The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  He has given this pig a name, Derry. He knows any day now Derry will be slaughtered, that he will have to help to hold him down, that the knife will be drawn across his taut throat while he is screeching with fear. And that his Da will boast afterwards of a clean kill, a quick kill, that he will have to hold the bowl under the slit neck to catch the spraying blood. He thinks Derry will fight more than most, hopes he will, that his trotters will scuff at the earth for full minutes before the life drains out of him and he goes limp to the world. His Da looks forward each year to killing the pig. Sean senses this, the way his eyes have the veneer of avarice over them when they rest on the brute. Sometimes he brings it treats, an apple, a carrot, a slice of bread and dripping. And they grunt together, his Da approving the spread of his girth, the pig falling on the gourmet morsel in moist, snorting grunts of ecstasy. But there will be nothing clean about the kill when it comes. Sean knows this from past experience. His hands will be red with blood. And there will be blood spattered on his face and soaked into his clothes. The death stink will be weeks in going.

  He thinks about the cycle of Derry’s life, of him having been not much more than a piglet when he arrived, of fattening him up, of listening to his grumbles and his excited squeals, of how comic he looks when he runs, and the joy of him as he slumps in a mess of mud, and of the way he loves to have you draw a twig back and forth across his rump. Then he wanders into another scene, the star of which is a pie – the pie that Derry ended up in, actually.

  Mother baked it. She was a good cook. They had a small range by then. He had taken to spying on her, watching her about her business in the kitchen, when she was all alone. He peeped in at the window over the sink. He marvelled at the locomotion of her, that she never stilled, slicing, chopping, peeling, weighing, washing, scrubbing, stirring. She moved about the kitchen, her long serge skirt swishing like a broom. She squatted on the three-legged stool and poked at the fire. She sucked on her teeth while roses bloomed in her cheeks, and perspiration pearled her nose. And she counted her silvery-grey rosary beads in her rough hands.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women.’

  Today the window is ajar and he smells her sweat and smoke and the steamy soap suds in the enamel sink. He imagines the place under her skirt, the soft damp place between her thighs, the briny wetness there, how he has come out of it.

  ‘And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’

  With one hand she feeds pieces of Derry into the meat mincer clamped to the side of the kitchen table, while with the other she turns the handle. He can see pink and white meat worms come wriggling out of the mincing mouth, as if it is spewing. She swipes away stray strands of greasy black hair that dangle before her eyes, and hunches her beetle-black brows as she seasons the worms in a cream china mixing bowl. Later he watches her rub butter into a snowfall of flour, add a drop of water, and with the wooden rolling pin lean her weight into it, flattening it into shape. His eyes are trained on her, as she spoons the squashed Derry worms into a pie dish, and when she carefully lifts the pastry lid over it, pinching the edges between her fingertips. Lastly she pricks it with a fork and paints it golden yellow, dipping her pastry brush into the beaten froth of a separated egg yolk. The pie bakes slowly, and after an hour he comes back and hides under the window, among the bracken, the juices running into his mouth at the delicious gravy fragrance that wafts to him on the summer air. As he is leaving he falls into a clump of nettles. They feel velvety for a second, and then the velvet changes into metal, painfully grating his lower legs and arms.

  The next morning, milking accomplished, he spies on her once more, as she makes up his and Emmet’s lunch pieces for school. He sees her cut hunks of bread and wedges of cheese, sees her lay them in the centre of the squares of calico cotton. Then he sees her walk to the larder, open the door, go inside and return bearing the pie. The crust is the colour of the midday sun, and when she cuts into it a squirt of mouth-watering clear brown jelly clings to the silver blade of the knife. She slices a single thick slice, and she folds it into one of the calico squares, then knots them both. She puts the pie back in the larder, and lays the lunch pieces on the dark-wood dresser. After they have spooned up the last smear of their porridge, he and Emmet go to fetch their lunches. Seeing them, she rises quickly and picks both bundles up, one in each hand. Sean knows which contains the slice of pie because he saw her set them down. Now she holds it in her right hand. Her sons stand before her, ready to receive her blessing. Sean stops breathing. His mother looks steadily into his foreign eyes, as she places the bundle in her left hand into his. Then she turns to Emmet and gives him the other, her eyes softening. Outside in the yard the cock crows. ‘Hacca croodle oooh,’ it goes, ‘Hacca croodle oooh.’

