The Start of Something.
Water doesn't look as if it could kill. When you're staring at it as it
spirals down the bathroom sink full of your spit and dirt. When you let
it run over you in the shower, its gentle flux convinces you to forget
how it can kill. It killed the boys in the river one night. Practising
their wheel spins in the park. Boy racers with brand new rubber tyres
scraping gravel over the sound of tinny music.
And laughing. I think they would be laughing.
I had stood in the park as I was standing now. This time I refused to
move. Carl had gone to look at the metal coffin in the weeds. I
imagined them in their deep water. The suffocating cold of the river
would be enough to kill them quickly. I had the sudden urge to wade in
and rescue them. I stayed there until the thudding in my brain stopped.
I envied them slightly. They didn't have to endure change anymore.
Their future had stopped as soon as they had piled into that car. Mine
began now, and here and then. Whenever I felt it pull me down.
It affected me. It had no connection with me at all. But it was a
change. A horrific change. Somehow I had managed to convince myself it
had happened for a reason.
Was I completely insane wanting to be with them in that river? Maybe I
was.
I thought back to the beginning of that night. The three of us. Shadows
cascaded onto the road, the others wandering along behind. My two
friends, Bex and Emma were with me. We drank, we talked, we got sad
because our lives were never the way we wanted them to be. I held on to
the things that were constant. The normality of the pub. The warmth and
comforting absence of change.
"That car's still in the river y'know," Everyone looked at the same
spot on the floor at that moment. The same bit of brown wooden floor
that held up the pool table was a distraction.
"They're still in there as well." Bex leant against the window ledge
and stared out into the cold. The water was preserving them, as morbid
as that was. And the cold. The river should have been ice as this time
of the year.
"I expect there's going to be a crowd when they pull them out
tomorrow." I shot a look at Mark. Typical, he never had any tact at
all. There's a fascination with things we can't make sense of. When we
stood out in the rain before the bell rang and let our clothes get
drenched with drizzle. The eyeliner dripped from our tear ducts. We
stood there talking and people looked from the windows in disgust. They
didn't understand that we would have rather stood out there and risk
being struck by lightning rather than mix with their scorn. They were
still interested in us though.
Maybe those lads weren't understood by anyone. I expect they had fallen
in love with the sickly smell of petrol whenever they went to fill the
tank and spent their Saturday afternoons stuck underneath a car bonnet.
In love with the mechanics of a battered old second hand ford.
"Were they drunk?" I asked. Emma shrugged and her brown ponytail swiped
at her head. No one looked as if they really cared. They were all
interested in the accident but not the people involved. My friends, the
only best friends I had ever had but still I seemed to want things
differently. I kept stupid things. Little drawings people did in pubs
on cigarette packets, addresses written on receipts I wasn't ever going
to use. I held onto the bad memories more. They forgot, they still
do.
I looked around the place. Bex flicked her long black hair over her
shoulders and ran her little finger underneath the rim of her left eye.
She looked at it uncertainly, to check her eyeliner hadn't run and
picked up her drink. I loved them all. I don't know why. Someone loved
those boys. I wonder who felt their presence. At the edge of that
river. The one that boats sometimes crossed on sunny days. Little
children were shouted at for going too near the edge.
"Lets walk down to the river," I looked at Carlos. This really was a
strange feeling, like I wanted to reach out and make him realise what
he was saying.
"Are you serious?" I said loudly over the chatter of the pub, " you
want to go look?"
He shrugged. The shrug all men do when they're being serious but
realise it's a mistake to admit they are.
"Why not?" Abba said, "You won't see anything anyway. The whole car is
in the river." I shivered. The cold was getting to me even in
here.
"We're going passed there. We might as well." Even Emma wanted to see
it. I sighed and picked up my glass. The reflection didn't even
resemble someone who cared anymore. It bounced off the tacky pub light
and lit up the bubbles in my drink.
Our walk down the hill to see the wreck was cold and should have been
melancholy, but it wasn't. The morbid fascination of teenagers,
together with the nagging feeling of boredom was pulling us down to see
it. We even walked faster. As if the car would disappear since its
collision with the river and all that was in it. I didn't know what I
was doing. I wanted to look because may be it wasn't there anymore.
Maybe they had taken it away or it was just a rumour. But I was wrong.
We passed the river. It looked to me to be calm and quiet, not
something that could cause so much tragedy.
It was morbid. We were morbid. But we were here and now we were all
silent. Carlo motioned towards the end of the park. The orange
reflective police tape flapped endlessly in the wind. I stood at the
opposite end of the park, not wanting to move. My first little taste of
death made me want my own life to progress. Just so I could move. Turn
away. I looked at Emma, who was edging towards the tape. Freezing to
death and not believing what we were doing I looked up at the patches
of cloud above us. Bex stood with me. She knew how I felt. Death
reminded her of her mum and both of us had no wish to see it in such a
raw form. Why couldn't we pick something less damaging to do on a
Friday night? I asked myself.
You could hardly see Emma and Carlo. They were just two figures in the
gloom. I was getting sick of this. I started to walk away and realised
no one was following. Hadn't they had enough? Carlo came walking up to
me in his usual relaxed manner as if he'd just seen a really nice
sports car, not a car with three dead bodies in it.
He saw my face and said quietly, "We shouldn't have come,"
They would be pulled out tomorrow. People would stop and stare. Life
would forget and change as it always did. The worst thing was that by
coming here to look at it, we were as bad as the people in broad
daylight. The only difference was we were doing it under the cover of
darkness.
Bex, Emma and I walked home falling in step with each other. Carlo
humming a tune he'd heard on his CD player before he came out, Mark and
Abba following behind, constantly talking at each other.
Everyone has probably forgotten about this now. The reason I remember
it is because I wrote it in my diary, though not like this is written.
Perhaps I've dragged up old feelings from the past. Only at the time I
didn't know how to react to them. My memory fools me into remembering
things like this. Little details, conversations, smiles. Oh, how I
haven't learnt much since then.
