Deep Water (8 page)

‘Okay.’

‘Was it for a bet, what he said to Rose?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why did he take such a stupid risk?’

‘He likes to. Anyway he knows someone who got a woman to show him her things that way.’

‘I’m pretty darn sure the boy who told him was lying.’ Andrea sat down beside her son. He had not changed his sailing clothes, and there were saltwater stains on his shorts right up to his groin. She said gently, ‘Justin’s a mixed-up kid. Remember that. So what happened to the rudder?’

‘I couldn’t pull it up in time. There’s a pin that fits in the top and stops you getting out the tiller. I yanked hard, but it wouldn’t budge.’ He pulled a face. ‘I think we should have gone head to wind at the last moment.’ She stood up and tossed him the banana. His smile faded. ‘It’s a bit green, mum.’

‘Then let it ripen.’

If only Leo had never met Justin, thought Andrea, as she went in search of Rose. The kitchen was empty but the scullery door was open. What the hell did one say to a respectable domestic who had been treated by a twelve-year-old boy as if she were a serving wench during the
ancien
régime
?
As Rose came in from the scullery, Andrea stared at the chopped vegetables on the table.

‘I am really so sorry my son’s friend insulted you.’

‘Don’ ’ee worry. I told ’im plenty.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘He won’t try messin’ again.’

‘Did you hit him?’ asked Andrea uneasily.

‘I said there’s nothin’ Satan won’t do to ’im now. So he got frighted and ran up over the fields.’

And what could she say to that, wondered Andrea. Hardly rebuke the girl for involving the powers of darkness in a prank. Andrea murmured, ‘I hope his rudeness can be forgotten now.’

Feeling anxious in case Justin had been badly scared, Andrea wished she had told Rose about his father’s death. Back in the sitting room, she found Leo taking tiny nibbles from his unripe banana.

‘Was Justin upset by Rose?’ she asked him.

‘Nope. He faked being scared.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘She’s a religious maniac, mum.’

‘Maniacs can be kind of scary.’

Leo said sharply, ‘Justin is never scared.’

Andrea raised conciliatory hands. ‘Leo, dearest, Justin pretends nothing hurts him, but that’s because he’s been hurt more than we can imagine.’

‘I think I know him by now.’

‘Then tell me what he truly cares about?’

Leo tossed away the banana skin. ‘You really want to know? He thinks the navy’s ships in the river are hush-hush boats and he wants to snoop around inside one.
That’s
what he cares about.’

Andrea smiled happily. ‘But that’s marvellous. The kids from the village school are going aboard a ship next week. I’ll ask the headmistress to let you and Justin go along too.’

Leo jumped up, white-faced. ‘You musn’t. He’d kill me for telling you his plan.’

Andrea was appalled. ‘He’d injure you?’

‘No, no. He’d say he couldn’t trust me,
ever
;
that I’d betrayed him; wasn’t his friend.’

Andrea’s patience gave way. ‘I could call his aunt right now, and she’d want him sent home for insulting Rose.’

‘Don’t call her.’ He was breathless with horror.

‘You have better friends, I know you do.’

‘He can’t go home.’

‘Would he bully you at school?’

‘I can’t explain.’

She touched his hand gently. ‘Leo, if I call his aunt, he won’t know you spoke with me first. Let’s do it now. He’s wrecking your holiday.’

Leo drew himself up. ‘He can’t go.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ shouted Leo, ‘his dad’s face was burned right off before he hit the ground.’

When her son had left the room, Andrea sat down heavily on the lumpy sofa and stared at some discoloured wax fruit on the table in the window. Talking to Justin about Rose seemed suddenly less urgent.

*

Justin crept into Leo’s room soon after midnight, leaving him in no doubt, from the moment his eyes opened, that this was to be the night of the crucial attempt. At once, Leo knew he would not be able to endure another night lying in bed waiting for Justin. It would be easier to share the danger with him than stay behind. As Leo got up and slipped out of his pyjamas, Justin silently applauded him.

‘Put on your dark blue aertex.’ Leo did as
commanded
and then held up his white plimsolls. ‘Don’t worry,’ soothed Justin, ‘you can rub mud on them later. Shove your swimming trunks in here.’ He patted a canvas beach bag. ‘Wear long socks or you’ll get scratched.’

