13 October 1984

The lessons were mandatory: everyone had to learn how to swim, the teachers said. They had packed the class onto a coach and sent them on their way with packed lunches.

Jim had sat on his own at the front, staring down at his jam sandwiches and wishing he could be anywhere but there. He could hear Carl and his friends laughing too loudly at the back of the coach, taking up the four seats along the last row, and jostling each other. He couldn't work out what was so funny, and didn't think he wanted to know.

Pulling out his notebook, Jim settled back into his seat. He looked out of the window and watched the trees and blue sky shoot past in a blur, wondering what it would be like to fly. He felt something hit the back of his head and, on automatic, he turned around to see what it was. A screwed up bit of paper lay on the floor beside him, and Carl and his friends were laughing even louder than before.

Not bothering to pick the paper up, or even acknowledge it, Jim turned back to face the front and blinked several times to stop his eyes from stinging.

The swimming pool was deceptive – Jim had no idea how deep it was, really. He could see the bottom, but he knew that it was meters down. It was glittering teasingly, almost asking him to jump in and break the stillness, and rippled eerily. The painted tiles on the pool walls chronicled the descent to the floor, getting deeper and deeper as they went along.

He'd heard a story, once, about a woman who had drowned in a swimming pool, her hair had gotten sucked into the ventilation system on the floor, and nobody had noticed her there, at the bottom of the pool, slowly bloating with water. People swam over her for weeks until someone complained about the smell and she was found, blue and swollen. Jim watched the water, almost certain that there weren't any corpses in there, but not definite. What if one reached up and grabbed him with their rotting arm, dragging him down to their watery grave? He shuddered.

"Dare you to jump in the deep end." The whisper came from directly beside his left ear, too close, and Jim flinched and turned to face Carl. The other boy was perfectly calm, his arms folded across his bare chest, and he was leaning his weight on one foot. His hair was wind-swept from the shower he'd had before changing and it made him look like a hedgehog. Jim would have smiled at the comparison, had his heart not been thudding sickly.

"I said," Carl's face flashed from jokingly friendly to a frown in an instant, and he took a step forwards. Jim stepped back, towards the edge of the pool. "I dare you. To jump in."

Jim shook his head fiercely and muttered something, not looking at Carl. He kept his gaze fixed on the damp floor in front of him.

"What was that, Irish?" Carl asked, raising a hand to his ear and cupping it mockingly, as if to hear better. "Speak up!" Then he laughed, because he'd already heard.

"I can't swim," Jim mumbled, blushing and shifting from one foot to the other. He hoped that his humiliation would be enough and he'd be left alone. His heart was hammering so hard that he thought it might burst out of his chest. Maybe this was why people had ribcages, he mused, because otherwise their hearts would spill all over the floor.

Carl let out a few bark-like laughs and looked at him with an unnerving mixture of pity and horror. His mouth formed an O in a parody of surprise and his eyes lit up as if he was about to tell a joke. "You can't swim?" He repeated, and gasped theatrically. "Well, I'd better fix that, hadn't I?"

Sensing the attack before it came, Jim started off in a sprint for the changing rooms. His feet slammed on the damp floor, in time with his heart, and his breath came in erratic bursts. He didn't bother to shout out – the coach was in his office and none of his classmates would help him – but focused his energy on running. He reached his hands out, centimetres away from the door to the changing rooms, when he felt someone grab his shoulder. He spun around and tried to hit out at them, but they got a hold of his wrist and began dragging him back towards the pool.

He shouted then, feeling tears springing to eyes. He didn't shout for help: that would be pointless. He cried that he couldn't swim, he couldn't swim, stop, please, he couldn't swim. Suddenly he was surrounded by a sea of pale faces, all of them smiling ghoulishly.

He was being pulled along by someone he didn't know the name of. He recognised the boy, vaguely, as someone who sat at the front of the classroom. Not too clever, not so that he got teased about it, but not too stupid either. He was average in looks, brown hair, brown eyes, and average in just about everything else. Jim didn't even know his name. He didn't know who was leading him to the water.

Panicking, Jim tried to lash out and only succeeding in weakly struggling against their grip. "Get his arms!" Someone shouted, and his arms were pinned behind his back, twisting his shoulders so painfully that he cried out. The crowd jeered as one – a rising, malicious, note. A couple of people laughed, but Jim didn't know who. They were a single entity now, not separate people. They were a monster.

The other students cleared a path as Jim was hauled to water's edge. He was held there, his toes clenching the rim of the pool and his breath coming haphazardly. He was staring down at the rippling water. He could see the bottom and the tiles looked large and distorted by the blue light of the water.

The slow tread of deliberate footsteps quietened the crowd and Jim let out a pathetic whimper. Because he knew. He knew who had made the class go quiet, and what that meant. He felt a shudder run through his body, involuntarily. He could only imagine how weak he looked. And, in that moment, he hated himself.

"Don't be scared, Jimmy." When Carl spoke, he was directly to Jim's left. The arms holding him in place tightened their grip and Jim hissed in pain. "It's not a long way down. It's just like flying, really." Jim didn't need to look at him to know that he was smirking cruelly. "Except there's a more permanent destination."

The push, when it came, made the world tilt and spin and everything blur. It must have only lasted for a few seconds, but Jim felt like he was falling a million miles. He didn't know which way was up and where anything was.

Suddenly, he slammed onto the hard face of the water and broke through. It smashed every nerve in his body and his bones ached with the force of it. His eyes were screwed as tightly as he could make them, black against the blackness of the water. He could feel himself sinking like a stone. If he could just come up for air. If he could just come up. His arms flailed and his legs thrashed wildly as he struggled to rise, but he could only break the surface of the pool for a few seconds, coughing and spluttering desperately, clawing for air, before sinking again.

Everything was muffled by the sound barrier of the water but, even in his terror, Jim could hear everyone laughing. They were laughing at him. He was drowning, dying, and they were laughing.

He struggled up for air again, his mouth wide and gaping as he took a few gasps and inhaled water. He coughed breathlessly to try and clear it, but the action made him sink below again. He couldn't stay afloat and, for all the struggling he had done, he could feel his little strength begin to fade. He could feel his lungs burning with the need for oxygen and his chest felt like it was on fire for it. He closed his mouth to stop the inhalation of more water and waved his arms wildly.

"Jim!"

The voice was familiar but the worried tone wasn't. Through the haze of droplets of water and fear for his life, Jim looked up and saw Carl. The other boy's face was a mask of concern and it was strange to see because it was so unusual. He was reaching his hand out, trying to grab Jim, and stretching as far as he could. "Take my hand!" He called.

Jim struggled through the water, trying to swim towards Carl's hand. He kicked and splashed like a dog and his eyes lit up with relief: it was going to be okay. For reasons unknown to him, Carl was going to help him out. Perhaps he'd realised that Jim was actually drowning, in danger, and had a change of heart. Jim vowed that he didn't care what Carl did to him ever again, and that he was just pleased to have been rescued.

Only centimetres away from the edge now, Jim managed to kick enough to just about keep afloat and reached out to Carl's hand. The other boy was smiling. But it wasn't a nice smile. It was a hungry smile, an impish grin. His eyes were sparkling harshly.

Jim's hand grabbed at air – Carl's hand was no longer there. At the last second, he'd whipped it away. Jim felt his stomach tighten and his vision go blurry as tears rose, unbidden, in his eyes. He watched as Carl raised his hand to his forehead and formed an L shape with his forefinger and thumb, mouthing loser. Then he cracked up laughing.

The water engulfed Jim's head and he let himself sink, wondering how long it would take to drown, and if it would hurt. He watched the dapples of light flit across the skin of the water above him and break the darkness of the water with golden-yellow bars. He felt as if he were at the bottom of the ocean and followed the progress of a stream of tiny bubbles from his nose to the surface. Everything was bathed in a mournful blue and looked quite beautiful. Jim felt pressure building in his head like he couldn't describe: like an iron vice was clamped on his temples and was slowly pressing down, as if his brain was swelling in his head and knocking against his skull. His heart was thudding silently, counting down the way a bomb does. Not long now.

He wondered if dying was meant to feel like flying. Perhaps Carl had been right, Jim wondered distantly. Maybe he was flying and that was okay because he wouldn't hurt anymore. Maybe he would go to a better place, a more permanent destination. He saw the water blur around him in an explosion of white bubbles and felt someone tug at his arms, heaving him up. No, no, no, he begged wordlessly. Leave me here. It's so peaceful.

When Jim broke the surface of the water he took an instinctive breath and coughed, throwing up a transparent mixture of water and mucus. He was on all fours, hacking. He had no time to breathe because each breath was just a gateway for another cough. His eyes were streaming and his nose was running – his entire body was dripping onto the tiled floor. He was shaking uncontrollably and he felt like he would never be warm, never be dry, again.

Very, very, far away, Jim heard someone shouting: What in the hell happened? He thought that the person need not be so loud, because it hadn't been scary. It had been calm. He had been okay, but now this shouting man had burst in and shattered the peace. Everything was rushing back in a wave. He could hear, through legions of water and fog in his mind, and he registered mutterings of "sorry". He could see, and he saw the sickly brown tiles of the swimming pool floor glistening with trails of his insides merely inches away from his face.

He sat back and swayed, realisation coming last: he had almost died. Carl had tried to kill him, right there in the pool. Perhaps not intentionally, but through Carl's actions Jim had almost lost his life. His vision focused and unfocused, hazing and sharpening. He felt caught between two existences, torn in two, not wholly there.

It was in this strange half-state, as the coach helped him up and wrapped a towel around his shaking body, carefully leading him to the changing rooms and telling him that he was okay, that Jim had a second realisation: it hadn't been enough. Whatever need that lay inside Carl hadn't been sated by this near-death experience. It wasn't going to stop.

The school didn't demand that Jim continued with swimming lessons; he was allowed to sit on the side of the pool with a book as the other children were instructed. And, as long as he lived, Jim never swam again.