The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  He will dance for her, dance for her in the rain. He has the spider bite in his blood and he will dance the venom out of his heart, dance the tarantella. And so he begins, slowly, slowly, step and step and twist and fall, and lift his arms and arch his back, and roll his head, and clap and whirl and duck and spin. Bend like a blade of grass torn from its roots by the keen trawl of the north wind. Faster and faster he goes, immune to the daggers that pierce the soles of his feet. He is like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, only a merman, treading on the points of nails or sharp knives, but like her he bears the agony willingly for his lady. He kneels down and begs her forgiveness for leaving, for his failed dreams, for Catherine who lay like an iron clod under him, for Bria who he loves dearly but not enough, for letting the hounds and horses run away with him, for chancing his luck with a mad blue buck who has trodden him down to the muck of his being.

  ‘For all this and more, Shannon forgive me.’ His confession, heavy with tears, falls and trickles between the stones, then subsides into the silt of her.

  He staggers up, stoops for his bottle, drains the last drop and sends it spinning through the night to plant the crystal seed of itself in her belly. It is his harbinger, going before its master to bring her news of his coming. Again he offers her the gyre of his body, spinning arms outspread, the way he did as a boy. When at last he pauses, breathless and giddy, he is showered clean so that he is ready for her.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’ He hesitates, in that instant knowing he is unworthy, raising his heavy head in the certain knowledge of her rejection. But when, black arms braceleted with bangles of moonshine, she beckons, her desire, he understands with a start, is as great as his. And as he wades into her icy embrace, collapsing into the polish of her mystery, she slides in eager response over him. He can wait no more. She senses it and opens her currents to him. He plunges then, plunges into her and she cushions his fall in the finest watered silk.

  In her perfection is his absolution. He is as fine now as the virgin boy who came to her in his innocence. He has let life inveigle him away from her. He deserted his only true love, his Shannon. But now he will make amends for his betrayal, he vows, as he swims into her depths. He will give himself wholly to her, forsaking all others, forevermore. She succours him and then bids him lay his weary head on her dusky bosom. ‘I am so tired, so very tired.’ She knows his thoughts and lisps back to him in the parlance of the river.

  ‘Lie with me, Sean. Give your will over to the flow of me. And let me take you with me to my mother, the sea. For there a bed has been made ready.’

  Chapter 24

  He is not sure what he expected – a great outpouring of grief, a fit of uncontrollable rage, to be so overcome by his phobia that he cannot bring himself to walk on the beach. But it is none of these things. The hot weather means that Saunton Sands is busy. He perches on a sand dune and spends an afternoon spying on other families, families whose perfect day is not going to end in tragedy. The scene has the bright certainty of a child’s painting, the broad brushstrokes of the blue sky, the even bluer white-capped sea, the sun bright as a warrior’s shield, the miles of sand the colour of sawdust. And dotted about in this collage are flags of pure colour, beachwear and picnic paraphernalia. It is a pleasure to see. There is a refreshing salty breeze tousling his hair. The rough and tumble of the waves and the plaintive cawing of gulls fill his ears – a holiday atmosphere.

  He shades his eyes and plays ‘X marks the spot’. But he cannot remember where it is, where the Abingdons pitched camp all those years ago, where Sarah drowned. And incongruously, this does not make him sad, but happy. So much sand has shifted since that dark day, so much that it looks like a different beach, washed clean. He stays in a nearby hotel for a few nights, and then for a week or so he drifts, staying in bed and breakfasts, moving from town to town. He outfits himself cheaply in beach gear, T-shirts and shorts. He rings the number Catherine has given him twice but there is no reply. He needs an update on Bria’s condition, wants to hear that she has made a full recovery, that Catherine is coping, that Sean is back and his problems are sorted. He feels a degree of compunction about Naomi too. She is mentally disturbed, he is certain of it now. But perhaps she can be persuaded to seek psychiatric help. In truth though, he probably would not go back to the flat but for his photograph album, and his framed photograph. The clothes and few items he took with him to London, he can easily survive without, but his photographs are priceless.

