by Anne Berry
In any case, his father always seems too busy to go to the swimming pool. They have been once or twice but he just seemed restless and bored, and when Owen didn’t take to the water the way a duckling would, he was impatient to go home again. And that impatience, that sense that his father knew he was going to fail, made it come true. It was like being cursed, him looking at the big clock-face on the wall and folding his arms. And the next thing Owen knew was that he was spluttering and choking, and feeling a belt of panic tightening about his belly, so that he really believed he might drown, right then and there, with his father watching. They hadn’t got as far as learning the swimming strokes so there wasn’t very much touching – well, hardly any at all, if Owen is truthful.
It is while he is thinking about this, while he is dribbling the ball and picturing his father holding him up in the water and saying encouraging things like, ‘Well done, terrific, you’re going to make a racing swimmer one day, my boy’, that he notices his mother. She is a long way off up the beach, running towards him shouting something. But he cannot decipher it because the wind is making a whirring sound in his ears, and besides, she is too far away. Still, there is something about the untidy way she is moving that makes him stiffen, and feel a bit empty and sick inside. It is a sort of headlong fall, nearly tripping up in her haste every few steps, and even though she must be out of breath, shouting in sharp bursts, rather like the screeches of the seagulls.
And then a flint arrow lances his beating heart and turns it to ice. He remembers. Sarah. He spins round. The stripy windbreak seems miles away, and as small as a postage stamp. How can it be that he has come so far? What was he dreaming about? But then he knows that, doesn’t he? And he can see the beach mat blowing away beyond it, bumping the sand and flapping, like a wounded bird. Surely, surely, oh please let it be true, Sarah is tucked up safe behind that buffeted stamp of canvas. Of course she is; she is sitting behind the windbreak happy as can be, precisely where he left her. Where he left her. The words clang in his head. Where he left her. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ Even though he is barely a few years older than his sister, he knows in some kind of dreadful, intuitive, grown-up way, that her plea will never leave him. He is as good as branded with it. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ This is the sinister dread that takes hold as he sprints. And because he is lighter and not sinking into the sand, he is much faster than his mother.
He is good at running. He even won the twenty-five yard sprint at his last school’s sports day. He recalls how proud he felt, his chest heaving with it, as he neared that ribbon. Then breaking through it, and turning round breathlessly to look for his father in the crowd of parents. And the disappointment, like a paperweight sinking in his stomach. His father had wandered off to talk to the school caretaker. He could see him by the trees at the edge of the field leaning over a bush tweaking the leaves. He had missed it. He had missed Owen’s victory.
But this is a different kind of race, a horrible race, one that you aren’t sure whether you want to win or not. He can hear his mother’s shrieks now, big ugly sounds, like the ones he hears in his head when the witches and monsters speak in stories. And he can hear the name too, screamed again and again.
‘Sarah! Aargh! Aargh! Sarah! Sarah!’
And then he is rounding the windbreak and screaming her name too. But she isn’t there, only the sailor’s white hat without her in it. There is a small pile of sand, and he thinks he can detect the lines where Sarah has drawn in it with her stubby fingers. And her scrap of pink blanket is peeping out from under it too, that horrid smelly thing that seems to be impregnated with an incredible power, sending his sister into a serene trance each time she rubs it rhythmically over her lips. But though he peers hard at it, she doesn’t appear. He keeps barking her name, as if in all likelihood she will suddenly rise up from under the sand. She will be like the sand creature in a book he has read, Five Children and It. And any moment she will spring up and shimmy the glittering grains off her, giggling at the great game.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees his mother streak past and hurtle down to the sea, and then straight into it with the waves breaking over her, and her behaving as if she cannot feel them. He rushes after her, rushes into the water, as far as he dares to go, knowing he is unable to swim. Then he runs up and down, the way he has seen dogs do sometimes when they are nervous of getting wet. And his mother keeps bobbing up like a seal, gasping out words as though a saw is grinding on her throat.
