She put her head down, and she didn’t look up until Jake’s voice finally cut through and she realised he’d been talking for a while.
‘See. Ella. Please look, honey. There they are. Okay? They’re on the kayaks and they’re fine.’
‘Can you see Sam?’ she demanded.
‘I can. I can see both boys. They’re both wearing lifejackets. They’re good kids. Ollie knows he isn’t allowed in the kayaks without a lifejacket on.’
Ella dared to look beyond the hair flopping in her eyes, while the exhausted haze of fear and exertion turned her legs to jelly.
They were less than a hundred metres from the dam. Close enough that now she’d stopped running she could hear Sam and Ollie talking, their excited voices carrying clearly. Ollie telling Sam about how he’d caught a huge marron once. ‘It had a hole under that rock right there …’
Ella put her hands on her knees and sucked in a few huge breaths. Then she put her hands on her hips and kept walking.
‘I thought you said Sam could swim?’ Jake said.
‘He’s been in a pool a couple of times with Erik. Not a dam on his own with no adults around.’
There was a gazebo built on the house-side of the dam that morphed into a short jetty jutting out over the water. The quad bike was parked in front of the gazebo. Two helmets gleamed in the sun, one slung over each handlebar.
‘How deep is it where they are?’ she asked Jake.
‘Pretty deep.’
Ella lurched into a run-jog.
Jake said, ‘Ella, look at them there; they’ll be more at risk of falling in if we burst in on them and scare them.’ But he started jogging too, keeping pace with her. ‘They’re just kids. Kids having fun. We were down here all the time every summer when I was a kid.’
‘It won’t be fun if one of them drowns.’
‘Ollie can swim.’
She rounded on him. ‘And Sam can’t. Not properly. I told you that. I never wanted him in the water. I never wanted to get back in the water myself. None of that matters now anyway.’
Ella got a foot on the gazebo decking and flung her voice as far as she could.
‘Sam Erik Brecker, you paddle that thing back here right now!’
Two boys’ heads flung up, and Ella could see Sam’s face, all what’s Mum gonna embarrass me about now? She didn’t care if she embarrassed him. All she wanted was to have him safe.
He jabbed his kayak paddle into the water, wobbled as he cut it too fast and the oar sliced free before he was ready. Sam swapped the oar to the other side and pushed through the water, and the nose of his kayak clipped Ollie’s and made both boys’ kayaks rebound.
Ollie laughed, put the tip of his oar to Sam’s kayak and pushed it away, but the momentum made Sam lose balance.
Ella toed her right sandal off, then the left.
Sam slapped at the water with his oar.
Ella stripped her blue blouse up and over her head and let it fall from her hands. ‘How deep is it at the end of the jetty?’ she asked Jake. ‘Deep enough to dive?’
‘He’s wearing a lifejacket.’
‘Is it deep enough to dive, Jake?’ she said, dead calm.
His breath hissed out on a frustrated, ‘Yes.’
Ella ran the length of the jetty and leapt, suspended for a second above the silent surface. She cut her arms hard out in front, wrapped her hands in a racing dive, arched her back, looked for the centre of the dam where Sam was going over, going in, and Ella broke the surface of the water like a torpedo.
* * *
The kid was about to get a dunking.
Unlike Ella, Jake had confidence in the lifejacket. He was more worried about losing the bloody oar. He was more worried about Ella, quite frankly. He’d never seen her panic like that, and he didn’t understand it.
‘Ollie, grab the oar, mate,’ Jake yelled.
Sam came gasping to the surface, shaking hair out of his eyes. He flung an arm out for the overturned kayak, got it, hauled himself across it up to the armpit and hung there like a drowning man might cling to a log.
Ollie’s white teeth flashed in a belly laugh. ‘Suck it, Sambo. Wetcha pants, didja?’
‘You’re the one who sucks, loser, you pushed me in,’ Sam said, bedraggled, indignant, but otherwise fine and laughing too. Sam scooped water in the hand that wasn’t holding on to the kayak, and tried to send a huge splash as far as Ollie.
Ollie retaliated by splashing water with the oar, and Sam got another dunking.
‘Wow, Sam. Your mum can swim,’ Ollie said.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your mum. Look. She can really swim.’
Sam turned to see Ella coming like a mother whale on a mission from God, and his eyes went wide as saucers.
And shit, did Jake agree with Ollie.
Ella was magnificent. Ella was amazing. Jake stood high and dry on the last board of the jetty, admiring the figure cutting through the water, part dolphin, part flying fish in a black bra and short shorts, and she was there in a flash. His dam wasn’t the size of the new one Pickles was building, but it sure wasn’t small, and she got to the boys in a flash, flipping the kayak right way up, boosting Sam into the seat.
‘Are you okay, Sammy? You promise?’ She said it over and over as the poor kid kept saying, ‘Yeah, Mum. Yeah, Mum. Mum, I’m fine.’
‘Sam can’t swim, Ollie. He shouldn’t have gone into the dam without me or Jake here.’
‘Mum,’ Sam hissed. ‘I can so swim. I did the swimming lessons at school.’
‘Not well enough to be out on the middle of a dam,’ Ella said, clearly not getting the boy’s message.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to push him in,’ Ollie said, and Jake could tell by the way Ollie’s teeth stopped flashing
