Kiss My Name Read online

  It was probably the rainfall that woke the girls up. By quarter past six, they were out of bed and standing next to ours, looking down on us and begging for breakfast. I am not a morning person and the Hock we’d had the previous evening was not helping me spring out of bed, so Deidre clambered up and made them some cereal. We knew from experience that it was a wasted effort telling our children to go back to bed, like the Grand Old Duke of York’s men, once they were up, they were up. I nodded back off. I remember having a pleasant little dream about Linda Lusardi until I felt a gentle rocking. It was Joanne trying to wake me up.

  “When are we going, Dad? Sarah and I want to get moving.”

  “Joanne, it’s pouring down out there, love.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Dad, Monty’s wet already. He lives in the water.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the boat, love, I was thinking about us.”

  “Mum said she’ll get our Kagools.”

  “Did she now?”

  “Please, Dad.”

  “OK, Joanne, just give me a few more minutes and I’ll come and start him up.”

  “Thanks Dad!”

  Joanne scuttled off excitedly to tell her big sister the news. Despite my mild protests, I was delighted that regardless of the bad weather, they were still looking forward to a day on the canal. If it had been raining in Devon, I was sure they wouldn’t have begging us to go down to the beach in the pouring rain at seven in the morning. This was further evidence that I had chosen the perfect holiday.

  Just after the seven locks of Johnson’s Hillock, we were heading towards Chorley in a place we later discovered was called Whittle-le-Woods when it happened. I was at steering the tiller at the rear when Sarah shouted back.

  “Dad, you need to slow down, there’s someone swimming in the water.”

  “Where?”

  “Up there on the starboard side.”

  I am not sure if there is a port and starboard side for narrow boats, there aren’t many ports on the Leeds-Liverpool canal, but it added to the sense of adventure calling the sides the port and starboard side. I looked forward and could see something, bobbing up and down in the water. I couldn’t see if it was an animal or a child, but you could tell whatever it was, was too small to be an adult. It was ten o’clock in the morning in the pouring rain, why would anyone be swimming in a canal in this weather? I pulled on the engine leaver so we could slow down and shifted the tiller to the right so we could veer left of whatever it was.

  Deidre was with the girls trying to communicate with whatever it was, trying to tell it to get out the way. All of a sudden, there was real panic in her voice.

  “Geoff! Geoff! I think it’s a child, Geoff! His head’s down. Quickly!”

  Nothing happens quickly in a narrow boat. It doesn’t travel quickly. If you pull the tiller, it doesn’t react instantaneously. When we thought split seconds may be important, we were in a vehicle that did things at its own, very slow pace.

  “Geoff, hurry!” Deidre shouted.

  “I can’t bloody hurry, woman. It won’t go much faster than this. I don’t want to hit him, either.”

  We were all panicking. Sarah and Joanne were anxiously looking at Deidre and me, hoping we could rescue this floating creature, whatever it may be. I could see the hair on the back of its head, as it was face down, it had a white t-shirt on, Deidre was right. It was a child, definitely a child. I manoeuvred ‘Monty’ so we were alongside him. He was now on our ‘starboard side’.

  “Oh my God, Geoff! Get him out from the back. I won’t be able to lift him.”

  At the front of ‘Monty’, there was plenty of room on deck for the whole family, but at the back, there was very little room for anyone other than the person steering the boat. My initial reaction was to think it would be far wiser for me to stop all power, move through the cabin and lift whatever it was out at the front end. My wife is an intelligent human being though and I think her decision was made, not just taking into consideration the floating object, but also her two young daughters looking nervously on beside her. With adrenalin pumping through my veins, I was purely focused on retrieving what we thought was a boy out of the water and saving him. I think, at this point, Deidre had realised he was beyond saving. She is a protective mother and Deidre did not want me lifting a body out of the water right next to her children.

  Once the figure was alongside the back of the boat, I knew it was a child. I put my hands into the water under its torso and lifted. It was not heavy at all. I angled it around so it faced me. It was a boy, a young boy. There were no signs of breathing but my immediate thought was that he did not look dead, his body was obviously cold and wet, but not decomposed in any way, I thought there was hope. I thought I was going to save him.

  “Girls, stay at the front! Deidre, come through. It’s a boy, Deidre. I need you to help me.”

  I had done first aid courses when I had been a Cub Scout and done a further course at Pearl, when I had volunteered to be a first aider. I knew how to give mouth to mouth. The videos we had watched always resulted in a happy ending. When I lay him down on the cabin floor though, there was a light white froth that was coming from his mouth and nostrils. I checked there were no ‘foreign objects’ in his mouth, as they told us to at work, tilted his head back, then started breathing into his mouth every few seconds, whilst holding his nose. I could hear Deidre’s footsteps coming through.

  “What are you doing, Geoff?”

  I didn’t answer, there wasn’t time to. If there had been time, I’d have asked ‘what the bloody hell it looked like I was doing?’

  I put my hand on his neck to feel for a pulse, there wasn’t one. This scared me as I had always been the best at finding a pulse on the course. I checked again, definitely no pulse, I began to administer CPR.

