The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  ‘Look, what . . . what exactly d’you want?’ Owen stumbles.

  The meatloaf sees off two Japanese women who have been sifting through the leather bags at the edge of the counter. ‘Sorry, closed, love,’ he mumbles through his harelip, arms wide, shepherding them in another direction.

  ‘If it’s Sean you’re looking for, he’s not here,’ Owen says with a growing sense of unease.

  Blue scratches his pointed chin thoughtfully, and a look passes between him and the meatloaf. ‘That’s a pity, ’cos you see, it is Sean I’m after. Your boss. The Irish. He has my money and he stood me up. D’you happen to know where he is? Think very carefully before you answer, eh?’

  Owen tries to swallow but his mouth is dry as sand. ‘He . . . uh . . . he said he would be away for a few days. He didn’t say where he was going. That’s all I know.’

  Blue ferrets inside his shirt for a second, creating the impression that he has plunged a hand underneath his skin. He fixes Owen with an interrogative glare, his icy blue eyes unblinking. Then, ‘That’s a shame,’ he remarks. ‘A real shame. If he calls you, be sure and tell him I’m on his scent.’ His eyes slide to the meatloaf.

  Then he is moving off, his minder bringing up the rear.

  ‘See you very soon,’ he calls over his shoulder, partnering the farewell with a dismissive wave.

  Owen closes up early. Naomi is not in when he gets back to the flat in the afternoon. He makes himself a coffee and sits on the settee, trying to collect his thoughts. He is busy being mature and sensible, when the tears of a small boy who has no more fight in him begin to flow. He lets them come, releasing all the pent-up, confused emotions that have been rampaging through him for weeks now. When he is done he goes to the bathroom and dashes cold water on his face, then dries it, rubbing at it roughly with a towel, determined now to marshal his wits. Sean has got himself into trouble, this much is obvious. He warned him of the dangers of getting entangled with thugs like Blue. But it isn’t his problem. All this would have happened if he’d never come here. He will wait to speak to Sean. He is bound to ring. And then he will tell him he is going, that this chaos is of his own making and he will have to manage it himself. And the new beginning he has promised himself, that second chance, well, he is going to take it, to have a go whether his father approves or not.

  He returns to the lounge and stands by the window, watching the ant trail on the streets below, glancing about the room. He really does not know what he is doing here with the kitsch bead curtain, the red paper-lantern lampshade, the lopsided Jimi Hendrix poster, and the lava lamp, its dismal orangey-brown blobs sitting like rotten egg yolks at the bottom of the glass funnel. His eyes stray back to the buttery-gold shafts of sunlight that lance through the windows, then to the steam-train trails of aeroplanes criss-crossing the blue sky.

  Sean lets himself into the flat half an hour later. If he is surprised to see Owen, sitting on the settee when he should be manning the stall, he does not show it. Neither does he ask where Naomi is. He stands and stares at him speechlessly. He resembles someone who, despite finding himself in the throes of chronic flu, has dragged himself out of bed to a purpose. He looks haggard, his skin has a plastic sheen to it. There are tiny blisters of perspiration spotting his nose and brow. His bloodshot eyes are permanently screwed half shut, as if sensitive to light. His hands are thrust deep into his trouser pockets. Unusually, he wears no jacket. His clothes look crumpled and soiled. Only his hair is neatly combed, greased down, not a strand permitted to spring out of place. It is Owen who breaks the standoff, recounting Blue’s visit to the market.

  ‘They’re looking for you, Sean,’ he winds up.

  ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ Sean says. ‘I’m sorry that you got involved. Are you okay?’ His voice is battered, raw, but the sincerity in it is unmistakable.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he tells him, though he isn’t. ‘They didn’t touch me.’

  Sean moves restlessly about the room, avoiding the windows, his hands fidgeting constantly. One moment he is pulling on his chin, the next, he is fingering his neck where the rash is in full bloom, and an instant later cracking his knuckles. It is Owen who takes control, climbing to his feet, and making his way across the room to sit at the dining-room table. Sean follows his lead and joins him, his eyes filled with a profound melancholy when they find his.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asks. Sean bites in air. ‘They’re not going to let it go.’

  He nods. ‘I can handle it, Owen. A bit of bad luck, that’s all. I just need a little time to get things straight in my head.’ He is sitting on the chair with the slash in its arm. He tugs at a tiny flap of yellow plastic, picks at the foam filling.

