Grace grew up in two places: in sight of the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa, and on the edge of East Anglia’s fens. More recently she’s lived in Newcastle-on-Tyne, in reach of Northumberland’s hills and crags. She now inhabits motherhood, hope for the earth, and an increasingly wild garden. She took English Literature at Oxford and is completing a Creative Writing MA at Goldsmiths, and has worked for fifteen years in international aid and development. She loves landscape and believes we can save our planet and that it can save us. And that is what this book, Water Vandals, is about.
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Water Vandals
Our hero Tom, 15, is breaking into a research facility because he’s suspicious about something he’s seen there involving water and adults seeming to be covering something up. The facility’s security guards have cameras everywhere. He’s been watching them for several nights to get their routine. It’s midwinter in freezing Northumberland. He’s climbing onto the roof of the main block to get in through a skylight, (with tools “borrowed” from his neighbour) but, characteristically, he doesn’t have an exit plan. The research facility is in remote countryside on the edge of Tom’s ex-best friend Callum’s farmland, which is how Tom came across the facility’s secret. Callum and Tom had been friends since they were little, but had a massive falling out just over a year ago and now barely speak.
Earlier, around midnight, we saw him first cut a triangular opening in the fence but not go through it, and then skirt round to a better concealed opening which he actually uses to get in, to lay a false trail if the guards discover and pursue him.
Under his toes, feeling precisely for a hold, the soles of his shoes – climbing shoes, bought for him with crags in mind, not this – slid slightly on the wall as they pushed him up but he didn’t let them take any weight for more than a nanosecond, and the tiny ledge of the top of the sign was under them before he could think too hard.
The light was an angled, rectangular flood lamp and the bracket holding it to the wall wasn’t the strongest. It was radiating a terrifying heat he could feel as he reached up and, mid-movement, he had to abandon his hopes of using it. His left hand reached instead for the top of the vehicle entrance – a firm ledge, the safety all his mind was focussed on now – found the corner – less to grip, in its smoothness, especially with the cold, but more to put weight on once he got there – all in the swiftness of the movement.
The chalk on his hands was getting wetter. Each ledge held a minute surface of water. His body was straining now, a kind of a jitter running into his limbs from the effort and the nerves, but after the first two windows – the first two floors’ worth – the flat roof was almost in reach. The sight of the top put heart in him for the last stretch, and he kept glancing up as though glances were another grip he could use.
The judder was worst in his right leg. But as he focussed his mind upwards – he had assimilated like a hypnotist’s instruction the mantra “never look down” and in his picture of himself, in his feel of his body, all his being was just here on the wall, suspended in indefinite space – the drop below didn’t exist.
From the top window’s ledge, another handhold, then a foothold, and the roof was in reach. The dark sky above it filled his vision. A security box, pentagonal, gave him an ironic final leg up.
The tiredness was starting to beat him. There wasn’t much to grip on the roof itself – flat concrete, it was – and his hands were sweaty now, the chalk nearly all gone. But he was there, he was there – and the roof was horizontal, that was the real break. It was cold, gripless concrete, but it was flat and gravity pulled into it, not off it. His torso sank gratefully onto it. His legs, shaking badly, tried to push him up but, no longer angled usefully against the wall, lurched wildly and nearly pulled his whole weight back off the roof and into the four-storey fall below. But he threw his weight forward, his hands grabbing nothing but the smooth concrete – and it was enough, his body was over the tipping point. He was up.
He lay fully on the flat concrete of the roof, and there was sky above him and air for breathing, and release – release for his arms and his legs and his muscles. He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes, deeply breathing in the night. His thighs and his calves and the flexors in his forearms sang gratefully of the cool after the burning. His legs shook. Thankfully, thankfully, he didn’t have to climb back down.
The skylight opened on a corridor, it looked like, so just the height of a room to drop. But it only opened about half a foot, and a metal hinged catch across the opening lessened the gap even further.
Lowering himself through feet first, backpack thrown down ahead of him, he’d lost his controlled fight with gravity and fallen, flailing, into the building’s insides, catching his shoulder blade and elbow and one hand, cutting his ear on the catch and scraping the other side of his face at the same time. He’d landed none too well, crumpled onto scratchy carpet tiles, the backpack under one curled leg. The metal inside it had found his shin as he fell onto it.
He opened his eyes and saw only blackness. Then a green light, small and slowly flashing. Some sort of smoke alarm in the ceiling. He ached in several places.
Tom had got himself up and got out of the corridor by a door with rubber seals around it which swished as he went through. Now he was in the large stairwell he had seen from the second skylight.
He couldn’t quite believe he was inside.
