A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  I’d not intended to sleep, and I didn’t remember having lain down on the bed, fully clothed. And it does seem odd to me, now, that the first thing I did when I woke was to take the binoculars from my desk and train them on the hytte, but I know that that was exactly what I did, even though I had decided earlier, once and for all, that I was bored with Martin Crosbie’s tawdry romance. I picked up the binoculars and trained them on the shoreline, pretty much from habit, and I saw them immediately, Martin and his girl, down by Kyrre’s boathouse. I singled them out right away, and I saw that they had taken Kyrre’s boat out, and they were dragging it towards the water, but that didn’t alarm me, or not to begin with anyway. Maybe I was still half asleep – I asked myself that question over and over again later: was I still asleep? Did I dream what I saw? – but it didn’t occur to me that there was any danger. It was just two people taking a boat out on a summer’s night – a boat that didn’t belong to them, of course, and I should have remembered how careful Kyrre was about that boat, and how he never allowed his guests to use it. But I didn’t remember anything. All I saw was a man and a girl dragging a boat down the shore and then, when they’d got it out into the water, pushing it out into the tide. There was a moment of quiet, and total, unnatural stillness, like in some old painting of a fishing scene by Christian Krohg, then I heard the outboard motor kick in and I saw, as the drama started up again, that Martin Crosbie had jumped into the boat and was heading out into the Sound, while his companion stayed behind on the shore. That seemed odd to me, and I was puzzled as to what might be happening, which is absurd, of course, considering what I already knew. But I really didn’t see it, not when the boat puttered out into the water and came to a stop, less than twenty metres from the strand, and not when Maia went and stood on the little lawn by the hytte, the better to see, I suppose, as the boat halted in the channel, the motor chugging away softly now on idle, and Martin Crosbie sitting there, looking for all the world like someone who’d been doing this all his life. Only, he hadn’t been doing this all his life and there was no reason for him to be out on the Sound. He had never shown the slightest interest in Kyrre’s boat and now, for no reason, he was taking it out into the white, calm water, where he had no business being – and Maia was watching, her hand raised, as if in some corny wave, all innocence and lovestruck stupidity.

  And then, suddenly, he was gone. About ten or fifteen metres out, certainly no more than that, and hardly in the kind of water that could claim a grown man, he stood up and, raising his hand as if to wave back, flickered a moment, like a character in some grainy old film from the 1920s, and, soundlessly, with no apparent effort or intent, he vanished. Later, there was no evidence to prove that this was what had happened – unlike the Sigfridsson boys, he didn’t drift down-shore with the tide, or wash up by a jetty to be hauled in by a passing fisherman – but he vanished nevertheless, and I was there, spying on him through the binoculars, when he went into the water. I was there, and I saw – or rather, I almost saw – what happened. I only looked away for a moment, a hurried glance, to where Maia stood watching, but it was in that moment, when I glanced away, that he disappeared. The last I saw of him, he had been standing, looking back, and though I couldn’t really see his face, not even through the binoculars, I had the sense, for one brief moment, that he was happy. And I think that Maia was happy too: I had seen her face, and I could all but swear that she was. Happy, that is, for Martin Crosbie, and not for herself. Not for having succeeded in tricking him into the water, the way the huldra in the old stories might have been, at the moment of truth: no; as absurd as it might sound, I still believe that whatever happiness each of them felt, for whatever perverse reason, it was a shared happiness and, when I saw that Martin Crosbie was gone, I knew right away that Maia would do nothing to save him. She would watch and she would let him go into the tide. No attempt to help or raise the alarm: she was happy, and what was happening was something that had been intended, something that should not be interfered with. The problem for me, however, is that, for the first few critical seconds, I did nothing either. I just watched as the boat drifted a little further and came to a stop, turning slightly in the tide, just twenty metres from the shore.

