The Water Children

As if she was a hypnotist and he was her subject, he nodded obediently. Instantly he was exhausted, worn ragged. He needed to sleep. Jimi Hendrix seemed far away, a blur of pink and orange, a flash of silver around his neck. He wanted to hear the end but he hadn’t the will to keep awake. Then Naomi was helping him back to the tent. ‘I want to see . . . see . . . Je . . . Jethro, Jethro Tull. I want . . . want to see Joan Baez. Naomi? Naomi?’ He waved his arm and stumbled. Distantly he knew he was losing co- ordination, control. ‘Was there something . . . something in that drink?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Na . . . omi?’ he slurred.

‘Yes?’ she said, a clear bell sounding through the fudge of his speech.

‘Don’t let me miss Leonard. Don’t let me . . .’ He broke off, remembering he had to breathe. ‘Don’t let me miss Leonard Cohen. I must . . . must hear Leonard.’ Someone was turning the volume down on his voice. The effort of making himself understood was too great. ‘Mm . . . mm . . . Na—’

‘I hear you,’ Mara, the black doll inside her, said. ‘Don’t worry, Walt, I’m going to take care of you.’ Now she was helping him into their tent and he was falling on his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to make you comfortable.’

‘You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re . . .’ She stroked his brow, drew her hand down his face, closing his eyelids as you might a dead man’s. His mouth fell open and his body went slack. She made a tight roll of her sleeping bag, and then held it over his mouth and nose. Using all her strength, she pushed down for long minutes, until her knuckles were white as lard and her hands ached. She only removed it when she was absolutely sure that he was dead. She pressed her fingers into his neck and felt for the pulse in his carotid artery. None. Walt’s blood was stagnating. Already his cells were breaking down, decaying, until all that he would be fit for was to be buried in the rubbish plantation. She sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork for a couple more minutes. She was grinding her teeth, the pestle-and-mortar grating punctuated by small satisfied grunts. She listened to her own eulogy for a bit and reminisced about her life with Walt, good and bad. Then gradually the tent impinged on her mix of thoughts. She didn’t like it, and he had been going to leave her alone in it while he lay with Judy.

She wished that they had brought the camper van. She felt safer in the van, shored up in the van. She could lock the doors and no one could get in. No one could pull her from her bunk in a sleep so deep that it felt like a trance, no one could grip her small hand in theirs, crush it between their strong adult fingers like a closing vice, and drag her through a forest of bunk beds where The Blind Ones slumbered. The Blind Ones chose to be sightless. Images played before their eyes, then vanished, never to be recalled. They were present, ever present, their eyes glowing but they witnessed nothing. Did you see? Did you see what happened? Mara wanted to scream at them, at their blank pudding faces. But she knew they would only turn their empty eyes on her and shake their heads. No, they did not see Father Peter creep past like a malignant ghoul in the thick darkness, Father Peter who in the daylight made them press their hands together and pray for forgiveness of their sins. In the sunshine with the sea breeze salty in their nostrils, he told them that they were miserable sinners, and that there was no health in them. Then in the black of night he came and drew Mara from the warmth of her bed. He took her to his small room, and told her as he lifted off her sleeping shift, that he needed to examine her, to seek out the marks of sin, to test her for evil. If she cried out the big hand was slapped over her mouth until she thought, just as Walt had, that she would suffocate. And when it was over the voice rasped that if she ever told anyone, she would go to hell, drown not once but for eternity, in a pit of molten flames.

And when she returned to her bunk, her skin bruised and crawling, the wet, musty smell of him on her, in her, she curled up in the dark forest and listened to the sounds of the others, The Blind Ones. The coughs and sighs and sniffles, the creaks of the wooden bunks as their occupants stirred, the rattle of windows, the thin whistle of the wind. She hugged her knees and imagined what it was like to be in hell forever, roasting in its fires. She imagined all of her, her organs, her flesh, licked with flames, consumed, until all that was left of her was the black crisp of her wicked heart.