He started down the stairs, looking around for cameras. There was one, domed to give it a wide, curled up view, in the middle of the ceiling.
He’d come out of a door marked “research archives” into the stairwell. The doors on the top floor didn’t have locks. They seemed to be all offices. Offices, reasoned Tom, probably weren’t interesting. They certainly didn’t look like they contained great watery mysteries. Sticking to the outer wall of the stairs, he headed downwards to the ground floor.
It wasn’t just plumbers he had seen here, as he’d told Callum. That first night, in the middle of January – when he’d been out here just by chance on the crag, curious and bored and at a loose end – he’d seen a vehicle arrive. A tanker of some sort, and a cargo was unloaded amid shouting and panic. There had been a strange kind of atmosphere among the shouters, as though they were afraid.
The oddest thing had been the noises. Tom’s memory of that night was an eerie mix of sounds: the people’s voices shouting, the noises from the tanker, and something else, reaching to him through the air on light gusts of winter wind.
It had been odd enough how they’d shout most of the time and then drop suddenly into frantic silence, as though they needed intermittently to listen. And when they went quiet, there’d been another sound. A high sound from the tanker, like when you’re in the bath and you slide about against the sides.
And above it all on the wind there was a high note of music that never seemed to stop, only slid to another lower note sometimes, like the song of a whale hanging in fathoms of ocean. It blew to his ears up on the crag, unsettling and cutting through him. Since he’d heard it that night, it had never left him.
The tanker had reversed into one of the large vehicle entrances he had just climbed over. Tom knew enough about milk tankers on the farm to know that that probably meant its contents were being unloaded through the back flap hatch. So whatever had been in it was now somewhere in this building.
But now he was finally inside. He wound his way cautiously down the spiralling stairs, pushing every door as he went. The third floor doors, the second floor, the first – all of them were locked. They all had electronic panels beside them to open them.
He reached the ground floor. He was limping a bit from his fall through the skylight. His ear was bleeding. With each locked door, he was controlling a new panic in his chest.
It was a panic unlike the anxiety of the night so far, his furtive approach, the climb – all that had had a goal in mind, a goal of discovery. Now discovery seemed impossible. He couldn’t get into any part of the building. He pushed harder and harder on every door as the panic rapped harder on his heart, but nothing gave way. Whatever there was to find was behind and beyond and out of his sight. In frustration he slammed a fist on a mute wall.
The roar of not being allowed here, not being safe here, not knowing what they’d do if they found him, rose up over his thwarted curiosity. What he needed to do was get out. And he didn’t know how.
But – he breathed, deliberately slow – no one had seen him so far. No one had caught him. Perhaps he was alone here; just the inert night watchmen in their office. Perhaps he could just wait till morning, till cleaners came and the security guards were relieved by the morning shift. Maybe in the basement – from here the staircase wound down one more floor. He could hide there and wait. He reached the last door. It had no swipe pad to the left like the others. He pushed it. It opened.
Stepping through it, he found himself in another dark corridor, a large, rounded desk surrounded by notices and screens preceded a double set of doors. A main entrance. That was why the door into this corridor had opened. Tom hesitated, and took a step towards it.
Tom looked around him. The first door in the corridor said it was the results check-in suite. He tried the handle. Locked. He had a rising feeling that he didn’t have time for many more doors like this.
Back through the woods, the farmhouse lay quiet, its roofs wet, its chimneys empty of smoke. A tawny owl swept up from the beck below and alighted on the gable to eat its kill. A light wetness was on its wings from the weather that coated everything. It shook itself and puffed up its feathers against the cold, swivelling its head completely to survey the night.
The lane, shining with melted snow, still harboured some of the sludge not yet liquid in the lowest nooks of its walls and hedges. The Friesians and the Herefords were sleeping in their barns, swaddled in their own steam in the cold of the Northumbrian night.
In his narrow room above the farmhouse kitchen, Callum was lying under three layers of duvets and blankets, staring into the yellow light of his phone, his hand tucked round with coverlets to hold it. He was hungry. He kept weighing up going to find what there was to eat – those waffles you could toast, or maybe some pasta was left from earlier – but the cold outside his den of wool blankets and feather duvets kept putting him off. Edie had messaged him back a few times earlier, but now she seemed to be asleep. Outside his window, the owl flew up from End House to the hay barn’s corrugated roof, and he heard it call softly into the dark.
Beyond the front desk, Tom saw one of the double doors suddenly clicked open, and a broad shouldered man in a security guard’s coat barged through. He was out of breath and holding a flashlight.
“How the bloody hell did you get in here?”
