The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ said her mother laconically, only just succeeding in keeping her tone level, and holding the car door open for Catherine to climb in.

  But it could be helped, so Catherine dashed back into the house and galloped up the stairs to their attic room, where she found Rosalyn lying on the den floor sucking her thumb. She pulled it out the moment Catherine tore breathlessly into the room, and sat up as her cousin kneeled down.

  ‘I was just coming to say goodbye. I’m sorry, I must have—’

  But Catherine interrupted her. ‘You’ll always remember me as the cousin you almost drowned with. That’s how you’ll think of me now. The feeling will be all black and bad.’ She hadn’t realized but she was crying, her cheeks were wet and her pitch was warlike. From downstairs she heard her mother’s impatient call.

  ‘Catherine, do come! We’re all waiting for you.’

  ‘Oh no, no, no!’ appeased Rosalyn. She took Catherine by the shoulders and held her gaze for a long moment. Dinah Hoyle’s imperious voice rose to them again.

  ‘Catherine, do I have to come up there and get you?’

  ‘I have to go,’ said Catherine miserably, dashing away her tears.

  ‘Because of you . . .’ But Rosalyn could not go on. A deep intake of breath, and then most awful of all, the mouth that never had, wobbled. An unsure, childish wobble that brought more tears to Catherine’s eyes.

  ‘Catherine!’ came her mother’s furious shout.

  Her cousin didn’t say anything else. She looked as if the effort of speaking that much had utterly depleted her. Then she hugged Catherine hard and their cheeks touched. Rosalyn’s felt very smooth and cold, like marble, against Catherine’s hot, damp one. She drew back, stood, took one last long look at Rosalyn, into her frightened, uncertain blue eyes, and left.

  Chapter 3

  The summer solstice. Stonehenge. 1965. The sun rising. The shared intake of breath. And the shadows lengthening on the scrubby grass. She’d been coming here for this since she was seventeen. It was what you did when you were a traveller. You followed the light. Now she was twenty-five. That meant she’d been roaming for eight years, falling in and out of company. Forever on the move. Naomi Seddon the nomad. She wondered what would happen if she stood still, if she gave the blackness inside her time to come bubbling to the surface. I am like one of those Russian dolls, she thought. If you pull me apart at the waist you will find another doll within, a black doll, Mara. She stared at the mysterious stone giants huddled in the middle of nowhere, like a gaggle of gods. Glancing about her, she could see that some of the onlookers were praying, and some were singing, and some were chanting. So she fell upon the words the priest had spoken to her when she arrived at the home, renaming her. They were all that remained of him under her skin.

  ‘And she said unto them, “Call me not Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”’

  She reached out a hand to the towers of rock. The feel of their solid flesh was chill and rough and lumpy under the pads of her fingers. She scratched them with her bitten nails and listened to the reassuring ‘scrit, scrit’ of their reply. And then suddenly she was aware of the tall man at her side, the unruly brown, shoulder-length hair tethered messily in a loose ponytail, the moustache that drooped down at the edges of his mouth in a way she thought delightfully old fashioned, like some romantic poet. The hint of sensual, full lips partially concealed under it. The dark-blue eyes perpetually amused by some private joke, the irises sparkling as they reflected the rising sun. All set in the slightly hawkish, predatory face. He slung an arm casually about her shoulders as if he’d known her forever, as if they’d journeyed there together, as if they were an old married couple. Then he pulled her round to face him, bent, moulded his large frame to hers, and kissed her as if they were not an old married couple, as if they had only just met, as if the powerful animal attraction between them made words superfluous.

  Later, when she wandered back to his van, after they drew the faded olive-and-yellow curtains, slipped out of their dew-damp clothes and fucked so sweetly that she wanted to weep, he took a huge breath and made a present to her of his speech. He dropped onto his back and rolled her over until she was on top, lifted her up into the saddle of him, his fingers almost meeting as he circled her narrow waist with his broad hands. And while his penis, still stiff and glistening, teased her open sex, he spoke.

