So, mandatory jollity with the Buntin’s holidaymakers until ten… and after that she was expected to party with all the other Blues until midnight. She didn’t know how they did it. She was nineteen and ought to be able to keep up, but she really wasn’t cut out for all the drinking and smoking and shagging that was just normal after-hours life for most of her workmates.
‘SNAP! SNAP! CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!’ sang out Ellie and Nettie as they approached Jungle Water World. Not long now and Ellie could get down to the last hour of mixing and mingling. She and Nettie would be vying to hang out with little Tyler’s hot dad for a bit, while Tyler’s mum tucked him into bed.
Ellie had to shove the pool door open. Martin must have forgotten to wedge it like he usually did. He normally liked to get up on his high lifeguard chair in time to wave the kids through, but the chair was empty tonight.
‘ALLIGATORS, NOT SO LEAPY! ALLIGATORS, GETTING SLEEPY!’ Ellie and Nettie heavily implied in song, Ellie walking backwards and waving her charges in.
There was some extra squeaking from two little girls nearest to her. Rosie-Mae and Blossom were shouting, ‘LOOK! IT’S ALL PINK!’
Others were joining in, too, thrilled at the sudden change of water colour, as if it had been magicked up just for them. Ellie blinked and felt something thud in her throat. The water wasn’t meant to be pink. It wasn’t meant to be red, either, but it looked red, up in the corner where the main pool flowed across a waterfall of tiles and into the Rapid River. The red faded to fuchsia, and the fuchsia to pale rose.
Shit, thought Ellie. She started leaping up and down, waving her arms madly. ‘HEY!’ she shrieked. ‘WATCH THIS! Let’s see if I can clap my hands over my head and walk out of the other door BACKWARDS!’
Some of the kids looked at her, but most were still staring at the pink pool.
‘WATCH MEEEE!’ Ellie heard the desperation in her own voice. In the corner of her eye she could see a trousered leg floating amid that reddest part of the pool, just protruding from the corner, beneath a palm tree which overhung the Rapid River run-off. Her need to keep the children’s eyes away from it was battling with her own instinct to stare — to work out if it was real. Suddenly, she stopped, just as Nettie arrived in the doorway at the end of the Alligator March. ‘AND ALLIGATORS — TURN AROUND!’ Ellie yelled, gesturing wildly at a puzzled Nettie. ‘BACK THE WAY WE CAME!’
At this point, there was a loud bubbling sound and the Rapid River suddenly started to gush. It shouldn’t have happened — the rapids machinery ran on a timer every ten minutes and by now it was meant to be switched off. The trousered leg and its black-shoed foot began to bob up and down and move across the pink pool. Ellie felt the thudding in her throat increase in frequency.
‘EVERYONE! TICKLE NETTIE!’ she shrieked, going for cheeky and landing on terrified. Still, she nearly did it. She nearly pulled it off as two dozen kids turned to mob poor, baffled Nettie. But Rosie-Mae and Blossom could not be distracted for quite long enough.
They turned back to look again, just as Martin, glassy-eyed and leaking a crimson ribbon from his slit throat, floated across the pool.
When the screaming started, Ellie couldn’t even tell whether or not she was joining in.
2
Her head was abruptly jerked back.
Then she was violently propelled forward, the belt cutting into her skin.
She thought maybe she was going to die. Here, in this metal coffin which smelt of 1979.
‘Jeeezuz! Francis, can you stop stamping on the bloody brake at the last minute? You need to brake way earlier than that!’
Her brother huffed and rolled his eyes, but he had asked for this, so he couldn’t really give her a hard time. ‘I am braking early,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it takes a while for anything to happen.’
Kate Sparrow gripped the seatbelt a little tighter and watched the car ahead pull away into the distance, wisely shaking off Francis’s unintended tailgating. ‘Well, maybe that’s because instead of buying a new Nissan or VW, you irrationally went out and snapped up a piece of retro junk. ‘
The gunshot blast scared rooks out of nearby trees. Kate jolted in her seat and caught her breath, and Francis pulled the Ford over to the side of the road and killed the engine, looking stricken. ‘Sorry, sis,’ he muttered. ‘It does that sometimes. Really didn’t mean to trip your PTSD.’
‘No… no it’s fine,’ muttered Kate, through gritted teeth. ‘I mean… it’s a good six months now since I got shot; why would your backfiring 1970s shitwagon be a problem?’
‘Look - it’s got a few issues, but it’s a collector’s item,’ he said, patting the wheel as if defending its feelings. ‘These babies really hold their value — getting it for ten grand was an absolute steal.’
Kate opened the passenger door and ducked awkwardly out of her brother’s bargain buy. It was mercifully cooler out here. Another charming original feature of the Ford Capri was its total lack of air conditioning. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of rapeseed blossom and nettles. The long, flat road they were travelling stretched away between fields of almost neon yellow, hemmed with green, under a bright blue sky. Apart from the offensive mustard hue of the Capri at its centre, the rest of the scene could have been painted on a plate