  I stood frozen for a long moment – a moment from a storybook in which decades pass – and then that moment was over and the spell was broken. Until then, I hadn’t been able to take in what I was witnessing – and I have to imagine that it was shock, shock and stunned disbelief, that held me there so long, unable to move as the boat drifted and the man who had been visible a moment before disappeared into thin air. I say thin air, because that was how it seemed to me. It wasn’t so much that he stepped out of the boat into the water – I didn’t see that, and I had no sense of it happening – it was more that he quite simply vanished, cancelled out by a grey light in which the surface of the water and the air above the boat were indistinguishable. And until that moment, I hadn’t been able to move. Martin had been there, I had seen him raise his hand, as if to wave and, when I turned to see how Maia would respond, he must have gone into the water, with that odd, rapt look on his face: rapt, happy, I didn’t know what it was, but that was how it seemed through the binoculars and maybe I turned away because that look, that simulacrum of happiness, was too awful to have to witness. It’s not as if I turned to see who he was waving to – I knew who else was there – but I did turn, just for a moment, and when I looked back, he was gone. And I suppose that was when I cried out. I didn’t know at the time that I had uttered a sound, but Mother told me later that that was what alerted her to the fact that something was wrong – and at the same time that I let the binoculars fall and stared out into the hugeness of the white night, everything suddenly far away and strange-seeming, too small and too wide to be real, she stopped what she was doing in the studio to listen. I think I believed that I had been tricked in some way and that the binoculars had something to do with that, but even with the naked eye, taking in the entire scene, I couldn’t see anything in that shimmer of grey and silver, and when I looked back to the lawn outside the hytte, Maia was gone too. Gone, as if she had never been there. As if neither of them had ever existed. I suppose that confused me, and I didn’t know what to do, or even whether I had imagined the whole thing – and then I was running, running downstairs and out through the front door, not because I thought I could help Martin Crosbie, but because I had to see for myself what had happened. I had to break the spell that had been cast. I believe I thought that if I ran to where the boat still sat, turning ever so slightly in the water, then this dream would end and I could tell myself that I had imagined everything.

  I didn’t know that Mother had heard me cry out, or that my leaving in such a hurry had startled her into following. It hadn’t even occurred to me to go to her for help, or to stay and call the police, or the coastguard, or whoever it is you call when something bad happens. I just started to run when the uncertainty of that empty boat and the unbroken grey of the water became unbearable. I didn’t know, as I ran down through the birch woods and across the open meadow, that Mother was just twenty metres or so behind me, not running, but walking in that quick, deliberate way of hers; I must have thought that she was in the studio, shut away in her separate world, and I had no idea that she was aware of anything until we got to the hytte and found Maia standing by the door of the little woodshed, with something – a shawl, or maybe a veil, I had the impression of fabric, of something silken – in her hands. I only knew, in fact, when I saw in Maia’s face that she was aware of someone behind me, someone whose presence on the scene surprised her, at least for a moment. I saw in her face – like looking in a mirror and seeing a flicker of movement away to the left somewhere – that someone else was coming and, for a moment, as I looked back with the sudden, uncomfortable sensation of standing between them, I felt that I had wandered into some zone where I did not belong. It only lasted for a moment, that sensation, but it was disconcerting for all of us. Even for Maia.

 
; Mother had been following me, and she only saw Maia at the last minute – only saw her, I think, when she saw herself being seen – and when she did, she stopped walking. She was about ten metres from Maia, and I was between them. For a second, no more, we stood, like figures in a tableau, each of us surprised by the fact of the others’ presence in the world – and then Maia went into an act that I cannot help but think was prepared, her attitude and gestures oddly rehearsed-looking, chosen to seem appropriate to the events that were unfolding, even though they weren’t appropriate in the most obvious way. She wasn’t frantic or tearful, she didn’t run to us the moment we arrived on the scene and appeal for help. She wasn’t even visibly upset, the way a character in a film might be in that situation. No: she was calm, and she was very still, though it was a stillness that could have been taken for shock, or stunned horror, and that – I thought this at the time, in spite of all that was going on – that was astute of her, because that was the most likely reaction for someone in her situation, her relationship to Martin Crosbie ambiguous, her being there at all a surprise. She had been standing in the middle of the lawn, where I had last seen her through the binoculars. After that, she must have walked away, to end up by the hytte. Now, however, she took several steps back towards the beach, back to where the boat was clearly visible, turning around in the open water.

  Mother followed her. ‘What happened?’ she said. She was calm, and her manner was deliberately reassuring, but I could see that she didn’t quite know what to do. She looked out towards the boat and something dawned on her, and she took Maia by the arm. ‘Is somebody out there?’ she said.

  Maia turned and gazed into her face, but she didn’t say anything.

  Mother looked back to me. ‘What did you see?’ she said. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t say anything and I suspected that this had something to do with Maia, who had turned away from Mother and fixed her eyes on me. Mother waited for me to reply and then, when I didn’t speak, she took another couple of steps and gazed out over the water. The Sound was calm, silvery, very still. Mother scanned its shimmering surface as if she thought that she could raise whoever was out there up from the depths by some effort of attention or will. Then she turned back to Maia. ‘What’s going on here?’ she said, her voice slightly more urgent now.