  There are not many of them. They do not begin to fill the worn blue leather album. But their rarity serves only to increase their value. Among his favourites are a shot of Sarah running in a rose garden. She wears a plaid dress with a round white collar. She is looking back at the camera laughing, her blonde curls flying. She has a daisy pinned in them, and she is surrounded by huge roses in full bloom, yellow, peach, cream and pink. There is a shot of them both on a slide. He is crouched at the top, arms wide, gripping her little hands. She is lying on the slide itself, pointing her feet and insisting that he let her go. In another they are sitting together in the stone-arched window of a castle, looking suitably awed. There is a family shot of them all together, outside a tent on a camping holiday. His mother is sitting in a fold-out chair with Sarah settled in her lap, and Owen and his father are standing to either side of them, striking masculine poses. The one of him and his father that he likes the best is of them flanking a huge train wreathed in clouds of steam. He can still remember the scorching smutty smell of it.

  But his most highly prized photograph is the framed picture of him and his mother, just the two of them, bundled up in coats, scarves, gloves and hats, proudly showing off the snowman they have built. His mother is leaning over him, her arms criss-crossed over his chest, her rosy cheek next to his. He is holding a carrot to his nose, in mock imitation of the masterpiece they have created. And they are both having a fit of giggles.

  He recalls the building of this snowman with the clarity of yesterday. Sarah had a cold and consequently wasn’t allowed to play outdoors. She was crayoning by the fireside. His father was browsing through seed catalogues. His mother was baking and the house was spiced with the mouth-watering aroma of warm gingerbread. Outside was a winter wonderland carpeted with glistening white snow, irresistibly tempting for a young boy.

  ‘Father, would . . . would you help me build a snowman?’ he ventured tentatively.

  ‘Not just now, Owen. P’rhaps when I’ve finished my tea.’

  ‘But it’ll be too late by then,’ he worried. ‘Maybe tomorrow. We’ll see.’

  He was unsurprised by the response, but this didn’t make him feel any less crestfallen. He resigned himself to reading The Shooting Star, his latest Tintin adventure, and was about to fetch it when his mother appeared at the lounge door.

  ‘You old killjoy, Bill.’ This last delivered hands on hips, to his father. Then, turning to Owen, ‘I’ll build a snowman with you,’ she said, her brown eyes shining impishly.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course. It’ll be the best snowman ever. Better get togged up because it looks freezing out there.’

  She brought two chips of coal for the eyes, a carrot and string beans for the nose and mouth. ‘Plus,’ she whispered like a naughty schoolgirl, ‘one of Father’s old trilby hats, and that knitted scarf Granny made him that he won’t wear. You get the twig broom from the shed just to finish him off.’

  They’d worked at it until their cheeks were afire and their noses were red as a clown’s. His hands in their gloves were numb with cold, but he felt hot as toast under his duffel coat. While he was bent over patting the last few handfuls of snow onto their snowman’s plump girth, his mother pushed a handful under his collar. He squealed and jumped with the chill of it, and then set about making the biggest snowball he could.

  ‘No, no, no!’ she shrieked as he chased her round the garden. ‘Have mercy, Owen.’ But he threw it all the same and it
landed with a thump on her back. As she brushed off snow crumbs, she was breathless with laughter. ‘You little tinker,’ she said affectionately. The light had a blue tint to it by then and she looked so lovely, her pale skin enriched by it. Sarah and his father waved at them through the window, as if trying to remind them both that they existed. And he thought that they looked rather jealous of the fun they were having. That was when his father got his camera and snapped the shot of them cheek to cheek, him with his orange carrot nose. Then they went indoors and ate hot gingerbread, and drank cocoa with nutmeg grated into the froth.

  When, days later, she saw him patrolling the snowman as it melted in the sun, she came outside and asked why he looked so sad. He faced her, his eyes welling up, his mouth a tight slash. ‘I can’t bear for it to disappear, Mother, to see what we made destroyed bit by bit. It’s awful.’

