The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  ‘Hello, Naomi,’ Judy greeted her, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary in waking up to see a woman squatting like a gargoyle ogling you. ‘I want to take Holy Communion. It’s Sunday. There’s a service by the marquee. Roman Catholic and Church of England. I saw a notice.’ Judy whistled through her even white teeth into the watery greenness. She was naked and so was Walt. Blinking at her, he nodded. Naomi backed out of the tent on her hands and knees like a dog, leaving them to worm their way from their sleeping bag and into their clothes. They emerged from the tent, hands clasped, to find her still attending them. She did not look vengeful, or angry, or jealous, just blank, a blank page.

  ‘Hello again,’ Judy said, relaxed. And she leaned forward and kissed Naomi lightly on the cheek. Walt followed suit.

  ‘Naomi, have you been with us all night?’ Walt wanted to know. She nodded.

  ‘Are you all right?’ breathed Judy. She had her scarf in her hand and had begun folding it, running a thumb and forefinger along the fabric edge as if creasing paper to make a fan. She tied it around her head. Then, ‘Do you want to take Communion? Come with us.’ And she clasped Naomi’s hand in hers and felt the rough nails scrabble against her palms.

  When they got close enough, the priests – there were two of them speaking into a microphone in resonant sing-song tones – ushered them forwards. Judy looked very earnest as she took the silver chalice. She focused on her reflection in it before she took a swallow. Walt mimicked her example. He glanced round to locate Naomi and saw that she was frozen. Her arms were slung about her chest, hands plunged into her armpits. She was staring at one of the priests, her expression haunted. He was robed in satin, the dark material patterned with huge swirling flowers, wide white cuffs on his bell sleeves. He was elderly. A side parting navigated its way through untidy grey straggles of hair. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on a large nose, which was latticed with broken red veins. His head was down, one hand lifted stiffly in blessing over the plate of wafers.

  The other priest, taller, less ostentatious in black, was pouring the wine into a second chalice. Suddenly Naomi spun on her heels, shoving her way through the communicants and fled. For a space she walked aimlessly. For a space she merged with a group who were all leaping like grasshoppers to bat about an enormous orange balloon, on the scale of a hot-air balloon but lacking the buoyancy.

  ‘Man, this is great,’ said one guy, his shoulder-length brown hair lashing about as he jumped. ‘Don’t you just want to do this forever?’

  She realized, startled, that he was addressing her. She was standing on tiptoes and lowered herself carefully. She made no reply. She was tiring of the pointless game. ‘I’ve won,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, far out! You’re a riot.’ She fixed him with her individual glare and he stopped springing about like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout. ‘Wow, your eyes are amazing. Like two separate women in one. Want to go somewhere?’ he propositioned bluntly. She gave her hesitant mechanical blink and stalked off.

  She joined a queue, shuffling forward patient as a cow, and was rewarded with a slice of melon, a hamburger, a pint of milk. She ate hungrily, drank thirstily, licked the cream off her top lip. Re-energized, she stepped into a wall of foam and leapt about, making believe she was inside a cloud. It was mildly amusing. It made her feel sexy, the foam on her skin and people looming out of the whiteness. She’d like to have fucked Walt with all that foam splitting and flaking around them. It would have been like screwing in a giant snow-globe.

  ‘But then he’s probably busy fucking sweet little Judy right now,’ she mumbled under her breath.

  She wasn’t in the mood to trampoline on clouds after that, so she spent a period staring at a plantation of rubbish. It seemed to be burgeoning right before her, dividing, doubling, a cancer spreading. It stank, its rank odour permeating the air. She wondered if anyone else saw the astonishing beauty in this living monument to decay and death. Then it was the evening. She materialized out of the throng and sat beside Walt and Judy on the grass. They heard Donovan, Ralph McTell and the Moodies. She decided that she would never forget the Moodies, the music from that incredible Mellotron seeming to wrap around them. It came from everywhere and nowhere, reverberating off the slopes, bouncing off the canvas gables on Desolation Row. The huge darkness was pegged with stars, the air was a mêlée of scents, of grass and hash and dew and people, and yes, even here, garbage. She was a drop in an ocean of people, pulled by the currents of music.

