Night Swimming

by Doreen Finn

‘Mummy was happy to hear from him. He said thanks for the money she sent him.’

  ‘Was it much?’

  ‘Don’t know. Probably.’ Daniel stopped to examine a moth that crawled along the glass window of the hardware store. ‘She’s doing a novena for him.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Mrs Sullivan had a list of prayers that she kept on the wall of her kitchen. Anyone who needed prayers or intervention was on it, written in her neat, orderly hand. Over the list hung a photo of the Pope and one of the Sacred Heart. The picture of the Pope I didn’t mind much – he just looked like any old man. But the Sacred Heart was spooky; the thorny crown and the bleeding heart – or was it the soul? – made me avert my eyes any time I was in Daniel’s kitchen.

  ‘The nine day rosary one.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Mrs Sullivan was prone to extended periods of prayer, often inviting others to join her. Sometimes these groups said their prayers outdoors, their chanting rising and falling in waves of monotony. Sarah didn’t like Gemma’s smart remarks about the prayer groups next door. Live and let live, she reminded my mother, whenever Gemma’s eyes rolled. Mrs Sullivan had loaned Gemma baby clothes, had helped her with breastfeeding when I was finding it difficult to latch on. She had minded me when both Sarah and Gemma were busy. There had been no words of judgement from her, Sarah said, at a time when all that Gemma was getting from most people was judgement. Remember the kindness, Sarah always said, and return it. It’s the best thing we can offer someone.

  ‘She wants me to join her at the novena.’ Daniel’s voice was gloomy now. ‘In practice for being a priest.’ He stuck his lower lip out and examined the jar in his hands.

  Ahead of us, Stevie and Beth had reached the canal.

  

  The streetlight reflected imperfectly in the unmoving black water. The outline of Barbara and Stan’s barge was up to the left, its occupants stowed safely for the night. The lock had been opened earlier and the water levels had risen. In the stillness of the night, the gush of canal water was thunderous. The weeping willows were carved into the darkness, trailing their branches in silence. A duck quacked. We leaned against the metal of the bridge, our reflections lost in the darkness and depth of the water.

  Beth produced a crushed packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her shorts. Without offering one to Daniel or to me, she handed one to Stevie, flicked a lighter at his cigarette and then lit her own. She exhaled a long thin stream of smoke, tapped the ash into the canal. When had she become such an expert smoker, I wondered. Standing there beside Stevie in the weak light, she looked years older. Stevie puffed on his cigarette, but I could tell by the speed of his inhaling and exhaling that he wasn’t enjoying it. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. He’d make himself dizzy if he didn’t stop. Too quickly, he flicked the half-smoked stub into the water.

  ‘Want another one?’ Beth offered.

  ‘Later.’

  I nudged Daniel. Stevie was out of his depth with Beth. Whenever she was around, he seemed mired in a perpetual game of catch up, forever trying to emulate her, impress her. Was Stevie in love with Beth? I dismissed the thought. Stevie wasn’t capable of love.

  ‘What will we do now?’ I asked.

  Night swimming wasn’t very interesting or exciting, if all we were going to do was hang around the canal.

  Beth shrugged. ‘Who cares? We’re outside, aren’t we?’

  Suddenly, night swimming was in danger of losing some of its gloss. Beth and Stevie leaned side by side against the bridge, murmuring. Daniel and I, excluded from their shared whispers, stood idly by. It wasn’t cold, but I shivered. Then I yawned. The tiredness that had kept itself at bay since Beth woke me collapsed on me, and all I craved was my bed, with its single cotton sheet and the coolness of the night air slipping through the opened sash window. I thought of Sarah and Gemma asleep in their beds, each of them ensconced in dreams, neither of them having the slightest idea that I was anywhere but in my own room.

  ‘I want to go.’

  Beth looked at me, another cigarette dying between her fingers. The smell of the smoke had stagnated on the still night air. It tickled the lining of my nose and made me want to sneeze.

  Beth pointed her cigarette at me. ‘You want to leave? We’ve only just got here.’

  ‘It’s boring. All we’re doing is standing around.’

  Stevie made a sneering noise, but he didn’t intimidate me. ‘What?’ I asked him. He dug his fists into the pocket of his shorts and looked away.

