Lifesaving for Beginners

you?’
    ‘That was years ago.’
    ‘She told me. When we were at the trough. You’d gone to examine hooves or something.’
    ‘Anyway . . . I wanted to tell you, you know, just in case . . . ’
    ‘In case what?’ I said. I was impressed by my voice. It sounded like the voice of somebody who was thinking about what to have for dinner.
    ‘In case . . . you know . . . look, I just didn’t want you hearing about it from anybody else, OK?’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be fine?’
    We haven’t spoken since then. It’s just as well, really. The past is better left behind. It’s time to move on. That’s what Minnie says. And in the daytime, it’s fine. It really is. I have Ed and Minnie and my writer’s block and being nearly forty and the faint, lingering pain in my one hairline-fractured rib to distract me.
    It’s only at night.
    Four o’clock in the morning, in particular. Your resources are depleted at this hour. Your resolve is not what it should be. I let myself out onto the balcony and rummage in my dressing-gown pocket for a pack of cigarettes. My hands shake and it takes a while to get one of them lit.
    ‘You OK, baby?’
    I look round. There is no one here but me.

 
    It’s Friday night. Ant and Adrian are home for the weekend. They come home a lot now. They are twins, which means that they look the same and talk the same and they used to do a magic disappearing act when they were kids. Everyone believed it, including me. They’re even more identical than Fred and George Weasley. They are studying science in London, which happens to be the capital of the UK and England. Ten million people live in London. Ten million and two, now that Ant and Adrian are there.
    Damo thinks Ant and Adrian are cool. Probably because they have long hair and they don’t live at home anymore. Damo says that when he doesn’t have to live at home anymore, he’ll stay up all night and he’ll eat his dessert before his dinner and he’ll never eat one single green. That’s what he calls vegetables. Greens. Even carrots and cauliflowers.
    Tonight we are having beans on toast for our dinner. I don’t like beans so I am having toast. Adrian makes my favourite drink, which happens to be hot chocolate with two marshmallows on the top. If Mam was here she would make me eat the beans. Or she would make something else, like spaghetti Bolognese. I love spaghetti Bolognese. Spaghetti is made from flour and water. Miss Williams has a machine that can make spaghetti. I’d love a machine like that. Today, she asked us to write a story about anything we like so long as it had the words adventure and holiday and storm in it. She likes getting us to write long stories so she can text her boyfriend during the class. Damo says he’s read her messages and there’s lots of sexy talk in them, but I don’t know if that’s true.
    I wrote about me and Mam going on holiday to Spain. That bit is true. We really did go on holiday to Spain last year. In the story, I said we sailed there and there was a big storm one night and we got tossed overboard and we would have drowned if it hadn’t been for my lifesaving, because I was able to rescue everybody, even Mam. That’s not true. We went to Spain in an aeroplane. There was no storm but it rained one day and the waves were huge and Mam wouldn’t let me go swimming. Miss Williams liked my story. She says I’m going to be a writer when I grow up but I don’t want to be a writer. How boring is that? She also says that I might be a computer programmer on account of being the person she always asks to fix the computers at school whenever there’s a problem with one of them. She points at me and says, ‘Fix it, Bill.’ I like computers but I’m still not going to be a computer programmer, even if Bill Gates happens to be the richest man in the galaxy.
    No, what I’m going to be is a lifesaver. Maybe on a beach or in the swimming pool. So is Damo, even though he doesn’t go to lifesaving like me. I said I’ll teach him everything I know next summer, if Faith brings us to the pool. Or the beach, maybe.
    Faith and Ant and Adrian are drinking wine with their dinner. Adrian’s not really supposed to drink wine because of what happened when Dad told Mam about Celia. Adrian drank loads of wine that night and Dad couldn’t see out of his left eye for about a week afterwards, on account of the swelling.
    I drank wine once but I had to spit it out. It looks