Daylight Saving (17 page)

“What do you think? You need to swim, but you need to keep warm, too. So I thought this was a nice compromise.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Well. It’s not
beautiful.
It’s a bit fake.”

“Fake can be beautiful. Like these fingernails,” she said. “I absolutely love it here, Daniel. How did you get the keys?”

“My best friend, Ryan, left them for me,” I said.

She laughed. We walked around to the deep end of the pool. The blue tiles shimmered on the pool floor, and the lights glowed softly on the walls beneath the water. Steam rose up into our faces. Lexi took my hand, and we fell forward into the silence and brilliance of the water.

We went deeper and deeper. I opened my eyes, and beyond the white fuzz of bubbles I was making, I could see Lexi, one arm out in front of her, long and still. In spite of the injuries and weakness, in the water, all her grace and beauty remained intact.

She took hold of my hand and pulled me down. For a moment, I thought she might never let me rise, but then I decided that I didn’t care. There were worse ways to go. Eventually, as I was running out of air, she wrapped her body around mine and we arced upward together, twining our limbs as we burst through the surface and into the muggy air. I was dizzy with the lack of oxygen. It felt good.

“I can hardly . . . breathe,” I said.

“But you can certainly swim,” she said.

She arrowed back under and headed for the rapids. I followed her and caught the tail of her slipstream, which pulled me along. I began to move my arms and legs to her perfect rhythm. Soon I could feel my heart tune in to the beat of her strokes. And then I was back in that silent space, my body weightless and free. I closed my eyes and imagined the blackish-green water of the lake, with the slinky bodies of the reeds dancing around me. I pictured the dull metal gray of the fish down there, the grainy silt like TV static, and Lexi up ahead. She pointed down, and I could see something glinting red. It was the glass in the door of her old home: the red galleon riding the bright blue waves. The colors reflected on her face.

I opened my eyes and woke from the vision. I surfaced and the moving water of the rapids carried me through a dark tunnel of thick vegetation, which cast a strange green light. Lexi was behind me, holding on.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“I feel much better.”

“Good. You look better.”

“You’re lying, but thank you,” she said. She was right. The water had diluted the blood, which ran across her face in rusty streaks. “Do you mind? About these wounds? Do they make me look horrible?”

“No,” I said. I thought of the picture of her face in the newspaper, before she died. Her fleshy cheeks and her head thrown back. Her eyes were still shining, but that was about it.

“But you don’t just like me because I’m battered and bruised? You’re not some kind of weirdo?”

“No. I can see past the scars, that’s all.”

She nodded and we kissed as the current dragged us through the dark tunnel of green light. “I’m going to miss you,” she said.

I realized then that it was
me
who would leave. On Sunday morning, I would go home to our house. I would live with my dad and eventually see my mum. I would go back to my average school, my average life, while Lexi was stuck here in this murderous loop.

Lexi seemed to read what I was thinking. “It’s OK,” she said. She smiled. I didn’t know if the smile was fake, but it was certainly beautiful.

When we got out of the pool, Lexi’s temperature began to drop rapidly. We were by the shell of the Dome. I looked over Lexi’s shoulder, but the night outside was so dark and misty that I could only see our reflections in the plastic glass. Then my eyes refocused and I saw him. The man. He was wearing his half-soaked coat now and smiling. The wound in his neck was spilling purple blood. Lexi had her back to him, and I tried to keep my expression neutral.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “But you’re freezing. I’ve got an idea. Come on, let’s go.”

I dragged her away from the shell and down the side of the pool. Past the food shack, there was an adults-only area with a hot steam room. The door was made from frosted glass, and inside, beyond the heavy eucalyptus steam clouds, there was a tiled bench to sit on. “Perfect,” Lexi said, resting in the corner.

I closed the door and sat beside her, the heat opening my pores. I could feel the sweat running down my chest. Lexi stroked back her hair. She was veiled in steam beside me.

“This is a treat,” she said. Her voice echoed in the chamber of blue and white tiles.

“Down in the water,” I said, “I felt like I was having a vision. Does that sound stupid?”

“No. What did you see?”

“I saw your front door. With the Armada ship. It was like we were in the lake.”

“You have excellent mindsight,” Lexi said.

I laughed.

“You know, the Crow used to send young men your age out into remote places, so they could have visions,” she said.

“Just the boys?”

“Yes. They wanted the males to get in touch with the spiritual world.”

“They didn’t think the women were capable?” I said.

Lexi laughed. “They believed women were
already
in touch with the spirit world, because they could give birth to children.”

Sometimes, when Lexi talked, I could feel the life she would never have unraveling.

“Anyway,” she said, “the boy would go out into the wilderness, without food and water, and wait for his spirit guide to come and tell him words of wisdom, or even tell him about the future.”

“Are you my spirit guide?” I asked.

She laughed again. “I’m not the person to ask about the future,” she said.

“But you are,” I said. “You know what’s going to happen tomorrow night.”

“Stop it, Daniel.”

“I don’t see the harm in telling me where you’re going to be. I could help you. I could do something.”

“He’s too strong. I thought about telling you, but when I saw that stab wound in your stomach, I knew he was too strong.”

“You don’t know how strong I am,” I said. “You’ve no idea. I can match him.”