Tom felt he was freezing over and flailing at the same time. The man staring at him, him staring back at the man, felt like an age, the look between them seemed suspended in space.
But it was really a split second. Tom turned and slammed back through the door to the circling stairwell and started running round to the foot of the stairs. The man was through the door behind him in an instant but he paused, watching where Tom would go. A realisation hit Tom’s flaring mind: he was probably headed into nothing but dead ends.
They eyed each other for a second. Then Tom put a foot on the stairs down and the man moved instantly to run round to him. Tom stepped off the stair and ran instead round the rest of the stairwell’s circle back to the entrance corridor the man had just left. The man swore and reversed his run to try and catch him.
Tom charged down the corridor and burst out through the main doors into the cold. He swerved right without thinking and saw the other security guard at the same moment rounding the corner ahead of him, at a run.
Tom slammed his heels into a brake and hurled himself in the other direction.
The first security guard was out of the doors behind him at the same moment, almost arm’s length from Tom, yelling. All Tom could do was put on all the speed he could muster. He pelted left round the corner in front of him, not knowing where he was going. He pulled over a pallet as he went past it, hearing them swearing as they met it. He kept going and turned another corner, all his breath and limbs straining to get him away. His every movement felt painfully slow.
Another decision – left, right or straight – and on a hunch he went right, knowing he couldn’t get away to the fence opening with them this close. His only way to escape at all was to lose them first.
Wheelie bins stood here against the wall. He dived between two of them as the men rounded the corner behind him. In the dark, lit only by the orange floodlights, he had a chance they hadn’t seen him.
“You go round. I’ll check here,” said one of them. Tom heard him coming up the tarmac. He would be seen in a second and he couldn’t get round or under the bins. Hiding in here had been a terrible instinct. It would be seconds before he was caught.
He only had one thing on his side: surprise. He crouched a bit and as the man leaned round with his flashlight to look into the gap, Tom dived rugby-like at him and threw him off balance with a throaty “oof!” They fell together across the wide alley to the opposite wall.
“Wee blighter!”
The man was grabbing for him while Tom was trying to hurl himself away. The security guard had weight and size on his side; all Tom had on his was that he’d got the man off his balance very temporarily.
Tom writhed like a wild creature. The man’s coat was oilskin and slippy. Tom’s hands couldn’t find any grip on it to push himself away. The man was trying to get his balance back and to hold the writhing boy. Tom’s fingers closed on something on the coat and at the same moment his right arm found the solid wall and pushed him away. The man fell back again. He hurtled up the tarmac before the man could get his feet back under himself.
In his hand, Tom realised, his ears pounding, his sides splitting, he had grabbed at something attached to the man. It was still in his fingers.
He took a corner to get out of the man’s sight as quickly as he could, and found himself at the same door he had come out of minutes before. His shoes were quiet on the tarmac. In his hand was the man’s security pass, and it suddenly struck him as a means of escape. The man was still not in sight. He swiped at the door’s security panel. It clicked open and he slipped inside.
Callum had fallen asleep at last. His breath whistled slightly from one side of his nose. The owl was long gone from the barn roof, back into the soft night it had swept through. The farm was quiet. The lane, and End House below it, lay still. Only the pines and the larches in the wood stirred occasionally as creatures moved through them unseen. Under the soil, plants waited, snow piled above them, water frozen in their roots. Below the woods, the beck muttered unceasingly into its rocky course downwards.
Tom stood in the darkened corridor, the sudden stillness here a shock on his ears. The door pulled itself shut behind him. He heard, outside, the security guard’s steps, deadened by the walls Tom had passed through, as though far away through a body of water. Tom stepped away from the door with its narrow glass panel. The man passed.
Voices, getting further away. It wouldn’t be long before he missed his pass and worked out what Tom had done.
Tom stepped quickly down the corridor, eyeing the door at the end. His curiosity wanted to check each door, but a drive in his chest argued only for escape.
He needed a fire exit or something. He went through the stairwell to the opposite door. The pass let him through it. Another corridor, longer. The only light came from the stairwell in the glass panel behind him. It smelled sterile. After the door swished closed on him, there was no sound.
There was only one doorway here. A wide, heavy-looking set of double doors, made of steel, no windows in them. The security swipe pad flashed two green lights in a repetitive beat. Overhead an electric sign said: “Lab in operation”. Opposite it were two cupboards, it looked like, marked “tank control” and “closed generator”. But beyond, Tom saw with a lift in his heart that the corridor ended in what he was looking for: a fire exit.
He started towards it. His mind was trying to work out which way this exit would lead him. Trepidation started back up in his ribcage. If it faced the south boundary, he could run straight across the tarmac to the fence opening he’d cut. He might make it.
