The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  Owen is visited by another memory that he omitted from his essay, the memory of a man who gave a brandy glow to his mother’s brown eyes. His name was Ken Bascombe. He was their next-door neighbour’s brother. He came to stay with his sister, Eileen Pope, one summer. He had sold his house in Surbiton and was emigrating to America.

  ‘Just a few things to do, one or two bits and pieces to sew up and then I’m off,’ he tells Bill, his deep, well-modulated voice bouncing over the garden fence.

  Bill has been digging. He always seems to be digging, as if one day he thinks he might unearth something precious. He has soil particles clogging his scant hair, and brown flecks on the lenses of his National Health glasses. And he has a smear of mud on one cheek and a patch on the other, like tribal war paint. He is a primitive native emerging from the jungle, ill-equipped with his garden weaponry for this meeting with tall, suave, sophisticated, civilized man. Owen is wearing a secondary school uniform, grey flannel trousers, a white shirt. He is sitting on the kitchen doorstep in the sunshine pretending to read, but really he is observing, he is observing his father and Ken Bascombe.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Ken, adjusting his tie and smoothing back his own abundant, crisp, blond hair. ‘So many more opportunities to make money over there, set up new businesses, get things moving. No limits to what you can achieve in that brave new world.’ Bill leans on his spade and nods. He rubs the inside of a wrist over one cheek, another brushstroke of earth paint.

  ‘Sounds . . . sounds, well . . . super,’ he manages eventually. He is stripped to the waist. His skin looks as unhealthy as the raw chicken’s spread-eagled inelegantly on the chopping board in the kitchen, waiting patiently to be drawn and quartered. In contrast his nipples seem very pink. They look out of place, as if someone has stuck them on him, as if you could just pinch them off like milk bottle tops. He rolls his shoulders, uncomfortable in his plucked-poultry skin.

  ‘I tell you, Bill, all those things you dreamt of having, over there in the Big Apple, you can really attain them. They encourage you. Not like here, eh? Slap you down just for trying over here.’ As he talks he describes a big circle with his arms. Owen notices that his hands are shapely, graceful, long fingered, expressive as a musician’s, with very clean, neatly filed nails. He has never scratched about in the dirt, you can tell. He appears to prod the ceiling of the sky, as if he can dip into heaven whenever it pleases him. He gives a chuckle and his magnetic eyes sparkle. Bill’s answering chuckle is a mirthless, agitated cough that is gobbled back hurriedly.

  Owen’s eyes flick over the page of the book he is reading, Gone with the Wind, then back to the man. Ken Bascombe is wearing a suit. The fence cuts him in half but the portion he can see is very smart. A cream linen suit, a pressed, laundered shirt, a shiny, blue tie that matches the striking, frosty blue of his eyes. He is tall and handsome, and in his jacket he looks cooler than his father does with nothing on. Now he slides a hand in an inside pocket, produces a packet of cigarettes, and a gold lighter that catches the sun with a scintillating flash. He offers one to Bill who shakes his head. When he starts smoking, Owen squints at him and conjures Rhett Butler.

  His mother comes out into the garden to take the washing down from the line. She crosses to the fence holding her empty basket in her arms, and chats easily to Ken Bascombe for a while. Her tone is such a low lisp that he cannot hear what she is saying. His father hangs back, looking oafish. After a few minutes his mother puts down the basket and rests her weight on one leg, the other leg bent back at the knee. She leans over the fence and smiles archly. She accepts the offer of a cigarette, although she knows her husband does not like her smoking. And Ken Bascombe, who will soon be travelling on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean to America, places her cigarette between his lips, holds his own to its tip, inhales deeply, and when it is lit hands it to her. Owen, thinking about how high the price of freedom was for the plantation slaves, notes that unusually his mother’s hair is brushed and loose. She has abandoned her apron too, something unheard of when performing her household tasks, until today, that is. Her cotton-print dress flutters in the gentle breeze, so that her son becomes aware for the first time that his mother has a body, a slender waist, shapely hips, full round breasts. For the rest of the day his mother sings.