  ‘Judy, we were always meant to be together,’ Walt declared. ‘Come back to San Francisco with me?’ And when she did not reply, only smiled, he asked her to give him her address, her phone number.

  ‘You’re a treasure,’ she said as if he was an adorable puppy she didn’t want to keep. Then, ‘Goodbye.’ She kissed him on the cheek and Naomi as well, and shimmered off, losing herself in the heaving mass. Walt’s face cracked as if it was a nut split open in a nutcracker. He was hardly aware of Naomi, of the bottle she handed him.

  ‘Jimi Hendrix,’ she said.

  ‘Foxy Lady,’ he replied, gulping the drink she had handed him. He grimaced. ‘What . . . what is it? It tastes like air freshener.’ But such was his thirst that he drained the bottle anyway.

  After a time she said, ‘You’re tired.’

  As if she was a hypnotist and he was her subject, he nodded obediently. Instantly he was exhausted, worn ragged. He needed to sleep. Jimi Hendrix seemed far away, a blur of pink and orange, a flash of silver around his neck. He wanted to hear the end but he hadn’t the will to keep awake. Then Naomi was helping him back to the tent. ‘I want to see . . . see . . . Je . . . Jethro, Jethro Tull. I want . . . want to see Joan Baez. Naomi? Naomi?’ He waved his arm and stumbled. Distantly he knew he was losing co- ordination, control. ‘Was there something . . . something in that drink?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Na . . . omi?’ he slurred.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, a clear bell sounding through the fudge of his speech.

  ‘Don’t let me miss Leonard. Don’t let me . . .’ He broke off, remembering he had to breathe. ‘Don’t let me miss Leonard Cohen. I must . . . must hear Leonard.’ Someone was turning the volume down on his voice. The effort of making himself understood was too great. ‘Mm . . . mm . . . Na—’

  ‘I hear you,’ Mara, the black doll inside her, said. ‘Don’t worry, Walt, I’m going to take care of you.’ Now she was helping him into their tent and he was falling on his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to make you comfortable.’

  ‘You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re . . .’ She stroked his brow, drew her hand down his face, closing his eyelids as you might a dead man’s. His mouth fell open and his body went slack. She made a tight roll of her sleeping bag, and then held it over his mouth and nose. Using all her strength, she pushed down for long minutes, until her knuckles were white as lard and her hands ached. She only removed it when she was absolutely sure that he was dead. She pressed her fingers into his neck and felt for the pulse in his carotid artery. None. Walt’s blood was stagnating. Already his cells were breaking down, decaying, until all that he would be fit for was to be buried in the rubbish plantation. She sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork for a couple more minutes. She was grinding her teeth, the pestle-and-mortar grating punctuated by small satisfied grunts. She listened to her own eulogy for a bit and reminisced about her life with Walt, good and bad. Then gradually the tent impinged on her mix of thoughts. She didn’t like it, and he had been going to leave her alone in it while he lay with Judy.

  She wished that they had brought the camper van. She felt safer in the van, shored up in the van. She could lock the doors and no one could get in. No one could pull her from her bunk in a sleep so deep that it felt like a trance, no one could grip her small hand in theirs, crush it between their strong adult fingers like a closing vice, and drag her through a forest of bunk beds where The Blind Ones slumbered. The Blind Ones chose to be sightless. Images played before their eyes, then va
nished, never to be recalled. They were present, ever present, their eyes glowing but they witnessed nothing. Did you see? Did you see what happened? Mara wanted to scream at them, at their blank pudding faces. But she knew they would only turn their empty eyes on her and shake their heads. No, they did not see Father Peter creep past like a malignant ghoul in the thick darkness, Father Peter who in the daylight made them press their hands together and pray for forgiveness of their sins. In the sunshine with the sea breeze salty in their nostrils, he told them that they were miserable sinners, and that there was no health in them. Then in the black of night he came and drew Mara from the warmth of her bed. He took her to his small room, and told her as he lifted off her sleeping shift, that he needed to examine her, to seek out the marks of sin, to test her for evil. If she cried out the big hand was slapped over her mouth until she thought, just as Walt had, that she would suffocate. And when it was over the voice rasped that if she ever told anyone, she would go to hell, drown not once but for eternity, in a pit of molten flames.