  ‘Where is Blue’s money?’ But Owen has guessed the answer.

  ‘I can get it back.’

  There are three place settings on the table fashioned out of strips of bamboo. Now Sean starts pleating one of them. ‘It . . . it was so easy, you know. A kid could have done it. A train to Brighton, meet a man on the pier, pick up a packet, deliver it to a contact in London.’ His tone is soft, mildly self-deprecatory. ‘All I had to do was . . . was pass it on. Like that children’s game, what is it now?’

  ‘Pass the parcel,’ Owen volunteers.

  ‘That’s right. That’s the one. Pass the parcel.’ He pauses to draw a laboured breath, then another. Looking at the bruised shadows under his eyes, Owen is sure that he did not go to bed last night. ‘But you see, I thought the music had stopped,’ he continues. ‘I thought it was my turn to open the parcel.’ He gives an ironic smirk. He leans closer. His breath is rank with booze. ‘But it’s okay. I’ve got friends I can go to. A bit of a cash-flow problem, that’s all. I can sort this all right,’ he confides in a stage whisper.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Owen points out gently.

  ‘Not as drunk as I’d like to be, I don’t mind telling you,’ Sean retorts, something of the old twinkle reasserting itself.

  ‘How much money?’

  Sean takes a hip flask from his pocket, unscrews the top and takes a swallow. He squeezes his eyes shut, absorbing the heat before opening them. ‘Never you mind. I can get it back to them. Give me forty-eight hours and this’ll all be forgotten, so.’

  ‘No more gambling, please.’

  ‘There you go again.’ Sean lays a hand over his. His skin is very dry, like paper, dry and cold. ‘What did I say? The priesthood, that’s what you’re destined for, you know. Just like Emmet. Sucking on lemons all day, counting sins and telling the world what’s wrong with it. From the first I knew you weren’t cut out for retail. Am I right?’ Owen’s stomach churns acidly. Bile rises to the back of his throat and he grits his teeth to prevent himself from gagging. ‘No need to reply. I can read it in your face. You’d have been after giving the goods away if you’d had half a chance.’

  Crescents of sweat are fast becoming full moons under Sean’s arms and over his chest. Buried beneath the facade of his blarney, Owen detects faintly, but distinctly, the acid of raw fear. Sean has returned to monotonously folding and unfolding his mat. His fingers run lightly over the wooden ridges, meticulously counting them, bent on seeing that each pleat contains the same number of bamboo sticks.

  ‘It was going so well and then it all changed. I kept trying to make it better, kept saying to myself, if this one comes in you could do an about turn, go home with cash to spare in your pocket. If not quite a rich man, then at least one who can stand his wife and daughter a weekend in a posh hotel.’ Sean pushes the mat impetuously away from him. It rolls over the edge of the table and falls to the floor. He hauls himself to his feet. ‘So there it is. I’m going to take a wee holiday by myself instead. A little space to think this through.’

  ‘Sean, you know I’m leaving. I can’t stay any longer.’ Owen too has risen and they face each other. ‘I feel bad —’

  ‘Don’t feel bad. I understand. But do me this one last favour.’

  ‘Sean, I can’t. I really have got to go.’ />
  ‘A couple more days, Owen. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll make it worth your while. So I will.’ This last nearly makes Owen laugh outright. Only Sean, plunged into chronic debt to a hood, could have the gall to make such an offer. ‘Hold it together for a few more days. I’ll be back by Sunday. Have it all ironed out by then, so. I promise you. Just run the stall for me till then.’

  Owen sighs. He wants to say ‘no’. He wants to tell Sean to bugger off, that from now on he’s out for himself. But he can’t. Something is holding him back. He hesitates, then, ‘You guarantee it.’

  ‘On my life,’ Sean says.

  ‘Is there a ‘phone number where I can reach you?’

  ‘I’ll ring here. Easier that way. I’m going to be on the move, you know. I’ve spoken to Catherine and she’s taking Bria and staying over with her parents till I get back. I’ve told her to ring you if there’s a problem. I hope you don’t mind.’

  He nods, pleased to hear that Catherine and their baby will be out of harm’s way. ‘But I’m off on Monday, no matter what.’

  ‘I know. You’re a good man, Owen!’

