Never Ending (28 page)

“This is where they went,” he says.

“Where who went?” She has one hand palm-down on each knee; braced, trying to stop shivering.

“Feebs. Declan.”

Shiv finds her eyes drawn to the water, as though her brother and Mikey’s sister might suddenly break the surface. “Not here.”

“Same thing.”

She imagines a vast subterranean ocean connecting all the rivers, lakes, seas of the world – an underwater afterlife for the drowned. Is this where Mikey believes he’ll go when the lake takes him? To be reunited with Phoebe? She doesn’t think so, given the things he’s said before and the way his mind works. His sister drowned because of him; his punishment should fit the crime. That’s what this is.

“We’re the same, you and me,” Mikey says.

Shiv wants to disagree, to say that Dec didn’t drown like Phoebe, but that’s not true. At the inquest, the pathologist said the presence of water in the lungs suggested her brother was still breathing as he entered the sea. The injuries from the crash and the fall down the cliff “would almost certainly have proved fatal” but he was still just about alive while Shiv stood on that rock, giving him up for dead.

She has lived with that knowledge.

“We’re not the same,” she says, even so.

Mikey turns to look at her. His hood makes a ghostly oval of his face. “It’s why you stopped eating,” he says. “And all the stuff you did before – breaking things. In here –” he raises a hand and presses his fingers against her forehead, as though giving her a blessing – “you can’t ever forgive yourself.”

He lowers his hand but the impression of his fingertips on her skin remains.

I can’t ever forgive myself
. She told Dr Pollard exactly that. “I can’t ever forgive myself. Can’t ever hate myself enough, no matter how hard I try.”

“How do you measure self-hatred?” the woman asked.

“By how much you don’t want to wake up each morning. By how much you go to sleep at night wishing tomorrow wouldn’t come – wishing you didn’t have to live another single day with what you’ve done.”

“Sounds to me like you have more than enough self-hatred, Siobhan.”

“But that’s the point. I
do
wake up. Every morning, I wake up.”

Not wanting to live with what you’ve done – is that the same as wanting to die? For Mikey, yes. For her, though?

Gazing out at the surface of the water, Shiv imagines standing up and
one–two–three
leaping into the water. The lake erupts, exploding in her eyes, nose, mouth. Cold. Stunningly, breathtakingly cold. She’s tumbling into pitch-black turbulence, thrashing uselessly, a whirl of bubbles scouring her face. Up and down have no meaning, there is only water, engulfing her – simultaneously pushing her away and sucking her in, repelling her but refusing to let her go.

Is this how it was for you, Dec?

Down. Down. Down. Her lungs are ready to burst.

This is it, then. Her repentance, her atonement: offering the thousands of days she has yet to live in payment for the thousands she took from him.

She stops resisting the lake and lets herself spin wherever it takes her. Nothing to fear. It’s not even water but feathers, she imagines – a sea of black down, soft and warm enough to sleep on. Shiv shuts her eyes. When she wakes she’ll be afloat on her back in the pool in Kyritos.

Declan will be there, in his red swimming shorts, sitting cross-legged on the end of the springboard. Grinning. Ready to splat her with the yellow tennis ball.

He opens his mouth.
No
.

What?

No
, he repeats.

Dec, I’m com—

But her brother stands, retraces his steps along the board and walks away from the poolside, bouncing the ball on the flagstones as he goes.
Thud–catch–thud–catch–thud–catch
. Even when he’s lost from view, Shiv still hears it, like the thump of her heart and the thrum of her pulse in her ears. Slowing. Fading. Stop—

She opens her mouth to call him back and her lungs fill with water.

It becomes darker all of a sudden and Shiv glances up to see a scrap of cloud crossing in front of the half-moon, looking for all the world like an X-ray of a lung. The wooden boards are hard and cold beneath her.

“I used to have this dream,” she tells Mikey, “where I dive into the sea and swim out to Dec and manage to drag him onto the rocks. I’m pumping the water out of him, giving him mouth-to-mouth, thumping his chest to get his heart going.” Her voice breaks. “But he’s just lying there. Just … dead.”

Mikey isn’t listening.