  She is still singing weeks later. Now she takes rides in Ken Bascombe’s Humber Super Snipe. The car has a top speed of nearly 80 m.p.h., she tells her son. It is a rich maroon colour, as if red wine has been sloshed all over the exterior, and it has real leather upholstery. Owen has sniffed the pungent animal scent of it. But he has declined the frequent invitations from Mr Bascombe, asking if he might like to take a spin in it. His mother’s spins have become so frequent that Owen imagines her as one of those twirling ballerinas. Round and round and round she goes. And he wonders if she will ever stop.

  She arrives home later and later in the evenings still spinning, with her hair secured under her Liberty paisley scarf, newly bought sunglasses concealing her eyes, her cheeks flushed red as ripe strawberries. There is a funny smell that seems to cling to her too, a briny, fishy scent that reminds Owen unnervingly of the Merfolk. And her skin is pimpled all over as though she is cold. She sits in a dream on the staircase, slipping off her sunglasses to reveal dewy eyes, and easing the knot of her scarf with quaking fingers.

  Then one night his father is in the kitchen scraping the vegetables for the tea that has now become a late supper. He has been listening for the door, ears pricked for his wife. Owen watches him carefully shave a potato, so that the peeling hangs unbroken, like a single muddy ringlet springing from a creamy white scalp. Then, while the pans are bubbling on the stove, Owen sees him fold the washing soporifically, smoothing out the wrinkles in the different fabrics. He stabs the potatoes with a fork, and deciding that the flesh is still resistant to the tines, busies himself guiding the carpet sweeper, push and pull, forward and back, as if he is practising a dance step. Owen, trailing him like a wan ghost from room to room, notes his brow slackening with the repetitive motion. His eyes have filmed over too as they trace the monotonous licking of the carpet pile, the ritual cleaning thorough as a mother cat washing her kitten.

  The next day Owen comes home from school to find his father sitting at the kitchen table. He has fat, brown tears streaming down his face. He must have been rubbing it and the tears have mingled with earth, he realizes. His father is crying tears of clay, his nose dripping brown mucus, his quick, flighty breaths finding the grains of soil in his flaring nostrils and catapulting them out.

  ‘Hello, Father,’ Owen says.

  He blinks his bloodshot eyes at his son in astonishment, as if having to remind himself that he did not drown as well that day on the beach. He seizes an onion from the sorry mound of vegetables by the chopping board, and brings it speedily to his eyes.

  ‘Peeling onions,’ he mumbles thickly. ‘You mustn’t mind me. I’m just a novice. I’m afraid your mother’s the expert.’ He takes a sudden desperate breath and then bites down, the way Owen has seen wounded soldiers do in war movies to stop from crying out in agony.

  Owen’s doubting eyes flick to the papery, copper skin of the uncut onion. He wants to ask where his mother is, although he knows. A series of fleeting images chase through his head. His mother sitting in the front seat of the Humber Super Snipe, windows down, the wind in her hair, eyes shining, screeching in exhilaration as the powerful car swings round a hairpin bend in the road. Then the same car parked near the Ridgeway, and his mother and Ken Bascombe walking up a sloping path, hand in hand. Lastly, his mother looking eerily beautiful, lying flat on her back following the drama of the swirling clouds. Her hair, threaded with wild daisies, speedwell and maiden pinks, is spread like an embroidered pillow on the green, green grass. Now she lifts herself up and folds her body over the man’s stretched out by her side. Light as dandelion seeds blown on a breath of wind, she bends to kiss his fair hair, the fine skin around the vivid eyes, the unlined forehead, then lets her lips br
ush his. The kiss deepens and his arms close about her, the two blurring into one another. Owen wants to ask where his mother is but he does not.

  Instead he says to his father, ‘Do you want any help?’

  And his father shakes his head, the wisps of greying hair flying about making him look like a mad professor bending over his marvellous new invention, the onion. With an effort he straightens his shoulders and summons up a gritty smile, a tracery of fine, brown lines cracking his lips.

  ‘I’ll call you when . . . when tea’s ready,’ he assures his son in wavering tones. Then, as the boy creeps from the room, he adds robustly, ‘We’re having . . .’ but he never finishes the sentence. As Owen mounts the stairs he hears him sob, and feels his own heart jerk in answer.

