Fat Boy Swim (10 page)

In fast-forward, Jimmy passed Dad – who ignored him – in the armchair. He dodged kicks from Maddo and Dog Breath, circling him like sharks after meat. Ducked squares of tablet Father Patrick flicked at his head as he swam by.

Jimmy strained for the deep end. For the first time ever in all the years of his swimming pool dream, he could make out the tiles marked:

DEEP END DEPTH 2 METRES

He was going to meet the Shadow Shape at last.

Blood pounded his ears from the effort he was making. His lungs were bursting as, with one final lunge, Jimmy reached for the edge of the pool.

Was that a hand there? Fingers reaching towards him? Ready to pull him out? Ready to greet him?

Jimmy arms strained their sockets, stretching for tantalising dream fingers. He lifted up his head, gulping in air as he surfaced. He opened his eyes, groping the darkness of his bedroom for the hand of the Shadow Shape. And –

CRASH!

toppled to the floor with a humungous thump.

Chapter
18

Weightless

Jimmy couldn’t help it. Kept floating off all through English.

Whole body rising up out of the seat, hovering horizontal over the class. Like Superman.

What a feeling!

If only he could pluck Ellie from her chair. Tuck her in the crook of his arm, pointing his fist at the open window. Together they would fly out, off to enjoy a day exploring the stratosphere.

Up, up and away
y
y
y
y
y
!

Late night supper on Krypton; coffee and tablet. Then home.

Jimmy was celebrating.

He could swim.

Three hours ago he had learned to swim. Nothing had ever felt so good.

Two lengths.

Skoosh-case.

Look
!
I can swim everybody
, he shouted silently at the class. And it was all thanks to Ellie. Not that she knew that.

Jimmy had made such a clatter falling out of bed that the downstairs neighbours thumped their ceiling with a stick. That had woken Mum. When she saw the state of Jimmy – a big, dazed, sweaty, breathless heap on the carpet – she nearly had the emergency doctor out.

Refused point blank to let Jimmy go to school: ‘School? You’re going in an oxygen tent, never mind school.’

No school, thought Jimmy, would mean no more Ellie until fourth year, and the thought of that hurt more than the purple bruise on his shoulder sustained when he tumbled out of bed and landed on his inhaler.

So he kept his appointment with GI Joe. Lied to Mum to do it. Told her they were discussing the swimathon catering budget in the school gym.

‘Ouch!’

GI Joe had greeted Jimmy with a friendly punch on that sore shoulder. The pain reactivated last night’s dream, flashed up the highlights:

Victor watching through narrowed eyes.

GI Joe in that outfit.

Ellie, the kissing mermaid.

Jimmy losing the Shadow Shape. Again.

GI Joe threw Jimmy some goggles and a pair of big dusty brown trunks. ‘Wakey, wakey, Jim. Try these for size. Can’t have you showing me up in wallpaper today,’ he said.

The trunks smelt of tobacco and damp. The elastic around the waist was perished. Jimmy didn’t like to ask where they came from, in case GI Joe confirmed his suspicion: they’d crawled from Father Patrick’s underwear drawer.

The pool was eerily quiet, stretching awake for the new day. Jimmy had his pick of the changing cubicles. The floors were clean. No music played, so the only sound was the rhythmic, soothing thrash thrash thrash of early morning swimmers – heads down, caps on – putting in their lap-fix before breakfast.

When he analysed it later, staring at the back of Ellie’s head during English, trying to figure how many different shades of brown he could distinguish, Jimmy realised he
knew
he would swim today.

Last night’s dream had primed him. Trained him up. Had left him with the
nearliness
of reaching the Shadow Shape.

At such an early hour, the spectators’ gallery was dark, no one, especially no Victor, looking on. Judging. Criticising. Mocking. Even the pool attendants – who had watched Jimmy nervously last night – were ignoring him, swabbing the poolside like sleepwalkers.

‘Do what you did yesterday,’ Called GI Joe. ‘Put your face in the water and count to three. Then surface. This time though
. . .
’

. . . you’ve got to lie horizontally, like in the dream.
An inner voice whispered through a secret earpiece in Jimmy’s head.
Remember you pushed off from the side and stretched your arms out in front and you flew –
?

‘
. . .
imagine you’re Superman, Jim. You won’t sink. Look I’ll show you.’

Jimmy twitched, impatient, as GI Joe waded alongside him and demonstrated what he wanted Jimmy to do. Legs against the side. Arms out. Face in the water. Kick off and –

Fly. You’ll fly, Jim. Try one stroke.