The guards would have called the others by now, from the sentry building up by the main gate where the barrier was. It made him nervous to push the door open, with no sight line out to check who might be beyond it. But he had to go – with nothing discovered, none the wiser. Disappointment fought with a survival instinct inside him. Better to go sooner than hang around any longer. He put his hand on it, pushed very slightly to feel for the point it would release, and took a breath in.
In a moment, a sudden second, he turned back on a stray and unconsidered instinct, and flashed the security pass onto the electronic scanner beside the heavy double doors. His original reason for being here had risen up in him and won. He had to know what was here.
Nothing opened. The panel started flashing red and a beep began. It seemed to be gearing up for a bigger alarm. He stepped back in panic. The beeping sped up, and then just as suddenly, it stopped. The doors hissed and swung inwards.
Tom stood still for a moment, and then stepped inside.
It was a very large lab, lit only by downlights on grey work surfaces around the periphery, and lines of green LED dots on monitors flashing up and down like waves. A bank of screens showed lines like heartbeats. In front of the heartbeats, an empty desk chair sat, its angle on its spinning base facing the door, as though someone had left it hours before and not bothered to push it tidily out of the way.
Tom stepped forwards.
A huge tank of water, the height of the room, dominated the lab. The water was murky and slightly green. A dim light somewhere behind it gave a silhouette to a shape hanging in the water, framed by the tank’s outline.
Tom’s gaze was hooked and reeled in by the thing in the tank. It hung as though from the ceiling, trailing like seaweed in the water. A terror, primeval and burning, started up his torso, like larva through rock. His feet, his whole body, were shut down by fear.
Whatever it was moved slightly in the tank.
He couldn’t see eyes but he felt he was being seen. He was anchored to the ground. The seaweed shadows lifted.
In a second, where a face could have been if it was a person, he saw eyes with no whites, just pupil. Large, black, gleaming eyes looked into his.
An avalanche of icy horror fell through his whole body.
The eyes narrowed. Tom felt his heart, his organs in his torso, sort of lurch and shudder within him. His feet would not move. He felt sweat starting on his brow, his palms. He couldn’t swallow. The eyes held him. Nothing else moved except a slight swirl in the murky water.
His whole lifetime seemed to pass in the time he was stuck frozen there.
By a huge surge of energy, he tore his eyes away and got his legs moving. No longer thinking about his pursuers, he was back out into the corridor. He punched through the fire exit door. He got out in the cold air, and he ran.
To the end of the building, across the open tarmac and the empty car park. His shoes slipped in the wet under his uncontrolled strides.
Shouting started back up behind him. Powerful lights flashed. An engine ignited.
Tom heard his own footsteps on the tarmac, slapping but dull in the wet, but to his frightened mind they seemed to be signalling like a beacon where he was.
His slight form dashed towards the perimeter.
The security guards from the main gate had joined the two who manned the site security office now, and the four of them had fanned out through the site.
The guards got in sight of the car park in time to see the escaping figure melt into the scrubby gorse that lined just the southern edge of the fence.
Once they reached it, the security team discovered a diagonal cut into the wire, making a sharp triangular opening just big enough for an adult to duck through. A bit beyond it, in the bracken under young sessile oaks, they found the stolen security pass, carelessly thrown and easy to spot.
They’d called in back-up, and within minutes a whole team of them fanned out into Ged McIntyre’s farm to search for the intruder, starting with the Christmas tree fields.
To the north and slightly west, through the fields of the Crages’ farm and over the wood, Callum woke from a sleep so deep it was like a well he had to swim up through.
It was pitch black in his room. No light came from outside. His phone said it was 2:11am. No one had messaged him. What had woken him? Dad wouldn’t be up for the milking for two hours yet.
His nose was cold and he shifted in his soft covers. His window rattled.
It was an old house, draughty and full of movements. Windows creaked and shivered in winter winds all the time. But Callum knew that rattle.
He stopped moving and his eyes slid to the window. Sarcastic phrases came unbidden to his groggy mind. Muttering, he pushed off the covers and reached for the top blanket to wrap around himself.
Tom was standing below the window, next to the coal store. Callum stood for a long minute looking at him, his face looking distinctly unimpressed. Then he moved to push up the sash and Tom clambered up to the coal store’s roof and onto the ledge above it. When Tom moved, Callum saw he had a limp somewhere in his body.
There had been a creeper here until last autumn, old and woody, but Mam had hacked it back so Callum had to lean out into the freezing night and reach down to haul Tom over the windowsill. Tom winced audibly at Callum’s grip on his upper arm. They both landed a bit heavily on the bedroom carpet. Callum pulled the window shut.
