Mothers

by Chris Power

  Ann found Jim further uphill, idly whacking a bush with a stick. The climb became a descent, and before long they stepped off the earth track onto the tarmac of the Withypool road. Ferns covered the high banks on either side, and branches of oak and beech joined to form a tunnel. Soon they were passing stone cottages and barns, the only signs of life the threads of smoke rising from chimneys.

  They had booked a room at the Willow Tree, whose custard-yellow walls and blue windows reminded Ann of a witch’s gingerbread house. She eased herself gratefully onto the bench of a trestle table that stood on a flagstone terrace above the road. The only other people drinking outdoors were a man and woman with a pair of velvet-brown pointers lying at their feet. The dogs stayed down, but their eyes rebounded from Jim to Ann to their owners. The owners nodded hello, and continued their conversation in low voices.

  ‘Drink?’ Jim said.

  ‘Oh god yes,’ said Ann, smiling. ‘Guinness. Pint please.’ Jim went inside the pub. Ann took off her boots and stretched her legs. They had walked more than ten miles of hilly ground that day, and now she was sitting down she felt like she might never stand up. Her legs were packed with wet sand. The dogs regarded her, their sides swelling and shrinking in unison. Looking up from them, she found the man staring at her. The woman, her back to Ann, was hunting through her bag for something. The man took a sip from his pint, his eyes never leaving Ann’s. She knew what that look wanted. He was rangy, strong-looking in brown Barbour and muddy jeans. His sharp jaw was mossed with a couple of days’ growth of beard, his eyes were dark, unblinking. Then the woman produced a lighter from her bag, and the man turned towards her and pushed a pack of cigarettes across the table.

  Jim returned with two black pints. The stout was cold and thick and Ann drank deeply, the beer’s creamy head forming a moustache that spread from her nostrils to her cheeks. Jim laughed, then tipped his glass so far back that he coated his nose, and rivulets brown as river water streaked across his cheeks to his ears. Now Ann laughed. The dog owners looked on in silence. Screw yourselves, Ann thought, thinking she might as well enjoy herself even as it all collapsed. She raised her pint in another toast. They clashed glasses and gulped down the cold, black beer.

  *

  From the window of their low-ceilinged room at the top of the inn Ann saw the purple and brown heights of Exmoor rising in the distance, beyond ranks of beech, oak and birch. She was wearing a towel and kneeling on the worn cushions of a bench seat. The bedside lamps threw out a bronze light. From the bathroom came the sound of running water.

  Jim leaned out of the bathroom door, eyebrows arched. ‘I think we can both fit in that tub, you know.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Ann said. ‘You get in, I’ll be there in a second.’

  She heard a gasp of pleasure and pain as Jim eased himself into the hot water. Ann fetched her phone to take a picture of the twilight view. The grey sky and green trees – not a trace of autumn visible yet – blended in a vividness she knew a photograph wouldn’t capture, but she tried anyway. She viewed the image: useless. Better just to look at it, she thought.

  Jim called her name. He was lying back in the bath. She motioned for him to lean forward and she took off her towel, placed it on the tiled shelf at the end of the bath and sat on it. She held Jim’s shoulders and moved him back so that he lay between her knees. His body was broad, and she needed to widely splay her legs to make room for him. She felt the surface of the hot water as a tightness around her shins. She leaned down, scooped up some water and poured it slowly over Jim’s scalp. Slicked to his skull, his hair glistened like wet stone.

  The day was ending and the bathroom, lit only by a skylight, was dim. In the near-dark Ann leaned Jim’s body forward and washed his back. His pale skin shone faintly in the darkness. He murmured her name, his face close to the water. He reached an arm forward and turned the tap, adding hot water to the cooling bath. Ann’s hands, coated in soap foam, worked their way from his neck down to his kidneys. She ran the sides of her thumbs up over the ridges of his spine. She noticed a chain of moles, flush with his skin, running along his shoulder blades. She put her hands in the water and cleared his back of soap. He started to lean back but she pushed him forward again. He rested his face on his knees. He said something she couldn’t make out. She put her finger on the leftmost mole and walked her hand across them, left to right and right to left. ‘You’re marked,’ she said. She waited for a reply, but all she heard was the deep, oblivious breath of a man asleep.