  ‘You have nice eyes. Different colours. I like that.’ She could feel him begin to jut, feel him butting into her an inch or so, no more, then withdrawing, and again, until she felt her own thighs clenching, the greedy muscles contracting in welcome. ‘I’m Walt,’ he breathed, his moustache quivering. She gazed down at the geology of his body. Well built, a labourer’s physique, the muscles – arms, abdomen (she glanced back over her shoulders), thighs – were hard, the contours clearly visible through the nut-brown hue of his flesh. There were springy curls of hair on his chest, legs, and around his groin and scrota, mingling with her own black bush. He was American, his voice a bass, luxurious and creamy, a voice that hugged you, that opened you up, that plundered you with an affable smile earning your groan of acquiescence.

  ‘I’m Naomi.’ He lifted her up, and as he did so eased himself in a few inches further, making her fit him. In response she emitted a sound that was more than a mew and less than a growl. He took another bellows-ful of breath, and through her half-shut eyes she saw the barrel of his chest heave. In unconscious mimicry she drew in the tincture of nicotine, oil, sweat, and the hint of fungal spores wafting from the rolled-back blankets.

  ‘Naomi,’ he said, all that breath of his spent recklessly on the three costly syllables. He pushed his way deep inside her, and deeper still. ‘I can feel the end of you, Naomi,’ he said, and she smiled because she doubted the truth of this, as she absorbed the tartness of his feral scent.

  Now, four years on, he was still thrusting into her, satisfied that he had plumbed her depths, that he had found his way to the source of her rivers, that he had possessed her entirely. And why should she spoil the delusion? It was a good life that she had with him, travelling from city to city, through green fields, along open roads in his VW camper van, with the psychedelic flowers winding over the tricoloured bands of its paintwork. Red, white and blue, for the Stars and Stripes. She liked the large skies, the dialogue of the windswept trees. She liked the smell of rain, the feel of it on her skin, in her mouth, sliding down her throat. Its taste altered subtly, so that sometimes it was salty, oily, smoky, sometimes it smacked of industrial machinery, had that tang of metal about it, the bouquet of belching, tall, grey chimneys. She liked to step out of her clothes and let it sluice over her body, finding out her hidden places, a far better detective than Walt would ever be, she acknowledged privately to herself.

  But she loved the sea, the slap of the icy, bleak, British sea – the only antidote she knew for the blackness. They sought out the sea weekly. Walt said that the salt was an antiseptic, that it did for a shower, that it was better any day than trying to wash your feet in the basin of a public convenience, then wipe your armpits and your groin on a scrap of dripping paper towel that was coming to pieces in your hand. He believed it even served as a mouthwash, that as you gargled it cleaned teeth and gums, both. But it was the dirty core of her that she wanted purified. Only the stinging assault of the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the English Channel, and the big brother of them all, the Atlantic Ocean, could cleanse her. The sea had knowledge of her that Walt lacked. It understood that chained within her there lurked a gothic monster.

  While Walt wallowed like a hippo, or lay on his back and blew a fountain of brine up from his sodden moustache, while his penis shrivelled with the frozen caress to the nub of a rosebud, she opened herself up to an altogether more satisfying kind of intercourse. She would swim out a few yards, her stroke an un expectedly athletic crawl for such a slight woman, her arms scything through the water in mathematically executed arcs. Then, very deliberatel
y, she would open her thighs as wide as she could, letting the sea rush into her, and in its carnal exploration confirm what it already suspected, that that was not the end of her, just the beginning.

  She could recite the names of the many places they met, like a woman naming the hotel rooms where she and her lover carried on their stormy, illicit affair. Durdle Door, Chesil Beach, Skegness, Saltburn-by-the-Sea, Fishguard, Tenby, Falmouth, Camber Sands, Eastbourne . . . On and on, they tripped off her tongue. No matter how far they wandered, eventually on this great island they encountered the sea. She didn’t tell Walt how she felt. She kept her sea fever to herself. After an encounter, her skin felt chafed with salty friction, her body battered with cold, her eyes streamed and her vision was misted. But the filth had been strained out of her and she was shriven, a sanctified vessel. Their last swim in Studland Bay had left her with the flu, her temperature rising steeply, until she felt so dizzy she could not stand up. He said it was just a cold, insisted that once she got to the festival she’d soon recover. But she’d been adamant.

  He’d removed the back seats of the van long ago. They slept wrapped up in blankets on a bit of blue-and-beige carpet he’d lifted off a skip. Now she huddled so deep into this, that all that was visible of her was her long black hair streaming out like a troll’s – witch’s hair, he liked to call it in jest. He tugged a strand, and for answer she gave a yowl that seemed to slash her raw throat like a knife. He lifted his hands in surrender and backed off, sulking with a joint in the corner of the field where they’d parked. Here, he attracted the interest of a herd of Friesian cows, their expansive nostrils huffing in the unusual aroma, their ears twanging off the flies, their soulful eyes rolling.

