Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  Show-off, Harper thought. I give him ten seconds maximum.

  Still lying flat, Bud began to turn. He was on his back in the water, spread out, eyes closed, arms and legs motionless: but even though he wasn’t moving any part of his body, he began to wheel in the water. Beneath the still surface of the shallow pool, there was a current, an invisible force turning Bud’s small floating body. As his brother began to spin, Harper jumped to his feet at the same time as Poppa and they both called out and Bud opened his eyes, raised his head and looked at them, just as the eddy at the edge of the pool took him, tumbled him, pulled him to the left. He made one attempt to stand, getting to his feet so quickly that he slipped immediately on the wet rocks. He was down again, then gone.

  In the terrible and silent months that followed, the pictures that came into Harper’s head when he lay awake in his bed at night, eyes wide open in the dark, were this: the sunlight striking the water, how it was clear as glass; Bud’s arms and legs outstretched in a starfish pose and how it seemed that he began to turn and spin in the river so very slowly at first, even though everything had happened so quickly; the dreamy look on his face as he turned and drifted and then, all at once, went from a slow turn to spinning in the water as he lifted his small, questioning face at the sound of their cries. The water beyond the pool was still so shallow, no more than thigh height on him, but the current beneath the surface so strong that when he tried to stand it took his feet from under him in an instant.

  As Bud disappeared around the corner towards the fall, pulled from sight, Harper looked at Poppa for confirmation that what he thought was happening was not happening, and that was the worst moment of all: the look on Poppa’s face as he stared after Bud, the knowledge that the fissure that had opened in his head had opened in Poppa’s head too. Something so horrible it could not even be imagined had actually happened, right before their eyes. The edge of the fall was a few feet away, just out of sight. While they were still trying to believe the unbelievable, Bud was already dead.

  It was four months on from that afternoon, when their house was still cloaked in grief, that the letter came from Holland, the pale blue envelope with the blue and red flashes on the edge, wafer-thin like an old man’s skin, his mother’s spidery and precise hand, addressed to Michael Luther Senior.

  It was a Saturday so he was home – he didn’t go to the cartoon shows at the Variety any more, not on his own. He had collected the letter from the mailbox himself. When he handed it to Nina, she put it on the kitchen counter and said lightly, ‘Let’s wait till your grandfather is home, shall we?’

  ‘Why is it to him?’ he asked, looking past Nina at the letter where it lay.

  ‘I really need some help with these greens.’ It was only later that he realised she had been playing for time.

  Poppa arrived back about an hour later, carrying some fresh rolls from Balian’s. He had been calling in on a neighbour who needed some advice: lots of people wanted free advice from Poppa. The neighbour lived in a big house in Sugar Hill and while they had lunch Poppa talked about how this neighbour had not one but two white maids and how a famous musician lived next to him – the conversation was low-key, as it always was since that day. Harper felt much older, these days – old enough, in any case, to recognise that normality was effortful for all of them. It was only as Poppa was patting his lips with his napkin that Nina, who had scarcely spoken a word throughout the meal, rose, turned to the counter-top where the letter lay and held it up.

  Poppa stared at the letter in Nina’s hand, and then he stared at Nina, and Nina stared right back.

  ‘It’s from my mother . . .’ Harper announced, unnecessarily. ‘We haven’t opened it.’

  Poppa said, calmly, his gaze still locked with Nina’s, ‘Nicolaas, if you’ve finished, you can go and play with Jimmy.’

  Harper rose and picked up his plate and Poppa said, ‘You don’t need to clear the table today, Nicolaas, go play.’ Harper began to feel sick. Clearing the table was a rigid duty. He looked at Nina but she was still staring at Poppa, the letter in her hand.

  Poppa repeated, in a light tone of voice, ‘Nicolaas. Go kick a ball around the garden.’

  As Harper closed the back door behind him, slowly because he wanted to hear what would come next, Poppa said, ‘We don’t know for sure.’

