He started to cry. “But what good does it do now?”
I let go of his arm and put my hands on his shoulders. I forced him to look at me. “A promise is a promise, Josh. I mean it. You do not tell anyone.”
He was right: in a way, we weren’t doing any good. There was no good to be done. But still, I couldn’t betray her. And if they knew about Katie, they’d ask questions about what happened afterwards, and I didn’t want anyone to know about what we did, Mum and I. What we did, and what we didn’t do.
I didn’t want to leave Josh like that, and I didn’t want to go home anyway, so I put my arm around him and gave him a comforting squeeze, and then I took his hand. “Come on,” I said to him. “Come with me. I know something we can do, something that’ll make us feel better.” He turned bright red and I started laughing. “Not that, you dirty boy!” He laughed, too, then, and wiped the tears from his face.
We walked in silence towards the southern end of town, Josh pushing his bike along beside me. There was no one about, the rain was coming down harder and harder and I could feel Josh sneaking the occasional glance across at me because my T-shirt was now totally see-through and I wasn’t wearing a bra. I crossed my arms over my chest and he blushed again. I smiled, but I didn’t say anything. In fact, we didn’t talk at all until we got to Mark’s road, and then Josh said, “What are we doing here?” I just grinned at him.
When we were outside Mark’s door he asked again, “Lena, what are we doing here?” He looked frightened again, but excited, too, and I could feel all the adrenaline rushing up inside of me, making me feel dizzy and sick.
“This,” I said. I picked up a stone from under the hedge and chucked it as hard as I could against the big window at the front of his house, and it went straight through, just making a small hole.
“Lena!” Josh yelled, anxiously looking around to see if anyone was watching. They weren’t. I grinned at him and picked up another stone and did it again, and this time it shattered the window and the whole pane came crashing down. “Come on,” I said to him, and I handed him a stone, and together we went round the whole house. It was like we were high on hatred—we were laughing and shouting and calling that piece of shit every name we could think of.
THE DROWNING POOL
2015
KATIE
On the way to the river, she stopped from time to time to pick up a stone or a piece of brick, which she put into her backpack. It was cold, not yet light, though if she’d turned back to look in the direction of the sea, she would have seen a hint of grey on the horizon. She did not turn back, not once.
She walked quickly at first, down the hill towards the centre of town, putting some distance between herself and her home. She didn’t head straight to the river; she wanted, one last time, to walk through the place she grew up in, past the primary school (not daring to look at it in case flashbacks to her childhood stopped her in her tracks), past the village shop, still shuttered to the night, past the green where her father had tried and failed to teach her to play cricket. She walked past the houses of her friends.
There was a particular house to visit on Seward Road, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to walk along it, so instead she chose another, and her pace slowed as her burden became heavier, as the road climbed back towards the old town, the streets narrowing between stone houses clad with climbing roses.
She continued on her way, north past the church until the road took a sharp turn to the right. She crossed the river, stopping for a moment on the humpbacked bridge. She looked down into the water, oily and slick, moving quickly over stones. She could see, or perhaps only imagine, the dark outline of the old mill, its hulking, rotting wheel still, unturned for half a century. She thought about the girl sleeping inside and laid her hands, bluish white with cold, on the side of the bridge to stop them from trembling.
She descended a steep flight of stone steps from the road to the riverbank path. On this track she could walk all the way to Scotland if she wanted to. She’d done it before, a year ago, last summer. Six of them, carrying tents and sleeping bags, they did it in three days. They camped next to the river at night, drank illicit wine in the moonlight, telling the stories of the river, of Libby and Anne and all the rest. She couldn’t possibly have imagined back then that one day she would walk where they had walked, that her fate and theirs were intertwined.
On the half mile from the bridge to the Drowning Pool, she walked slower still, the pack heavy on her back, hard shapes digging into her spine. She cried a little. Try as she might, she could not stop herself from thinking about her mother, and that was the worst, the very worst thing.
As she passed under the canopy of beech trees at the riverside, it was so dark she could barely see a foot in front of her, and there was comfort in that. She thought that perhaps she would sit down for a while, take off her pack and rest, but she knew that she couldn’t, because if she did, the sun would come up, and it would be too late, and nothing would have changed, and there would be another day on which she would have to get up before dawn and leave the house sleeping. So, one foot in front of the other.
One foot in front of the other until she reached the tree line, one foot in front of the other off the path, a little stumble down the bank, and then one foot in front of the other into the water.
JULES
You were making up stories. Rewriting history, retelling it with your own slant, your own version of the truth.
(The hubris, Nel. The fucking hubris.)
You don’t know what happened to Libby Seeton, and you certainly don’t know what was going through Katie’s head when she died. Your notes make that clear:
On the night of Midsummer’s Day, Katie Whittaker went into the Drowning Pool. Her footsteps were found on the beach at its southern edge. She wore a green cotton dress and a simple chain around her neck, a blue bird charm engraved “with love.” On her back, she carried a pack filled with bricks and stones. Tests carried out after her death revealed she was sober and clean.
Katie had no history of mental illness or self-harm. She was a good student, pretty and popular. The police found no evidence of bullying, either IRL or on social media.
Katie came from a good home, a good family. Katie was loved.
I was sitting cross-legged on
the floor in your study, leafing through your papers in the late-afternoon gloom, looking for answers. Looking for something. In amongst the notes—which were disorganized and in disarray, barely legible scribbles in the margins, words underlined in red or crossed out in black—there were pictures, too. In a cheap manila folder I found printouts on low-grade photography paper: Katie with Lena, two little girls grinning at the camera, not pouting, not posing, throwbacks to some distant innocent pre-Snapchat era. Flowers and tributes left at the edge of the pool, teddy bears, trinkets. Footprints in the sand at the edge of the pool. Not hers, I presume. Not Katie’s actual prints, surely? No, they must have been your version, a reconstruction. You followed in her footsteps, didn’t you? You walked where she walked, you couldn’t resist feeling what it felt like.
That was always a thing with you. When you were younger, you were fascinated by the physical act, the bones of it, the viscera. You asked questions: Would it hurt? For how long? What did it feel like, to hit water from a height? Would you feel yourself break? You thought less, I think, about the rest of it: about what it took to get someone to the top of the cliff or to the edge of the beach, and to propel them to keep moving.
At the back of the folder was an envelope with your name scrawled on the front. Inside was a note on lined paper, written in a shaky hand: