The Story of You Read Online Free PDF Page B

again. I ran round to that side of the quarry; your dad was surfacing on and off now, gasping for breath. Voz was trying to keep him afloat but he was struggling, shouting out. ‘He’s got his foot stuck!’ I didn’t even think this would be the first and last time I would jump off the hundred-footer, I just did it. It seemed to take forever to hit the water. I remember feeling overcome with gratitude that it was at least the water, rather than a crane or a trolley. I swam with all my might to Joe. All those years swimming for Kilterdale paid off, because I was a demon out there! Your dad was trying to keep his head up. There was wild terror in his eyes – it reminded me of a panicked horse. I dived down below. I could see his foot flailing in the murky water. He had it wrapped round some tubing – it looked like the inner of a tyre, but I couldn’t be sure. It didn’t take me long to set his foot free, then I pushed him up, me following, until we got to the sun.
    It was ages till he could breathe properly again, once Voz and I had pulled him onto the rocks. He must have belly-flopped because he’d really winded himself. When I looked up, Butler was still standing at the top of the cliff, white as a sheet.
    Everyone was hugging me, calling me a hero, but all I could think was: Great, the first time I get to have skin-to-skin contact with Joe Sawyer, I look like this. Do you know the first thing your father said to me, after, ‘I think you just saved my life’?
    It was, ‘Did you know your hair was green?’
    So, that was how I met your father. That was the start of the summer that changed everything.
    As soon as I’d heard that whooshing sound that told me my message telling Joe I was coming to the funeral had gone, I’d wanted to reach inside the computer and take it back again. Now there was the four-hour journey up to Kilterdale to worry about. So much time to sit and mull.
    Thankfully, the train was so packed that I spent most of the journey sitting on my bag by the Ladies’, too busy moving every time someone needed the loo to think about where I was going. I eventually got a seat at Crewe; halfway, I always think, between London and Kilterdale. The tall sash-windowed houses of London are far behind, we’ve passed the Midlands plains, and now the wet mist of the North has descended; there’s the red-brick steeples, the people with their nasal, stretchy vowels. Soon, there will be the hard towns with their hard names – Wigan Warrington – before the factories thin out into fields and sheep, and then that crescent of water, surrounded by cliffs and mossy caves. The grey-stone houses stretching back, higgledy-piggledy. The whole thing looking as if it’s about to crumble into the North Sea at any moment. Kilterdale: my home town. It’s the place I used to love like nowhere else, and now it was the place, save for the odd guilt-provoked trip, I avoided at all costs; where life for me began, and life, as I knew it, had ended, too.
    I closed my eyes. At least there was one benefit of going back: I’d get to ask Dad about Mum’s ashes. Since the day we’d got them back from the crematorium, delivered to our door and so much heavier than I’d ever imagined, we’d kept them on the mantelpiece in a blue urn. Denise (evil stepmother, although not so much evil, perhaps, as hugely insecure) had gradually colonized the area: replaced the photos of us with ones of her own daughter, but the ashes had never moved. Last time I’d been home, however, they hadn’t been there. I’d asked Dad about it then and several times since but he’d always shirked an answer. This time, I decided, I couldn’t let it go.
    An old man got on at Lancaster and sat next to me. He was eating his homemade sandwiches out of tin foil. I secretly watched him as he munched away, then as he brought something rustling out of the plastic bag beside him. It was a DVD. When I craned my neck, I saw it was
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.
    ‘I