The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  His mother is Chapel (and so are he and his sister), his father is Church. ‘Like the squire,’ says Alphabetical Dance, half-seriously. Religious conflict is expressed chiefly in their Sunday competitions of humility and goodness. Deep female sighs and eye-rollings versus frowning male worthiness, with her bottle of sacred Jordan water sitting in the centre of the mantel like a referee. But his father’s hunger usually means his withdrawal from the battle by lunchtime, leaving the other side to martyrdom and marmalade toast.

  He’s winking at the children. Provocatively slicing himself a slab of mutton. ‘Grace, I’ve been hearing about those Christians from the New Jerusalem Church and I’d welcome your opinion on earth-bathing.’ Eating pink meat off the knife like a ploughman, knowing she hates that. His juicy mastications roaring in the silent room.

  ‘Baptism by soil, certainly makes a change. That Dr Pugh and Miss Arundell in Urchfont got themselves buried naked up to their heads for six hours a day. Stuck it out for nine days, I hear. Beautifully powdered and dressed, the heads. Appeared not unlike two fine cauliflowers.’

  In the Sunday suspense she almost rises to the bait. He’s having trouble keeping a straight face.

  ‘Mind you, even out of the ground Dr Pugh liked to dress in cut turfs. Massaging himself with nervous balsam of his own making. Turned his skin green as moss and his last fortnight on earth he ate no food at all.’

  But he doesn’t tease for long. Where’s the fun in a response of silence? Tight lips that stay pursed well into Monday? Anyway, his strong feelings about religion are only to do with drainage and seepage. His passion is roused by the churches’ proud and foolish habit of building on rising ground. He says rain from the churchyards drains down into the local wells and poisons the water.

  ‘Graves and gravity!’ he snorts. ‘Show me an outbreak of fever and I’ll show you corpse-spoiled drinking water.’

  It is interesting therefore that his annual drowning cycle takes place with the regularity and solemnity of religious festivals. It begins each year at Michaelmas when the river, in his opinion, is ‘thick and good’. The true faith of Alphabetical Dance is water.

  The mood of Sundays weighs heavily on the eleven-year-old boy. The air has a different look, smell and sound to him. A humble grey light casting asphalty shadows over and far beyond the Ebenezer Baptist Chapel. A threadbare day holding a scurfy sadness, as if someone aged and pious were hunched inside his body.

  Waking to the subdued kitchen murmurings of the Sabbath, the prim odours of soap, starch and scorch, his soul feels old and tired. His spirits plummet, stifled in a second by the idea of Sunday best, prayers, the worthy, dull routines of chapel and Sunday school. All the passive, insipid, bygone nature of the day.

  Inside the bare, square chapel he looks up from their own bald and waxy Pastor Gerard to the hermetically sealed windows of opaque green glass set high in its walls and imagines he’s in some underwater prison. On Sundays he feels submerged, a hypocritical prisoner of the past. And when he finally emerges into the air, swifts wheel and scream around the grey church roof.

  Long before he and his mother and sister reached the river, the water carried the people’s voices singing ‘Shall We Gather’ up over the meadow and along the road. The bank on one side was steep and densely wooded, the sun had not yet risen over the rim and the water looked deep and still, penetrated by night.

  Shadows on water are more sinister than shadows on land. The mobile black surface recalled his father’s old bogey-myths: river phantoms, night-eels who savoured men’s entrails, goblins who gorged at night and withdrew like fogs at dawn. And nymphs posing as beautiful washerwomen to lure men to the riverbank. Only sleeping when the morning mists steamed from their victims’ drowned mouths. Will buttoned his shirt collar against them and tried to steer his mind to Jesus.

  There were clumps of horses and donkeys and hay carts and farm traps tied to trees at the top of the bank. All the way around and down the sides of this natural amphitheatre crowded tiers of men, women and children. Boys were climbing trees, and some had crawled way out on rocky outcrops for a better view. There were people upriver as far as he could see. In the distance where the sun shone they were singing ‘Shall We Gather’. He could hear the words rolling downstream, jumbled up with the burbling of the water and the breeze in the treetops until, as the sound swept nearer, the massed voices drowned the sounds of the river.

