As we waited for the water to sink to its lowest point, we spoke about a lot of things and also not much. We sat there for a while. We talked about people we had both known. The names, we used their whole names, they filled us up in some way. I still couldn’t work out if all this was a hello or goodbye. Davey held my hands and touched my face and we kissed each other a lot of times and I put my head on him and they felt like the right things to do.
‘I don’t think it will get any lower than that,’ Davey said at a certain point. The colour of the silt. It looked like freshly poured concrete. The type we’d try to find as kids so we could write in it.
We looked at the shape of the waves to see if the water would head out even more, but they kept changing and it didn’t matter. It was time to go.
‘Stop saying the horse,’ he said to me. ‘She has a name.’ I nodded. ‘Swifty,’ he said. ‘Swifty! You’re stone cold,’ he said, shaking his head at me. ‘The stone coldest. Stop being rude and check her feet with me.’ The way she lifted each ankle for him, one by one, all he had to do was touch it. ‘She hates it when stones are stuck.’
After that, I held Kole’s gun tucked in my armpit as I did up my jacket, and it nearly dropped into the sludge.
‘I’ll take that,’ Davey said, as he slid the barrel deep into his leather belt.
He had me stand on his knee to mount. Old days. Davey’s body as a climbing frame. There was no saddle, just like there was always no saddle. He led her forward, looking down to see how her hooves would take to the ground.
He spoke into her neck, and shut his eyes when he was talking, and then there we were.
We waded, this ramshackle trio, into the water.
Swifty went easy through the water. Her legs made tiny slivers of waves that pushed away from us. I weighed so little by this point that she didn’t even seem to know I was on her back. I put my hand behind me and stroked her hip, and there was flesh on the bone – more flesh than I had.
We had almost got halfway across – Davey still on his feet, water to his thigh now, me high on Swifty’s back – when we heard the first of the sounds.
The wind sharpened. This high-pitched noise at first, then low. Getting louder. It was coming from the other side. Davey turned to me. His eyes. He went on his tiptoes like that would help. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Oh fuck.’ He turned back then forward again. Fast one way, then the other. Swifty started to do the same. ‘Can you see what it is?’ he said.
I put my hands up to shield the sun so I could see. The noise got louder and louder. And then I saw it.
‘Davey,’ I said. ‘It’s a plane.’
We were clear as day for them to see. Swifty’s white back in the middle of the brown flood plain. The coat I’d stolen from the house was red. We stopped. Davey looked straight up. We both did. It wasn’t like the planes that had dropped food packages. It looked military, but low, light. I felt sure in that moment that it would fire if it saw us.
And then Davey placed the reins over the horse’s neck, so I could take them, and he pulled Kole’s gun out from his belt.
His shoulders were shaking. He gripped the gun with both hands.
For a second I couldn’t speak. The plane got nearer. It got lower, too. Davey moved his arms in time with its path.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I can do it, maybe. It just has to get a tiny bit closer.’
Davey’s arms weren’t shaking from fear, just from how tightly he was holding the gun. It was when I saw the slightest shift in his body, and I knew he was about to pull the trigger, that I shouted for him to stop.
‘What, Chance?’ he said.
‘What if…’ The thought that it could be you in there. Somehow, my first thought was still always you. You being okay.
‘If what, Chance? What? Just say it.’
I couldn’t. But he looked at me like he could see everything.
‘How many chances? You give them every chance,’ he said. ‘Every chance. And when is it…’
There were tears running down my face. His hands dropped.
‘Even for a maybe,’ he said.
The plane was nearly directly above us now.
‘You’re an idiot,’ he said. He looked right at me. ‘You always have been. You’re so dumb about this stuff,’ he said. ‘You’re so stupid.’
But I looked at him, and he was crying too.
We braced for them to shoot. Davey’s arms were up over Swifty’s side and I held them. I could feel it. I could feel it, everything ending. I could feel it between the bones in my spine. At least I’d got this far. At least I tried. That thought washed through me.
But then the plane flew high again. It flew over us – then it flew on.
I switched between looking up, and shutting my eyes so tightly I saw colours rather than black. Neither of us could say anything. As it passed over us, our heads followed it. As it got further away, the sound seemed to snag in the air behind it. But it kept going, it kept going, it kept going.
