Night Swimming

by Doreen Finn

  He was right. I shouldn’t have taken out my annoyance with Beth on him. He hadn’t done anything wrong. I touched his arm with my fingertips. ‘Sorry, Daniel. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  But it did matter. I knew it did. I could see it in the way his face had fallen at my harsh tone, the hurt that passed across his eyes. Our bare shoulders rubbed, brown from weeks of sunshine. ‘Daniel.’

  ‘I said it doesn’t matter.’ He turned to me, his hand outstretched. ‘Here. Look at this.’

  An insect I hadn’t seen before crawled slowly up Daniel’s wet, suntanned arm. Its wings were translucent, outspread as though it might take flight at any moment. Its body was iridescent, its eyes bulging. It buzzed gently, nothing more than a barely audible vibration.

  ‘What is it?’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen one before. Maybe it’s one of those foreign insects that’ve arrived here because of the heatwave.’

  The heatwave was changing our lives in so many different ways, and now I couldn’t imagine what life had been like before the sun didn’t shine every day, before we had to stay in the shade and make sure to drink plenty of water, yet not too much for fear of running out. It was hard to remember green grass and making sure to always have a cardigan when leaving the house, and checking the forecast to see when the rain would be due. Because before the heatwave there had always been rain, lots of rain, and it had been the yardstick by which we measured our lives. Not any more, though. Now, it was the sun and the heat and threat of a water shortage that kept our attention. Mrs Brennan ran out of ice pops every day. Tar melted darkly on the roads, and when we dug our nails into it, half-moon crescents were left behind. Last week, a dog left in someone’s car all day had died. Gemma told me that morning that cities were hotter during a heatwave because the buildings and roads absorbed the sun’s energy. ‘I don’t miss the rain, do you?’ Gemma had said.

  I didn’t. Not a bit. My mother thought that maybe we all needed the madness that only a heatwave could bring, a change from our usual routines. It was good for people to worry less about what everyone thought, to have less to fear than usual. Irish people were great with fear, Gemma said. There was always something to be afraid of. The Church, hell, each other. Gemma thought that the heatwave was a bit like being stranded in a strange land, where new customs and routines had to be learned, got used to. It did everyone good to break out of their comfort zone. I liked that phrase, comfort zone. Gemma explained that it just meant the things that we kept doing because we liked doing them and they felt safe, even if they weren’t the best things for us to do. I could use comfort zone next time I played Scrabble. Or would Beth allow two words?

  The canal’s surface nearby was corrugated from Beth and Stevie’s splashing. Stevie turned to us and ran his arm over the water, sending a wave in our direction.

  ‘Hey!’ Daniel shouted, as his insect took off. ‘Look what you did. I’d never seen one of those before.’

  Stevie stuck his lower lip out. ‘Oh poor little baby’s lost his precious fly. Are you going to run and tell your mummy?’

  ‘Leave him alone, Stevie. Go and pick on someone else.’

  Stevie laughed. ‘Like who? You? And have your granny run after me?’ He laughed again, but it wasn’t a proper laugh. Mean-edged, his laughter was anything but funny. ‘I’d like to see her try.’

  Anger was a sudden, pulsing rush. No one was allowed laugh at my family. Sarah was unfailingly nice to Stevie and it stung me to hear her dismissed so contemptuously by him. Sarah said Stevie had suffered the most when his father forgot to come home. He’s the eldest, Sarah had said. It’s always hardest on the eldest because they have to take responsibility, be the man of the house. I wanted to say that if Stevie had been my son I too might have forgotten to come home, forgotten on purpose.

  ‘Just watch yourself, Stevie.’

  Stevie laughed again, a mocking shout that disturbed the hush of the day. I turned instead towards a family of swans that floated nearby, four cygnets scrambling to keep up with their graceful parents.

  ‘Just swim, you guys,’ Beth said. ‘It’s so nice.’

