Waterland

by Graham Swift

  Save that Freddie Parr couldn’t.

  Dick’s eyelashes whirred. Dad swore – the soft oath of a God-fearing man who swears never in anger but only in distress – and fished once more with his boat-hook amongst Freddie’s clothes.

  We got Freddie Parr out of the water. Between us, we lifted him up the landing-steps – a water-logged body is not light – and carried him on to the concrete stretch of tow-path in front of the cottage. There, because it is the recommended position for the resuscitation of the not-quite-drowned, Dad had him placed chest-down on the ground. And there, because Dad had at one time under the auspices of the Great Ouse Catchment Board (which subsumed the Leem Drainage and Navigation Board) been given token instruction in the Holger-Nielsen Method of Artificial Respiration, he began to press between Freddie’s prominent shoulder-blades, to raise and lower his stiffened arms and to continue to do so for a full quarter of an hour. Not because he did not know, any less than Dick and I knew, that Freddie was dead, but because Dad, being superstitious, would never exclude the possibility of a miracle, and because this ritual pretence at resuscitation staved off the moment when he must face the indictment of truth. That the corpse of a boy had been found in his lock, a boy who – had his lock-keeper’s vigilance not failed him that night – might have been saved; that because it was his lock, it was his responsibility; that it was the corpse of the son of a known neighbour of his; that in retrieving this corpse he had cack-handedly wounded it about the head with a boat-hook, and to wound the dead was perhaps a sin more heinous than to wound the living; that the appropriate authorities must be informed and summoned; that, once again, Trouble was invading his quiet riverside life.

  For when a body floats into a lock kept by a lock-keeper of my father’s disposition, it is not an accident but a curse.

  More water flowed from Freddie Parr’s mouth, but no blood flowed from the mulberry gash in his temple. Water flowed from Freddie Parr’s mouth in rhythmic spurts according to the pressure of the persevering hands between his shoulders. For there is such a thing as human drainage too, such a thing as human pumping. And what else was my father doing on that July morning than what his forebears had been doing for generations: expelling water? But whereas they reclaimed land, my father could not reclaim a life …

  Thus I see us, grouped silently on the concrete tow-path, while Dad labours to refute reality, labours against the law of nature, that a dead thing does not live again; and larks twitter in the buttery haze of the morning sky, and the sun, shining along the Leem, catches the yellow-brick frontage of our cottage, on which can be observed, above the porch, a stone inset bearing the date 1875, and, above the date, in relief, the motif of two crossed ears of corn which, on close inspection, can be seen to be not any old ears of corn but the whiskered ears of barley.

  The water slops out, in astonishing quantities. And no amount of rhythmic pressing and pulling on Dad’s part, no amount of dogged application of the Holger-Nielsen Method can hide the fact that he is desperate. That though his lips do not move he is praying, that he is thinking of Jack and Flora Parr who do not know, at this moment, that their son is dead. And I too am praying and hoping – I do not know if it is for Freddie Parr’s sake or for my father’s – that Freddie Parr will miraculously revive. Because it seems to me that in his futile pumping at Freddie’s body, Dad is trying to pump away not just this added curse, but all the ill luck of his life: the ill luck that took away, six years ago, his wife; the ill luck that had his first son born a freak, a potato-head (for that’s what Dick is). And more curses, more curses perhaps, as yet unknown.

  Only Dick, of the three of us, shows no dismay (but what can you tell of the feelings of a potato-head?). For him, this removal of a body – even a familiar body – from the river is perhaps not essentially different from his daily task (for which he will be late today) of removing silt, by means of bucket-dredging apparatus from the bottom of the Ouse. For Dick is a good worker, potato-head though he is, there is no doubt about that. There is no doubting his manual strength, his stamina, his sullen willingness to get on with the chores he is set. Dick smells of silt. He goes now to the edge of the tow-path. He is holding the boat-hook. He leans on it and spits – a great gob of the old Crick phlegm which, though thick and in good supply, has momentarily failed to quell my father’s inner agitation – into the lock-pen. He watches it float, bubble, sink. His cow-lashes flutter over his fish-eyes.

