by Doreen Finn
‘Night night, Stevie,’ said Beth.
Stevie pulled at a branch on the tree, then let it spring back with a snapping sound. The unripe apples were small hard spheres, too green and bitter to eat. In the warm night air, their scent was sharp, undiminished by the cigarette smoke.
Stevie sloped over to Daniel, shook him roughly by the shoulder. Eventually they both disappeared.
‘If we stand around like this, can we call it night swimming?’ I asked Beth after a moment’s silence, while she impressively pulled on the cigarette. She offered it to me, lit end first. I declined. Gemma didn’t smoke and neither would I.
‘No, too many people about.’
‘But it’s night time.’
Beth shook her head again. ‘Night swimming is done in secret. You can’t do it if anyone’s around. It has to be when everyone else is asleep.’
‘What if your mother sees you smoking?’
Scorn dripped from Beth’s features. ‘My mother! She hasn’t a clue. And besides, what can she do to stop me?’
Many things, I would have thought. No pocket money, no sweets, no going out. Lists of punishments would be prepared for me should the temptation to smoke ever arise.
‘Hey, so …’ Beth spoke around a mouthful of smoke, ‘what do you think of Stevie?’
‘He’s a pain in the neck.’
Laughter, muffled by a coughing fit. Beth considered the cigarette in her hand, then stubbed it out against the apple tree. Tiny sparks jumped. ‘No, he’s cool. I like him.’
‘I don’t.’
‘He could be your brother, you know that?’
‘What? Stevie? How?’
A languid shrug, which I was beginning to know well. ‘Just.’
‘Just what?’
‘My mom said that you have the same hair, and she’s right.’
I tugged my plait over my shoulder. ‘This is nothing like Stevie’s hair.’ Mine was long, thick. Stevie’s was lighter in colour, summer-streaked, almost girlish. Daniel wore his hair quite long too, but his curled at his neck. It was much nicer.
‘But look at the colour. You could be twins!’
I didn’t reply. It was late. I was tired and arguing never left me feeling anything but hollowed out inside. Besides, my father was Bolivian. One day I would go there and find the place where they’d buried him.
Beth leaned against the wall, one foot behind her. ‘I’m too hot.’ She spread her arms out, splayed her fingers against the dark bricks. She pulled away and turned to look at the wall. ‘What’s this?’
There was a door in the wall, old, unused. Sarah had planted a clematis beside it and now it obscured the green painted wood. All the gardens had doors to the lane, from when the houses were built, during the time Queen Victoria was on the throne, so deliveries could be made from the dairy, the mill, the slaughterhouse. Now, most of the doors were unused. Ours was locked. It was hardly ever opened. The only person who needed the lane was the man who ran the piggery. People sometimes left waste food outside their lane doors for the pigs. When Gemma was a child, they called him the Skinsman because of the amount of potato peelings he gathered for the pigs.
‘Can we open it?’ Beth pushed against the door. The old wood creaked.
‘Stop it! Sarah will hear.’
Beth pushed again. ‘No, she won’t. She’s too busy.’ She slammed the palms of her hand flat against the green paint. ‘We need to open this door.’
‘Why?’
She faced me. ‘Megan, I swear, sometimes you really are the most unimaginative person I’ve ever met. This door could be life changing. We could use it to come and go at night, and never worry again about waking anyone up.’ She knocked on my head with her knuckles. ‘Earth to Megan. Night swimming.’
I had an idea where this was leading. ‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no ? There is no no. There’s only possibility.’
Beth moved too fast for me. I no longer felt safe, even from myself, my traitorous self that wanted to follow her, that wanted to swim at night, to explore beyond the confines of my own life. But too much change scared me. Everything was charging ahead too quickly and I needed time to adjust.
Beth turned abruptly away from the door. ‘Anyway, I’m going to change the music. Coming?’
She walked back towards the party without waiting for a response. I followed her. Her hair swayed like a white veil in front of me, platinum in the darkness.
Back in the dying embers of the party, Sarah and Holly scraped leftovers into a plastic bag and stacked the plates in piles to be carried inside. The contents of glasses were thrown into the shrubs. Conversation, punctuated by the clatter of silverware being gathered, was quieter now, a contented murmur under cover of darkness.