  I was treading water. My hands were ivory under the water, my movements slow, ponderous. My body looked like a phantom. Dark specks in the water swirled around me. Daniel ducked under, not surfacing until he reached the far bank. Then he set off for the barge. I remained where I was and observed as he spoke to the man on the deck. He put his book down as Daniel spoke to him, Daniel’s hands clutching the tow rope that kept the boat in place. The man pointed to something on the barge, then to something else. Eventually, Daniel hauled himself onto the deck. Water rushed off him. I imagined it splashing on the sun-bleached wood under his feet, then quickly evaporating as the hot air inhaled it. The heatwave claimed all moisture for itself, making it disappear as quickly as it had materialised.

  

  ‘Megan!’ Daniel waved. ‘Come over here. Come on!’ His voice was impatient, echoing on the water’s surface. Behind me, Beth and Stevie had started jumping off the wooden lock into the narrow part of the canal, the part where the boats passed through when the lock was open, right before the bridge. It was the most dangerous part, the spot where those boys had been jumping the first time I was there with Beth. Stevie was doing it to impress Beth, and Beth was following his lead to prove she could keep up with him. I wanted to warn them, to say something, but they were too busy shrieking, their bodies smacking off the dark water that lay on the other side of the lock. There was an old sign nailed to a wooden post, warning of the dangers of swimming in that section, but it was faded and peeled, and no one took any notice of it. Certainly not Beth and Stevie, anyway, in their eagerness to show off to each other.

  ‘Megan!’

  I turned my attention back to Daniel and swam towards him. The man helped me onto the deck of the barge. His hands were large and he pulled me easily on board. I stood beside Daniel, water streaming off me. It was so hot that I didn’t miss having a towel or something to wrap around me. The sun warmed me, heating the skin on my shoulders, the backs of my legs.

  ‘Megan, look!’ Daniel held out a book. ‘Look what he has.’

  It was just an ordinary book, nothing remarkable at all. The red cover was dog-eared and creased, the spine beginning to peel at the edges.

  ‘It’s the insect book I was telling you about.’ Daniel began leafing through the pages, pointing out the ink drawings of bugs, their bodies sectioned for labelling. Daniel had told me, when his love of creatures began to take hold, that an insect was an animal with a notched or divided body. It came from the Latin insectare, meaning to cut up. According to Daniel. He was full of facts. Useless facts, Stevie said, but I liked hearing about things that I wouldn’t normally have come across.

  ‘This is Stan,’ Daniel said. ‘He studies insects.’

  The man stood near us. He wore a straw hat and his checked shirt was short-sleeved. He had shorts on and his feet were bare. His chair was further down the deck of the ancient barge, another book face down like a tent on the seat.

  ‘How did you know Daniel liked insects?’ I asked.

  Stan shook his head. ‘I didn’t, but a dragonfly landed on those reeds over there and I wanted someone else to see it.’ He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. ‘My wife has no interest in any creatures at all and this was such a beauty that I didn’t want to be the only person to see it.’

  As if on cue, a woman came up the steps to the deck, squinting in the dazzle of sunlight. She was about Sarah’s age, her hair caught up in a bun at the back of her head. ‘Good Lord, the heat down there is a killer!’ she said, fanning herself with a magazine. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Stan.’ She stopped when she saw Daniel and me. Her smile was sudden and warm. ‘Well, hello there! Who are you?’

  ‘These fine people are future entomologists,’ Stan announced proudly.

  ‘I’m not,’ I interr
upted. ‘Just Daniel.’

  ‘Good for you, lovey,’ the woman said. ‘One insect person in the family is more than enough, thank you very much.’

  ‘Barbara’s just saying that,’ Stan said, laughing. ‘She loves the little creatures underneath it all.’

  ‘I’m Barbara,’ she said, offering me her hand.

  ‘I’m Megan, and this is Daniel. We live nearby.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you lucky? What a lovely place to live.’ Barbara gestured with her hand. ‘To have all this around you! Very lucky indeed.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, we’re from Kildare. We come up here most summers so Stan can look at insects.’

  ‘Do you come on this?’ Daniel asked, indicating the barge.

  ‘Oh yes. We take the canal all the way. But we’re usually not as lucky with the weather as we’ve been this year. Now, can I get you children something to drink? Some water? Orange, maybe?’

  ‘Well, I know I’d love some orange,’ said Stan.

  ‘Me too!’ Daniel and I said at the same time.

