John: I don’t remember talking to Pea about it at all.
Cathy: I didn’t know where he got the money from, in all honesty. He didn’t talk to me about it.
John: I went to a loan shark. It wasn’t the first time. With a business, sometimes there are cashflow issues, and you know you’ll have the money in a week but you need it now. I never told Cathy about those things, because I knew she’d worry. This was the most I’d ever borrowed, though. The guy whistled when I asked him, told me the interest would be high. I said I understood that, and we shook on it. I looked in his eyes, to see if there was any compassion there. I don’t think there was. I’d never got on the wrong side of him, but I’d heard about what happened if you did. He had guys who worked for him, but I think he did a lot of the persuading himself. He was a big guy, and his eyes were dead. Like something had happened to take the life out of them and he no longer cared about anyone or anything. I kept looking at him until he blinked, and then I looked down. For less than a second, I wondered what I’d got myself into, but then he started pulling cash out of this bag in a desk drawer and I shook my head and started to count it. It was enough for the deposit. He was going to get the rest to me in a couple of days.
Pea: The new rollercoaster arrived from one of the other big parks. It takes a while, when they’re moved like that, because they have to be dismantled and then put together again, and then they have to run loads of tests to check it’s working correctly and it’s safe. Dad was impatient to get it up and running. I guess it had cost a lot of money and he wanted to start making a return on it. He said that as well as sealing the AJ Silver deal, it would bring people to Wildworld from further afield.
It was a pretty cool ride, the 360. Half undercover, in darkness, and half out in the open. You had to go up some steps and through a door and get in the carriage in near darkness, and then when it started you shot out into the daylight and did various turns closely followed by two loops and then a slow ascent up to the highest point. The final drop took you back into the covered part, so you couldn’t really see where it would end. Dad said he’d been thinking about getting a rollercoaster like this for a long time.
Cathy: I’d never heard him talking about getting a new rollercoaster. I thought we were focusing on the younger end of the market, but I didn’t get involved. John had this way of making you feel small if you disagreed with him. He could argue with an empty chair, and even if you knew for a fact you were right, he was capable of twisting things around until you were no longer sure. I didn’t want to get into that. We needed the rollercoaster to get AJ Silver there, so we got it. I phoned Maggie, told her it was in place and ready to go.
Maggie: I didn’t ask about where the rollercoaster had come from. Cathy assured me it was there and up and running. That was good enough for me.
John: In order to fit the new rollercoaster in, we had to get rid of this tiny ride that barely got used. It had these cars and aeroplanes and buses and kids would sit in a vehicle and then it went round in a circle on a track. I didn’t think twice about getting rid of it. But on the day, Pea appeared and she was flapping her arms and saying it had been her favourite ride when she was little. I shrugged, told her there was nothing I could do. There was nowhere else for the rollercoaster to go.
Pea: I told him he was putting it in completely the wrong place. All the biggest rides were in Adventure City, and he was about to get it set up in Fun City, where the little kids’ rides were, just because there was a space. And he was planning to take out this ride I’d spent half my childhood on. I said there was room in Adventure City if he was just a bit creative. He folded his arms across his chest, and it was a challenge. He was inviting me to tell him something he hadn’t been able to come up with himself. He didn’t think I would, of course. I pulled a map out of my back pocket and opened it up, and he sighed as if he couldn’t believe I was claiming to know best about his theme park. I said, ‘Look, if we moved this ice cream stand over here, and got people to queue for the Gravity Spin on the other side, the new rollercoaster could go here.’ I pointed. He shook his head. But I could see that he knew I was right. He said he would think about it. And next thing I knew, that old cars ride was safe and Dad was directing the people with the new rollercoaster to Adventure City.
John: It was a good idea. I admit that. And it made me realise how much Pea knew about the park. I’d always known she spent a lot of time there, but I hadn’t realised she was paying so much attention. It was a lesson.
Pea: He never said thank you, or acknowledged that it had been a good idea. He didn’t really go in for praise.
John: The first day the 360 was open, the queue stretched for miles. We used to have these markers that told you how long you could expect to queue for. Twenty minutes, or forty minutes, or an hour, sometimes. That queue went way past the hour marker. We didn’t have a marker for an hour and a half, but I reckon people were queuing that long. And more than once, I saw kids get off and go straight back in the queue for another go. That was enough to convince me that I’d done the right thing. Yes, it was a lot of money, but it would pay for itself, I was sure of that.
Danny: Problem solved, right? Nobody could have predicted what happened next.
Pea: It was about two weeks after the new rollercoaster arrived, a few months before the AJ Silver visit. I was in the park with Alex like usual. It was early March, still cold enough to freeze your fingertips off. We were wrapped up with hats and scarves, and I could feel the cold of the ground seeping into my boots, making my toes numb. I said we should go and get a hot chocolate. There were stands around the park that sold hot drinks in winter and cold drinks and ice cream in summer, but the only place you could sit inside was the huge food hall, which was a hellish place of kids screaming and running around everywhere. So we just bought our drinks at the stand near the go-karts and sat on a bench.
