Night Swimming

by Doreen Finn

  ‘Go on inside and get a drink. I’ll be up in a minute,’ Sarah said, her hand on my arm.

  The back of my neck was damp. So were the palms of my hands. I dragged them down the front of my T-shirt, leaving a grimy trail across my stomach. I thought of the boys in the canal, how their whooping had echoed off the water’s surface. How they had glistened like seals.

  5

  Gemma was painting a portrait of me. It had been Sarah’s idea, but Gemma agreed almost immediately, which meant that I had to sit for half an hour each day in the attic. I didn’t mind, except that I wasn’t allowed to talk. There was to be no movement of any sort from me, unless my mother asked for it.

  The ghosts kept watch as I sat on the chair. Gemma had pushed it into the centre of the room and then made me sit with my hands in my lap, my ankles crossed. It was early, but the heat had already risen, languidly stretching itself across the morning. I’d already completed my watering outside, the plants limp from days of minimum water. The windows in the low attic ceiling were open, but the air didn’t stir. A car engine sputtered outside on the main road. The canal was out of sight, but I knew it was there. Since my trip with Beth the day before, it had burned in my mind. I saw the mercury splashes of water, the bare backs of the boys as they dive-bombed, heard the flat smack of skin on water.

  My mother wore her usual old shirt that had belonged to my grandfather, paint-spattered, frayed at the cuffs, too large for her.

  ‘Would my granddad have liked me?’ The question fell between us.

  Gemma took ages to answer. She always did when she was working. ‘What?’ Her voice was vague, faraway.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Eventually her face cleared. ‘Sorry, Megan.’ She wriggled her fingers, then picked up a blade and started sharpening her pencil. The scraping was the only sound for a few seconds. Blade on wood. ‘What did you say?’

  I waved away her question, accidentally swatting a fly that had come in the open ceiling window. ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  She looked up. ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Music?’

  ‘Carole King.’

  That was the album I loved most that summer. It wasn’t new, but I hadn’t heard it before then. Carole sitting at the window on the cover, her feet bare, a striped cat her companion on the window seat. Gemma crossed the floor to the shelf where she kept the record player. Albums were bundled beside it. She selected Carole King and clicked on the record player.

  Gemma resumed her sketching. She never liked me to look at what she was working on, couldn’t stand being inspected. I was used to it, never bothered asking her to show me anything unfinished. I listened to the first side of the record before moving. The sun inched slowly overhead, shortening the shadows in the attic. Gemma’s pencil scratched against the paper.

  Sarah’s knock was soft, a triple rap on the closed attic door. She poked her head around. ‘Sorry for disturbing. I won’t be long.’

  Gemma laid her pencil down, flexed her fingers. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Sarah stayed where she was, resting her shoulder against the door frame. ‘I was talking to Judith and she wants to mark their national day tomorrow. Are you available?’

  Gemma leaned back in her chair, stretched her hands above her head. ‘What are they planning?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Judith said they usually have a barbecue with some friends.’

  ‘A barbecue?’ Gemma laughed.

  I chimed in. ‘We don’t have a barbecue, Sarah.’

  Sarah turned to me. ‘I know, love. They’ll have to do something else. Anyway, will they include you?’

  My mother had already picked up her pencil again. ‘Sounds nice. Why not?’

  ‘That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll make something, a salad or something, although God knows what they’ll think of it. The things Judith cooks! And all she seems to talk about is food, and where to buy things. She asked me if I had any cilantro yesterday. Cilantro!’

  Gemma’s mouth edged into a smile. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What could I say?’

  ‘That you hadn’t a clue, mother!’

  Sarah folded her arms. ‘I couldn’t say that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want her thinking I’m even less sophisticated than I already am.’

  Sarah surprised me. She never worried about what others thought, and was forever reminding me that it wasn’t what people thought of me that mattered, it was the kind of person I was.

  Gemma laughed. ‘You’re very sophisticated, Mum. Don’t let a few Americans put you down.’

  What’s sophisticated, I wanted to know.

  Gemma explained. ‘It means you know things.’

  ‘About what?’