  *

  ‘Do you think we’d have made it across?’ Ann asked at dinner in the pub dining room.

  ‘Across what?’ Jim said, around a mouthful of steak.

  ‘The stepping stones.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Sure. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. You seemed … scared?’

  ‘Scared?’ Jim’s cutlery clattered against his plate. A couple at the table beside them turned at the sound. ‘Are you serious? Course I wasn’t scared. A bit cautious, maybe, that’s all.’

  ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Listen,’ Jim said, straightening in his seat, ‘wet gear is no joke—’

  Ann started to smile.

  ‘What’s funny?’ he said.

  She only shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t important.

  After dinner she suggested a walk, but Jim said he was tired and they had an early start in the morning. ‘Bit too dark and scary out there for me, anyway,’ he added, which she had to give him credit for. She thought about going out on her own, but found she was too tired, after all. Back in the room they undressed, put on robes that had been left out for them, and lay on the bed watching TV. Ann felt restless. She was bored by what they were watching, and rolled on her back to stare at the beams in the ceiling, listening to the film Jim was so absorbed in. It was about a series of bank robberies, each more elaborate and violent than the last. When it ended Jim said he was going to sleep. Ann asked if he minded her light being on. ‘No,’ he said, but instead of turning away put his arms around her and gathered her towards him. She opened her mouth to his kiss. One last time, she thought. Why not? His hand moved inside her robe. His thumb began circling the nipple. She drew him down on top of her. She closed her eyes and saw him striding away from her up the ridge, away from the river. He entered her and she felt a lump at her throat that she let out in a low moan. The river ran fast past the stepping stones, another world away. He pulled out of her, his quick breath hot against her cheek. She gripped him and squeezed, feeling the semen surge across her belly. He rolled off her and reached down with his hand and fumbled at her until she pushed his hand away. ‘Sleep,’ she said. He murmured something and again moved his hand towards her, but she pushed it back again. She reached up and switched off the light. She lay in the dark listening to the sound – so faint – of purling water. She started to touch herself and pushed herself back against the mattress. She was crossing the room, opening the door. The stairs creaked. The boot room was cold. She climbed away from the village, up past the rivulets’ trickle and wash, past silent trees and sleeping sheep, and emerged at the top of the ridge above the river. Moonlight frosted the fields and scorched the water silver. Descending, the water’s noise grew. The moon lay on the river in a serrated white line, stretching and gathering with the water’s movement.

  The stones were a chain of black squares in the liquid silver. Across the water rose the mass of the moor. On the far bank he stood, in his Barbour and jeans. She crossed the stones, flecks of icy water against her shins. He crossed, and they met in the river’s flow. He pushed her down and was inside her. She straddled him and worked herself up and down the length of him. She pressed her palms against the cold, wet rock. As she came she leaned down into the fast-running brightness of the water, plunging her face into its icy grip.

  *

  When Ann woke her irritation with Jim had swollen into anger. They ate breakfast in near silence, and exchanged few words as they walked. She had decided that when they re
ached that day’s goal she would tell Jim she was going back to London. All she wanted was to be away from him.

  The day was cloudy and cool: good for walking. They decided to avoid roads, so their route bypassed the village of Exford and took them towards a smaller crossing over the Exe. About half a mile before that, however, they came to a fast, narrow stream just ten feet across that wasn’t marked on the map. The banks on both sides were very steep: the grey water, crested in places with curds of white foam, hissed past a good six feet below them. A split tree trunk had been laid between the banks, long ago judging by how embedded in the path it was.

