Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  ‘At least have a coffee!’ wailed Nina, as Poppa rushed back out without bidding either of them goodbye. The front door slammed.

  ‘When they call, he goes,’ Nina said, shaking her head. ‘There’s always someone in trouble somewhere.’

  Harper never returned to the boarding house. That Sunday, his mother and Michael came over with a small suitcase with stiff clasps that contained his clothes, two books which he had to give straight back to them as they belonged to the local library and a new ball that Michael had bought him as a present. He was told he would be staying with Nina and Poppa for a few days while his mother and Michael ‘sorted out a few things’. The few days turned into a fortnight. Then it was announced to him, with some degree of fanfare, that Anika and Michael were going to get married. They were all going to live together in the big house with Jimmy the dog. The room with the sewing machine was going to become Harper’s official bedroom and he could choose which colour it was painted as long as it was blue or white. It was the first time he had ever had his own room.

  The household had its own engagement party, the five of them, standing a little awkwardly in the sitting room together, while Poppa came through from the kitchen holding a bottle of something he called ‘homemade elder wine’ to pour into the glasses Nina fetched from the cabinet in the corner. It was the only time Harper ever saw Nina and Poppa take alcohol and he sensed even then that it was something of a momentous gesture.

  Poppa held up his glass and said, ‘This is to welcome Anika, and Nicolaas to our family . . .’ he paused, ‘and also to celebrate the fact that this is legally possible since only just over a year ago, God bless the wisdom of the California Supreme Court!’ He turned to Nicolaas and looked down at him and said knowingly, ‘Perez v. Sharp.’ Michael groaned aloud, took Anika’s hand and squeezed it, and Nina frowned at them and Poppa lifted his finger in admonition while continuing, ‘And henceforth, this state, the first since Ohio, is no longer going to violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, amen!’

  ‘Amen!’ said Nina, much more loudly than she did at mealtimes, and even Michael and Anika murmured it, and Harper piped it too, raising his glass of orange juice and cheering along with the others. He didn’t really understand why they should toast the Supreme Court of the State of California but he did understand that the unusual collection of people that was his new family was somehow heroic, just for existing, and that the figurehead of this heroism was Poppa, who looked, as he lowered his glass, both delighted and exhausted. Nina was standing the other side of Poppa and he heard Poppa say then, from the corner of his mouth, ‘You’re next, baby. You in big trouble now.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ Nina replied, and a small laugh ran around the group.

  ‘Are you getting married too?’ he asked Poppa, looking up at him.

  Poppa rested his large hand on the top of Harper’s head and said gently, ‘Yes son, we are, not immediately though, it’s been a long wait, but this time around it’s Michael and your mother. Nina and I get our turn later in the year.’

  Harper was silent for a minute then. There were five of them in their group, and four of them were paired off. Poppa bent down, his hand on Harper’s shoulder, and it was the first of many occasions when Poppa seemed to know exactly the right thing to say. ‘I guess you might be feeling like the one left out at the moment, but all you have to do is wait a while. No one is the odd one out for long.’ Harper looked up at him, and as Poppa straightened, he gave him an enormous wink.

  Harper’s baby brother was born some months later. He was called – after some heated debate in the household – Joseph, although from the beginning, they all called him Bud.

  It was Poppa and Nina who brought Bud home. Anika was in hospital for three weeks after the birth, with complications, Nina said. Michael was with her a lot. Harper was not allowed to visit her in hospital but she would be home soon, he was told. It was nothing to worry about. Sometimes ladies got sad after a baby, it was normal.

  Poppa lifted Bud in his carrycot onto the kitchen table and Harper went over to have a look. He had been hoping his newborn brother would look up at him and smile and clutch his finger in his fist like babies were supposed to do, but Bud was tightly swaddled and only his fat little head was visible, moving very slightly from side to side as he began to stir from sleep. Looking down at this thing, slug-shaped in its blanket, Harper was suddenly overcome with a feeling he had never felt before, a wave of some strong emotion so sudden and welling within him that he felt dizzy and gripped the sides of the carrycot. He stared down at the baby and the baby opened his eyes and his dark-eyed gaze roved around loosely, ill-focused and helpless. Then baby Bud yawned and Harper and Poppa and Nina all looked at each other and smiled and exhaled at the same time.

  Nina came and stood next to him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘He’s all yours, Nicolaas, he’s your baby brother.’ And Harper realised that, for the first time in his life, he was no longer the newest addition to any group or family. Poppa and Nina would die one day because they were old and his mother and Michael would die too because they were the next oldest and he had always thought that when that happened, when his mother died, he would be alone, but here was a baby that belonged to him and he would die first, not the baby, because he was older than the baby.

  Baby Bud screwed his face up in an expression that in an older child or adult might have meant a sneeze was coming but in a newborn baby, Harper quickly learned, was preparatory to a cry.

  ‘Milk time,’ Nina said, ‘you’d better help me, Nicolaas, it’s going to be your job sometimes, you know.’ A bottle was boiling in a pan of water on the stovetop. A pile of diapers was neatly folded on the counter beside it. Not being the youngest any more was going to make Harper a certain amount of work.

