Sometimes you were cryptic, other times angry; you repeated old insults, you dredged up long-submerged disagreements, railed against old slurs. The death wish! Once, in the heat of the moment, tired of your morbid obsessions, I’d accused you of having a death wish, and oh, how you harped on about that!
Sometimes you were maudlin, talking about our mother, our childhood, happiness had and lost. Other times you were up, happy, hyper. Come to the Mill House! you entreated me. Please come! You’ll love it. Please, Julia, it’s time we put all that stuff behind us. Don’t be stubborn. It’s time. And then I’d be furious—It’s time! Why should you get to choose when to call time on the trouble between us?
All I wanted was to be left alone, to forget Beckford, to forget you. I built a life for myself—smaller than yours, of course, how could it not be? But mine. Good friends, relationships, a tiny flat in a lovely suburb of north London. A job in social work that gave me purpose, a job that consumed me and fulfilled me, despite its low pay and long hours.
I wanted to be left alone, but you wouldn’t have it. Sometimes twice a year and sometimes twice a month, you called: disrupting, destabilizing, unsettling me. Just like you’d always done—it was a grown-up version of all the games you used to play. And all the time I waited, I waited for the one call I might actually respond to, the one where you would explain how it was that you behaved the way you did when we were young, how you could have hurt me, stood by while I was being hurt. Part of me wanted to have a conversation with you, but not before you told me that you were sorry, not before you begged for my forgiveness. But your apology never came, and I’m still waiting.
I pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table. There were postcards, blank ones—pictures of places you’d been, perhaps—condoms, lubricant, an old-fashioned silver cigarette lighter with the initials LS engraved on the side. LS. A lover? I looked around the room again and it struck me that there were no pictures of men in this house. Not up here, not downstairs. Even the paintings are almost all of women. And when you left your messages you talked of your work and the house and Lena, but you never mentioned a man. Men never seemed that important to you.
There was one, though, wasn’t there? A long time ago, there was a boy who was important to you. When you were a teenager, you used to sneak out of the house at night: you’d climb out of the laundry window, drop down on to the riverbank and creep around the house, up to your ankles in mud. You’d scramble up the bank and onto the lane, and he’d be waiting for you. Robbie.
Thinking of Robbie, of you and Robbie, was like going over the humpback bridge at speed: dizzying. Robbie was tall, broad and blond, his lip curled into a perpetual sneer. He had a way of looking at a girl that turned her inside out. Robbie Cannon. The alpha, the top dog, always smelling of Lynx and sex, brutish and mean. You loved him, you said, although it never looked much like love to me. You and he were either all over each other or throwing insults at each other, never anything in between. There was never any peace. I don’t remember a lot of laughter. But I did have the clearest memory of you both lying on the bank at the pool, limbs entangled, feet in the water, him rolling over you, pushing your shoulders down into the sand.
Something about that image jarred, made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a while. Shame. The dirty, secret shame of the voyeur, tinged with something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on and didn’t want to. I tried to turn away from it, but I remembered: that wasn’t the only time I’d watched him with you.
I felt suddenly uncomfortable, so I got up from your bed and paced around the room, looking at the photos. Pictures everywhere. Of course. Framed pictures of you on the chest of drawers, tanned and smiling, in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, on skiing holidays and on beaches, with your daughter in your arms. On the walls, framed prints of magazine covers you shot, a story on the front page of the New York Times, the awards you received. Here it is: all the evidence of your success, the proof that you outdid me in everything. Work, beauty, children, life. And now you’ve outdone me again. Even in this, you win.
One picture stopped me in my tracks. It was a photo of you and Lena—not a baby any longer, a little girl, maybe five or six, or maybe older, I can never tell children’s ages. She’s smiling, showing tiny white teeth, and there’s something strange about it, something that made my hair stand up on end; something about her eyes, the set of her face, gives her the look of a predator.
