There’s a place on the road to the west where there’s a car park for a lake. Traffic signs announce a viewpoint with little triangles that are supposed to show there’s something nice to look at. People stop in the car park and sit on the grass drinking tea from flasks. We used to go there, when my children were younger.
The day of the first accident wasn’t especially hot or sunny, I remember. We were having a barbecue in the car park for my son’s eighteenth birthday. My brother-in-law had brought a few of those disposable barbecues along; we’d boiled sausages and chicken in advance so no one would get food poisoning. All the cousins sat on a blanket drinking beer. My husband had already had too many, and he was slurring his speech in a way that reminded me of his mother. My brother-in-law kept adding meat to the grill, swatting at flies with a set of tongs. It was well into the evening and we hadn’t made it down to the lake yet. I was happy to see all the cousins talking to each other and I was thinking how lucky they were. I didn’t have cousins who were close to my own age and the cousins I did have had been raised differently to me. My aunt and my mother didn’t see eye to eye on many things.
From the picnic spot the hill slopes steeply to the water, where it reaches a small beach. To the left of the beach are some wide concrete ledges that people spread their towels on in summer. The concrete gets warm so the ledges are pleasant to sit on even if they’re always full of junk that people leave behind: socks and ratty towels and goggles with one lens broken.
From the ledges you can watch the diving platform. To jump off the platform you cross the beach and walk along a wooden pier over the water. You then climb a metal ladder which runs up one side of a concrete column; a diving board hangs off the other side. There’s space for a few people to stand at the top. It looks like it should be used by lifeguards but there aren’t any lifeguards at the lake.
I remember hearing the screams of the jumpers as I gathered greasy paper plates and empty crisp packets. The lake stays cold all year round, colder than the sea, so even in the middle of a heatwave the water is a shock. People shriek as they plunge and they shout when they surface. My sister-in-law was trying to convince the boys to go down and jump in the lake while I shovelled rubbish into black sacks.
The screaming seemed to get louder and louder. Then a man came charging up the hill shouting about a missing child. I think the first thing he said was, ‘A boy fell into the lake and we can’t find him.’ I knew straight away that he hadn’t fallen into the lake. He’d jumped in, from the diving platform. My sister-in-law threw water over the barbecue and we followed the man down the hill.
My daughter wasn’t there that day because she’d decided to go to Dublin with her boyfriend. When she left she told my husband that we shouldn’t expect her back for a few days. I remember thinking that she would be sorry to miss the excitement. And then I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have the pleasure of telling her about it because she wasn’t speaking to me. Anyway, she was in Dublin and my son was next to me and my husband was probably in the portaloo. Everyone was safe and sound. I felt a little excited, the way you do when you’re near danger but you know nothing will actually happen to you.
When we reached the concrete ledges everything was in chaos. It was as if people thought the missing boy might suddenly appear from underneath a towel or a heap of clothes thrown off willy-nilly in the rush to do something. Some people called his name as they walked up and down the beach. Others clustered at the top of the diving platform, hands shading their eyes, searching the water for a sign. A few people yelled into their phones about an accident at the lake and I imagined a harried emergency services phone operator fielding half a dozen calls at once.
Soon I could hear the sirens getting closer and then the police and maybe some ambulance staff appeared on the beach wearing hi-vis vests and talking into walkie-talkies. They organised us into a group, and we walked the shoreline, right up to where the woods began, looking for the boy. Every stone looked like the crown of a head; every shadow on the water suggested a body beneath. At first, the boy’s parents participated in the search but they soon left the group. They went to the pier, where they sat and stared at nothing. The woman, I remember, wept silently. Her husband (I assumed it was her husband) sat with his arm around her. His legs were so long that they dangled into the water. It seemed strange that he was touching the same water that had swallowed his son.
No one was found. A boat was fetched and the next day they dragged the lake. They went deeper and deeper, but still they found nothing. They called off the search a few days later. They put up notices in the car park, closed the diving platform with chains and posted DANGER DEEP WATER signs on the little beach.
People had all kinds of theories. That an underwater river had swept the boy away. Or the search and rescue team were incompetent. One of the more outlandish theories was that someone had released pet piranhas into the lake and they could eat a body in thirty seconds flat. The Loch Ness Monster conspiracy theorists had a heyday. You know the nonsense people say when there’s no good explanation for something.
*
I remembered a story my mother told me, a kind of folk tale about a witch who created the lake. The witch came to town disguised as an old woman and went begging for a place to stay. She knocked on each door but no one answered. The people pretended they weren’t at home. My mother would describe this witch, her awful tangled hair and her fingernails like yellow talons and her mouth full of pointed and broken teeth. My mother didn’t believe in censoring fairy tales. Eventually someone let the witch in because she promised to pay them well. In the morning that house was the only house left in the town. The witch had conjured a new lake overnight: all the other houses were submerged in the lake water.
