Never Ending (29 page)

Mikey.

She doesn’t suppose she’ll ever see him again. Isn’t sure she wants to, or that he’d want to see her. In any circumstances it would be hard to have a friendship with someone whose life you’d saved – to have that hanging over both of you. Harder still when the other person didn’t want to be saved.

Turning away from the lake, still hand in hand with Shiv as they retraced their steps along the jetty onto solid ground, he had looked despondent. As though he had failed.

Maybe he’ll have another go when no one’s there to stop him.

Or maybe, one day, he’ll feel differently. Come to value his life again, find a way of living without Feebs, and be glad Shiv helped him have that chance. Maybe, years from now, she’ll see Mikey on a bus or train, or in the street, or in a café or pub, and there’ll be a spark of recognition in their eyes. A shared, tentative smile. The awkward beginnings of a conversation that might or might not lead somewhere.

She splashes cold water on her face after her nap and heads downstairs. Dad’s in the kitchen with the lawyer’s uncle; they’re sipping coffee. The sight of the tiny cups and the bitter aroma rekindle a memory of dancing in the street with Nikos.

She dwells on that for a moment.

There are flowers on the table, wrapped in cellophane. Dad starts to ask if she managed to sleep but Shiv interrupts, indicating the bouquet. “What’s that for?”

“I thought we could go out there.” He hesitates. “If you want to.”

Out there
. The road where the crash happened, he means. Or the beach where Declan’s body washed up. But those places have nothing to offer Shiv.

“Dad,” she says, “I want to go to the villa.”

The uncle drives them along the coast road in a battered blue Fiat. He pulls up in the approach to the holiday villas and Shiv gets out onto the track, standing in a slowly dispersing cloud of dust kicked up when the car braked to a halt. Dad asks the guy to wait, please. He answers in Greek and flicks on the car radio.

As they set off, Dad explains that he got the old man to park here, rather than right by the villa, in case the current occupants are in. On foot, the pair of them could recce the place more discreetly.

“Recce?”
Shiv says.

“It’s short for reconnoitre.”

“I know what it means. I’m just wondering if we should black up our faces or wear camouflage or something?”

He gives her a look. She’s seen the same question in Mum’s and Aunt Rosh’s expressions:
Do we do “funny” yet?

Shiv shoulders her bag and walks silently beside her father, unable to help remembering the time she sat on the front step watching Nikos’s pick-up bounce along this same track with two windsurf rigs in the back. Or the time she followed Declan back to the villa in the dusk after her brother had caught them kissing.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” Dad says.

Shiv doesn’t reply. They’ve had this argument already, in the kitchen of the safe house. She has something she needs to do, she told him. That’s all. Since she left the clinic, there’s been a quiet resolve to Shiv that none of her family knows how to deal with. There’ll come a time when they learn to refuse her again but, for now, she gets whatever she wants.

As they near the villa, Dad diverts them onto an overgrown path.

His plan is this: they follow the path into the olive grove, where the low wall will offer a clear view of the rear of the villa, the garden and pool area. If anyone is about, they’ll simply carry on as though they’re out for a stroll and skirt back round to the track where the lawyer’s uncle is waiting.

Shiv looks at him. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment and she thinks he’s going to deny it. But he says, “Yes,” his voice a little husky. “I’ve come up here a few times.”

“To do what?”

“Just … I sit on the wall. And look. That’s all I do, Shiv. I look.” Then, with an odd laugh, “You know, I even thought about renting the place so I could come here whenever I felt like it.”

“Bloody hell, Dad.”

“I know, I know.”

“And
I’m
the one who gets sent to a clinic.”

He laughs and the look he gives her is so full of love it takes her breath away.

The villa is different from how she remembers it, the images in her head merging with those projected onto the walls of her PTU. She knows she’ll never quite be able to separate the two from now on.

Bizarrely, as she gazes at the rear of the villa, she half expects to see Caron – in her scarlet dress – lazing on a lounger beside the pool, smoking a cigarette.
Ah, you
made
it
, she says, spotting Shiv. When she messaged Caron on Facebook about her plan to visit the villa, her friend replied:
r u TOTALLY mad?!?
Then, another message:
dont u DARE come back with a tan!! ;-) xx

Laura and Katy said pretty much the same thing, oddly enough.

Shiv’s going down to London to stay with Caron next weekend; meet her folks, see the sights. Her first nights away without her dad since she left the clinic.

“No goat,” she says to Dad, nodding towards the olive grove.

It might be dead or just tethered somewhere else. She asks if her father recalls Dec trying to feed it an apple, but he doesn’t.

Shiv steps over the wall and into the garden, catching Dad by surprise.

“Shiv, no – what if they come back?”

She keeps going and he doesn’t have much choice but to follow, drawing up beside her as she comes to a stop at the poolside.

It’s late October, the end of the holiday season, but the villa is in use. A pink inflatable dolphin, lilo and stripy beach-ball cluster at one end of the pool. Other signs of occupation: a game of quoits not cleared away; a cup on the table under the pergola; four pairs of flip-flops (two adult, two child-sized) by the patio door; towels flapping listlessly on the line. But the windows are shut and everywhere is perfectly quiet.

“I wonder if they know?” Shiv says.
About us
, she leaves unsaid. About who rented this place back in the spring and what happened to their son.

“It’s like we were never here,” she says under her breath.

Beside her, Dad says, “I thought the same, first time I came back.”

