The Swimmer

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Fool,’ I said idly. ‘Didn’t he know how refugees are treated here?’

  Apparently not, Eric said. He continued his story. It meandered slowly and sometimes confusingly across that long, hot afternoon. I was only half listening. In less than a week I would be beginning a new life in the outskirts of London. Everything about the old life had changed so suddenly that I had barely any time to adjust, yet in some ways I felt I had been living this new life for ever. Eric lit his pipe and the scent of tobacco rose and dispersed into the fine summer air. I tried to image the tropics he was describing, but I had never been further than Ely in my life.

  ‘Imagine, Lydi,’ he said quietly, ‘what it would be like if you were going so far that you could never come back.’

  Like death, I thought. A picture of my mother’s foot with its shoe half off her foot flashed before my eyes. Then vanished again.

  ‘A man lives his life and thinks he will go on living it, uninterrupted,’ Eric said. ‘But then it falls apart, like flesh from a bone, and he is surprised.’

  Overhead another fleet of planes stopped all conversation with their roar. The noise disturbed the dragonfly and the heron. Both disappeared from view and did not return again that day as I sat on the gently rocking boat listening to Eric tell me who my father was.

  ‘And you had no idea until that moment?’ Stephanie asks.

  I shake my head. None whatsoever.

  ‘So why do you think she never told you?’

  My head is beginning to ache. I shrug. Who knows, really?

  ‘Eric said she had been frightened of my reaction.’

  He thought she blamed herself for Ben’s death. Guilt might have kept her quiet. Anyway, a curtain had been opened. I remember staring out at the landscape: the marshes and the meadow, the sun on the field where the horses grazed. Behind us was my old home, hidden by a bank of trees, and in the distance, hardly discernible, was the sea over which my father had come.

  I asked Eric to take me to the spot where he had been killed. We drove across to the marshes later that day. The tide was low by now as we waded across to the field where it had happened. From here I could see the window of what used to be my mother’s study. She would have had a clear view of the river and the field beyond it from here. But she had been downstairs in the kitchen, trying to get rid of Miranda and Jack, wondering where Ben had got to, thinking it was getting late. It was summer then too and the reeds would have been high. She wouldn’t have seen him running across the field from the kitchen. All she would have heard would have been a shot. She would not have understood where it was coming from. She might have been smiling, talking to Miranda. He had run, with his head down, carrying his rucksack on his back. Maybe he knew he was already a hunted man. Possibly he thought they were after him because he had no proper papers, or because he was working, illegally. No one except the police would have known the truth of it. So he ran, with his head down, innocently, heading for cover in the thicket of matchstick trees. He would have been all right had he crossed the river and made it to Eel House. Had he done so he would have been safe. But he must have stumbled in the long coarse grass. As she watched, two men emerged from the other direction. They were waving their arms and their voices carried faintly across on the breeze. Instinctively, she had known something was wrong and she had hurried out through the door, leaving Jack and Miranda calling out to the children. Later she would run away to her special part of the beach and they would send out a search party for her. Of course, by that time she was at Eric’s farm, inconsolable with grief. But in that first instance, all my mother did was scramble across the narrow gap in the hedge and into the field. By the time she reached him, he was already dead.

  Eric told me that although the lawyers had tried there had been no compensation for the mistake. My father had been an illegal immigrant and as such had no right to any police compensation.

  ‘It was some months before your mother realised that she was pregnant with you,’ he told me. ‘And by then the fight had gone out of her.’

