The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  That summer learning to swim became Sean’s chief occupation. At night by candlelight he pored over the by now tatty book, committed its drawings to memory, practised the positions on dry land before ever entering the river. And something he hadn’t planned on was occurring too: the Shannon was schooling him. He had not expected this but she was, there was no doubt about it. It had only been his second lesson, the one in which he took the plunge and had dunked his head under the water, when she showed him how air could assist him in her realm. Before putting his head under the surface he had automatically taken a deep breath. To his astonishment, with his lungs full to bursting he found that sinking was nigh on an impossibility. The lungs were like inflated balloons, in fact rather like the floats that buoyed up the flying boats, enabling them to skim on the fluid runway.

  Armed with this information, he rapidly grew more intrepid, swimming in water waist deep, because that was what he was doing, he now admitted to himself, flushing with pride at his own achievement. He was swimming. Sean Madigan had taught himself to swim. He had lost his fear, the fear inculcated by his family, by his friends, by the superstitious farming community. He had mastered two swimming strokes by now, the crawl and the breast stroke. He was getting faster too, venturing a few yards further out into the river each Sunday. By the start of August he had begun jumping and diving off the rocky promontory that jutted out into much deeper waters. The sense of elation he experienced as his body bulleted through the crystal depths was second to none. The sensual rewards of heaving the water aside were infinite. He kept his eyes wide open, had done so from that initial bathing. There was not sufficient salt to hurt, and he was enraptured by the bleary glimmer of his vision in this new environment. Most wondrous of all was looking up from beneath the water into sky above. It underwent a metamorphosis too. The light was a glitter, a chandelier of trembling planes, so that it took on the appearance of another river, only a river of radiance, a river that merged with his beloved Shannon, that fused with it, that penetrated it, in the way he knew that man penetrated the inner softness of a woman.

  And she didn’t lie to him either. When he crept up to her, peered into her mirrored surface, the reflection that she sent back to him was true. She understood that he was a breed apart, a rogue seed that had planted itself in his mother’s belly, defying the strictures of her world from the second of conception. Confirmation of this, although none was needed, came in the rare guarded looks his mother gave him. How seldom did those sharp dark eyes meet the yearning greenish-blue of his own. But when they did, he knew she was searching for something of herself, for her genetic imprint in her oldest son. She had teased apart the strands of him, hoping to find that instantly recognizable line that ran back to the years of famine and strife, the line plainly visible in the faded sepia photographs that stared out at her from the frames hung on the whitewashed walls.

  But time and again as she had watched him grow, he sensed the ache of her disappointment. He was a foreigner even to his own mother, a cuckoo in her nest. And because she did not understand him, she was afraid of him. But the Shannon locked his image in the deep green of her. She adopted him as if he were her very own water child.

  It was the final week of August when someone saw him. It was Brandon Connolly, that nosy man from the creamery down the road, who spotted him plunging into the water from his diving-board rocks. Right away he set off to inform his mother of her aberrant son’s mischief. She told his father, and Sean was whipped, not just once but several times. The brass-studded leather belt his father used raised huge welts on his back, his buttocks, and his thighs, welts that wept pus and took months to heal. He felt as if the bites of them were ingrained on his soul.

  His mother told him he was disobedient, that given half a chance the water would kill him the way it had the little girl from Labasheeda, poor Iona O’Neill. His father told him that if he ever so much as paddled in the River Shannon again he would save it the trouble, and wring his son’s neck himself. He demanded he say sorry for doing such an irresponsible thing, sorry to his father who needed him on the farm, sorry to his mother who, God help her, valued his useless hide, sorry to his younger brother who had seen him set such a bad example. Emmet smirked and asked to finger his wounds when they were fresh from his beltings. Sean saw that he liked the feel of the warm, sticky ooze between his podgy fingertips, liked the salty smell of his brother’s pain.

  But Sean did not apologize because he was not sorry. He was defiant. He loved the water, loved the education it had given him. The Shannon’s catechism was that nothing was impossible. She instructed her disciple that if he had a will to do something, then a way could be found. He liked to sit in the twilight at the very top of the hill, from where he could look down at the view, at the farm he so hated, and at the green braid of the river he so loved. He knew she was waiting for him, that one day she would welcome him back into her heavy arms, and then, then it would be as if he had never left her embrace.

