“I don’t want her to know I’m looking at them,” I say.
“Why?”
Her cheek has a red handprint on it. I can still feel the sting of it on my own skin. The anger that burns my insides turns to something else, something heavier.
“Because she’d look at them with me, and then she’d start crying again.”
Melody shrugs. “Why do you want to look at them anyway?”
“Dunno.” I sit on the bed beside her. “To see if I remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Falling in,” I say. “Drowning. What it felt like.”
She takes my hand in hers. “But you didn’t fall in. I did.”
“But I am he—”
“—as you are me. I know.”
We sit quiet for a while. Her fingers aren’t warm or cold on mine. They’re just there. I ask, “Do you remember what it felt like? When you fell in. When you drowned.”
“No,” she says.
“You’d think you’d remember something like that.”
“Well, I don’t,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because I am he—”
“—as you are me—”
“—and we are always together.”
Those aren’t the real words, but it doesn’t matter. They’re still true.
Quiet again. Then I say, “Sorry for hitting you.”
“S’all right,” she says. She leans close to me. “Do you want to go to the river now?”
“Yeah,” I say.
I peek into the living room. Mum is lying on the couch, her breath raspy in her throat. A bottle of red wine is open on the table, a mostly empty glass beside it. I leave her there and close the front door as quietly as I can. The garden gate squeaks. Inside the house, Angus barks like he does at the postman. I know if he wakes Mum, she’ll just shout at him to shut up before she rolls over and goes back to sleep.
I go to the end of our road, turn back into the Crescent, then into the Ballynahone estate. The houses here are smaller than ours, newer, and uglier. I’ve been beaten up here a couple of times. Today it’s all right, though, because most of the kids are at school. Except the ones who mitch off, but they aren’t around either.
There’s a playground down some concrete steps. Mum used to take me here when I was younger. She says I’m too old for swings and slides now.
The Folly is on the other side of the playground. You have to open the gate and go through. A path leads down into the trees. Soon, you can’t see the houses, only the brown and grey trunks, and the leaves, still green. Conkers, hidden in their shells, lie on the ground. I kick at them as I walk. Some of them I stamp on. Like little skulls crushed under my feet.
The river cuts through our side of town. It used to be bigger. It carved a bowl out of the earth, Dad told me, and that’s where the trees grew. The ground slopes down towards the water until you reach the gravel path at its bank. Today, there isn’t much here. Just a stream. It smells of chemicals, and suds clump on the surface, foaming around the stones that poke up out of the water. Dad told me there used to be fish here. Tiny ones called sticklebacks, he used to catch them in buckets when he was a kid, but they’re all gone now.
Melody walks behind me.
“Are you going to that place?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say.
I walk towards the bridge. Halfway across, I stop and look over the railing. I see a wheel off a bike gathering mud and weeds. Rusty beer cans and plastic bags. Next big rainfall, when it turns from a dirty stream back into a proper river, the rubbish will be washed away. Like old memories.
“Come on,” Melody says.
I follow her across the bridge to the gravel path on the other side. She stays ahead of me. The ground dips up and down. We pass the picnic area with its benches and burnt patch in the grass. Where the path cuts closest to the river, there are fences of wood and wire. Melody stops at one.
I put my hands on the fence. Look over. There’s a drop on the other side, straight down into the water. Even if there wasn’t enough water to drown in, you’d break your head on the stones. I lean a little farther.
I imagine my head hitting the stones, going blind from the pain and the shock of it, warm things spilling out.
Dad says imagination is a curse. Picturing the worst horrors you can think of, then writing them down. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to write anything anymore.
The water moves like a fat snake.
“It was summertime when you fell in,” I say.
“Was it?”
I imagine what it felt like. Slipping, falling away. A hand holding my hand, then not, then down into the water.
“I think it must have been cold,” I say. “Even if it was summer.”
And how fast the water. Swept away, just like that. They found the little body half a mile downstream, snagged on fallen branches.
“Why don’t we remember?” I ask.
“Maybe we were too young,” Melody says. “Or maybe we don’t want to remember.”
“Maybe,” I say.
I know Melody isn’t real. Not real in the way Mum and Dad are, or even Angus. I know she lives in my head. I know the real Melody I talk to has never been, never grew up like that, never learned to talk and run and hit and bite and all the things she does.
But still, there she is. And she is we and we are all together.
Melody stands close. “I think what Mum says isn’t true.”
“What?” I ask.
“About you and me.”
“What about you and me?” I ask.
“About you being me.”
I don’t answer. I look at the water, the fat snake.
“What if you’re not me?” she asks. “What if I’m not you?”
“Shut up,” I say.
“What if you’re just you and nobody else?”
“Fucking shut up,” I say. Loud enough so my voice comes back to me through the trees.
“I think she didn’t slip,” Melody says. “I think I didn’t fall.”
“Stop it,” I say.
“I think she carried me down the bank,” Melody says. “I think she brought me down there, and she put me in the water.”