The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  6

  Although Mr Vanlow did not belong to the most affluent caste of citizens, he had enough money to pay for his own private view of the ocean, and this is where his white square mansion-compound decorated with silver ornaments and fake flickering lights, apparently in imitation of the ring’s interiors, sat. You could usually find him, if he was around, in his favourite spot, overlooking the clean-filtered ocean water, gazing languidly out of his vast glass walls, while sipping expensive drinks and eating forbidden food: fried baby fish, pigeons, sometimes even more exotic species. At the limit of his vision was the Barrier, that gigantic protective structure, all whiteness, the little windows of the abodes it contained glimmering in the distance, the sharp flickering of their security systems—red, green—reassuringly shining here and there. Over its roof, the hovering vehicles glided elegantly until they found their docking places. Sometimes, flamingos flew in this direction from the neighbouring marshes, and all the humans gathered politely on the other side of their glass walls, pointing at them in awe, marvelling at their existence. They ought to be extinct, those birds. But the marshes had been miraculously spared generations back, and the flamingos had thrived accordingly. Now they were the symbol of the city, their image attached to everything imaginable.

  You could tell he was a contented man, happy with the position he had attained. He treated Mother with respect, although he had clearly married her for her status and her beauty. He tried to give her everything she wanted: an array of doctors paraded into our compound to see Aster; Mother had the exclusive use of her own little hovering vehicle. Our table was always brimming with exotic and expensive edibles. The one thing that Urania laughed at was her husband’s fondness for a ‘view’ of the ocean. She preferred to walk there, to remove her silk slippers and dip her feet in the water. I think he was a bit hurt by her light mockery, and this made me even fonder of him.

  I was also happy in Old Town. At home, our interactions as a family had resembled the movements of a structure that needs constant oiling but is left to rot. I had almost made my life with Eli, with Savina. It hadn’t helped that Mother had been so overprotective of my brother as to jealously guard him—for herself, that is. Here, with Urania leaving for the shore most mornings, I sometimes ventured into his tiny room. Savina, or one of her helpers, would be reading to him, giving him a sponge bath. Some other times he would be sleeping on his own.

  My brother was a mystery. Nobody knew what was wrong with him, except that one day he had decided to stop interacting with us. He had never learnt to speak or to walk. Now, once Mother left the compound, I would walk into his room and sit with him. I didn’t fancy the idea of reading him the constellation children’s books that he always had around, but I tried sometimes. He seemed to like the fable of Alira, the flying girl. I also started telling him about my adventures with Laurel and her brother, and I think that he reacted similarly to when he heard a story he favoured, as if he enjoyed my little outings—could that be possible?—and that his eyes glinted in a mischievous way when I told him of my escapades: climbing the rocks to touch the Barrier, catching a furtive glimpse of the ocean, devouring the pouches of frozen milbao. During a particularly hot day, I brought him one of them, and I patiently helped him eat it, lying in his bed. I swear he almost smiled in my direction that day.

  But just when I was getting used to Old Town, enjoying the new, fragile connection it was helping form between me and my little brother, Mr Vanlow announced that all renovations were finished, and that we would be returning to Gobarí. Mother received the news with vacant eyes, and moved towards the view, following the flight of the flamingos. As much as the coast pulled my mother, Gobarí called to Mr Vanlow. He was eager to see the changes and improvements done to the property, and to start playing at being the owner of a historical house with aristocratic connections. He might have brought the money to the marriage, but Mother’s old family line of techies, rotten and half mad as it was, had certainly brought the distinction.

  Urania did not want to go back, and her refusal didn’t have anything to do with missing the ocean. She had a single reason: the weather was about to break.

  It was difficult to pick this up if you had not lived through it. Almost none of the oldtowners, not even Mr Vanlow, it seemed, with his short stay in Benguele, could understand what the storm could mean. But we knew; oh yes, we knew. Savina claimed that she could smell it in the air, and Mr Vanlow laughed at her for being superstitious.

  ‘Oh well, I wonder how much you will laugh soon, jeré,’ she said darkly, and left the living room and went into the kitchen. I followed her. She had made the neat kitchen her own in the time we had been there, and bunches of dried herbs hung from the ceiling. I sat and she put a plate of green chickpeas in front of me, and I started peeling them, taking them from their shells and pushing them out with my thumb. Like a child, I didn’t want to see my mother and Mr Vanlow arguing.

  The signs were clear: it would be the storm to end all storms. The moorhens abandoned Genovese Park, venturing into the streets; the wall received little electrical discharges during the day, anticipating the large ones coming. And the heat was like we had never experienced, utterly unbearable. The change in the weather would be equally dramatic. If a storm of these proportions was about to break, and if it would bring torrential rains that might last days, it would be safer to stay in Old Town, not to risk the wilderness of Gobarí, cut off from civilisation. We had not experienced fast floods in years, but it had always felt like a lucky escape. Now, there was something ominous hanging over all of us.