  At fourteen his state education was over. There was no money for the church school. And besides, it was time to be a man, to take up his role working the farm beside his father. But Sean preferred his books, the books that promised him there was another life he could lead. He did not shoulder his share of the chores. He idled away the hours reading. What’s more, he was too big to beat now, and though his father berated him and his mother wailed and prayed, he ignored them both, preferring to listen to the seductive voice of the river instead. Finally in despair they packed him off on an aeroplane to live with his Aunt Regan in a house in Twickenham, England, where she still worked as a teacher. There were rivers enough there, he found. He went to London and watched the Thames flow grey and sluggish under Waterloo Bridge. But his heart belonged to the Shannon and the pull of her was ever near.

  He still has the threadbare book, keeps it under his pillow. And at night just before he drifts off to sleep, he hears the whisper of her telling him that anything is possible, telling him she is waiting, just like him, for the moment when they will be reunited.

  Chapter 6

  1975

  Catherine is wearing one of those medical shifts that tie at the back. She has done her best to draw the heavy white cotton flaps together, to leave no gaps. But she does not think that she has succeeded. She feels that there is a ruler of bare flesh sliding from the nape of her neck, down her back, to the cleft between her pale buttocks and on to her clenched thighs. Under the shift she is naked. There is in fact only this single layer of fabric shielding her from the world. Oddly, nothing makes her feel more vulnerable than her bare feet. There are goose-bumps on her skin, and she is so cold that intermittently she twitches involuntarily.

  She surveys the small room. Carpet tiles in dirty brown. A divan bed with a dark-blue cover. ‘It crackles when you sit on it,’ she mutters to herself. She established this when she hunched on a corner of it, chewing a painful hangnail. She pushed back the bedcover and saw the thick plastic sheet, then hastily drew it back again, as if she was nosing around in someone’s private bedroom, as if at any moment they might come in and catch her snooping. There is a wardrobe too, painted in maroon gloss, where she hung her clothes. A tartan skirt, a jumper, woollen tights, boots. She visualizes the dark interior of the wardrobe and her clothes hanging up waiting for her to return, for her to inhabit and animate them again. She visualizes the other white shifts waiting for the other women to file through. There is a chunky wooden chair with a red plastic seat. Her white handbag squats in the centre of it, like a PVC cat. The room is lit from above, a hanging bulb in a smoky-glass shade. There are venetian blinds at the window. They were closed when she came in. She tried to open them but they seemed to have jammed. Still, she supposes it doesn’t really matter. It is a cold grey November afternoon, a day in which the low winter sun barely seems to have the strength to crest the horizon, before starting its descent into the frosty darkness of another night.

  Soon she will come for her, the nurse. Although she has said t
here will be a delay, that the earlier patient was late. ‘Some of these young girls just don’t think.’ She snorted cynically when she said this, her eyes flicking over Catherine, appraising her condition, judging how far gone she was. ‘Doctor’s time is money.’ She gave a disapproving sniff and her large nostrils flared, reminding Catherine of a pig’s. ‘Anyway, it’s had a knock-on effect, so I’m afraid that he’s running a bit behind. Nothing to worry about, though. He’ll get to you before you know it. In the meantime, enjoy the rest. That’s what I say.’

  Catherine misheard, thinking she said ‘get at you’, and she tightened inside, as if bracing herself for his assault. She was understandably apprehensive. But she need not be. All she was saying was that there was a queue. Catherine was in line but must wait her turn. Nevertheless, she had taken an instant dislike to this woman, Miss Janney, two days ago when they first met, with her cropped greasy black hair, her shrivelled-apple skin, her cunning, small, grey eyes, and her foreshortened arms. She looked butch, muscled. Catherine suspects that Miss Janney isn’t a nurse at all, despite the green overall she is wearing. It could be a cleaning uniform for all she knows. Didn’t she keep telling Catherine, when she arrived, how clean the doctor was, how hygienic. She wonders if she means that he doesn’t pick his nose, or that he washes his hands thoroughly after going to the toilet. But then the nurse added with a meaningful lift of her brows, that he kept his instruments sterile, not like some she could mention. No risk of infection here. And again, perhaps it was because it all felt a bit surreal, an image of the doctor polishing a trumpet had interrupted her chain of thought.

