The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  Chapter 17

  Monday, 9 August

  2 a.m. In Owen’s dream he is standing on the empty beach squinting at the sparkling sea. Beside him on the sand is Sarah’s coffin. It is small and neat and white as alabaster. The pink petals of the rosebuds it is wreathed in are crimpling and browning in the scalding temperatures. He looks down and traces the letters of her name engraved on the brass plaque. ‘S . . . A . . . R . . .’ But the sunlight bounces onto it, dazzling him, so that he does not get any further. When he turns back to the water he sees what looks like a porpoise swimming towards him. It ploughs a creamy furrow as it nears, and he realizes that it is not a fish after all, but a mermaid. She has long wavy black hair, and a tail covered in shiny scales. She swims into the shallows, and he sees her hair moving like the purple tentacles of a jellyfish under the crystal water. Then she fountains up, her tail splitting into legs, into gleaming tin legs, her arms reaching for him.

  ‘I am the lady of the lake,’ she calls. ‘I am your lady of the lake.’ Her eyes are shut tight but now they twitch open, one after the other. First blue, then brown. As her slimy wet body envelops him, she coos into his ear, ‘Please stop crying, please stop. I have to make you stop.’

  And Owen is awake, sitting up in bed, soaked in sweat, his ears pricked. He can hear a voice rasping in the still dark flat. His heart feels as if it is in his mouth, so that it is hard to breathe. He gets up, turns on his bedside light and pulls on his jeans. He tells himself that it is only Naomi sleep-walking again, that all he has to do is guide her, meek as a lamb, back to bed. He has done it before many times. But if this is the case, then why is he so petrified? Why does the primeval terror that has stalked every age of man have him in its clutches? Terror of the unknown, of monsters too ghastly to contemplate, of Merfolk with lips chiselled from ice and bottomless oceans squeezing the air from your lungs, of the blackest of black interminable nights. He steps into the corridor, cocks his head, listens. The drizzling taps wheeze like heavy smokers. He knows this game of hide-and-seek, knows where she hides and where he must seek for her. She is scrunched up in the cramped space between the settee and the wall. Always the same spot, naked, digging at the plaster. He pushes aside the beads carefully, stills the swinging strands with his hands. For a moment he waits. Trapeziums of moonlight fall through the open windows onto the floor, illuminating a settee armrest, the rug, a corner of the coffee table. The fridge in the galley kitchen hums a single note. There is the faint aroma of burnt toast on the air. She is clawing the wall, the sound frantic, like a trapped animal trying to dig its way out.

  ‘Stop the baby crying. Please, stop the baby crying. It makes my head hurt so. Make it be quiet, Miss Elstob. Make it shush. Baby’s hot. Poor baby. Baby can’t sleep, she’s hot. Poor, poor baby. I shan’t scream. I shan’t. I’ll keep the scream in my head, splitting in my head.’ Her voice is light and childlike.

  Two of her nails are bleeding a little, he sees, when he takes her back to bed. And the name ‘Mara’, carved into the wall, is no longer indistinct, for now the plaster is stained with blood. In the morning she tells him that she needs another week before she will be ready to come back to the market. He looks in on her before he sets off for work, and is pleased to see that she is sleeping peacefully. As he steps onto the street the heat seems to crackle up from the pavement.

  London has become a coastal resort, but without the sea. Beachwear is de rigueur. Calamine lotion vies with suntan oil for record sales. Bodies of every shape and size litter the yellowed grass of parched parks, enjoying the latest craze, sunbathing. Sunburn and prickly heat are the most common complaints in the chemists. Ice cream and cold drink vendors in white coats wield more power than men in suits. Barbecues have replaced meat and two veg for the evening meal. Fractious residents pull their mattresses onto patios and balconies, and sleep under the stars like desert kings. The government is advising people to put bricks in their toilet cisterns, to share baths, to use the leftover water on their dying gardens. The traffic snake’s true colours are unrecognizable, dulled down by layers of choking dust. Biblical plagues of ladybirds and aphids have been unleashed. And in the market the most popular T-shirt has the slogan, ‘Save Water, Bath With A Friend’ printed on it.