  We had gone into the field after that and he showed me the exact spot where Ben, my father, had fallen; never knowing he was to be my father. With my mother not yet my mother. The field was full of small speedwell flowers and a few daisies. From this point you could see the house very clearly. It was so close; he must have thought he could get across the river and reach it before they could catch him. He must have run as fast as he could, desperately trying to reach the safety of Eel House and my mother. I stared helplessly at the ground thinking of how he must have bled and the way the police officers would have gathered round. I had seen farmers gathering in this way to look at the animals they had shot. I lifted my head to find the patch of sky he would have seen as he lay dying. It was nearly evening by now, long after the time when it happened. The light was leaving the sky in the quick way of late summer but there were still some slivers of brightness here and there. The world had been changing and changing for months and now it had changed again. It would never stop changing, I thought. We were at war. Soon, it was predicted, there would be another world war. The war to end all wars, was what the media said. Hadn’t they said that once before? Yet a man can die with the glow of a receding sun in his eyes without knowing he had a child. I thought of the grief this simple act had brought with it. I thought of the silence that had bound my mother, stopped her from telling me the truth. And I had a sudden picture of Mum reading that poem and me, pushing her away.

  ‘Never mind, now,’ Eric said. ‘Things happen in spite of the best intentions, sometimes because of them. You were only a little girl.’

  He gave me a hug.

  ‘I often talked about it with her,’ he confessed. ‘She told me she had tried many times, but you always looked so terrified that she was frightened of losing your love. She was a timid woman, you know, Lydi. Life had taken everything away from her She didn’t want to lose you, too. She had been told by someone—I think it was your aunt—that she should wait until you showed a natural curiosity.’

  ‘And I was never going to show that!’ I said.

  Eric looked at me sadly.

  ‘I thought I was a donor baby. Belonging nowhere.’

  ‘Is that what you felt?’

  I nodded, speechless.

  ‘Just like your father did. Rootless.’

  He had hoped the place where I grew up would be enough for me.

  ‘You had your home,’ he said. ‘And your ma and me and the farm. I hoped that would do. But it was just a hope.’

  I saw I had been rootless too, for a long time, years, probably, since I had been very little. The teachers used to say I was a restless person. Suddenly I saw why. Love, or at least the hope of it at my conception, was what I had longed for. Why else continue? What was the point?

  I stop speaking. The lawn mower has long since finished cutting the grass. Stephanie reaches up and opens the window, letting in a pale golden evening sun. I have gone well past my hour, but she has not stopped me. We sit for a moment in silence. Her face is in shadows and I cannot easily see the expression on it.

  ‘So now you know,’ she says, finally.

  I nod. I find I am exhausted.

  And…’ her voice trails off. ‘What now?’

  There is one more thing.

  ‘It will have to wait,’ Stephanie says.

  I imagine her voice has become less harsh. Perhaps my story has affected her after all.

  ‘Do you have a photograph?’ she asks. ‘Of Ben? Perhaps in amongst your mother’s things?’

  I tell her there was nothing in my mother’s papers, nothing in any of the places Eric and I had looked. Whatever happened that summer had gone unrecorded by any camera. I don’t even think my mother had owned a digital camera, I say. But I have seen a photo of him.

  ‘Bring it with you for your last session,’ she says.

  May 9th. Fourth session.

  He showed me the letter that same evening. We had just had supper. Neither of us ate
very much. It was hot and we were both in some state of shock. After we had finished, he cleared the table. Flossie was running about outside barking at an invisible cat and all the stars were beginning to come out in a wide and cloudless night sky. The moon was rising slowly through the trees, shedding a watery light. Eric put a bowl of plums out for us to eat and I got some ice cream from the old freezer. There was a companionable silence between us. We had lived this way for months now. In some ways it was no different from the days when Mum was alive and I would have sleep-overs at the farm to give her a rest. Her presence was very near tonight as we sat under the stars. But there was more to come.

  ‘I have something here that belongs to you,’ he said, and he handed me two photographs.

  In both of them was a man, about my height, hand shading the sun from his eyes, smiling at the camera. It was as though I was looking at an image so like myself. Later, when I was alone in my room high in the attic of the house, I re-read the letter. Eric had handed it to me saying it was mine by rights.

  My Dear Eric, I read out loud to Stephanie.

