‘It’s really shallow.’
Quick as flash Thomas unbuckled his belt, whipped off his trousers and, without a moment’s hesitation, slid down the bank into the ditch. Arms flailing, he waded through the murky water. The two moorhens immediately rose out of the water and whirred into the stand of rushes growing on the opposite bank.
We whooped and yelled.
Startled, Thomas lost his balance. He went under. He came up again, his hair matted with duckweed, water pouring out of his nose and ears. He was coughing and spluttering like crazy.
‘Hey, stupid!’ we jeered. ‘You should be on the other side. That’s where they’ve gone!’
Because he was so short, the water came up to his waist. The pelting rain was leaving bubbles as big as tennis balls on the surface. The moorhens quacked in the rushes. Then, suddenly, Thomas let out a yell and plunged head first in the water, throwing up fountains of spray. For a split second his striped shirt ballooned around his neck, then it, too, went under. We saw one foot kick in the air, then the other, and then they too were gone.
We waited.
After a little while we cupped our hands to our mouths. We shouted, ‘Hey!’
The water swirled and bubbled.
‘Hey, show-off!’
The moorhens re-emerged from the rushes. They paddled into view, their coal-black heads cocked as if to show they felt quite safe again, now that their hunter lay drowned at the bottom of the ditch. If his body was ever recovered, we’d be in big trouble! We just stood there, petrified.
‘Out of my way!’ screamed Lucy, running up with the bird-catching net in her arms.
Relieved, we stepped aside for her, then closed ranks again. We each picked up a corner of the net, regrouping this way and that since we couldn’t immediately agree on the best way to proceed—dredging, dragging, each had his or her own quite valid opinion about what to do, and clung to it stubbornly.
‘One two three … now!’ cried Lucy, jumping into the water with a huge splash. She landed safely, no more than knee-deep in the ditch, and without hesitating bent down and plunged her whole head underwater to reconnoitre, her little bum sticking up in the air.
At her Now! some of us had already started casting out the net, but others hesitated, so that the net wafted down in slow motion, entangling Lucy as she tried to stand up again. We were in such a tizzy that, without thinking, we began pulling it in. The net went taut, it cut into our hands, and Lucy went down. The water closed over her head.
We let go of the net. We were in a complete panic. We wanted to go home, we wanted to be in the kitchen watching Mummy shell peas with her steady hands. But we couldn’t move. We tried to think of water lilies and other nice things, and then about how great it was that we were going to learn to read, after the summer vacation! Once you knew how to read, our parents had told us, you could have all these vicarious experiences without having to live them yourself. Reading books let you have life doled out to you like homeopathic drops: diluted to the hundredth degree. Which was definitely a better option, sometimes.
Suddenly, with a great roar, Thomas shot up out of the water. Coughing his guts out, he flung something black up on the embankment. He panted, ‘A rat, quick, get a bucket on top of it!’
Just a few feet away from him, struggling furiously with the net, Lucy, too, was on her feet. Flailing wildly with her arms, her legs planted wide in the water, she finally managed to disentangle herself. Indignantly, she cried, ‘Wasn’t it a moorhen you were supposed to catch?’
The next day they each had a ring on their finger drawn in magic marker. If you dared so much as think ‘Thomas Water-on-the-brain,’ you’d get a vicious kick in the shins from Lucy. His name was now Thomas the Rat. He came up to her chin, and the work on the ark was abandoned.
Toward the end of that drenched summer, a few weeks later, we all received an invitation to the engagement party. At home there was some uncomfortable laughter when our folks tore open the envelope and read the card to us. You could tell Lucy had told her mum exactly what to write.
‘Should we give them a salt-and-pepper set?’ our own mums sniggered to our dads. ‘Or maybe a toaster?’ To us they said, waving their hands, ‘Oh, run off and play, for goodness’ sake,’ which made us prick up our ears, because we wanted to report back to Lucy later what they’d said. But Lucy was much too preoccupied with Thomas to listen to our stories.
Enviously, we wondered what those two could be up to. At Lucy’s house just about everything was permitted, as long as her mum wasn’t disturbed while at work in her studio. She didn’t pay any attention to the kids that came over. She didn’t expect you to sit and have something to drink with her in the kitchen first, either; you could just go ahead and do whatever, she didn’t care. Lucy’s announcement of their engagement was probably the first time her mum had even noticed Thomas.
Maybe the two of them were busy building a cabin in the rectory hallway; maybe they were even finding out where babies came from! The latter was a mystery that had become of increasing interest to us of late, especially since we never seemed able to get a satisfactory answer at home. You came out of your mother’s tummy, yeah, obviously, there were pictures to prove it, a whole album full. But the way you got into that tummy in the first place—that was such an unbelievably gross story that you knew right off they must be pulling your leg, no matter how serious their expression. We were sure it involved a completely different scenario, something to do with gravity, or something. Didn’t our fathers always tell us everything had a scientific explanation?
Without Lucy to play with, the days were long and tedious. Every time we started some game with high hopes, it always ended up getting horribly bogged down, now that Lucy wasn’t around to fine-tune the rules if necessary. Afternoons that should have been perfect for a game of Ali-Baba-and-the-Forty-Thieves ended in chaos and angry tears. All our treasure hunts, races, and dress-up sessions went sour. And every time we snuck over to Thomas’s house on Shepherd’s Close to try kidnapping him, we got there too late. He’d already gone off to play somewhere, said his mother.
She was a short, squat woman, with beady round eyes that looked as if she was about to apologize for something, and she always had a rag in her hand to polish our fingerprints off the door jamb. According to our mothers, who were past masters at sniffing out information on newcomers in record time, she was dirt-phobic. She never set foot outside, they said, except to shake out her dust mop.
Why on earth someone with that kind of problem would marry a groundsman, who tramped home every day with mud on his shoes, was the sort of thing they loved to speculate about. ‘Maybe he’s really good at it,’ they whispered, covering their mouths. At what, Mummy? What’s he so good at? Oh, child, that’s none of your business.
Sometimes we’d catch sight of the man who was really good at none of our business, maintaining the grounds of the housing estate, or on the village green. He wore a broad-brimmed yellow sou’wester on account of the rain, that hid his face completely. There was something about him that made you think of a buffalo, the way he charged at the wild roses and barberry bushes. The kids living on Pitchfork Hill had seen him with their own two eyes (cross their hearts and hope to die) pulling out great handfuls of stinging nettles without gloves on or anything! We were terribly impressed. We decided that if we upset Thomas even in the slightest, the nettle-man would break every bone in our body, and suck out the marrow, too.
The engagement party was set for Sunday afternoon. It was supposed to be an English tea party. We weren’t