  There is no tea that night. Owen sits upstairs in Sarah’s room on the balding, apple-green coverlet, as the darkness digests the small house. He resists its advance, leaving on the bedside lamp. He will not give way to tiredness and close his eyes. And, as if he is plagued with vertigo crouching on the ledge of a skyscraper, he will not look down either. He does not have to peek to know they are there, reptiles writhing about his bed. Their shadows glide like blue-grey fish among the sweeping ferns of her flocked wallpaper. Sometime in the night, or perhaps it is the morning, he hears the Humber Super Snipe return, hears it revving outside the window. But still he does not move, just follows the Merfolk as they weave and slide along the aquarium walls of Sarah’s bedroom. Later, the click of the front door sounds very loud in the orphaned house, and the drone of the milk float that follows it, almost deafening.

  When he ventures out of Sarah’s room he finds his mother sitting on the stairs, a suitcase propped on her lap. He has to clamber over her and it is a tricky operation in the greyness. On a lower step he swivels round and, feet apart, legs braced, faces her. For a longest time their eyes lock. He wonders if, like him, she is thinking of the day they made the snowman together.

  ‘Where are you going, Mother?’ he asks in a small voice. He hears a noise and glancing over his shoulder sees his father, face crinkled like a used teabag, cheeks still stained with brown streaks, standing, hands in pockets in the lounge doorway. ‘Are you leaving, Mother?’

  But his mother does not answer. And then a moment, a moment when a diver is on the edge of a high board, when he sways forwards, feels for the point of balance, and holds himself there. Owen listens to the sound of his own breathing, light puffs, and his father’s dragon breaths dragging painfully in and out. His mother inhales and expels air silently under her butter-yellow belted summer coat. The horn of the Humber Super Snipe shrills, and Owen and his father swing round to stare accusingly in its direction. After a pause it screeches again. The note seems more urgent now, more impatient.

  When Owen looks back, his mother has risen and is clasping the suitcase. And the way she stares at the front door, is as if everything else in the cramped hall, the telephone table, the telephone, the coat stand, the man and the boy, are without any substance at all. One last time the car horn blares, and this, a long sustained beep that makes all their ears ring as if they have been roundly boxed. Owen steps aside so that she can pass by un impeded. She treads down the stairs, crosses to the front door and rests her hand on the handle. He is still riveted to the spot where she sat and so he does not see her glance back, not at his father but at him. Slowly she turns and starts to heft the case back up the flight of stairs. Outside, the engine that has been idling, leaps into life with a bellicose roar. Then it is the purr of a contented cat. And finally it is no more than a mouse scampering away, the horn a distant squeak.

  He blinks and a merman has slithered out of his nightmares. He is sitting on the same step that his mother sat on minutes earlier, his scaly tail flapping against the striped runner, briny puddles soaking into it. He shakes his head, and his brass-wire hair floats up like the mane of a jellyfish, to sting the white ceiling. The salty, dead-fish stink of him fills the air, making Owen want to gag. He turns and runs into the lounge, slamming the door behind him and very nearly tumbling over his father. Bill is on all fours harvesting the vegetables that are scattered all over the carpet, orange-coned carrots, copper-balled onions, sausage strings of Lincoln-green courgettes, cucumbers lying like sea slugs on the woollen pile, and dozens of cherry tomatoes. He is still dressed in yesterday’s mud-stained gardening clothes, and Owen is still wearing his school uniform. He moves with purpose over the vegetable patch rug, uprooting the vegetables one after another, and placing them with care on the seat of the settee.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he mumbles, taking in his son with a swift upward glance. ‘Just clear up this mess. Wouldn’t want your mother finding it like this when she gets up, now would we?’ He chortles with impish pluck. He raises his bushy eyebrows at Owen, hinting at the dire consequences that might be in store for them both if he does not complete his mission. ‘I see you’re all ready for school. Good chap. Just the ticket. Won’t be a moment and then I’ll go and start up the car.’

