Aidan Chambers

So the only way to go now was seaward. Cool. Unpeopled. What Barry (he who became it) called ‘the escape route’.

Good old happy-go-lucky Spike was in school that day with exams still to sit. I had crewed for him once or twice, cack-handedly. He only took me out, I think, because for some reason he thought I was good for a laugh. And I liked him because he is one of those people you never have to worry about. He’s always in trouble at school because he won’t wear anything but raggy jeans and a scruffy shirt. Sometimes I think his blood must be laced with anti-freeze because he wears the same outfit summer and winter, no matter how cold the weather gets. But there are other kids who dress worse than he does and who don’t get into as much bother. I think he does because he is one of those kids who exude sex. His flesh is somehow more fleshy than other people’s. Girls take one look at him and tremble at the sight. In the right mood I tremble a bit myself. On Spike a crummy shirt and well-worn jeans only serve to emphasize his sexiness. I think he knows it too. He certainly takes advantage of everything going. And that just gets adults, especially teachers, even more riled. He’d been up in front of the Head five times that summer term already, ostensibly because of the way he was dressed.

Well, that day last June Spike was sweating it out in the exam room. And I didn’t think he’d mind if I helped myself to his Tumble and gave myself a free sail while I did my thinking. I’d never single-handed anything more than a beach cushion before, but what the hell, I thought, it couldn’t be that difficult. The weather was calm—a steady breeze not strong enough to blow a castaway ice-cream wrapper along the prom, the sun bright and hot, the sea no more than chuckling. The tide was on the flood but the water was still shallow enough for me to wade out to Tumble if I went now. What harm could I do?

I quickly decided single-handed sailing was a doddle. Maybe I should get a dinghy of my own. I lounged back complacent against the transom, stretched my legs so the sun could dry my wet jeans. Master of the con, captain of the lonesome bridge, I steadied the thrusting bow on a point just seaward of the pierhead and let myself be carried slap-and-splash against the tide towards the level horizon.

Not that the horizon meant freedom and empty space, for the sea before me was all Thames estuary. But everyone had warned me what a treacherous tideway it was, a trap of confused currents and looming inattentive cargo boats. As safe for an incompetently handled sailing dinghy as an urban motorway at rush hour is for a kid on a tricycle. But I would turn back, I promised myself, before life got too hairy. All I wanted was a chance to sit back and think for a while. Alone.

In fact, one of the things I was thinking as I floated down the river in Tumble was that when it came to my career everyone I met seemed to think s/he was an expert who knew better than I possibly could know myself just what I should and should not do with my life. I even formulated a useful scientific principle out of this experience. I freely offer it to everyone who finds him/herself in a similar predicament. Thus: The confidence with which all and sundry foist their careers advice on to you varies in inverse proportion to the adviser’s own success in his/her chosen occupation.

Or, as my father puts it: Them as says most knows least.

One thing I had decided. I would take a summer job.

Thus was my mind preoccupied as I cruised wantonly on the opaque Thames. (Sea and sand at sunny Southend? I ask you! Mud and metabolic liquefaction washed away by daily doses of tidal North Sea salt more likely.) The sun stiffened my jeans as the Thames water’s mono-sodium glutamates dried out. I felt like I was wearing paralysed treacle.

I slipped my jeans off, treading them into the bottom of the boat. Underneath I had on only a pair of red jockey briefs with fetching white trim, but who was around to get excited?

Correction: I was tanned almost all over.) Of course this is nothing exceptional in a macho-spa like Southend. (Being tanned I mean. Or, come to think of it, being proud of it too.) But my normal skin colour till then had been somewhat on the pale side of chickenbreast white, so I used to keep all but my extremities hidden from the public gaze. I even used to wear a track suit for gym class if I could get away with it so as to avoid unseemly comments about my spectral hue.

Of course if we were lucky enough to avoid that fate, a worse lay in store. Beyond the pier stretched the real and vasty North Sea. I was not yet tired enough of life, I decided, to wish for a trip into that certain grave. Death I was interested in; being dead I was not

A head of streaming jet-black hair above a broad and handsome face split by a teasing grin atop a tidy body, medium height, with the build and frame that can dress in worn and weather-bleached blue-jean shirt and pants as if in this year’s flashiest marine gear.

Enter Barry Gorman, eighteen years one month. Further details throughout what follows. This is he who becomes it. The Body.

In his yellow flasher, he was grinning, and holding up for my inspection one pair of dripping jeans.

Mine. Like me, lost overboard during the troubles.

Further details throughout what follows. This is he who becomes it. The Body.

In his yellow flasher, he was grinning, and holding up for my inspection one pair of dripping jeans.

Mine. Like me, lost overboard during the troubles.

8/That image is on instant replay in my head.

It was the beginning; and the beginning of his end.

9/‘Yours?’ Barry shouts.

I nod, resigned to humiliation.

‘Need any help?’

I look helplessly around.

‘Get her upright. I’ll tow you ashore.’