  He sat down. A long silence came then.

  Then Nina’s voice, a strangled kind of shriek. ‘That selfish . . . selfish . . . trash . . . that’s all she is.’

  He had never heard Poppa raise his voice to Nina before now – Michael, when he was here, him occasionally, but not Nina.

  ‘Never use a phrase like that of our boy’s mother! It isn’t right.’

  ‘Is it right what she’s doing? Is it? How can you defend her? Everything went wrong the minute she came along. Michael.’

  ‘Michael wasn’t her fault, you know that.’

  ‘She didn’t help.’

  A concession, then. ‘No, she didn’t. But . . .’ Poppa’s voice was softer now.

  He had descended two of the steps before he sat down to make sure his head wasn’t visible in the glass panel in the top half of the door. All the same, all they had to do was glance out of the kitchen window to see that he hadn’t made it as far as the backyard.

  Nina was crying now. ‘Haven’t we lost enough?’ she sobbed. ‘Haven’t we?’ Poppa was soothing her.

  The most frightening thing was that, whatever the contents of the letter, things were bad enough for them to have forgotten him. Normally, Poppa was sharp enough to realise if he was hovering around. He sat on the step, listening to Nina’s sobs. At the end of the garden, Jimmy was snuffling in the border, the fluffy swoop of his tail a crescent-moon shape, batting to and fro.

  He still expected his brother to show up at any minute – still caught himself wondering why Bud did not come jumping down the stairs, two at a time, like always, or appear running around the corner of the house just as Harper had picked up a ball or a bat, claiming it was his. In the mornings, he woke up alone in the box room and looked over at Bud’s empty bed, the quilt neat and smoothed. If he closed his eyes again immediately, he could hear Bud’s voice in his head. He still thought to himself, some mornings, When I open my eyes again, Bud will be there. If I believe in it strongly enough, then that will make it so. Arjuna the warrior could have made that happen, somehow. Reverend Wilson had organised a memorial service and the whole of the district had come – people still left pies and casseroles on the veranda with chequered cloths over them – but there had been no funeral. His body had yet to be found.

  Later that day, Poppa called him into the sitting room and asked him to sit down. It reminded him of the first time he had come to the house, when Poppa had asked him into the kitchen and enquired, with a lawyer’s solemnity, whether it could really be true that he had an extra a in his name; and for the first few minutes of the conversation, even as it became clear how serious this matter was, he wondered whether Poppa was about to turn the whole thing into a joke.

  ‘Nicolaas, son, tell me, how much do you remember about your mother?’ Poppa continued without waiting for him to answer. ‘Do you remember how, when she left, your mother said she would either come back or send for you and Bud? Do you remember that?’

  He didn’t remember the conversation quite like that, but that didn’t seem important right now. It was more than three years since his mother had left. There had been letters occasionally, a birthday card each year. There had been a Christmas present that had arrived one February, three small hardback books he couldn’t read with a note saying he mustn’t forget his Dutch.

  ‘Well, even though Bud is gone, has been taken away from us, that time has come,’ Poppa said.

  They were going to Holland? He remembered so little about having lived there. The bread they ate was stale. They had to wear three coats inside the house because it was so cold. His mother had wailed every day that without his father’s army pension, they would starve. T
hey were going back to mud and cold? Did you still have to wear three coats inside the house?

  ‘When are we going?’

  Poppa paused. ‘Nina and I aren’t going, son. Our lives are here, in Los Angeles. My work is here. We would keep you here with us forever, if it was possible, I want you to know that. We think of you as ours. But your mother is your mother and she wants you back.’ It finally became clear: no Nina, no Poppa, no Jimmy either. He had lost Bud and now he was losing the rest of them.

  It was very simple. ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Nicolaas, your mother wrote us some time ago, after – after Bud was taken from us. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to worry you in case it wasn’t going to happen. We wrote back saying how we very much wanted you to stay with us but she has written us again and she is insistent and she is your mother, after all. She wants you back.’

