Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

in her hand and she looked at it again as she pressed the buttons. The saved message ran across the screen:…its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b 18… Lyn never said sorry, but Kerry could tell when she was.

      There was a bus stop ahead, and she limped up to it, sinking down gratefully on to the wall. She eased her feet out of her shoes – her best ones – and rubbed her toes. Her feet were wet and splashed with mud. She looked up the road, squinting through the rain that distorted the lights and dripped into her eyes. And there was the bus, pulling away from the lights.

      She scrambled on board, grateful for the warmth. The driver was friendly and smiled at her. ‘You’re a bit wet, love,’ he said cheerfully. It was almost empty. Kerry pressed her face against the steamed-up window. The bus jolted and rattled, bumping her head against the glass.

      She looked at her watch. She should be there by now. She keyed in Lyn’s number, but she got the answering service. She keyed in another message: pls w8. Please wait. Please, please wait!

      Lyn never did anything she didn’t want to. She used to try and teach Kerry that as well. ‘You don’t have to do what he says,’ she’d say, when Dad had told Kerry to go to bed, or tidy her room, or do her homework. But Dad wasn’t Lyn’s dad. Lyn’s dad had left. ‘She’s jealous, Kizz,’ Dad used to say. ‘She’ll get over it.’ And he’d tried to be friends with Lyn, but Lyn didn’t want to know. It drove Kerry mad sometimes. Dad would read her a bedtime story, and Lyn would come in and pretend to be looking for something. ‘You’re too old for stories,’ she’d say. Dad would promise to take Kerry swimming. ‘I’ll take her,’ Lyn would say. ‘She’s my sister.’ But then she usually forgot so Kerry never got to go swimming.

      And then Lyn had gone.

      She pressed her face against the window. They were nearly there. She stood at the door fidgeting with impatience. ‘Can’t let you out here, love,’ the driver said. ‘Got to wait till we’re in the stand.’

      And then the doors were open and Kerry was out of the bus and running as the driver’s ‘Take care, love,’ echoed after her. It had stopped raining, but her clothes were wet and her feet were hurting. She ran up the ramp that led to the tram tracks and across the bridge high over the road. That way to the tram and Meadowhall. That way was the old market.

      The steps took you to an empty road and a car park, and they smelled of pee. She used to run down those steps with Ellie, both of them holding their noses and laughing, pushing past slower people, excited about the shops and the lights and the people. And Dad used to follow behind laughing at them too, and saying things like, ‘Careful, Kizzy, slow down, remember you’ve got an old man here.’ And he’d get them a burger – Ellie’s mum didn’t like Ellie eating burgers, so it was a secret. Kerry and her dad liked secrets – and…Kerry didn’t want to think about that.

      She tried not to think about the afternoon either, about the way the mist made it hard to see as she walked along the path, about the black rectangle of earth, and all the flowers piled up, dead, like the people in the graves. And the names. They were only names, they didn’t mean people, until she saw the stone with the gold letters. Ellie… Ellie and Kerry.

      No Ellie now. She remembered the kids walking past her house that last morning, the day after the police had come and taken Kerry’s dad away. They had to walk past that way, there was no other way for them to go, and she waited for them to call out, ‘Hey, Kizz, you coming?’, waited, didn’t run out like she usually did to join the arm-linking huddle on the walk to school, but no one called, and no one looked, not really, just glances that Kerry could see from behind the nets where she was watching, and their faces were tight and frightened, and they said things to each other as they passed and they cast their eyes over the house again, and then they ran off up the road.

      And she’d gone to see Maggie. Maggie used to talk to Kerry when Mum was ill. ‘You’re fine, Kerry,’ she’d say. ‘You’re a great kid.’ And she meant it. Or Kerry had thought that she meant it. But Kerry had gone to Maggie and Maggie’s face had been all twisted and blotchy, like Mum’s was, and she’d looked at Kerry as though she hated her. ‘Get away from me,’ she’d said, and she hadn’t shouted it, she’d said it in a cold, dead sort of way. ‘Get away from me, you…’ And someone had come to the door and pulled Maggie inside, and had looked at Kerry in the same way as she pushed the door shut. And all Kerry could hear was the crying.

      And Dad had gone to prison. He wrote to Kerry. Once a week, the letters came, and Kerry wrote back. But they couldn’t say anything real to each other. Kerry couldn’t write about what it was like at home with Mum, or what had happened at her last school and the place they’d last lived. She could still remember the voices in the night, Paedo! Paedo! And the sound of breaking glass as a brick shattered the front window. She couldn’t tell Dad about that. And he wasn’t telling Kerry anything. He said things like It’s not so bad once you get used to it and Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. Only he didn’t say that so much now. In his last letter, he’d said, Prison changes people, Kizz…

      She didn’t watch the TV news, she didn’t read the papers. The teachers said they all should. But Kerry didn’t want to read what they said about her dad: Pervert. Monster. Evil.

      She was there – Victoria Quays, the entrance to the canal basin. The water was black, reflecting the white of the moon. She hurried across the cobbles, her feet turning on the uneven footing, towards the café.

      She pressed her nose against the window. Lyn? The café door opened, and some people came out. Kerry bit her fingernail. She could see through the steamed-up windows. There were only a few people, and she was sure…She kept looking. Lyn wasn’t there.

      She tried Lyn’s number but got the answering service again. ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I got it.’ I got the message. That was a daft thing to say. Of course she’d got the message. Lyn knew that. It was so late, she’d got fed up and gone.

      She didn’t want to give up yet. She could walk along the towpath, walk to the gallery. Maybe Lyn was there. She could see the faint gleam of the water ahead of her. The city lights made an orange glow against the sky but the path itself was in darkness. She hesitated a moment, then stepped out of the light into the shadow of the first bridge. The air was cold and damp and the ground felt soft and slippery under her feet.

      She could see a faint gleam beyond the tunnel mouth and the dank smell of the water closed round her. Now she was feeling her way, her hands pressed against the curving stone wall that came down low, almost to her head. The water lapped against the brick in a sudden flurry of ripples as though something had disturbed it.

      As she came out of the tunnel, a shape formed itself in the water, a moored boat, dark and featureless, half concealed in the shadow of the bridge. The boards of the deck were grey and uneven. The path seemed to be petering out now, the buildings coming right to the water’s edge. She was faced with a blank brick wall. She was on the wrong side of the canal. She needed to go back to the canal basin.

      The moon came out and the reflection of the canal side appeared in the water. The water was still now, and she could see the walls that lined the path, the bushes and the path framed in the mirror of the canal. She turned back, and the darkness faced her, the black mouth of the tunnel, the smell of the canal that had rippled as though something was moving through the dark water. She didn’t want to go back that way.

      Her throat felt tight. She turned round again, and the boat was low in the water beside her, and a brick wall in front of her. She looked back, but the tunnel waited, trapping Kerry between the canal and the wall.

      

      Eliza couldn’t sleep. The sheet kept twisting up as she tried to find a comfortable place to lie, and she felt too hot, then she felt too cold. It was raining again, and the steady beat on the window became an irregular rattle as the wind blew the rain across in a flurry. The roof creaked. She turned over and punched the pillow into shape again. She settled down and curled her arm round her head. Deep, slow breathing, relax into the bed, just let go and melt away…There was a