Taken by surprise, I’d caught the kitten.
‘Yours!’ Squelch ran off laughing back to the village. ‘Yours!’
The kitten was cold and stiff as a pack of meat from the fridge. Only now did I realize it was dead. I dropped it. It thudded.
‘Finders,’ Squelch’s voice died off, ‘keepers!’
Using two sticks, I lifted the kitten into a clump of nervy snowdrops.
So still, so dignified. Died in the frost last night, I s’pose.
Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.
Nobody’d be out on the frozen lake, I’d suspected, and there wasn’t a soul. Superman 2 was on TV. I’d seen it at Malvern cinema about three years ago on Neal Brose’s birthday. It wasn’t bad but not worth sacrificing my own private frozen lake for. Clark Kent gives up his powers just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed. Who’d make such a stupid swap? If you could fly? Deflect nuclear missiles into space? Turn back time by spinning the planet in reverse? Sexual intercourse can’t be that good.
I sat on the empty bench to eat a slab of Jamaican ginger cake, then went out on the ice. Without other kids watching, I didn’t fall once. Round and around in swoopy anti-clockwise loops I looped, a stone on the end of a string. Overhanging trees tried to touch my head with their fingers. Rooks craw…craw…crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs.
A sort of trance.
The afternoon’d gone and the sky was turning to outer space when I noticed another kid on the lake. This boy skated at my speed and followed my orbit, but always stayed on the far side of the lake. So if I was at twelve o’clock, he was at six. When I got to eleven, he was at five, and so on, always across from me. My first thought was he was a kid from the village, just mucking about. I even thought he might be Nick Yew ’cause he was sort of stocky. But the strange thing was, if I looked at this kid directly for more than a moment, dark spaces sort of swallowed him up. The first couple of times I thought he’d gone home. But after another half-loop of the lake, he’d be back. Just at the edge of my vision. Once I skated across the lake to intercept him, but he vanished before I got to the island in the middle. When I carried on orbiting the pond, he was back.
Go home, urged the nervy Maggot in me. What if he’s a ghost?
My Unborn Twin can’t stand Maggot. What if he is a ghost?
‘Nick?’ I called out. My voice sounded indoors. ‘Nick Yew?’
The kid carried on skating.
I called out, ‘Ralph Bredon?’
His answer took a whole orbit to reach me.
Butcher’s boy.
If a doctor’d told me the kid across the lake was my imagination, and that his voice was only words I thought, I wouldn’t’ve argued. If Julia’d told me I was convincing myself Ralph Bredon was there to make myself feel more special than I am, I wouldn’t’ve argued. If a mystic’d told me that one exact moment in one exact place can act as an antenna that picks up faint traces of lost people, I wouldn’t’ve argued.
‘What’s it like?’ I called out. ‘Isn’t it cold?’
The answer took another orbit to reach me.
You get used to the cold.
Did the kids who’d drowned in the lake down the years mind me trespassing on their roof? Do they want new kids to fall through? For company? Do they envy the living? Even me?
I called out, ‘Can you show me? Show me what it’s like?’
The moon’d swum into the lake in the sky.
We skated one orbit.
The shadow kid was still there, crouching as he skated, just like I was.
We skated another orbit.
An owl or something fluttered low across the lake.
‘Hey?’ I called out. ‘Did you hear me? I want to know what it’s—’
The ice shucked me off my feet. For a helter-skeltery moment I was in mid-air at an unlikely height. Bruce Lee doing a karate kick, that high. I knew it wasn’t going to be a soft landing but I hadn’t guessed how painful a slam it’d be. The crack shattered from my ankle to my jaw to my knuckles, like an ice cube plopped into warm squash. No, bigger than an ice cube. A mirror, dropped from Skylab height. Where it hit the earth, where it smashed into daggers and thorns and invisible splinters, that was my ankle.
I spun and slid to a shuddery stop by the edge of the lake.
For a bit, all I could do was lie there, basking in that supernatural pain. Even Giant Haystacks’d’ve whimpered. ‘Bloody bugger,’ I gasped to plug my tears, ‘Bloody bloody bloody bugger!’ Through the flinty trees I could just hear the sound of the main road but there was no way I could walk that far. I tried to stand but just fell on my arse, wincing with fresh pain. I couldn’t move. I’d die of pneumonia if I stayed where I was. I had no idea what to do.
‘You,’ sighed the sour aunt. ‘We suspected you’d come knocking again soon.’
‘I hurt,’ my voice’d gone all bendy, ‘I hurt my ankle.’
‘So I see.’
‘It’s killing me.’
‘I dare say.’
‘Can I just phone my dad to come and get me?’
‘We don’t care for telephones.’
‘Could you go and get help? Please?’
‘We don’t ever leave our house. Not at night. Not here.’
‘Please,’ the underwatery pain shook as loud as electric guitars, ‘I can’t walk.’
‘I know about bones and joints. You’d best come inside.’
Inside was colder than outside. Bolts behind me slid home and a lock turned. ‘Down you go,’ the sour aunt spoke, ‘down to the parlour. I’ll be right along, once I’ve prepared your cure. But whatever you do, be quiet. You’ll be very sorry if you wake my brother.’
‘All right…’ I glanced away. ‘Which way’s your parlour?’
But the dark’d shuffled itself and the sour aunt’d gone.
Way down the hallway was a blade of muddy light, so that was the direction I limped. God knows how I walked up the rooty, twisty path from the frozen lake on that busted ankle. But I must