“I don’t want you to match him. I don’t want you to be anything like him. It’s not brave to be like him. All that physical nonsense. It takes guts to be gentle, Daniel. That’s what you’ve got.”

I turned on her. “I don’t
need
to know where you wake up. I can just go and find him. I can do it now or tomorrow. He was out there a minute ago. I saw him. He can’t have got far,” I said. I stood up, but she pulled gently on my arm.

“Sit down,” she said.

“I can find him, and I can smash him.”

“Smash him?”

“I’ll confront him. I’ll get Ryan to help.”

“It won’t do any good,” she said.

I stopped talking. The knowledge was filling my mind. The wound in his neck. The fact that I couldn’t see him on Evans’s security DVD. I knew what she was going to say.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“But. In the newspaper. Witnesses said they saw you together. He bought you a drink. The barman must have seen him.”

“He was alive then.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I killed him.”

I was reeling from the heat of the steam, but the air in my lungs felt cool and sharp. “What happened?” I said.

“He thought I was gone. He was just lying there on top of me. I’d picked up the screwdriver from the car and put it in my pocket, but I hadn’t been able to reach it while he was attacking me.”

“Why?”

“He had a knife to my throat. But he thought I was dead. He relaxed. I could feel the blood coming up into my mouth, and I knew I hadn’t got long. I grabbed the screwdriver and jammed it into his neck.”

In the gaps between the clouds of steam that rolled out of the vent in the floor, I stared at her and realized that the new dark blood on her cheeks didn’t belong to her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“Tell you what? That I’m a murderer?”

“Lexi, you’re not a . . .” Even in the clouded room, I could feel that she’d turned away, that she was ashamed. “Can’t you stop yourself from killing him?” I asked.

“No. I’ve told you. I’m just watching it all happen,” she said. “I’m feeling it and watching it, but I can’t do anything. I’m witnessing my sin. I deserve this.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not true.” I said those words she had once said to me. “Lexi, it wasn’t your fault.”

She didn’t reply. Through the vapor, I could see that the scars on her legs were like pink icicles; deep grazes sparkled with tiny red grains, and I saw a new slash drawn across her arm like a jet stream. Pine needles fell from her hair. She put her head back against the tiles and sighed.

“Isn’t it possible that we could just stay awake? If we stay awake, then he can’t take you,” I said.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“But we could try.”

“Do me a favor, young man,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Remember this week,” she said.

“How could I ever forget it?” I said.

“Just keep playing it in your head. Remember the things we’ve said and done. It’s the only way I can exist in the real world. Remember this week and play it on a loop.”

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

She extended her fist toward me, and I touched it with mine, felt the knuckles slip into the grooves again.

In the heat, I could feel the badness sweating out of my body and turning to vapor. I felt pure and clean. I reached out to her through the steam, but my hand touched only the tiles. She was gone.

The next morning, I didn’t want to know. I lay in bed for hours, awake. I could hear Dad in the kitchen, doing the deep breathing that meant he had a hangover. Gavin came in and wound him up about Tash. Dad laughed and made coffee, and then they went out.

It was noon before I could bring myself to open the Aztec-patterned curtains and look out on a world without Lexi. The day was dry and crisp, a dusting of frost on the cabins, but only in the shade. Where was she now? Where did she go?

I thought about school. I was due to return next week. After their holidays, I often heard my classmates talking about holiday romances. Most of them were liars: lads with self-inflicted love bites on their shoulders, telling tall tales about having wild sex with women in their thirties who seemed to share a lot of physical characteristics with our geography teacher. The ones who had really been in love on holiday didn’t talk about it much. They just came back acting differently. After her family trip to Newquay, Ellie Marsh returned with a double‑pierced ear; she’d started wearing Vans and had bleached her hair with lemon juice. With Jack Sansom, it was brogues and the New York Dolls.

What would I have? I didn’t know what music Lexi liked, and most of her clothes she had stolen from the women’s changing rooms. And she was dead, for God’s sake. Chances were, I’d be going back to school even weirder than I was before I left. I thought of the red glint of her front door. I still had so many questions.

In the kitchen, the wine bottles had been thrown away and the glasses cleaned. The bedsheets were in the washing machine. Tash’s makeup compact was on the countertop; some of the powder — the color of her skin — was dashed on the Formica.

I put my hand behind the tiny green buds that just a week ago had been ripe tomatoes.

My swim trunks were still wet, but I put them in my rucksack anyway. Maybe if I swam, if I found the old rhythm, the visions would come. I might see her, and in my visions she might tell me where she woke. I doubted it, but there was nothing else to do.

I went outside, where I could hear Tash and Chrissy arguing through the open window of their cabin.

“How could you?” Chrissy said.

“Very easily, after two bottles of wine,” Tash said.

“He’s so vulnerable, Tash.”

“I wish you’d stop going on about that boy. He’s just a teenager. He’ll be fine.”

“I wasn’t talking about the boy. The boy is perfectly strong. I was talking about his father.”

Well,
I thought,
that’s a little victory.
The sisters began arguing about breakfast. Tash wanted a bacon sandwich, but there was only pumpernickel bread. They could have been arguing about a world war and I would have thought it was pointless. I cared only about Lexi.