  Miss Janney probably isn’t qualified in anything except taking your money. Granted, she had been very good at that, though. Exceptional, actually. ‘Only cash is acceptable, the full amount, mind, up front. Small denominations but no coins. Fivers are best. If you come without it the operation will be cancelled. You’ve been warned,’ she told her when she rang, her earlier tones of consolation and reassurance falling away to be replaced by a hard, unyielding wall of terms.

  Catherine’s thighs are rigid now, so that she imagines the doctor having to jimmy them open with a crowbar. There is a funny smell in the air, a smell something like throat lozenges mingled with bad breath. It makes her want to gag. She gulps in air and controls her exhalation in one steady stream. And as she does so she attempts to gather up the wayward ends of her thoughts, and set about plaiting them together, making good.

  She is here for an abortion. These days it is a common enough procedure, nothing to make a fuss about. She is a modern woman, and this is what modern women do when they discover they are pregnant and they do not want a baby. The nurse said that most women had one, some time or another. ‘It doesn’t always happen when it’s convenient, does it? You’ve got to get things right. You owe it to yourself, don’t you?’

  You’ve got to get things right. That phrase leapt out at Catherine. Because she hasn’t got things right, not ever. Only wrong, dreadfully wrong. And it seems to her that every decision she takes is like another step out on the fragile ice, another wrong turn in a maze. She has lost her bearings. The farther she goes the less likely it is that she will make it back.

  ‘I won’t lie to you. It isn’t pleasant. But so long as you catch it early enough, it’s no worse than having a tooth extracted.’ Catherine hasn’t had a tooth out yet, so this comparison, even if it is apt, is somewhat wasted on her. When Miss Janney said this, Catherine wanted to ask if she was talking from personal experience, if she’d had an abortion herself. But the prickly manner dissuaded her.

  The turn in which she had walked up to the altar and said ‘I do’ to Sean Madigan, had been a monumental disaster. She hadn’t loved him then, doesn’t love him now, for God’s sake. Is she an imbecile? Why does she think you get married? This she can answer readily enough, though. To escape, to flee the mother who yanks on the strings of your life, until you feel as if you don’t have any control over it at all. Secretarial college in Twickenham? What had she been doing there? She doesn’t want to be a typist. She doesn’t want to type up the notes from someone else’s life, from a man’s life. She wants her own, her own life, her own notes, thank you very much.

  Her thoughts wing back to their first meeting, hers and Sean’s, the way people talked sentimentally about this fateful collision. Well, if it was fate, kismet, call it what you will, then it was a contrary branch of it. Not only are they star crossed, their families are a sea apart, literally – the Irish Sea. What’s more, the pair of them are dismally lacking when it comes to explosive chemistry betwixt the sheets. There is, she broods meditatively, something to be said for sex before marriage. She should have tried it. The litmus test to check if you are compatible, and so avoid years of misery if you aren’t.

  She was waitressing at L’Auberge in Richmond to earn some spending money of her own. He came in for a meal with friends. He was very polite and his eyes – were they blue or were they green? Even now she couldn’t make up her mind. But they were kind. His eyes were kind. Besides, she liked his soft Irish accent, his come-to-bed tones, even if when you got there it was a dreadful anticlimax. It was easy on the ear, his voice. It calmed her, made her feel safe.

  She sits on the edge of the bed now and feels the plastic buckle noisily under her bottom. She expects that they have plastic covers because of the blood. Otherwise the mattress would be stained. And a stained mattress is sordid, a chilling taster of what’s to come. It could put ladies off, ladies less decided than she was. This way they can pop the cover into a washing machine, give the plastic protector a wipe-over with a bit of disinfectant, and it will be as good as new. It’s sensible really.