  And only Dick sees, through blinking eyes, as we try to raise the dead, that two lighters are approaching in the distance, upriver, from the Ouse, and will require passage through the lock. Drowned body or not, the lock-gates must be opened and closed. And soon this riverside calamity which is known only to us will be known to others too, the news carried up the Leem by the lightermen of the Gildsey Fertilizer Company. Soon the desperate silence on the tow-path will be broken by the voices of those for whom this drowned boy is only something on the periphery, not at the hub of their concern. ‘Ent much sense squeezin’ the water outa dead body’ (first lighterman). ‘Boat-’ook? What d’you use a boat-’ook for? Coulden you dive in an’ pull the bugger out?’ (Why not indeed? Because it’s bad luck to swim in the same water as a drowned body.) By the voices of policemen and ambulancemen, with questions and note-books, for whom this sort of thing is not exactly everyday, but not unusual.

  And why make a fuss about one drowned boy when over the far horizon and in the sky a war is being fought; when mothers are losing their sons every day and every night the bombers are taking off and don’t all return? The wide world takes priority. And even Dad, who once watched the wide world drowning in Flanders yet lived to tell the tale, will one day tell perhaps, with a flick of cigarette ash and a shake of his head, how he fished that poor drowned lad out of the New Atkinson.

  For the reality of things – be thankful – only visits us for a brief while.

  But – for a brief while – the scene which seems endless: the tow-path; the glinting Leem; lighters approaching downstream; Dick by the lock-pen; Dad labouring in vain, but not knowing how to stop, at the water-filled body of Freddie Parr.

  And Dad does not see, in his agitation, something to make this scene even more endless and indelible. For under and around the gash on Freddie Parr’s right temple is a dark, oval bruise. Or perhaps Dad does see it, which is why he goes on levering Freddie’s arms, not wanting more Trouble. And perhaps Dick sees it, which is why he turns away and spits in the lock-pen. Perhaps we all see it; but I am the only one to consider (notwithstanding my ignorance of how speedily a corpse bruises) that the bruise on Freddie’s right temple, which is a dull yellow at the edges, was not made by the boat-hook.

  But the lighters are approaching. Dick is opening the tail-gates and the lightermen at the same time are seeing something on the tow-path which will justify a break in their upstream journey. They clamber ashore to inform us of what we know already but do not want to know, that Jack Parr’s son is dead, sure as they’re alive; and to be the means at last of making Dad cease his relentless squeezing and pulling. The lightermen gabble. Dad is quiet; then suddenly remembers he is a lock-keeper, with official duties in cases of emergency.

  Twenty-five minutes have passed since Freddie was hoisted from the river (the perimeter of the puddle in which he lies is already beginning to dry). And it will be another thirty-five minutes before the policeman from Apton and the ambulance from Gildsey will arrive. By which time (because dead bodies, like picked fruit, do indeed bruise) a new bruise, caused by the boat-hook, will have begun to form over the old bruise which could not have been caused by the boat-hook, rendering the two bruises, in due course, to appear, to the casual eye, as one. And because of this; because in giving his account to the policeman Dad stressed more than once, with contrite insistence, that the wounds to Freddie’s head were made by his own inexcusable clumsiness with a boat-hook (to which I and a grunting Dick bore witness); because the policeman was satisfied; because time elapsed while the unfortunate parent
s were informed and summoned (another endless, indelible scene) and the body was transported to the mortuary in Gildsey, and time blurs details; and because the examining pathologist, having been informed of the business of the boat-hook, did, indeed, have a casual eye and was concerned only to ascertain that Freddie’s lungs were water-logged, and to note the further conclusive fact that the subject’s congealing blood contained a substantial infusion of alcohol – the preliminary verdict on Freddie Parr was that he died (being a non-swimmer and also drunk at the time) by drowning, between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. on the night of the twenty-fifth to the twenty-sixth of July, 1943.