  And so they missed the 1969 festival. She wasn’t sorry. The music was more his thing. He’d introduced her to it. Though it was true she enjoyed the way that, similarly to the purge of the sea, sometimes it drowned out her voice, Mara’s voice. But beyond this bonus, it was just background noise to her. You smoked, you floated, you made love or fucked as the mood took you, and it jangled away, shredding the air. She appreciated it with a kind of detachment. Not like him. He entered into it as a monk might renounce the world and vanish into a monastery. He submerged himself in it, was liberated, regenerated, reincarnated he would have claimed, in the waterfall of its undulating notes and chords, in the sweet, sour, salt, bitter psalms, in the penetrative shudder of it.

  After hearing about Woodstock he was doubly determined that they make the 1970 festival. And just to ensure she did not jeopardize the trip, he kept the van steered well away from the coastline and the inclement sea. Once it was confirmed that Leonard Cohen would be performing, nothing would have prevented him from going. He set about it with the fervour a disciple might have dredged up to see the risen Jesus.

  Naomi tried to share in his excitement, but her blood was dulled. Did he think she was an idiot? Mara was an all-seeing, unforgiving deity. ‘Walt is tiring of you,’ came Mara’s voice now, her buried twin, her black inner doll. ‘He is taking his pleasure elsewhere. You can smell the sex on him.’ She scraped and worried and clawed at Naomi’s scabs, until the wounds bled afresh. ‘He’s planning to leave you, did you guess? He’s thinking about going home, going back to America, to San Francisco. Alone. He’s going to offload you. He’s made up his mind to jettison you like rubbish.’

  The camper van had been playing up, so Walt insisted that they travel on foot to the Isle of Wight. They left it on a gypsy site nearby, taking with them rucksacks and a small blue tent they had picked up second hand. In truth, their fun bus was in a decline, like an elderly relative in poor health whose every day brings some fresh woe. The carburettor was blocked, a gasket had blown, the starter motor needed replacing, the exhaust was falling off, and the rust was so extensive that you could glimpse the road in a few places.

  ‘All we need is for it to pack up and ruin things,’ Walt said, screwing up his worried eyes, and drawing down his eyebrows at the prospect of such an unthinkable outcome. To end up tinkering with the van while a god was descending from his cloud onto the Isle of Wight, or more likely from a helicopter, well, it didn’t even bear thinking about. After a heated dispute they left on the Saturday, finally managing to board the 3:45 p.m. ferry from Portsmouth, arriving at the Festival site at Afton Down two hours later.

  ‘Well, we’ve missed Joni Mitchell,’ Walt said, peeved. ‘I told you we should have come on Thursday or Friday at the latest.’ Naomi, who hadn’t really felt like coming at all, chose to ignore him. They set up camp on Desolation Row, overlooking the stage.

  ‘I feel like a pioneer,’ Walt said, grinning. ‘A pioneer building a log cabin on the great prairies. Only it’s a tent.’ He looked to Naomi to share the joke but she remained po-faced. ‘We can enjoy the show from here for free. If we feel like it tomorrow we can get tickets, go into the arena and get up close and personal, eh?’

  Naomi nodded. She gazed about her. The people just kept flocking in, as if a dam had burst, a dam of people cascading into the fields and onto the slopes until they were chock full with tents. They looked just like wooden building blocks spilled over the yellowing grass, blue and orange and green and red and white. The stage was a pale hump in the distance. The surrounding marquees provided hopelessly inadequate facilities for the hundreds of thousands of tired, hungry faithful, struggling with groundsheets and guy-ropes. The air was filled with the strains of music, with the collective murmur of the masses of jostling bodies, wreathed in beads and flowers and hats and scarves. And it was dense with the fragrance of incense and hash.

  ‘The atmosphere is wild, just wild,’ Walt told her, miming playing electric guitar. ‘You can trip on this alone. Who needs drugs?’ But despite his protestations it seemed he did. He produced some purple hearts, gave one to Naomi and took one himself. Discreetly she pocketed hers. They wandered about the canvas city letting the music possess them. Walt began chatting to some Americans, two men, Kelwin and Alan, and a young woman, Judy, she said her name was. They joined a queue, bought cups of soup, and sat cross-legged, companionably sipping it together. All but Naomi. She had lost her appetite.

