No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (top 10 non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📕

But still he was falling, still he was falling backwards.

Out into space.

But he didn’t let go.

So as he fell, David fell with him.

Then there was another explosion of pain as his body smacked down on the water, as it closed over his head, as it flooded into his nose and mouth. And now it was David who clung to Bram, the two of them tumbling over and over in the churning river, and he felt another blow, to his shoulder, and kicked desperately with his legs, desperately pushed his head above the surface as they were dragged by the current under one of the arches of the bridge and spat out at the other side.

Cold.

So cold.

All the warmth had been sucked from his body and he was shaking, his teeth knocking together, his chest cramping so whenever his head broke the surface he could only manage tiny gulps of air.

He was going to drown!

But into Bram’s head came the words of the instructor on the wild swimming course:

If you fall into a fast-flowing river…

Don’t fight the current. Go with it.

But David was pulling at him in panic, and his head went under again.

Flip onto your back.

Get your feet pointing downstream.

He managed to roll, in the churning water, onto his back, but David hauled him so he kept on rolling, buffeted and sucked under by the current.

‘Can’t… swim!’ David’s voice rasped in his ear as they resurfaced before they both went back under, David pulling him around and down so both their bodies were tipped over and over in the dark water until Bram didn’t know which way was up, and there was freezing water in his nose and mouth, and the blackness was coming.

With the last vestiges of his strength, he pushed David away. Kicked out at him.

And now he was free, and as he flailed his frozen limbs, as he forced his body up to the surface, his nose and mouth up into the air, as he gasped it, air, he saw David’s head in the water in front of him, just out of reach, bobbing away from him, the smooth, pale baldness of it standing out in the dark water. He flipped onto his back and pointed his feet downstream, his head lifted by the force of the current so, finally, he could breathe.

He tried to angle himself to follow David, to let the current sweep him in the same direction, but the pale bald head was gone. He couldn’t see it any more.

Fill your lungs with as much air as possible for buoyancy.

He gulped in more air, spluttering as he inhaled water with it.

Look around you for calm water.

There were often eddies by the banks of a river where the water turned back on itself and cancelled out the force of the current, creating little pockets of safety. He got a hand up to his face to swipe the water from his eyes, squinting through the film distorting his vision, trying to keep his head still as his body was shaken and jarred by the current swirling around him.

There wasn’t enough light. He couldn’t see anything but the roiling water and the indistinct bank of the river, to his left, flashing past.

He would just have to take a chance and head for the bank.

Get onto your front and swim diagonally across the current, not at right angles to it.

Bram hadn’t been in a pool for weeks. Months.

But he was a strong swimmer.

He could do this.

The instructor on that course in Wales had said Bram had an excellent technique, one of the best he’d seen.

He was a bloody good swimmer!

He pushed his head up out of the water and took a long breath before flipping onto his front and starting to swim, powering himself through the water, still going downstream but easing himself across the current towards the bank. His muscles protested, his limbs weak and so cold he could hardly feel them, could hardly tell where they were in the water.

But the muscle memory was there. His body knew what to do.

And then, before it seemed possible, he was scrabbling with his hands at the earthy bank, at the vegetation; he was hauling himself out of the water and flopping on the ground, lungs heaving, limbs shaking, coughing water up onto the wet grass.

28

‘I’m glad he’s dead!’ sobbed Kirsty again, as if trying to convince herself that this was true.

Bram said nothing.

He was sitting naked on the edge of the bed while Kirsty gently towelled his bruised chest and back. She hadn’t let him out of her sight since he’d got back, bathing him like a child, insisting he stay in the hot bath until he was warm.

He barely remembered how he’d found his way back to the car in the dim light of dusk. He must somehow have managed to retrace his steps along the road and up the path into Anagach Wood. He could only remember meeting one person, a woman walking a little dog near the car park, who had looked at him curiously, but he hadn’t felt up to offering an explanation for why he was trudging along in soaking wet clothes.

He’d been trembling so much, by the time he’d got back to the car, that he had had great difficulty extracting the car key from his pocket, and God knew how he’d managed to drive home. That was a blur too.

When he’d got back to Woodside he’d found he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get out of the car, and eventually Kirsty had come down the verandah steps and opened the driver’s door and said something, but he hadn’t been able to speak. She’d somehow got him upstairs and into the bath without Phoebe seeing him. And when the shaking had stopped, when his brain had started to unfreeze itself, he had been able to tell her what had happened.

And now she dressed him, like a child, talking to him firmly but gently, telling him to lift