I could feel a pulse in my neck, an old fear rising. I lay back down on the bed and tried not to listen to the water, but even with the windows shut, at the top of the house, the sound was inescapable. I could feel it pushing against the walls, seeping into the cracks of the brickwork, rising. I could taste it, muddy and dirty in my mouth, and my skin felt damp.
Somewhere in the house, I could hear someone laughing, and it sounded just like you.
August 1993
JULES
Mum bought me a new swimming costume, an old-fashioned one in blue-and-white gingham with “support.” It was supposed to have a kind of 1950s look to it, the sort of thing Marilyn might have worn. Fat and pale, I was no Norma Jean, but I put it on anyway because she’d gone to a lot of trouble to find it. It wasn’t easy finding swimwear for someone like me.
I put on a pair of blue shorts and an extra-large white T-shirt over the top. When Nel came down for lunch in her denim cutoffs and a halter-neck bikini, she took one look at me and said, “Are you coming to the river this afternoon?” in a tone that made it obvious that she didn’t want me to, and then she caught Mum’s eye and said, “I’m not looking after her, OK? I’m going there to meet my friends.”
Mum said, “Be nice, Nel.”
Mum was in remission then, so frail a stiff breeze might knock her over, her olive skin yellowed, like old paper, and Nel and I were under strict instructions from our father to Get Along.
Part of Getting Along meant Joining In, and so yes, I was going to the river. Everyone went to the river. It was all there was to do, really. Beckford wasn’t like the beach; there was no funfair, no games arcade, not so much as a mini-golf course. There was the water: that was it.
A few weeks into the summer, once routines were established, once everyone had figured out where they belonged and who they belonged with, once outsiders and locals had mingled, friendships and enmities established, people started hanging out in groups along the riverbank. The younger kids tended to swim south of the Mill House, where the water moved slowly and there were fish to catch. The bad kids hung out at the Wards’ cottage, where they took drugs and had sex, played with Ouija boards and tried to contact angry spirits. (Nel told me that if you looked hard enough, you could still find traces of Robert Ward’s blood on the walls.) But the biggest crowd gathered at the Drowning Pool. The boys jumped off the rocks and the girls sunbathed, music played and barbecues were lit. Someone always brought beer.
I would have preferred to stay at home, indoors, out of the sun. I’d have preferred to lie on my bed and read, or play cards with Mum, but I didn’t want her to worry about me, she had more important things to worry about. I wanted to show her I could be sociable, I could make friends. I could Join In.
I knew Nel wouldn’t want me to go. As far as she was concerned, the more time I spent inside, the better, and the less likely it would be that her friends would see me—the blob, the embarrassment: Julia, fat, ugly and uncool. She squirmed in my company, always walking a few paces ahead or lagging ten behind; her discomfort around me was obvious enough to attract attention. Once, when the two of us left the village shop together, I heard one of the local boys talking. “She must be adopted. There’s no way that fat bitch is Nel Abbott’s real sister.” They laughed, and I looked to her for comfort, but all I saw was shame.
That day I walked to the river alone. I carried a bag containing a towel and a book, a can of Diet Coke and two candy bars, in case I got hungry between lunch and dinner. My stomach ached a
nd my back hurt. I wanted to turn back, to return to the privacy of my small, cool, dark room, where I could be alone. Unseen.
Nel’s friends arrived soon after I did; they colonized the beach, the little crescent of sandy bank on the near side of the pool. It was the nicest place to sit, sloping down so that you could lie with your toes in the water. There were three girls—two locals and a girl called Jenny who came from Edinburgh and had gorgeous ivory skin and dark hair in a blunt-cut bob. Although she was Scottish, she spoke the Queen’s English, and the boys were desperately trying to get off with her because rumour had it she was still a virgin.
All the boys except Robbie, of course, who only had eyes for Nel. They’d met two years before, when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and they were a regular summer thing now, even though they were allowed to see other people the rest of the year because it wasn’t realistic to expect him to be faithful when she wasn’t around. Robbie was six foot one, he was handsome and popular, he played a lot of rugby, his family had money.