‘Sarah! Sarah! I can’t . . . can’t find Sarah!’ And Owen thinks stupidly, as salt spume strikes his eyes, making him wince, why is she searching for her there in the wide ocean, why is she trying to fish for Sarah? Then under again and up, a gulp of breath, another dive. A long beat and she explodes from the water, fixing Owen for a second, her brown eyes slitting with the salt bite, or is it something else? ‘You stupid boy! You stupid, stupid boy!’ Then down again, and for the longest time, it seems to Owen, the stupid boy, darting to right and left as if blocking a goal. And up to spit out once more, ‘I told you to watch her. I told you to stay with her. I told you, I told you, I told you, you idiot!’ And her face all ghastly and coming apart like a mirror breaking, and her ribbon undone and the wet hair streaming over her eyes, and stuffed in her mouth.
Then suddenly his father thundering past him, like the charging rhinoceros he saw on his last birthday at London Zoo, only pausing to kick off those shiny shoes. The two of them now, both seals together, one, an arc of grey, one of yellow, white and turquoise, looping about each other. And his father’s straw hat bobbing on the water, bobbing so gaily on the water that Owen wants to tear it to pieces. And finally his father bursting triumphantly from the waves with something in his arms, something that is Sarah. He dashes out of the breaking surf and Owen sees Sarah’s head lolling over his arm, and the sunlight of her curls ironed straight with their load of water. He sees that her body is so white it is almost silver, that her eyes are sealed shut as though she is sleeping soundly. He sees the bright pink and yellow dots of her swimsuit, and that his father’s comb-over is snarled with grit that glints like pinheads. He sees them arrange Sarah as if she is a display of flowers, sees her splayed out on the sand, sees his mother kneeling beside her, gripping the star of her hand. The shadow of his father slides over them. Then he distances himself from the dismal frieze, his blue eyes bulging with horror, so that Owen can see the red veins against the waterlogged whites.
‘Bring her back!’ hisses his mother in a voice more dreadful than the ones he imagines in the fairy stories. It lacerates the air and consumes the gulls’ cacophony whole. And the look she casts at her son is blacker than hate and darker than death.
Again his father steps forward reluctantly, bends his clumsy body, kneels slowly, awkwardly, the way Owen has seen him do in church. He takes hold of Sarah’s brittle arms and gives them a jerk, as if urging her to stop this tomfoolery and get up. Nothing. His great hands span her motionless chest and he pats her in effectually, like a dog. His eyes are swamped with panic, for this little Lazarus will not rise up and be well. All the while his sodden clothes dribble salty tears. And then it strikes Owen with the force of a sledgehammer: his father does not know what to do, he does not know how to bring Sarah back.
The surfer comes racing out of the water, hurling aside his board, barrelling into their grief. He shoves Owen’s father out of the way, wipes the wet tendrils of hair from the blanched face, pulls back Sarah’s head and hooks a finger in her mouth. Then he pinches her tiny nostrils between a graceful thumb and fore-finger, and, as Owen looks on aghast, he kisses his sister. He is trying to kiss Sarah alive again, like the prince in Sleeping Beauty. His father hovers in the background, impotent, his drenched clothes drooping over his slumped frame. The kisses are light puffs of air that seem to oil the rusty hinges of Sarah’s chopstick ribs. Owen gives a strangled whoop of joy as they swing. She is coming back after all. But the moment the surfer stops they stop, and are still again. Then he feels her che
st, and finds the spot where the buried treasure is hidden. He starts to delve for it, digging with his fingertips. And still no gleam of life, just the jagged pieces tumbling from his mother’s face, making the portrait of it grow more and more indistinct.
People come and crowd about them. Someone shouts that they have called an ambulance. His mother rocks to-and-fro, and eerie noises emanate from the abyss inside her, making Owen want to block his ears. The surfer keeps trying, he keeps trying to raise Lazarus; right up to the moment the medics arrive with a stretcher he is trying. Then they try too, and afterwards they put Sarah on the stretcher and hurry off to the ambulance, to try some more, they say.