  She put her arm about his shoulder and considered for a moment. ‘Think of it like this, Owen,’ she said. ‘He isn’t a snowman at all, he is a water child locked in that big frozen body. The sun is releasing him, letting him escape. Look. Don’t you see him in that puddle, the silver light dancing on the surface? Can’t you feel how happy he is to be free?’ And she squeezed his shoulder. The following year there was only a smattering of snow, not nearly enough for a snowman. Sarah wasn’t waving at the window. His mother was nowhere to be seen. And the Water Child was the only light that stopped the darkness from swallowing him.

  Towards the end of August he tries Catherine’s number again from a call box. Her father answers. Owen recognizes the ponderous voice. He asks who is calling.

  ‘It’s Owen Abingdon. We met at Catherine’s house in Hounslow a couple of weeks ago, when Bria wasn’t too well.’

  ‘Ah yes, one moment, please.’

  A pause, then, ‘Owen? Is that you?’ There is relief in her tone.

  ‘Yes. I’ve rung before but I must have missed you. Are you okay?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Is Bria all right?’ he asks anxiously.

  ‘She’s fine. Doing really well. It’s something else. I don’t want to tell you over the ’phone. Can you meet me?’ They agree a rendezvous the following afternoon in a café close to Covent Garden.

  ‘One more thing. Owen, I rang the flat. I had to talk to you. I thought it was you who answered. I didn’t say much. “Owen, it’s Catherine.” Just that, I think. And then I realized it wasn’t you at the other end of the line, it was her. Naomi. I hung up straight away.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’ll deal with it. Don’t worry about it,’ he told her.

  ‘But Owen—’

  ‘Catherine, it’s all right. I’ll look after you.’ He reflects on those words the next day, as the train he is travelling in nears London. He has to remind himself that she is married, that it is not his job to care for her. It is beginning to feel as if Britain’s climate has altered permanently, as if its population will never again be able to bemoan drab rainy skies. Hot-water bottles, toasting crumpets over the fire, bed socks and umbrellas, plastic fold-up rain bonnets, all these seem relegated to the past. They have become relics of a temperate age, consigned to annals of history alongside the ice age. The ventilation windows adjacent to his seat are jammed. After a third attempt to yank them open Owen resigns himself to stewing.

  ‘Phew! It’s too hot for comfort,’ the man sitting opposite him comments. He is middle-aged, rotund, with a short boxed beard and thinning walnut-brown hair. And, Owen is to discover, he is garrulous. He puffs his cheeks up, then gusts air out, making his sparse fringe riffle. ‘How anyone can work in this heat . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Rain must come soon,’ Owen says without much faith.

  The man pushes the sleeves of his blue and white striped shirt up and undoes another front button, exposing inches of chest hair. ‘I tell you what, it makes you want to join a nudist colony.’ Owen smiles politely. ‘Round where I live the tarmac is actually melting. Melting! Can you believe that? The other day my daughter was sunbathing in the garden listening to her records. Five of the 45s warped in the sunshine. Ruined, they were. Pubs running out of lager. It’s like the end of the world.’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’

  ‘People passing out on the underground with heat exhaustion. Farmland turned to dustbowls. I heard the reservoirs have run dry. Fires everywhere. Here, have you heard they’ve appointed a Minister for Drought, Dennis Howell? They’re calling him The Rainmaker. What d’you think his chances are, eh? ’Cos I tell you what, we need someone to perform a bloody miracle and fast.’

  The Rainmaker. Owen reflects on this as he makes his way to the café to meet Catherine. There is an old film with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn called The Rainmaker, he recollects now. Burt’s character, Starbuck, was a conman, he thinks wryly, wondering if Dennis Howell is any fitter for the job. He is early. They are meeting at 4 p.m., so with a quarter of an hour to spare he orders an ice-cold Cresta Soda. As soon as it becomes vacant he pounces on the table nearest the pedestal fan. After they have talked, he plans to call in at the flat, to see Naomi and retrieve his photographs and his few possessions, before setting off for good.