On the third night after her ordeal she crept from her bunk, barefoot, holding the rough cotton of her shift between her legs to sop up the blood. She slipped through the doors like a shadow, and stumbled in the twilight. She trod grass and gravel, twigs and grit. She felt her way to the steep path that led down to the beach. She heard both her names spoken in the ‘shush, shush’ of the sea. Naomi. Mara. Naomi. Mara stepped onto a plain of cool grey sand, the pads of her feet sinking into it.

‘And she said unto them, “Call me not Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”’

As she neared the sea it greeted her with a cheer. Raising her head, she saw something that made the charred lump of her heart leap – its long blue smile faintly lit by the push of dawn. And then she was running, peeling the bloodied shift off, over her head, and running heeled with exultation into the icy water.

Chapter 4

Sixteen-year-old Owen has been set an essay for English homework, the topic ‘Childhood Memories’. It begins rather well as he lists remembered sensations. Sucking milk so cold from gill-sized bottles through paper straws that the ice splinters pricked his tongue and raked his throat. Sitting in a wicker chair that creaked and pinched his thighs when he shifted position. Eating jam sandwiches that stuck to the roof of his mouth. Squashing a tomato in his hand and feeling the juice of it ooze from between his closed fingers, and the seeds plant themselves in his sticky palm. Smelling the manure that had just been dug into the earth at his father’s allotment, as he stepped into the Cimmerian gloom of his rhubarb shed. He records his first sight of the blush-red rhubarb stalks poking up lewdly from the tangle of dowdy brown roots.

When he has finished the assignment he creeps into Sarah’s bedroom and sits on the side of her bed, feeling as if he has stepped into a time warp. Nothing has been changed in here. The space, Sarah’s space, is petrified in time. A clock stopped with Sarah’s last breath. His mother never opens the bedroom window. She wants the air that her daughter inhaled, that inflated her small spongy lungs, sending oxygen whizzing around her four-year-old body before she exhaled it, to remain trapped in the jar of this room. It is the reason that she slips speedily in and out, slamming the door with haste. Once inside the airtight hallowed place, she rations her own breathing, moves to new positions where she hopes that the air has not yet been recycled, and very slowly lets the snail of it slide into her. Look, this air, this air here, in the corner, inside the cupboard, at the back of the bottom drawer, this has not been tampered with. This is virgin. This is Sarah’s. She scrabbles about on her knees, and her head and shoulders disappear inside an empty drawer, so that she looks as if she is sticking her head in an oven, as if she is attempting to gas herself.

Both Bill and Owen have seen her do this, and both have guessed her motive as she rolls about on the floor, buries her head under the rag rug, or stands on tiptoes on a chair, her respiration at a turtle’s pace. Someone who was not there on the beach that day, someone who did not hear the words, ‘Don’t leave me, Owen,’ someone who didn’t see Sarah dredged up from the ocean bed, vampire white, eyes cemented shut, that someone would not have known. They would have surveyed Ruth Abingdon contorting her body into cramped gaps, or stretching giraffe-like to lick the ceiling, and they would have said, ‘That woman is mad; she should be taken to a locked ward.’ But Bill and his son Owen were there, and her behaviour does not seem so bizarre to them.

Owen glances about him, his gaze settling on the small, mahogany, free-standing bookcase. There are several titles of Noddy, a collection of fairytales with lovely illustrations that Sarah liked to trace with a chubby finger, while her father or her mother or her big brother read to her. His eyes rove the room and take inventory. The white enamel paintwork on the cupboards has yellowed with age. The curtains, a pink floral pattern, have been bleached long ago by the sun. The rag rug that his mother made for her daughter has faded too. Sarah’s cuddly toys are piled up on the pillow, a small teddy, sunflower-yellow with a black button-nose and a balding head, a floppy rabbit, its long ears lined with peach felt, and a golliwog whose stuffing can be peeked through a splitting seam on his foot. The worn scrap of her comfort blanket is kept folded in a lacquer jewellery box on the bedside table. There are more toys in a box at the end of her bed.