  Gemma tapped her pencil on the table. ‘I don’t know, like things about art, or food, things like that. You know what wines to drink with dinner.’

  ‘But Sarah hardly ever has wine.’

  Gemma gestured. ‘I know, but it’s that sort of thing. It’s hard to explain.’

  I was no more enlightened than I had been before.

  ‘So,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m still no clearer on what cilantro is.’

  ‘It’s coriander.’

  Sarah laughed. ‘That’s all? I was imagining all sorts of exotic things.’

  ‘Can I go now?’ I asked. I was thirsty. The record had finished, the ghosts hadn’t appeared and I wanted to go outside.

  My mother nodded. ‘Go on. Just leave the door open on your way out. It’s too hot in here.’

  I made for the door. Sarah went out ahead of me.

  ‘Megan?’

  I turned back. Gemma’s hands were stretched towards me. ‘Hug?’

  Her shoulder was strong under my cheek, and I rubbed my face against the fabric of my grandfather’s faded shirt. My mother stroked my arms, my back, pulled me onto her lap.

  ‘My angel.’ She sat back, put her hand on my face. ‘You’re my little angel. Do you know that?’

  I nodded. This was when being with my mother was best. When it was just the two of us and she held me to her. She always used to do that, back when I was little, and sometimes I caught tears silvering her skin. Then she’d kiss me extra hard and hug me a little bit tighter and not let me go for a long time.

  ‘I’ll see you later, Meg.’

  I hugged her once more. ‘See you later, alligator.’

  ‘In a while, crocodile.’

  Not a ghost stirred as I exited. The attic looked as it always did: the books, the stacks of supplies, the line of dancers caught in the slipstream of an eternal tango. The smell of linseed and turpentine heavy on the late morning air. As I stepped onto the landing, I heard the record player click back on again. Bob Dylan, his harmonica whining. The banister was cool to touch. I trailed my hot palm along its curved surface and thought of the decades of hands that had worn it smooth.

  6

  It was their voices I heard first. The apple I’d grabbed from the bowl on the kitchen table cracked against my teeth. Juice leaked down my chin. Stepping out of the kitchen, onto the wooden deck, a man’s voice shouted, ‘Careful!’

  Jim was back. Sarah had said he would be in. He had to replace some cornicing in the hall, paint the architraves and repair a ceiling rose in the front room, but the big job for now was fixing the garden steps. The new steps lay neatly in place. All the old, rotting wood was piled at the side of the garden. Rusty nails poked their heads out. Jim had also put in new posts, making the deck stronger. Sarah wanted to put the chairs outside again, so we could sip our tea and watch the morning gather its strength. Maybe we could even have a table, a small one, and eat all our meals there. The heat was too intense for eating much, but it would be nice to sit out anyway. I was beginning to forget what cold weather was like. I hoped the summer would last and last.

  Jim had sandpapered the steps, the railings and the decking the previous day, and now he was painting it all. Sarah had chose
n green, a pale sage, and Jim’s brush was deft, quick, the dry wood swallowing the paint without delay. He had managed to paint the entire handrail without splashing the bougainvillea too much. Now, he smiled up at me, the morning sunshine making him squint.

  ‘You’ll have to use the other stairs. There’s to be no walking out here until tomorrow. Do you hear me?’

  I said yes.

  ‘It’ll be dry in no time in this heat, and then I’ll put on another coat and it’ll be right as rain. You won’t know yourselves, with your fancy green steps and deck.’ He laughed. ‘The neighbours will all be jealous of you.’

  He rattled the rail to show how firm it was. ‘See that? Nothing short of an earthquake is going to dislodge this staircase.’

  Sarah waved at me from the end of the garden. She pointed to the garden flat. ‘Just come down the stairs inside. I’ve left the door open for you. It’s only for today.’ Shading her face with her arm, she called over to me again. ‘Where’s your hat?’

  I pretended not to hear her. Not for any reason was I going to appear in front of Beth with that ridiculous hat. A campero, Gemma called it. Worn by all the best gauchos. No way was I wearing it. A headache was infinitely preferable. Why they couldn’t just buy me a normal hat made of cotton or straw, I would never understand. Sarah’s standard response did not sit well with me: why waste money on a new hat when there’s a perfectly good one there for you?

