Fish Boy Page 11

  The moon comes back. It reaches its arm down into the water. A long, white light. The fish stop and stare and look up.

  They wriggle float in the beam.

  The light disappears and they snap out of it.

  I swim over to the shoal.

  Some of the mackerel nod at me; most of them turn away, as if they don’t notice I’m here. A small one slips by my hair and says ‘hi’ really quietly. I get the general feeling they’re in a huff. I look down. Bob disappears. I turn around, look between my legs. I can’t see him anywhere.

  I try to get in the spin. The fish squeeze together and bounce me out. I try again. They make a hole, a silver tube. I glide right through and end up on the outside. They seal the hole back up.

  I try to keep pace with them on the outside. My hair blows over my goggles. They move faster, tighter.

  They don’t look at me. I stop swimming. ‘What?’ I say. ‘What do you want?’

  They stop.

  There’s a kind of murmuring that rises up and around, a wall of noise. I can’t make out anything. They cock their heads, look at each other and stop. A group gets nosed out of the shoal.

  The others poke them in the back. They make an arrow, but it keeps changing. No one wants to be at the front, to stand out, everyone keeps backing off.

  The one in the front gets nudged to keep going. It’s Bob. I know it is by the way he doesn’t look at me.

  He swims close. Push, push, push. The others move him on. I want to grab him and get out of here.

  He stops by my nose.

  He looks back at the shoal. They move up, closer like a wall that’s moving in, closer like a game of Grandma’s footsteps. He swims up to my chest and darts between the tags and my body. I try and swat him away.

  ‘No,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘No.’

  Stay, say the fish. All of them.

  I think of falling out with Dad. Of Mum’s face in the kitchen. Of the wheelchair. It feels good to be wanted.

  Bob swims in front of me. His eyes are big and hopeful.

  He wants me to be part of the Us.

  I shake my head. I can’t stay.

  He takes my tag chain between his teeth and swims up.

  He says.

  A fish comes at me from behind.

  No, it says and grabs the chain.

  Another’s by my side,

  Another’s by my neck.

  No, they chant.

  All of them are going for the chain. Like it’s keeping me from them, in the big-shine.

  I grab the metal. It’s thin and digs into my fingers. ‘No,’ I say and kick them away. But they keep coming, breaking off from the shoal, more and more in a swarm, their bodies flicking up and around, closer, closer, closer.

  They swim by my face. I can’t see anything. They’re strong, all together, they’re really strong.

  The chain’s rising. I pull it down. My fingers are slipping. The metal’s straining, I think it might snap, but it doesn’t. It lifts. The water thrashes. I’m losing my grip.

  I close my eyes. It’s so hard to focus, to think. My head is full of fuzz. I squeeze my eyes shut to block out the fish froth. A tail whacks me in the ear.

  They’re lifting the tags over my head. Their tails push me down. I think of Mum being ill forever. Of Dad’s angry face, I think about Jamie Watts and school and my fingers slip off.

  Then I think about Zadie and that downhill bike ride feeling and Patrick. I picture his face, like he is bobbing in front of me. Like he is knocking on the front of my goggles. He is mouthing something. ‘Megallas,’ he says all slowly in his silent goldfish face.

  I open my eyes. ‘Megallas,’ I say. ‘Megallas, Megallas.

  BHAM.

  The fish scatter like glitter tipped out in the sink.

  I rise like a balloon, kicking for up and pop the surface.

  I take a lungful of air and reach for my chest. The tags are gone.

  Too Strong

  I’m bobbing on the surface and gasping for breath. The wind stings into my ears. I feel the empty space on my chest. It doesn’t matter, I think. I try to tell myself, It doesn’t matter, I’m out now. But it does. Those tags were my escape route.

  I feel my heart, like the water, thumping. It takes over my head. I look around. It’s dark. Just a line of moon on waves, like a pathway, like a guiding light. I look for the shore but I can’t see anything. I spin round and round. I don’t know where I am.

