Chapter 3 #4
Tim: I left for five minutes. I was bored shitless.
It was about half two, and there was so much of the afternoon to go.
I was dying for a fag. I saw Eddie walking past and called him over.
Eddie did a bit of everything. Litter-picking, cleaning, maintenance.
He wasn’t officially trained to look after the rides.
Eddie: My name’s Eddie Watson. Tim asked if I could cover him while he went for a cigarette. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have training on rides. But he said he’d cleared it with Mr Hunter, and I believed him.
John: I asked Tim directly if he’d been there when it happened. He looked sheepish. Said he’d gone for a cigarette. I just about managed to stay calm. Asked who he’d left in charge. He said Eddie.
Eddie: Tim said to me it was just a case of getting everyone in their seats, lowering the safety bar and hitting a button to make the carriage go. Then when the button lit up, it was ready for the next one. It sounded simple enough.
John: Eddie wasn’t trained on ride management.
He did all sorts around the place, and he’d been with us for a couple of years, but he’d never asked to manage rides and I’d never thought to train him on it.
I looked at him, then. He was in his thirties, and I knew he had a young family.
His face was ashen. I asked why he’d agreed to look after the rollercoaster when he knew he didn’t have the requisite training.
He said Tim had asked him to and shown him what to do.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep my cool.
I dismissed everyone other than Eddie and Tim, told them to check the rota and get ready for the day, and then I sat down at a table with those two men.
They were both wearing the uniform of black trousers and a green Wildworld polo shirt. I didn’t know where to start with them.
Eddie: I said I was sorry. I genuinely was.
After it happened, I’d stayed in the booth until Tim got back, and he’d said, ‘Holy fuck, man. What the fuck are we going to do?’ That boy’s mum was shouting and crying, and I didn’t know how serious it was, or how it had happened.
I’m not proud of it, but we ran. We ran to the exit and didn’t look back.
John: I said that what I didn’t understand was how it had happened.
Even with someone inexperienced at the controls, you simply can’t send a second carriage until the first one is near the end of the track.
The button lights up when the next one is ready to go, and if you press it before it lights up, nothing happens.
Eddie: I told him that the button lit up, and then I pressed it. It was the truth.
John: I was sure he was lying, but I couldn’t work out what the truth was.
I marched them over there, in the end. I took them into the hut and started it up.
Then I sent an empty carriage round, and when it got to the furthest point, the light came on and I sent a second one.
I looked at them both, as if to say ‘See?’
Tim: I didn’t know what he wanted us to say. We’d fucked up. But neither of us had done anything deliberately to cause that accident.
Eddie: I told him one last time. I didn’t understand how, but I hadn’t pressed the button until the light came on.
He was muttering, face like thunder. Then he said we were both fired.
Tim took it on the chin – it was all right for him, it was just a student job, he could probably get another one in a day or two – but this had been my livelihood for more than two years.
I had two children at home, and my wife was pregnant.
I wasn’t too proud to plead for another chance.
Tim: When Eddie started laying on all the stuff about his family and their financial struggles, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.
I was thinking about the festival my friends were going to, the one I’d turned down because of work.
I was hoping there were still tickets available.
I felt bad for Eddie, of course I did. It was me who’d asked him to cover. But he could have said no.
John: I told Eddie my decision was final, and I walked them out.
Cathy: I knew John would fire someone over it, but I was surprised he let Eddie go.
He’d been a good worker. John told me what had happened afterwards, and I said it sounded like he’d made a stupid mistake and I wasn’t sure the punishment fit the crime, and John looked at me like I was a stranger and said could I leave the hiring and firing to him.
He stormed off then, saying something about how he needed to redo the rota now he’d lost two members of staff.
It was strange and quiet that day. When Pea got home from school, she walked into the office where I was faffing about pretending to catch up on admin and she put the local paper down on the desk in front of me.
I gasped. Call me na?ve, but I just hadn’t thought about it being covered by the press.
The headline read ‘Boy, 8, injured at Wildworld’.
There was a photo of him in his hospital bed, his legs all bloody and bruised.
His mum had been quoted as saying she would never go back and she hoped other parents would learn from her experience. It was a disaster.
Pea: School was hideous that day. Everyone was talking about it.
As usual, the rumours only contained a shred of truth.
There were people saying the boy had broken a leg, lost a leg, lost both legs.
Nicole Waddington sauntered over in Science, after lunch, and said she guessed AJ Silver wouldn’t be coming to Wildworld any more, now that people were getting seriously injured there.
As she walked away, she said, ‘If he was ever coming in the first place, that is.’ I was so over it by then.
Alex was sitting next to me and he put a hand on my arm as if to calm me down.
I don’t know what made me do it, but I picked up my safety goggles and threw them at the back of her head.
They were only light, just plastic. When they hit her, she stopped walking and spun around and asked me what the fuck I thought I was doing.
Mrs Lane chose exactly that moment to walk in.
It took her precisely two seconds to determine what was going on and she gave us both detention, said she didn’t want to hear any more about it, and started the lesson.
Alex: Pea was so wound up over that accident. I mean, I can understand why. If that park went down, her family was sunk. And if news of this accident got back to AJ Silver’s crew, I was pretty sure that whole thing would be off.
John: I told Cathy that we needed to focus on damage limitation.
We couldn’t let it ruin the AJ Silver visit.
I was sure it wouldn’t make the national news, some kid getting his knee scraped at a small theme park, and I was right, it didn’t.
It seemed very unlikely that Maggie and co would find out, unless someone told them.
Cathy: None of us were going to tell them, were we?
Pea: In the detention, Nicole didn’t say a word to me.
We had to copy out pages from our Science textbook for an hour.
Usually, I walked home with Alex, but of course he was long gone by the time detention was over.
It was just Nicole and me, no one else in sight.
She lived in the same direction, too. I hung back and let her set off first, then made sure I stayed well behind her.
We were almost at the turning for her road when she turned around and looked at me with pure hatred.
‘You’re going to regret doing that, Pea,’ she said.
I didn’t really take it seriously. I mean, what was she going to do?
Danny: What was she going to do indeed? We’ll find out pretty soon. But first, here’s what happened to the rollercoaster after the accident. Pay close attention.
John: I called out an engineer who came to look at the ride the day after the accident.
I wanted it open again as soon as possible.
His name was Nigel Woods. He was familiar with Wildworld and all the rides, although this was his first time seeing the 360.
He scratched his head and muttered a lot, and I told him everything I knew about what had happened.
I had to leave him to it in the end. There was an issue with the food ordering, and a vast quantity of chicken nuggets had turned up that there was no freezer space for.
I asked him to come and find me in the food hall when he was done.
An hour or so later, he appeared. ‘Loose connection,’ he said.
I raised my eyebrows, inviting him to go on.
‘I’d better show you.’ We strode over to the rollercoaster.
Pea and Alex were sitting on a bench close by.
Pea asked whether we knew what had happened yet, and I said Nigel was just about to show me.
They both stood up and followed us to the hut.
I don’t really know why, though Pea did always take an interest in anything that was happening at the park.
Sebastian appeared then, out of nowhere, said Cathy was looking for me. I held up a hand to tell him to wait.
Pea: I was just curious. I’d heard Dad talking about how he didn’t understand what could have happened, and I didn’t either. We crowded around Nigel, and he got out a screwdriver and started to dismantle the big green button you had to hit to send a carriage around the track.