  Ann saw Jim hesitate, looking downstream and then up. ‘I’m sure there’s a long way round,’ she said. ‘Better safe than sorry, right?’

  Jim turned and started to say something, then turned away. He walked onto the log bridge and was halfway across – Ann had just placed a foot on the splintered wood – when he lost his balance, crouched, yanked himself back upright for a moment, then flipped backwards and down into the water. He was carried under the bridge and Ann saw his head strike a group of jagged stones. He lay face down in the water. Carried swiftly, he was snatched round a bend and was gone, and it was that Ann never forgot: the terrible speed of it.

  THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES

  My family has come to Cephalonia. My daughters, four and two, have never had a beach holiday before. Mostly we go to Sweden to visit my wife’s family. This year, though, is different. This year my wife said: ‘Sun. A guaranteed week of it.’ And so here we are, lying on sun loungers and running into the water and out of the water, and turning brown by degrees.

  It’s my first time back in Greece since I was ten, when my family went to Rhodes. I remember spending nearly all my holiday money on a game called Crossbows and Catapults. I was always playing games, mostly ones with knights and spells and monsters. In this one you had to destroy your opponent’s castle with plastic pellets fired by your catapult and your crossbow, the giant kind of crossbow that I knew was called a ballista, because back then I was really up on my medieval military hardware.

  The box seduced me. It had a picture of a battle on it. A bearded Greek was turning and shouting, as if you, the game’s owner, were rushing into the fray right behind him. Up ahead, a large blue disc was about to strike a group of cowering soldiers. The Greek’s opponents, barbarians, had flung the disc from a catapult positioned in the distance, beyond a red river. They were the standard kind of barbarian: leather jerkin, fur loincloth, horned helmet; everything they wore had once been alive. Behind them their fortifications lay in ruins. The Greeks had fired their own catapult, too, and the foremost barbarian’s arms were raised towards the speeding red disc. He welcomed death with a yell, spittle falling from his mouth in strings. Like I said, the standard kind.

  The rest of my money went, as I remember it the same day, on a pair of ‘Punky’ sunglasses, a cheap curve of black plastic with mirrored lenses that instantly became, alongside a white Lacoste sweatband inherited from a cousin, my favourite article of clothing. All I wanted to do was wear my sunglasses and go back to our hotel to play my new game. I didn’t care that I’d be playing alone: my brothers, five and seven years older than me, liked football and snooker, not swords and magic and made-up stuff.

  *

  On the second day my mum, my brothers and I got stuck in the small hotel lift. We were only a couple of feet above the third floor and tried forcing the doors, but we couldn’t get them more than a few inches apart. ‘Help!’ we called, but no one answered.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my mum said, ‘your dad will work out where we are.’ Frank and Dominic were excited, making jokes about running out of air and saying they’d climb out through the roof: they knew how, they said, because they’d seen it in a film. The lift was hot. I stared at a strand of my mum’s red hair that was stuck in a curl on her forehead. I thought about there being nothing below us but empty space, and how the wire we were hanging from might fray and snap. I concentrated on not crying. My brothers would call me a baby if I cried.

  My mum had found her phrasebook. ‘Vo-e-thee-ah,’ she said. ‘That’s “help” in Greek. Vo-e-thee-ah.’

  ‘Vo-e-thee-ah,’ we repeated uncertainly.

  ‘That’s right, very good,’ she said. She spoke the word more loudly. She pitched her voice very high and sort of sang it, in the voice she used to call our cat. ‘Vo-e-thee-ah,’ she said. ‘Vo-e-thee-ah.’

  Just when I felt sure we would be left to hang there forever, voices came back, faint but distinct. Mum smiled at me and puffed some air up out of her mouth in relief, freeing the stuck curl. She called out loudly, ‘Vo-e-thee-ah!’

  We all joined in and the lift rang with the word: ‘Vo-e-thee-ah!’

  The voices answered again, this time from just beyond the lift doors. ‘No,’ one of them said kindly, ‘no. Vo-ee-thee-ah.’