  On his way into the market, Owen thanks Enrico for arranging their stay in his father’s cottage, and tells him what a lovely week they had there. For the duration of their exchange, Enrico struts like a cockerel, delighted at the compliments, unaware of the dark ramblings harassing Owen’s mind. While he prattles, Owen relives their last night and recalls the part he had to play in the unfortunate turn of events. He makes his excuses, not wanting to be reminded about what has passed between him and Naomi. ‘We’ll talk more later. I can see Sean getting impatient, so I’d best go.’

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ Sean tells Owen, when he is given the news that he is quitting the market. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose you. But I can see you’ve made up your mind.’

  ‘Naomi should be back next week. At least she says that’s what she intends,’ Owen says, trying to muster up some enthusiasm for arranging fans of decorative hair slides on the mirrored counter. ‘I’ll try to hang on till then. I don’t want to leave you short-handed.’

  ‘That’s good of you.’

  Owen is surprised by how well Sean is taking it. He was worried that after their desertion to Tuscany, giving his notice would earn him a prolonged tongue-lashing. But he seems unperturbed, preoccupied, so that Owen ponders if he has really absorbed the information.

  ‘And how is the lovely Naomi, after her Italian retreat?’ Sean inquires, drawing the blade of a penknife down the taped seal of a cardboard box.

  ‘She’s good,’ Owen lies. He is becoming adept at lying. ‘She loved Italy, but I think she’s glad to be back.’

  He nods, snapping shut his penknife. ‘That’s great. I told you she’d get over it. Sunglasses for the kids. What do you think?’ he says desultorily, leaping seamlessly from the topic of abortion to novelty goods. He holds up a miniature pair with Minnie Mouse pirouetting in a spotted frock around the rims.

  ‘Fantastic! The kids’ll love ’em.’

  ‘Exactly what I thought,’ Sean tells him, pleased. For the next couple of hours they are both occupied with the brisk morning trade. But by lunchtime things have quietened down again, the nigh-on-torturous heat putting punters off. They both feel too hot and sticky to eat, but Owen forays above ground to buy iced lollies and cans of Coke.

  ‘Orange or lime?’ he offers on his return.

  ‘Orange,’ Sean grins. ‘I could do with the vitamin C.’ He sits on the stool, Owen leans back on the counter, and like schoolboys they give their sole attention to licking and sucking the sugary ices. Owen becomes aware that he is sucking in time to the beat of disco music. When he is down to the stick, Sean, who made short work of his, begins talking.

  ‘You know, if you could do me a last favour before you take off, I’d be eternally in your debt.’

  ‘Like what?’ Owen rejoins easily.

  ‘Oh, not much, not at all. It’s only that I need to be away till Thursday. I know it’s asking a lot, without Naomi giving you a hand, but d’you think you could cope for a few days alone?’ The orange pencil of a moustache fringes his upper lip.

  Owen sucks his cold teeth before replying. ‘I don’t see why not.’ He shrugs. ‘If it’s only a couple of days I can manage.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Sean’s eyes are over-bright, as if he has not slept and is forcing himself to stay alert.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Oh, nowhere interesting. Not off to Italy on my hols, that’s for sure.’ He picks his Coke up off the counter, and tugs the ring-pull. A hiss and coffee-brown froth bubbles out. He raises it to his lips, and Owen can see the serpentine movement of his throat as he drinks. ‘Thirsty weather, eh?’ he says when he has almost drained the can.

  ‘Mm . . . Is there some place I can contact you if need be?’ Owen pushes.

 
‘I’m on the move, you know. Here and there. But like I said, I’ll be back on Thursday.’ Owen nods. ‘My luck’s changing. I can feel it. The Midas touch.’ He takes a last swallow, then looks far off, far beyond the concrete walls of the market. ‘I don’t plan to stay here much longer myself. It was only ever a stopgap. One day soon I’m going to have that picture-perfect house for Catherine, with a paddock for Bria to keep a pony in. You wait and see.’

  Chapter 18

  Hounslow, 3 a.m. The open windows bring no relief from the stultifying heat. Catherine, in a sleeveless nightdress, shuffles up and down, up and down, like a zombie. Bria fights in her arms, her thin wail filling her ears. The baby is too hot, too hot to rest. The bedside lamp casts overlapping ellipses of light and shadow on the walls. The mesh-patterned wallpaper makes a prison of the room.

  ‘Sh . . . sh . . . shush,’ she soothes, circling her fingers gently, massaging her baby’s back. ‘I know it’s hot. I’m sorry. Shush now, shush.’