  You will be surprised to hear from me after so long. I fear that you might not want to be reminded of me and I take a risk writing this. I was always one to take risks with you, Eric. I can tell you exactly how long it has been since we spoke. It is almost sixteen years. Long, painful years for me in every imaginable way. From the moment I left you and the deep winter your country was in I was catapulted back into the reality of my own life and the terrible events that surrounded it. I planned to write to you and to Ria. I planned to say those things I had been unable to voice during my visit. I had every intention of revisiting our shared secret, the love you gave so freely, wanting nothing in return. How clearly, how painfully I remember it. Thanking you is hardly appropriate. To tell you that you saved my life does no justice. So why didn’t I write? I could not. The truth of my situation is simple. To get over a death such as the one I have had to come to terms with takes time. All the years of a person’s life twice over. Ben was twenty-five when he died and only sixteen years have passed, so by that rule I still have many more years before I can hope for any respite. Writing, even thinking of you in all my sorrow was not an option. I suspect I hardly need to tell you this, Eric. I know you will understand. I know what kind of man you are, how far finer a person you are than anyone I have ever known. Mine was a long slow and painful journey to understanding. I’ve had to come to terms with who I am, how this war has shaped me. You were right when you said we need never meet again. I thought you cruel at the time and it was only much later that I understood.

  I returned home to an apparent end to the civil war in my country. I say apparent because the government was proclaiming it had destroyed the Tamil strongholds in the North and the East. But in fact all was the same old chaos. The one outspoken journalist who unreservedly supported the underdogs in this country was assassinated by the army; hungry, powerful thugs are the new ruling class. We, as a people, have had no one to turn to for years. There was nothing new in this except that, for me, it no longer mattered whether I lived or died. You see, Eric, what I had discovered was that violence is not particularly endemic to this place alone. In Sri Lanka the violence we witness daily goes on openly whereas, forgive me, in your country it seems to me the violence is hidden. Coated in sweet words, committed and then apologised for with apparent sorrow, but committed anyway. In the name of democracy, or freedom, or the war on terror. In the long nights that I have had to endure since leaving you I have been thinking of this terror that our various governments pledge to fight. Who is he and what face does he have? I find it impossible to comprehend that Ben’s face represented terror to the people who killed him. I find it impossible to imagine that a face so loved could be mistaken in this way. But there it is. As you can see, the events of that time go round my head for all eternity. I fear they will not cease until I too cease to exist.

  On my return to my home town, after a journey of interminable difficulty (can you imagine it, first the long, uncomfortable flight, then being manhandled at the airport in Colombo, then the journey by jeep to Elephant Pass and the danger at every army checkpoint when my documents were examined, and then the road blocks that went on and on) I arrived at my house to find people gathered around. Part of the house had been ransacked and broken into and many of my things had been stolen. Tara was waiting for me, along with two of my friends. They told me the priest had disappeared days after I left. They told me it was because the authorities believed he had helped Ben to leave the country in the first place. Can you believe it? Ben was dead and they were punishing the priest for something that no longer mattered anyway!

  Returning home was far more painful than I could have imagined. I was returning to a country that was a foreign place. England and its frozen snow, its terrible emotions, were large within me. I could not shake them off, and as I wandered through the small rooms of my house and out through to the garden it seemed to me that the lush tropical life and the heat of the sun was now completely in monotone, while my memories and I existed in colour. Tara saw instantly that the change in me was irreversible. Tara was nobody’s fool. She had always been able to read people as though they were books. It is her special talent. The three weeks had been a lifetime for her, too. Her lovely face was furrowed and pale, and I saw within it what time would eventually do to it. We faced each other warily. There were things we could no longer discuss. I had been to claim my son. Even though I had not been able to bring him back home with me, still he remained my son. What of her? The unspoken agreement, made in that other life, seemed elusive and insubstantial now. She tried telling me this; we tried honesty and then saw that the time for honesty had passed. What was left?