  And when she returned to her bunk, her skin bruised and crawling, the wet, musty smell of him on her, in her, she curled up in the dark forest and listened to the sounds of the others, The Blind Ones. The coughs and sighs and sniffles, the creaks of the wooden bunks as their occupants stirred, the rattle of windows, the thin whistle of the wind. She hugged her knees and imagined what it was like to be in hell forever, roasting in its fires. She imagined all of her, her organs, her flesh, licked with flames, consumed, until all that was left of her was the black crisp of her wicked heart.

  On the third night after her ordeal she crept from her bunk, barefoot, holding the rough cotton of her shift between her legs to sop up the blood. She slipped through the doors like a shadow, and stumbled in the twilight. She trod grass and gravel, twigs and grit. She felt her way to the steep path that led down to the beach. She heard both her names spoken in the ‘shush, shush’ of the sea. Naomi. Mara. Naomi. Mara stepped onto a plain of cool grey sand, the pads of her feet sinking into it.

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

  As she neared the sea it greeted her with a cheer. Raising her head, she saw something that made the charred lump of her heart leap – its long blue smile faintly lit by the push of dawn. And then she was running, peeling the bloodied shift off, over her head, and running heeled with exultation into the icy water.

  Chapter 4

  Sixteen-year-old Owen has been set an essay for English homework, the topic ‘Childhood Memories’. It begins rather well as he lists remembered sensations. Sucking milk so cold from gill-sized bottles through paper straws that the ice splinters pricked his tongue and raked his throat. Sitting in a wicker chair that creaked and pinched his thighs when he shifted position. Eating jam sandwiches that stuck to the roof of his mouth. Squashing a tomato in his hand and feeling the juice of it ooze from between his closed fingers, and the seeds plant themselves in his sticky palm. Smelling the manure that had just been dug into the earth at his father’s allotment, as he stepped into the Cimmerian gloom of his rhubarb shed. He records his first sight of the blush-red rhubarb stalks poking up lewdly from the tangle of dowdy brown roots.

  When he has finished the assignment he creeps into Sarah’s bedroom and sits on the side of her bed, feeling as if he has stepped into a time warp. Nothing has been changed in here. The space, Sarah’s space, is petrified in time. A clock stopped with Sarah’s last breath. His mother never opens the bedroom window. She wants the air that her daughter inhaled, that inflated her small spongy lungs, sending oxygen whizzing around her four-year-old body before she exhaled it, to remain trapped in the jar of this room. It is the reason that she slips speedily in and out, slamming the door with haste. Once inside the airtight hallowed place, she rations her own breathing, moves to new positions where she hopes that the air has not yet been recycled, and very slowly lets the snail of it slide into her. Look, this air, this air here, in the corner, inside the cupboard, at the back of the bottom drawer, this has not been tampered with. This is virgin. This is Sarah’s. She scrabbles about on her knees, and her head and shoulders disappear inside an empty drawer, so that she looks as if she is sticking her head in an oven, as if she is attempting to gas herself.

  Both Bill and Owen have seen her do this, and both have guessed her motive as she rolls about on the floor, buries her head under the rag rug, or stands on tiptoes on a chair, her respiration at a turtle’s pace. Someone who was not there on the beach that day, someone who did not hear the words, ‘Don’t leave me, Owen,’ someone who didn’t see Sarah dredged up from the ocean bed, vampire white, eyes cemented shut, that someone would not have known. They would have surveyed Ruth Abingdon contorting her body into cramped gaps, or stretching giraffe-like to lick the ceiling, and they would have said, ‘That woman is mad; she should be taken to a locked ward.’ But Bill and his son Owen were there, and her behaviour does not seem so bizarre to them.