  But in response to her mother’s attempts to comfort her, Bria’s bleats grow louder, her head rolling fretfully against her shoulders. Catherine has tried her with the bottle but she pushed the teat out of her mouth, coughing the milk down her chin. After each cry she gives a tiny shocked shudder as she gasps in a breath. Her cheeks are rosy, and her brow, when she lays a hand on it, is burning. Tears have started to spill unbidden down Catherine’s own cheeks. She is collapsing, one supporting pillar after another giving way within her. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she sniffles over Bria’s jerking head. ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.’ Her voice croaks with weariness.

  She took her daughter to the doctor yesterday, and last week – twice. She is such a regular there now that the receptionist makes no effort to book her in with the same doctor. There are four at the practice and she has seen all of them. They must be part of a conspiracy because, after a thorough examination of Bria, they each tell her the same thing, that she has a lovely healthy baby.

  ‘How are you feeling lately, Mrs Madigan?’ Doctor Newell asked her yesterday. He leant forward and peered intently into her tired eyes. He was the oldest of the general practitioners and didn’t make her feel rushed the way the others did. There were photographs in gilded wooden frames arranged on his desk. She had seen them before and had started memorizing details in them. A silver filigree brooch. A rose bush. A floral sunhat. Pearl earrings. A suede jacket. A royal-blue dress. There was a smiling middle-aged woman sitting on a garden chair, a serious young man standing erect in a black graduation gown, clutching a scroll, and the same man a bit older in a family portrait taken in a studio with, presumably, his wife and baby. So, Catherine deduced, Doctor Newell was a grandfather, as well as a father. And they all looked perfect. A perfect family, with perfect children, who grew up and married perfect partners, and had perfect babies. They were the sort of family featured on cereal boxes and in television advertisements.

  ‘Mrs Madigan? I said, how are feeling?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s the baby I’ve come about,’ she said in a monotone. In her arms an angelic Bria slept soundly. At every appointment, as Catherine stepped into the surgery, her daughter’s rigid body relaxed against her, the sea-coloured eyes glazed over, the minute eyelids drooped, and the rosebud mouth stretched in a contented yawn. Seconds later and she was fast asleep, as if she knew here she was safe from her mother’s inept care. She frequently had to be woken up to be examined, making Catherine feel an awful fraud.

  ‘You know, babies are very clever at picking up on their mother’s distress,’ Doctor Newell told her, a kindly twinkle in his dark-brown eyes. He rubbed his hands together and gave her a reassuring fatherly smile. ‘If you’re unhappy, they’re unhappy.’ He waited a moment, inviting her confidence. She focused on the ring he wore on his little finger, a gold setting and an agate, was it? A pearly grey swirl in a blue stone, as if there was a spirit trapped inside, a girl sealed under the ice. She took a speedy mental inventory of the monumental causes of her malaise. A mother who left no room for her, a catastrophic marriage to a man she did not love, and an unplanned baby who meant the only exit was effectively blocked off. ‘Happy mothers make happy babies, Mrs Madigan,’ the doctor reinforced his message. He sang it out jovially like an advertising jingle, and in an instant she was jumping on the big bed with cousin Rosalyn, exchanging slogans from popular adverts. She had been so happy that day, the kind of happiness that is like proved dough, and keeps on swelling till you think you’ll burst with it. Happy mothers make happy babies. The doctor’s professional opinion was a reminder, if she needed any, that here was yet another of her failings. Her inability to put on a brave face was selfish. Her failure to replace her slough of despondency with stoic cheerfulness, for the sake of her child, earned her another black mark.

  She had wanted to breast-feed Bria, despite her mother’s insistence, delivered primly, that a bottle was infinitely more tidy and convenient. ‘You were bottle fed, Catherine,’ she pointed out succinctly when she came to visit her in the hospital. ‘I wasn’t going to have any of that messy carry-on. With the bottle you can be sure baby is getting everything she needs.’ She was standing by the window re-applying her lipstick. She hadn’t stopped fussing with her appearance once. Face powder, hair, jewellery, collar, belt, shoes. Adjust, pat, tuck, smooth, align. Anyone would think she was a model about to step onto the catwalk. Catherine wanted to scream at her to stop, to just stop, to come close and look, look at this beautiful baby she had made, at what a miracle she was, to call her by her name, Bria, instead of the androgynous baby she kept using.