  The candidates for baptism were huddled in a black and white flock on the bank. Their friends and families stood back a little, in recognition of their status. Most of the women looked pale and drawn, but several girls were skittish and pinkly vivacious, like bold, veil-less brides. Some of the males trembled with emotion. Most of them fidgeted self-consciously with their tight collars or their bicycle clips. They weren’t men and youths he looked up to. Spotty municipal clerks, shiny drapery assistants, damp-fingered librarians, most of them. Young men with the neutral patina of religiosity. Damp patches of tension in their armpits. He was the youngest of them, and his delighted mother, who had been smoothing and dabbing at his hair, now patted the back of his neck and pushed him towards them.

  There was a sudden hush and a short black figure stepped into the water and waded out into the river pool until he was waist-deep. While he secured a firm footing on the river bed, three helpers, one of them fat Mr Freeth the haberdasher, came and stood between him and the waiting group on the bank and made a human chain. They faced downstream, and the running water banked up in ripples behind Mr Freeth’s buttocks. There was another burst of song and then silence as, one at a time, the awestruck candidates came down to the brink, paused a moment, and with a small splash plopped in and waded to the outstretched hands of the pastor’s helpers.

  And too soon there was no one ahead of Will. Hands plucked at him and pushed him forward. The edges of his vision clouded and narrowed so tightly he could barely make out the ranks of watery smiles, the polite tiers of blurry angels hovering under a sky as white and clotted as paste.

  The beautiful, the beautiful riverrr …

  In a trance he stepped into the river. The shock, the clamminess of his trousers, just registered before Mr Freeth hauled him up and pushed him against the current to another man, who did the same. Then looming before him was the legendary Mr Harold Thring. Before Will could snatch a breath or gather a single Christian thought, little Mr Thring, surprisingly strong, grabbed his shoulders and dunked him like a biscuit in a tea cup.

  Cold water flooded into his ears and eyes and engulfed him. Above him Mr Thring’s voice said something religious, but all he heard was babble. Mr Thring’s hands heaved him up into the air again and passed him back along the line to Mr Freeth, who led him, dazed, to the bank. He scrambled up and stood dripping while his mother brought him a towel and hot tea. The cold water had made him want to piss. She looked on him fondly as she dried his hair. Her eyes were glistening and she kept saying, ‘Oh, William. How reverent! How impressive!’ Even Sarah smiled on him.

  There were others still being baptised and as he sipped his tea he watched their dunkings with a growing detachment. The sun was on the water now and he was trying to concentrate on Jesus, but his bladder and the ritual in the river below somehow drove Him away. The efficiency of the immersions, the bedraggled flock, made him think more of shepherds at a sheep-dipping. Under his towel, in his wet trousers, he trickled secretly down his legs.

  Now his mind drifted around the way the women’s dresses alternately clung and billowed in the current, and the feeling of the sun on his head, and the sugary dregs in his tea cup. His mother was still humming ‘Shall We Gather’ and the tune was embedding in his brain. In the sunlight a kingfisher suddenly pierced the skin of the river—a quick sapphire needle spearing his vision, too—and flared away.

  His Sabbath mood was on him one November when he and Sarah diverted home from Sunday school along the river bank. Neither of them was up to speaking. Sarah carried their Bibles and prayer books and her tongue kep
t making smug clicks on the roof of her mouth. This week’s illustrated religious text was rammed in his pocket. Holding a shepherd’s crook like a boat hook, Jesus tended gambolling lambs on a field of soggy paper.

  The way the noon light struck their familiar haunt gave it a similar watery Christian look. The river was older and greyer than he’d seen it, the rest of the day was leached and hazy. In the breadth of his sight no waterbirds swam, no fish rippled the surface, no boys fished. A weak sun bled into a sky as pale as birdlime. Flighty breezes caught the raw willows on the banks, then left to huff in the tops of elms. An over-respectful dove cooed in an elder tree. In a danker reach of the river the Sunday feeling burned the back of his throat and he had to speak.

  ‘What if I was to throw myself in the water?’ he said. ‘And drown?’

  Sarah stopped clicking and blinked. ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘I might.’

