The Water Is Warm

by Jennifer Stawska

  All those things I had forgotten and you took me through them. You asked the questions that no one else had ever asked. You helped me to answer them and coped with how I felt. Despite everything that we had done together by then, the plans, the promises, the confidence, faith, everything that you gave to me, despite everything, my past still kept coming back and you, only you, coped with it. You held my hand through that desert as well. You showed me the way. What must all this read like? And yes, you were, you are my family now. Oh well.

  Jennifer was different. That’s easier to write about.

  We emailed each other, Jennifer and me, and very quickly caught up again. Our emails buzzed with news. And Skyping her, only a few times, was good as well; I realised how much I had missed her and having a friend of my own to talk to went some way to help me to feel I wasn’t a complete social outcast. It also helped me keep my end up while Josh was re-creating his relationship with his family. She knew about Josh from my emails and the two of them spoke for some time on one occasion, leading to Josh insisting that we should invite her out to Sweden when we got there. They would have got on well. They both have a slightly zany sense of humour.

  By the turn of the new year, the start of 2008, I really think that we had both earned our happiness. We had got all the ducks in a row, the dominoes were all lined up – what other analogies can I find? Well, anyway, we were happy, very happy. We loved each other. A smiling future shone before us, like in the song. I am listening to it now. A bright young joy.

  This, then, is how the ducks got shot. How the dominoes fell.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  It was one of those stunning Sri Lankan mornings. 15 February 2008 – the monsoon was well over and the hot season had begun all along the south coast, east and west. Clear blue skies, warm but none of the strong heat that we sometimes get here by early afternoon. The road sides were lush, colourful and full of dense vegetation. The road surface, repaired by then after the tsunami, black and full of mirages as the day’s warmth gathered. The air was clean and fresh.

  Just past Mirissa there are two long, straight pieces of road on the A2, with only a slight curve between them. The road was good and surprisingly free from traffic and Josh was able to open up the throttle. We were on our way back to Arugam Bay for one last time before we left.

  When it happened it did so very quickly. That thin thread that held our lives was cut - for Josh immediately. For me it’s been with identical effect, just slower.

  A child ran into the road. That’s all. No doubt children do it all the time. But on this occasion, time and presence combined. Josh, had no choice - hit the child or swerve and, of course, he swerved. I knew straightaway what was happening. I held him more tightly around his waist as he struggled with the bike, trying to get control of it. But once a bike is in a skid there is nothing to be done. The tree on the other side of the road was large and solid. I can picture it now, as it raced towards us.

  Just before the bike hit the tree, I know that you tried to turn the front wheel thinking that your body could protect mine and take the brunt of the collision. I have played the slow motion scene over and over again in my mind. I believe that is what you did. Even in that split second, your instincts were not to save yourself but to try to protect me.

  As a result, Josh went head first into the tree. My brain tells me that I saw him. It’s in my mind. Is it a true recollection? Who knows? Well, in the next instant, because of the way that the bike hit the tree, I was flying through the air and missed the tree. I think I yelled your name. I hope I did. It was just like when I had spun in the water after the tsunami struck, that feeling that I was just about to die and thinking ‘oh well.’

  However, once again, I did not die; I landed in a clump of bamboo, broke some ribs (again) and punctured one of my lungs. My helmet protected my face but my lower legs had loads of minor cuts. I was alive, in pain and pretty breathless.

  I made my way to the site of the collision. People were already gathering by the roadside, staring down at the tree, the bike and Josh but I was the first to go to him. His neck was broken and he must have died immediately. His helmet was smashed and his body was obviously lifeless. I pushed away the undergrowth around him and sat with his head, his beautiful head in my arms. I took off my helmet and I cried and cried and cried, rocking his head in my arms. I just kept saying ‘Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me’ but it was pointless because he had already died. It was like the nightmare of the Colossus coming true. I felt as if my head would blow apart.

  Then some of the gathering crowd came down to us and started to tell me that I should not move him and should not have touched his head. However I know when someone is dead, I have seen it before. So I sat there with this group of people chattering around me like monkeys but I was not letting go of you.

  The police arrived, of course, amidst a cacophony of discordant and blaring noise and invasive lights. Next came the private ambulance with similar sound and fury. The presumption of the small minded uniform, disguised as a human being and conferred with a tiny bit of power, is to be found in every country, this one no less than others. An overweight, sweaty policeman with half a diploma in the art of stupidity, thought that he would take charge. He had a truncheon and a whistle which, for some reason he waved and blew at the crowd. He then came down to me and told me to put Josh down. ‘Fuck off,’ I panted at him. By then I was in pain and not breathing properly but I was not leaving Josh and who did this guy think he was, trespassing into our world? ‘Simon, don’t do it.’ I could hear your voice in my head. I can hear your voice in my head right now. Don’t do it? Why not.

