The Drowning Read Free Page A

walls.
    I feel like I’ve landed from another planet, been dropped into someone else’s life and left to get on with it. I want to go back to the hospital. This place isn’t mine. The woman downstairs isn’t my mum. The boy who died wasn’t my brother. There’s been a mistake, a terrible, terrible mistake.
    I’m shaking now. I’m scared. I can’t handle this. I don’t want to be here.
    My nose catches that smell again, the smell a body leaves in a place when it’s slept there night after night. And it tells me I’m wrong. This place is mine. There’s no getting away from it.
    I wrap my arms around myself and curl up tighter in my sleeping bag, but I still can’t relax. Without thinking, I unwind one of my arms and reach under my mattress, and my fingers close around something hard and flat. I pull it out. In the soft light I see the cover of a hardback book. The letters in the title are large, white against black: Of Mice and Men . Lying on my side I open it up and find the first page. The light isn’t good enough for me to make out the type, but I don’t need to see it, the words come to me from somewhere in the fog of my brain:
    A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
    “For fuck’s sake, Cee, turn the bloody light out.”
    “I’m still reading.”
    “You’ve read that thing six hundred times.”
    “So?”
    “So put the bloody light out. I’m knackered.”
    Holding the book close to my chest, still cocooned in my sleeping bag, I wriggle across the floor until my face is hovering over Rob’s mattress, his orange sleeping bag. I rest my head down, breathing hard. The material under my nose is rank,as rank as mine, only different. I shut my eyes again and I can hear him breathing.
    “Say good night, Cee,” he says. And I know that this is what he does every night. Did. This is what he did.
    He’d tell me to say good night first and I’d say, “Night, Rob” back.
    And he’d say, “Night, Cee.”
    Every night.
    I say it now — “Night, Rob” — and I keep my eyes closed, my body lying in the gap between our beds, my head on his mattress.
    His breathing is steady and slow and I find myself breathing in time with him. The book falls to the floor and I’m drifting. Drifting slowly off to sleep.

I wake up in a dark, quiet space. I’ve got no idea where I am, what time it is, who I am. And then, slowly, it comes back to me.
    My name is Carl Adams.
    I’m fifteen.
    My brother’s dead.
    The last thought rattles around my head. Rob’s dead. Rob’s dead. I know it’s huge, but it’s only words, just words.
    I remember falling asleep here, hearing his breathing, his voice. There’s nothing now. No noise from outside, no TV playing. Only a tap dripping somewhere in the flat. It’s a faint sound, but everywhere’s so quiet now I can definitely hear it — and my mind focuses on it. Plip, plip, plip. Like seconds ticking away on a clock.
    The top of the sleeping bag is wet where I’ve dribbled in my sleep. I move it away from me, sit up, and wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. My head’s achy and my throat’s dry. I struggle out of the bag and stumble onto the landing. The light’s still on. I head for the bathroom door, where the dripping sound’s coming from.
    It’s the cold tap at the sink. I turn it full on, bend forward, cup my hands, and splash water onto my face.
    A boy shouts.
    A girl screams.
    Water’s in my face, my eyes, my ears.
    My heart’s racing. I’m close to them now, so close I can see their arms and legs thrashing, see his jaw clenched with the effort, her face contorted with terror.
    I jump back from the sink and reach around blindly for a towel. My hand finds the pull cord for the light, I tug at it, and the light clicks on. I grab a towel from the floor and frantically rub