  ‘I want to go too,’ Daniel said. ‘There’s nothing happening. We’re not doing anything.’

  Beth flicked her cigarette butt into the air. It landed on the road where it was quickly obliterated by a passing car. A snatch of music blared from the car’s open windows and a slurred voice shouted at us to go home.

  ‘We need music,’ Beth announced. ‘Next time we come, we’ll bring a radio.’

  I thought of the radio, huge and cumbersome, in the front room, and Sarah’s small transistor that she kept by her bed when she wasn’t downstairs or in the garden. Neither would be an option.

  ‘I’ll take my mom’s little radio, her portable one,’ Beth said. ‘Then we can listen to music while we’re here and no one will hear us.’

  Daniel pointed to Stan’s barge. ‘Stan and Barbara will.’

  ‘Then don’t come with us,’ Stevie said. ‘It’d be better without you anyway.’

  ‘Leave him alone.’

  It was something I seemed to say to Stevie with increased regularity. Leave Daniel alone. Stop picking on him. I turned to Daniel, who was examining the low stone wall that ran along the side of the canal to the lock. Lock six, it was called. The lock-keeper’s cottage, abandoned now, was across the road from where we stood, its red bricks black in the night. In the old days, only the keeper could open the lock for passing boats, and he lived with his family in the tiny cottage that came with the job. Daniel started chasing something along the wall. An insect, no doubt.

  ‘I’m going,’ I said to him. ‘Coming?’

  Beth, despite her reluctance to leave, turned to Stevie. ‘Come on, we’ll all go.’

  Stevie didn’t argue with her, but he made his displeasure known in the filthy look he threw at me. I turned away. What Stevie thought didn’t interest me.

  Beth tried to justify her early leave-taking. ‘If we don’t all go together, then we run the risk of waking my parents when we get back. If we wake them, there’ll be no more going out at night. If they don’t know what we’re doing, they can’t stop us.’

  

  We whispered goodnight to the boys as they slipped soundlessly up the granite steps to their front door. Stevie had a key on a piece of string around his neck. I had wanted to return by the lane, but Beth had insisted on using the front door and I was too tired to argue. The door to the garden flat squeaked briefly as Beth pushed it open. She put a finger to her lips as she let me pass her by. The small wad of paper she had wedged into the door to keep it from closing fully was still in place. She picked it up and stuffed it in her pocket, alongside the defeated cigarette box. Behind a closed bedroom door, Judith and Chris slept. Not a sound disturbed the silence of the lightless flat, not a murmur or a snore. Beth accompanied me to the French doors, one of which was still open. She retreated back into the house as I slipped out into the garden. The two deckchairs were on the patio. Chris’s record player sat, squat, between them.

  It was more a sense of something than any actual proof. A change in the air, an inkling of a presence. The deckchairs. A candle dying in a glass jar. The record player. Sure, they had been there when we had met in the garden an hour or more before, but now they seemed different. The angle had changed. A record sleeve that hadn’t been there before now leaned against the opened lid of the player. Two more candles in jars placed at intervals on the stairs.

  A squeak on the wooden steps warned me and quickly I hid. The strap of my sandal caught on stray shoots of bougainville
a that crowded the ground at the foot of the stairs, but I managed to stop myself from falling. I ducked behind the steps, darkness and a cloud of blooms obscuring me.

  I didn’t need to peep to know that it was my mother and Chris on the stairs. More creaks told me that they were sitting down. I held my breath, afraid of discovery. What could be the worst thing? Confessing to being out night swimming, or my mother knowing that I had seen her doing some night swimming of her own? Like a tiger I crouched, my breathing shallow and rapid. Staying quiet seemed the best option.

  23

  The conversation on the steps above me wasn’t enough to keep exhaustion from buzzing, persistent and demanding as a mosquito, in my brain. Sarah’s night-scented stocks, in their terracotta tubs, filled the air around me with their fragrance. Normally, I inhaled them. Now, I tried to keep from sneezing.

  Gemma’s skirt ends trailed between the green wooden steps. She was wearing the magenta skirt again. I could see her bare heels, the glint of her silver ankle chain in the candlelight. The stem of a wine glass where she laid it down. I imagined her hair, piled in a knot on top of her head, like a pagoda, a pencil stuck into it to keep it from slipping.