One by one, the visitors got up to leave, patting their shirt pockets for glasses, checking around them for handbags and cardigans, cigarette boxes and silver lighters, discarded shoes. Goodbyes were exchanged, along with promises to meet up soon. Gemma was nowhere to be seen, at first, and Sarah called my name before I saw my mother over by the record player, flicking through the stack of records piled to the side. Beth busied herself slipping discs out of their paper sleeves.
Sarah held her hand out to me. ‘Come on, Megan, it’s far too late. We’ll go upstairs now.’
‘Are you coming?’ I asked my mother. Even though it was late, she looked lovely, her dress gathered at her knees, her face bright and happy. She held an album in her hand. Carole King.
‘I’ll follow you on up.’
‘Can I do anything else?’ Sarah called to Judith, who was just inside the French doors.
‘No, thank you,’ Judith said, walking towards us, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist. A tea towel was draped, waiter-like, on her left arm. ‘My, it’s warm.’ She laughed. ‘I hadn’t expected to hear myself saying that quite so much here.’
I thanked Judith for the party.
She touched my face with fingers soapy from dishwashing. ‘Oh, you’re welcome, sweetie. I hope it wasn’t too boring for you, with all those adults.’
I allowed Sarah to steer me up the green steps, her hands light on my shoulders. The kitchen door was wide open. The house was still hot when we went inside, a close heat that we moved through as though it were a fog. Lying on my bed shortly after, too warm even for a sheet, I tried to stay awake, to run through all the new things from the evening. An oblong of moonlight, almost too bright not to be sunshine, illuminated the floorboards. I thought I heard Beth outside in the garden, but maybe it was just a record playing.
10
Thirst woke me, but it was the laughter that I heard. Soft, muffled, it travelled the silence of the night. At first, I thought it was one of the attic ghosts, but then I heard it again and it seemed to come from downstairs. There was a voice behind it. A man’s voice.
I rolled out of bed. My feet touched the wooden floorboards without a sound. The door creaked when I pushed it open and I stopped for a moment, ever mindful of waking Gemma or Sarah. Nothing stirred.
I stood on the carpet outside my bedroom, placed my hands on the banisters and looked down. The long staircase ran like vertebrae up through the house. On the first return was the bathroom, on the second my bedroom and Sarah’s, then up six steps to Gemma’s room, then on up to the attic. The stairs were cobwebbed with shadow, light from the street thrown in fractured splinters through the fanlight above the hall door. In the kitchen, as I reached for a glass, I heard the laughter again, closer now. A woman’s laugh this time.
The kitchen door was open. Outside, the fleeting darkness was complete, an ebony sheet resting over the gardens. Sarah’s night-scented stocks breathed their fragrance into the empty air. Tiny lights flickered at intervals around the garden below me. Beth’s candles in jars. Again, the laughter, stifled. A low murmur of conversation.
My eyes adjusted to the lack of light. At the foot of the wooden steps, two forms were visible. A white dress, a curta
in of dark hair. My mother. Gemma and someone else. I squinted, trying to bring a face to the unfamiliar outline. Then it spoke. I knew those soft, drawling vowels, those elongated syllables. By now, the slow drag and pull of how Chris spoke wasn’t so new to me any more. The first time I’d heard him, it was difficult to understand exactly what he was saying, but soon his accent had ceased to mystify me. Southern, was how Sarah described it. A Southern boy. Only Chris wasn’t a boy at all. He was forty-five, Beth had confided. Forty-five. Such an age was almost incomprehensible to me. Beth had then whispered that Judith was five years older. That made her fifty. What an age. She didn’t like anyone knowing her age, was ashamed of being older than her husband. That’s just silly, Sarah said when I told her. Age is no one’s business but your own.
Liquid glugged. Glass chimed. They laughed, clinked their glasses, swallowed. I crouched behind the largest of Sarah’s pots. A huge rosemary plant obscured me, blunting the other scents of night. The sky was clear, with only a glitter of stars shaken across its vastness. A quarter moon hung at an odd angle. The heat of day had receded, but a warmth lingered, even outside.