The contents of the wardrobe he knows by heart. He is confident that he can faithfully reproduce every dress and skirt, every cardigan and jumper and coat, every blouse and vest and pair of pants, her dressing gown and folded pyjamas. The socks have a drawer all to themselves. They nestle there like rows of white mice, some with lacy cuffs, or bows, or motifs of lambs and baby chicks. The shoes are polished. That is something his father deals with under the heading of ‘Caring for Sarah’s Kit’. Everything must be ordered for a surprise inspection one morning, one fine morning when they will chance to open her door a crack and see the spill of Sarah’s light-golden curls on the pillow. You can smell the polish when you fling wide the cupboard doors, and see the shoes standing to attention like soldiers on parade. They shine as his father’s did that day on the beach, the day she died. And there are tiny wool slippers, and a small pair of wellington boots, bottle green. Sarah’s smell is still here too, though like the curtains and the rag rug, its hallmark lemony heat grows fainter by the week.

His mother comes in every day, religiously, as if attending a daily service. Owen has seen her coiled like a rope on the bed, her knees drawn up, her face pressed to the pillow, to the toys, sobbing dryly. She would prefer Owen not to enter Sarah’s bedroom. She has not expressly banished him, but he has grasped this from the cross engraved on her brow, the downward pull of her mouth, the jump of the nervous tick in her cheek when he approaches the door. So he tries to resist the urge to spend time with Sarah, or at least to put it off until the need has become so strong that he cannot help but succumb to it – as he does now.

Sarah’s last words to him are caged in his head. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ They clang like a heavy chain. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ They make his scalp feel tight and his brain throb. Sometimes it is only the prick of a needle trying to winkle out a splinter, a nagging pain that, although it makes him irritable, is just about tolerable. But sometimes it is an ice pick hacking away in his skull, over and over and over, until the agony of it is unendurable. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen!’ When it is like this he is prepared to do anything to make it stop. He visualizes the ice pick driving into the sentence and cleaving the words apart. Owen. Don’t. Me. Leave. Don’t. Leave. Owen. Me. Leave. Owen. Don’t. Me.

He drives the heels of his hands into his eye-sockets. But it is no good because after a second they begin to reassemble. The word worm wiggles and wiggles the shape of the sentence back again, and then Sarah calls out even more loudly, enunciates ever more clearly, ‘Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen!’ And it sounds as if Sarah is right here next to him. There is the stranglehold of her arms belting his waist, and the fairy-dust hair brushing his chest, and the feathery lashes tickling his flesh.

His attention is distracted by the apple-green candlewick bedspread. It is looking threadbare now, as if the moths have gorged themselves on it. Actually it is not the moths but his mother who is responsible for the damage. Her busy fingers have pulled the cotton cords from it so many times that it has de veloped chronic mange. He shuts his eyes again and this time he is besieged by an image of himself. A gangly limbed boy, his mussed sandy hair like a tangle of gold wires in the candle flames. He is swaying slightly on the balls of his feet, feeling suddenly dizzy, the burnt smell in his throat. He draws in his breath with wonder, hypnotized by the glistening crimson arms of the rhubarb stalks, the ruched crowns of buttery yellow and natal green, edging towards the light. The flames flicker as if stirred by his exhaled breath. Their grey felt shadows graze the rough shed walls, tall then short, short then tall again. He can see them etched on his eyelids, jostling one another in their struggle to escape the suffocating wooden womb. He inhales and takes the musty smoke-laced odour deep down into his lungs. He looks automatically to his left, a twin looking for his other half. But Sarah is not there. Wire-wool tears scour his eyes. He blinks them away, and then he sees the Water Child blazing in her place.

Owen is visited by another memory that he omitted from his essay, the memory of a man who gave a brandy glow to his mother’s brown eyes. His name was Ken Bascombe. He was their next-door neighbour’s brother. He came to stay with his sister, Eileen Pope, one summer. He had sold his house in Surbiton and was emigrating to America.

‘Just a few things to do, one or two bits and pieces to sew up and then I’m off,’ he tells Bill, his deep, well-modulated voice bouncing over the garden fence.

Bill has been digging. He always seems to be digging, as if one day he thinks he might unearth something precious. He has soil particles clogging his scant hair, and brown flecks on the lenses of his National Health glasses. And he has a smear of mud on one cheek and a patch on the other, like tribal war paint. He is a primitive native emerging from the jungle, ill-equipped with his garden weaponry for this meeting with tall, suave, sophisticated, civilized man. Owen is wearing a secondary school uniform, grey flannel trousers, a white shirt. He is sitting on the kitchen doorstep in the sunshine pretending to read, but really he is observing, he is observing his father and Ken Bascombe.