Alex: It was just a normal day. Freezing, so I guess February, or possibly the start of March. I was ready to suggest we give it up and go inside to watch a film or something when Pea said she’d buy me a hot chocolate. Still, I was about half an hour from actually freezing to death. I didn’t have a good winter coat,because I could never find one I liked back then, but I had a hat and gloves on. We warmed our hands on the cups, and I asked her for the latest on Zak and she happily obliged.
Sebastian: I was at a friend’s house. I didn’t find out until later.
Cathy: I was in the office, just pottering about. I’ll never forget, this woman came rushing in at about two in the afternoon, white as a sheet, and said there’d been an accident on the 360. I asked her what she meant by an accident and she said I had to call an ambulance, that someone was seriously hurt. I picked up the phone and dialled 999. First time I’d ever done that. The man on the other end of the phone asked me lots of questions and I clammed up, didn’t know. I had to pass the phone to the other woman in the end. So I heard about it like that. A boy, she said, quite young, maybe ten. One carriage had gone into the back of another one and he was trapped. I felt sick.
John: I heard the shouting. I wasn’t far away. I was at the Ghost Train and it was pretty close to the 360. I went straight over there to find out what was going on. The ride wasn’t in operation and when I went into the covered part I could see that there were two carriages together, that one had gone into the back of the other. There were still people sitting in the carriages. Outside, I could hear a woman screaming. ‘My boy, my boy!’ I asked the ride operator whether anyone had called an ambulance and he said someone had gone to the office for that. I thought about Cathy, how she would react. And I turned and ran up to the office.
Pea: I can’t describe it. We were nowhere near the 360, weren’t even in Adventure City, but it was like the news spread through the park. A kind of unstoppable wave. I heard a couple of people walking past talk about the park closing, and I thought at firstthey meant the summer closure, for AJ Silver. Then I heard a mum rounding up her kids, saying the park was closing and they had to go home. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even three in the afternoon. I looked at Alex and he shrugged.
Alex: Pea wanted to go to the office and try to find out what was going on, so we headed that way. People were pouring out of the place, all heading for the exits. It was clear that something major had happened. Pea wasn’t saying much, so I just kept walking with her. It took a while because the picnic bench where we’d been sitting was about as far from the exit as it was possible to be.
Cathy: John turned up, closely followed by Pea and Alex. I said an ambulance was on the way. I assumed they knew what had happened, but Pea didn’t. Her eyes went really wide and she asked me to tell her what was going on. John was pacing, running his hands through his hair. He looked like he might explode at any minute. I told Pea there’d been an accident on the 360, that someone was trapped.
Pea: I didn’t understand. I knew how rollercoasters worked. One carriage set off, and then when it was at the furthest point of the track, a second one went. It wasn’t possible to send the second carriage going before the first one was at the right point. It was built into the mechanism that it wouldn’t let you do that. I started to say some of this, but Dad looked up at me and told me to shut up. He’d never spoken to me like that before. I just stared at him.
Alex: I knew John pretty well, and I’d seen him angry, like the time Pea and I dyed our hair red and got dye all over the tiles and several towels. But that day was something else. The rage, ormaybe the fear, was radiating off him. He couldn’t keep still. And when he came close, I thought I caught a whiff of stale booze.
John: Drinking? It was three in the afternoon. Of course I hadn’t been drinking.
Cathy: When the ambulance arrived, we all rushed over there. Me and John, Pea and Alex, and the paramedics, of course. The park was deserted by then, and it had the kind of hush you only heard after it was closed. But as we approached the 360, I could hear a woman crying.
Pea: It was the mother of the boy. She was crying. Wailing. She sounded completely deranged.
Alex: God, yes, I remember. There was a small crowd of people waiting just outside the entrance to the ride. Presumably friends and family of the people in the carriages. They’d ascertained that only one person was hurt, this young boy, and his mum was hysterical. Something felt off about it, and then I realised it was that I couldn’t hear him crying. He was totally silent. I thought maybe he was dead.
Cathy: No, there was never any suggestion that it was a fatal accident.
John: All I kept thinking was what if someone had been killed? What if that little boy was dead? It would end us.
Terry: My name’s Terry Blakely. I was one of the paramedics at the scene that day. We spoke to John Hunter, the owner, and he took us over to the little booth where the ride was operated from. It was inside and it was badly lit. I asked John if he could bring the carriages back in slowly and safely, and he said he could. He started the thing up and pushed a button to get the first carriagemoving. My colleague had warned the people inside it what was going to happen. When the carriage was safely in the starting position, John released the safety bars. I held up both hands and asked the people in the carriage not to move. And then I went to them one by one, checking they weren’t hurt or bleeding or in pain. There were a couple of teenagers in the back row who had some pain in their necks. I thought it was probably whiplash but I radioed for help just in case. We got them on stretchers so they could be checked over. Then it was time for the second carriage to be brought in. John did the honours. I noticed that his hands were shaking.