“When I was little, I imagined the places we stayed on holiday didn’t exist except for the time we were there. I couldn’t bear to think of other kids sleeping in our beds or swimming in our pool or playing where we played.”

We
. Her and Declan. Shiv slips a hand into her father’s.

“Why did you come here, Shiv?” He’s being gentle, patient; but she can tell it bothers him that the holidaymakers might return.

If she didn’t want to do the thing with the flowers, what
does
she want to do?

Her gaze settles on the pool. She thinks of the hours she and Declan spent in that water. Then, another thought: the lake, the jetty. Funny how the lake at Eden Hall used to remind Shiv of the sea at Kyritos – and now the pool reminds her of the lake.

Dad’s hand is sweaty in hers. The sun is bright and warm but Shiv’s arms are covered in goosebumps.

“You coping OK with this?” Dad asks.

“Not really, no. How about you?”

“No.” Then, giving her hand a squeeze, “Look, we should—”

“Yeah. OK.”

He doesn’t know yet, but Shiv won’t give evidence tomorrow; not the way the lawyer wants her to. Won’t help them “win” the case.
The two defendants
weren’t
racing
, she will say, her voice strong and clear.
It was an accident. No more, no less
. She shouldn’t have gone to the party in the first place, or accepted a lift home when she knew the guys had been drinking. However much trouble it would’ve got her into, she should have phoned to ask her parents to collect them in the taxi.

Then, she will describe how Nikos risked his life to save hers – scrambling down the cliff and onto the wave-swept rocks, pulling her back from the edge when she was about to dive into the sea after Declan. Holding on to her.

“I’d have died if it wasn’t for him.”

That’s what she’ll tell the court.

Dad will be furious. Or not. Perhaps it won’t surprise him that much. In time, maybe he’ll come to realize it was the right thing to do.

Dad has clung to this case as grimly as Mum once clung to Declan’s room; just as Shiv once clung to the idea of her indelible guilt. As though, so long as they have something of Dec to hold on to, it prevents him from being finally, irretrievably dead.

Her brother
is
dead, though. But Shiv’s love for him remains. Her memories of him remain. It is these things – weightless, formless as they are – which raise her to the surface and let her live in the light. Not absolved of her guilt, not freed from grief and loss, but absorbing all of it into who she is. Atoning for Declan’s death by living the life that she can, with enough joys and sorrows for both of them.

She goes to the patio and picks up a plastic spade from the beach set. It’s encrusted with sand, and the buckets, she notices, are half-filled with pretty-coloured pebbles.

“What are you doing?” Dad asks.

Shiv doesn’t answer. She makes for the flower border where she spotted the ball that time. Finding a clear patch of soil, she kneels down and starts to dig – little scoops of earth that she sets aside in a heap, conscious of Dad watching her from the other side of the pool.

When the hole is deep enough, Shiv sets the spade down and opens up the bag, her hands grubby and damp with perspiration. She reaches inside.

“What’s that?” Dad says. She didn’t hear him approach and the closeness of his voice makes her jump.

Unfurling the T-shirt, Shiv holds it up for him to see.
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody
.

Her father doesn’t speak.

She folds the T-shirt again and places it in the hole. A pause. Shiv looks at the shirt for a moment then covers it over with soil, filling the hole right up and levelling it off so that you’d never know the ground had been disturbed.

She stands up, brushes the earth from her hands. Dad doesn’t say a word, or hold her hand, or pull her into a hug, or anything like that. But he stands next to her by the flower border and when she turns away he turns with her.

A last gesture, as they step back over the wall and into the olive grove. Shiv stops and takes another item from her bag.

A yellow tennis ball.

She stands on the wall, takes aim, and gently lobs the ball into the pool for one of the children to find.

Acknowledgments

I am more grateful than I can adequately express to my editors – Mara Bergman at Walker Books, in London, and Wendy Lamb at Random House, in New York – for their patience, skill and diligence. Their detailed, incisive feedback on various drafts, along with that of Wendy’s colleagues Dana Carey, Caroline Gertler and Jane Brachfeld, went way beyond the call of duty.

Huge thanks, too, to my UK and US agents – Stephanie Thwaites, at Curtis Brown, and Tina Wexler, at ICM Partners – who also provided valuable editorial input and much-needed encouragement at crucial moments. When my belief in this novel wavered, theirs never did.

Above all, heartfelt thanks to my wife, Damaris, who makes everything possible and whose own recent challenges put mine into stark perspective.

One morning fourteen-year-old Alex wakes up to find himself in the wrong bedroom, in an unfamiliar house, in a different part of the country. The family at the breakfast table are total strangers. And when he looks in the mirror he gets the shock of his life!

How is it possible that Alex has become another boy – a boy called Phillip, or Flip? But more importantly, how will he switch back to become himself again?

“
Flip
swept us all along. Thanks to Martyn Bedford’s masterly balance of tension and wit, this unique fusion of the surreal and the everyday proved utterly convincing.”
Judges Shortlist citation, Costa Children’s Book Award

“Bedford’s taut style and psychological insight make
Flip
a gripping thriller.”
Amanda Craig,
The Times

Martyn Bedford
’s first novel for teenagers,
Flip
, won four regional awards and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award. He is also the author of five adult novels and numerous short stories. Between them, his books have been translated into thirteen languages. A former journalist, he now teaches creative writing at Leeds Trinity University and regularly visits schools to give talks and to run workshops. Martyn lives in West Yorkshire with his wife and two daughters.

Visit Martyn online at
www.martynbedford.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.