  However I stood up. ‘Please don’t take him away from me. Please let me go with him.’ And after a lot of rambling discussion of which I did not understand a single word and even more arm waving, Josh was put onto a stretcher with a white sheet over him and then into the ambulance with me sitting, burning with distrust, in the police car, there being no room for me in the estate car type ambulance. I had an oxygen tank between my legs and a mask over my mouth. The ambulance crew gave me some painkillers but they didn’t seem to make much difference.

  The policeman stuck to his sweaty word and delivered me, behind the ambulance, to a small private hospital in Tangalle. I very much doubt that this was the nearest hospital since it took an hour to get there and involved going through Matara. The bastard policeman would not stop talking in his opaque accent on the way there; I have not the first clue what he was saying. I have no doubt that there was some financial advantage for him in going to Tangalle.

  When we arrived they placed Josh - or rather his body - in a side room and allowed me to sit next to him there. The nurses came in and out of the room with sedation and pills for me. As soon as we were alone I got up from my seat and knelt down next to the stretcher bed beside you, resting my head on the side of the bed. And I wept. And as I wept your eyes stared blankly and your face bore a hint of a smile, like the smile on my father’s face after he died.

  And so I knelt there, talking to you. Thanking you for everything that you had done for me. Telling you how sorry I was that I had not valued you more. That I had not driven that day. Begging you to come back to me. Overwhelmed by disbelief. Hearing your voice echoing through my head. Feeling your cold hand under mine. Feeling my own life drain away as it was sucked out of me by the vacuum of your death. I can’t write any more of this. Josh, I loved you and I have no wish to recover.

  I want to be cleansed of this misery. I want to go to the sea. I have traced my story. I have stuck it out tapping away into this computer. I have followed it through from start to finish. I want you to feel that I have done you proud; that I have left a trail forever that shows who you were. I do not give a damn about myself. I am sick to death of myself. I just want anyone who reads this to know who you were. There will never be anyone who is your equal.

  The rest is just mechanical. After about half an hour, that’s all I had, a kind nurse came i
n to the room. She put her hand on the back of my head and said ‘We need to take him now...and we need to sort you out as well.’ I stood up, his body was wheeled out on the bed and I never saw him again. A bed was brought into the room. I was told to lie on it. I did so. I was given even more sedation, and I took it. Lots of it. The next thing that I remember is that I was almost thrown out because I had no money on me to pay for medical treatment.

  ‘Ring the embassy,’ I said. The doctor I was speaking to laughed.

  ‘What for, what are they going to do? Will the ambassador pay your medical fees?’

  In the end they took my credit card, ran it through a machine after I had given them my pin code (so, it’s a miracle the thing is still accepted anywhere) and only then did they give me treatment. That’s how things work here.

  ‘Where’s my friend’s body please. What has happened to it?’ I asked the same nice nurse while all that was going on.

  ‘They’ve had to send it to Colombo to be stored there.’

  Nobody had said a word to me about that.

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ I just burst into tears and that hurt like hell so…crap, crap, crap. Medical stuff. They inflated my lung by putting in a tube and, I suppose, I must have been x-rayed. I was told that the tube had to stay in place for a few days and I would have to stay in hospital.

  ‘I want to go back to Sweden with my friend’s body.’

  ‘Out of the question. You can’t fly with a tube in your lungs.’ That was the same doctor.

  ‘Where is his body? Please can you help?’

  ‘You must ring the Swedish embassy.’ And he walked off.

  Well I rang the embassy and went round and round in circles. But in the end I spoke to someone there who told me that his body would be repatriated as soon as possible. I gave them the name of his parents and asked the embassy to contact them.

  ‘Can I fly back to Sweden with him,’ I asked the person at the embassy.

  ‘Are you medically fit to do so?’ Well, that was the end of that. I couldn’t fly with a tube in my chest and what would happen when I got to Sweden? I spent two more days in hospital with my head buried in my hands just asking myself over and over again ‘what the fuck do I do now?’ How could I go to Sweden? England? France? Where? My visa was about to run out. I was right back where I had started. So, I did the only thing that I could think of. As soon as they took out the tube and put a plaster over the hole I left the hospital and found a taxi. I went back home. To Unawatuna.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  I arrived in the middle of the afternoon. When Sunil saw me coming along the beach he ran towards me. I have no doubt that he could tell from looking at me that something was very wrong not least because I was so obviously injured.

  ‘Where is Josh? Why are you back so soon? What has happened?’ I did not have the strength to reply. I just stood on the beach, hugging Sunil with him burying his head into my shoulder.

  When we separated he looked into my face and asked again ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Sunil, it’s Josh…’

  ‘Is he dead?’ He could tell.

  ‘Yes, Sunil, I am afraid that he is.’

  Sunil buried his head back into my shoulder. I held his head and stroked his hair and could not find anything to say except ‘I am sorry, Sunil. I am so sorry.’