Jimmy didn’t need anyone to show him. He already knew.

Suddenly, like a light switching on inside him, he realised the ability to swim was there. Always was. Stored under layers of blubber and misery.

In the DNA.

Buried deep.

A secret.

That first stroke was the hardest. Not immediately, when the initial push-off carried Jimmy away from the side and out into the pool. That felt magic! Jimmy was weightless. Flying. Swimming. Then that momentum faded, and Jimmy began to sink towards the bottom of the pool.
Game over. Wheech him out with the big hoop and call the paramedics.

Not today. Not after last night.

Through his goggles Jimmy could see GI Joe’s hands in the water ready to grab him. Ready to help him stand. Say, ‘Not bad, Jim. Let’s try it again.’

Not today. Not after last night.

Because Jimmy wasn’t ready to let his weight suck him to the bottom.

So he kicked. Not gracefully, but not disgracefully either. It was an instinctive frog-kick, strong enough to lift his legs into the horizontal position and keep him afloat. And so he kicked again, and again, and before he knew it, he was well past GI Joe. Kicking. Floating. Breathing. Swimming. All the way to the deep end.

His lungs were bursting as he grabbed the side, and hauled his head out of the water.

‘Yesss,’ he spluttered, imagining the Shadow Shape’s long fingers reaching down, shaking his hand.

Chapter
19

Sooks

‘Ten years on? Who knows where I’ll be, or what I’ll be doing. Maybe I don’t want to write down too much in case that limits me. After all, the world’s my oyster.’

Mrs Hughes surveyed the class over her reading glasses, and sighed. ‘Now that,’ she said, ‘had vision. Excellent!’

‘Who done it, miss?’

Maddo’s eyes slid suspiciously over the class.

‘Don’t worry, Matthew, it wasn’t you.’

Under cover of snorting Victor muttered, ‘That Skellie Sook,’ just loud enough to attract a glare from Mrs Hughes.

‘With a couple of exceptions, most of these essays were
extremely
disappointing,’ she went on over the dying laughter, fixing her eyes on Victor. ‘In style,
and
content. Most of you think you’ll be picked out to join some band who don’t write their own songs, and writhe around semi-naked on children’s television.’

‘Sounds a’ right to me,’ snuffled Dog Breath.

Mrs Hughes sighed. ‘Pack up, you nosey lot.’

Blink and you’d miss the imperceptible glance of approval that Mrs Hughes sent to the back of the class where Jimmy sat. Unless you were Victor. Paying attention when it
really
mattered.

‘Sook,’ Victor snarled under his breath, grinning like a hungry shark who’s just spotted lunch on the horizon.

‘Jimmy. Excellent. Well done.’

Mrs Hughes followed Jimmy out of the classroom. Behind the camouflage of his bulk, she rested the flat of her hand against his back.

‘You know that when people write down their goals they tend to achieve them. You stick in there. ’Bout time we saw what you were made of.’

In the corridor, Jimmy dodged Victor and moved to catch up with Ellie. Camouflaged by the interval throng he figured he could get away with being seen beside her. He needed to give her the mini-disc he’d made.

Well: that was the pretext. He really just needed to see her. Talk to her. Get closer. Breathe in the same air she breathed out.

There she was, up ahead, tight in the middle of an arm cleek with Senga and Chantal. Totally out of place flanked by that pair, Jimmy realised, watching the trio slam quickly through the interval seethe. Ellie, Jimmy sensed, was in trouble again, although there was no way he could reach her fast through the broil of bodies clogging the corridor.

Which is why he boomed,
‘Ellie!’
at the top of his voice, surprising himself even more than the scores of pupils who clamped their hands to their ears and dived aside like deafened skittles as he bowled the length of the corridor in her wake.

Not realising at first, in his haste, that Victor and co. were following in his slipstream, hustling him into the same empty classroom where Senga had yanked Ellie.

With a nod from Victor, Billy McIndope stood edgie at the door.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Victor, driving his knuckles into Jimmy’s stomach to push him towards Ellie. ‘The happy couple: Skellie Sook and Squashy Sook.’

‘Pure saddos, in’t they, Swifty?’ said Senga, who always called Victor ‘Swifty’ despite his periodic promises to punch her lights out if she didn’t quit.

Senga fluttered her short pale lashes, wobbling her head from side to side as though the screws on her neck had worked loose. Victor glared at Senga, driving his fingers deeper into Jimmy’s belly with jerks of his wrist.

