Eighteen

Nine o’clock. P.M., as Kenny might say. No stars tonight, no moon. A sickly yellow glow came from the distant Bacon Factory, but the light did nothing much – in fact, it made the trees and bushes around the pond darker, denser, like sweat on a black T-shirt.

I’d brought the back light from my bike. The front light would have been better, but that had got nicked ages ago. The back light cast a weak red beam, so everything it touched looked like a scene from a horror film, but without it I’d never have found the pallet.

I hauled it out from the bushes and got to work. I’d had a brainwave about what to use to help the raft stay afloat. Plastic milk bottles. I’d scrounged a bin-liner of them from a skip behind the kids’ playground. Most of them had been scrunched up, and I didn’t fancy having to blow into them to get them back to the right shape. But I found enough with their caps on to keep the raft afloat.

I managed to get about ten bottles in the space between the top layer of planks and the bottom layer, wedged in various ways. I wouldn’t have fancied going down a raging torrent with rapids and rocks and all that, but all the raft had to do was get me twenty metres out to where I thought the body was.

I knew I was going to get soaked, so I didn’t bother messing around this time – I just waded in and dragged the raft behind me, still holding the bike light in my left hand.

I looked back and it seemed to be working. The raft was floating much higher in the water.

I put my foot on it. It wobbled. I staggered. I realised that this was going to be difficult, even if the stupid thing stayed afloat. I put the red light in my mouth, held the raft steady with both hands, and tried to jump on. The raft tipped right up and dumped me arse-first in the freezing pond. I staggered up, gasping, and saw that half the bottles had popped out and were floating about on the pond like mutant ducks.

All day I’d been feeling like I was wrapped in a thick blanket of nothingness. But now I felt the rage and hopelessness and despair burst out of me, and I yelled out something – not words, just noise, because the torch was still in my mouth – and I slapped my hands down hard on the crappy raft, like a baby does when it doesn’t like its food.

Then, as the raft floated a few metres away, and as I stared dumbly at it, a voice came from behind me.

“That’s rubbish, that is. You need a bouncy castle.”

I looked round and I saw Kenny standing there. He had the lilo in his arms. All the foul things that I’d been thinking and feeling fell away, and I was just here with my brother, and we had a job to do.

“But it’s got a hole in it, Kenny,” I said. “The air won’t stay in.”

“Fixed it,” he said, and he started to blow it up.

“How …?”

Kenny kept on blowing, and I felt a bit stupid, still standing there in the water.

He finished, and the lilo was as tight as a drum.

“Puncture repair kit,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. “For the bike. I squeezed the bouncy castle till I felt the air blowing out of the hole, then I put the special glue on it, then I put the patch on it, then I waited. And now it’s fixed, see …”

And it was.

I waded out up to my knees and got the raft back.

“We should let the air back out,” I said, “then we can put the bouncy castle in between the two layers of wood.”

And that’s what we did. Kenny squeezed the air out, then we threaded the deflated lilo in between the layers of the pallet, then Kenny blew it up again.

This time, when I pushed it out, it sat high and proud on the water.

“That’s a real boat,” Kenny said. “A bouncy castle boat.”

“It’s great, Kenny. It was a good idea. Now you hold the torch while I go and find the treasure.”