‘You want some water?’
‘I’d love some.’
‘Ice?’
‘God, yes!’
Chris disappeared, only to materialise again in seconds, a jug of water in his hand. Ice jangled as he poured some for Gemma, then sat down beside her on the step.
‘So, you’re okay with living here? You know, with your mama and all that?’
Gemma turned away from him. ‘Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?’
Chris shrugged. ‘I couldn’t wait to get away from mine. Soon as I was finished high school, I was gone.’
An edge crept into Gemma’s voice. ‘I have a child. It’s not about upping and leaving. I can’t do that.’
‘Hey, I wasn’t saying that. Your mama seems like someone I wouldn’t mind being around. She’s sweet.’
Gemma gazed down the garden. ‘Believe me, I couldn’t be without her. Not with Megan. I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own.’
‘That hard, huh?’
‘Harder than you’ll ever know.’ Gemma ran her free hand through her hair. ‘The great moral majority have had me tried many times over.’ She sipped again from her glass. ‘The indignation of the righteous.’ She laughed, but it wasn’t a proper laugh. It was more of a shout and it managed to be sad at the same time.
Chris said something, but his voice was too low and I couldn’t catch it. Gemma shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t change any of it. Not really.’
My foot was starting to fall asleep. Pins and needles threatened. I eased myself into a seated position. I was getting bored. Night swimming wasn’t as enthralling as Beth had made it sound. I’d imagined adventure, a chance to move beyond the everyday and sample the forbidden. But this – my mother sitting at the foot of the steps, with Beth’s father beside her, the night so inky it made everything near-invisible – was barely interesting.
I wondered where Judith was. Was she sleeping? Did she not hear my mother and Chris, did their softened voices not reach her where she lay indoors?
Gemma leaned her elbows on the step behind her, let her head fall back as she looked at the indigo sky. ‘I can’t believe how warm it still is.’
‘I know, right? It almost reminds me of home.’
‘I haven’t slept well in weeks, ever since this heatwave began.’
Chris scrabbled in the jug of water and extracted an ice cube. Without asking my mother’s permission, he slid the slippery frozen cube the length of her arm. Gemma’s intake of breath was sharp, and she started. But she said nothing and, after a pause, Chris did it again. Gemma kept her eyes on the sky; did not once look at Chris until the ice was melted and only tracks of water glistened on her skin.
The rosemary was making me feel sick. My bed suddenly seemed like the best place to be. The kitchen was a few feet away. Would I make it without being rumbled?
Gemma stood up. Her dress settled in ghostly folds around her legs. ‘It’s late. I need to go.’
Chris didn’t rise. ‘Stay.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Stay.’
‘Really. I should go.’
I knew Gemma. She didn’t sound in the least bit anxious to leave.
‘Come on. A few more minutes.’ He laughed. ‘I can’t finish this on my own.’ He held up the wine bottle.
Gemma hesitated. She glanced up the steps at the house. I prayed that she wouldn’t see me. She shrugged, a fluid motion I knew so well, and sat back down. ‘All right, five more minutes. But only five, okay? I have to get up early.’ She said nothing about the ice cube and Chris had left the jug on the ground, out of arm’s reach.
‘Scout’s honour.’
Chris held up his fingers in some three-fingered salute I had never seen before. He tipped the remains of the wine into my mother’s glass. I seized the opportunity and escaped back into the house. The heat that seemed to hide in the walls of the house, in the floorboards, eased itself into the empty darkness. It followed me up to my room, which seemed hotter than it had been when I woke up. Without thinking of the night swimmers below me, I shoved the sash window up. It creaked in resistance, then groaned as it rose. Outside, all was suddenly silent once more.
11
The following day, I helped Sarah pick raspberries. The canes lined the wall at the end of the garden and stood in rows, bowed under their burden of fruit. My campero kept the sun off my face and out of my eyes. Thankfully, Beth was nowhere to be seen. No way did I want her to see me wearing such a horrible thing.
