Maxwell’s Ride Read Free Page B

Ah, the callowness of youth. Their bums hit the soft rubber seating simultaneously and the car swirled to the right, spinning away from the slippery planking in its carefully controlled current. They glided around, the craft sliding effortlessly past polystyrene rocks and mock cacti, chaparrals surprisingly high for Hampshire. In the crags concrete cougars crouched for attack, granite grizzlies growled. Maxwell leaned back, his arms spread over the cool black shoulders of the car. In the distance, screams told them that Montezuma’s Revenge had claimed another set of victims, hanging upside down like pupae about to hatch. This was more like it, Maxwell mused. Tranquillity, just him and the girls and the coolness of the water.
    He was just leaning forward to say something inconsequential to Tiffany when the first buffet hit. He lurched across the car, missing the girl’s lap by inches.
    ‘I wouldn’t move about, Uncle Maxie,’ she suggested. ‘It is called Wild Water, you know.’
    Maxwell knew. But he’d seen Deliverance, not once but several times. If Jon Voight could do it, he could do it. Besides, his legs were longer than Burt Reynolds’s. And he still had his own hair. The car spun in a sudden vortex, the rocks hurtling past in a blur of grey. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Maxwell felt his face whipped by an instant wind, the G force flattening his features as he did his best to grin reassuringly at Lucy. She was laughing, throwing her head back as the car bucked and jolted, sliding downstream now at an impossible speed. Maxwell grabbed at the craft. There was nothing to grab. Nothing to grip. He slid sideways, crushing Tiffany again and rolling backwards.
    Everybody was screaming, laughing, trying to catch their breath, trying to be nonchalant. Only Tiffany was staring ahead, watching the car in front, the end of the ride. Maxwell’s knuckles were white again, rather like his face and his knees came up for the umpteenth time as he tried to steady himself. Water was buffeting the car, soaking him for the second time that day and no one was more delighted than he was as the car slowed to a crawl.
    There was pandemonium in front. Maxwell glanced backward to the car behind, where a party of underprivileged schoolchildren were still sliding and shrieking, making life unnecessarily hellish for the poor bastard of a teacher who had given up his holiday, like Maxwell, to do his duty. Faithful unto death.
    ‘Uncle Max, what’s happening?’ Lucy asked.
    ‘It’s just the end of the ride, darling,’ Maxwell told her, wondering at the naïveté of the question. But it wasn’t. From nowhere, under the shadow of the jetty, uniformed Magicworld staff were scurrying backwards and forwards, ashen-faced. Maxwell saw one of them turn away quickly and vomit over the side, her heaving shoulders held by the friend who steadied her.
    They were converging on the car in front where the weasel-eyed man had been sitting. But the car seemed empty. Maxwell’s craft hit it amidships and bounced away, sending an arm flailing over the side. Then the screaming started. First Tiffany, then Lucy, then several of the park staff.
    ‘Get out,’ a pale-faced boy in a company coat was jabbering to Maxwell. ‘There’s been an accident. We have to stop the ride. Get out. Please.’
    Maxwell hauled his nieces upright and got them onto the water-splashed planking. It was cool here and dark after the May sunshine. He screened the girls from the car in front and the old Toyota advert filled his brain – ‘the car in front is a coffin’. He half turned to see the weasel-eyed man slumped in the watery bottom of his craft, his mouth open, his eyes staring at the rubber seat, as though in disbelief.
    ‘Shut it down,’ he heard a voice hiss over a walkie-talkie. ‘For fuck’s sake. We’ve got a dead bloke down here.’
    ‘Uncle Maxie …’ Terror was etched on Lucy’s face.
    ‘Sshh,’ he hushed her, encircling them both with his strong, safe arms.