  Why did fear transfix me at that moment when the boat-hook clawed at Freddie Parr’s half-slipping, half-suspended body? Because I saw death? Or the image of something worse? Because this wasn’t just plain, ordinary, terrible, unlooked-for death, but something more?

  Children, evil isn’t something that happens far off – it suddenly touches your arm. I was scared when I saw the dark blood appear but not flow in the gash on Freddie’s head. But not half so scared as when Mary Metcalf said to me later that day: ‘I told him it was Freddie. Dick killed Freddie Parr because he thought it was him. Which means we’re to blame too.’

  And that same evening, after I’d cycled back from my tryst with Mary (because she and I had one of those youthful things going, which, though youthful, are not always innocent and which, though they happen in your youth, can affect the rest of your life), something else floated down the Leem, was seen and fished out only by me.

  The swallows are skimming the water above the sluice. The late July evening is only just beginning to darken. Gnats are jitter-bugging above the rushes. And I am lying in a little cavity in the river-bank, under a willow, upstream from the cottage on the far side; a place where I have often sat or lain and fed my hunger for books. Where I have polished off Hereward the Wake, The Black Arrow and With Clive in India. And, more recently, chewed thoughtfully, if distantly, over school textbooks (does it surprise you that your tiresome teacher was once a tiresome swot?) or concocted my high-flown essays (wince again) on the Jacobite Rebellions or The Effects of the Seven Years War. But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now). I have brought my fear.

  Through willow branches, I watch Dad. He is walking to and fro, sentry-like, along the far tow-path. Sometimes he looks at the gently gliding river and sometimes he looks at the sky. He is talking, soundlessly, to himself. And now and then he rubs his right knee, the right knee wounded all those years ago in 1917. He rubs it because he has made the mistake earlier in the day of kneeling (the worst possible thing for that still susceptible knee) on a hard surface (concrete) for several minutes. Yet he was scarcely to have considered … And now he walks, up and down, the twilight darkening his profile, nursing and flexing the suffering joint, but still not really thinking of it. He won’t go to set eel-traps tonight; but he won’t go to bed either. When it’s dark and nearer dawn than dusk he’ll still be rubbing his knee at the lock-side. Because, last night, for want of vigilance …

  And Dick is by the lean-to against the left-hand wall of the cottage, doing what he will always be found doing when there is nothing else to do – ‘mending’ his motor-cycle. That is to say, removing parts of it (for, though it’s old, there’s nothing wrong with that motor-cycle), oiling them, holding them up to the light, blowing on them, rubbing them, and putting them back again. Dick has a way with machines. Every day he coaxes into continued action the antiquated gear of a bucket-dredger which, were it not for the war, would have been declared obsolete long ago. And it is conceivable that, but for the lack of something up top, this way with things mechanical, which in Dick’s case is less a skill than a sort of kinship, might have taken Dick far in some relevant field – hydro-engineering, say, for which there is constant demand in the Fens.

  Dick lacks, indeed, certain accomplishments which even the mechanically minded find useful. Dick cannot read or write. He is not even good at putting a spoken sentence together. He has received a rudimentary schooling at the village school. But the strange thing is that whereas it would seem that Dick’s shortcomings required extra and extensive attention, his education was in fact curtailed, even, one might say, deliberately abandoned by the parents. To the younger son was given the privileged role of the bright schoolboy of whom much was expected and who was therefore to be protected from all things menial; while to the elder (who did not seem to mind) was assigned a lifetime of daily toil. And while this determined policy on the part of the parents might have expressed the simple recognition that their first-born was, after all, irreclaimable, this did not account for the rigour with which it was pursued: for that moment, for example, when the younger son, thinking it only right to impart to his less fortunate brother some of his, albeit frugal, learning, embarked (the future teacher in the making) on a programme of secret tuition; and, being found out, was not only stopped short in his scheme of enlightenment but was roundly told by the provoked father (who was not a man, it was true, easily roused to great temper or severity, especially since the sad death of his wife): ‘Don’t educate him! Don’t learn ’im to read!’

