The Swimmer

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Amma,’ his voice admonishes me, ‘Amma, don’t beat yourself with a stick!’

  It was the expression he used whenever he saw me become agitated.

  When I came out of the mortuary, the woman, Ria, had thrust a tissue into my hand.

  ‘Mrs Chinniah,’ she said.

  It was the first I knew of my own tears. The police were carefully sympathetic. They were wary of me as if I was some sort of unexploded bomb. After all, they were going to be sued, weren’t they? For getting the wrong man? For thinking my beloved son was a Pakistani Muslim; a terrorist who steals passports and makes bombs. For thinking he had been slaughtering farm animals when all the time it was some white criminal who was framing the refugees. My Ben, who loved all animals. There were two crimes, I wanted to scream. And none of them involved my son. The lawyer, hired by Ria, had been grim-faced and determined. Justice, he told me, would be done. Now there was nothing left to fight for, they talked about justice. Ria, her face a perfect, neat symmetry of emptiness, watched me, frowning. Ben would have talked to her about me, of course and I imagined she was trying to work me out. Try, I thought, grimly. What had my son to do with her?

  The sun has temporarily disappeared. A large notice advertising fresh eggs flashes by. Grief clots heavily inside me. I dare not move in case it escapes and takes on a life of its own. The coach travels onwards, carrying us through a landscape of vast fields and endless skies. Time passes, minutes move seamlessly. I can tick them off neatly from my life.

  As we left the mortuary, Ria asked the driver to drop us off at Saxmundham.

  ‘I’ve left my car in the car park there,’ she said in a low voice.

  It was all she said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  I remember I licked my lips like an animal in a trap. The moment stretched like an elastic band, tightly around my head.

  ‘We’ll see you Monday at ten, then?’

  Still I continued to stare out of the window.

  ‘Mrs Chinniah?’

  It was the lawyer. I couldn’t think what his name was.

  ‘Yes,’ Ria said quickly. ‘Yes, ten on Monday. We’ll be there.’

  At Saxmundham we changed cars and the lawyer shook my hand. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Not far,’ Ria said, glancing at me, as she got into the driver’s seat.

  The road we took wound its way through empty countryside flanked by fields and leafless trees. They reminded me of a child’s drawing. The earth, I thought, had killed itself. It was black and petrified and poisoned. I remembered my father saying long ago when the war first began, we would always love our country no matter what, because we had our childhood in it. We cannot change the way things are, I thought dully.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Ria asked.

  I shook my head and she sighed.

  ‘You should eat.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She frowned.

  ‘Tomorrow will not be any easier, Mrs Chinniah.’

  Why did she keep calling me Mrs Chinniah? I felt a savage stab of rage. I had no idea where it came from, but as if she understood Ria gave me a sharp look. I hate you, I thought. She slowed the car down and turned into a narrow lane. I thought perhaps that we had reached her house but instead I saw a flat colourless expanse of water. It had begun to rain slightly and a late afternoon sun was struggling to break through the tight drum of the sky. Ria drove the car up a pebbled path and stopped. Turning off the ignition, she wound the window down and through the wind I heard the long, keening cry of a lone seagull. It was my undoing, this cry, flying straight to my broken heart. Surely Christ had stopped at this godforsaken place?

  She said nothing while I cried. I must have sat there weeping for twenty minutes or so, but all she did was sit motionless, staring out at the sea through the windscreen of the car. She was cold, you see. A cold, white woman without feeling. I cried as though I hadn’t cried already, as if I had only just heard the news. As if the person who had sat so obediently on the long journey here was another person, entirely. After a while, as her silence grew, I began to speak.

  ‘Everything I have ever prayed for,’ I cried, ‘all throughout these long months, was only that I might see him again. It was all I wanted, going to Mass every day, taking communion whenever I had the chance, hoping to hear word, to see him one last time before I died. And now, God has granted my wish.’

  She continued to look elsewhere. The sea rocked very slowly. It smelt of melancholy.

