The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  He steps to the bath’s edge and forces himself to look down. He is holding his breath as he leans over. His spread fingers start exploring the fat pleats of woolly fabric, pockets of water trapped like miniature rock pools within it. Now he is patting it carefully, his hands travelling swiftly across its rugged landscape. He touches something satiny as soap, a tiny foot. He scrabbles at the drenched shroud, peeling back the heavy layers to reveal a baby. Bria. She is lying on her back in inches of icy water. She is lifeless, her skin waxen, her lips a bluish hue. With a light touch he probes the small torso, dares to lay the flat of his hand against the saturated pink baby-grow. Through the towelling material he feels a flyaway tick, the rapid tremble of a heartbeat. She is alive! He slips his hand under the baby’s body, cups her head and carefully lifts her up. Hugging her close, he hurries to his bedroom.

  Bria’s head falls on his shoulder and the ghost of a whimper escapes her mouth. There is a bib still tied at her neck, with a nursery-rhyme cow leaping a golden bracket of moon. It is blotted with the watery yellow of infant bile. Her eyes are shut fast, her fine hair is plastered to her head, and she is icy as death. He lays her on the bed and strips the clothes from her. Last is her nappy, laden with water. He rummages in the wardrobe and pulls out a navy cotton sweatshirt. Somewhere he has read that the most efficient way to restore heat to a baby is to hold it next to your own skin. He rips off his T-shirt, enveloping her with the heat of his own body. ‘Bria . . . Bria . . . come back,’ he whispers, clasping her close, willing life back into her, gently rubbing the tiny limbs to restore the circulation. When at last he feels her stir he lays her on the bed, and swaddles her in the sweatshirt. Supporting her in the arc of his bent arm, he sees her eyes start, then the lids droop again. He is going to ring Catherine, but as he emerges from his bedroom, Naomi appears in the beaded doorway, barring his way.

  ‘Where are you going, Owen?’

  He daren’t risk Bria’s life further by delaying with this mad woman another second. He steps to the flat door, slides the bolt and opens it.

  Naomi’s head lolls to one side. Her hair is virtually black now. Her lapidary eyes are unfocused. ‘Owen?’

  ‘Out. I’m going out.’

  ‘Are you taking our baby?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t be long.’ As he descends the stairs he hears her call after him, ‘Because we’re a family now. We have to stay together, no matter what.’

  ***

  Catherine has stared at the ’phone so long now, that like a word uttered over and over, it has grown surreal, an unfamiliar object. It feels as if time has slowed to a standstill. She sits in the husk of a house that is not a home. She has put all her faith in a man she has only met once. She does not know why. Her baby’s life depends on him, and him alone. She should have rung her parents, contacted the police. And yet something compelled her to turn to Owen, to charge him with bringing her back. Bria is dead, her reason tells her so. Her baby is dead. She must accept this. But her heart prays, please, please.

  She gazes round the hall, her senses heightened. The front door is painted yellow, mustard yellow. Beneath this epidermis lie many other shades, she is sure, past lives layered one over the other. The walls are papered, a pattern of cream lozenges on brown lozenges on beige lozenges. Looking at it makes her feel woozy. The floor is lino, muddy green hexagons. The early evening light is unkind to the ill-used house. It exposes the pram, the empty pram in all its hopelessness. This morning it had a baby in it. This evening it is empty.

  Catherine knows about death. She knows you may be larking in the snow one minute, and being sucked under the ice the next. She knows that it has a small voice, small but determined. Death is easy. Death is a slip. It trips you up when you least expect it. She thought it didn’t matter, that none of it mattered. The dreadful days she has slogged through made her pine to be back in the ice, to let it have her. She felt the clamp of the frozen jaws and welcomed it. She thought there was nothing much worth salvaging in her life. Then Bria came.

  And so she waits poised on the edge of a second, knowing she may fall either way. Her hearing is sensitive. Voices slur through bricks and mortar, music pounds, traffic keeps up a dreary debate, a bus’s brakes grind and wheeze, a horn sounds, engines turn over like cement mixers. Then one slows approaching number 17, stops, a door slams, footsteps approach. She has the sudden insane desire to drop to the lino floor, clasp her hands over her head, to take cover before the bomb blast. Knocking. Someone has come knocking at her door.