  “Geoff, the poor kids dead, love. You aren’t going to save him. There’s no-one around. He won’t have just fallen in now. He’ll have been there all night. One of us needs to go and call the police.”

  “Deidre, I am not leaving this poor lad until we know we have tried everything,” I explained, as I started the chest compressions. I remembered the guidelines about putting your fingers between the nipples and start chest compressions quickly with about thirty compressions to two breaths.

  “I’ll rub the souls of his feet and you shout him, Geoff!”

  Deidre had remembered me teaching her CPR one evening after doing the course and had remembered bits I had forgotten. She had given up hope, but if I hadn’t, she was still going to support me. She removed his trainers, white and green Dunlop ones and his socks and rubbed his feet. I spoke to him.

  “Come on, lad, you’ve got so much to live for, son. You’ve got to pull through this. Come on! Wakey wakey! Don’t give up on us! If you can hear this, don’t give up on us! Please, come on! Come on!”

  Deidre spoke softly.

  “Geoff, you’ve tried, love. We got here too late. He’s dead.”

  I looked at his helpless little wet body on the floor of our narrow little cabin. I put my head in my hands and cried. All I could think about was his family. They were probably out searching for him now or sitting at home, praying for his safe return. They would still be living in hope. Hoping this little fellow would walk in and get a telling off and a grateful, relieved hug. Their worst fears were about to become their reality, they did not know this, but we did.

  For those moments, I had forgotten about our children.

  “Is everything OK, Dad?”

  Sarah had wandered through into the cabin.

  “No, Sarah, it’s not. Just keep away.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I’m afraid he is. Stay with your sister for now, Sarah. Your Mum will come through in a minute.”

  Sarah did as she was told. She did not want to be looking at a dead body, she knew it was the stuff of nightmares. We had no idea what to do with the body, so I just lifted off the floor and put it on one of the settees and then laid a cover over the poo
r boy’s face. I then left Deidre with the girls and went looking for a local house where I could ring the police from.

  An elderly couple in a small end terraced property allowed me to phone the police from theirs. The police were back at the narrow boat within twenty minutes and that afternoon, the poor mother and father of the boy identified his body. His name was Colin Strong, a ten year old local boy, who had been missing since the previous afternoon. How he came to be in the water is a mystery that twenty five years on, has never been solved.

  I never knew Colin. I never kicked a football with him, I never had a chat with him about school or ice cream or sweets, but I still think of him nearly every day. After our statements to the police, we headed straight back towards Silsden. Children are pretty resilient to a tragedy like that, so Sarah and Joanne still found time to laugh and smile, but it did affect them, not just on the rest of the holiday, but it made an imprint on the rest of their lives.

  Deidre and I did not attend the funeral. We did not feel it was our place to. I could dramatise it and say that it changed our lives but although you do keep a slightly closer eye on your children, kiss them and hug them a little more, thank God for small mercies more often, the emotional wound heals just to leave a tiny scar. He was not our child. For the Strong family, I am sure it was very different. They had two children until that day, now they only had one. Their grief must have been unbearable, must still be unbearable and I am sure the mystery surrounding his death makes it even harder to accept.

  NICKY – August 1986

  These days as an adult, I am the type of person who likes to find an answer to every question. If I am watching a film on DVD and there is a half familiar actor in it, I need to pause the film, Google the actor’s name then check out where I know them from. To me, every question should have an answer. The fact that some questions have answers that are beyond my comprehension drives me mad. Since my Mum died, when I was only a little girl, I have always been searching for answers to the big question about death.

  Where had my lovely Mum gone? Was she in some perfect heavenly place? Was she a ghost or had her existence ceased the moment she took her last breath on earth?

  Simon thinks once you die, you die. You just revert to what you were for the billions of years before you were born, nothing. To me though, that is still not enough of an answer. What does nothing look like? What colour is it? How is it possible to not feel, to not see, to not love, to not think? It is beyond my comprehension. It is impossible for me to think the same way as Simon. That once I die in this world, my soul and my spirit will disappear too. I don’t see that happening. Nor do I see Simon disappearing from my existence after death. Simon might not agree, but I am sure he is my soul mate and will be with me through eternity.

  As a child in the 1980s, the bond that Simon and I had was important to me, but I would not have suspected that I would now be describing him as my soul mate. There is a Gary Larson cartoon, or two cartoons, which depicts a boy in bed thinking over and over about whether a girl loves him and there is also a cartoon of a girl in bed, thinking about whether or not she likes ice cream. That cartoon perfectly sums up my romantic relationship with Simon back then. As children, he was desperate for our relationship to happen. I, on the other hand, was totally oblivious to him romantically. I loved him dearly but not in a romantic way.

  My Mum’s death happened at an early stage in my life, but in many ways, Simon’s brother, Colin’s death, hit me harder. The reason for this was guilt. I felt no guilt about my mother’s death, she was a sick lady and even at my tender age I understood that there was nothing that I could have done to make her better. Colin’s death was different. I knew my actions, encouraging Joey and Simon to come to see Top Gun with me, indirectly contributed to his death.

  Dad heard about Colin’s death on Red Rose radio. I was up in my room at the time, listening to records on my Frisco Disco.