  A good man. A tight knot in Owen’s stomach begins to loosen at this. Much later, long after Sean has gone, lying in bed, Owen hears Naomi come in. He hears her in the kitchen, the bathroom, the small sounds of her preparing for sleep. Then, apart from the susurration from the dribbling taps, all is quiet. He cannot bring himself to turn off the tiny bedside lamp. It isn’t much, this puddle of light, no bigger than the follow spot on an otherwise darkened stage. Nevertheless he huddles under it, face pressed into the pillow. Don’t let them come, he begs silently, not tonight. Don’t let me hear Sarah’s voice. His eyes rake the dimness for the Water Child, until he has satisfied himself that he is not there. He has not come to him all this long hot summer. Perhaps he has abandoned him. Perhaps the next time they crowd him in will be the last. He dreams that they net him in a sweat-soaked sheet, that they pull him through the impenetrable blackness of deep water. He is drowning in a purgatory alive with slimy sea snakes, when her voice wakes him. He gulps in a breath, scrambling up in bed. She is sitting on the floor staring at him, the way she did before.

  ‘You’re having a bad dream, Owen.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sorry. Was I making a noise?’ he pants.

  She surveys him curiously, head crooked. ‘Muttering. You were muttering,’ she whispers. ‘Lots of muttering, that’s all.’ For a while they both give an ear to the hissing exhalation of the leaking taps. Suddenly she drums her feet on the floorboards, the hollow percussion heightening the tension for him. Then, as suddenly, she stops. She wears a vest top, pants, and nothing else. He can see a packet of cigarettes on the floor and a lighter. She has one between her hands, unlit, sandwiched by her palms. ‘We both have bad dreams, don’t we?’

  ‘You got in late,’ he says inconsequentially.

  ‘I was visiting a friend, a new friend.’

  ‘Oh?’ He tells her that Sean won’t be back till Sunday, that he has got himself into a bit of difficulty, that he owes some money to Blue. She gives a careless shrug.

  ‘Poor Sean,’ she says, her voice going against the grain of the words. ‘Poor, poor, Sean.’

  ‘I’m on my way next week.’

  ‘I’m so sick of this heat,’ she says as if she has not heard. ‘I wish I could go down to the lake now, take off my clothes and dive in. I’m imagining the cold smack of it. Do you remember that night that I swam in the lake, Owen? Our last night. The cold black water. It’s hard to sleep in this weather. My friend isn’t sleeping very well either. She has a baby who can’t settle. So we’re all awake. You, me, my friend, her baby.’ She puts the cigarette back in the packet. ‘It’s too hot to smoke.’

  ‘Who . . . who is she?’ Owen says, his tone querulous. He smoothes a creased fold of sheet over his thigh.

  ‘Shall I tell you?’ she continues. ‘I’ve been to see Catherine and Bria.’ He stares at her in disbelief, feeling the now accustomed wrench of fear. ‘Catherine gets very lonesome, you know. And who would blame her? Shut up alone in that house all day, with only the baby for company.’

  ‘Does she know who you are?’ he asks, his voice very low.

  She smiles and taps the cigarette packet with a finger before replying.

  ‘Oh no! For Catherine, I am Mara, married to an architect. We’re expecting our very own baby soon.’

  ‘Your own baby?’ he parrots stupidly. ‘But I don’t understand how—’ He has it then and his jaw slackens. The cushion in the carrier bag, the smock dress.

  ‘For her I make believe, pretend, just like children do. Bria is a peach, fragile as a porcelain doll and just as pretty. There’s foxy red in the fair curls and she has her father’s eyes. Catherine says she’s been having a trying time with her lately, but when I picked her up she was an angel. Very small, very light. When they are so little you have to be careful not to break them, Owen.’ He reins in the urge to condemn her actions vehemently, an instinct telling him to tread carefully.

  ‘I told her I wanted a boy. I took care of a baby once. Did I tell you?’ He shakes his head. She gets up as she imports this, then comes to sit on the corner of his bed. ‘Catherine has a pram with a tiny mattress, the bedding fresh and white and so delicate. Broderie Anglaise on all the borders, like fairies’ wings. And a blanket soft as fur, with a pink teddy appliquéd in a corner.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why have you been to see her?’ He rubs his face as if trying to wake himself up, as if he can’t quite take in what she is saying.

  Her mouth stretches in a smile. ‘I was curious,’ she says.

  ‘But surely you realize no good can come of this, only more pain.’

  ‘I wanted to see them for myself. Catherine and Sean’s baby, Bria.’ There is asperity in her tone.