  Mr Vanlow would not listen to reason. He called Mother frivolous for not wanting to miss parties, and dances, and soirées. Mother pointed out that she did not want to be cut off from the doctors. She was thinking of Aster. Mr Vanlow claimed that with the new gliding vehicles, capable of hovering over anything, the rains could not maroon us. Mother reminded him that even hovering vehicles had to land sometimes, and that they could not do so over the forest, or in the roads if the roads were rivers.

  But Mr Vanlow was determined. We packed. I said goodbye to Laurel and Ariel. There was no reasoning with him. ‘There is no reasoning with stubborn men, that has not changed,’ chanted Savina, half laughing. Was she laughing at Mother, at me?

  Nothing happened on the way back, of course. Mr Vanlow had been right about that. The rain had not picked up, although Savina had explained to me that it could increase in strength suddenly, as if someone had pulled a plug up in the ring without warning, letting the water flow in full force. She had lived through fast floods. But we managed to arrive shortly before the rain gave way to a much worse scenario. It was raining, of course, and with some force, and so we could not see the extent of the repairs and marvel at the vision of the many improvements that Mr Vanlow had kept us apprised of in the city.

  Instead, we went in quickly, and Savina entered the big house with us, when she should have taken the back path into her kitchen shack, an external construction where she also lived. This was odd. But she was helping my mother carry my brother into his room at the back of the house, to put him in bed. He was exhausted from the journey. The odd, heavy rain had made him cry a little.

  The odd rain, I call it, for we had just arrived at the door when it changed in force, becoming a mad downpour. For that was what happened, there is no other way of explaining it: the heavy drops were suddenly collapsing from the sky like thick buckets of rain, forcefully trashing everything in their way. I saw leaves and branches and trunks and whole trees falling; I saw what remained of the external shacks rushing into our porch, and branches and animals and children and objects, floating indistinctly on the surface of the brown water; I saw a mighty eagle, the kind that could carry a grown man, crashing from the sky, breaking our porch roof. And then I knew we were in trouble. Our new, shiny, repaired house was collapsing. Not all of it, but some bits, here and there: the porch, the balcony, the adjacent shacks of kitchen and bathhouse; and the back of the house, where our
sleeping quarters were—carried away by the force of the water. Before we could prevent it, before we could take him to safety, beds and walls and little brother and all.

  7

  They used to fish for pearls at the depths of the ocean, in the olden days. And now, we try to fish for pearls at the end of space. Nobody knows what is out there, and how could we? All those children gone, lambs to slaughter. Nobody ever returns, or sends a message of hope. And if they did, would it have got to us?

  The swimmers also gave their lives. They also did it for us, in a way. Their desire, to get to the point where water and sky touched; there, they would ascend, ulalé, no need for vessels. Urania used to say that if you managed to reach the line of the horizon, the place where the ocean and the sky met, you would continue swimming among the stars.

  I knew it was only a tale, the line of the horizon a hallucination, our planet a sphere that would never really, truly, touch the ether. But sometimes, at night, when the ocean and the sky were the same colour, and the constellations appeared reflected over its mirrored surface; on those nights of waters as calm as the space above us, I could almost believe her.

  The Fox. Alira, the Little Bird Ascending. My own star sign, the Kingfisher. The Three Sisters, each of them given a special task, a special power to look after us all. I was capable of recognising some of them up in the sky, the ones all the beanie children learnt. The line of the horizon was the threshold, the place where the boundaries blurred. Which boundaries? What were they keeping apart? That, no one remembered.

  Whenever I couldn’t sleep properly, I would wake in the small hours of the night and would go out onto the balcony that ran all round the first floor at Gobarí. The constellations appeared then. If I believed Savina, followed my shuvaní blood, I would think that all known history was there, all the lore; and then there was the future as well, written in capricious formations, the stars showing us the path we must wander, heavy with meaning. To believe that, you ought to accept that there was only one possible future, not many. To believe that, you ought to accept that there would be a future at all. And I wanted to believe it, that was what I had always wanted: to trap this future, this thing, and make sure it did not escape between my fingers like sand from the ocean shore.

  * * *

  I have never seen constellations so clear as I see them now—I can almost touch them from my window in the Upper Settlement. Only back in Gobarí they had been so bright; in those sleepless, endless nights of my childhood. At dawn, after interpreting their auguries, I would leave the house quietly and run to the pond, and wash in its waters. Savina insisted that I learnt the histories of some of the constellations at least. Just in case, she said. Just in case time stopped once more, or even worse, just in case it accelerated all of a sudden, and more monstrous creatures were spat out at our feet for us to deal with, eat or be eaten. Just in case I needed to find my way back home.

  * * *

  After the flooding I found myself back in Old Town, alone now. Something else had happened in Gobarí, something I did not know how to interpret. I was a child after all, and my world was collapsing. The flood was receding slowly, painfully. Some of the fields were still half-filled with water. There was debris and destruction all over the place. The forest, which had always seemed shiny to me, the purest green, seemed off colour somehow, midway between green and brown. It was a tired forest, an exhausted forest.