  And it was that same night that the father (composure regained) told the younger son about mother’s milk and everyone having a heart …

  Dick works at his motor-bike. It could be said that Dick’s love of machines, if love it is, springs from the fact that Dick himself is a sort of machine – in so far as a machine is something which has no mind of its own and in so far as Dick’s large, lean and surprisingly agile body will not only work indefatigably but will perform on occasion quite remarkable feats of dexterity and strength. This despite the clumsy mental faculties that go with it and its deceptive air of ineptitude. Dick wants to know why other people are not like machines. Perhaps Dick too wants not to be like a machine. Dick stumbles helplessly or blenches in a kind of puritanical horror at any event which proves that human behaviour is not to be regulated like that of a machine. Except when he descends to foolish attempts to imitate, by mechanical means, the idiosyncrasies he sees around him, Dick can give the impression that he looks down from his lofty and lucid mindlessness, half in contempt and half in pity at a world blinded by its own glut of imagination. That he knows something we don’t. And this impression – this pose – can lend Dick, in the eyes of others, a certain rugged pathos; can even invest him (for there’s no getting away from it, Dick has an ugly mug) with a perverse appeal. But it makes Dick lonely. It makes him suffer. Which is why he talks, for solace, to his motor-bike, more than he talks to any living thing. And why it has even been said (and Freddie Parr was one of the chief rumour-mongers) that Dick is so fond of his motorbike that he sometimes rides it to secluded spots, gets down with it on the grass and …

  Dick crouches by the lean-to. As well as silt, Dick smells of oil. He holds up some bit of engine to inspect. Dick has big powerful hands. But I cannot see his eyes.

  And Dad walks. And in walking, as he passes the cottage, he steps perceptibly to one side, round the spot on the concrete where …

  To and fro; up and down. His figure, on the river-bank, looms darker against the fading sky and takes on for me some of that pitiful charisma Dick too can exert. He must imagine I’m up in my room, nose buried in my books. For if he knew I wasn’t, his head would be turning and his neck craning in even greater fretfulness. He’d be searching along the river. For he’s one of those who believe that sorrows seldom come singly, and he’s already witnessed, this morning, one father and his drowned boy.

  To and fro. Perhaps he’s thinking, on this day when there’s so much else to think on, of the old conundrum of his two sons. How one pores over books, one over motor-bikes; how one is a moron, and one has brains, will be a clever man. He doesn’t guess how the brainy one is hiding from the brainless one.

  Because the brainy one’s scared.

  About-turn. Pause. Flex leg. Rub knee.<
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  And then something catches my eye amongst the rushes. Perhaps it has just, that very moment, drifted there, or perhaps it has been there all the while. A bottle. And since it is a habit if you live by a river to fish out the debris it brings down, I reach out, hook one finger into its neck and retrieve it. A bottle. A beer bottle. A bottle of thick dark brown glass, but not a sort of bottle that is seen any more around the Fens – or has been seen for over thirty years. Label-less, undirtied, with a slender neck and an upright, slim rather than squat appearance.

  All this I observe before, as darkness gathers, I take the bottle and carry it along the river-bank, to below the sluice, from where it will float down to the Ouse, and even, perhaps, in time, to the sea. An old-fashioned, but quite unmuddied, beer bottle, with round the base, embossed in the glass, the words: ATKINSON GILDSEY.

  6

  An Empty Vessel

  BUT there’s another theory of reality, quite different from that which found its way into my fraught after-school meeting with Lewis. Reality’s not strange, not unexpected. Reality doesn’t reside in the sudden hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this and for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History, and its near relative, Histrionics …

  And did I not bid you remember that for each protagonist who once stepped on to the stage of so-called historical events, there were thousands, millions, who never entered the theatre – who never knew that the show was running – who got on with the donkey-work of coping with reality?

  True, true. But it doesn’t stop there. Because each one of those numberless non-participants was doubtless concerned with raising in the flatness of his own unsung existence his own personal stage, his own props and scenery – for there are very few of us who can be, for any length of time, merely realistic. So there’s no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for presence, for feature, for purpose, for content.