  ‘Catherine? Catherine?’ More knocks. ‘It’s Owen. I’ve got Bria. I’ve . . . I’ve brought her back. I’ve brought her back, Catherine.’ She is not sure if she can get up, if her legs will support her. ‘Catherine? She’s okay. Catherine?’

  She climbs to her feet in increments, like a frail old woman, and feels her way along the wall, leans into it, lets it press the kinks out of her. She rolls onto the door, presses her face up to the frosted glass panel set in its top half. She can see him on the other side of it, his features glimpsed through the pane of ice. Fair hair, blue eyes, red hair, green eyes, undulate. He stoops so that he is level with her. Their lips would be touching but for the glass. She stares at her reflection in him, and he stares back at his, in her, Water Children, kindred spirits. A mother who has lost her child. A child who has lost his mother. They surface and breathe in unison. In the division of a second, something comes of nothing. And the splinter of ice lodged in both their hearts begins to melt.

  ‘Catherine, it’s all right. You can open the door.’ His lips brush the pane as he speaks. He waits. Bria squirms in his arms. She is warm now and hungry. Catherine thinks, I am going to faint. But she doesn’t. She lays her hand on the door knob, turns it and pulls. The door judders open. Arms that are not hers levitate by themselves, they rise and reach. And the breath snags in her throat so that she keeps having to tear it out of her. He puts the baby in the arms that are not hers, and the breath rips, and the cry comes.

  ‘Ah! Bria!’

  Later, he thinks about the paradox, that the baby held her, and not the other way round. He sees the buttercup light that spilled into the hall as she opened the door, sees it giving her red hair the lustre of gold. He thinks about her dreamy green eyes, their soft setting of light-brown lashes and brows. He recalls the way his body relaxed as he watched her ministering to her baby. He had not known that he was all angles and ridges until then. They communicated in broken sentences, a phrase, a gesture, a dialogue of action. She rang her father and told him that she was worried that Bria was ill. He came to collect them, and said he would take her to the doctor. She agreed to stay with them for the time being. Before Owen left she took his hand and held it a long moment, then she gave him her parents’ telephone number.

  Heading back into London, he thinks about the leaking tap, how the water was rising speedily, how little time there was left. He thinks about how easy it is to drown, how a little girl on a sunny day can wander into the blue of the sea, and be snatched and dragged to her death in seconds. For a time he strolls the city streets. He watches young women in bright summer cottons laughing and chattering, tossing their heads, linking their arms, running for a bus, climbing into a cab, pedalling a bike. What would Sarah be like now? What kind of a woman would she have grown into? He did not realize that the pang of missing someone you never knew could be so acute. Would they have argued, joked, teased, laughed? Would they have had nicknames for each other? Would she have leant on him and he on her? Would entwined stretches of their lives have been like a three-legged race? Would her brother have meant as much to her, as her absence meant to him? He does not go back to the flat. He boards another train, overground. He is journeying west, his destination North Devon, an outing to the seaside. He is on a pilgrimage to Saunton Sands, to revisit the sea that took his sister. He is going to turn back the pages of his life and bookmark his last day spent with Sarah.

  Chapter 23

  Nothing much had
changed on the farm. In fact, Sean thought, it was rather like journeying back in Doctor Who’s Tardis. His father was dead and buried. A brain tumour had reduced a man built like an ox with the most robust of constitutions, to dust. Emmet, the second son, the favoured one, the child who fit snugly into the rural scene, had assumed the mantle of authority as his birthright. And to fortify his position he had taken himself a wife, Grania Quinn. She was the fourth daughter of good solid stock. Her jaw line was well defined. Her eyebrows were raven black and bold. And she had a light furring of hair across her upper lip that looked like a moustache in the midday sun. Her wide hips had effortlessly delivered him two strapping sons, Colum and Hugh, proving the merit of his choice. His mother still presided over the kitchen, only now they had a stove, electricity, an inside privy, and running water, hot and cold.