  Above me, the conversation unfurled like a flag, the dipping and swelling of their voices, murmurs of assent, whispered laughter. Their words fell around me, mist-like. Gemma told Chris of her painting, her night classes in the gallery. She told him of a scholarship she had been forced to turn down, years before, but she didn’t tell him why. I didn’t know anything about a scholarship, hadn’t known Gemma had said no to an offer of study. Hispanic studies and art history. It would have meant a year in a Spanish-speaking country and Gemma hadn’t wanted to leave me.

  ‘You can always go back to it,’ Chris offered, as he poured wine into my mother’s glass, before filling his own. ‘That’s the great thing about education. It’s always there, waiting for you.’ A dull clunk as he put the bottle down.

  Gemma sipped from her glass. ‘You sound like my mother.’ But I could hear the smile in her voice.

  ‘Then your mother is a wise lady. Learning is there for the taking. Your time will come around again.’

  ‘The most important thing, for me anyway, is not to regret anything.’ Gemma paused. ‘And I don’t, you know? Not a thing. Not in my life, anyway. I couldn’t change anything, because then I wouldn’t have Megan.’

  I held my breath at the mention of my name.

  ‘She’s a sweet kid. She could teach my lady a few manners.’

  ‘Beth’s a nice girl.’ I heard hesitation in Gemma’s voice, a hint of a lie.

  ‘She is, when it suits her. Me? She’s fine with me, but she gives her mother a hard time. And she always has done. This is nothing new, no pre-teen hormones or whatever you want to call it. She senses something in Judith, call it weakness, whatever, but she’s on it and she never lets up. Then Judith overcompensates for it, instead of calling Beth on her tricks.’ He drank his wine. ‘Makes the whole thing worse.’

  ‘Why don’t you step in?’

  Chris laughs and Gemma shushes him. ‘Me step in? What can I do? I just leave them to it; let them sort it out themselves. I’d only make everything worse.’

  ‘How did you meet her?’

  ‘Judith? Oh, through friends. She was sous chef in a restaurant. Someone I knew had been there, got her number, then decided that she was more my type than his. The usual.’ I couldn’t see his shrug, but I sensed it, that fluid roll of the shoulders that Beth had inherited. Dismissal. ‘I don’t need to tell you, things aren’t great.’ Another laugh, but this time the warmth had drained from his voice. Chris shifted on the steps. They creaked above me and I worried that they would collapse on top of me. ‘This posting was supposed to be a good thing, but really we’re just killing time till we kill each other.’ Again, that laugh.

  ‘But isn’t she lonely here? I mean, away from home and everyone she knows?’

  ‘It was her idea. A clean start.’ Chris stood up abruptly. The noise disturbed a spider. It scuttled over my foot. I suppressed the urge to shriek. ‘Anyway. I’ll get you that record I was telling you about. I hardly ever play it now. Reminds me of that whole time we were at war in Vietnam. America’s shame.’

  Gemma didn’t say anything. She held out her hands and allowed Chris to pull her to her feet. Standing, they were more visible. I saw Gemma smile up at him, and he didn’t let her hands go until she said he should get the record before the sun rose and all the neighbours saw them. But she laughed as she said it, and Chris laughed too, even as he dropped her hands. Then, quietly, so carefully that I almost missed it, Chris put his hand to my mother’s head, pulled out the pencil from her topknot and let her hair fall in a heavy sheet over her shoulders and down her back.

  ‘That’s better. I’ve been wanting to do that since the first moment I saw you.’

  Gemma said nothing and the silence tipped itself over them and held them apart from me. The only light was candlelight, and the adults’ outlines were barely visible from where I crouched, intruder-like, behind the wooden staircase. Chris put his thumb to my mother’s lips, his other hand on her hair, and I watched him drag his fingers, slowly, through its darkness, again and again. Then it was over and, as though nothing had happened, they went over to the record player.

  ‘Come inside for a second and I’ll get another record that I think you’ll like. But quietly, mind.’ Chris put his finger to my mother’s lips, and she held it there with her hand.