In the panic, Davey had turned us back around. We were facing home again. The colour in his face. Anything left of it had gone. ‘Do you want to go back?’ he said. ‘Should we just?’ He looked at me. ‘We know it there.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Or I can go back? I can go back if you want me to. If that’s what you want, Chance.’
But I shook my head. We shook our heads at the same time, actually.
‘I suppose we’re here now, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Better get on with it.’
And so we waded on, Davey, Swifty and me, in the direction of the wall. Rolls and rolls of barbed wire had fallen from where they had originally been placed, and caught the light, in jagged flashes, in the water. We’d decided on the place with the missing rectangles of breeze block. Figured it could be a foothold, handhold, eyehole, something. Adrenaline doesn’t leave the body quickly. Mine swirled with it. I could feel it under my collarbone.
Sometimes one of Swifty’s legs sank and left us off balance, but she’d only take a second to right herself. Stayed easy as anything, even as the water got higher and higher.
We were getting closer. It was fifteen foot tall. Twenty. Mac was right. Three of Davey, maybe four. Taller as we got near. Davey got there first. Looked back at us. Then we both put our hands against it. Up close, the breeze block was rough cut, almost had a kind of sparkle to it. Some parts had been painted with that sticky, slick anti-climb paint, but it was done so roughly. Random smears, easy to avoid. I rubbed my finger against the mortar between two low-down bricks, and a few grains of it came away so easily.
And that was when I looked at the wall, and looked at it, and saw that it wasn’t really a wall made for water. Not in any real way. The blocks were turning dark with damp already. The mortar was normal mortar, made of sand. It wasn’t a wall to stop water. It was a wall to stop us.
But not this person, I thought. Not this person any more.
We tied one of Davey’s ropes to the crowbar. The plan was to throw the bar through the hole in the breeze block, and hope it would jam on the other side, so we could use the rope to pull ourselves up. Twice I missed. Hard to throw from sitting down. We dragged the crowbar back to us through the muddy water.
‘Let it steam out your hand like a fucking javelin,’ Davey said, and the third time, I made it. It flew through the hole. I tugged the rope. It held tight. We looked at each other.
‘I’m going first,’ Davey said, ‘’cos you’re about eight times better at climbing than me and I’m not getting stuck here.’
He turned to Swifty and took her heavy soft head in his arms. He kissed the front of her nose, then pressed his forehead against it and took the deepest inhale as if he could make the smell stay there. He kissed her one more time, then he turned away quickly, like a second longer would have stopped him leaving. He pulled at the rope, then, without looking at me, he started to walk up the wall.
His feet moved easy against the grey. He used the rope as a kind of banister. ‘Can you see through?’ I shouted up when he made it to the hole.
He said something about it being green, green on the other side.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Greener on the other side. It’s a joke. I can’t see a thing yet. Hollow inside.’
With his feet standing in the hole, he could reach to the top of the wall. His wrists went white as he pulled himself up. I watched his back – so vulnerable like that, with his hands above his head. But he gave this grunt thing and then he hauled himself up. I looked up too. His head was in front of the sun and it flared either side of him. He was sitting on the edge of the wall, right at the top of it.
‘Okay then, spiv,’ he said, flexing blood back into his wrists. ‘You coming up or what?’
I got the rest of the bags up to him, one by one. Pulleys and carabiners. Reef knots. Knots I hadn’t used for so long.
With my hand on Swifty’s blaze for luck, I said thank you, then started to climb. Hands on the rope, feet on the wall. All my blood in my fingertips. The ease of it, though. The space that seemed to spring between my feet and the water. This lifting in my chest.
‘You’re right,’ I shouted up. ‘I’m fucking great at this.’ He laughed at me.
People must have done this before. Surely they must have. Davey dropped down a second rope for me, and just as I swung from one to the other, I saw a handprint of blood about a metre and a half to the side of my head.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’ Looked dry, at least.
As Davey pulled me up, my coat came open and I cut my belly on the brick. I lifted up my T-shirt. Four hot red stripes.
‘Jesus,’ Davey said, pulling his trainer free from some rusty razor wire. ‘Look at it.’