‘Two stupit, ugly sooks, trying to get in wi’ the teachers. Writing sooky stories, and
this
one,’ Victor pistoned his arm deep into Jimmy’s stomach, ‘hanging about wi’
my
Coach in the swimmin’ pool. What’s that all about, Sook? Trainin’ for the Fatty Olympics? Or –’ he licked his lips, ‘– following the family tradition?’

‘What?’ Jimmy straightened up, confused. What was Victor on about?

‘Yeh, what’s that all about, Sook?’ Maddo echoed, while Dog Breath, let rip a full-on halitosis guffaw in Jimmy’s face.

‘Speak.’

Victor’s voice turned ugly.

‘Aye, speak,’ chorused Senga. She manoeuvred one sovereign-ringed hand into Jimmy’s belly alongside Victor’s, her other hand tugging Ellie roughly by the hair.

‘So hungry you swallowed your tongue, fat boy?’ asked Victor withdrawing his arm. He unbuttoned his shirt cuff, rolled one sleeve to the elbow and flexed his hand. Surgically, thought Jimmy. When Victor flashed a humourless ‘watch this’ grin at Maddo, who stood grinding his fist into the palm of his hand in anticipation of violence, Jimmy noticed that the pupils of Victor’s pale blue eyes were dilated with excitement.

Victor’s voice was a whisper in Jimmy’s ear.

‘Why does Coach want you to swim?’ he coaxed, drawing his fist back in line with Jimmy’s face. ‘You better talk fast.’

In that chink of time between Victor’s question and his fist descending, several things seemed to happen.

First of all, Jimmy realised that because he was only concerned about Ellie, he wasn’t at all afraid of Victor. So he answered him. Calmly. ‘Coach doesn’t want me to swim,’ he said. ‘
I
want to swim –’

‘What for?’ Victor had the question out while Jimmy was still speaking. Fist poised, Victor was frowning. Same way, Jimmy noticed, as he’d been frowning while he watched him from the spectators’ gallery.

The second thing happened while Victor finished speaking. Ellie broke Senga’s grasp of her hair with a karate chop that reverse-stamped the scrolled
VICTOR
from Senga’s identity bracelet into the flesh of her wrist. Ellie meanwhile flew at Victor’s upraised arm, snatching blindly – literally blindly, since Senga was wearing her glasses upside down – for Victor’s fist. Her clumsy intervention was
just
enough to take Victor’s mind from his target and give Jimmy a nanosecond to step aside so that Victor landed his punch, not into Jimmy’s yielding flesh, but onto a hard school desk.

And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Victor howled like a cowardly wolf, showing his hand to his cronies, keeping his own head averted.

‘Is it cut? Is it cut? Feels like its broke.’

‘Wee bit cut, Vic,’ said Maddo, licking his chops at the blood pouring from Victor’s spliced knuckle.

‘See what you Skellie cow’s did to ma Swifty?’ Senga screeched like a hoarse banshee, freezing Chantal, who, entwined with Billy McIndope, was trying to sneak away.

‘Never mind Skellie. Ah’m bleedin’ here,’ Victor moaned.

‘Need stitches on that, man,’ said Dog Breath. He leaned over Victor who recoiled and moaned even louder, wafting away Dog Breath’s concern with his uninjured hand.

‘You’re dead meat, hen,’ hissed Senga jabbling a knuckle-dustered digit at Ellie, but from a distance. Her free hand clutched her karate-chopped wrist. ‘What’ll ah dae wi’ her, Swifty?’

‘
Ah
don’t know, stupit,’ Victor bawled into Senga’s face, splattering her blouse with his blood as he waved her back. He’d turned pale, Jimmy thought, greeny pale. Shilpit. Scared. Still scared.
More
scared than he’d looked moments ago when Jimmy had answered his question about swimming.

Funny that, thought Jimmy, pushing Victor aside to retrieve Ellie’s glasses from Senga’s head.

‘Ouch. You’ll need stitches in that right enough,’ he said, peering at Victor’s knuckle with casual interest. Then, with a nod to Ellie, he opened the classroom door and let her out before him as the bell rang for the end of interval.

‘Are you all right?’ Jimmy made sure he ushered Ellie into an alcove of the nearest quiet corridor before either of them had time to speak.

‘Are you all right?’ Nodding, she echoed him. For a moment, her hand reached out and rested on his sleeve. ‘Thanks,’ she said.