  Barbara disappeared down the narrow steps and when she emerged she was carrying a tray with four glasses and a bottle of orange.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand and watched as Beth and Stevie pushed each other off the lock and into the water.

  ‘Do you know those children?’ Barbara asked, pointing. ‘What they’re doing is terribly dangerous.’

  ‘That’s my brother,’ Daniel said. ‘And Beth lives downstairs in Megan’s house. They’re just swimming.’

  Beth’s shrieks ricocheted off the flat surface of the water. Her laughter stirred up something within me. I wanted her to laugh like that with me, to think that things I said and did were equally as funny and exciting as whatever Stevie was saying and doing.

  Barbara put the tray down on the deck. ‘You need to tell them to stop. A boy drowned doing that in Kildare last summer. He fell and the water levels were too low and he died. It was dreadful.’ She waved both her arms in the direction of Beth and Stevie. ‘Yoo-hoo! Hello there! Would you like a glass of orange?’

  Daniel looked at me and a giggle bubbled deep in my throat. Please God, don’t let me laugh, I prayed. It would be like those times in school when laughing was totally forbidden, which only just made it even more impossible to avoid. I looked away, but Daniel’s bare foot soon found mine and he pressed down on my toes.

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Orange!’ Barbara called. Beth and Stevie must have been deliberately ignoring her, because everyone who passed by could hear her and we weren’t that far away from the lock. I hoped no one I knew was passing at that moment, as Barbara called out. Yoo-hoo. Yoo-hoo! It was embarrassing, but funny too. I somehow suppressed the laughter that threatened to rise out of me. Daniel’s foot pressed harder, squashing my bare toes against the flaking surface of the deck.

  Just as I was about to surrender to the laughter, something caught my eye. Beyond the weeping willows that grew along the bank near where Stan’s barge was moored, a flash of red fabric appeared and disappeared, weaving among the green leaves and the pale-brown branches that curved towards the water. I knew that skirt, that particular shade of red. I had seen my mother make it. Magenta, she said the colour was. Named after the Battle of Magenta, in Italy, where they had waved flags dyed red. I had watched Gemma cut the fabric, tack stitches along the hem, then sew it all together on Sarah’s sewing machine. I would have known that colour anywhere. Squinting, I shaded my face with my arm. A glance of pale-blue blouse, a brown arm. Suntanned foot in an espadrille.

  The appearance of my mother distracted me, stemmed my urge to laugh, and I turned towards the trees, ready to call out to her when she came into sight again. I opened my mouth, but closed it again when I saw that she wasn’t alone. Along the narrow path that ran parallel to the canal, my mother was walking with someone.

  With a man. With Chris.

  Daniel hadn’t seen them weaving in and out of the weeping willows, sunlight catching them and shadows hiding them. No one had picked up on the fact that my mother was with a man who liked her, who night swam with her. Barbara still yoo-hooed to Beth and Stevie, who had finally responded to her and were swimming over to the shabby barge. Daniel had turned to Stan, who was pointing out a pair of circling dragonflies in the reeds. I was the only one who had noticed my mother. By the time Beth and Stevie had hauled themselves on board, canal water rivering down their bodies and splashing onto the bone-dry deck, Gemma and Chris had disappeared, over the bridge at Portobello and into the bustle of the late-morning crowds.

  I could see all the people, even from here. Unwrapping sandwiches on canalside benches, sitting on the grassy banks, crossing the bridge. Cyclists chained bicycles to lamp posts, office workers drank tea from flasks. Further up again, boys were jumping into the water. Their cries looped back to where I stood, a glass of orange undrunk in my hand.

  I was aware that something was stirring, or had already begun, but try as I might to imagine it, I was unable. I had wanted to call out to my mother, to shout her name. Gemma! But something had prevented me. Even though it was midday, even though I was with my friends, I knew I’d seen something I shouldn’t have, something adult, secret. Forbidden.

  Barbara cut across my thoughts with an offer of more orange. I shook my head. No, thank you. In the others’ glasses, ice jangled and pale liquid splashed. I felt the sun on my shoulders and my skin tighten in protest. My T-shirt was discarded with the rest of my things in a small pile on the canal bank, and there was no shade in which I could shelter. I was irritated with the sun, with the heatwave, with all the red skin I saw around me. I was tired of having to save water, watch what we used, worry about running out. The grass was like hay. The flowers were dying. And now my mother was out walking with Chris. I had to protect her, keep her safe, but she was like mercury, slipping out of my grasp every time I tried to hold on to her.