  ‘I hate her.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Your mother loves you and that’s why she wants you back.’

  ‘She knows I like it here.’

  ‘Yes, she does but her need is greater than yours, in her head.’

  ‘Then she is a bad person. How can you let me go and live with a bad person?’ He suddenly felt very grown up, like a lawyer. It was simple. He just had to win the argument, then everything would be okay.

  Poppa had been standing up in front of him, but now he sat down next to him, reached out and, very gently, took hold of his upper arm, as if he needed to hold on to it for support. ‘Nicolaas, I can see how it seems like the same thing to you, from your point of view I mean, but she isn’t a bad person.’

  ‘Then what is she?’ At that moment, the immediate calamity was less pressing in his head than his appreciation of the struggle his Poppa was undergoing, the great lawyer, so used to dealing in certainty, now facing his toughest challenge yet: the moral reasoning of a twelve-year-old boy.

  Poppa pursed his lips, taking the question very seriously. ‘She is rather a person who believes that because of the bad things that have happened to her, she can never be blamed for the bad things she does herself. Nothing is ever Anika’s fault, we realised that after a while. When a person believes themselves to be unaccountable for their actions then there is nothing you can do. You can’t argue with them, you can’t reason. You might as well bang your head against the wall over there.’

  ‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  Poppa hesitated. ‘No, I don’t believe it is the same thing. The harm and hurt from your point of view may be just as great, but being unaccountable is not the same as being bad even though the unaccountable person may do as much harm as the bad person.’

  He was unconvinced. What did motivation matter if the end effect was the same? There was a long silence between them then, while he struggled with the idea that this argument was more than theoretical.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nicolaas, truly I am, because you’ve had so much moving around, and we had really hoped that your moving around was done, that you were here for good. Now, son, I know how you are feeling but I think we need to go and see Nina now and be brave for her because . . .’ And suddenly, Poppa stopped in the middle of this speech, and took a great heaving breath, as if he had been underwater for the whole conversation, had only just surfaced and had the chance to gulp at air. ‘Because we need to try and make her feel better, okay? Can you do that? Can you, Nicolaas?’

  Reverend Wilson’s brother took them to the Union Passenger Terminal in his Packard sedan. Jimmy came with them in the car, then was being delivered to neighbours to be looked after while Harper, Nina and Poppa undertook the long journey cross-country. Harper watched the car pull away with Jimmy looking at him out of the back window, his ears high, head on one side slightly, panting a little as it was a hot day. But even then, he did not really feel the weight of his departure, not with Poppa and Nina with him and a long ride on an Interstate to look forward to.

  They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the station. They had just waved Jimmy off. Nina was checking their belongings: small travel cases for her and Poppa, his large one; a wicker basket with a lid that was piled high with luncheon-meat sandwiches. When he had asked why she was making so many, she replied, ‘The rest of America isn’t like West Adams. We might not feel too comfortable in some of the restaurants.’

  Poppa frowned and scratched his neck. Nina had persuaded him to wear his heavy coat. ‘I’m a little warm in this thing,’ he grumbled.

  Just then, a police officer in a peaked cap with a badge wandered up, a leather strap diagonal across his chest, attached to his belt, just above his gun holster. Harper stared at the holster and the heavy-looking black gun: a real gun. He looked up at the officer, a man with a puffy white face and cheery smile, and grinned at him. The officer grinned back.

  ‘You folks travelling today?’ he asked them, looking at all three of them.

  ‘I have our tickets here,’ Poppa replied, patting the pockets of his heavy coat.

  The officer was looking at Harper, then said, ‘That’s okay, I don’t need to see them. This your child, boy?’

  Harper looked at the officer, confused, but Poppa, who had stopped patting his pockets and was standing very still, replied quietly, ‘My grandson.’

  The officer reached out a hand and placed it on Harper’s shoulder, giving him a small pat. ‘Nice-looking kid. You look after your grandparents now, son.’