‘What about a torch?’ asked Leo, searching for socks.

‘Got my school one here, but we may not use it.’

A square of moonlight on the linoleum told Leo why. As he put on his socks, he said, ‘Mum says some village kids will be shown over one of the ships soon.’

Justin seemed shaken, but only for a moment. ‘That’ll be the
MTB
or minesweeper.’ His conviction grated with Leo.

‘Could be the
MGB
,’ he objected.

‘Look, who cares?’ snapped Justin. ‘I’m only
interested
in the small boats.’

‘Why?’

‘They spend more time away from their moorings than the rest. I’ve bloody told you that, Leo.’

As they crept past his mother’s door, Leo felt a pang of guilt. By going with Justin, he was deceiving her. But at least with the two of them together one would be able to raise the alarm for the other in an emergency. And Justin’s plan seemed likely to keep them out of trouble, since they would creep down to the ships through the woods, instead of approaching in the open, along Porthbeer beach.

Speeding towards the river, Leo felt an unexpected surge of happiness. Earlier he had been worried about cycling without lights, but his eyes had quickly grown accustomed to the darkness. If he could only be told that their mission would not after all involve plunging into black and icy water, he would enjoy every minute. But fear nagged constantly.

‘What will you say if we’re caught?’ he asked Justin as he pedalled beside him.

‘We won’t be caught.’ The wind flung Justin’s words away so that they were hard to hear.

‘But we
must
know what to say.’

‘It’s a dare. We’ll say that.’

The tarmac glowed palely in the moonlight as it wound snakelike between black woods on either side. Bats swooped across the road, making the boys duck and swerve. After riding for ten minutes, they freewheeled to a halt at a point which Justin declared was due north of the spot where he wanted to hit the river. Leaving their bicycles, they walked towards a tangle of trees and undergrowth. In the profounder darkness of the wood, Leo blundered into hollies and brambles. The pain of his scratches hardly troubled him. They were closer to the river now, and panic fluttered in his chest. A long way off, he heard what he thought was a farm dog barking.

‘A fox,’ whispered Justin authoritatively.
Whenever
a twig cracked, Leo froze, to Justin’s
amusement
. ‘We could knock down a tree and no one would hear.’ They moved across a clearing
overgrown
with straggling elders and stumbled into the bed of a stream.

‘All we do now is follow it,’ said Justin, as if he had meant all along to arrive at this spot.

The stones underfoot were jagged and the bottom often dropped into deep hollows. At times their progress exhausted them as much as if they’d been running. Searching out safe shallows by the bank
they were obliged to push aside brambles that arched across the stream.

On the beach at last, Leo was thankful to find the tide out. The distance to the ships would be shorter now than at high water. Pulling on their trunks, the boys kept on their shirts in case their pale skin was visible in the dark. Because the ships were half a mile downstream, they crept along at the top of the beach for what felt like ages to Leo.

To their left, the water was coal black except where small waves reflected ribbons of moonlight. In silhouette, the ships looked dark and threatening. Leo’s queasiness was growing worse. The furthest he had swum in his life had been six lengths of the swimming pool at his old school, a distance which would just about take him to the nearest of the ships.

‘What are we meant to look for on board?’ he whispered.

‘Anything unusual.’

‘Like what?’

‘If I knew
exactly,
we wouldn’t be looking.’

They had left their shoes with their clothes and the shingle was already hurting Leo’s feet. He was glad when they moved onto soft mud, until he felt it oozing between his toes. They struggled not to laugh as their feet made lewd squelching noises as they walked along.

The shingle spit from which they chose to swim shelved steeply into the water, forcing them to dig in their heels to stop themselves falling in with a splash.

Justin whispered, ‘Can you see the trawlers?’

‘Aren’t they the smaller ones with the sentry boxes on top?’

‘The boxes are their wheelhouses. You swim to the nearest. I’ll try the other.’

Even now, Leo could not believe what he was about to do. He should come clean at once and tell Justin it was too risky for a poor swimmer like himself; but even as they entered the water he could not bring himself to utter. The water was cold enough to make his legs ache painfully, though seconds after he started swimming the pain vanished. With each stroke, he saw sparks of phosphorescence flicker around his hands. The ships looked deserted, so he doubted whether any sailors were keeping watch. Though he supposed their blackout could be faultless.