  This feeling was new: the satisfaction of her wide-eyed anxiety and sudden loss of authority. He felt older, taller. When they came to a boat landing spattered with duck droppings he walked briskly to the end of the little wharf, peered over the edge and teetered thoughtfully on the brink. Specks of scum streaked past in the layered current. Algaes and fish-mucus, upriver flotsam, a dead rat and a branch like a clawing hand.

  He saw his own body and luxuriated in images of parental grief. He said, ‘A good place to jump from.’

  ‘You can swim anyway.’

  ‘People can stop themselves from swimming and just sink.’

  ‘It’s not deep enough.’

  ‘You can drown in a bathtub. Old Piddle Quirk drowned in a ditch at Market Lavington.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘All right, I’ll do it.’

  ‘I’d like to see you.’

  He lurched forward.

  ‘No, Will, don’t! I’ll tell.’

  Fortuitously then a neat triangle of ducks swam round the bend and past the landing. The drake was the apex, the aloof spearhead. The flanking females quacked pugnaciously behind. Will was losing interest anyway. Some child had left a jar of bullfrog tadpoles on the bank; to change the subject he tipped it over and scooped up the tadpoles. Thick black bodies wriggling softer than decay in his hands.

  One by one, he threw the tadpoles to the ducks. Still warmed by her panic, strangely exhilarated by the shift in the world’s ways, he watched the triangle disintegrate into chaos.

  Another example of his father’s artistry with water: he creates ponds to entice the mist and clouds. He traps water vapour in his dewponds. One April Saturday he announces casually that a new dewpond is wanted near Martinwood. Lately he has become bulkier, grizzled as a boar. His ears and nose are sprouting. He’s all spiky eyebrows, too, and his thick body rolls as if to test the floor. He looks edgier these days, stiffer and closer to the ground, and his voice is lower and muttery.

  ‘Only time I can spare,’ he says.

  ‘It’s Palm Sunday tomorrow,’ she says.

  ‘But not today, Grace, and I can’t help the seasons,’ says Alphabetical Dance steadily, not looking at his wife. ‘The old dewpond got iced up and crumpled in winter. Anyhow, it’s looking, not working. It’s only our eyes’ll be doing it.’

  ‘Our eyes?’

  ‘I need Will for this.’

  Amazing that a cloud can form so quickly above and around her. Dewponds unsettle her. There’s the pagan element, and the problem that siting a dewpond requires nighttime observation. One of Nature’s drawbacks is that it doesn’t rest at midnight; it’s irritatingly illogical and drawn-out and too readily seeps into the Sabbath. Nature creates freaks, like the white otter her husband has recently trapped, stuffed and provocatively installed in a glass case on the mantel. So crockery is noisily adjusted, jugs and cups shunted into important new alignments on the dresser. Meanwhile her dish displacements create a vacuum that sucks all the air from the kitchen. A dark mood of nimbus, she bustles eventually into the sitting room, towards the sanctity of the Jordan water. And is mocked by the adjacent albino otter.

  How to bustle without losing ground? How to separate Nature and Almighty God?

  ‘It’s not Easter yet, Grace,’ says his father, heading for the door.

  The trap is already loaded with tarpaulins and sacking, and a bottle hidden under them for the chill. At the door he turns and for the first time faces his wife’s stormy eyes. For a long moment he looks about to say something more. But he says, ‘Don’t you worry if we’re late for once.’

  She turns away.

  His father calls over his shoulder to him, ‘Put on your dew-beaters. And a coat for the hilltop.’

  And they leave. He has never before noticed the act of leaving the house, the significance of departure.

  They drive the pony and trap up as high as they can go. Up the perversely named downs, which are most definitely ups, the whole patchwork of the land’s weathers and whorls and striations unrolling before them. There, rainy river valley, and there, magenta dusk, and there, sunny meadow, and over there, looking south across the misty sweep of Salisbury Plain, he believes he can see the Channel.

  The escarpment steepens sharply and they unharness the pony, pile it with tarpaulins, and lead it up the narrow sheep track. Following the oblique trail of droppings and high smell of ammonia to the top. Sheep urine and the vegetable combustion of the hillside defying the sharp wind. Snagged in the brambles, scraggy, waving wool-ends as big as lambs taunting a soaring falcon.