  Beth fished an ice cube out of her glass and, holding it between unsteady fingers, ran it across Stevie’s shoulders, right where the sun was doing most of its damage, turning his skin red and freckled. Stevie let out a shout, but Beth shushed him.

  ‘Quiet. This feels great on hot skin.’

  Stevie wriggled a little, but he quietened down, closed his eyes, allowed Beth to run the ice over and back across his skin. He opened one eye to watch her, then closed it again, his face free of expression.

  As quickly as she had started, Beth stopped and flung the melting ice into the canal. It disappeared with barely a ripple raised on the water’s still surface.

  And all I could think of was Chris doing that to my mother, crossing boundaries I hadn’t even known existed.

  ‘I’ll be back in a sec,’ I said, setting my glass down, the orange barely touched.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Daniel asked. He rubbed his nose, sunburn making it peel. Mine too was beginning to shed its skin, a delicate unfolding of burnt flakes. Despite the peeling, we both had a scatter of tiny freckles across the bridge of our noses.

  ‘Nowhere, just saw someone from school.’

  ‘Who?’

  But I was gone, slipping off the barge and onto the canal bank, the heat-deadened leaves dry and prickly under my bare soles.

  

  I found them quickly. Gemma’s laughter was distinctive, and with no mother or daughter to cause her to smother it, it rang out, loud and pure. They sat on the grass under a tree, not far from Portobello Bridge. Gemma and Chris must have heard the chat and the laughter from the boat, but if they did, they clearly didn’t bother looking around to see.

  Using a weeping willow to shield me, I watched my mother and Chris Jackson without being seen. Gemma had taken her espadrilles off. Her toenails were painted red, the same deep shade as her skirt, which circled the ground around her. Chris sat beside her, leaning back on his elbows as they talked. He pointed something out to my mother. As Gemma followed his index finger, Chris took a strand of her hair in his other hand and tucked it
behind her ear. She turned to him, smiling, and repeated his gesture, curving her finger around a lock of his dark blond hair and hooking it behind his ear. Chris grabbed her wrist and Gemma laughed.

  Scrambling backwards, I slipped on a discarded ice-cream wrapper and fell. Not giving myself time to dust off, I scuttled back to the barge, under the cover of the weeping willows. The light through the leaves threw dappled shade on my skin. The canal glinted in the sunlight.

  19

  That evening, at dinner, I pushed my food around my plate. It was too hot to eat much and my appetite had dwindled. My shoulders were sunburnt and my skin felt stretched, sore. The omelettes Sarah had made were light and fluffy, and bright yellow from the eggs she bought from a woman around the corner who kept hens in her garden. Omelettes were one of my favourite things to eat, but now they somehow didn’t seem that interesting.

  From downstairs, new smells drifted, something sweet and warm and yeasty, like cakes or bread. Judith was cooking again, probably something else new and different. The previous day it had been stacked enchiladas, with fried eggs on top. Judith had offered me one, but I was afraid to try it, scared of not liking it and not wanting to appear rude. Beth had urged me to sample it, but I made an excuse about my own dinner being ready upstairs.

  Upstairs, downstairs. How quickly and easily our house had been divided into two separate worlds, two entities that could not have been more different. Upstairs, life was regulated by punctual mealtimes, good behaviour, consideration for others, hard work. Downstairs was altogether more fluid, with meals taken when and if necessary, sulking was tolerated as something verging on whimsy, permission was rarely sought but assumed, and nothing was thought of the martini glasses that often littered the kitchen table, or of the other, stranger-sounding drinks that were consumed. Daiquiri. Sloe gin fizz. Harvey Wallbanger. Tequila sunrise. I shaped their strangeness with my mouth, dredging my mind for something, anything, that would give me a clue as to what exactly they contained, but absolutely nothing came forth. I was as in the dark as if the Americans had been speaking another, unknown language. Which in so many ways they were.