  When I stepped out into the garden, Daniel and Beth were sitting on the wall. It was over six feet high, and I used irregularities in the brickwork as footholds for climbing. Daniel kept an old chair on his side, saving himself from the scraped knees and scuffed shoes that I frequently suffered as a result of scrambling up to sit beside him. Beth’s clogs were tumbled together on the grass. Her legs hung long from her white shorts, her hair like a spill of cream down her back.

  Why was she talking to Daniel? How had she even met him? He was my friend. Not hers.

  ‘Hi, Megan.’

  Beth’s drawl irritated me in that moment. It sounded affected, put on. I bit my apple, considered ignoring them both. I hadn’t seen Daniel in days, and now here he was, sitting on the wall with Beth. Over the wall, I could hear Stevie, Daniel’s older brother, kicking his ball against the brickwork. He knew it annoyed Sarah, but he did it anyway. Stevie liked to irritate. Besides fighting with Daniel and destroying his things, he enjoyed getting in everyone’s way. Gemma said he was insecure because his father left, that he liked to remind people that he existed. She said he was worried that if he wasn’t annoying people, they’d forget he was there. I wasn’t so sure. I think he just liked tormenting Daniel and, by extension, me. Gemma said I should be nice to him, to make him feel better about himself. I thought Stevie was feeling just fine about himself. It was others he needed to be nicer to.

  ‘Here!’ Daniel threw me something and I caught it with my left hand. Something slimy stuck to my palm, but I kept my hand closed around it. It wouldn’t do to recoil, to be spooked, not in front of Beth. I knew what it was.

  Daniel had thrown me a snail. He loved animals, all creatures, even the glutinous kind. I opened my hand, peered at the snail. My apple I discarded. The birds would eat it. The snail had retreated inside its shell, a tight spiral of flecked grey. Beth recoiled, as I’d presumed she would.

  ‘Yuck. Gross.’ She waved her hand in front of her face. ‘Keep it away from me.’

  Daniel collected creatures and kept them in jars, on beds of grass that we pulled from the garden and minuscule bits of sticks that we dropped in. Often, they died; other times they escaped. I preferred it when they got away. It was cruel, somehow, keeping insects imprisoned in old jam jars, even if they had been scrubbed to perfection. Between the airline sticker collection and his insects in jars, not to mention Lives of the Saints , Daniel was kept busy. I helped him, but my own interests lay elsewhere, between the pages of books, in drawing, and in the mysterious hieroglyphics of sheet music that I was beginning to conquer. But these were individual pursuits, things I did when it was time to be at home.

  I placed the snail on a twist of clematis and we watched it nudge its way upwards.

  Beth swung herself off the wall. ‘You guys are so weird.’

  ‘Why?’ Daniel asked, turning to face her.

  Her shrug was graceful. ‘You just are. I mean, bugs and things.’ She shuddered. ‘Horrible.’

  Then Beth looked beyond me, towards the house. Her face changed, brightened. I turned and saw a man cross the grass towards us. He looked a bit like a man off a cover of one of Gemma’s records: tall, sun-browned, wearing denim from head to toe.

  ‘Daddy!’

  She put her arms around the man’s waist, laid her cheek against his chest. The man poked Beth in the side, the soft fleshy part below her ribs, but gently, as though he might hurt her if he did it any harder. She squealed and sprang back from him.

  ‘Guys, this is my dad. Daddy, this is Megan and this is Daniel.’ She turned to us. ‘You can call him Chris. Everyone does.’

  Chris’s hand was firm around mine. His hair was blond, almost like a woman’s hair in the way it fell, thick and straight and all the one length, past the collar of his blue shirt. Three pens stuck out of his shirt pocket. His tanned feet were bare inside his sandals, the nails clean and square. I think I noticed his feet because I’d never really seen men’s bare feet close-up before and imagined them to be vaguely distasteful, grubby and unkempt. His teeth were the whitest I’d ever seen. So this was the night swimmer. He looked vaguely like the Greek gods from my history book at school. We’d read some of the myths and I’d loved them. Chris was Apollo, or perhaps Helios, all golden locks and burnished skin. I’d never seen a father like him before. Like mothers, fathers had a pattern of familiarity to them when I was a child. Mostly, they were absent, at work all day in jobs that required a suit. They came home, sat in favourite chairs, had things handed to them. They doled out physical punishment to their children and were the last word on discipline, even though mothers were the ones who spent all their time with their children. It baffled me, and more so because I didn’t have a father to compare. It’s not that I missed having one. I didn’t. It made no difference to me. Our small, female world was fine just as it was. Fathers distorted things, tilted the balance.