  Still she sat, motionless, her face covered slightly by her delicate blonde hair, saying nothing.

  ‘There’s a town near the house where I lived as a child,’ I told her. ‘My grandfather worked there and my father too. When the war flared up again, this place was prosperous; there was a university department, a train station. Many families used to take the train from there to Colombo. There were always people saying goodbye to relatives going down south to find work.’

  I don’t know why I was telling her this, but I felt, by some tension in the way she sat, that she was listening.

  ‘Then the government reinstated an old rule: no Tamils could continue their studies at the universities. In retaliation, the Tigers mounted a series of attacks on Colombo. I was pregnant with Ben. I can’t tell you…’ I paused, made a gesture, hesitated, not knowing how to express all I had felt. ‘This was my first pregnancy, this baby meant everything to me, my whole life was tied up with him. The war was a reality and my father was worried. He wanted us to leave, but where could we go? Percy was only a sub-post office clerk. We had no money, no connections either in India or the UK. I remember my father saying, “One day this war will overwhelm our people. It will destroy this country, make it unrecognisable. And the day will come when we shall see the sea from this verandah.” I laughed. This was impossible, I told him, but he was right. One day the government ordered the air force to bomb Jaffna and the university. They flattened the railway station, and from the verandah it is possible to see the ocean, now. Just as my father predicted.’

  I stopped talking. Exhaustion drifted over me in waves. Ria moved slightly.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ she said, finally, and the next minute she had opened the door of the car and was striding out.

  The beach was covered in large brown and white pebbles. This made it peculiarly difficult to walk on, but I followed her. There were a few people walking dogs and some children running along beside the water. Everyone was bundled up in clothes and hats. The cold edged my grief like a bed of thorns. The wind whipped through my thin coat. Ria strode determinedly towards the line of waves. Then she turned to me, her face pale, frowning. I thought how cold she looked, how cold she was, so much part of this landscape, really.

  ‘Look over there,’ she called, pointing. ‘That’s Dunwich. There is a whole town under the sea. Can you see the cliffs?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, once Dunwich was a medieval town with fifty-two churches.’

  ‘What happened? Was there a war?’

  ‘No, only a war with the sea. There was a terrible storm one day.’

  ‘Like the Tsunami,’ I said. ‘That destroyed everything in parts of Sri Lanka.’

  Ria nodded.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  The light was beginning to go. The sky, which had seemed pale and insipid, had suddenly become stained with blood red. The sea changed.

  ‘This place,’ Ria said, and at last she was looking straight at me, ‘this is where I came. Afterwards. There was nothing else I could do, you see. They called the ambulance, there were police officers everywhere, I…’ She spread thin hands out. ‘I was superfluous. There was nothing for me to do or say. I was nobody.’

  I was struck by the phrase.

  ‘So I came here.’

  She swallowed.

  ‘That day,’ she hesitated, ‘when they took Ben away, before I could ring my friend Eric, I came here, wanting to hear the bells that legend says ring under t
he waves.’

  I saw her lips twist as she tried to keep them in a straight line.

  ‘Did you hear them?’ I asked.

  I spoke reluctantly. I knew she was trying to share something with me, but I couldn’t bear the idea of intimacy now. What had Ben seen in her?

  ‘No,’ she said, with an impatient gesture of her hand. ‘No. I just wanted to show you this place.’

  I knew perfectly well she had brought Ben here. I should have gone up to her, taken her hand, perhaps, maybe, even kissed her. A better woman than I was would have done that. But my son was lying in a windowless room and it was beyond me to summon up the smallest gesture of affection towards this stranger. So instead, we stood staring at the sea; together, yet not.

  An early darkness descended, brought down like a curtain, closing up the gap between land and sky and sea. Soon the lights in the town came on one by one and the tips of the waves became ghostly white against the gathering gloom. It was only four o’clock, but already it was dark.

  ‘We should go back to Eel House, Mrs Chinniah.’

