In the wet weather, when it had been raining for many weeks – gossamer curtains of rain then thudding downpours of rain – a pond would form itself outside the gate of our school. It was a dirty thing, a sullen brown disc. There it would stand, not far from our low redbrick school building, as all around lay the low marshy fields: all sulky bogs, shivering hedges, the melancholy of black ploughed earth, the deep green conservatism of the ground that was unturned.
As I grip my pen, as I look back across the vault of so many years, I see myself leaving the school one late September afternoon. I see myself walking towards a bunch of lads gathered by the pond. There were six; I drifted up to the little group. The day was clammy, but there was no rain; lazy clouds of mist hung around the fields, drifted from the boys’ mouths as they chattered. I reached the group’s edge – the boys’ faces acknowledged I was there: a twitch of cheeks, a flick of the eyes. I just stood and listened as the stench of deep sludge and rotten matter wafted up from the pool. One kid – a brown-haired lad with glasses and an infuriating face called Dennis Stubbs – was instructing the others. His arm was back, his elbow bent. He held a stone in his raised hand.
‘You watch!’ Stubbs was saying. ‘Watch how I chuck it. I’ll teach you all to skim.’
‘You can’t skim a stone, Stubbsy,’ a lad called Richard Johnson said. ‘You can’t do owt right, can you? That’s what Mr Weirton told us.’
‘I don’t care what he said,’ Stubbs replied. ‘Just watch me do it.’
Forlorn objects peeped above the murky, almost suspicious waters of the pond. There were tin cans, half a football, the upturned wing and bulbous undercarriage of a toy plastic aeroplane – a prize I wouldn’t have minded rescuing from that dark water and slime, if it were not for some vague fear of sinking mud, of visions of my last bubbles of breath breaking on the pond’s surface.
Stubbs looked towards the plane, eyes narrowing. Before anyone could stop him, he flung his stone. A flat blade, it spun over the water. Gravity made it dip; it hit the stagnant pool, sent up two reluctant waves of heavy liquid and sped on towards its target. Two more bounces, two more resentful splashes and the stone struck the hull of the plane. The flying machine shifted, flopped onto its back and – with a gurgle – disappeared under the water.
‘Stubbsy,’ a kid said, ‘be careful! Weirton’s still in the school – he might see us!’
At the mention of that name, my heart knocked an extra beat; worry tinted all our faces. Neck muscles tightened; lips were pulled back; eyes protruded. Dennis Stubbs soon recovered himself.
‘Look how scared you all are!’ he said, high voice mocking. ‘You’re just a bunch of scaredy cats!’
‘We’re not scared!’ said Richard Johnson. ‘But Weirton could come out dead easily! And someone might see us from the pub and tell him.’
The pub, another low redbrick building on the pond’s other side, was a mysterious citadel, a fortress of the adults. Fumes of beer were breathed out by the occasional swing of its door – an enticing earthily sour smell. Lights and laughter would stampede out with them before turning and rushing in with the door’s backward sweep. Could adult eyes from the pub spy, betray us?’
‘There’s no one in,’ Stubbs knowledgeably said, tossing another flat stone in his hand. ‘It’s closed. And Weirton’s doing his marking or he’s on the bog or something – won’t be out for another ten minutes.’
We all laughed at the wickedness and irreverence of Stubbs’s words, our imagined reactions of Weirton to them. Stubbs whisked his arm, let go of his stone. It bounced over the pond, pinged off a rusty can. The impact uprooted it from its grave in the sludge. It tottered, tipped, filled with water, sank. Stubbs’s confident display inspired the boys.
‘Let’s have a go! Let’s have a go!’
The lads flapped and bounced, searched the ground for pebbles, snatched up flat stones, barged and pushed one another. Richard got one, hurled it over the water. It hit the football – in a lethargic roll, it heaved up its muddy side, flopped a few inches farther from the bank. Shoved to the edge of the scrum, I hadn’t got a stone. But a bombardment of skimming objects soon flew across the water, ricocheting off cans, directing the football around the filthy circle.
‘Wait!’ someone shouted. ‘What about Marcus?’
Hands froze; stones were dropped; all the boys gasped; dismay scrunched faces – how could we have forgotten Marcus?
‘Do you … think he’ll … be all right?’ Johnson asked.
‘After all that I doubt it,’ Stubbs said with a sneer.
‘Are you sure it’s true?’ another boy said.
‘Jonathon Browning’s brother says it is!’ I chipped in. ‘He says he’s seen him!’
‘You can’t trust those Brownings.’ Another boy turned to face me. ‘They’re a bad lot my mum says – a bit like you Watsons.’
‘But he says he’s seen him!’ I insisted. ‘He’s seen his head all muddy, sticking up above the water!’
Eyes darted; mouths fell; faces looked down.
‘Do you think he’s … he’s really in there?’ someone asked.
‘Where else could he be?’ Stubbs said. ‘He disappeared suddenly and we haven’t seen him anywhere else, have we? And the grown-ups always tell us not to go near the pond in case we drown.’
This convinced the lads. Poor Marcus now dwelled in the pond’s depths. We stood silent, thoughtful for some seconds.
‘What about our skimming game?’ a lad asked.
‘Well,’ said Richard, ‘he’s deep down in the pool. He won’t stick his head up if he’s got any sense. If we just skim on the surface, it should be OK.’
The shore came alive with the motion of bodies and soon we were all chucking. Boys took up sideways stances like classical athletes, unleashed the discuses of their stones, but they were not under any Olympian blue sky – a low slab of tombstone grey hung in the English heavens. The stones whizzed and splashed. Then Stubbs strained to lift a huge rock, almost a boulder. Like a shot putter, he held his weapon against his neck, performed an anxious shimmy with his feet and heaved his stone over the pool. It spun in a heavy arc before it dropped in a curve and landed on top of the football. A crown of water was hurled up – spikes and jewels of liquid dirt – and both stone and football vanished. The water slopped back down, but several bubbles appeared on its swaying skin – bubbles I guessed spiralled up from the pond’s bed.
‘It’s Marcus!’ a lad shouted. ‘Look – he’s breathing!’
We ourselves breathed a gasp, stood with down-stretched arms, frozen feet ready to run. A few more spheres of air gurgled up. The water shifted and rippled.
‘Oh no!’
‘Look at that!’
The pond’s surface was punctured. A head appeared, anointed with mud and green slime.
‘It’s him! It’s Marcus!’
‘Arrgh!’
‘Run!’
We sprinted past the pub, it’s beery curiosity now forgotten. A few lads hived off who lived on that building’s other side. The rest of us powered down our patch of town’s main street. I ran, catching gulps of fear with my juddering breath, not daring to look back, but driving my legs forward. My heart bashed my ribcage. On I dashed, as grateful companions on either side reached the sanctuary of their houses, beyond whose thresholds no outer malevolence, however powerful, could pass. But I lived right on the edge of our district, which itself lay on the edge of our small town Emberfield. I laboured past the smart semis, the neat front gardens, past the garden gnomes – lurking around concrete toadstools or fishing in ornamental ponds, past the fake wishing wells my parents had to stop me casting money into. On I ran – a stitch ached and spread, but I forced my feet, my throat spasming at the thought of slimy mud-drenched arms grasping my ankles. At last, right on the edge of town, I made it to my home.