Dead Water

by Ings, Simon

  Peder Halstad has pieced this puzzle together: more and more he acts as Eric’s eyes and ears, while his employer spends an ever greater part of his life on paper, shaping a commercial empire that grows more abstract by the day.

  Vibeke Dunfjeld is a lecturer now. An ecologist. She is writing course materials for the Open University. No small accomplishment after years on the margins. Arrest and imprisonment. Self-harm. Hospital. Her father’s surviving friends – one or two well-placed emeritus professors – have taken a discreet hand in her rehabilitation.

  Gabalfa is a new estate: a crude mock-up of a future that has yet to emerge from the war’s sticky ashes. Prefabricated houses and kerb stones on the skew. Houses rather less robust than the rorbu cabins – fishing boats, halved and overturned and fitted with a door – that his family once rented out to fishermen in Austvågøy.

  Aberporth Road. Bacton Road. It is as though the war, not content with robbing Cardiff of many civic buildings, has gone on in the silence and relative calm of a phoney peace to destroy the city’s very idea of itself. In place of the old buildings, however small they were, however mean, come these dull ideas of houses, Not houses but ‘houses’. Not walls but ‘walls’, flat ‘roofs’ that cannot stand the touch of real rain. These are streets built by weary men. Men for whom contingent gestures are enough.

  Eric’s shirt collar feels as though it’s shrunk a couple of sizes. His trousers are sodden and press, cold and clammy, against his thighs as he walks; they hobble him. His shoes are soaked through.

  He is at the house now. No amount of abstraction, no amount of theory, can insulate him from this moment. He opens the gate. Crazy paving. A lawn more grey than green under the sky’s woolly overcast. He knocks.

  He has imagined this moment to death over the years, to the point of erasure: a needle blunting itself against the bleared grooves of a shellac record. The door opens and here is Vibeke Dunfjeld: a forty-five-year-old Welsh widow, part-time lecturer and ornithologist. The poignancy of this moment – the erosion of a remembered beauty, Vibeke’s once sparkling eyes freighted now with experience and disappointment – barely registers against the crackle and white noise thrown up by Eric’s years of lonely speculation and rehearsal. He has expected so much from this moment over the years, good and bad, that nothing the world actually throws at him can surprise him. This plain, square woman, these thin lips prematurely lined, the glassy, bulletproof quality of these eyes – these things neither surprise nor dismay him. He is aware, most of all, of a tremendous sense of relief. Clearly they are past the time when her sex might have had power over him. At last, after years of waiting, they are strangers!

  Every outdoor garment Vibeke possesses is hung from wall hooks just inside the front door; as Eric enters he knocks a coat on to the floor. Rehanging it is a minor test of skill, like a child’s puzzle. He picks his way over unopened envelopes, catalogues, notices for jumble sales, fêtes, public meetings. The hall is carpeted, its mealy colour made even more indeterminate by scuffs of mud and paint. An offcut, the carpet gives out a couple of feet short of the kitchen and a vaguely oriental blue linoleum takes over. There are clothes and undergarments over every chair back and radiator. Vibeke complains that she has nowhere to dry anything on a day like this. Sweaters. A child’s stripy top. Tights. Vibeke has a child, then? Another child? Peder said nothing about this.

  In the kitchen dolls slump in a delinquent row against a skirting board. Sheets of foolscap paper cover the kitchen table, spiralled and scribbled over, drawings half-done. Books: Hilda Boswell’s Treasury of Poetry, Hilda Boswell’s Treasury of Nursery Rhymes. Powder-pink forest sprites with schizophrenic eyes. Of the girl herself there is no sign. She must be at school.

  Vibeke sits Eric down at the table, then turns to the sink where she engages in some indeterminate activity halfway between food preparation and washing-up. Eric studies her as she moves about the room: hunched, uneasy in her own skin. ‘I suppose you’ll want tea,’ she says.

  The mess filling this place seemed cheery after the bleak and empty street – but now that he is sitting down his impression of comfort is rapidly evaporating. These drawings, swept aside to make room for his tea – these aren’t the child’s. These are Vibeke’s. An adult hand drew these. However disordered, this is an adult’s way of drawing a bird. A face. A hand.