‘Oh yes,’ says Ken, adjusting his tie and smoothing back his own abundant, crisp, blond hair. ‘So many more opportunities to make money over there, set up new businesses, get things moving. No limits to what you can achieve in that brave new world.’ Bill leans on his spade and nods. He rubs the inside of a wrist over one cheek, another brushstroke of earth paint.

‘Sounds . . . sounds, well . . . super,’ he manages eventually. He is stripped to the waist. His skin looks as unhealthy as the raw chicken’s spread-eagled inelegantly on the chopping board in the kitchen, waiting patiently to be drawn and quartered. In contrast his nipples seem very pink. They look out of place, as if someone has stuck them on him, as if you could just pinch them off like milk bottle tops. He rolls his shoulders, uncomfortable in his plucked-poultry skin.

‘I tell you, Bill, all those things you dreamt of having, over there in the Big Apple, you can really attain them. They encourage you. Not like here, eh? Slap you down just for trying over here.’ As he talks he describes a big circle with his arms. Owen notices that his hands are shapely, graceful, long fingered, expressive as a musician’s, with very clean, neatly filed nails. He has never scratched about in the dirt, you can tell. He appears to prod the ceiling of the sky, as if he can dip into heaven whenever it pleases him. He gives a chuckle and his magnetic eyes sparkle. Bill’s answering chuckle is a mirthless, agitated cough that is gobbled back hurriedly.

Owen’s eyes flick over the page of the book he is reading, Gone with the Wind, then back to the man. Ken Bascombe is wearing a suit. The fence cuts him in half but the portion he can see is very smart. A cream linen suit, a pressed, laundered shirt, a shiny, blue tie that matches the striking, frosty blue of his eyes. He is tall and handsome, and in his jacket he looks cooler than his father does with nothing on. Now he slides a hand in an inside pocket, produces a packet of cigarettes, and a gold lighter that catches the sun with a scintillating flash. He offers one to Bill who shakes his head. When he starts smoking, Owen squints at him and conjures Rhett Butler.

His mother comes out into the garden to take the washing down from the line. She crosses to the fence holding her empty basket in her arms, and chats easily to Ken Bascombe for a while. Her tone is such a low lisp that he cannot hear what she is saying. His father hangs back, looking oafish. After a few minutes his mother puts down the basket and rests her weight on one leg, the other leg bent back at the knee. She leans over the fence and smiles archly. She accepts the offer of a cigarette, although she knows her husband does not like her smoking. And Ken Bascombe, who will soon be travelling on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean to America, places her cigarette between his lips, holds his own to its tip, inhales deeply, and when it is lit hands it to her. Owen, thinking about how high the price of freedom was for the plantation slaves, notes that unusually his mother’s hair is brushed and loose. She has abandoned her apron too, something unheard of when performing her household tasks, until today, that is. Her cotton-print dress flutters in the gentle breeze, so that her son becomes aware for the first time that his mother has a body, a slender waist, shapely hips, full round breasts. For the rest of the day his mother sings.

She is still singing weeks later. Now she takes rides in Ken Bascombe’s Humber Super Snipe. The car has a top speed of nearly 80 m.p.h., she tells her son. It is a rich maroon colour, as if red wine has been sloshed all over the exterior, and it has real leather upholstery. Owen has sniffed the pungent animal scent of it. But he has declined the frequent invitations from Mr Bascombe, asking if he might like to take a spin in it. His mother’s spins have become so frequent that Owen imagines her as one of those twirling ballerinas. Round and round and round she goes. And he wonders if she will ever stop.

She arrives home later and later in the evenings still spinning, with her hair secured under her Liberty paisley scarf, newly bought sunglasses concealing her eyes, her cheeks flushed red as ripe strawberries. There is a funny smell that seems to cling to her too, a briny, fishy scent that reminds Owen unnervingly of the Merfolk. And her skin is pimpled all over as though she is cold. She sits in a dream on the staircase, slipping off her sunglasses to reveal dewy eyes, and easing the knot of her scarf with quaking fingers.