  Everywhere we found the cadavers of animals, and they were even more fantastical than we remembered. The flood had overturned a nest of giant centipedes, and there they were, in the middle of the road, a little mountain of them, piled atop each other, all their purples and yellows and reds, the colours that indicated their capacity to poison us, utterly gone. They looked grey now, a dull colour. The beanies danced and partied around them, and set fire to the little promontory. I could understand them: we had all been terrified of finding one when we collected rambután or performed any of our daily tasks in the jungle. They were perhaps the most dangerous creatures we knew.

  At least these centipedes had been spat out by the water; we could admire their demise or not, pity them or not, but their fate was a certainty, and there was consolation in that. My brother was still missing; his body had not been recovered. Urania was more aloof than ever now, a shadow of her former self. I have patchy memories from those days: I hid a great deal from people, did not want to be found. Everybody was so busy that they did not miss me. I wandered alone among the destruction, without thinking where I was going. I was lost, perhaps; I felt lost. I could not stop thinking about him. Where could he have ended up? Something broke inside me, something that could never be repaired again. My only consolation was to hope that it must have been quick. He surely could not have tried to swim against the current to save himself, as he had never learnt how, like the fishermen who ventured the Three Oceans to bring us food, who never learn to swim in order not to prolong their agony if a leviathan wrecked their ship: falling into the abyss quickly is a much better fate than an agonising and long demise.

  The pond had overflowed as well. The little shore around it had disappeared. The plants around it were destroyed. I still walked there every day to be safely on my own. Nobody else went there. The beanie children never swam in it, scared as they were of the basilisk. And I myself started seeing the place through their eyes for the first time. It was a ghastly place, that was the truth. Now, this was easier to perceive as well. Its murky waters were now brown, almost black, with dirt and upset. It was a curiously altered scene, as if a cataclysm, something precise and unavoidable, had toyed with the little civilisations that camped around its humble shores. The hawkbit, the water-mint, the calendula: all gone, destroyed. The shores were thick with debris, its glistening sands all disarranged. There was a strange wave-like movement to the water, reanimated as if from the dead, which I had never seen before.

  These animated waters gave me an idea I had never thought of. They were imbued with a certain energy, that much was clear. I had an idea.

  Firstly, I gathered my tools; then, I thought of the words. I imagined the ceremony as a ritual bath. I would feel clean, refreshed, purified, even among the debris, perhaps precisely because I was communing with that chaos, alluding to it, petitioning to it. I brought incenses, fragrant oils belonging to my mother, shuvaní staples: rosemary, lavender, valerian. Pine cones, seashells. The most important thing: my brother’s sponge. I could see as if from afar: distant memories of baths when I was little, Mother above me, her happy face dipping a small cup in the bath water, and repeatedly bathing my head with the liquid, small gestures of the old, forbidden religion the swimmers had sprouted from; after all, the symbol of their deity, of he who died for our sins, had been a fish.

  I did my ceremony, hoping that I had managed to raise the required energy from me, and from the place, and feeling that the ritual would be heeded precisely because I had chosen the broken pond of all places. I tried to imagine it all unfolding, my petition heard, my brother found.

  I had cleaned myself; I had cleaned the pond; I had cleaned the past.

  There was no reason to think it would not work, and work it did.

  One morning I walked to the pond, as per usual, and what I found inside its waters was Urania herself.

  Her eyes were lost up above, towards a sky that could not be seen due to the thick canopy over the pond, even after some of the trees and the branches and the lianas had been washed away. I stayed where I was; I did not want to disturb her. She emerged slowly, and I could see that she was dressed in an expensive techie robe from Old Town, now ruined after her swim. A branch must have broken beneath my slippers, and she looked in my direction for a moment; thankfully, she did not see me. Her eyes were vacant, strangely white, and her look was lost and uncomprehending. I saw there and then that my mother had transcended this world at last. She had finally accomplished her swim, albeit not where she would have wanted. But she looked dead somehow.

  She wasn’t dead, of course
. But her vacant expression scared me a little. She ignored the noise and moved towards some bushes, and there, after much moving of branches and breaking leaves, she uncovered what I later learnt was my brother’s corpse, bloated and rotten and as grey as the centipedes after its time in the water. She kissed it lightly on the forehead, and rocked him gently in her lap.

  I had done it. My first magiks had worked perfectly.

  I turned around and ran as fast as I could towards the only security I knew: Savina. Papa wasn’t around, of course.

  When Urania was found, she could not speak a word. She was unresponsive; beyond death now, but also beyond life. Nothing mattered to her any longer.

  Mother was ill, that was all they were saying to me; no one would tell me where she was being sent. Perhaps they thought I would have no interest in seeing her, and would prefer to forget her. Mr Vanlow flew up again to the Upper Settlement. Eventually, Savina left to live with her son, and that was it, I was alone. She came to see me before leaving, put something in my hand, saying a little prayer as she did: later on, I would find out that it was a little pouch of herbs. I looked at her quizzically.

  ‘Keep them under your pillow,’ she said, and she hugged me. ‘It is time, the time is now,’ she said, caressing my blue locks with her open palm.

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘Time for being brave, as brave as you can be.’

  I felt something break inside me. When I looked at her face again, her eyes were slightly watery, but she didn’t cry. She was smiling. I smiled back.