  ‘Please don’t call me that,’ I said, anger rising like the waves. ‘My name is Anula.’

  ‘We should go back, Anula. You must be cold.’

  Again I was aware of some hesitation on her part, but it was easier to ignore it.

  By the time we drove back to her cottage it was pitch black. I had no sense of where we were. The rest of that evening remains a blur. I know at some point she made food, but what it was, and whether I ate it, I have no idea. She offered me a drink of whisky. I shook my head, declining.

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine, instead?’ she asked. ‘It might help you to sleep?’

  Suddenly the one thing I wanted was to be alone. I wanted Tara; I wanted to die, to drown myself in the sea we had just left; to find the church that lay beneath it. As if she could read my thoughts, she took me into the sitting room where she had lit a fire. It was warm and very beautiful in the room. I looked around at the photographs on the piano. I was looking for a picture of Ben. There was a piano. I wanted to ask her if he had played it, but at the same time I didn’t want the answer. I felt I was burning up with a fever.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, instead.

  ‘Permanently for almost four years and before that very occasionally whenever I could. I used to come here as a child. My father’s brother owned it, and when he died it came to me. I was lucky.’

  I digested her words with barely any interest.

  ‘Mrs Chinniah—Anula,’ she corrected herself, ‘you should not be here. It is monstrous, this thing that has happened. It is a case of mistaken identity. The police were in a rush, the lawyer thinks we have…I want to do the best I can about what has happened, to bring them to justice, to make them admit their error. I am sorry you are being put through this, I’m sorry and angry and devastated all at the same time. If I have to spend the rest of my life doing so, I will bring them to justice…’

  She trailed off and it was my turn to be silent. A great rage was hijacking my grief. What was this woman saying? What did she know about being devastated?

  ‘Ben used to play the piano when he was younger,’ I told her, abruptly, reining in my rage.

  Ria placed the bottle of wine by her feet, now she poured herself another glass and offered me some again. I nodded. We had bought him a secondhand record player, I told her. And after that he found some records. They were all jazz. He’d play one record over and over again, starting from the moment he woke up until he went to school. Then he’d play it again as soon as he got back home and he’d start improvising it on the piano. Or he’d play one section of the record, one chord, one progression, then he’d do it on the piano. Then back to the record. Then back to the piano. How we laughed! Percy used to throw up his hands in despair; the neighbours, some of the jealous ones, complained because you could hear the sound of that record and that piano a long way away in the evening. People asked us how we stood it. It wasn’t living so much with a person, Percy used to say. It was more like living inside an instrument! We began in a way to be affected by the rhythm of the music so that we too tapped out the tune when he started playing, or, in the case of Percy, he would whistle it over and over again until I shouted at them both to stop driving me mad!

  ‘The truth was,’ I continued, ‘whenever Ben touched that piano, he made it sing. I have never seen anyone play like that. You should have heard him!’

  There was a long, significant pause.

  ‘He never forgot how to play it, did he?’

  Ah, I thought, so he did play for you. And then I looked at her with a kind of pity and also of triumph for I could see how far she had travelled with him, how deep her attachment and therefore her wound must be. And, I thought with bitterness, what kind of a woman was she, not to have given a single thought for Tara, waiting for news from Ben.

  ‘He never stopped playing it,’ I said. ‘Two weeks before he left we were invited by Father Anselm to go to the big cathedral to a gathering there. Our church is bombed out, you understand. There is no church, just two or three of us gathered together in the jungle. But the cathedral is different. At the back there is a piano left from the old days; when Mass used to be said at Easter and at Christmas. Father Anselm wanted Ben to play for us, for one last time.’

  I stopped. Could it be that Father Anselm knew Ben would not be coming back? That the significance of his departure was perhaps more than the rest of us realised? Nobody will forget the way he played in that back room of the old cathedral, with the priests sitting there in their shirt sleeves, and a handful of nuns tapping their feet and nodding, and with me, beside them, smiling and smiling as if my heart wasn’t really breaking.