  Her mother’s preference had been Jane or Elizabeth or Ann. Or for a boy, James or David or Timothy. Solid, sensible names, she said. When Catherine had whispered their choice of Bria for a girl and Carrick for a boy, her mother had looked askance. ‘You don’t want baby to be teased at school. Because that’s what’ll happen if you give it a silly name. You mark my words.’

  ‘They’re Irish names, Mother,’ she had rejoined defensively, her lips quavering. ‘Sean wanted an Irish name.’ Her mother had raised one eyebrow and sniffed in disgust, whether at the mention of Sean or their chosen names, she didn’t know.

  In the maternity ward she watched Catherine’s attempts at breast-feeding her granddaughter with an expression akin to horror. ‘Quite honestly, I don’t know why you’re bothering with all that palaver.’ She looked away from her daughter’s exposed breast, a seed-pearl of milk oozing from the flushed, peaked nipple. ‘A formula feed will ensure that baby gets all her vitamins.’ She began taking apples, oranges and grapes out of a carrier bag and arranging them on the plate set on the bedside table, where a few evidentiary chocolate-bar wrappers lay scrunched up. ‘A nourishing diet is essential to give baby a good start in life.’

  ‘But she’ll get everything she needs from me,’ Catherine protested, eyes rabbit-pink from all the crying she had done since the birth. Sean had missed it, of course. He had promised to be there, in the delivery room, a modern father, but he was late. The only thing she could predict accurately in her husband was his unreliability. Later, he brought an oversized cerise bear, cheap and garish, and a box of dark chocolate Brazil nuts. She hated dark chocolate and Brazil nuts. The combination, so soon after the trial of labour and birth, made her want to be sick. He told her she was a great girl, altogether, and he held Bria and said that she was a great girl too. ‘Pretty as a fairy princess,’ he flattered. But she wasn’t a fairy princess, she was a real baby who had to be fed and changed and loved and talked to, a baby who needed a father as well as a mother, a father with a steady income to support her. After that he went to the pub, to wet the baby’s head, he said with a wink. Only the baby was here with her, not in a filthy smoky pub, where strangers bought him double brandies, and slapped him on the back, congratulating him on becoming a daddy.

  She had painful mastitis. Her breasts had become pendulous appendages, throbbing and swollen. The nipple had cracked on her left breast
, and a thread of blood had leaked from it. Various nurses made concerted efforts to get her milk flowing, pinching her sore nipples and ramming them in the eagerly rooting mouth, but to no avail. She was persevering but without success.

  ‘Why must you be so stubborn about this?’ her mother demanded tersely, as Bria alternately sucked and then wailed at the cruel deprivation she was suffering.

  ‘It’s something I want to do,’ Catherine retorted, in the voice of the frequently thwarted child, whose shoes she had not long outgrown.

  ‘You train baby much more easily on the bottle,’ her mother had countered, as if that was the end of the matter, as if her daughter was a puppy who needed to be housebroken. It had not been a question of perseverance in the end, but of survival. Did she want baby to starve? And so she had given in, bought the tins of SMA powdered milk, filled up the sterilizer, submerged the bottle and teats, and hoped that a full belly would mean a contented baby.

  But now, as she paces the floor watching the minute hand approaching 4 a.m., Bria still grizzling and sleepless, exhaustion making her feel faint, she knows it is not nearly that simple. Her daughter’s needs are complex, so complex that she does not believe she will ever be clever enough to interpret them. Tonight, or perhaps it is more accurate to say this morning, it is the heat and the con sequent nappy rash that is distressing her. In desperation she decides to give Bria a bath, a middle-of-the-night bath. She fills the yellow plastic baby bath with lukewarm water, hefts it onto the bathroom floor, undresses Bria and lifts her carefully into it. Her daughter reacts instantly, her face registering wide-eyed amazement. She ceases fretting and looks about her with interest. Afterwards they slumber for two hours straight, side by side in the double bed. At Bria’s first cry Catherine wakes with a start, all the magic fled. She is so tired that her skin doesn’t seem to fit, so tired that her head feels far too heavy to lift from the pillow, so tired that the sunlight streaming in at the window jangles on her eyes.