  All day Sean meditates on the pie, how good it will taste, how the crisp butter pastry will dissolve against your tongue. He visualizes the succulent pink worms, how they will have set together with flecks of white fat into firm flesh. He broods on Emmet opening up his calico square, and his greedy eyes glittering up at the sight of the pie wedge. He envisages him cramming it into his gobbling mouth with its overbite, gulping it down hog fashion, without savouring the flavour, the texture, all the Derry days that have gone into the making of it. His own cheese feels hard and bitter in his mouth, and the bread appears stale and sour, so that it sucks the moisture out of him. And he goes to the toilet and spits out his rejection, ignoring the rumbles of his empty tummy.

  That day at school they learn that wolves once roamed free in Ireland, that as the oak forests were cut down and the land cleared, the wolves were driven by starvation to hunt on farmland. They preyed on cattle and sheep, and the farmers hunted them down until the last wolf was extinct. Sean imagines what it was like to be that last wolf, large and grey and lonely, with a bushy tail, long snout and pointy ears, and eyes sharp as unrequited love. He thinks about how he must have searched for another of his kind, that he would have loped about at night, those lone eyes silvered with moonlight, howling his grief. He wants to howl like the last wolf. He wants it so badly that he cannot wait for Sunday to come round. When the house is abed and they all sleep soundly, he creeps out and prowls in the night-shine. He runs light-footed through the black land, till he comes to her. Her face, with the amber harvest moon and cloud shadows flitting over it, is polished tortoiseshell. He strips and sinks into her, and she moans, cold and hard as nails of cut glass raking over his body. He takes a balloon’s breath and hauls himself under her, down and down in the darkness. Then he opens his mouth and as she pours into him, he howls the howl of the last wolf.

  In Brighton, beside Sean on the bench they come and go, the elderly couple, two young women bickering, a man who dribbles water from a bottle over his panting dog, a family with two children who vine themselves around the ornate iron armrests. He knows it is time to leave, to catch his train. But as he makes his way through the High Street he drags his feet like a recalcitrant schoolboy. He pauses in a doorway to take a nip from his hip flask, and he greets the kick of it as it hops into him, like a dear old friend. The pavements have gone all continental, cafes spilling out onto them, people lounging like dusty cats in the sun. The envelope still crackles. There is twenty thousand pounds in it, a fortune. For a few hours he is a rich man. He will sit down at one of the tables and enjoy an ice-cold lager. If he misses this train he will catch the next . . . or the next. What is there to worry about? What is the rush? After all, he is his own master.

  His order is taken by a girl with a white streak in her wispy brown hair, and glasses with square lenses burnished copper by the sun. Perhaps it is the weather, perhaps it is his heartbeat drumming through the money, but he is backward looking this afternoon, glancing over his shoulder at yesterdays. His granda comes to his mind – Da’s Da who went to the bad. That was how they all referred to him, Granpops who went to the bad. But Sean met him before he arrived there, when he judged there were still some drops of good left
in him. He came to stay at the farm once. Sean’s Ma was taken ill and rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

  She was a month off giving birth when it happened. Tiny babies often slipped out of his Ma. Each time she fell, she went to church and prayed to God and Lord Jesus and all the saints, to hold them in. And she prayed some more at home, kneeling before the tiny shrine she had made to Mother Mary, in the kitchen. She rubbed her knees raw with the praying. But one after the other out they slid, refusing obstinately to stay in the snug red of her. Sean wondered if perhaps they knew what sort of life was waiting for them on the farm, if they preferred to go back to where they came from rather than fetch up here. Anyway, this baby had hung around and grown some, till his Ma’s belly was stretched and popping with it. It was spring and she’d been to the fields and picked a bunch of wild flowers, daisies and poppies and tree mallow. She’d put them in a glass jar in Mary’s shrine.