  I think of the orchid mantis. When it’s born it has twenty minutes to harden its body under a leaf and pick a path. Left or right? Right. It escapes a jumping spider and gets eaten by another mantis. Mantis will eat anything that moves. Survival is just a matter of chance.

  If I go the wrong way I’ll be swimming out not in. If I go left or right I’ll be swimming round forever. Three wrong ways, only one right one. I have no idea which one to pick. I don’t know what to do. I bob up and down in the swell. It’s getting higher. The water is throbbing. It goes through all of me, fills my ears, everything, it’s too much.

  My head goes under. I come back up, gulp air in. I don’t know what to do. I try to fight back, to swim in. A wave pushes me further out. I think of Patrick. What if you don’t come back? I feel cold. A chill that creeps up and into my bones. What if you can’t? What if you can’t?

  I stop kicking. Killer whales chase the humpback calf and its mother till they’re exhausted. Till the calf can’t take it any more. The mother pushes him up on to her back to breathe and they move in for the kill. I think of giving up.

  A wave gets my head from behind; my chin smashes down into my chest and hits something hard. The whistle, right. The water pushes me back up. I press my hand against it. It seems tiny. It seems stupid. But it’s still a chance. I pull the whistle up and out of the suit. A wave hits and nearly pulls it out of my hands and over my head. But I hold on. My fingers are freezing – the warmth of the metal stings them awake. I grab it in my fist and blow.

  The noise is sharp. It cuts into my ears. The sea tries to drown me out, but it can’t. The pitch is too high. It cuts through and across and up and up, like it’s lifting me out. I blow till my lips sting.

  My head buzzes. The water throbs and growls.

  Something is pecking at my foot. It nudges and strokes my neck. It whispers in my ear.

  It sounds scared. It pecks me on the ear and scoots off.

  I drop the whistle and close my eyes.

  Banned

  Two hands grab my shoulders and roll me up in a net. They haul me in, like a fish and lift me out. I feel the throbbing and realise that it’s an engine, not in my head. I see the orange base, the inflatable edge and realise that I’m in a lifeboat. The boat is the growl.

  A guy with no hair is steering, hood up, talking into the radio. Another straps a life jacket round my chest, a silver blanket over my head. ‘Billy Shiel?’ he says. I nod. ‘Was it just you out there, son?’

  I nod again.

  ‘A laddie gave us a call,’ the man with the radio says. ‘An anonymous caller. You’re a lucky one, eh.’

  ‘It’s Col you want to thank,’ the blanket guy says and nods at someone on the other side of the boat.

  ‘Ears of a bat,’ the guy with the radio says.

  Col says nothing, just walks over, lifts the whistle round my neck and nods. He looks deep into my eyes, like there’s something he can see. Something no one else can. We stare at each other.

  The guy next to me nudges my arm and says, ‘Good preparation, son.’ I see his face reflected in the whistle. ‘Life saver.’ I wonder where Patrick is right now. I put it back down under my suit. I wonder where Bob is.

  Col pulls a stack of emergency response cards out of his pocket. ‘How long were you in the water?’ he says. I shrug. He reads the questions and I answer. Temperature, skin colour, breathing, His words drift out with the roar of the engine.

  I pass.

  They stand down the ambulance on the radio.

  The boat
speeds us off, back to the shore.

  I watch my water world drifting away.

  When we get to the land I just want to go home. Alone. But they won’t let me. At the boathouse we drink tea with sugar in tin mugs. I feel it slide down and spread out inside.

  Col passes me the biscuits. I eat three. ‘You’ve perked up,’ he says and winks at the others. ‘Let’s take him home, lads, eh.’

  We get in the back of a blue Land Rover and bump along over the cobbles and away. I look out the window and watch the moon bouncing on the waves as we go.

  It disappears behind the crocodile rocks. I feel like a rabbit in a cage.

  When we get to my house I want to run.

