I realise he’s just asking what everybody else wants to ask. Everybody else tiptoes around the subject, very often scared to say anything in case they say the wrong thing.
I sigh. No one has asked me this before, so I even surprise myself with how certain I am. ‘Yup,’ I say. ‘I feel it. Here.’ I touch my chest near my heart. ‘It’s a twin thing.’
Iggy pouts and nods slowly as if he understands, but I don’t think you can unless you’re a twin.
‘Shh,’ I say. ‘Listen.’
I’m hoping that I might hear the whining noise from the night that Tammy disappeared. But the only sounds are tiny waves rippling on to the shore every few seconds and the rhythmic bump, bump of a bright orange fibreglass canoe hitting the long wooden jetty that sticks out over the water. The old planks of the jetty creak under our weight and Iggy unpacks his tackle bag.
The last time I stood on this jetty, I think, was with Tammy, playing our throwing-stones game. It’s basically: who can throw a stone furthest into the lake? But we’ve got rules, like size of stone, best-of-five and so on. Maddeningly, she nearly always wins. She’s good at throwing. Iggy is chuntering on …
‘Here we go. Two eight-strand braided fishing lines, one hundred metres, each with a steel wire trace … Four ten-centimetre shark hooks … one short rod and my good old pike reel, plus a Johnson Laser Lure.’
Iggy – who has a school record that you’d call ‘inconsistent’ – would get an A-star in fishing-tackle speak. From his bag he extracts something that he unwraps from its plastic and holds in front of me. I nearly gag at the smell.
‘What the …?’
‘It’s chicken. It was in the bin behind your pub.’ He adds quickly, ‘And if it’s in a bin it’s not stealing, is it?’
He had explained the plan on the way here, but now – kneeling on the jetty screwing his four-part rod together – he goes over it again.
‘So, this chicken breast is the bait. We paddle out about thirty metres and drop the chicken over the side attached to the buoy.’ He points to a red buoy the size of a football in the bottom of the canoe. ‘That should stop it sinking. It’s attached to the line and my rod. We paddle back, letting out the line, and just wait. Pikey comes along and sniffs the lovely meat …’
Iggy acts this out, his eyes narrowing as he twitches his nose left and right.
‘He just can’t resist it! Bam! Down go his jaws and he’s hooked. We see the buoy bobbing and start reeling him in to the jetty, where you are ready with your phone to get the pictures. Then we release him and we cycle back to fame and fortune, or at the very least, our pictures in The Hexham Courant!’
I keep telling myself that everything will be fine, even as we throw all of the gear into the canoe and I step into the rocking vessel, with the freezing water in the bottom seeping into my trainers. Suzy follows us and I could swear she looks at me funny. She takes one sniff of the rotten chicken and moves as far away as she can, right up to the far end of the canoe.
I hadn’t mentioned anything to Mam about going out on the water, because I hadn’t known till Iggy said so. My conscience is clear. But still …
‘Iggy?’ I say. ‘Do we … erm, do we have life jackets?’ I feel daft saying it, and even dafter when I see the look of disdain on Iggy’s face. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘I can swim.’
We unhook the wobbling canoe from the jetty and start paddling out towards the middle of the lake, saying nothing.
Perhaps it’s the motion of the canoe, but I begin to feel a bit queasy. The chicken (the dead one) isn’t helping. The putrid smell is on my hands from where I tossed it over the side attached to the red buoy.
I lean over and dip my hands in the icy water to wash them, then jerk back with a yelp, rocking the canoe.
‘Hey! Watch it!’ protests Iggy.
Did I imagine it?
I did imagine it. I look again: it’s just a log, submerged below the surface. There’s a branch coming off it that sort of looks like an arm, and in my head the whole thing became a floating body and I thought it was Tammy, and it wasn’t. It was just a log, and my mind playing tricks on me.
‘Shall we go back now?’ I say, trying to keep the tension out of my voice.
We paddle back, letting out the thick line as we go.
And so we wait on the jetty. And wait. I look up at the sky, which is much darker now, and I think I should be going back.
My phone’s clock tells me that we have been here for more than an hour, and frankly, I am bored, cold and still a bit shaken by the log-that-was-just-a-log.
And then the buoy moves.
‘Did you see …’
‘Yup.’
We scramble to our feet and stare out over the lake to where the buoy is once again still, with tiny ripples expanding from it.
‘What do you think?’ I say, but Iggy just takes off his cap and runs his fingers thoughtfully through his messed-up red hair, looking at the water.
We stay like that for several minutes then he says, ‘I think we need to check’ and he starts to reel in the line. ‘Perhaps the bait’s been taken, or fallen off. Dammit.’ The line is jammed. ‘Might have got caught on weeds, or a log.’
The more he tugs, the tighter it gets. ‘Come on,’ he moans, getting into the canoe. ‘We’ll have to free it.’
‘We?’ I murmur, but I get in anyway.
Iggy whistles to Suzy, just like you would to a dog, and she hops in obediently after us. Iggy pulls his cap down purposefully, pushes his glasses up his nose, and we begin to paddle back out towards the bobbing buoy.
Before we reach it, the massive splash comes.
It’s huge – like a car has been dropped into the water from a great height over on the other side of the reservoir.
Obviously, it isn’t a car. But – equally obviously – I don’t think it’s an invisible spaceship either, because I’m not completely mad.
But that is what it turns out to be.
After that splash about two hundred metres away, comes another one a few seconds later, slightly smaller but still enormous, and closer to our canoe. In the light of the rising moon, the water droplets glisten as they cascade back down. Seconds after, there is a third splash, then a fourth, all getting closer to us in a straight line, as though a massive, unseen stone is being skimmed across the surface. By the time the fifth splash comes, only about six metres from the boat, the resulting waves have started to tip our little canoe violently