It is then, as they jog up the beach looking like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film, with his father stumbling behind them reaching for his car keys in the soggy envelopes of his pockets, that his mother collapses. She seems to be eating the sand where Sarah has lain, pasting it over her face and cramming it into her mouth. And the noise that comes from her then is an inhuman roar. It commands a sea of tears to cascade from Owen’s eyes. The wind harvests them and sews them like seed diamonds in the sand. People bend over his mother and help her up as if she is an invalid. Propped between a tall man and a short woman, his rag-doll mother is dragged after his father and the ambulance men, and the stretcher with Sarah lying white as a cuttlefish and very still upon it.
The onlookers start to drift off, muttering in low voices to one another. He hears an elderly man say that he thinks they are too late, that the little girl is dead. No one seems to notice Owen. He stoops to extract Sarah’s comfort blanket from the sand, presses it to his nose and breathes through it. And there is the scent of his sister, lemony sweet and warm and sleepy. With her filling him up, he stumbles after them.
***
For Owen the best moment of the day was the very first, the glow of consciousness before he opened his eyes, before the images and sensations assailed him. But the trouble with the glow was that it ended almost before it had begun. And his bedroom was soon so crowded that there was hardly any room in it for him. It was like being on a film set, only not having a named role, just being an extra, a walk on, a bit part, absorbing the atmosphere, being careful not to upstage the real stars.
Sounds. The neat, brisk tap-tapping of footsteps in the hospital corridor, fast approaching. The pop of air rushing out of his mother when they told her. The grinding of his father’s teeth that came again and again, as if he was trying to file them down into stumps. And the shout of silence from the empty back seat as they drove home in the Hillman Husky, the silence imploring them to go back, reminding them that they had forgotten something, that they had left someone behind.
Smells. The stink of the sea, salt and mineral and washed-up dead things slowly rotting. The bitter, mothball odour of his mother’s breath for weeks afterwards, the air seeping stale and stagnant from the bleakness inside her. The fading scent of Sarah in every room of the house reminding him that she was gone, like a receding echo. The rich, heavy, fertile fragrance unleashed, of crumbling earth teeming with worms and maggots, undoing creation, as the open grave reached for his sister.
Sights. Her blithely ignorant clothes busy preparing themselves for her return, swirling around in the belly of the washing machine, waving merrily at him from the washing line, piled patiently in the ironing basket. His mother’s insistence that they be laundered, pressed, hung in her cupboard, folded neatly in her drawer. For what purpose? That they remain in readiness for Sarah’s second coming? And toys looking all lost and forlorn, as if they were clockwork and their keys were missing. Her drawing of the family taped to the kitchen cupboard, a stick daddy and mummy and Owen and Sarah, all standing in front of a square house, with the sun sending its rays in straight, uncomplicated lines to illuminate all their days. A tiny, white coffin with a brass plaque on the lid that caught the light as they lowered it into the ground, and him imagining that it was Sarah’s golden soul, that they were burying the dazzling hummingbird of Sarah’s spirit, consigning it to eternal darkness. It did not seem much bigger than the shoebox he had buried his hamster in at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, the coffin that held the remains of Sarah.
Touch. The grip of his father’s fingers digging into his shoulders at the funeral, the nails feeling like thumbtacks being driven into his flesh, the pain that made him want to be one never-ending scream. The fineness of the hairs he pulled from her brush and tucked in the pages of his bus-spotting journal, the sensation of rolling them gently between his fingers, and recalling the crowded touch of them against his bare chest that last day on the beach, almost a year ago. And the guilt, the great collar of guilt that he was yoked to, from the second he woke, with its load growing steadily heavier and heavier, until by the evening he felt like an old man who hardly had the strength to straighten up.
But today was different. He could tell straight away that he had not wet his bed, and surely this was a good sign. Just to make sure, he propped himself up on an elbow and explored under the covers with his free hand. Dry. He was dry. Perhaps today his mother would not suddenly cave in mid-sentence, imploding, deflating as if she was a punctured balloon, and groaning, that growling groan that he knew carried the cadence of death.
