It was like I had woken up from a dream. The real world hit me. The expanse of water in front of me, which before had seemed narrow but now seemed like a vast ocean. For a moment, I thought I had been standing there for ages, and I panicked.
And then another thought thundered into the front of my mind. A memory of Adah telling me about her time messing around in the pool at school. And how she’d never learnt to swim.
‘Don’t worry!’ I shouted at Adah. ‘I’m coming.’
We were only a matter of steps away from the bridge, and I remembered there was a big fallen branch leaning up on the side halfway along. I raced towards it, grabbed it – it was lighter than it looked – and dragged it back across the bridge and down to the stream’s edge. With horror, I saw Adah was being dragged along, slowly but surely. She couldn’t swim. And she was losing her fight with the slow-moving water.
‘Take it!’ I shouted at her. ‘Take it!’
A few grabs. Some splutters. Then she had hold of the branch. It took every effort in me to pull the branch with her clasping on until she reached the bank. She crawled onto the leaf-covered mud, pulling herself up, her hand clawing at the mixture of leaves, water and mud as she struggled to get onto the hard ground.
She was coughing and spitting out water, and when she’d straightened and rubbed her face, I could see that she was crying.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, and I took off my coat and put it round her. It seemed like the nicest thing to do. ‘Do you want to come back to mine? It’s not far. It’s too early for tea but we can maybe watch a video and you can change into some of my clothes.’
She didn’t spend any time thinking about it. She nodded, meekly. She was trembling all over, though I thought it was more from the scare than the cold.
‘Or I can walk with you back to your aunt’s house? I don’t mind.’
It was making me feel more and more worried, the fact she hadn’t said a single word since getting out of the water. She started to plod along slowly in the direction of the cottage. ‘Yours,’ she said, quietly. I followed her, and we walked the rest of the way back to mine in silence, broken only by the sound of drips from her soaked clothes pattering on the leaves as we went.