  ‘And now you have, do you feel better for it?’ He is dousing his anxiety, keeping a desperate kind of control. Catherine is a victim in all this, much like himself. And as for Bria, well she is an innocent. The thought of Naomi picking her up, cuddling her, and Catherine not knowing who she is, that this is the woman her husband has been sleeping with, fills him with horror. ‘Well?’ he prompts.

  ‘I feel like someone who has had an annoying itch for months and months, and now I have scratched it.’ She catches her bitten nails on her teeth, tapping them like a dentist.

  ‘So that’s it. You’ve done it. Now you’ve satisfied your curiosity, you won’t see her again.’

  ‘Why are you so worried about it?’ There is a shrewdness in her cadence. ‘You suddenly seem very concerned about Catherine.’

  ‘I’m concerned about both of you, how this could harm you both. Give me your word you won’t go again.’ He catches hold of her hand, and when she does not respond squeezes it a touch too forcefully. She squeals and pulls it away as if he has nipped it.

  ‘If it means so much to you. I was getting bored anyway,’ she sighs, curling up on the bed beside him. Now she continues speaking in a relentless flat pitch she has not used before. ‘So you’re quitting the market. Key-rings and purses, buckles and bows. It’s all shit, y’know. All this stuff. All crap they make in some hot-house factory in Hong Kong.’ Her voice is a distant drone now, a low murmur, her fingers softly striking the head-board. ‘I imagine the journey sometimes, Owen. Did you know that?’ She does not wait for a reply. ‘I sit on that stool, and I look at some trashy trinket winking away under those God-awful lights that leach the life out of you, and I unmake it in my head. First I’m in the box, in a crate in the belly of some great container ship, crammed in with a million other crates. Then I’m being juggled about while an ocean storm batters us and the ship pitches and tosses.’ Owen winces involuntarily. But Naomi, lost in her own musings, does not heed his reaction. ‘Then I’m being unpacked by some poor kid who gets up at five, works till after dark, and sleeps in a bunk bed, in a room with countless others, a room not so different from th
is one. After that I’m inside a machine. I’m hot liquid metal inside the cogs and springs of its guts, being stamped into shape. And before that . . . ah, before that, Owen, I’m in the earth, buried. A lump of metal sunk in the grave of a mountainside. And it’s quiet there, peaceful. The only sounds you hear are the maggots turning over the crumbs of dirt. All that way. Pulled and pushed and poked and melted and moulded, to be sent halfway round the world. For what? To light up the Irish’s stall like a bit of raggedy tinsel. And then we lie to the gullible and tell them all that glitters is gold. Isn’t that right, Owen?’

  Her head swings round, and she fastens her disarming eyes on his. ‘I’ve come a long way too. Did you guess that? You did, didn’t you, Owen?’

  Chapter 22

  Friday, 13 August

  The heat makes it hard to comfort Bria. It is not the weather for hugging, for cuddling, for swaddling her baby in blankets and getting cosy together. Even the warmth of the bottle seems to distress her. It has been another terrible night spent pacing and rocking and sighing and crying. Sometimes she rocks when she isn’t holding her baby, as if it is really her who needs comforting and not Bria. A little after 4 a.m. her daughter finally drops off, the hiccupping sobs slowly lessening, the spaces between them growing longer. By then, though Catherine is overtired, she has her second wind, the blood seeming to whir through her veins. She draws a chair up to the cot and sits quietly contemplating her baby. She is so beautiful that it robs Catherine of her breath. The love she has for her feels like gravity. She is the centre of a whirlpool, the nucleus of her life.

  Outside, the main road keeps up its endless dirge. The light that is beginning to filter through the open window is a grey-blue. It reminds her of Isleworth Pool. She misses swimming. She will start going again and she will bring Bria with her. She will teach her daughter to love the water, not to be sucked underneath it. She should be at her parents’ house now. Sean told her to go, made her promise to. Well, she lied. Hadn’t he lied to her dozens of times? She doesn’t want to be lectured by her mother on the do’s and don’ts of childcare, on how abysmally she is neglecting the former and enacting the latter. He is in choppy seas, her husband, heading for a tempest. He has done something stupid, something rash, something reckless. She knows it instinctively. Oh, he tried to cover it up, his tone chrome bright. But as she listened it was apparent to her, and she felt anger and pity vying for pole position in her heart.