And all told it was not a bad day, that Saturday, not as bad as some that had gone before it. The groan did not crawl out of his mother’s gaping mouth, not in his earshot anyway. His father took the afternoon off and helped Owen to make his model Airfix Spitfire. They sat at the dining-room table with layers of newspaper spread out before them. They did not talk, except to mutter the name of the next piece they would be assembling. The newspaper crackled quietly as they went methodically about their allotted tasks. They did not touch, except once when their fingers met, sliding the tube of glue between them. They focused all their attention on the fighter plane. Owen looked forward to painting it. When it was complete he had already decided to buy another one. He had been saving up his pocket money.
His father came to tuck him in at night now. His mother only put her head round the door and blew him a kiss. She shied away from physical interaction with her son, much as his father did, but for very different reasons, Owen thought. She was scared that she might show her revulsion for the stupid boy who left Sarah alone to drown.
But then all was ruined, for that night the Merfolk came again for him. He woke and saw that his bed had become a raft, rapidly shrinking on a rough sea. He gripped the sheets, his palms damp with sweat, and felt his small craft pitch and toss under him. In his struggle there were times when the deck seemed virtually perpendicular, and he was fighting with all his might not to slide off the wall of it. At first he only glimpsed them, caught a flash of dishwater-grey, a sudden splash, the sound of hollow laughter rising like streams of bursting bubbles. He drew up his knees and pushed his face into the mattress. But even in the blackness their lantern eyes found him. When, panting for breath, he reared up and gulped in air, their webbed hands shot out of the water and grabbed at him. He gazed in horror as their spangled bodies humped and wheeled. It was as if a huge serpent was writhing about his boat bed. He peered into the depths and saw their merlocks waving like rubbery weeds in the murky swill. The water’s surface was eaten up with their scissoring fish mouths, the worm stretch of their glistening lips, the precise bite of their piranha teeth.
‘Tacka-tacka,’ they went, ‘tacka-tacka.’ And they tempted him with their honeyed promises. ‘Owen, come with us. We will teach you to swim. Ride us like sea horses. Gallop with us through an underwater world of neon blues and greens. We will juggle with sea anemones and starfish. We will dig in the silver sand for huge crabs, and trap barnacled lobsters in their lairs. We will net all day for fish and shrimp, and tie knots in the tails of slimy eels. We will surf the bow waves of blowing whales. And we will build coral castles, and play tag in gardens of kite-tailed kelp. Only, only . . . come with us.’
And he stuffed his fingers in his ears and hid under the covers, refus
ing to listen to any more of their lies. They did not fool him. They forgot, he already knew they had stolen his sister, drawn the shining soul out of her limp body and kept it to light the black depths they skulked in. Would they never go? Would they haunt him forever? He turned on his bedside lamp and prayed, soaked in sweat, for the visions to fade. He did not call his father to witness his shameful cowardice. He did not call his mother, because she was no longer there. But he did look at the photograph in the ebony frame that stood on his bedside table.
His father had taken it last Christmas. It was a picture of him and his mother and the snowman they had made. His mother had her arms wrapped about him and he was holding a carrot to his nose, in a fair imitation of Pinocchio. Beside them was the most magnificent snowman Owen thought he had ever seen. His chest swelled with pride knowing they had built it together, just the two of them, his mother and him. As he stared at it, his memory fast forwarded a few days, and he saw himself looking at the same snowman, tears spilling from his eyes. The sun had come out, the barometer in the porch was reading ‘Fair’, and the snow was melting. Their snowman that they had worked so hard to build, was vanishing. Then his mother was beside him, asking him what was the matter. And when he told her she said an amazing thing to him. Not only did it stop him crying, but it also made him smile. And as he remembered her words, they made him smile again. She told him that locked in the big frozen body was a child, a child made out of water, a child who pined to be free. Only when the snowman melted was the Water Child freed.