  Chris was saying something to me. I blinked. His laugh was like Beth’s, shouty and sudden. I smiled and he turned to Daniel, enveloping his hand in his own big one. It gave me a moment to draw breath.

  Chris’s voice was slow and oozy, like honey. Words took their time, easing themselves into the spaces between us. He grinned a lot, called us y’all , took pleasure in tickling Beth. Bethy , he called her. Li’l girl.

  ‘Where’s Mama?’

  ‘Gone to the store. What are you doing, Daddy?’

  Chris raked his hair, his fingers separating the strands into shades of blond. Dark and light.

  ‘Just in from work, baby. Just in.’

  ‘But I mean what are you doing now? What do you want to do?’

  This was a different Beth unfolding before me. The pouting lower lip, the offended silence that watermarked our slow walk home from the canal were gone. In front of her father she was a new person, someone who laughed, who greedily sought his attention. She reminded me of a bird, preening her bright feathers, needing to be noticed. She was Phoebe, vying with the mortals for her father’s attention.

  A huge bee bounced on the air between us. Beth shied away. Stevie shouted on the other side of the wall, something inconsequential, unimportant. I rubbed my arm where the skin was turning pink. Jim’s paintbrush kept up its scratching, the dry wood swallowing the paint. Swatting at the bee, I noticed my mother standing at the kitchen door.

  Something shifted in that instant. I was too young to understand, and maybe no one there in the garden in that sunlit moment fully understood but, looking back, that was the second that things tilted. Everything had run along its own lines up to then – our lives, our routines
, our home. Our female family. But that all changed with Gemma’s appearance at the kitchen door, her bare feet touching the newly painted wood of the deck, her hair falling out of its topknot, my grandfather’s old shirt splotched with paint, and that split second of awe on Chris’s face. The shift on Chris’s features was infinitesimal. If pressed, I couldn’t have sworn it happened. When I glanced back at Chris, his face was normal again; he was smiling at something Daniel had said and I was left wondering if I’d imagined it all. Until he did that thing again with his hair – the raking of fingers. This time he did it with both hands, and he cast his eyes in my mother’s direction, without moving his face.

  Gemma saw him, and she seemed to understand, though I had no idea what it was that she had detected in his furtive glance. At nine, I had no real understanding of what happened between men and women. My mother floated down the wet steps, like one of her attic ghosts. She ignored Jim’s squawk of protest, paid no attention to the sage green paint that coloured her soles. She appeared to glide the remaining distance to where we huddled, Daniel coaxing the bee onto a clematis bloom, Beth laughing at her father, who appeared now to be pouring all of his concentration into what his daughter was saying. He made no move to acknowledge Gemma until I reached out my hand to her. The other hand I kept closed around another of Daniel’s snails, this one smaller and more curious than its relative, who had disappeared among the clematis petals. Its head nudged invisibly against my clammy skin. The urge to drop it was too much, and I opened my palm and flung it over the wall.

  ‘Hey!’ Daniel turned to me. ‘Why’d you do that? It was only a little one.’

  Chris saved us from further confrontation. He held his hand out to Gemma. She dropped mine with a gentle squeeze.

  ‘Chris Jackson. Your new tenant.’ He smiled. ‘Good to meet you, ma’am.’

  Gemma took his proffered hand. ‘Gemma. Welcome.’

  Never had I seen my mother so at ease with a stranger, so smooth in her exchanges. Usually, she kept a distance between herself and new people, especially men. She allowed conversation to evolve around her, rarely putting herself in the centre of it. Always hovering, watchful. Gemma knew what it was to be talked about and she trusted few people.