  When we told Raja, he was in the kitchen getting things ready for the evening. Sunil rattled something off in Tamil, a language that I have never learnt properly. Raja just put his head in his hands and sunk to the floor in the corner of the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. I had no more comfort to give. I put my arm around Sunil and stood there. I remember feeling, suddenly, very, very tired. Sunil and I went out of the kitchen and walked down to the water’s edge. Then I told him what had happened. The whole wretched story, and Sunil held my hand while I told it. Aged 12, and he looked after me – just as he had done when we first met.

  ‘What will you do now?’- Sunil has a simplicity about his conversation.

  ‘Sunil, I think I’ll have to go back to England, now.’ I had prepared that. It was a lie. I knew he would ask.

  ‘Simon you can stay here. I am sure Uncle will fix it’

  ‘Sunil, you know I can’t.’

  ‘But you don’t want to go back to England. I know you don’t. I’m sure you can stay if we try.’

  ‘I can’t Sunil. I really can’t. I’ll just stay here for a night, if I can, and then go to Colombo and take the plane to London.’ We discussed it a bit with Raja but there was no way I could stay there, for all sorts of reasons. We all knew it.

  There was also no way that I could take with me the few things that Josh and I had accumulated over the previous three years. I changed out of my own clothes and into the some of the few clothes that he had left behind. I put as many of his clothes as I could into the small backpack that I had in the cabana, everything else had been left behind in the hospital. And the rest? The rest we placed on a bonfire, seeped it in petrol and set it alight in the moonlight. As we did so and I felt Sunil’s hand slip into mine. We just stood and watched the fire.

  ‘Simon, come and sleep in our house’ – that’s what Sunil called it by then. He insisted that I slept on his bed while he curled up on the floor next to me. I was too tired by then to put up a fight.

  And next morning I walked to the bus stop and took the 5 a.m. bus to Galle. I will never see Sunil or Raja again now. Sunil stayed with me until the bus arrived. As I climbed on board, I turned and looked at him. ‘Goodbye Simon,’ he said and then stood watching me as I took my seat. I waved to him as the bus went off. He waved back once and then turned away. I went to Colombo but had no intention of catching the plane. That’s how I ended up going to the war torn north east of the island, to hide away there. That is how I ended up in Nilaveli, near Trincomalee with Dharan and Karunya. Running away again, like a dog with its tail on fire.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  So now this story has turned full circle. I am back to where I started it. It is a week since I finished writing and I have spent the week finding a lawyer and writing a will.

  Having finished the story I have been able to step back from it all and think about what it means.

  It means that I have lived a very full life in which I have known the extremity of happiness. I have known and felt unqualified love, both as a child and as an adult. I have seen births, at the camp, and many deaths. I have known and been responsible for failure and intense loneliness. But it also means that you, Josh, took me away from all that and gave me another life that I did not deserve – without you what would I have been? I hope that what I have done since your death has not let you down as I have wallowed in my grief. Your death ended your journey and should have ended mine too but I have survived long enough to write this for you and now that purpose is completed as well.

  I know now that I can retain my faith and I can find peace and that you did the same; that is precisely where I want my journey to end. In the words of Simeon, once again, from the cantata by Bach to which we often listened: Ich habe genug – I have enough. My life is as fulfilled as it ever could be. I want nothing more now and my future here could only be in grief and insanity if I don’t take this one opportunity that I have now to end things as I want to do. In peace. If I don’t take this chance it will never come again, not in this way, because I will become an emotional invalid and I am not going to do what my father did, die in misery.

  I know also that if I die now I die whole. I do not die as a lawyer, I do not die as the emotionally disabled son of a suicidal father, I do not die as the irresponsible man who ditched Penelope, Catherine and Martha or even as your partner. I do not die as someone who is gay, straight or bisexual. I don’t die as someone who has over-invested in a dream. I die as Simon Greenwood and I do so from choice. I die as a man who loved one other man and would not want or accept anybody else. That’s all. Having struggled to make a life for myself and to understand what it means I ha
ve now done just that and there is nothing more to do.

  Practically, what am I going to do? Gin, oodles (definitely a word for the likes of me, eh!) of gin, with a bit of pill flavouring. What could I call that as a cocktail? Between the waves? Sounds about right.

  Do I fear death? I have thought of that a lot over the past few days. And the answer is no I don’t - why should I fear death now? I want it. It takes me to where you are. It is the thought of living that terrifies me. Of course I do fear the process of dying, of the last seconds of drowning but I know what that must feel like after nearly drowning on 26 December 2004. It’s very quick. Anyway, who cares? And as to the where, well that is obvious. Unawatuna, where else? I know that when I get there I will see Sunil’s night light shining out from a distance. Then, it’s time to take a dip, from the other end of the beach. I suppose it’s a sort of moonlight flit.

  I don’t want to draw this out further but before I do release my grip on this writing, I want to say this. Thank you Josh; with every ounce of my being and from the very bottom of my heart. Thank you, Josh. You taught me that I can love and be loved and that I am not entirely useless. You took me to God and offered me some sort of redemption - and we found God, both of us, just you and me together and nothing could be more important than that.