Sarah’s radio was wedged in its habitual place, the fork in the apple tree. Black streaks marked the bough. Beth’s cigarette, stubbed out in a hurry the night before. Men’s voices sombrely discussed a loyalist paramilitary attack over the weekend. An ambush on a deserted country road. Three o’clock in the morning. A family man, father of six, shot twice in the head. Execution style, the presenter said. The loyalists were making a point. What point, I wondered? Once Belfast or any part of Northern Ireland was mentioned on the news, Sarah usually reached for the switch. She didn’t like me listening to reports about violence. The same happened with the riots in Soweto, the killings in Cambodia. The merest reference to any unrest and the radio was switched off. My grandmother firmly believed that there was no reason for me to know anything about man’s inhumanity, about what human beings were capable of doing to each other. I understood her desire to shield me, her need to protect me, but I also knew it wouldn’t work. No matter how quickly she drew my attention to something else, or distracted me by pointing out the window, it was impossible. I knew about the war in Belfast. I knew about the rioting in South Africa, about Pol Pot. It was impossible to hide that summer. There was violence everywhere and the news leaked into our lives. Not even the heat could mask it. Headlines screamed at me from the newspapers, radio bulletins on the hour every hour delivered the latest atrocities. Because I wasn’t meant to hear any of it, I heard it all.
Sarah wanted to protect me. That’s why we didn’t have a television. Sarah said television made people stupid, stopped them thinking for themselves, but I knew she wanted to keep the world’s sadness out of our home. If I was exposed to all the wrong in the world, it meant that Sarah, my grandmother, was unable to do her job. Stop worrying, I wanted to tell her. Don’t fret. But I couldn’t find the words to tell her, and I hardly understood her concern myself.
At that moment, Sarah was too preoccupied by the garden to pay much attention to political uprising. I dropped berries into a basket at my feet. The wasps were going crazy, crawling over the raspberry canes, diving into my basket. Sarah swatted at them with a rolled up newspaper, but it was a pointless battle. The wasps were too determined and there were too many of them. I just hoped we wouldn’t be stung.
Paramilitary activities were still loud on the airwaves when suddenly Sarah heard what was being discussed and nearly twisted her ankle trying to reach the radio. Be
fore she could turn it off, the discussion ended. A thin stream of music rose into the quiet garden. Opera. Sarah loved opera. I hated it, all those awful songs that went on forever, and everyone dying at the end. The high voices carried an echo of sadness into the stillness of the summer heat. Berries kept piling up in the basket. Sweat gathered under my ridiculous hat, making my head itch. I craved a drink of water.
At the end of the garden, the door to the lane was almost invisible behind the clematis. Beth was right. It threw up endless possibilities. A chasm was opening inside me, the urge to move on and explore doing battle with staying safe, quiet, out of trouble. I needed to keep Sarah and Gemma from worrying about me, and the only way to do that was to behave. I suspected that they had enough to worry about.
Judith materialised as Sarah and I were finishing. She balanced a tray with a jug of something opaque and three glasses. ‘Good morning, ladies! You look like you’re in need of refreshment.’
She poured lemonade. Ice chinked. Thin slices of lemon floated on the surface. ‘I hope you like this. I make it all the time back home.’
‘This is delicious!’ Sarah said, taking a sip. ‘I don’t know what I did to end up with you living downstairs, but I’m certainly glad you’re here.’
She and Judith laughed.
Judith looked at me right as I yawned. ‘Tired, Megan?’ I covered my mouth quickly. ‘It was a late night for everyone,’ she added.
‘A bit,’ I conceded.
I told her how Daniel had fallen asleep on the blanket, omitting the part where Beth and Stevie had stolen the cigarette and smoked it, how they hadn’t been night swimming because so many people had been around.
Judith said she and Beth had gone to bed after everything was cleared away. ‘Chris stayed up a bit. He does that a lot at home.’ She shook her head. ‘A throwback to childhood. I just want to go to bed, but he insists he sleeps better if he sits outside a while on hot nights.’ I liked her accent. Its cadences were different to Chris’s, less drawled. New Mexico. I needed to find it on the map. Land of green chillies and Tabasco and marinating meat.