  *

  The boat guys send me upstairs while they talk to Mum and Dad. I go in the shower, put on my polar fleece onesie and get into bed. I feel hot but not sleepy. The front door shuts and Mum and Dad come up. Their faces look flat and serious.

  ‘A mile offshore?’ Dad says. ‘A mile?!’ He slaps his hand on his leg. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’

  ‘It was okay,’ I say. ‘I was in control.’ I look out the window.

  ‘You weren’t,’ Mum says. ‘You were lucky. Thank god someone was there.’

  ‘Bloody stupid!’ Dad moves his arms like he doesn’t know where to put them next. One goes on his hip, one in his hair. ‘As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.’

  Mum gives him a look. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ she says stroking my fringe.

  ‘Too right he won’t be doing it again,’ Dad says. ‘We can’t trust yer, can we? That’s the end of it. Right.’ He brings his hand down like an axe. ‘You’re banned,’ he says and goes out the door and slams it behind him. Mr Minnington at number 46 whacks the wall with a frying pan. He hates door-slamming.

  Mum kisses my head. ‘Get some sleep,’ she says and goes out too.

  I close my eyes and hear Mum and Dad arguing downstairs. I put my fingers in my ears and slide under the blanket like a snail into a shell.

  Real Friends Talk

  I get up and go to school. I’m a black rhino on the run. Full of fury.

  Banned.

  I wish Sir David was around. But he is nowhere. That channel has tuned right out.

  At break I find Patrick in the usual place. I just stare at him. He stares right back. ‘I’ve got your stuff,’ he says and hands my tent over. It’s all neatly packed up. I don’t take it. It drops on the floor.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Thanks a lot.’ I say a l-o-t really slowly. He looks confused. I don’t know if he’s stupid or just acting it. I pretend to pick up a phone. ‘Oh yeah, hi,’ I say. ‘I’m an anonymous caller. I’d just like to ruin someone’s life.’

  He narrows his eyes. ‘Repetitive breath-holding causes serious brain injury,’ he says.

  I turn around to see Joel and Becky staring at us. We walk over to the far end of the field, by the old chestnut where someone has turned RABIES into JELLY BABIES. I wonder if it was Mr Royston, the caretaker taking care of the tree. Wanting people to like it again.

  ‘You were down there for ages,’ he says.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, I thought you needed help.’

  ‘Well you thought wrong.’ He didn’t. I look at the floor.

  ‘You were the one who asked me to go on lookout. I looked out, I couldn’t see anything. It was totally dark. I couldn’t even see where you were.’

  ‘Yeah, well you won’t be having to do that again,’ I pull a strip of bark off the tree. ‘I’m not allowed back in.’ I curl the strip round my finger and pull it tight. ‘Ever.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Sorry … I didn’t think …’

  ‘No. You didn’t.’

  ‘Actually I did. I kind of thought I didn’t want you to die.’ He pulls away, crosses his arms over his chest. ‘What actually happened down there?’ he says. ‘What took you so long?’

  I stare at the grass.

  ‘Oh, so by the way.’ He stares right at me. ‘What’s wrong with your mum?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Patrick keeps staring, like he’s expecting me to say something else. ‘I’m going,’ he says and picks his bag up off the floor.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought we were friends.’

  ‘We were.’ I’m totally confused. ‘We are.’

  ‘Real friends tell each other stuff. Real friends talk.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I saw your mum.’

  My blood freezes. ‘When?’

  ‘When you were down there, when I was covering for you.’ He looks back, right at me. ‘She went by. With your dad. In a wheelchair.’

  I don’t know what to say. I officially have nothing to say. So I say the most stupid thing, like saying it makes everything okay, like if I say it I can believe it. ‘It wasn’t her,’ I say. ‘It must have been someone else.’

  ‘Grow up,’ he says and turns and leaves. I watch him walking over the field, getting further and further away.

  I scrunch my hands up into balls and shut my eyes. ‘They asked me to stay,’ I shout after him. ‘Forever.’ But the wind just carries the words off somewhere else.