He’s staring straight ahead, at the water – placid and dark, utterly indifferent to them. Not his river, but it’ll do. That’s what he’s thinking, for sure. Now the moment is finally here his intensity comes off him like an aura.

“What if this isn’t it?” Shiv says.

Mikey gives her a sidelong look. “What?”

“What if this
isn’t
your punishment?”

He goes on looking at her, his face etched in shadows, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of the rucksack. “You said you wouldn’t try to stop me.”

“Just suppose the price you have to pay isn’t
dying
but
living
?”

“That don’t even mean nothing.”

“’Cos that’s
my
punishment. Every day for the rest of my life, I have to live with what happened – with what I did.”

Beside her, the boy rises to his feet, carefully, balancing himself, adjusting the shoulder straps. He straightens up, toes at the very edge, like a diver on a board. Out of the corner of her eye, Shiv’s aware of movement: Webb and Sumner, edging closer to the jetty. The security guy is with them.

Another figure, too: Dr Pollard.

Not now. Please not now
. One word, one sudden move, and he’ll jump and that rucksack will take him straight to the bottom.

They stop. They remain silent. Shiv exhales.

“I came to this clinic,” she says, “wanting them to teach me how to do it – live with what I did to Dec.” She keeps her voice even, not wanting to show any sign that he has unnerved her by standing up. Or to alert him to what’s happening behind them. “I guess I wanted them to take away the guilt and the loss. The pain. The
blame
.”

Mikey ignores her. Stays perfectly still.

“Without all of that,” she goes on, “I could get on with my life. I could
live
.”

“Don’t talk to me. I don’t want—”

“But I
can’t
get rid of it, can I? That’s the
real
punishment, Mikey: Declan is dead … and I’m not.”

Shiv stands up too. Slips a hand into his. He tries to pull free but she holds on.

“Dec lives in here, now.” With her free hand she touches her forehead where Mikey pressed his fingers a few minutes ago. “And here.” She places the hand over her heart. “Same for you with Feebs,” she says quietly. “If you kill yourself, she can’t live there any more.”

Mikey is trembling. Shuddering. He might be crying but she daren’t look. She stares straight ahead at the lake. Keeps his hand firmly in hers.

“Let me go.” He tries to break her grip.

She tightens it. “I’m not letting go, Mikey. If you go in, we both do.”

“Let
go
.”

“No.”

Two realities open up in Shiv’s mind.

In one, Mikey propels himself off the end of the jetty, taking her with him, the weight of the rucksack dragging them both down, hand in hand, to the depths.

In the other, he doesn’t.

Which is the true reality and which the false, Shiv doesn’t know yet. But she will wait right here with him until she finds out.

Return to Kyritos

They fly to a neighbouring island and transfer to Kyritos by boat to avoid the TV crews and photographers. To be on the safe side, Shiv wears a floppy hat and shades. Dad’s lawyer meets them at the dockside and drives them to a “safe” house: his uncle’s, in a village up the coast from the main town.

These tactics will only delay her encounter with the press – they’ll be waiting for her on the steps of the courthouse tomorrow morning.

“Is this where you usually stay?” Shiv asks.

Dad shakes his head. “No, I stay in the town.”

Of course. His isn’t the face they want to splash on their front pages and news bulletins. He isn’t the star witness.

The lawyer is a little man, shorter than Shiv, with an unpronounceable name and dark hair on the backs of his hands. He spends the morning briefing them about the hearing: going over the questions Shiv’s likely to be asked, coaching her how to answer them. Just as importantly, how to
present
herself to the court.

Both defendants admit driving while intoxicated, he explains – they couldn’t deny it, after their breath and blood tests the night of the accident. That a young boy died as a result adds another layer of severity to the charges. But the pair deny they were racing. If the lawyer can nail them for that they’ll go down for a
long
time.

Shiv is the prosecution’s emotional trump-card: a grief-stricken fifteen-year-old girl traumatized by her brother’s horrific death. If she stands in that witness box and says the right things, cries in the right places – paints a vivid picture of Declan’s last moments of life – the jury will believe her over the two in the dock.

“I made them do it,” Shiv tells the lawyer, not for the first time.

“That is not our case, Siobhan.”

“It’s the truth though.”