  He had a new school now – he went on the bus each day that stopped at the bottom of the hill. It was black kids mostly and on his second day, two of the boys in his class shoved him up against a wall in the corridor and demanded to know what he thought about Pearl Harbor, but the school secretary came along and said to the boys, hissing beneath her breath, ‘Shame on you. Nicolaas isn’t Japanese, he was locked up by them and has come to America to live with his grandfather.’ The boys had stepped back and looked at him. ‘Locked up?’ said one, impressed: but Harper hadn’t noticed that bit. His insides were swelling with pride at the word grandfather.

  At the end of the school day, he would run up the hill to see his baby brother. Nina was usually in the kitchen when he got home. Harper would sit on a chair at the table and Nina would give him a drink of milk and he would demand a full account of Bud’s day.

  When he looked back on those few years in California from the perspective of adulthood, it was hard sometimes to remember that early part, the happy part: five years of routine and certainty for him – what happened at the end of those five years was so overwhelming and calamitous that it collapsed time, concertinaed those years into no more than a few images. It made it seem as though that early, happy period for him had been no more than the prelude to the inevitable.

  Poppa’s work was something that Harper only ever comprehended glancingly. What it meant to him mostly was that Poppa was out of the house a lot, including evenings and weekends, and that this was a source of tension between Poppa and Nina and sometimes Poppa and Michael. Sometimes, the people Poppa worked with would come to him. The sitting room would fill up, often so many people that some sat on the floor. There would be debates and one or two of the men would leave, shrugging their coats on as they went out and slamming the door behind them. Mostly, people filtered out quietly, often long after Harper had been sent to bed. He would be awoken by the murmurings of hallway departures.

  Once, when Bud was still a baby, Harper came downstairs to see Nina standing at the front door, holding it open, looking out anxiously. She turned as she heard Harper and said, ‘Go through to the kitchen, go on now.’

  Harper stopped where
he was, halfway down the stairs. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just go, go on, not long. Poppa’s just clearing something off the front lawn.’

  He couldn’t see Poppa from where he stood but he could hear the hiss of the garden hose. ‘What’s on the lawn?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Nina replied, shutting the front door and turning to him, shooing him with her hands. ‘Just some bleach, someone stupid spilt it.’

  The next two meetings were held in the kitchen, until Poppa decreed it was ridiculous. The kitchen was too darn small.

  People would bring things on plates for the meetings, often – there was always food in Nina and Poppa’s house – and sometimes, Harper would hand round the things on plates. Once, as he was handing round some slightly undercooked cookies that collapsed as people lifted them from the plate, a plump man with large hands looked at Harper and said, ‘Say, son, where you from?’

  ‘My grandson is from Indonesia,’ Poppa called across the room, where he was standing talking to two men who were both smoking. ‘All the way across the world.’

  ‘How come you . . . ?’ the man began to Harper.

  Poppa cut across him. ‘How he got here doesn’t matter. He’s here now.’ He gave Harper a smile.

  It was only later, years later, that he realised that the whole time things were going right for him, they were going very wrong for Michael Junior and his mother: almost from the start.

  They had jobs for a bit – his mother worked in a shop for a while, Michael a garage, but no job seemed to last, and sometimes they were both home for weeks at a stretch but they stayed in their room and if he asked Nina she would say, ‘They’re very tired, they’re resting. Don’t disturb them.’ Then they would be gone all weekend. One day, he went into their room when they were away; he was looking for a book he had been reading on their bed and, underneath the bed, he saw a tin box and a flat-shaped bottle on its side and a row of four or five glass tumblers that all looked sticky and, without understanding, he knew that these were bad things that had been hidden. He said nothing to anyone.

  Michael was kind to him, when he was around. He sat on the steps leading down to the garden wearing a white undershirt and smoking, smiling his slow smile and tossing a ball to the end of the garden so that Harper and Jimmy could run after it together. Harper always let Jimmy win.

  But there were the fights between his mother and Michael that took place in that bedroom when the door was closed. Michael’s voice was deep, patient mostly, until something crashed against the wall. His mother always started shrill and hysterical, right from the very beginning. They did it in the evenings after Harper had gone to bed, but he woke to hear it often.

  One evening, when it was particularly noisy, Nina came into Harper’s and Bud’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, and stroked his hair back from his forehead. Bud was sound asleep in his cot. Harper had been lying awake for a while. Nina stroked him for a while in silence, then said, ‘They saw a war, Nicolaas, try and remember that, what your mother went through, what Michael went through in a different way, those of us older, those of us younger like you, it’s difficult for us to understand what they went through. They were just so young, and Michael saw some terrible things, I know, even though he doesn’t talk about them. He is . . . well, it’s hard to explain.’

  And then, one day, Michael wasn’t there any more, and Poppa stayed off work for a while – which was unheard of – and took to standing at the window in the front sitting room, just staring out into the street, his hands in his pockets, for hour after hour. Harper’s mother stayed in her room and wept and there were sharp words between her and Nina on the rare occasions that she emerged.