  Owen nods and presses his spine with all his might into the lounge door, arms spread, palms flat, knowing what lurks behind it. He thinks of the Humber Super Snipe eating up the roads, heading for the coast and the waiting ship. And then he thinks of their Hillman Husky in its washed-out shade of grey, an old, mud-caked elephant. He recalls the grains of earth freed from the upholstery creases by his weight, the gritty sensation of them sticking to his bare thighs, the stacks of plant pots that fight for space at his feet. He folds his arms, and feels his diaphragm jig to the uneven metre of his phantom tears. And then the Water Child is there, drowning his demons in a flood of light.

  Owen receives an ‘A’ for his essay on childhood memories. The Abingdon family he writes about is just like the Woodentops. The father works in an office, the mother is happy all the live-long day in the kitchen, and the son plays in the garden in the reliable sunshine. His English teacher, Miss Laye, asks him to read his essay aloud to the class. She tells the other students how accomplished it is, how vivid and descriptive. ‘Owen has set a very high standard with this excellent piece,’ she says, giving her student an approving smile. He wonders what mark he would have got if he told the truth. What would she have said to the waiting class then?

  Chapter 5

  Sean Madigan is standing on Richmond Bridge staring down at the Thames. It is a glorious evening in early summer. Tyre tracks of pale cloud etch a ghostly path across the hyacinth-blue sky. The only hint of approaching night is the denser, more richly pigmented line of the distant horizon. The river is still busy, a thoroughfare of pleasure boats and smaller rowing boats. From where he stands he can see people strolling along the towpath or enjoying a drink outdoors in one of the riverside pubs, a mother pushing a double buggy, a man walking a dog, a family of ducks bobbing on the merry-go-round of the water.

  In just under an hour he will be meeting Catherine. It is their third date and he is going to take her out to dinner at a pretty Italian restaurant on Richmond Hill. He has picked it mainly because of the views, the panoramic views over the river, though he has reconnoitred and glanced briefly at the menu. He knows she will like it. She isn’t hard to please, not one of those women who are forever summing you up, what you wear, if you’re mean or generous with your pennies, whether or not you take them somewhere besides the pub. Catherine appears content to be carried along with the current. As far as he can tell, and he admits that it is still early days, her nature is easy-going, self-contained, appreciative. She seems to enjoy listening to him talk, to his craic, to his jokes. And when he outlines his plans for setting up a business selling shampoo, her eyes follow his with interest. He recognizes that she is impressed. She sees he is a man with aspirations, that before long he will be making his mark. She has foresight, this English woman; she approves of his goals. She has the perception to look beyond an Irish navvy moving from one construction site to the next, to glimpse the man he will become. He is saving, puts by money each week, has worked out to the l
ast detail what he will need to get his business up and running. He has sketched out his blueprint and she has encouraged him in his endeavours.

  He met her at L’Auberge where she was waitressing. He liked the look of her straight away. Shoulder-length red hair tied back neatly with a velvet ribbon, and constrained green eyes that fluttered away from you and had to be coaxed back constantly. There was an immediate rapport between them. He didn’t imagine it, because she smiled and accepted the note he passed her with his ’phone number scrawled on it. And then she rang him no more than a week later. On their first night out he took her to the pictures to see The Poseidon Adventure. He put his arm around her protectively in the darkness. But that was all. For some reason he didn’t want to take advantage of this young woman, who dressed so demurely and who gave him licence to be whatever he wanted to be.

  For their second date he suggested ice-skating and was surprised to see a flash of real anxiety light her otherwise placid eyes. So instead he took her shopping to Kensington Market, and out for lunch at a Beefeater. Catherine seemed delighted with that outing too, letting him choose an embroidered Indian smock for her, and a necklace of amber beads that stood out against her pale skin.

  Her voice is very English, very posh. He hasn’t met her family yet but he expects that they are quite highbrow. If he is correct in his assumption, it means that he is already moving in the right circles. Who can say where their relationship may lead? He has only kissed her once so far, on the lips but chastely, her mouth firm and unyielding under his. He doesn’t mind. In fact he sort of approves in a masochistic way. She is a good girl, a virgin, he is sure of it. Ironically, she is just the sort his mother might select for him, except of course that she is English. He can wait. It will be all the more special when it comes. He will teach her the joy of lovemaking. But he will take it very gently, very slowly. After all, she is beginning to matter to him, so it is vital that he do things properly. When you stumble on a woman of Catherine’s class, you don’t want to go scaring her off.