Authors: Louise Candlish

The Swimming Pool (35 page)

And he looked at me and I could see he got it. He knew I knew. Then he pretended he didn't. âDon't worry about the others,' he said. âThey've got their own parents with them. Let's try and get you dry, shall we? Help is on its way.'

Then the alarm stopped and the lights came on and Mum was there. I thought she was going to go mental but she was fine, she was great. She said I would go to sleep that night and in the morning I wouldn't remember a thing about it. Her voice was really calm, like Bryony's. Then I heard the ambulance sirens and I saw
Georgia on the stretcher and remembered what I'd done. There was the most terrible screaming, I felt like I was being crushed by the sound of it, and then they said it was me, it was me who was screaming.

âI want to go home,' I said, and I kept repeating it and repeating it, like I was the alarm now, and they said to stop, please stop, they would sort it out.

âShe needs to be with just us,' Mum said. âJosh is being allowed home. I'll insist she is too.'

They took us in a kind of ambulance car and I felt better when I was in my bedroom, just me and Mum and Dad. And then I woke up and they weren't there and it turned out I was in a ward at Trinity Hospital, and the pain in my chest and throat was so bad I started crying.

No wonder I felt like I was in a film. It kept cutting from place to place, face to face, like someone was editing my story for me, telling me which lines to say. It was like it wasn't real, even though I knew it must be.

I have never been questioned by the police or any of the authorities; Mum and Dad protected me from that.

They've
asked me, of course. Question after question, angle upon angle.

Why did I need to follow Georgia and Josh to the water's edge? Couldn't I have operated the stopwatch from a safer distance?

âI couldn't see their heads well enough. It was darker than I expected.'

Didn't you realize you'd turned off
all
the lights?

âNo,
I made a mistake.' (True.)

Did you slip?

âI think so.' (In a way.)

Were you trying to stop them? Mum said.

Were you worried one of them had got into difficulties? Dad said.

What were you doing? What were you thinking? Do you have any idea what could have happened?

I think quite enough
did
happen, the other says. It was sometimes hard to tell who they were accusing, me or one another.

And then, after days or weeks or months, they stopped asking. They'd been advised by one of their experts to lay off.

Sometimes I think Mum knows, or has at least guessed that it didn't happen the way everyone's agreed it did. She's been bad herself. She knows the feeling when you're not in charge of yourself, when you're possessed by something wild and vicious and headlong. When the right way to act is completely ignored; it's just some meek, lame voice you pretend you can't hear.

Georgia's forgotten it, I'm sure of that. Or else she's decided not to tell. Just like she's decided not to contact my dad since she moved away. I know that for sure because Izzy's brother helped me hack into Dad's email and there was nothing from her, not even from last summer. He's erased her, like she never existed.

Of course, Dad and I haven't ever discussed what they did together. It wasn't like I actually
saw
anything, so
he would only deny it anyway. But when you know, you know (that's one of Bryony's sayings). I think Georgia's mum knew too. I saw her watching my dad watching Georgia at the party and there was a flicker in her face that looked like understanding, like she wasn't noticing any more that he looked like that old actor. She was way better at reading people than
my
mum, way better at spotting clues.

Sometimes, I think of Elm Hill last summer as the Cluedo board, the new one Dad hates so much, where you don't go to the cellar to make your accusation but to a bright-blue swimming pool at the centre of the board.

Of course, the game's exactly the same, either way: before you can make your way to the middle, you have to work out who the villain is.

Unless you're prepared to risk your hand and guess.

Acknowledgements

My
thanks to the team at Michael Joseph/Penguin for their expertise and dedication, in particular to Maxine Hitchcock, Kimberley Atkins, Eve Hall, Francesca Russell, Claire Bush, Sophie Elletson, Lee Motley. And to Hazel Orme for an impressively eagle-eyed copyedit.

Heartfelt thanks to all at Curtis Brown who've supported this novel (and its writer) with such commitment and energy: Sheila Crowley, Becky Ritchie, Abbie Greaves, Luke Speed, Alice Lutyens, Johanna Devereaux, Claire Nozieres. Also Deborah Schneider at Gelfman Schneider in NYC.

A big thank you to Lily Johnston for her very helpful research and to Tara Fisher-Harris at Brockwell Lido in south London for answering my many questions. (For the record, Brockwell Lido is in no way a model for Elm Hill Lido but is instead quite exemplary in its running.)

Lara Channing's book is
Poolside
With Slim Aarons
(Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2007). The film she loves is
La Piscine
, directed in 1969 by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider.
Mermaid on Mulberry Street
is of course fictitious.