  The dolls, slumped against the wall, return his stare.

  ‘I suppose you have been wondering about Else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My daughter.’

  ‘Else. How lovely.’

  Silence.

  ‘How old is Else?’

  ‘Eight.’

  Eight: that was Havard’s age, at his adoption.

  ‘Do you take milk?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Lemon, if you’ve got it.’

  She goes to the fridge and takes from inside the door one of those acidyellow plastic lemons – a Jif lemon, for heaven’s sake, mascot of the postwar shoddy. He says: ‘I have pictures of Havard. If you would like to see them.’ His sodden jacket is hung over the back of his chair: he reaches into it and pulls out his wallet. The snaps are crumpled and water-stained. He lays them on the table.

  ‘Well,’ she says.

  He lays the pictures out on the table. Havard on a camel, with a view of the Sphinx. Havard on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Havard by the Niagara Falls. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I brought these for you.’

  ‘You should have brought the boy.’

  ‘The boy?’ Eric thinks about this. ‘Havard?’

  ‘He must be seventeen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A young man by now.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring him? Didn’t he want to come?’

  ‘I –’ In a rising panic, Eric realizes he has no answer to this. ‘I didn’t think –’

  Vibeke goes back to the sink, to whatever it is she is doing, or not doing, or pretending to do. ‘It’s all right,’ she says.

  He says to her, ready for anything: ‘It must have been hard for you.’

  Her smile is weathered. ‘Hard. Yes.’

  ‘What did they do? Where you were. Where they kept you. What were they trying to do?’

  Vibeke appears genuinely puzzled: ‘I think in the end they just wanted me to be somebody else.’

  ‘Were you really so crazy?’ A little levity. Nothing wrong with a little levity.

  ‘They thought so. They had funny ideas about crazy. You wouldn’t agree with them at all.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Oh, no. Do you remember all those letters you used to write to me, about your climbing trips? Your Arctic walks? Weeks, months in the wilderness. Living in the teeth of it. Knowing it by living it. That is what you wanted me to understand.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘I loved your letters. They inspired me. I tell my students about them. About you.’

  So, after all, there has been some way in which he has touched her! He remembers the white eagle. Her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze elsewhere, not on him, never on him. ‘You were right, of course,’ she says. ‘Right about that kind of life. It was right for me. I’m glad I lived that life. In spite of everything, I’m glad.’

  Dizzily, Eric tries to make sense of this. Her years of vagrancy are something he’s assumed she would rather forget. Petty thievery. Courtrooms. Jail. On the contrary: she seems to have recast them as something heroic, something she chose – and Eric her mentor, the cause of it all!

  Eric studies the inside of his cup. No leaves. No pattern. No future. Tea bags. ‘You’ll have to tell me what happened.’

  Vibeke tells her story: how the stateless peoples of the far north were forced south by hunger. ‘The Germans burned everything to the ground. Well, you know this.’ She stole what she needed to survive. She raided bins and cellars and larders. ‘Like a bear in winter!’ Eventually she reached civilization. What was left of it. ‘The government had passed a law against p
ulling a cart with horses. Can you believe that? They wanted us to be different people. They wanted us to be like them. They beat us into shape.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looks her in the eye. Out with it: ‘And Havard, they took him away from you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They told me you were cutting yourself.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That. That’s when I was inside.’ She pushes up her sleeves to show him: a cobweb of thin white scars.

  He stares at them. He wants to be sick. Her sexual power is gone but in its place comes something tougher. Something horrid. ‘I looked for you.’

  ‘And you found little Havard.’

  ‘Eventually. They told me you had had a child.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I looked for you. I wanted you. I –’ He stops, dumbfounded. In the struggle to explain, he has finally declared himself, more than thirty years too late.

  ‘You found my son instead.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you took him.’

  ‘It was the least I could do. Given the way I feel about you. Given the way I’ve always felt about you. For heaven’s sake, Vibeke, you must know how I felt, it can’t possibly have passed you by.’

