Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [48]
I had one place to go and I couldn’t swim but if I didn’t learn fast I wasn’t going to learn at all. I threw myself backwards and heard two flat cracks, nails being punched into a biscuit tin. Then I was looking down at the oily-black surface of the river, wondering how I’d been spun around. Then I felt the branding iron in my gut.
The somersault crashed me feet-first into the river. I went deep and touched bottom, felt the mud give, sucking me down. I struggled, knowing I should, but I didn’t have much air in my lungs when I jumped and taking the bullet on board hadn’t helped. Hitting the water squeezed out the last of the cool, pure oxygen. My lungs burned hot and raw, began to melt.
The last thing I thought was, ‘O Jesus, this is it.’ Then my heart blew and a million needles shot into my brain. The blackness came down, and there in the shadows I saw a couple of friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, a lifetime. My father was there too.
All told, it wasn’t such a bad deal.
16
How you drown is, you’re underwater, not breathing. You lose consciousness. Carbon dioxide overwhelms the oxygen in the blood. The brain sends out a message that oxygen is required. You breathe. Water floods your lungs. You drown. It’s not pretty.
Not everyone drowns that way. Sometimes the involuntary breath causes a laryngospasm. The flood of water touches the vocal cords, triggers a reflex action. The throat seizes up. Nothing gets by the blockage. You suffocate. That’s no prettier.
That’s how people drown. But I’d been shot, too.
The branding iron in my side dragged me back to consciousness. I might have been down there five seconds or five minutes, ankle-deep in the mud, when I finally realised I wasn’t dead. If I’d been dead, I wouldn’t have known I had a branding iron melting my flesh. I wouldn’t have been able to wish I was dead, either.
Breaking point arrived. My brain shut down all auxiliary functions, focused on kicking my left foot free of the sucking mud. The mud gave. The Puffa did the rest.
I broke the surface like a porpoise in heat, felt the air on my face, body convulsing, coughing up a lungful of river. I was deaf and blind, the whole world pitch black. When I finally grasped that I was under the bridge, the current sweeping off the bend, carrying me across the river rather than out to sea, the panic subsided. That gave me a chance to think, to come up with a plan that might keep me alive.
The moment passed. I started panicking again.
I paddled for the far quay, frantic, battling the current to stay under the bridge, the Puffa buoying me up at the waist. Thinking that, whoever they were, they were pros. There were no shouts, no wasted bullets fired at imaginary targets, nothing to let me know where they were, what they were doing. Which was just as well, there wasn’t a damn thing I could have done to stop them and I had other things to worry about. Like, if I didn’t get out of the water quick smart, the cold was going to kill me quicker than any gunnies.
It took twenty minutes to reach the far quay, three yards forward and two yards back, every second a bullet in the back of the head. When I finally got there the stone was smooth, slimy. I let myself be carried downstream, buffeted by the swell between the dock and the huge coal-freighter moored just beyond the bridge.
The rusty ladder embedded in the quay came at me fast. I bobbed by, reaching. I didn’t make the same mistake the second time, crashing in on the ladder with a sodden clang. I clung to the rungs for a minute or two, until the branding iron seared into my side, and then I let go again. I passed the next six ladders. By the time I got to the seventh I was down at the deepwater, two hundred yards from open sea, and fainting. My fingers were numb, the ladder rungs icing over. Twice I fell back into the water. On the third attempt I hauled myself out onto the dock, giddy with achievement.
I limped across the quay on jelly legs, crawled into the doorway of an abandoned warehouse. Unzipped the Puffa, pulled my shirt