“Shall I tell you what is the truth?” he says. “They were the ones who rode the mopeds when they were drunk. The ones who raced with each other. It was one of them who lost control and crashed.”

“But—”

“
They
killed Declan. Not you.” He stares her down. Then, miming bags under his eyes, he says, “Stay up late tonight, yes? And no make-up tomorrow.”

Yeah, and make sure to shave your hands
, she doesn’t tell him.

“He wanted Mum to testify as well,” Dad says, after the lawyer has gone. An extra tug at the jury’s heartstrings.

Like that would happen.

Her mother is improving, but she won’t be coming back to Kyritos any time this century – and certainly not for a court case she wanted nothing to do with.

In the difficult silence that follows, Shiv wonders if Dad has begun to have doubts too. Before she went into the clinic, his
quest for justice
– for revenge, really – was an obsession. He wanted Joss and Nikos punished. Now that the trial is here, he seems uneasy. Like someone caught up in events he initiated but which have gathered their own momentum, sweeping him along. Dad used to tell the lawyer what to do; these days, it’s the other way round.

After lunch, Shiv takes a nap beneath the deliciously cool draught of a ceiling fan in a bedroom that houses a small shrine to a haloed Greek saint. She sleeps for an hour.

She sleeps a lot just lately. Nightmare free, mostly. In between sleeps, she has been eating the food Aunt Rosh piles up before her. That’s where the three of them are staying, now – back in England – while they’re waiting for the house sale to go through so they can start again in a place where Declan never lived.

Going to her aunt’s, rather than home, was the second surprise when Dad collected Shiv from the Korsakoff.

The first was the sight of Mum standing there with him in the car park.

That was seven weeks ago. Her mother is still an imitation of the woman she was before Kyritos but, day by day, she is evolving a new version of herself. Like her family, Mum will never be whole again, but she is finding a way to live with what’s left. When they hugged beside the car, it was as though Mum was the one who’d spent two months in a clinic and Shiv had come to take her home.

Her parents, her aunt, have barely asked Shiv about her time at the clinic.

They treat her like a shell-shocked soldier; whatever they do, they mustn’t upset her with talk of the war. So they sit in Aunt Rosh’s lounge, and watch TV, or a DVD, or play Scrabble, or read. She’s fine with that. She doesn’t need to talk about her treatment and they don’t need to hear it. And so Shiv sleeps and eats and makes a start on resuming something like normal life. She’s met up with Laura and Katy a couple of times (coffee shop, cinema). She’s even catching up on her schoolwork and there’s talk of her being able to go back in January.

Phase 3
, as Dr Pollard called it, at Shiv’s final debrief: life without Declan.

In the months between leaving Kyritos and entering the Korsakoff Clinic, what Shiv had thought of as learning to live without her brother was nothing of the sort. Her greatest delusion – her “primary confabulation”, according to Dr Pollard – was that, when she looked in the mirror of her life, all she saw was her brother, the embodiment of her everlasting guilt.

“We’ve tried to help you smash that mirror,” the Director told her.

“By making me look over and over at the thing you didn’t want me to see?”

“Yes. If you stare at something long enough and closely enough, it begins to change, to become – to
mean
– something different.”

Shiv couldn’t help laughing, giddy and a little reckless with the imminent prospect of being discharged. “I still think psychotherapists are full of crap,” she said. “I guess I just have to sort out the good crap from the bad crap.”

Dr Pollard smiled. “I must include that phrase in our promotional material.”

A glimpse, there, of the woman who’d thrown everyone’s case notes into the bin all those weeks ago. Shiv had liked her, back then. After what the treatment had put her through, she wasn’t sure “like” was the right word any more. But she’d ended up trusting Dr Pollard.

Had ended up thanking her.

Looking back, Shiv isn’t sure she’d have been so ready to understand the point about the mirror if it hadn’t been for Mikey. Witnessing his torment that night down at the lake – staring into
his
abyss, with him – brought Shiv face to face with the chasm that might open up in front of
her
, if she let it. The treatment had taken her to the edge so that she saw exactly what she was stepping back from. But standing at the end of the jetty with Mikey, talking him down, Shiv found that the words she spoke to him were also the ones she needed to hear herself. That the reasons he shouldn’t die were indistinguishable from her own reasons for re-learning how to live.