authorities would be reluctant to listen to us. They wouldn’t welcome our challenge. And, when they ignored us, who could we take our questions or findings to? Beyond any first line contacts within the authorities, the system was a blur. A faceless blur.

  A man hiding behind a man, hiding behind another man.

  At the end of the third day, Agnes’ nephew Billy made a discovery. Not the grand discovery we were all hoping for, but a smaller, disturbing one.

  He had been spending his days further down the road, in the company of Old Man Merlin, sole occupant of the Cadley resident. Old Man Merlin was a local eccentric and old fool, but he was harmless enough and Esther was content for the old man to fill Billy’s head with silly tales and dreams.

  Better than your macabre stories of the past, she had said to me once, a warning not to tell him the same bedtime tales I shared with Elinor. A warning I had ignored on several occasions, I have to admit.

  My stories are my connection with the past; they are everyone’s connection with the past and, in these impoverished, decaying times, our only media for recording and passing it on. Our only way of not forgetting, and we must not forget. So, when I’m asked – begged, in Elinor and Billy’s case – to recall tales of the past, I will do so, with or without parental permission, even if the children think of it as story-time, rather than a lesson in history.

  Billy and Elinor’s relationship with Old Man Merlin and the Cadley residence had been long-standing. Given an adventurous nature on Elinor’s part and Billy’s pliable resistance to anything his cousin demanded, I’m certain they would have disappeared off to his towering house, with or without Esther’s permission. So, it was no surprise that the young boy took himself off there in the days that followed Elinor’s disappearance.

  Yet, what he returned with on that third day was a surprise – an unwelcome one, at that.

  He brought it home in an old plastic container Old Man Merlin had provided. Inside, gently wrapped in what appeared to be a clean, white napkin, was the tiny corpse of a rat.

  The small act triggered two key reactions. Firstly, Agnes snapped: she’d had enough, wanted them gone, could do without bloody dead bodies being brought into her house; bring back her daughter, alive, if you were going to bring anything back! Secondly, she demanded that the house was cleared, asking us all to leave. Within an hour, all were gone. Me too – I had to go, just for a bit, give her some space. I left a small brotherly kiss on her forehead, and did exactly as she asked: I left and took the small corpse with me.

  Ignoring the laws of caution instructed by our authorities, I left the house without my protective gear in place and hopped over to Papa H’s house. Whatever was out there – in the stagnant water, in the atmosphere – a few seconds’ of exposure wasn’t going to infect me. And, if it did, I wasn’t of the mind to care.

  Once inside Papa H’s, I placed the box on his kitchen table, lifted the lid and we both inspected the contents in silence.

  ‘What did the others think?’ he asked after a while.

  ‘They didn’t,’ I told him. ‘They just saw a dead rat, brought in from outside by a silly, thoughtless boy.’

  Papa H returned to his ponderous silence for a few more minutes before he spoke again.

  ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ he eventually uttered and I nodded. ‘So, what do you suggest we do?’

  A night of talk began, taking us into the early hours, allowing Agnes a lot more time and space than she ever asked for…

  PLAY

  ‘The day they came was an ordinary day. A day before the flood. Before the water washed through every part of the land. The days when milk floats hummed along the roads, delivering bottles of milk each morning to doorsteps, when daily newspapers and magazines were delivered by bicycle or moped.

  ‘Door-to-door salesmen were still in high supply and medium demand. Cars were a familiar sight on the road: being driven, parked, washed or some abandoned – just not all abandoned. Children could play in the street, too – kicking balls, skipping with ropes, throwing off their coats and jumpers when they got too warm. It wasn’t the better days; the money times were over and the riches were with the few, the remaining scraps with the many. But the floods were yet to come; a river was still an isolated, controlled area and small rowing boats were not common place. Indeed, it was rare or considered quite unnecessary to own one.’

  A pause.

  ‘Why have you stopped?�
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  ‘Thought I heard something. A noise. A whirring sound. You not hear it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll continue. Now where was I? Oh yes. But the floods were yet to come. A river was still a river, and a road was still a road…’

  PAUSE

  2. Billy

  The old man’s house – Old Man Merlin, as my mother, aunt and everyone else I knew referred to him as – was a treasure trove of things lost, forgotten and forbidden. A museum of broken artefacts, unwanted plunder from the past that he and I saw for the silver and gold it was. We were junk pirates, he said. That’s how we came together, how we built our special bond. That, and the fact my cousin Elinor disappeared.

  His name wasn’t Old Man Merlin at all, he told me. I think everyone knew that really, it’s just he had that crazy old man wizard look about him, plus his house soared up like a tower, giving it a castle-like majesty. So, Merlin rather fitted. But, as he lived in the Cadley residence, I’d guessed he was really Mr Cadley.

  ‘Wrong,’ he informed me one time, with a certain relish. ‘It’s not my name at all. Just the name of the man who had this place built. I will tell you what it is, young Billy. But it is a secret. And it will be your first test.’

  ‘Test?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Your first test. If you can keep this secret, then maybe I will tell you others.’

  ‘Do you have many?’ I asked him and he simply grinned, revealing a line of chipped yellowing teeth.

  Shall I begin with Elinor? Tell you a bit about what happened? Not that we know much, not so far.

  It has been over a month now since Elinor disappeared. She’s dead. She drowned in an accident on the way to school. You are not to say this in front of your aunt, Mother told me, after she had broken the news, saying it very quickly, before my tears started, as if somehow these hurried words would halt the crying. My mother doesn’t like crying. She hasn’t time for it. Not anymore. She prefers to occupy herself with being busy and advises others to do the same. Being busy nearly always translates as cleaning. When my father left, crying took up too much of her time, so she will waste no more on it, preferring to fill a bucket with hot soapy water and scrub. You are not to say she is dead in front of your aunt, she instructed and it worked: my tears were at bay. She will not accept the facts. So, we’ll just say that Elinor is missing, until your aunt accepts the truth. Okay? I agreed, nodding, before taking myself off to cry and waste time out from under her stern gaze.