The Last Weekend (33 page)

His sleek head ottered away through the tide. I should have realised: with his big hands and long legs, he had the perfect physique for swimming. Whereas I fought to stay afloat — the waves flogging my back, the salt acidic on my skin — he moved smoothly over the surface, like a black billiard ball rolling over baize.

The waves weren’t high but I was shipping water and sinking.

‘Ollie,’ I cried, the race forgotten, terrified I was going under. But my shout died in the waves’ throat. We were past halfway now, and I was ten yards behind.

Hyperventilating from cold and exhaustion, I wondered if it would be better to die than to live through the days ahead:
the £10,000 I’d have to find; the disciplinary hearing; the emotional fallout from making love to Daisy. Panic ought to have meant an adrenalin surge, but the gap between Ollie and me remained the same, whereas the gap between him and the finish was closing fast. I flung my arms out in a last effort, even managing half a dozen strokes of butterfly, before subsiding to a weary doggy-paddle.

Resigned to defeat, I closed my eyes to protect them from the burning salt. When I opened them again there, miraculously, was Ollie, just a couple of yards ahead. For a crazy second I thought I’d been rewarded for my efforts, but then I saw that he was treading water: if the gap between us had narrowed, it was only because he’d come to a halt. I thought of the story I’d read at university all those years ago, about the man who goes to prison for fifteen years to win a bet, then throws it all away at the last minute. Perhaps winning no long mattered to Ollie, either — because he thought he was dying; or because, having come within yards of victory, he had proved his point. The sight of him bobbing there enraged me nonetheless. Worse still was his patronising ‘Are you OK, Ian?’ when my arms were balsa and my legs pure lead. The sea wasn’t deep here — ten or twelve feet at a guess — but whereas he was in his element I felt anchored to the ocean floor.

‘OK?’ he shouted again, his back to the waves.

‘No problem,’ I shouted, swallowing more seawater.

‘You had me worried there.’

‘I’m fine,’ I gasped. ‘There’s the finish line. Let’s go.’

Thumbs up, he grinned and swung round, Ollie as I’d always known him, desperate to stay ahead. The wave that broke over him as he turned wasn’t huge, but it was bigger than any we’d faced till then and the force of it knocked him back. I was luckier, having seen it coming, and dived below, into the marble
undertow, like a boxer ducking under a hook. When I resurfaced Ollie was right next to me. Buffeted back by the first wave, he was ready for the second, which we swam through almost side by side. After those two, the worst seemed to be over. We were paddling alongside each other in a trough. The white buoy appeared farther off now, but would be easily reachable once we got our breath back. Ollie looked tired, like me, allowing the swell to carry him over the next few waves. Dangling there like frogs, we dared each other to make the first move. When he began to thrash, I followed, eyes closed, heading for the buoy. The sea was flatter now, hard and smooth as a butcher’s slab, no glassy gulfs to overwhelm us. I closed my eyes, driving forward, almost home.

It must have been the rip tide that dragged us into each other without warning. Or perhaps, as we pushed ourselves, Ollie veered naturally to the right, and me to the left. Either way, ten feet short of the finish we collided like competing boat crews, not sufficiently to capsize but with a violent thud, Ollie’s arm hitting my ribs like a wayward oar. I kicked out to get free and accidentally caught him in the balls, or so I guessed from his angry scream. ‘Sorry,’ I cried, but he came back at me, clutching my arm. Since I was now the one nearer the buoy, I thought he’d done it to pull me back, and I shoved him away. That he might have been winded or in trouble didn’t occur to me. The shove wasn’t meant to be forceful but it sent him down, and when he didn’t re-emerge I stopped for a second, to check whether he was all right. When he lunged upwards, I saw it had been a ploy. His eyes looked bright, eager, desperate — desperate, I thought, to win. He grabbed my arm again, his fingers like the suckers of an octopus, his mouth a rictus grin. I tried to shake him off but his arms snaked round me, the left gripping my shoulder while the right circled my neck. As we struggled, whiteness bloomed
about us, a feathery line of bubbles drifting away. Still he wrapped himself round me, like bindweed, dragging us both down. As well as his grip, there was the weight, his body roped to me like a corpse. I wanted to shout at him to stop messing around, that no bet was worth risking death for, but my mouth was shut against the water. Changing tack, I let my body go slack, in the hope he’d do the same. It didn’t work: we sank like two white statues through the green. Surely even Ollie can’t hold his breath much longer, I thought. But he kept on going, down into the blackness, my body tied to his. I punched him in the face but the water deadened the blow. I kneed him in the stomach but my knee rebounded. I remembered him saying he had no feelings any more. That love and friendship no longer counted. That he’d reached a place beyond morality where nothing got through.