After the accident the council tried to keep people off the diving platform. If this had worked maybe everyone would have forgotten about it, except the boy’s poor parents of course, who will never think of anything else for the rest of their lives. But then the next week another boy, about the same age as the first, jumped off. He also disappeared. They did the usual searches but before they could get too far with the dredging, a girl jumped. And then another child and another. It seemed that every night a child was getting to the platform and jumping off.
The council sent diggers to tear up the pier and parent groups started demanding that they knock down the platform. The concrete ledges were turned into memorial sites, covered in plastic flowers, or wilted real flowers wrapped in cellophane, or plastic-coated photographs of children with broad smiles squinting into the sun. I felt compelled to visit the site over and over, as if I had some insight that the others didn’t. As if I was going to find a sign of the children. The photographs faded almost as quickly as the flowers until it was impossible to distinguish whether they pictured boys or girls, and if they were sitting on a bicycle or standing next to their dog.
People speculated it was a suicide pact. The town was littered with signs for mental health services and contact numbers of helplines, with posters calling for the picnic spot and the car park to be bulldozed. Priests spoke about it at Sunday Mass: our lives, they reminded us, were not ours to dispose of.
I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing my own kids jumping. Every night I got up half a dozen times to see if my son was in his bed and when he wasn’t I sent him text messages and waited, staring at my phone, for a message back. My daughter had moved to Dublin now and didn’t reply to my messages no matter how many I sent. I monitored her Instagram account the way I checked her breathing when she was a baby.
*
Then the videos started to appear. They were made by the jumpers but weirdly they were always uploaded after the kid had disappeared. They might have jumped from the platform one night and then three days later a video would appear. Even people who know about these things, who could figure out the real date a video was made and the real location, said the videos were legitimate. They hadn’t been manipulated in any detectable way. In the footage, the kids played by the side of the lake. They asked their friends to film them jumping: you saw them falling through the air, screaming with joy and then emerging from the water, gasping, as their friends cheered. The sun was shining and everyone looked like they were having a great time. In the videos, the place was recognisable as the lake except something was off: the wooden pier was still there but the surface of the water looked wrong in a way that I couldn’t describe. There was no explanation for the videos. Parents of the kids who had jumped swore their kids weren’t even friends with the other people in the videos, that they’d never seen them before, they didn’t remember any day that summer that had been so sunny.
Speculation continued in the comment section under the videos. People offered strange ideas: that the jumpers hadn’t actually drowned, that a portal had opened in the lake and all you had to do to enter was jump. I kept thinking of the old town drowned by the witch, sitting there under the lake for centuries. There are a few old houses near the lake and I pictured her knocking on the door and being taken in. I imagined one of these houses as the house where she’d stayed.
The lake should have been full of bodies but it sparkled in the sun when you passed it from the road. I wasn’t the only one who knew the story about the witch. Some people said the children had gone to the old town under the lake: that it was a better place where people enjoyed a happy reflection of a life that was grey and sunless on the surface. Even adults began to feel that they’d misunderstood their entire lives, that they were not on the surface of the earth but in fact underground and the only way to escape was to plunge into the lake. The diving platform was needed, they said, to pick up enough speed to break through to the other side.
Adults started jumping. Parents first, looking for the children they had lost, then followed by more children or siblings or their own parents. There were more and more each day. The council responded by lining the roadside and woods with metal fencing. They broke up the concrete ledges. But the diving platform stayed, waiting for a wrecking crane to be assembled on the beach. And as long as it stayed, people managed to jump.
*
I went to the diving platform myself one night. On the drive over I told myself it was just curiosity. I imagined telling my daughter about it whenever she might call. Maybe there was something other people hadn’t noticed, some explanation. The sky was so clear that night that the half-moon lit up the lake. I parked my car on the road shoulder and picked my way down the hill and through the trees.
I was surprised by how shallow the water was, how I could wade out to the platform. I reached the column and managed to scramble up using the chains they’d put around it. From the top, I looked down into the water and thought about what my husband would say to my daughter if I jumped. I liked the idea of disappearing, the dark water swallowing me into that cold silence. I imagined going under as a gentle tugging away of consciousness, like pulling a tablecloth from a table. I stood there watching the moonlight on the surface of the lake, hoping for some kind of sign. Maybe a familiar face in the water or the sound of other jumpers calling me.