  She turned away from me!

  It’s the custom of dewpond makers to wait on the highest peaks for the night fogs, which fall on the high downs even in summer. People sleeping at normal hours are unaware of these fogs, so wet that a man riding on the downs before dawn finds his clothes sticking to him and every tree dripping water. Dewpond makers squat on the foggiest hills and wait for the sun to burn through the mist banks and tell them where to site the ponds. As they wait, huddled under tarpaulins, too cold and damp with haze to sleep, they drink a dew-cap to keep warm, and they tell stories.

  He was digging a dewpond above Devizes once, his father tells him, and brought up a pelvis on his mattock. It was a mass grave, countless pressed and layered skulls and femurs calcified together into a rich stratum. The thing was, it looked as much a part of the earth’s structure as any seam of slate or quartz. He and his labourers withdrew their picks and shovels and stepped back to consider this geological formation. They had already carted clay and limestone and straw up to the hole, put in a fortnight’s time and labour, but they filled it in.

  ‘Who were they? Where did they come from?’

  Under the tarpaulin his father could be a Druid. Beyond his hooded figure nothing happens but the swirling of the void. The clouds have dropped so low they now envelop them. The pony has been swallowed by clouds. There is cloud on his own fingertips and cloud blurring his boots, and when he breathes he takes cold damp into his lungs and tastes clouds.

  His father’s muffled voice says, ‘These hills were Bronze and Iron Age hill-forts, and henge tombs before that. Human sacrifices and plague and wars from Day One.’

  The soft bitterness of evaporated people is on his tongue. The cold sourness of bodies unearthed in the mist.

  She didn’t say goodbye.

  His father sips from the bottle, clears his throat and pats the chalk and sandstone ground. Pinches up some wet dirt in his fingers. ‘Cavaliers defending Devizes drove a company of Cromwell’s men over this escarpment.’

  Will leans against him, peering into the murk.

  ‘You know Mary Beamish hears the screams of men and horses on still nights.’ He sips again. ‘But those old Roundheads and Cavaliers are busy most nights somewhere or other. Re-fighting their most ferocious battles in the sky.’

  All he hears is their thick breathing and the soft patter of fog on their waterproofs. The smeary, moonless sky is unflamboyant. Nothing vibrates on the hill but the wind on the dewy grass. Nonetheless he feels weighed down by ancient sarsen st
ones and clouds of history. Barely suffered by the rituals of the knowing earth.

  ‘Reminded me of a chunk of French nougat, that seam of skulls was pressed so tight in the chalk,’ his father says. ‘Shame you Baptists don’t drink whisky.’ He takes a swig himself, pulls his tarpaulin around Will’s shoulders and sits close.

  Flickering skin on his scalp, skin unrolling cold down his neck and back.

  Oh, my dad.

  At first light Alphabetical Dance nudges his son and stands and shakes the stiffness and moisture from his shoulders. He steps out from under the tarpaulins surprisingly chirpy, clears his throat, stretches, squats again, scoops his hands into the grass and splashes dew up in his face.

  ‘Might learn things today,’ he says.

  A miniature spiderweb holds a kaleidoscope of dewdrops. Sheeny tracks of snails and slugs crisscross through the dew. Kestrels already cry over the hill. Will brushes dew from the pony’s coat and warms his hands on its flanks. His father turns away politely and pisses a green path down the silvery hillside, and when Will mentions food he nods.

  ‘Hold your horses, unless you want to boil up some nice snail broth.’

  When most of the mist has burned away, small clouds stay in the hollows. To site the dewpond they search out these dips which have kept the haze. There a pond might last. Then his father tramps the dewy ground looking for that special misty pocket with the qualities he wants. Ground wide enough and free of rocks to allow the digging, puddling and ramming of a pond twenty yards or so across. ‘No bloody sarsen stones in the middle, but not too chalky either or the worms’ll burrow up and hole it.’ And on a gradual slope (‘to give the winter ice room to expand and not cut into the sides’) and also (‘m’ yown preference’) abutting a tree or bush.