فصل 38

38

THE DROWNING POOL

2015

KATIE

On the way to the river, she stopped from time to time to pick up a stone or a piece of brick, which she put into her backpack. It was cold, not yet light, though if she’d turned back to look in the direction of the sea, she would have seen a hint of grey on the horizon. She did not turn back, not once.

She walked quickly at first, down the hill towards the centre of town, putting some distance between herself and her home. She didn’t head straight to the river; she wanted, one last time, to walk through the place she grew up in, past the primary school (not daring to look at it in case flashbacks to her childhood stopped her in her tracks), past the village shop, still shuttered to the night, past the green where her father had tried and failed to teach her to play cricket. She walked past the houses of her friends.

There was a particular house to visit on Seward Road, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to walk along it, so instead she chose another, and her pace slowed as her burden became heavier, as the road climbed back towards the old town, the streets narrowing between stone houses clad with climbing roses.

She continued on her way, north past the church until the road took a sharp turn to the right. She crossed the river, stopping for a moment on the humpbacked bridge. She looked down into the water, oily and slick, moving quickly over stones. She could see, or perhaps only imagine, the dark outline of the old mill, its hulking, rotting wheel still, unturned for half a century. She thought about the girl sleeping inside and laid her hands, bluish white with cold, on the side of the bridge to stop them from trembling.

She descended a steep flight of stone steps from the road to the riverbank path. On this track she could walk all the way to Scotland if she wanted to. She’d done it before, a year ago, last summer. Six of them, carrying tents and sleeping bags, they did it in three days. They camped next to the river at night, drank illicit wine in the moonlight, telling the stories of the river, of Libby and Anne and all the rest. She couldn’t possibly have imagined back then that one day she would walk where they had walked, that her fate and theirs were intertwined.

On the half mile from the bridge to the Drowning Pool, she walked slower still, the pack heavy on her back, hard shapes digging into her spine. She cried a little. Try as she might, she could not stop herself from thinking about her mother, and that was the worst, the very worst thing.

As she passed under the canopy of beech trees at the riverside, it was so dark she could barely see a foot in front of her, and there was comfort in that. She thought that perhaps she would sit down for a while, take off her pack and rest, but she knew that she couldn’t, because if she did, the sun would come up, and it would be too late, and nothing would have changed, and there would be another day on which she would have to get up before dawn and leave the house sleeping. So, one foot in front of the other.

One foot in front of the other until she reached the tree line, one foot in front of the other off the path, a little stumble down the bank, and then one foot in front of the other into the water.