  Her fractional shrug is all his disappointments rolled into one. ‘Perhaps I have forgotten.’

  He is too weary to argue now. Too weary even to mourn the death of this thing he has been carrying around all these years. This love, if that is what it is. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it’s best forgotten. It was never... Being older than you, I suppose. I was afraid...’

  ‘You could have got me out of there,’ she says. ‘If you had loved me, you could have set me free.’

  He stares at the backs of his hands. He is as old as the century. He is sixty years old. Sixty! How did he get so old? ‘I loved you. You were – I couldn’t have cared for you. They told me that.’

  ‘You took their word for it. The doctors. The police. Peder Halstad. You took their advice.’

  Eric finds himself in a place where he can see no justice in anything he has done. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I took their advice.’

  ‘Poor Eric,’ Vibeke croons. She picks up his cup and carries it to the sink and sets about making another pot of her ghastly tea. ‘Never really in love is my guess.’

  ‘You can think what you like.’ The words are out before he can stop them. It’s no small thing to say to a woman who has spent years of her life in mental hospitals: a delinquent labelled unfit to rear her own child. He closes his eyes, afraid to meet her gaze, aghast at his own stupidity. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘Forgive me. Look,’ he says, as if this were an explanation, ‘I need the toilet.’

  Behind the locked door of her bathroom, safe at last, Eric’s steadying breath comes cheaply perfumed: Yardley, Fabergé, Estée Lauder Youth Dew. He studies the shelf above the sink. No ambergris in this line-up. Perfumes that have never seen the inside of a whale’s arse. He looks around him, ever more dizzy, ever more claustrophobic, hunting for something to latch on to. The room’s as generic as a toothpaste advertisement.

  He flushes the toilet and unbolts the door. Through the open doorway next to the bathroom comes a puttering: gas running dry in the bottle.

  He discovers the sitting room. Here the welter of clutter and rubbish implies some intense, disordered industry. Vibeke has been cutting out pictures of birds and sticking them into scrapbooks. Ordnance Survey maps are spread out over the floor. A Calor gas heater stands in the centre of the room, spitting out a gluey heat. On a table in front of the window, piles of guidebooks and timetables frame a seated figure. A child.

  ‘Hello.’

  The girl turns round. Her face, so serious, reminds him so much of the child Vibeke that he forgets to breathe. ‘Who are you?’ There’s no lightness in his voice at all. No friendliness. The girl climbs off her chair and edges around the room.

  ‘I’m Eric. Hello.’ It is too late for reassurances. All he can do is make way for her. She runs lightly out of the room.

  He hears the kitchen door come open and Vibeke’s voice, muffled by distance. Confronting mother and daughter together is more than he can handle. Let them discuss him for a minute, if they want to. Let Vibeke find him in here, what does it matter? Anything to get away from that kitchen, that yellow melamine, that bloody tea.

  He explores the room. On the desk, between the piles of bird-watching pamphlets, he sees something. A cherry-red something. Hideous. He picks it up. He turns it over in his hands. Red leather.

  It is Lothar Eling’s notebook. He opens it.

  Perturbations will disrupt even an ideal, frictionless fluid, if it is effectively unbounded. So the weather will not die.

  By some of Eling’s sketches, the professor has added a line or two in the margins. There is other writing too. Cartoon snakes with dizzy eyes. Vibeke’s girl has been laying crayon over Eling’s testament, his dying words. How could Vibeke let her daughter do that?

  Beside the notebook is its case: a stiff, once waterproof wallet, stained now, scribbled over with felt-tip pens and flecked with shards of rub-on transfer. Head of cat. Leg of cartoon dog. Eric crams the notebook into its case and pockets it.

  Vibeke and the girl, Else, are waiting for him in the kitchen. They are staring out of the kitchen window. He comes up beside them and he sees what they see, which is to say, nothing: a vast, still, grey pool. The Taff has burst its banks. Water, heavy with silt and coal dust from Taff Merthyr and Trelewis Drift, has overrun the convolutions of road, park and playground. Isolated by the rising flood waters, already the children’s play apparatus has lost its landward familiarity and acquired the eerie mantle of abandoned dockyard machinery.