Then one night his father is in the kitchen scraping the vegetables for the tea that has now become a late supper. He has been listening for the door, ears pricked for his wife. Owen watches him carefully shave a potato, so that the peeling hangs unbroken, like a single muddy ringlet springing from a creamy white scalp. Then, while the pans are bubbling on the stove, Owen sees him fold the washing soporifically, smoothing out the wrinkles in the different fabrics. He stabs the potatoes with a fork, and deciding that the flesh is still resistant to the tines, busies himself guiding the carpet sweeper, push and pull, forward and back, as if he is practising a dance step. Owen, trailing him like a wan ghost from room to room, notes his brow slackening with the repetitive motion. His eyes have filmed over too as they trace the monotonous licking of the carpet pile, the ritual cleaning thorough as a mother cat washing her kitten.

The next day Owen comes home from school to find his father sitting at the kitchen table. He has fat, brown tears streaming down his face. He must have been rubbing it and the tears have mingled with earth, he realizes. His father is crying tears of clay, his nose dripping brown mucus, his quick, flighty breaths finding the grains of soil in his flaring nostrils and catapulting them out.

‘Hello, Father,’ Owen says.

He blinks his bloodshot eyes at his son in astonishment, as if having to remind himself that he did not drown as well that day on the beach. He seizes an onion from the sorry mound of vegetables by the chopping board, and brings it speedily to his eyes.

‘Peeling onions,’ he mumbles thickly. ‘You mustn’t mind me. I’m just a novice. I’m afraid your mother’s the expert.’ He takes a sudden desperate breath and then bites down, the way Owen has seen wounded soldiers do in war movies to stop from crying out in agony.

Owen’s doubting eyes flick to the papery, copper skin of the uncut onion. He wants to ask where his mother is, although he knows. A series of fleeting images chase through his head. His mother sitting in the front seat of the Humber Super Snipe, windows down, the wind in her hair, eyes shining, screeching in exhilaration as the powerful car swings round a hairpin bend in the road. Then the same car parked near the Ridgeway, and his mother and Ken Bascombe walking up a sloping path, hand in hand. Lastly, his mother looking eerily beautiful, lying flat on her back following the drama of the swirling clouds. Her hair, threaded with wild daisies, speedwell and maiden pinks, is spread like an embroidered pillow on the green, green grass. Now she lifts herself up and folds her body over the man’s stretched out by her side. Light as dandelion seeds blown on a breath of wind, she bends to kiss his fair hair, the fine skin around the vivid eyes, the unlined forehead, then lets her lips brush his. The kiss deepens and his arms close about her, the two blurring into one another. Owen wants to ask where his mother is but he does not.

Instead he says to his father, ‘Do you want any help?’

And his father shakes his head, the wisps of greying hair flying about making him look like a mad professor bending over his marvellous new invention, the onion. With an effort he straightens his shoulders and summons up a gritty smile, a tracery of fine, brown lines cracking his lips.

‘I’ll call you when . . . when tea’s ready,’ he assures his son in wavering tones. Then, as the boy creeps from the room, he adds robustly, ‘We’re having . . .’ but he never finishes the sentence. As Owen mounts the stairs he hears him sob, and feels his own heart jerk in answer.

There is no tea that night. Owen sits upstairs in Sarah’s room on the balding, apple-green coverlet, as the darkness digests the small house. He resists its advance, leaving on the bedside lamp. He will not give way to tiredness and close his eyes. And, as if he is plagued with vertigo crouching on the ledge of a skyscraper, he will not look down either. He does not have to peek to know they are there, reptiles writhing about his bed. Their shadows glide like blue-grey fish among the sweeping ferns of her flocked wallpaper. Sometime in the night, or perhaps it is the morning, he hears the Humber Super Snipe return, hears it revving outside the window. But still he does not move, just follows the Merfolk as they weave and slide along the aquarium walls of Sarah’s bedroom. Later, the click of the front door sounds very loud in the orphaned house, and the drone of the milk float that follows it, almost deafening.