  Why am I telling you this now? Firstly, Eric, because I want you to know I did not forget you. That I was unable to write had no bearing on how often I thought of you. I want you to understand that there has not been a single day when secret thoughts of you didn’t fill me with longing. Grieving for you on top of losing Ben has been a private and complicated thing. Just as you always told me it would be. What cannot be discussed cannot be cured. With no one to tell, the agony has gone on and on. Old age does not diminish emotions. Who ever thinks that has never grown old! The truth is, I will never get over you. Tara was a constant reminder of Ria, and every time I thought of Ria I felt I was withholding things from Tara. My mind was in so much torment that I no longer knew what to think. In the end I just lived each day, rising with the light and laying my head down with the night. In between, I did what was necessary to stay alive and in this way time inched past. The events that I had witnessed replayed themselves over and over again in my mind, each time a little more desolate than the last. But you must not think I forgot you. I saw snow in my dreams, falling endlessly. I would wake in the hot, dead nights and hear the sound of water birds. It does not cease to amaze me that when one really wants to die, as I so often did in the years that followed, it becomes an impossibility. Why is this so?

  For a time there were no more disappearances and people began to hope that torture was a thing of the past. The rebels had been defeated, the army controlled the area now and we Tamils remained, penned in like animals in what were once Tiger-controlled areas. This was peace, as the government described it. At some point in the years that followed, Tara went mad. It happened after the soldiers raped her. Yes, Eric, the soldiers who were guarding us ‘for our own good’ were often unable to resist doling out some extra punishment for our past ‘crimes’. It was, you understand, all part of the peace process. It was a price we were expected to pay, uncomplaining. In any case, who was there to complain to? The government? The police? Young women were the main target of the peace operation. Tamil girls are prettier that their Singhalese counterparts, they are easier to find. Tara was always going past the checkpoint on her bicycle. It was the only way to reach the shops. One morning she set off as usual but this time a young soldier stopped her and took away her pass. There was s
omething wrong with it, he told her. A couple of other soldiers came out and looked at it. They agreed. She was asked to step inside the office. She protested, saying the pass had been fine yesterday, what could be wrong with it today? The soldiers grinned. Today is different, they told her. Inside, she was taken into a room that had no windows and asked to wait. A man came in and handcuffed and gagged her. Then he raped her. After that another man came in and another. She was not released until early afternoon. By the time she got home she was already beginning to lose her grip on reality.

  At the time I badly wanted to write to you. Tara was my last link with Ben’s life in this place. She was important to me. But then I thought of Ria. Once again all my difficulties, the impossibility of understanding what had happened between Ben and her, stopped me. Call me a coward, Eric. I am ashamed that I could not overcome my feelings towards Ria and write to you. But I have learnt to admit to what is impossible for me to do. Some months afterwards, Tara committed suicide. I did not weep at her funeral. I no longer am able to cry.

  Recently I moved from the town of Jaffna. The government was offering Tamil civilians the chance to relocate. It was a move to show the world that they were fair and reasonable people. The world, of course, couldn’t care less. It was too busy culling people in other parts. Sri Lanka was a place that had been something once briefly long ago and now was no more than a full stop on the atlas. In the great scheme of culling that was taking place around the globe, what went on on our island was as nothing. Anyway, I was paid a visit by a Tamil official who worked for the government. He used to be a friend of my husband, Percy, but the necessity of survival had changed him. I did not blame him; I merely observed the process of survival. I am a hard woman now, Eric, I observe many things that cannot be talked of. Anyway, this man said that the council felt I needed a change, I had endured a lot at the hands of the white imperialist bastards. This was the way they washed their hands of the tragedy of what was done to my son. The man told me that I could move to the east coast if I wished. There was a job in a community centre for someone who could read and write in English. I decided to take it. There was no reason for me to stay in the old house. All my memories are dispersed around the world, lifted by the winter breeze in beautiful, (forgive me) but terrible, Suffolk. I am therefore free to go wherever I wish. It was at this point that I realised how I had been freed from desire. This is what first Percy and Ben have done for me. They have released me at last, I thought. At this I broke down and began to cry. The Tamil official looked at me stonily for a moment. Then I saw that there were tears in his eyes, too. I will never be vindicated like you are, he said, very, very softly, in old-fashioned Tamil. I have made choices. I told him that most of us had to make choices. The thing was that the choices we were offered were unworkable. That is what has come from the destruction of our spirit, he told me.