  Emmet had greeted his sudden arrival with deep-rooted suspicion, which even the bottle of Jameson’s Whiskey had done little to assuage. He still feared being usurped by his older brother, his eyes contracting to pencil-thin lines, his lips pulling like a drawstring purse when he saw him toiling up the lane. Inwardly Sean crowed at his wariness. But as his fatigued eyes took in the slopes of tussocky pasture, the cows ambling aimlessly about beset with flies, he admitted to himself the full extent of his loathing for this mean, grudging soil. Emmet could have it and welcome. He had never wanted it, not any part of it; not his mother sucked of all goodness until her weathered skin was wrinkled like a prune’s and her hands were rubbed raw; not his father who had lumbered about, arrogant in his ruthless, unyielding assertion of right and wrong, dealing out his farmyard justice with a peeled birch cane; not his brother who smugly attended church with his family every Sunday morning, and who masturbated away the afternoons in the outside toilet, poring over pictures of naked women he had found under the leaves of an unlit bonfire on the Boyles’ neighbouring farm.

  Sean had talked up his London success over a supper of stew and potatoes, his fast-growing retail business, his beautiful wife, Catherine, his model baby daughter, Bria, while Emmet’s brood goggled at him curiously, and Emmet’s wife busied herself cruising the table, topping up her family’s fast-emptying bowls. The spoons had scraped the china like chalk squeaking discord on a blackboard. His nephews’ Adam’s apples had yo-yoed madly in their feeding frenzy. And his mother, an animal’s unquestioning tolerance in her empty eyes, had chewed and chewed with her bad teeth on a chunk of bread soaked in milk. Every so often she had eyed this man who had grown in her womb, as if he had fallen from Mars. Emmet, at the head of the table, had sipped his whiskey sourly from a greasy tumbler, spooned his food unthinkingly into his mouth, and glowered at his older brother at the opposite end of the table with close-set eyes. If he had been a cat his tail would have been twitching, and a low premonitory growl would have emanated through the nicotine-stained enamel of his overbite.

  They’d made up a bed for Sean on the settee in the small room off the kitchen, the one that his mother optimistically liked to call the parlour. The family was settled at the other end of the house, beyond the right-angle in the tail of the single-storey building. Sean sat and waited. He listened as the distant sounds of the house quietened, a door closing, something grating, his brother’s gruff bark, and then there were only the creaks of the ancient farm’s bones, the dyspeptic gurgles of pipes and the sonorous tick of the mantel clock. At just gone midnight the nocturnal cradle song stole into the comparative hush, the breeze hefting the window experimentally, the hoot of an owl, the click of claws behind the wainscot, the plaintive lowing of a cow, and yes, he could just detect it, the a cappella chorus floating to him on the unfurling spinnakers of river mist.

  He had brought the book and he fingered it now in the squint of lamplight. The grey cover was worn and tattered, and the pages had grown flimsy as tissue paper with constant handling. He leafed through it, pausing at the diagrams, those fantastical diagrams that had fired his young mind. He sniffed in the frowsty odour, more welcome to him than the bouquet of a fine wine. Who would have thought the absurd little man in the old-fashioned pantaloon bathing trunks, and the hat that looked like a pilot’s helmet, would have taken him step by step to heaven? With infinite patience he had taught him how he might seduce an Eve who was the nonpareil of womanly perfection. Again he heard her call to her lover. In answer he took up the book, pushed the packet of prescription sleeping pills, Mogadon, twenty in all, to the bottom of his trouser pocket, slipped the bottle of Armagnac under his arm and set off.

  As he started down the hill, he felt a charge of adrenalin course round his body at the prospect of the reunion. All these years, he had not forgotten and neither had she. He recalled the welts on his bare buttocks, his thighs, his back, how they stung after his father’s savage beatings. He halted for a moment, wincing as he recollected the exquisite pain. For days it had been as if his skin was covered in a swarm of wasps, biting him over and over. It had bled, to begin with a weak, watery sort of blood mixed with pus, that gradually thickened to a deep crimson goo. Then this too had hardened, and small scabs had formed that had caught on the fabric of his clothes, occasionally being knocked off with friction and weeping anew. And afterwards the itching as the healing commenced. Somehow all of it was connected with her. The humiliation of having to strip before this red-faced Da, the man who had set himself up to be Sean’s judge and jury. And the submission, bearing the torture without crying out, humbled by the feelings of self-purification that had invested him later.