  Electronic Fog

  On December 4th, 1970, Bruce Gernon was flying to Bimini when he saw a strange hovering cloud.

  Bruce Gernon tried to fly over it but the cloud moved. It kept moving at the same speed as the plane and then faster until at 11,500 feet it formed a tunnel, dead ahead. There was no way of escaping it, so he flew in.

  Inside the tunnel the cloud walls spun anticlockwise. The plane’s compass and navigation tools went crazy and spun anticlockwise too.

  Bruce Gernon flew on and out of the tunnel expecting some blue sky at the end. But there was none, everything was grey. He flew in the grey haze, seeing nothing, no land or sea or sky, not knowing where he was or where he was going.

  The fog peeled away in ribbons. The compass stopped spinning. The Miami control tower gave him radar identification that he was directly over Miami Beach. He looked down and saw the beach. He looked again. It shouldn’t be possible. A flight to Miami takes seventy-five minutes but he’d only been flying for forty-five.

  I think of Bruce Gernon flying with no idea where he was going, what he was getting himself into. That what he thought was the right way was totally the wrong way, how the fog threw him off course, out of time, how his head was so muddled he had no idea where he was at.

  The Eye of the Storm

  After school I stomp home.

  The cars go past like speedboats.

  I nearly step out into one and get a Hard-it in the face.

  But don’t.

  In my mind I walk through the Sahara Desert, miles and miles of heat and sand and emptiness, I fly up round the jagged edges of Krakatoa. I watch it explode. Thirteen thousand times the power of an atomic bomb. I think of the lava flooding out, boiling over, melted rock bubbling out of the earth. I pull up and out and into space like a satellite. I watch the storm coming, a white swirl on the thermal map, I watch it head for the Florida coast. Closer, closer, closer. I think of the people in the houses, the flats. The stuck ones, with nowhere to go.

  I snap out of space and up our front steps.

  I push the door open and head for the stairs.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Mum is standing at the bottom.

  ‘Where do you think?’ I try to push past her.

  ‘Billy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sit down,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’ She slumps on to the step. ‘Doctor Winsall came round,’ she says.

  ‘When?’ I hear the wind rattling at the windows, pressing up against the house.

  ‘When you were out.’ She puts her hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off, watch the thermal camera, the white swirl shifting shape.

  ‘They think they know what’s wrong.’ I swallow even though my mouth is dry. ‘Well. They do
know. They know what it is.’

  The swirl gets up speed, comes closer, and closer …

  She stands up and goes over to the dresser.

  ‘I printed these.’ She pulls out the drawer and gets out some papers. They say ‘What is ME?’, ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – The Facts’ and ‘Explaining the Inexplicable’.

  BOOM! The swirl hits the shore. The wind storms in, fists blazing, knocks over a bus shelter, pulls out a palm tree. Mum holds out a magazine cover with someone lying down in some leaves on the front. ‘New Look, New Outlook!’ it says. I don’t want to look at them. I’m the crazy cameraman, the guy holding on to his balcony with both hands, locked into the storm. Staring at the sea.

  ‘Do you want to read through one, together?’

  ‘No,’ I say and fold my arms.

  She starts reading. I put my hands over my ears. ‘I said no!’

  I think of Sir David running for the shelter, locking himself into the bunker. In my head he holds a hand out, wild white hair blowing around his face. His hand looks good and strong. I want to take it. But I don’t. I can’t. I’m stuck, rooted to the spot.

  ‘I don’t want you to have a label like a …’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A supermarket chicken. A dead chicken in a packet with a label on.’

  ‘I’m not going to die. It doesn’t say I’m going to die.’ She reaches for my hand. I pull it away.

  ‘They’re just guessing,’ I shout. ‘It’s just stupid guessing.’

  The cyclone tucks me in its heart, wraps its wind arms around my chest, over my ears till I can’t hear anything and everything fuzzes.