  He began to wonder if Michael had died and nobody had told him, but when he asked Nina what had happened, she sat him down on the back step, which was where the difficult things often got said in their house, and told him that Michael had been unhappy for a long time, ever since he came back from the war, unhappy in the same way that his mother was sometimes unhappy, and that she, Nina, guessed they had got married hoping that their unhappiness would cancel each other’s out but instead it just made it multiply. Did he know that his mother sometimes took a few too many alcoholic beverages? He nodded. That much he had worked out. Well, Michael did too sometimes and they had sort of encouraged each other, which was obviously a bad thing. They both should have been with people who would have done the opposite. There had been a big argument when he had been at school one day and Michael had gone off to another city and it would probably be a very long time before they saw him again and it was making everyone very sad. It was particularly hard for Poppa, Nina said, because he saved people all day long and yet he couldn’t save his own son.

  At this point, they heard, behind them, ‘Dubba! Dubba!’

  They turned. Bud had crawled out of the open kitchen door and wanted them to watch as he stood unsteadily, a feat he had only just learned, before dropping to all fours again and crawling the small space over to Harper. Once he reached him, he levered himself to his feet again by grasping at Harper’s shirt, standing unsteadily for a moment like a tiny, genial drunk and then splaying both fat hands and bashing them on Harper’s head, a kind of fierce patting.

  ‘Hey Bud, cut it out,’ said Harper, smiling and remaining motionless to allow Bud to continue, and Bud laughed his throaty chuckle as if what he was doing was the funniest thing in the world.

  Nina looked at them both and shook her head and said, ‘You two brothers got a lot more sense than the whole of the adults in this house put together. People say things are complicated but you two know they aren’t, they’re really simple.’

  It was a Sunday afternoon when his mother told him she was going back to Holland for a bit, to see Aunty Lies. His first thought was that she was going to say he had to go with her – she had told him often enough that he was the centre of her world. The thought of being separated from Bud and Jimmy the dog, even for a few weeks, was more than he could bear.

  But instead, Anika pressed him to her bony chest and said, ‘I know you’ll miss me so much, Nicolaas, but I need you to be braver than you’ve ever been. Things here have been really hard for me since Michael left and I need to go back home for a bit. Can you manage without me for a little while? It’s something I just have to do, things have been so mixed up here lately and you know how much I miss our Homeland.’ Did he? ‘I’m just going back to sort out a few things. Bud is still little and he’d get seasick if I took you both now, you wouldn’t I know because you’re really good about that kind of thing. You know, you’re the only man who has never let me down.’

  With Michael and his mother gone – and neither absence given a definite end date – the house was calmer, although as Bud grew, that livened things up a bit. He was a toddler who ran up and down, everywhere, from the minute he could, both furious and amused at the same time: tight curls, light brown skin with a throw of dark brown freckles across his nose, as if he had been playing with a very fine paintbrush, a high piping voice that called Harper, ‘Nick-er-lus.’ Three syllables at least. Once he had learned to pronounce it, he would jump his small bottom up and down in his high chair at mealtimes, repeating it again and again if he did not have Harper’s full attention for one minute of the meal. ‘Nick-er-lus, Nick-er-lus, Nick. Er. Lus!’

  ‘You know, Nicolaas,’ Nina said once, when she was getting him to help her fold laundry. ‘That little boy thinks all the good things in the world come from you, like you’re a god or something. You should hear him when it’s time for you to come home from school.’

  He was not a god. Nor was Poppa, the great lawyer who everyone admired so. If either of them had been a god, it would never have happened, that dreadful day three years later, in the bright sunshine, with the sun sparking off water clear as glass.

  So many times, in the aftermath, he found himself reliving that afternoon and holding back or running forward, insisting that they took the other fork in the path, being ill that morning, or pushi
ng Bud off a step so that he would twist an ankle – anything, anything that would mean that day could not progress until the moment when time stopped altogether, in bright light, the thunder of white water in the air.

  Other families had holidays, that was the truth. But other families were not like theirs: Poppa, Nina, Nicolaas and Bud. It wasn’t just their ages or their different skin tones, no one of the four of them alike, it was Poppa’s work too. Nina explained it to them one evening, when Poppa was, as usual, late for dinner. ‘Think of it like this, boys. Your Poppa is out there fighting this giant monster. It’s a great big monster that eats people. And he knows full well he can’t defeat it all on his own and that it’s going to take years and years but even when he works really hard that monster keeps on eating. But if he stops work for a bit, the monster eats harder and faster.’ She paused and looked at each of them sternly. ‘And so what’s Poppa to say to the people who get eaten if he takes a break? Sorry, I’ll be back tomorrow?’

  Harper looked at Bud, across the table from him, five years old, wide-eyed, knife and fork clutched in the wrong hands. He thought maybe that comparison was a little much for his small brother.

  The front door slammed and Poppa ambled, shoulders down, into the kitchen, loosening his tie. Bud dropped the knife and fork onto the table with a clatter, jumped down from his seat and flung himself against Poppa’s legs, burying his face in them. Poppa put his hand absently on Bud’s head and looked up and Nina said, ‘I was just explaining to the boys how you were out slaying the dragon.’