  ‘For the thanks,’ she said. Then she sank down to her swollen knees, began groaning and didn’t get up again. His Da went with her, and Emmet was sent to his cousins. Sean was left to manage the farm and Granpops arrived in his beaten-up old truck, to help keep things running. He was a huge man who smelt of whiskey, tobacco, age-old dirt and sweat. The few occasions Sean had seen him, he was wearing the same clothes, and they looked as if they had not been washed for years. Trousers like tree trunks, they were so creased and besmirched, braces stained with oil, a patched wool shirt grey with ancient food stains that would not do up over the hump of his stomach, and a battered old porkpie hat.

  But it was Sean who did all the running, while Granpops sat in the easy chair by the fire, and smoked his pipe and drank his whiskey. When Sean came in from the fields the bottle was half empty, the pipe had been knocked out on the kitchen table, and the fire was dead. He was awful hungry, ready for a plate of stew, or some Colcannon with good mashed tatties and chopped kale and cream, or a slice of blood sausage flavoured with tansy herbs. But there was nothing, so he started rooting in the cupboards.

  ‘What are you doing, boy?’ drawled his granda from under his porkpie hat. And Sean jumped in his weary hide, because he had been sure that Granpops was snoozing. He whipped off his hat and squinted at him with his one good eye. The other was a greenish smear and gave Sean the willies.

  ‘I’m looking for something to eat,’ he told him guiltily.

  Granpops heaved himself out of the chair and he rootled about with him. They found two tins without labels on, and he clumsily opened them both with a penknife which had dried blood on its blade. Sean fetched spoons and forks, and they sat at the kitchen table eating. Sean had beans, and from his can, Granpops forked apple slices through his smacking fleshy wet lips. They had to be careful not to cut their mouths on the jagged metal edges. Halfway they swapped. Then Sean lit a candle, and his granda had a few more swallows of whiskey and belched. He told stories of how he’d been a sailor and worked his passage across the Atlantic Ocean to America. But he hadn’t liked it there. ‘The work was too hard and the living poor, you know. Not a fit life for a real man.’ So he’d come back home to the green land.

  Later, when Sean was going to bed, Granpops said, ‘D’you want to come for a ride in my truck, boy?’ And Sean nodded, although it seemed a crazy thing to do, drive about aimlessly in the dark. They motored a long way, the truck coughing and spluttering and farting, and Sean being shaken about so much he thought that he might fall to pieces. His granda leant on the wheel, and squinted with his good red-rimmed eye at the dirt track that wound ahead of them. ‘D’you know where we’re going, boy?’ he asked. Sean told him that he didn’t. And his granda chuckled at that and laid a grubby finger on his nose, a large nose that began in one direction and ended in another. They came to a barn and there were other cars and trucks parked outside it. As he climbed out, Sean smelt oil, and he burped a whiff of beans and apples. He looked up at steel stars nailed into the inky walls of the night. The moon was the colour of pumpkins and seemed to rock overhead, so that fastening on it made him feel giddy as a rolling cartwheel.

  Inside, the barn was lit with oil lanterns, and it was sardine tight with men. The noise of excited voices leapt and juddered and jumped, and Sean saw that money was changing hands. Granpops had forgotten about him, so he squeezed through the mass of bodies to where they all fringed a sawdust space. There, two men were stripped to the waist, circling each other like snorting bulls. To Sean they appeared as David and Goliath. David was stocky with broad shoulders and a bushy brown moustache. And Goliath was tall, with a long neck and a bald head. The next day, thinking back, Sean could not remember who threw the first punch. Only that the barn suddenly erupted, and there was jeering and barracking and shouts of encouragement. The mass of people pushed behind him. There was the reek of sweat and rage, of acrid oil and feverish dreams in his nostrils. The fists flew and the contact cracks caused shivers to run down his spine. A spray of blood specked his cheek. There were grunts and moans as the punches were landed. One of David’s eyes swelled up so much that he couldn’t open it, but he kept on fighting. Sean had been sure that Goliath would win, but it was David who was the victor, with a sneaky right hook that the giant never saw coming. Back at the farm, Sean had his first taste of whiskey. It was like a hot stinging coal setting his throat on fire.