With the last dregs of strength, I forced my hand under his chin, pushing till his neck tipped back to horizontal, our bodies tilting in a slow arc till he was underneath me. Useless till then, my legs now had my weight behind them and kicked a path along his thighs to his chest so that I could tread him down. I trod him like grapes. I trod him like earth. I trod him till his hands slipped, the noose slackened and he floated away, trodden under, trodden down.

Back up top, I coughed and gasped, my eyes salt-scorched, my lungs exploding in my ribs. For a time I lay there with my head tipped back. Below me, the water felt cold and hard, like a stone slab. Slow clouds drifted above.

Once I got my breath back and the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I swung myself upright. Where had Ollie gone? And when would he resurface, grinning at his prank? It briefly occurred to me he hadn’t been fooling, that there had been more to his arm-wrestling than winning the race. But it seemed more likely he’d pop up and sneakily pip me to the post. Taking
no chances, I paddled the last few yards and touched the buoy with the fingers of my right hand.

Looking round, exhausted and triumphant, I could still see no sign. ‘Joke’s over, Ollie, where are you?’ I shouted. A black shadow seemed to flit below. It could have been nothing. It probably
was
nothing. But I took a deep breath and prepared to dive down.

It was then that Rufus broke water, ten yards away, nosing up from the depths like a seal. ‘Here, boy,’ I said, as he frantically paddled my way. Almost at once he went under again. Where Ollie and I had swum, the waves had broken between us and the shore. But Rufus, closer in, had been battered by them and now he was paying the price. His black snout broke the surface again, just feet from me, then disappeared. Normally dogs are good swimmers, but Rufus was in trouble and the sight of him struggling was more than I could bear. Reaching below, I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upwards. I had little strength left after my own ordeal. And Rufus was hard to manoeuvre, a dead weight, his sodden fur dragging him down. But by keeping his head above water with one hand and paddling with the other, I managed to steer us both towards the shore. Close in, where the waves broke, I nearly lost him again. But at last my feet touched bottom and, with what little strength remained, I pushed him to the safety of the shingle.

Only then was I free to swing round and scan the sea. Surely Ollie would be visible by now. But between the two buoys was green and white water. Nothing else.

I swam out again and searched for him as long as I could, floating on my back at the end, useless, brain-dead, thrashing in circles. Near the second buoy, my hopes rose as a large black shape appeared. But when I closed on it my hands met wood. Ten minutes passed, maybe twenty, maybe more.

I kept expecting Ollie to bob up, against the odds. He’d grab my leg as I clambered through the breakers. He’d tap me on my shoulder as I put on my clothes. He’d leap from a sand hollow as Rufus and I shivered through the dunes. He’d be the one taking the car keys from his trouser pocket. The one in the driver’s seat of the MGB. The one making the 999 call from the telephone box. The one pulling up the drive. The one breaking the news. The one holding Daisy as she howled. The one saying he’d done all he could. The one who’d got home safely. Who’d pulled through. Who’d triumphed. Who’d lived to tell the story as it was meant to be written, not the story I’m telling you now.