  I seized my chance to go upstairs while they were indoors. The steps squeaked as I took them two at a time, but I didn’t care. In my room, I pushed the window up and I could hear Gemma and Chris still talking, their voices a slow murmur now, honeyed in the darkness and the lingering heat. Out over the gardens to the east, the sky was already lightening, silver streaks disrupting the cover of night. Soon, it would be morning.

  The sheets were cool on my hot skin. I tried to replay what I had just seen and heard, but it was impossible. Sleep swooped out of what was left of the night, gathering me up in its embrace. I imagined Chris putting his record on the turntable, the scratch of his chair on the patio flagstones as he settled himself to watch the dawn break. I imagined Gemma climbing the stairs to her room, a glass of water in her hand. I wanted to think about the ways in which life was suddenly changing direction, but I could barely comprehend them myself. Sleep was a relief for my crowded brain. It emptied me.

  24

  The hose was old, and dusty from lack of use. Beth and I lifted it off the patio and carried it down to the door in the wall. Stevie jiggled a wire coat hanger in the lock, and the door swung silently out into the lane. The smell of pig was strong. There was just enough moonlight to allow us to see, and we dragged the hose to the tap in the lane and attached it.

  Stevie was already opening the lock on the door in the empty garden as we lugged the heavy rubber over. ‘Come on,’ he hissed, holding the door open. It was half rotted and one of its hinges had fallen off with a clang.

  ‘We’re going as quickly as we can,’ I whispered.

  ‘Well, you need to be faster. I can’t hold this thing up forever. It’s going to fall off.’

  It was only a short distance from the tap to the garden, and the hose slithered like a python behind us as we hurried along the poorly surfaced lane.

  The pool was black in the moonlight. Its coating of leaves and clay lay thick on the bottom. We let ourselves down by the rickety ladder and scooped up as much of the debris as we could with the plastic spades we’d brought, flinging it up onto the ground around the pool. It took much longer than we’d thought it would. Stevie eventually clambered out of the pool and went into the lane to turn on the tap. Water hissed from the hose onto the grass, the flow jerky and uneven.

  Stevie gestured impatiently at the hose. ‘Come on, it doesn’t matter about leaves. Let’s just get it filled before someone comes along.’ Somehow, he managed to prop the door up on a brick so it wouldn’t fall off the remain
ing hinge. Picking up the nozzle, he dropped it into the pool. Water splashed over our feet, our pyjamas, soaking us. I yelped. Daniel squealed.

  ‘Sshh,’ Beth whispered. ‘Someone’ll hear us.’

  Laughing, we scrambled up the ladder. Part of it had come away from the pool, and it moved every time our feet met the rungs.

  

  ‘What do we do now?’ Daniel asked. Some time had passed and we were still sitting on the dry ground. I peered over the edge of the pool to look at the water’s progress. It looked as though hardly any had accumulated, the remaining leaves floating on a few inches.

  We tensed when muffled voices materialised from the Dohertys’ garden next door, a man’s and a woman’s. Laughter ensued, more noise. Then we heard a man grunting. Beth’s eyes widened. ‘Who’s that?’ she whispered, pointing. More grunts.

  ‘Is it the pigs?’ Daniel asked, to which Beth and Stevie started laughing.

  ‘What?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Nothing, Dan,’ Beth said, laughing again.

  ‘Must be all the sandwiches she’s feeding him,’ Stevie said, and he and Beth exploded again. Maybe they were too loud, because the noise stopped and the night fell silent again. The water gurgled and spluttered. ‘This is going to take all night,’ I said. ‘We can’t just sit here for hours, waiting for it to fill.’

  ‘Then go home,’ Stevie said.

  Beth glanced at Stevie, and I caught something in her look, something I couldn’t quite understand. My mind was suddenly far down the road, in the park, behind the thick trunk of the chestnut tree. I could see small, pig-like eyes, a T-shirt concertinaed by insistent hands. I heard a tennis racquet on bone.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Beth, getting to my feet. Stevie wasn’t anything like those boys at the park, but Beth seemed to need his attention. When Stevie was around, I was superfluous.

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll stay with Stevie. You two can go home. That way you can cover for us if anyone notices we’re missing.’ I noticed Stevie’s knuckles pressing into Beth’s thigh, her short pyjamas barely covering the tops of her legs. She returned the gesture. Her giggles were soft, edged with excitement.