  ‘Like it?’ his granda asked.

  It made him feel sick, but he did. He liked it so much that he took another gulp. Granpops rubbed his whiskery chin, and pulled on his web of grey hair. He waggled his nose between his finger and thumb so that Sean could hear the cartilage creak. He plunged his big hand into his pocket and laid five twenty-punt notes on the kitchen table. ‘When we set out tonight I only had one of these,’ he said. ‘But I took a gamble, boy, and I won. Now I have five. Let that be a lesson to you.’

  Sean had never seen so much money. ‘How did you know that the little man would win?’ he slurred, rubbing his tired eyes and feeling his head swirl.

  His granda dragged up his shoulders and dropped them heavily. ‘I took a chance. Didn’t have to lift a finger, but today I’m a rich man.’

  The baby, a girl, was stillborn. Sean didn’t think he’d mind but he did. He’d lost his little sister before he even had her. They had a proper funeral for her with a mite-sized coffin. And they lowered it into a mite-sized grave, and put a wooden cross on it. His mother called her Molly. He was sad when they put her in it, which was funny because he hadn’t known her. No more babies followed Molly. And he only saw his granda a handful of times after that, sitting outside a pub in Kildysart, swigging from a bottle, singing to himself. By then, his Da said that he had gone to the bad altogether.

  Sean has finished his lager now, and it feels to him as if his head is bobbing on a cool minty sea. He can still hear the seagulls yawping and scrapping with each other. He pays the bill and leaves. On the way to the station he passes a betting shop. He hesitates for a moment, only a moment, before going inside.

  ‘Didn’t have to lift a finger, but today I’m a rich man,’ he whispers. And he remembers the gleam in his granda’s good eye.

  Chapter 21

  Thursday, 12 August

  Midday. The thump, thump, thump, of the deadening bass rhythm inside his head makes Owen want to scream. He does not think that he will ever complain about mucky grey skies and drizzling rain again. In the sauna of this unending heat wave these things have become the stuff of fantasies, rare and wondrous as unicorns. A tickling sensation marks the passage of a drop of sweat trickling between his shoulder blades. Sean should be back by now. He had hoped that he would be here to open up with him this morning, that perhaps he could have left him to it and taken the afternoon off. His eyes veer between his wristwatch where the hands keep on revolving, and the flight of stairs, splashed with sunshine from above. They grow as they descend, the new arrivals, shoes, jeans, skirts, tops, and last of all he is able to put a face to them. He is searching for the familiar cheap suit when, with a lurch of his heart, he spots Blue. He
is fingering goods with disdain on a neighbouring stall, his minder as always behind him.

  The stallholder is transparently nervous, wary of the interest her souvenir cups and plates are garnering from this unlikely quarter. Owen’s heart bangs in his chest and the heat drains from him at the mere sight of them. With no more than a slight nudge and shift of his round, dead eyes, the meatloaf indicates to Blue that Owen has seen him. He glances up, turns slowly, and clamps on the parody of a smile. Taking their time, the two stroll towards him. Owen, his back to the counter, stiffens under their scrutiny. He can feel the nerves in his fingers tugging, the tendons alive with anxiety.

  ‘I’d like a little chat, if you don’t mind,’ Blue says. Owen’s brow instantly tightens into a frown. They are hemming him in, a barrier between the stall and the stream of browsers.

  ‘What about?’ he inquires, keeping his tone friendly.

  Blue gives a predatory smirk. ‘Just friendly, nothing to worry about. I’m after a bit of information, that’s all.’

  He is wearing a flesh-pink shirt, sleeves rolled up, neck open to reveal pallid skin. Under the market lights it resembles a loose second skin. ‘Unseasonably hot, isn’t it?’ There is a newspaper folded on the stool, which Owen has been trawling through for restaurant vacancies. Blue snatches it up and fans himself with it. ‘Like a furnace down here. Don’t know how you stand it.’ He licks his thin lips and pulls at his open shirt. ‘You’d think they’d get you poor bastards a bit of air conditioning, eh? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A blast of cold air.’ He raises a hand to twiddle the sparkling stud in his earlobe.