  ‘All I know about music is that most people don’t really hear it,’ I told Ria. ‘Ben hadn’t been near a piano for almost a year. He was at a tense and troubled crossroad in his life. But that day, when he began to play, he and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again. They seemed to find a direction, but then they panicked again. Until finally, unexpectedly, almost in a dream, he seemed to find, right there beneath his fingers, the blues. In the darkness of the tropical night, with all the stars out and his trip to England only a moment away, he was telling us the tale of how we suffer and what things make us happy. We sat listening, mesmerised by the music, listening to the tale that is the oldest in the world. It seemed like the only light we had in all that darkness.’

  A log fell off in the fire, a shadow crossed Ria’s face.

  ‘I was well aware that night that the world was waiting outside, as hungry as a tiger, while trouble stretched above us, wider than the sky. And as I watched him playing that night, I saw what it meant to be a Tamil. How one day, in some way, he would pay the price for being one. In the indigo light, with all the stars shining as they had for millions of years, I saw too that in the scale of things my sorrow hardly counted for anything,’ I said.

  Ria sat with her head bent. I’m not sure how much she had understood, but she looked beaten. Something vile and uncontrollable rose up in me. It felt like vomit. Good! I thought, and then I said goodnight to her and went up to bed.

  11

  EIGHT O’CLOCK. TRUMPINGTON. TRAFFIC JAM SOMEWHERE in Cambridgeshire. A thirty-minute wait. The stationary traffic forms a long, docile line. No horns blasting, no abuse being shouted, nothing falls off the lorries, nothing breaks or buckles. Instead there are grey, faceless buildings, and a sea of red brake lights.

  You would think the identification was the worst that could happen to me. You could think it, but you would be wrong. It was my first night in this country but my nightmare was only really just beginning. When what little there was to be said had been said, Ria and I went to bed. The room she had put me in faced the river. I could hear it licking and sucking faintly, almost, but not quite reaching the sea. I lay on the bed like a rack of bone, listening to the long dark night
as it passed into infinity. I felt it press against me. I felt I was suffering from a form of sleepless extinction. An owl hooted somewhere in the trees. Maybe it had been hooting for centuries.

  Eventually I must have fallen asleep. When I woke I had no idea what time it was. A strange light, stitched through with phosphorescence, greeted me. The silence was as remote as the death I was facing. Had I the experience, I would have understood that snow had fallen in thick blankets around this flat landscape. Unknowing, I went shivering to the window and saw the black-and-white television-set light that came from outside. ‘Snow fell undated’, the expression came to me from the dredged-up line of a poem I had once read. Memory has its own way of revenge. Emptiness cut through me. Ria slept, exhausted, in her room on the floor below. The house slept with her. I had never seen trees without leaves, never seen their construction so clearly laid bare. One frost-crippled leaf dangled on a branch. I am fifty-two, I thought. An old woman. Yesterday I had not known snow.

  I can hardly speak of what happened next. How do I justify it to myself? How to explain that I moved from one dreamlike state to another? Now, when it is too late, sitting on this coach, I think of Percy. I need absolution from Percy. All the violence I had ever witnessed was beginning to fuse together. Think of it, Percy, I beg, silently. I was alone, at the end of the earth, mesmerised by the falling snow. What would you have done? I watched as some flakes fell heavily earthwards while others wheeled around in the semi-darkness. Then I opened the window a fraction and felt the air, tensed up and bleak on my face. Gradually the sun rose, glittering but powerless against such cold. The wind from the day before had died and I heard a high, nasal chatter, ebbing and whimpering into silence. It was a bird moving from branch to branch, flicking the thin powdery stuff on to the ground. I stared crazily at it. The light and the sky and the shadows and even the room I stood in were all against me, I thought. The sheer remoteness and desolation of this place hit me with such force that my legs trembled. Everything had gone except misery.