  ‘It’s going to come in the house!’ Vibeke runs into the living room. Her daughter follows. Eric stares out of the window at the swelling gutters, the film of dirt winding fingers through the weedy lawn under the window. He is trying to get the sense of this, the scale, but he is a stranger here, he does not know the lay of the land, all he can see is the corner of the child’s playground, the edge of a street, a few feet of lawn...

  ‘Else, mind out the way!’

  ‘But Mummy, I want to help!’

  They are in the front room. Vibeke is plucking maps and books up off the floor. She’s stuffing papers at random on top of books ranged along high shelves. She pauses, staring at the shelves. ‘They’ll never hold,’ she says. ‘When the wall gets wet the shelves will never hold. Christ.’ It’s only a prefab after all: panels of plaster held together by prayer.

  Still, Eric can’t muster anything like Vibeke’s sense of urgency and a grotesque suspicion springs to mind: what if this sudden flurry and panic is just something she does ? What if flood drill is part of her domestic routine? He knows nothing about Vibeke. She has, after all, for years been counted among the mad.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  What if this is just something she does? Every time a drain gets blocked, or leaves jam a gutter, or a main bursts...

  At his feet he notices a spreading stain. He is seized with infantile horror – a visceral shame at the disobedient body. The stain spreads and spreads, between his legs and into the room, towards the frantic woman and her child. He turns, and the hall is wet, black with smuts. Something – a sort of fur – is growing up through the pile of the hall carpet. It is wet, but it is not water. It is more mineral than that. It has a colour and a sheen. It is the solid earth gone fluid around him. It prowls around his legs and tucks itself under a decrepit divan piled with toys, picture books and crumpled washing. ‘Vibeke.’

  A smell fills the room: loose stools and rancid food. The vomit of Gabalfa’s sewers.

  Her hand to her mouth, Vibeke gazes around the room, her eyes wide and helpless. Else, taking her cue from her mother, starts to cry. What can they do? It will all be destroyed. It is inevitable. The dolls in the kitchen are already drowning in the black slurry pouring in through the back door. The flood is over the soles of Eric’s shoes, now. A fresh cold
seeps between his toes.

  Eric crosses to the desk. He lifts the lace curtain and looks out.

  The streets are running with water. If it is water. Black water. Wavelets criss-cross each other, sheets drawn up over a bed. ‘Dead water.’ He remembers this. ‘The propeller churns, but the boat doesn’t move.’ Children are running about. Splashing. Men and women wade through the street in wellington boots, carrying suitcases, carrier bags, nothing at all. He looks from house to house. He’d thought these structures follies, rosy-spectacled half-gestures. These houses are not childish. They are the product of an unspeakable and very adult realism. Their shabbiness is not an accident. It is integral. It is meant. Bodies, atom-flashed against these plywood walls will leave no prints, for the walls will fall away as fast as the bodies evaporate. These buildings have been made to serve present need, because the present is all there is –

  ‘Eric!’

  He looks at Vibeke, her elfin face thickened and coarsened by time. Her eyes, once mischievous, are merely schizophrenic now. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  What would she have him do? Canute the waves?

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing!’

  ELEVEN

  Eric Moyse’s merchant fleet served the Allies well during the war. His office preserves letters of thanks from the British Treasury, the US Maritime Commission. But Eric, while serviceable, has always had his sights set on the greater prize. Boxes and boxes and boxes in boxes. Whoever won that war won the world – but it was Eric’s world they inherited. A world in a can.

  Eric spent the larger part of the war behind a desk in Roosevelt Street, New York, with a view of the tumbledown East River pier. In those days the congested Brooklyn waterfront was lined with piers, transit sheds, multi-storey factories, all of them just a stone’s throw from the water. Now the factories of Brooklyn are empty and all the clever money has moved south to deep water, new cranes, new railheads in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.