‘Just a tiny bit,’ I said. ‘Like a really tiny bit.’
The next couple of hours unfolded like a beautiful dream. We watched the sky until all the different colours had consolidated to black. We talked remarkable nonsense about the meaning of existence. We giggled until we hiccupped.
At one point Phin said, ‘You’ll have to come, sometimes, when I move to Hammersmith. You’ll have to come and stay.’
‘Yes. Yes please.’
And then at some other point I said, ‘What would you do if I kissed you?’
And Phin laughed and laughed and laughed until he got a coughing fit. He was doubled over with mirth and I watched him with a blind smile, trying to fathom the meaning of his response.
‘No,’ I said, ‘really? What would you do?’
‘I’d push you off this roof,’ he said, still smiling. Then he spread his fingers apart and said, ‘Splat.’
I made myself laugh. Ha-ha. So funny.
Then he said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘And go where?’
‘I’ll show you. Follow me.’
And I did follow him. Stupid, stupid boy that I was. I followed him back on to the attic landing and out of a window and then down the side of the house in some dreadful awe-inducing, nausea-inspiring act of daredevil insanity.
‘What are you doing?’ I kept asking, my fingernails dug into bare brick, my trouser legs breaking apart on juts of masonry. ‘Where are we going?’
‘It’s my secret route!’ he said, looking up at me with wild eyes. ‘Let’s go to the river! No one will know!’
By the time we landed flat-footed on the lawn I was bleeding from three different places, but I didn’t care. I followed him as he stepped through the shadows to a gate that I had no idea existed at the foot of our garden. Suddenly, Narnia-like, we were in someone else’s garden and then Phin grabbed my hand and hoiked me round two corners, through the magical gloom of Chelsea Embankment, across four lanes of traffic and on to the riverside. Here he let my hand drop. For a moment we stood, silently, side by side, and watched gold and silver worms wriggling across the surface of the water. I kept staring at Phin, who looked more beautiful than ever in the dark, moving light.
‘Stop staring at me,’ he said.
I stared at him harder.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Stop staring.’
But I stared harder still.
And then he pushed me, with both his hands, pushed me hard and into the black water and then I was under and my ears filled with echoing bubbles, and my clothes became heavy and attached themselves to my skin and I tried to scream but swallowed instead and my hands felt for the river wall and my legs kicked against thick, gloopy nothing. And then my eyes opened and I saw faces: a constellation of blackened faces circling mine and I tried to talk to them, tried to ask them to help me but they all turned away and then I was coming up, a pain around my wrist, Phin’s face above, dragging me up the stone steps and on to the bank.
‘You bloody loony,’ he said and laughed, as though I was the one who had chosen to fall into the Thames, as though it was all just high jinks.
I shoved him. ‘You fucking bastard!’ I screamed, my not-yet-broken voice sounding shrill and unbearable. ‘You absolute fucking bastard!’
I stormed past him, across four lanes of traffic, causing someone to hoot their horn at me, and to the front door of the house.
Phin chased me and approached me at the front door, breathlessly.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
I should have stopped there and then, I really should. I should have taken a deep breath and evaluated the situation and made a different decision. But I was so engorged with rage, not born just of being pushed into the freezing, filthy Thames, but of years of Phin blowing hot and cold at me, of giving me titbits of attention when it was in his interests to do so and totally ignoring me when it wasn’t. And I looked at him, and he was dry and beautiful and I was wet and ugly, and I turned and very firmly pressed my fingertip into the doorbell.
He stared at me. I could see him deciding whether to stay or to run. But a second later the door opened and it was David and he looked from me to Phin and back again and his shoulders rose up and his mouth tightened and he looked like a caged animal about to pounce. Very slowly and thunderously he said, ‘Get inside now.’
Phin turned then and began to run, but his father was taller than him, fitter than him; he caught up with him before Phin had even made it to the corner of the street and felled him to the pavement. I watched with my chin tipped up defensively, my teeth chattering inside my child skull, my arms wrapped around my body.
My mother appeared at the door. ‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked, peering over the top of my head. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’