  *

  My wife wanted sun, but it terrifies her. We spend what seems like hours each day coating our daughters in sunblock, until their limbs slip from our grasp. Then we coat ourselves. The youngest, Nora, thinks sunblock looks, smells and tastes delicious, and I’m constantly batting her arm out of her mouth. ‘More cream,’ she says, eyeing the bottle thirstily. I worry that one day I’ll find her guzzling it.

  *

  I ignored the rules that came with Crossbows and Catapults in favour of my own, something I did a lot back then. In the regular game the figures of the Greeks and barbarians were little more than set dressing, but in my version they became much more important. I recycled some basic combat rules that used six-sided dice rolls to determine who won each round, and how much damage they inflicted. I kept a record of hit points on a pad, and when a piece was killed it wasn’t removed from play but lay dead on the battlefield. This was important. The record of the carnage was my favourite part of the game: the pattern of corpses told the story of the battle. Studying it between turns flooded me with excitement, like the moment in hide-and-seek when the seeker shouts comingreadyor-not and a fizz of anticipation crawls through your body, from between your legs right up to your scalp.

  When I was playing it was like it was real: the war machines, the fallen walls and the heaped bodies all trans-formed from plastic into wood, stone and flesh. I moved around the field of battle and pressed my head against the ground to see it up close. I can remember the feel of the cool tiles of the hotel-room floor against my cheek. Sometimes I stayed in one position for so long my breath made a pool of condensation on the tile, as smoke drifted and moans carried on the wind.

  *

  When she’s with her sister, most of the games devised by my eldest, Sonja, revolve around exclusion and repeated demonstrations of the arbitrary. The exact amount of time it takes can vary, but one moment the girls will be playing well together, fussing over the care and comfort of a group of dolls, or driving plastic cars around an imaginary network of streets, and then, having turned my back for less than a minute to send an email or fetch something from another room, I look up and Nora is in tears, surrounded by a great emptiness, while Sonja is happily playing with all the toys in another corner of the room. Or else whatever game they were playing has metamorphosed into a prison scenario, Nora invariably the prisoner as Sonja stalks up and down outside her cell, cackling like a sadist.

  When I see it I’m glad my brothers were so much older, and mostly left me alone.

  *

  My parents rented a car to explore the island and we travelled south from Rhodes Town, towards Lindos. There was no air conditioning so we drove with all the windows open, and the car filled with rushing wind that snatched at the pages of my Fighting Fantasy book. Mum told me to stop reading and pay attention to where we were, so I looked out of the window for the shortest amount of time I could get away with. I saw low green hills covered in bushes, and trees with pink and purple flowers.

  ‘Myrtle and thyme,’ Mum shouted over the wind, pointing out of the window. I saw birds that looked like pigeons flying between th
e short trees. To the left, past a drowsing Dominic, was a sea so still it could have been a painted blue floor. The world was fine, but it wasn’t much beside a book.

  We drove to a place called St Paul’s Bay, the beach empty despite the heat. The bay was almost sealed off from the water by two arms of rock. On one side the rock was low and looked like the head of a duck lying flat against the water. On the other, stretching much further into the sea, ran a series of cliffs that might have been a vast slumbering dragon. Flecks in the rock made the cliffs glint as if they were scattered with tiny mirrors. We set up camp under a solitary pine tree, where the sand was less gravelly. White butterflies, like scraps of paper, flapped around us.

  Thinking of the previous day’s battle, I saw Greeks and barbarians positioned on either side of the bay hurling missiles across the water. The Greeks were winning, but the barbarians yelled and cheered and shook their weapons just the same. One of them bent and bared his bottom, laughing as he slapped his cheeks.

  Mum wanted to go for a swim, and because no one else wanted to go with her I said I would. Dominic, Frank and Dad, in T-shirts and shorts, lay on towels in the sun. The sun glared off their white skin so much that it hurt to look.