  It was a cool, damp night, the haze of mizzle moonlit, so that it seemed he was walking through a fairy landscape draped with lengths of spangled organza. Over his head was a pauper’s night sky, with here and there cloud rags worried by eddies of wind. The moon was as yellow as the thick cream which rose like a sun in the still-warm milk pails of his boyhood. The sight of it re covered the smells of the milking shed for him; the immaculate astringency of the sluggishly breaking day; the sweetness of the straw crunch interspersed with the ripe steam of the beasts’ breaths; the splat of dung that exuded the comfortable waft of the earth’s entrails; the taste of his own inhalations, still vinegary with the stagnancy of sleep; the ‘siss, siss’ of the bluish-white line of milk darting into the snowy broth; and the invasive chill that made him lean in closer to the heat of the coarsely haired flank, while the dumb creature patiently tolerated his fumbling, stiff fingers pulling on her udder.

  But now as he reaches his mistress his face is saturated, the burn of his eyes delivered into a healing witch-hazel bath. Oh no, he does not imagine the leap of her as he tumbles out from the now heavier curtain of drizzle. He sags on the small apron of beach in his jeans and soggy fisherman’s sweater, in his socks and his shoes, feeling overdressed in her presence, wondering if she can really recognize him after so much of her has flowed on past to the sea.

  ‘I didn’t bring my bike,’ he mutters bashfully, as if to prod her memory. Mist vapours cling to her black surface, like a slinky diaphanous evening gown, affording slashed glimpses of her sable flesh. His heart is so full that there is no room for words. But the most incredible thing about her is that it doesn’t matter, that she reads his deepest thoughts as though they are her own. He treads down to where she varnishes the shingle and the pebbles, flirting with the wet tickle of her. And he sits, clumsily, falling on his bottom at the last, jarring his coccyx painfully on the unyielding jags of the stones. His shoes are dipping in her and she is seeping, soothing as balm, into his nylon socks, tempting him. He leans forwards, and without unlacing them shoehorns them off, hurling them as far out as he can, hearing, gratified, her splashes of reception. She toys with one of them for a second, makes a raft of it and gives it safe passage, before wrecking it with a sudden surge and greedy suck.

  He uncorks the brandy, holds the bottle to his lips and drinks a long draught, so that it barely touches his mouth, so that it is a moment before he experiences the resurgent slam of it, jabbing hotly into the soft membrane of his throat. Then he sets
the bottle down among the grit, silt and stones. Next he rummages in his pocket, produces the envelope and carefully prises it open. He jiggles the white tablets out into the tremulous palm of his hand, drops his head and licks them off it, four, two, one, three, and again until they are all gone. As he chews his mother looms out of the mist. She is masticating her softened white bread like one of their cows chewing cud, mindlessly. She swallows, her toothless mouth yawning wide, and fat white maggots of script wiggle out of the cracked corners.

  ‘Wicked . . . unnatural boy . . . naked . . . no shame . . . as God was his witness . . . diving off the rocks . . . the Shannon . . . an evil spirit in him . . . the Father says it’s Satan’s doing . . . whip the sin from him . . . cavorting with the devil in the river . . . a water demon.’

  When his taste buds start humming with the bitterness, and the impulse to spew up all the wretchedness threatens to overwhelm him, he reaches fast for the bottle. He gulps and his throat, anaesthetized to the scorch, feels nothing but a woolly abrasion. He gives it a shake. Over half gone. He places it carefully back down, pulls off his wet socks and climbs to his feet. He undresses, his baggy, soggy cable-knit first, making a shorn sheep of him, then his granddad T-shirt. While the drizzle smacks the crucifix set of his shoulders and runs in little rivulets down his belly, he wrestles with his belt buckle. He blinks back raindrops or they might be tears, and contemplates all the buckles he has ever sold in the market, visualizes a mountain of them glittering in the sun like a pile of factory waste. The belt comes apart as if by its own volition, and he unzips his flies. His jeans fall in elaborate circus flounces around his bare feet. He wears no pants and once he has stepped out of them, more tricky to accomplish than he has envisaged, he is naked and has nowhere to hide. The crab pinch of the riverside stones is at him then, but they seem to be hurting some other man on some other shore. He is . . . what? He breathes . . . he breathes . . . he breathes the way the cows breathe in the milking shed in the early morning greyness, with will and effort, a wilful, effortful soughing.