When Nel had been with Robbie, she sometimes came back with bruises on her wrists or the top of her arms. When I asked her how that happened, she laughed and said, “How do you think?” Robbie gave me a weird feeling in my stomach and I couldn’t help but stare at him whenever he was around. I tried not to, but I kept looking at him. He’d noticed it now and he’d started to stare back. He and Nel made jokes about it, and sometimes he’d look at me and lick his lips and laugh.
The boys were there too, but they were over on the other side, swimming, climbing up the bank, shoving one another off the rocks, laughing and swearing and calling one another gay. That’s the way it always seemed to be: the girls would sit and wait and the boys would mess around until they got bored and then they’d come over and do things to the girls, which the girls sometimes resisted and sometimes didn’t. All the girls except Nel, who wasn’t afraid of diving into the water and getting her hair wet, who relished the rough-and-tumble of their games, who managed to walk the tightrope between being one of the boys and serving as the ultimate object of their desire.
I didn’t sit with Nel’s friends, of course. I laid out my towel under the trees and sat down alone. There was another group of younger girls, around my age, sitting a little way off, and one of them was a girl I recognized from summers past. She smiled at me and I smiled back. I gave her a little wave, but she looked away.
It was hot. I longed then to go into the water. I could imagine exactly what it would feel like on my skin, smooth and clean, I could imagine the squelch of warm mud between my toes, I could see the warm orange light on my eyelids as I lay back to float. I took my T-shirt off, but that didn’t make me any cooler. I noticed that Jenny was watching me and she wrinkled her nose and then looked down at the ground because she knew that I’d clocked the disgust on her face.
I turned away from them all, lay on my right-hand side and opened my book. I was reading The Secret History. I longed for a group of friends like that, tightly knit and closed off and brilliant. I wanted someone to follow, someone who would protect me, someone remarkable for her brain, not her long legs. Though I knew that if there were people like that round here or at my school in London, they wouldn’t want to be friends with me. I wasn’t stupid, but I didn’t shine.
Nel shone.
She came down to the river sometime in midafternoon. I heard her calling out to her friends, and the boys calling back to her from the top of the cliff where they were sitting, legs dangling over the edge, smoking cigarettes. I looked over my shoulder, watching as she stripped off and waded slowly into the water, splashing it up against her body, enjoying the attention.
The boys were coming down off the cliff top now, through the wood. I rolled onto my stomach, keeping my head down, eyes fixed firmly on the page, the words a blur. I wished I hadn’t come, wished I could slink away unnoticed, but there was nothing I could do unnoticed, literally nothing. My shapeless white bulk didn’t slink anywhere.
The boys had a football, and they started to have a kickabout. I could hear them calling for passes, the ball slapping against the surface of the water, shrieks of laughter from the girls as they got splashed. Then I felt it, a stinging smack against my thigh as the ball hit me. They were all laughing. Robbie held his hand up and ran towards me to get the ball.
“Sorry, sorry,” he was saying, a wide grin on his face. “Sorry, Julia, didn’t mean to hit you.” He picked up the ball and I saw him looking at me, at the muddy red mark on my flesh, pale and marbled like cold animal fat. Someone said something about a big target, yeah, you couldn’t hit a barn door but you can’t miss that arse.
I went back to my book. The ball hit a tree just a few feet away from me, and someone called out, “Sorry.” I ignored them. It happened again, and then again. I rolled over; they were aiming at me. Target practice. The girls were doubled up, helpless with laughter, Nel’s shrieks of mirth loudest of all.
I sat up, tried to brazen it out. “Yeah, OK. Very funny. You can stop now. Come on! Stop it,” I called out, but another one was taking aim. The ball came towards me. I lifted my arm to protect my face and the ball slapped against my flesh, a hard, stinging blow. Tears pricking the backs of my eyes, I scrabbled to my feet. The other girls, the younger ones, were watching, too. One of them had her hand over her mouth.
“Stop it!” she shouted out. “You’ve hurt her. She’s bleeding.”