  She looks beautiful when she arrives, in a cheesecloth dress, flowers embroidered on the yoke. Her hair brushes his hand as she sits down. It is loose, held back with sunglasses worn like an Alice band. There are gold sleeper earrings piercing her earlobes. She orders the same as him when the waitress comes round.

  ‘How are you?’ Owen begins. ‘How’s Bria?’

  ‘We’re both fine.’ But her eyes are sorrowful as she says this. She touches his hand for a second. ‘It’s so good to see you again, Owen.’ The waitress sets down the drink and a glass. He sees that her fingers are trembling as she pours it. She looks up and her eyes find his. ‘Sean’s dead,’ she says simply.

  There is a momentary pause while he takes in this terrible news. ‘Oh God, no! I’m so sorry, Catherine!’ His initial assumption is that somehow or other Blue got to him, but this is dispelled an instant later when she tells him that it was suicide.

  ‘He drowned himself, Owen. He drowned himself near his childhood home, in the Shannon River. He took sleeping pills and booze and went for a midnight swim. I went to Ireland for the funeral.’ He cups his mouth and takes a few juddering breaths. But at least he knows that Blue did not catch up with him, that in the end he was quicker than the horses and the dogs he bet on, that he outfoxed them all.

  ‘It’s been awful. My cousin Rosalyn was here. She came over for the service. I went to the place where it happened, a secluded shelf of shingle beach and the huge greenness of that river pushing past it,’ Catherine tells him. ‘His mother said that he used to go there to bathe, that as a boy he taught himself to swim in that very spot in the Shannon River.’

  He nods and a night audience with drunken Sean revisits him. My mistress, my green mistress. He should be shaking imagining it, the River, how it flowed through Sean’s life, then over it. ‘My mistress, my green mistress.’

  ‘My green mistress? What’s that?’

  ‘Something he said one night. I just wonder . . . if he meant, well, his river.’

  Catherine nods, sips from her glass, then sets it down. ‘His mother said it wasn’t right, what he did as a boy. Teaching himself to swim like that. She said that it wasn’t natural, that it was shameful. A man in the village saw him, saw Sean diving from rocks into the River Shannon, and he told her. His father whipped him, Owen. His father whipped him for swimming in the river.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Owen whispers.

  ‘He was cremated. Did I tell you that?’ Her eyes look distant.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They gave me a pot with his ashes in it. I asked his mother if she wanted to keep it, but she said no, that he’d caused enough trouble. She said it so dispassionately, as if she really did not care. So . . . so—’ She breaks off and unconsciously draws the letter ‘S’ on the table with the tip of her little finger. Then a small sound as her
breath jars. ‘So I took it to the Shannon, to the shingle beach, to the place where he drowned. I went by myself. I clambered onto the rocks that he must have dived from. And . . . and I took the lid off the pot and sprinkled his ashes in the river, watched them float away on the swell. Because, well, because I think he loved it there. He must have loved the river to choose to end his life in it. Was that silly of me, Owen?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t silly. It was the right thing to do. He would have been pleased.’ Owen covers her hand with his. It is small, cool and smooth. Her free hand rummages in her shoulder bag and she lifts out a book, a battered grey book. It is no bigger than a paperback novel and half the thickness. Threads have frayed from its binding, and there are a few discoloured patches here and there. Its spine has been concertinaed with much use. She places it with care between them.

  There is a pause while they both drop their heads and look at it. They might be praying. In a café slotted in among so many others, people meet, talk, argue, laugh, crockery chinks, cups steam, machines hiss, tills jingle and voices rise and fall. And Owen and Catherine sit reverently and stare at an undistinguished grey book. It might have come from a jumble sale, or a charity shop. It might have lain on the dusty shelf of a second-hand book shop for lifetimes. Or it might have been found by a ten-year-old Irish boy rifling surreptitiously through his aunt’s trunk one Christmas, a boy who hunched over its well-thumbed pages by candlelight, and dreamt of having mastery over the green mistress who ordered all their lives. Now the Water Children sense its powers. Owen knows that when he lifts the cover, he will be opening a door onto another world, a water world, that he will need to grow fins to enter it.