save me. I wanted to go to heaven with Falcon and get away from Mum forever. That’s why I took the handbrake off when she got out of the car to have a cigarette. I knew that when she went into that house with the scary dogs tied up outside and blinds all down, then when she came out again with her eyes looking like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, I knew she had used Falcon’s birthday money to buy her drugs. I knew we weren’t going to The Warehouse to buy Falcon’s PlayStation. But he didn’t know that.
The man who pulled me out of the car made me sit on the grass next to all the swan poo. He told me to stay where I was and he dived straight back into the water again to try to get Falcon. But his arms came up through all the weed and then his head popped back up out of the water and he was gasping in big gulps of air but he didn’t have Falcon with him.
Mum came and put a blanket around me that smelt like a dog and she sat beside me like she didn’t notice all the swan poo and we watched all the other people diving into the water. All those people scared the swans away. I heard people say ‘She’s in shock’, but I didn’t know if they were talking about me or Mum. And then ages later when the ambulance was there, two men came out of the river with the water pouring off them and one of the men was carrying Falcon in his arms and he had green slime all over him and he was white and very wet. They tried to push the water out of his stomach with their hands.
Afterwards, when I was in the hospital, it was nice. Everyone wore shoes that squeaked on the floor. The nurses were kind to me and gave me green jelly cut up into squares and strawberry ice cream. They wouldn’t tell me if Falcon was dead but I knew he was and then later Dad came in with his eyes all red and told me the doctors hadn’t been able to save him.
When Mum sat beside me on the grass with all the swan poo and put the smelly dog blanket around me she made me promise never to tell anyone it was me who took the handbrake off. She said I got it wrong. She said I hadn’t done that. She said I’d imagined it. Mum said that she had killed Falcon, that it was her fault he was dead. And she was so sure about it. And in a funny way, I believed her.
Chapter 27
THURSDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2012
Despite the cool shuddering breeze that had blown up, all the windows of Salena’s BMW were wound down. Had Sunny done that so the car would fill up quicker? So it would sink faster? It wasn’t until I was halfway down the street that I could confirm it was indeed Sunny in the driver’s seat. Approaching as I was from behind the car, it took longer to identify Neo hunched down in the front passenger seat, his fine, blond curly-haired head coming only halfway up the seat. Four sneakered feet waggled on the dashboard. Both heads were bent over, their attention focused on something below the dashboard. The handbrake? Heart pounding, I slowed my step and listened for their voices above the hum of distant traffic and the plaintive honking of the black swans.
Justin had parked at the top of the street and reluctantly agreed to stay out of sight while I approached Salena’s car on foot. He knew it was safer for me to talk to Sunny but he hadn’t found it easy to trust me and from where I stood, halfway between his car and Salena’s, I could still see him pacing back and forth nervously. It was Justin who had guessed Sunny would come here. That he’d been right about it was a shock to me. I continued to walk slowly towards the car, conscious of the need to keep calm so as not to alarm either of them.
The BMW was parked at the bottom of the dead-end street, the nose of the car parked right over the footpath. A wide muddy lawn directly in front of the car sloped steeply down to the lake. Even from where I stood I could see the lake was alive with