When he ventures out of Sarah’s room he finds his mother sitting on the stairs, a suitcase propped on her lap. He has to clamber over her and it is a tricky operation in the greyness. On a lower step he swivels round and, feet apart, legs braced, faces her. For a longest time their eyes lock. He wonders if, like him, she is thinking of the day they made the snowman together.

‘Where are you going, Mother?’ he asks in a small voice. He hears a noise and glancing over his shoulder sees his father, face crinkled like a used teabag, cheeks still stained with brown streaks, standing, hands in pockets in the lounge doorway. ‘Are you leaving, Mother?’

But his mother does not answer. And then a moment, a moment when a diver is on the edge of a high board, when he sways forwards, feels for the point of balance, and holds himself there. Owen listens to the sound of his own breathing, light puffs, and his father’s dragon breaths dragging painfully in and out. His mother inhales and expels air silently under her butter-yellow belted summer coat. The horn of the Humber Super Snipe shrills, and Owen and his father swing round to stare accusingly in its direction. After a pause it screeches again. The note seems more urgent now, more impatient.

When Owen looks back, his mother has risen and is clasping the suitcase. And the way she stares at the front door, is as if everything else in the cramped hall, the telephone table, the telephone, the coat stand, the man and the boy, are without any substance at all. One last time the car horn blares, and this, a long sustained beep that makes all their ears ring as if they have been roundly boxed. Owen steps aside so that she can pass by un impeded. She treads down the stairs, crosses to the front door and rests her hand on the handle. He is still riveted to the spot where she sat and so he does not see her glance back, not at his father but at him. Slowly she turns and starts to heft the case back up the flight of stairs. Outside, the engine that has been idling, leaps into life with a bellicose roar. Then it is the purr of a contented cat. And finally it is no more than a mouse scampering away, the horn a distant squeak.

He blinks and a merman has slithered out of his nightmares. He is sitting on the same step that his mother sat on minutes earlier, his scaly tail flapping against the striped runner, briny puddles soaking into it. He shakes his head, and his brass-wire hair floats up like the mane of a jellyfish, to sting the white ceiling. The salty, dead-fish stink of him fills the air, making Owen want to gag. He turns and runs into the lounge, slamming the door behind him and very nearly tumbling over his father. Bill is on all fours harvesting the vegetables that are scattered all over the carpet, orange-coned carrots, copper-balled onions, sausage strings of Lincoln-green courgettes, cucumbers lying like sea slugs on the woollen pile, and dozens of cherry tomatoes. He is still dressed in yesterday’s mud-stained gardening clothes, and Owen is still wearing his school uniform. He moves with purpose over the vegetable patch rug, uprooting the vegetables one after another, and placing them with care on the seat of the settee.

‘I won’t be long,’ he mumbles, taking in his son with a swift upward glance. ‘Just clear up this mess. Wouldn’t want your mother finding it like this when she gets up, now would we?’ He chortles with impish pluck. He raises his bushy eyebrows at Owen, hinting at the dire consequences that might be in store for them both if he does not complete his mission. ‘I see you’re all ready for school. Good chap. Just the ticket. Won’t be a moment and then I’ll go and start up the car.’

Owen nods and presses his spine with all his might into the lounge door, arms spread, palms flat, knowing what lurks behind it. He thinks of the Humber Super Snipe eating up the roads, heading for the coast and the waiting ship. And then he thinks of their Hillman Husky in its washed-out shade of grey, an old, mud-caked elephant. He recalls the grains of earth freed from the upholstery creases by his weight, the gritty sensation of them sticking to his bare thighs, the stacks of plant pots that fight for space at his feet. He folds his arms, and feels his diaphragm jig to the uneven metre of his phantom tears. And then the Water Child is there, drowning his demons in a flood of light.

Owen receives an ‘A’ for his essay on childhood memories. The Abingdon family he writes about is just like the Woodentops. The father works in an office, the mother is happy all the live-long day in the kitchen, and the son plays in the garden in the reliable sunshine. His English teacher, Miss Laye, asks him to read his essay aloud to the class. She tells the other students how accomplished it is, how vivid and descriptive. ‘Owen has set a very high standard with this excellent piece,’ she says, giving her student an approving smile. He wonders what mark he would have got if he told the truth. What would she have said to the waiting class then?