I looked down. There was blood on my leg, trickling down the inside of my thigh towards my knee. It wasn’t that, I knew right away, they hadn’t hurt me. The stomach cramps, the backache—and I’d been feeling more miserable than usual all week. I was bleeding properly, heavily, not just spotting—my shorts were soaked through. And they were looking at me, all of them, staring at me. The girls weren’t laughing any longer, they glanced at each other openmouthed, halfway between horror and amusement. I caught Nel’s eye and she looked away; I could almost feel her cringing. She was mortified. She was ashamed of me. I pulled my T-shirt on as quickly as I could, wrapped my towel around my waist and hobbled awkwardly away, back along the path. I could hear the boys starting to laugh again as I left.
• • •
THAT NIGHT I went into the water. It was later—much, much later—and I’d been drinking, my first ever experience of alcohol. Other things had happened, too. Robbie came to find me, he sought me out, he apologized for the way he and his friends had behaved. He told me how sorry he was, he put his arm around my shoulders, he told me I needn’t feel ashamed.
But I went to the Drowning Pool anyway, and Nel dragged me out. She pulled me to the bank and hauled me to my feet. She slapped my face hard. “You bitch, you stupid fat bitch, what have you done? What are you trying to do?”
2015
Wednesday, 12 August
PATRICK TOWNSEND
The Wards’ cottage hadn’t belonged to the Wards in almost a hundred years, and it didn’t belong to Patrick either—it didn’t really seem to belong to anyone anymore. Patrick supposed that it probably belonged to the local council, though no one had ever laid claim to it. But in any case, Patrick had a key, so that made him feel proprietorial. He paid the small electric and water bills, and he’d fitted the lock himself some years back after the old door had been smashed down by yobs. Now only he and his son, Sean, had keys, and Patrick saw to it that the place was kept clean and tidy.
Only sometimes the door was left unlocked, and if he was perfectly honest, Patrick could no longer be certain he had locked it. He’d begun to feel, more and more over the past year, moments of confusion that filled him with a dread so cold he refused to face it. Sometimes he lost words or names and it took him a long time to find them again. Old memories resurfaced to breach the peace of his thoughts, and these were fiercely colourful, disturbingly loud. Around the edges of his vision, shadows moved.
Patrick headed upriver every day, it was part of his routine: up early, walk the three miles al
ong the river to the cottage, sometimes he’d fish for an hour or two. He did that less these days. It wasn’t just that he was tired or that his legs ached, it was the will that was lacking. He didn’t derive pleasure from the things he’d once enjoyed. He still liked to check up on things, though, and when his legs were feeling good, he could still manage the walk there and back in a couple of hours. This morning, however, he’d woken with his left calf swollen and painful, the dull throb in his vein persistent as a ticking clock. So he decided to take the car.
He hauled himself out of bed, showered, dressed, and then remembered with a snap of irritation that his car was still at the garage—he’d clean forgotten to pick it up the previous afternoon. Muttering to himself, he hobbled across the courtyard to ask his daughter-in-law if he could borrow hers.
Sean’s wife, Helen, was in the kitchen, mopping the floor. In term time, she’d be gone by now—she was head teacher at the school and made a point of being in her office by seven-thirty every morning. But even in the school holidays, she wasn’t one for a lie-in. It wasn’t in her nature to be idle.
“Up and about early,” Patrick said as he entered the kitchen, and she smiled. With lines crinkling around her eyes and streaks of grey in her short brown hair, Helen looked older than her thirty-six years. Older, Patrick thought, and more tired than she should be.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Oh, sorry, love.”
She shrugged. “What can you do?” She put the mop into the bucket and propped it upright against the wall. “Can I make you some coffee, Dad?” That’s what she called him now. It had felt strange at first, but now he liked it; it warmed him, the affection in her voice as she sounded the word. He said he’d take some coffee in a flask, explaining that he wanted to go upriver. “You won’t be anywhere near the pool, will you? Only I think . . .”
Into the Water Page 6