Every few strokes, Leo told himself he would give up and swim back to the shore the moment he felt tired. But he swam on, even when his fingers were numb and he had pins and needles up his arms. When reaching the buoy of his trawler, he rested for several minutes, clinging to its ring.

From the land this small ship had seemed to lie very low in the water. Close to, the sides rose high above him, as daunting as an overhanging shelf of rock. There was a wooden ridge that ran round the boat about four feet above the water, so he hoped to pull himself up onto it, if he could find a rope fender. He was swimming towards the stern, looking, when he heard something that made him gulp in water. Men were talking behind the timbers of the hull. Terrified, he launched himself towards the beach.

With the tide in his favour, Leo was soon swept upstream beyond the spit where he and Justin had first entered the water. He landed in watery mud on the far side of a low reef. Stumbling back towards his clothes over barnacle-covered rocks, his whole body was wracked by uncontrollable shivering. He knew he had to struggle on without resting until he could put on his dry jersey.

As Leo reached his clothes, angry shouts echoed from the moorings. He heard a splash, as if someone had jumped into the water from the deck of one of the ships. Seconds later, there was a squealing noise and a heavy smack, which reverberated across the river. A ship’s boat had been lowered fast and hit the water. A searchlight on the
MGB
’s bridge stabbed the darkness, its beam swivelling from side to side. Leo didn’t know whether to stay or escape. If Justin had been caught, the sailors might bully him into admitting he hadn’t been alone.

Leo waited for ten minutes before accepting that Justin would not be returning. Then he dragged his aching limbs up the beach. Too cold and distraught to brave the woods without help from Justin’s torch, he allowed its beam to lead him swiftly to the stream. Driven by acute anxiety for his friend, he found his way to the road in half the time it had taken them to reach the river.

*

Andrea sat up in bed, averting her eyes as she switched on her bedside light. Blinking, she saw her son standing near the door.

‘What’s wrong, Leo?’

She listened with a sick feeling in her stomach as he stammered out a fantastic tale about swimming to different naval ships – he and his trouble-making friend.

‘Where’s Justin?’

‘Under arrest, most likely. They caught him.’

Wanting to hug and kiss her son because he had not drowned himself, she also wanted to shake him. ‘How could you do anything so downright crazy? You could have gotten in trouble in the water and died.’

‘He was going anyway. So I had to go.’

‘You should have told me. You’re almost thirteen, Leo. Not six.’ She started to dress rapidly, not even bothering to tell him to wait outside. ‘How come you’re sure he’s okay?’

‘The sailors launched a boat for him.’

‘You saw them do that?’

‘I heard it.’

‘Maybe they launched the boat to go ashore. Maybe they never saw him.’

Leo started to make small snuffling noises. ‘He’s a really good swimmer. Really he is.’

Andrea fastened her skirt. ‘We’d better go find him.’ She had a vague memory of having seen a house outside Porthbeer with the navy’s flag flying outside. She picked up her handbag and ran downstairs. ‘Don’t delay me, Leo.’ In the dining room, she downed a mouthful of neat whisky from the bottle. Just then, she heard an automobile stop in the lane.

She opened the door. A sailor was leading Justin up the path. The boy was wrapped in a grey blanket
and was barefoot. He no longer looked cocky, just scared and rather pathetic. As soon as she had ushered them into the sitting room, the sailor cleared his throat.

‘I’m Petty Officer Lee, madam. Sorry to call at this hour, but this young gent was caught trespassing on one of HM’s ships.’

The man’s uniform was not quite the same as the officers’ at the club. When he removed his hat, she saw that he was older than she’d thought – about forty. Out of the corner of her eye, Andrea saw that Leo looked almost as scared as his friend.

‘Come and sit down, Justin,’ she said, gently steering him to the sofa and then sitting with her arm through his. ‘I don’t imagine he did any harm,’ she remarked coldly to the petty officer.

‘I wouldn’t know about that, madam. It’s up to
Captain
Borden and Lieutenant Commander Harrington to decide whether to call in the police.’

‘To arrest a boy of twelve?’ she gasped. Leo began coughing as if to drown her words.