“What the bleedin’ bejesus happened to you?” Callum’s exasperated exhale came after a minute of catching his breath. Nothing but the apocalypse would have brought Tom here, he knew. Tom just looked at him and said nothing, still panting.
He started pulling off his coat, but the effort seemed to defeat him before he’d managed one sleeve.
He had blood on his ear, dried in smudges along his neck but still dewy where the cut was; a graze the other side of his face, as though to match; a scrape down the outside of his right hand, skin ragged along it, which turned out to go all the way up in jolts past his elbow; rolling up his trouser leg, a straight gouge and what looked like a carpet burn up one shin, over the beginnings of a parallel bruise.
Tom seemed unfussed about the leg once he saw it, though Callum guessed it was that giving him pain when he moved. Instead he pulled up his jumper to look at a horizontal line that was both scrape and deeper impact – it looked like he’d been slammed stomach-first into a low wall.
“This is – life getting dull down at the cottage, was it?” Callum had had to swallow a gasp. It was irritating to have to hide your shock; it was irritating to be shocked. It meant he had to care, and he’d spent over a year forcefully not caring about Tom.
“I just need some antiseptic. For the ear,” Tom pointed, as though the others were irrelevant. He was reaching round with his other hand to feel the middle of his back, a wince in his face. He shuffled his coat off at last.
“I think you need more than that,” Callum hissed. “Where’ve you been?”
“And I need you to look at my back.”
“Back?”
Tom tugged at his top and heaved it up with a groan, turning his back to Callum to show him the left shoulder blade.
“I can’t see anything there.”
“The left?”
“Sure, the left.”
“Press on it,” said Tom, muffled inside his upside down top, arms stuck inside it.
“What?”
Callum put the heel of his hand on the line of the bone. Tom flinched. Then he said, “but it looks fine?”
“It looks fine, mate.”
Tom pulled his tops back down. It was strangely normal between them at this moment. He looked at his hand. “Should probably clean this too,” he said, standing up, and then his head rushed and he slipped back down again without meaning to.
“Whoa, ok.” Callum felt afraid suddenly. He wished he could wake Mam, or that Sandy was home. “Ok, stay there.”
He handed him water in the glass he’d brought up to bed with him, and went out to the bathroom to find First Aid things. His thoughts were speeding up – blood sugar, that was a thing – that’s what his Mam would think of. He hadn’t expected any answers from Tom, but he expected the Facility would get a mention if Tom was the sharing type – and yet, how could anything at that place have made Tom look this way?
He left Tom dabbing TCP on his cuts and went to the kitchen as quietly as he could. When he came back Tom was sitting leant against the bed with a quilt around him and a blanket over his legs. His face was white. He raised his eyebrows as Callum came in with a plate.
“Waffles and pasta?”
“Yeah, and when did you last eat?” hissed Callum defensively.
Tom thought for a moment. “Tea. Eight hours ago, probably. Oh, I had a protein bar.”
“Sounds hearty.”
He’d brought a mug of something too. “You made tea?” Tom’s incredulity overcame his exhaustion.
“Sugary tea,” Callum harrumphed awkwardly. “That’s what Mum says. When someone’s bleeding.”
“It’s barely any blood.”
The hot mug in Tom’s hands was unbelievably comforting. He was freezing now, right through his bones. He tucked the blanket closely round his legs. Every strand of cold air felt evil.
“Sure. You’d be turned away from a blood bank for not having enough to spare.”
Tom’s eyes were closing and his head lolled, and he mumbled, “it’s not the blood.” Callum wondered if he was raving.
He noticed afresh the cold on his own skin and thought – airing cupboard raid. Like when they were small and needed to build a fort.
Tom knew how he must look, but tiredness like lead was stealing over him. He couldn’t think of words and he didn’t want to; how could he explain, even to Callum, that there was a shock working in him, that it was that, not the wounds, that was catching up with him, making him have to sit on the floor, feeling several times colder than it really was?
He felt in a wave, sitting there, how he’d missed Callum, this past year and a half. He’d been too angry and disenchanted for most of that time to feel this other side of it. He’d missed this room, these blankets, the climb up the coal store.
Callum had slipped back out to the landing and now returned with a mushrooming armful of duvets and quilts. He foraged in his duvet for his hot water bottle and made Tom a nest on the carpet.
Tom fell asleep with a swaying ocean rocking his reality. The shape hanging in a water tank, lit by waving LED lights, wouldn’t leave him. It would neither sharpen and become clear, nor fade and let him rest.