  Sean doesn’t know, not about the baby, not about the abortion. But she thinks he has guessed the other part, the heartless part. Because without it things don’t work. They don’t work with it, either, sometimes. But at least you stand a reasonable chance. Her mother and her father are ignorant too. If they knew where she was this minute . . . There had been a weak moment when she thought she might tell her brother, Stephen. But she changed her mind. She realized they would all try to stop her going through with it, not for her sake, but for themselves.

  Her mother would dote on a grandchild in a way she couldn’t do with her own daughter. She would indoctrinate it, until one day Catherine’s child would see her through her mother’s eyes. And then it, too, would despise her. For Sean, it would be a better cure-all than brandy, for a short while anyway. A baby to fix things, to tether them together, to make them a family, to make him a fairytale father. She had a hunch that her brother would convince himself that she was only frightened, and would intervene. And then he would go away and leave her to it, feeling like a great guy, a brother who looked out for his kid sister. Selfish motives, all of them, really.

  If she lets the baby come it will bind her fast to this nightmare existence, to Sean, the dreamer, the drinker, the womanizer, the man with big ideas that evaporate with the coming of dawn and the arrival of the hangover. Was it only two months ago that they married? It seems like a lifetime. She closes her eyes and sees herself on the big day. And she very nearly gasps because she looks so young, like a little girl who has been let loose with a dressing-up box, a girl trying on her mother’s outgrown ballgown. She does not look like a woman in a wedding dress, radiant on her wedding day. She had dropped a dress size in a matter of weeks. She was lost in flounces and frills of white satin, lost in the snowy maze of a winter’s day where every turn brought her closer to the perilous ice. The tightly gathered crinoline skirt, fitted bodice, puffed sleeves, designed to emphasize such feminine attributes as a neat waist, shapely hips and an alluring bust, sagged on her drooping frame. Even her red hair, gathered optimistically into tortuous loops and curls, was rebelling. Wisps had defied the industrial hairspray, applied so copiously by her mother that Catherine, choking, thought she might pass out. They gathered in single-strand corkscrews at her hairline and shadowed her eyes, giving her the va
gue appearance of a pampered poodle before a dog show. She was slumped on the uncomfortable leather-effect settee. Her mother’s earlier admonition that she must remain standing so as to avoid creasing, at least until her father arrived to collect her, being patently ignored.

  ‘Otherwise you’ll look all crumpled, darling. You wouldn’t want that.’ Catherine, eyes down, made no response to this. She battled back the tears that threatened to finish off the job started by her hair, and devastate her makeup as well. Shortly after this her mother departed for the church. Her father had rung to say he was leaving her brother’s garage. This very minute he was sputtering his way towards the Kingston house in the polished, beribboned Austin Seven, with her brother, Stephen, the chipper chauffeur for the day, at the driving wheel. And despite the cloud she was engulfed in seeming impenetrable, it did have a lining that was considerably better than the hackneyed silver one. White gold, Catherine decided, her green eyes lifting to lock with Rosalyn’s.

  Yes, the American Hoyles were over for the wedding. Better still, Rosalyn was her unofficial bridesmaid – unofficial because she would not suffer her to wear a hideous garment on a par with her own. She was bridesmaid in title only. In fact, Rosalyn in a laurel-green silk trouser suit, with a scarf dappled in beiges and purples looped at her graceful neck, was a feast for the famished. Her shoulder-length black hair fell in thick layered waves. She wore a chipped fringe that gave a quirky, mischievous slant to her pretty face. In addition, she had another accoutrement that filled Catherine with envy. In her lap was a camera, a Rolleiflex. Rosalyn was a freelance photographer, and although it was early in a career that promised to be successful, her work had already been remarked upon. It was garnering attention in the right quarters because, exactly like Rosalyn herself, it was unique and original. Today though, she would probably face the greatest challenge ever to her burgeoning skills – how to make a desolate bride look ecstatic. She narrowed her eyes and peered into the view-finder, sighting her cousin, and adjusted the focus. Catherine flinched. Snap. A crystallized second. Photograph one. Frightened young bride swamped in ill-fitting wedding dress. She lowered the camera.