November

One thing they don’t tell you when you’re young, or if they do you fail to listen, is that getting older doesn’t make you any wiser. If life were arranged more fairly, the loss of youth would be offset by knowledge and self-confidence. You would know who you are and where you’re going. But, till lately at least, that is not how it has been for me.

The other thing they don’t tell you about is depression. Apparently researchers have found that the worst age for depression is forty-four. Not fourteen, when you’re a tortured, self-mutilating adolescent. Not seventy-four, when half your friends are dead and you think you’re next. But forty-four, the age I am now. At forty-four, so I read in a recent article, people feel exhausted by their kids (I have none), or suffer the loss of their parents (mine are still going, worse luck), or become aware of their own mortality (I’ve been aware of mine since I was five). The article made no mention of what makes people
truly
depressed at forty-four, which is realising that the life they’re living is the only one they’ll ever have. What hits you at forty-four is that the person you imagined being, and promised yourself you could still become, isn’t going to emerge, that you’re stuck with who you are till you cease to be. Unless — an even worse prospect — a diminished version of yourself (drunk, drugged, disabled or demented) takes over.

Apologies if I sound miserable. But seeing the light sometimes begins with a plunge into darkness.

Before Badingley, I thought I had all a man could reasonably hope for: career, marriage, home, health and sanity. Afterwards I saw things differently. What had made my life tolerable till then was that it seemed provisional: a book I could lose myself in but return to the library whenever I chose. Now I realised it was becoming the opposite: fixed, fated, the only story I would ever have. I’d got by until then because I felt needed. But necessity is the enemy of invention. And work and marriage were killing what inventiveness I had.

The weekend away was intended as a brief escape. I didn’t expect it to bring me freedom. That was pure luck — the bonus ball.

It might seem tasteless to talk of luck in the wake of what happened. Ollie was my friend and his death devastated us all. More than once I’ve picked up the phone to call him for a banter or wind-up. The desolation I feel replacing the handset is hard to describe.

When tragedy strikes you go over it time and again, as if by doing so you can avert it, turn the clock back, derail the runaway train. As I see it the key factors were these:

– Ollie was bipolar and/or having a breakdown.

– He deluded himself he had cancer when his tumour was benign.

– He wrongly suspected Daisy of having an affair with Milo.

– He feared Daisy would leave him.

– He had these suspicions before I carelessly mentioned my own, which confirmed them. (I used to berate myself for putting the thought in his head; now I realise it only stuck because he mistrusted Daisy already. Jealous people don’t need a cause, they’re jealous because they are jealous.)

– He felt guilty about his failure to parent Archie successfully.

– He hoped that a family holiday would put everything right.

– He also hoped that by renting the Badingley house he could relive the happiest time of his childhood.

– That time was in reality the unhappiest, because his father had drowned there. So Ollie claimed or believed. (I still have serious doubts. When I googled ‘Moore, Drowning, East Anglia, August 1976', nothing showed up. And I can’t ask Ollie’s mum for confirmation because she’s gaga. I sometimes wonder whether Ollie’s parents didn’t just divorce — whether his father isn’t still out there somewhere.)

– So powerful were Ollie’s memories of that summer that he created a kind of bubble — a time warp, lost domain or parallel universe — into which we were all drawn. I’m a level-headed bloke but believe me there was a weird psychic energy around Badingley. Mr Quarles, for instance: was he for real?

— In reliving (and he hoped exorcising) the trauma of 1976, Ollie planned to use me as his stooge. Winning our bet would be redemptive, with Badingley a site of triumph rather than loss.

— All would have been well but for the storm on Sunday night, which washed out tennis the next day.

— Though physically powerful, Ollie was not a strong swimmer.

— His heart wasn’t strong, either. Though the coroner recorded the cause of death as misadventure (death by drowning), a medical student I got talking to in the pub the other night said a heart attack could not be ruled out.