  “Nicola, can you come down here, please!” he shouted from downstairs.

  I liked playing my records pretty loud, so I wasn’t sure if he had been shouting me for a while. I guessed from his stern tone that he probably had. I lifted the needle off the record and hurried downstairs. It was another rainy day, even wetter than the Top Gun afternoon, the previous day and as I ran down the stairs, I could hear the raindrops drumming against the windows. My Dad was in his study, he had a comfy chair in there, where he would often sit and listen to the radio or read books. They were usually gardening books. He has always been a green fingered man.

  Dad was, as expected, in his comfy chair. I was expecting a request to play my music a little more quietly, so Dad’s question seemed a little strange.

  “Nicola, your friend Simon, who is often around at Joey’s. What’s his surname?”

  “Strong. Why?”

  “I thought so. Does he have any brothers?”

  “Just one, Colin. I saw him yesterday, before we went to the cinema. He wouldn’t come because he wanted to play cricket. Why, Dad?”

  Dad stood up out of his comfy chair.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Nicola, but I’ve just heard on the radio that a boy’s body was found in the canal this morning, up near Whittle-le-Woods. He’s been named as Colin Strong. I think it must be your friend’s brother.”

  I didn’t say a word. For a few seconds, I just stared at him. Then I ran. I could hear Dad shouting after me,

  “Nicola! Nicola! Come back here this minute!”

  I ran out of the study, ran out the front door and I just kept running until I arrived at Simon’s house. I didn’t pause to put a waterproof on, so the dress I had been wearing, one of the many that Auntie Gill had chosen, was soon soaked through, but that did not matter one jot. I was hoping to see Colin, but if he wasn’t there and something had happened to him, I knew I needed to see Simon. I needed to see him, I needed to speak to him and I needed his forgiveness. Death seemed to follow me like a shadow and that scared me, but losing Simon’s friendship scared me more. I wasn’t sure if seeing Simon would solve the problem, but I knew sitting in my room listening to Five Star definitely wouldn’t. Maybe Dad had it wrong, maybe he hadn’t heard it right, maybe once I arrived at Simon’s house everything would be fine. I would be nicer to Colin from now on, I decided, up until now I hadn’t really made much of an effort.

  I was probably quite a spoilt little ten year old, being the only child of a widowed father, so had yet to learn qualities such as tact, diplomacy, discretion and empathy. I arrived at Simon’s doorstep thinking more about my own potential grief than that of Simon and his family. I put my finger on the doorbell and kept it pressed in for a few seconds. I knew the Strong’s had an orange Ford Escort estate, an old one, as I used to see Mr.Strong driving around with his ladders on the top or it would be parked at the bottom of a road and you would soon see him up the ladder somewhere whistling away. There was no car on the path now though, just puddles.

  Simon answered the door. He looked fine, not grief stricken or tearful, just fine. My Dad had made a huge mistake. Rather than feeling anxious, I now felt embarrassed, I had no idea what to say, so just stood there silently with water dripping off my nose and dress. My appearance seemed to go unnoticed with Simon.

  “Nicky, what are you doing here?”

  Simon said this without a trace of emotion. That struck me as odd. He had not been like that the day before at Top Gun. He had been speaking with such excitement. Doubts began to creep back.

  “My Dad said....my Dad said....”

  “What?”

  I blurted it out.

  “That your brother was dead. He said Colin had died.”

  “He has Nicky.”

  Simon said this in such a ‘matter of fact’ way, like he was talking about his pet goldfish or a character on a soap opera that he didn’t particularly like. I immediately thought back to the visits that my Dad and I had made to the hospital and the hospice to see Mum, how I had cried at her bedside, engulfed with sorrow. This just did
not seem right. A bit of me was annoyed with him.

  “Then why aren’t you crying?”

  His voice waivered a little as he replied,

  “It doesn’t seem real, Nicky. It just doesn’t seem real.”

  Part Three

  The Penny Pinchers

  ZARA –May 2011

  Flo and I were walking back to our cars after work. It was a lovely, warm day but I was in no mood to be enjoying the sunshine. Penny Pinchers queues had been ten deep all day and that was with three tills open.

  “God, it’s been hectic today,” I said to Flo, “I’ll be glad when this credit crunch is over, so everyone doesn’t come looking for bargains in our place.”

  “I know. Chaos. Have you noticed that only ugly people ever come in? Rows and rows of ugly people. I reckon there must be a sign on the door saying, ‘If you’re ugly, come on in and fill a basket full of useless crap, but if you’re good looking, piss off, you are not welcome in our scummy shop!’”

  This was an opportunity to tell Flo my news.

  “Talking about good looking lads, I haven’t had chance to tell you, it’s all off with Danny.”

  “Honestly! Bloody hell, Zara, what happened, I thought you were well keen?”

  “It was a mutual decision. Well, sort of, anyway.”

  Flo and I had been friends since nursery. She knew me too well.

  “So, Danny rang you and finished it and you said ‘OK’!”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “What then?”

  “He text me to finish it, so I text him back and told him he could go and screw himself, but he’d best buy himself a microscope first, otherwise he’d struggle to find it.”