  Harper glanced at Poppa, who was staring straight ahead, looked back at the officer and said quickly, ‘Yes, sir.’

  And the long journey and the passing countryside led eventually to this: another embarkation shed, a huge thing with a vaulted roof and sawdust floor and great, high windows through which vast shafts of light lit the crowds of passengers below and made travelling clothes, travelling crates, boxes and suitcases all shades of brown and grey, the flat colours of transience. After they had got to the head of a very long queue and put his name on the passenger list, the woman at the desk gave them a sheet of paper with the rules for Unaccompanied Young Persons and handed over a label on a piece of string. He had to wear it around his neck at all times. It had Holland-Amerika Lijn printed on one side and HAL in big capitals on the other with his name, date of birth and his destination written in a sloping hand. Beneath was the name of the person who was meeting him at the port in Rotterdam: Mrs Anika Aaltink.

  He was mortified. He had to wear a label like a tiny child would? He was going to be thirteen soon.

  ‘Just like a parcel,’ Nina said, as she tucked the label inside his jacket, kneeling in front of him, even though that made him taller than her now. All at once, she grabbed him and held her to him. Harper glanced around, over her head. In the corner of the departure shed was a group of teenage boys in school uniform.

  ‘The most precious parcel in the world,’ Nina said brokenly into his chest. Poppa put his hand gently on her shoulder and patted it until she released him and stood up.

  His last sight of Nina and Poppa for eight years came as he exited the departure shed at the far end, on his way to the jetty. When he turned around, they were standing holding on to each other and smiling at him: Poppa tall and bulky in his winter coat and hat, Nina, petite and smiling bravely, both with their hands raised. Nina waved hard and Harper, who had attached himself to the end of the group of boys, lifted his hand in an awkward little half-wave, glancing from one of them to the other quickly, worried that whichever of them was the last one he smiled at, the other might be upset – but at the same time not wanting to embarrass himself in front of the group of big boys just ahead of him.

  It was a relief to get out onto the concrete jetty, where the ship loomed and the air smelled of smoke and fuel and a soft rain fell and the business of goodbye was over. Right at that particular moment, the adventure to come seemed adequate compensation for leaving his grandparents behind. The missing them would come later.

  *

  Travelling the Atlantic Ocean alone, the label round his neck at all times as he
had been instructed, even when he was washing – surely it must have made some impression on him? When he tried to remember that voyage, there was something in his head about an ice cream, an ice cream sandwich made with thick soggy slabs of some sort of cookie mixture. A sailor who played cards with him? A little girl in a pinafore? Without his mother there to make the pictures of the voyage, that Atlantic journey at the age of twelve seemed vaguer when he thought back to it than the one he had undertaken with his mother when he was three. Saying goodbye to Poppa and Nina must have been hard but, as far as he remembered, the voyage itself didn’t bother him – being in a state of transition was too familiar to his bones.

  The arrival – that was different. Like all the passengers, he hung over the side, watching the coast appear. He joined the melee processing clumsily down the gangplank, bumping his case on the wooden ridges and losing control of it at one point, tripping a young woman in heels just ahead of him. She turned her head back to him, scowling over her shoulder, then stopped, blocking the way for everybody, to adjust her stockings. Then he was on the quay and trapped in a huge crowd of adults who grouped and gathered in greetings before moving off, people clinging to each other. When a clearing opened, he turned to his left and saw, first of all, a barrel-chested man in a tweed coat and black hat who was shouting, ‘Indié verloren, rampspoed geboren!’ with his arms wide open. His ruddy face was contorted and open-mouthed, as if he had made a tremendous joke. On her knees next to him, kneeling right there on the wooden planks of the arrivals jetty, was a woman with her hair scraped back in a ponytail that revealed harsh lines leading down from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. She had tears pouring down her cheeks. She, too, had her arms open and she was crying, ‘Come here! Oh come here, baby boy!’