  Owen glances about him, his gaze settling on the small, mahogany, free-standing bookcase. There are several titles of Noddy, a collection of fairytales with lovely illustrations that Sarah liked to trace with a chubby finger, while her father or her mother or her big brother read to her. His eyes rove the room and take inventory. The white enamel paintwork on the cupboards has yellowed with age. The curtains, a pink floral pattern, have been bleached long ago by the sun. The rag rug that his mother made for her daughter has faded too. Sarah’s cuddly toys are piled up on the pillow, a small teddy, sunflower-yellow with a black button-nose and a balding head, a floppy rabbit, its long ears lined with peach felt, and a golliwog whose stuffing can be peeked through a splitting seam on his foot. The worn scrap of her comfort blanket is kept folded in a lacquer jewellery box on the bedside table. There are more toys in a box at the end of her bed.

  The contents of the wardrobe he knows by heart. He is confident that he can faithfully reproduce every dress and skirt, every cardigan and jumper and coat, every blouse and vest and pair of pants, her dressing gown and folded pyjamas. The socks have a drawer all to themselves. They nestle there like rows of white mice, some with lacy cuffs, or bows, or motifs of lambs and baby chicks. The shoes are polished. That is something his father deals with under the heading of ‘Caring for Sarah’s Kit’. Everything must be ordered for a surprise inspection one morning, one fine morning when they will chance to open her door a crack and see the spill of Sarah’s light-golden curls on the pillow. You can smell the polish when you fling wide the cupboard doors, and see the shoes standing to attention like soldiers on parade. They shine as his father’s did that day on the beach, the day she died. And there are tiny wool slippers, and a small pair of wellington boots, bottle green. Sarah’s smell is still here too, though like the curtains and the rag rug, its hallmark lemony heat grows fainter by the week.

  His mother comes in every day, religiously, as if attending a daily service. Owen has seen her coiled like a rope on the bed, her knees drawn up, her face pressed to the pillow, to the toys, sobbing dryly. She would prefer Owen not to enter Sarah’s bedroom. She has not expressly banished him, but he has grasped this from the cross engraved on her brow, the downward pull of her mouth, the jump of the nervous tick in her cheek when he approaches the door. So he tries to resist the urge to spend time with Sarah, or at least to put it off until the need has become so strong that he cannot help but succumb to it – as he does now.

  Sarah’s last words to him are caged in his head. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ They clang like a heavy chain. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ They make his scalp feel tight and his brain throb. Sometimes it is only the prick of a needle trying to winkle out a splinter, a nagging pain that, although it makes him irritable, is just about tolerable. But sometimes it is an ice pick hacking away in his skull, over and over and over, until the agony of it is unendurable. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen!’ When it is like this he is prep
ared to do anything to make it stop. He visualizes the ice pick driving into the sentence and cleaving the words apart. Owen. Don’t. Me. Leave. Don’t. Leave. Owen. Me. Leave. Owen. Don’t. Me.

  He drives the heels of his hands into his eye-sockets. But it is no good because after a second they begin to reassemble. The word worm wiggles and wiggles the shape of the sentence back again, and then Sarah calls out even more loudly, enunciates ever more clearly, ‘Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen!’ And it sounds as if Sarah is right here next to him. There is the stranglehold of her arms belting his waist, and the fairy-dust hair brushing his chest, and the feathery lashes tickling his flesh.

  His attention is distracted by the apple-green candlewick bedspread. It is looking threadbare now, as if the moths have gorged themselves on it. Actually it is not the moths but his mother who is responsible for the damage. Her busy fingers have pulled the cotton cords from it so many times that it has de veloped chronic mange. He shuts his eyes again and this time he is besieged by an image of himself. A gangly limbed boy, his mussed sandy hair like a tangle of gold wires in the candle flames. He is swaying slightly on the balls of his feet, feeling suddenly dizzy, the burnt smell in his throat. He draws in his breath with wonder, hypnotized by the glistening crimson arms of the rhubarb stalks, the ruched crowns of buttery yellow and natal green, edging towards the light. The flames flicker as if stirred by his exhaled breath. Their grey felt shadows graze the rough shed walls, tall then short, short then tall again. He can see them etched on his eyelids, jostling one another in their struggle to escape the suffocating wooden womb. He inhales and takes the musty smoke-laced odour deep down into his lungs. He looks automatically to his left, a twin looking for his other half. But Sarah is not there. Wire-wool tears scour his eyes. He blinks them away, and then he sees the Water Child blazing in her place.