Winter Tales

by Kenneth Steven

  The words echoed inside him. He felt his face burn with anguish and frustration and rage. He wanted to rail at his father as he turned away. It wasn’t fair, it was wrong, he couldn’t. The words melted into crying; a tangle of angry sobs, words that no longer made any sense. He chucked the box on the ground and crouched, folded into himself, weeping as he’d done when he was four. He couldn’t take this away; it wasn’t his and he didn’t have the right. He didn’t care. Lewis hugged his arms about his chest and looked down, searching, to the lake. But the island was gone, swallowed by dark.

  *

  Now the Lodge was quiet; all the lights were out. Roddy’s soft snore was like a whine; along the corridor their father had finally gone to bed. Lewis had heard Winnie closing her door and hadn’t been able to put her out of his mind. He remembered her scent and sat there on the floor in the darkness, wondering. Then he thought of the Christmas House and glanced away, wanting to escape the prison of his own head. He would drive himself mad. He had left last; by then Roddy was out onto the ice with rugs and boxes, calling impatiently for him to hurry. He hadn’t had time to say goodbye.

  On the floor beside him were the swimming trunks. The white stripe showed in the darkness. He felt back at Glenellen on a morning in mid-October. He could hear Macgregor . . .

  ‘All right, there’s room for an awful lot of improvement; I’m pretty disappointed with the lot of you. Now I’ve to be at a meeting in exactly eight and a half minutes, so out in two and shower. Ditchfield, you are my eyes and ears. One scrap of trouble and I want to know. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The plimsolls squeaked along the changing-room corridor as Macgregor disappeared. The sound of the ticking drip of water. Then the outer door banged and the place erupted: echoes of shrieking and laughter, water being cuffed and bodies dive-bombing the deep end. Ditchfield shouted something at George Fife; shouting was the only way of making yourself heard. If only he’d come back, Lewis thought. If only he’d hear.

  But he didn’t. In two minutes they began dragging themselves out, knowing the period bell was looming. As Lewis was clambering out at the shallow end, he felt hands at his shoulders pulling him back. For a confused second he saw a sea of faces above as he was ducked in the water; the piercing shrieks hurt his ears as he went under and struggled up, fighting his way through them and gasping for breath.

  ‘Where d’you get the trunks, Cameron? Your mother?’

  The showers were already on when he got out. Someone singing; the sound of someone else farting. He returned to his cu­bicle as slowly as he could, dragged down his sodden trunks and picked up his towel. His heart hurt in his chest. He walked into the sweat and the steam.

  ‘Here he is, lads! Make way for the great swimmer!’

  He saw Ditchfield in front, a whole head taller than himself. He looked at him with nothing less than hatred: his eyes black.

  ‘What’s that between your legs, Cameron? Is it real or just stuck on? Shall we find out, lads?’

  Ditchfield whipped his towel from a hook at the side of the showers. The jackals started clapping, cheering and clapping. On the other side and out of the corner of his eye, Lewis saw another towel. He glanced at the clock, willing the minute hand to move. Still another four and a half minutes to the bell. They’d trapped him. He couldn’t get back to his own towel.

  Ditchfield dipped the end of his in water and twisted it, taking all the time he wanted. He practised a flick; let the towel crack in the air in front of him. The slow clapping increased; a murmur of expectation and delight. Ditchfield moved closer.

  A towel came at Lewis from another corner and he reached out pathetically with one hand. He felt the cold gust of air. An echo of mirth went up at his attempt to save himself. He glanced at Ditchfield, eyes pleading, felt his own back against metal. He couldn’t go any further.

  Ditchfield aimed at his groin and Lewis clutched at himself. The wet tongue of towel stung against his hands and was gone. How many seconds to the bell? How many seconds to go? The other towel came to distract him again and he swung round, enraged and humiliated. And Ditchfield took aim. The lightning fork flickered in the air and there was an audible crack as it hit. Lewis screamed and crumpled onto the tiles. A cheer rang out; echoed through the whole building.

  Ditchfield turned to get dressed, waving his towel in victory. And as they melted away, the bell rang at last.

  *

  He held the trunks in his hands. If there were thirty weeks of term each year, and he had two periods of swimming a week, that meant three hundred before leaving Glenellen. There was no way out.

  He heard something, a muffled sound from Winnie’s room, and held his breath. It was ten past twelve; Christmas Day was over. He listened and realized that Winnie was crying. Like a soft, slow wave; the way he’d cried when his mother died. He’d thought then of a story, of a child whose mother dies and who goes down to the underworld to ask if ever she might be restored. Oh yes, was the answer, if you weep a whole river of tears, and that river flows here into the darkness, she’ll be restored. So he returned and wept until the river was enough. But it wasn’t true.

  Lewis got up, the swimming trunks still in his hand. He held the door handle, turned it softly to keep the house’s quiet. He knew how to do it right; the door sighed and he went into the corridor on soft feet. He listened outside Winnie’s door; saw no edge of light showing from inside. He didn’t knock, just turned the handle and slid the door open.

  She sat up in bed, trying to smudge away her tears.

  ‘I heard you,’ he breathed, and sat down at the bottom of the bed. He began to see her face; she grew out of the dark.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, but he shook his head. That wasn’t what he had meant; that wasn’t why he had come.

  She looked down for a second, into the net of her hands, then met his eyes again.

  ‘I was crying because of my mum and dad. I don’t want to go home because I know what’s there. This was like a dream, and now it’s over. They’re divorcing, and I’ve to go and live with Mum in America. She’s going back there.’

  Lewis nodded and felt something break inside. There was something he had dared hope, or dared begin to hope – like a bridge, or like ice even. He’d believed he could walk over, that it would hold, and now that too was breaking. He was sinking and he couldn’t even cry out.

  ‘When I go home, I’ve to start packing. I’ve to get ready for a whole new world.’

  Suddenly he thought of something, one small thing. He searched in his pocket and brought out the little elephant his grandfather had carved. He held it in his fingers, then dropped it into her empty hands.

  ‘That’s for you,’ he said. ‘For when you feel you can’t go on. Hold it and believe. Don’t forget.’

  He half-stood and then bent forwards through the soft dark and laid his cheek against hers, just and no more. He caught her scent and closed his eyes.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he whispered.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she breathed, not understanding, her word more like a question. Then he was gone; before she could speak again he had turned away, as though swimming through the room’s shadow and flowing from her world into somewhere else, and she had to touch her cheek to believe he had been there at all.

  He went downstairs, his hand a hiss on the banister. In the porch he found his shoes and slipped them on. A rain thin as soft hair over the woods and the Hallion hills. He turned and went round the side of the track, down the slope towards the lake through the frost-sculpted grass and bracken. They jagged his ankles like tiny swords. Just once he looked back, up at Granny Cameron’s window, but it was dark and empty, like a blind eye.

  He didn’t stop; he went on down to the bottom and out over the ice, the way Harry had gone that first day. He looked for the Christmas House but it was lost in dark and rain, as though it had never been. He went on, his feet makin
g not a sound, till he’d reached the rocks at the end of the island. The ice creaked. He smiled and stopped, took off his clothes till he stood sculpted white and pure in the moonlight. Then he put on the new trunks.