  She examined Judy with her contrasting eyes. In her blue scope she observed that she was pretty, a few inches taller than herself. She itemized her clothing. Leather stitched boots, purple tights, an A-line dress with a V-neck and fitted sleeves. The material was a colourful pattern of dotted ovals, which looked vaguely like a frog spawn. Her brown scope took particular stock of her hair. Though mostly a golden yellow, it had lots of other shades in it, streaks of brown and strawberry blonde and red. It mantled her shoulders, hung down her back. The scarf tied round her head made her resemble an Indian, an Indian squaw. She wore a thick silver band on the middle finger of her left hand, and occasionally glanced down at a watch on her wrist.

  Now Naomi felt Walt’s eyes veering between them. ‘He’s comparing you,’ Mara said. She looked down at her own boyish flares, her tight T-shirt. ‘He’s thinking that you have no tits, that Judy is shapely, feminine. He’s thinking that she is young, unspoiled, and that you are old, used.’

  They stayed together, all five of them, although their tents were pitched some distance apart. They strolled into the woods, climbed a huge tree and hung off its branches as if they were Christmas baubles. They made a campfire with a few sticks and sat around it talking. They smoked some hash, and the shorter of the men, Kelwin, with buck teeth and frizzy hair, offered round a bottle of red wine and some small white pills that he vouchsafed were good stuff, the finest. Naomi pretended to take one but she tucked it in her cleavage. When the bottle came round she mimed having a swig but hardly wet her lips. They were all too far gone to notice. Mara cautioned her that she needed to keep a clear head.

  As the night drew in around them Naomi studied Walt, the way an artist might study a model. She saw him put his arm around Judy and murmur into her hair. Her different coloured eyes followed the stroke of his hands on her legs in their purple tights. Chi
n lifted, she saw him trace the lines of the ribbed cotton. When he found the zips on her boots and started rhythmically pulling them up and down, her eyes were riveted. She registered the tenderness with which he touched Judy’s face. The brush of their lips scalded her own. She could feel the black tide of Mara rising up, as Walt pushed Judy back on the grass, and laid his head on her full breasts.

  ‘I can hear your heart,’ he said. ‘Boom, boom, boom.’ Far away the music played, and his head bounced as Judy giggled. ‘You have the crisp unworn fragrance of brand-new clothes,’ he said. Naomi scrutinized them through the pathetic little fire. Walt cupped one of Judy’s breasts. ‘Your nipples will be pastel pink, like sugared almonds. Kissing them will be like sucking on small, hard, sugared almonds,’ he rhapsodized. Kelwin and Alan laughed raucously at this and exchanged lewd looks. Alan ran a hand down Naomi’s spine, tried to make a nest for it on the swell of her buttocks. She sat like an ice sculpture and hexed him with her wild eyes. And he rose, rubbing his thighs awkwardly, as if they were soiled, and went to collect more firewood.

  ‘I need to make love to you, Judy,’ Walt said reasonably. Judy clasped her hands behind her head and sighed contentedly. Then they were holding onto each other as if they were cast adrift in an ocean and each was the other’s lifebuoy. They stood. Again they kissed, long and lingeringly. When they headed off towards Judy’s tent, Naomi tracked them. She waited, and when they re-emerged she joined them as they made their way down Desolation Row. They found a loose panel in the fencing and clambered through into the arena. They managed to fight their way right up to the stage, and The Doors played, and The Who, and Sly and The Family Stone. Walt caressed her wiggling serpentine body. He toyed with her and petted her. Feet apart from them, Naomi gave off intense hatred like static. When they went back to Judy’s tent she hastened after them, tripping over sprawled bodies, being sworn at, being kicked. She stayed outside until she had counted the stars, then snuck in. She squatted like a gargoyle in a corner and kept vigil while they slept. The music vibrated her ears, and Mara was a marble rolling in her head, muddling her thoughts. She was wide eyed when Judy sat up, stretched, yawned. Walt woke more slowly. He saw Judy beside him, her fair hair sleep-tumbled. A second later he started at the spectre of Naomi crouching at her feet. The tent was jade green, the morning light filtering through it creating the impression that they were all under the sea.