  Maia shook her head like someone who suddenly feels dizzy and is trying to regain control of her thoughts but, once again, she didn’t say anything.

  ‘Have you called for help?’ Mother said.

  The girl looked puzzled – and then, just for a moment, I thought she was going to laugh. Not a hysterical laugh, but the laughter of someone who has been keeping up a pretence for too long and can’t sustain it any more. She shook her head.

  ‘There’s no phone here,’ I said. I hadn’t intended to speak and I felt an ugly shiver of surprise, as if I’d been made to do something against my will. I looked at Maia. I didn’t believe in her. I knew she was pretending. But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to stay clear of her. There was something else, something I can only think of now as a fear of contagion. It’s ridiculous, I know, but she seemed to me contagious in some way. I’m not talking about illness here, I’m not talking about a virus. Or maybe I am. A virus. An infection of the will.

  Mother turned. ‘There’s no phone?’ This seemed to annoy her, though only for a moment. Then she seemed to give up on us altogether and walked right to the edge of the water, her eyes fixed on the empty boat. ‘What happened here?’ she said again, but she was suspicious now, because something didn’t add up.

  I went with her, my eyes still scanning the water. I had no hope of seeing anything, I didn’t expect Martin Crosbie to bob up suddenly and start flailing about in the tide, but I didn’t want to be left behind, so close to Maia – not because I was afraid of what she might do, but because I didn’t want her to look at me. It was ridiculous, I can see that now – I even thought so at the time – but I was afraid of her. I was afraid that she would look at me while Mother’s back was turned and laugh in my face, or say something to show that she knew I suspected her. And, yes, as absurd as it sounds, I was afraid that she would infect me in some way and then I would never be rid of her. ‘Martin Crosbie was in the boat,’ I said. ‘I saw him –’

  ‘Martin Crosbie?’

  ‘From the hytte,’ I said.

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what happened to him?’ Mother was puzzled now. She could tell something was wrong, but she seemed not to believe what I was saying. How could Martin Crosbie have been there, when he was so obviously not there now? If he had fallen into the water, he would have struggled, called out, tried to save himself. And he hadn’t. There had been no cry, no struggle. I knew that too, and for the first time, I started to doubt myself. What had I seen through the binoculars? What had I imagined? Had I been dreaming? ‘He can’t have just disappeared …’ Mother turned back to appeal to Maia for her version of the story – and I understood her line of reasoning. Whatever I had seen, I had seen from far away, while Maia had been there all the time, and she would have seen everything.

  But Maia was gone. I knew it right away from the look in Mother’s eyes when she turned – a look, not of surprise, so much as puzzlement – and when I turned I could see that we were alone now. Mother frowned. Maybe she was beginning to suspect this was some childish prank. She looked at me. ‘Who was that girl?’ she said. ‘Do you know her?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about Maia, not there, at the edge of the water, with the boat still turning slowly in the current and the sense that Martin was somewhere under the surface, just ten metres away and beyond saving.

  ‘Well, do you know her?’ Mother said again. She sounded so casual, as if nothing serious had happened.

  I looked at her. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s the one … she was a friend of the Sigfridssons.’

  She stared at me. ‘The Sigfridssons?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I suddenly knew why she was so calm. She had begun to suspect that this girl had played a trick on me. She thought that, with Maia’s help, I had imagined the whole thing, that I’d been affected in some way by the mysterious deaths of my school friends and by the stress of exams and not being able to decide what to do with my life. Which was ridiculous, of course – and she had to have known that Mats and Harald weren’t my friends, because I didn’t have any friends. And that was something else she knew. She knew and she had let it pass all those years, which suited me well enough, but surely it should have seemed odd to a parent that my only friend was an old man who lived along the shore and told crazy stories about farm boys who went out to fetch water in the broad light of day and never came home and babies stolen from their beds by the troll people. She was watching me carefully, and I knew, before she said it, what she was going to say next. I don’t say that she wasn’t concerned for me, but that wasn’t the point. Her not believing was the point. ‘Are you sure you saw –’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘These summer nights can play tricks on you –’

  ‘I saw what I saw.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. She put her hand on my arm, just below the elbow. ‘We have to go back to the house now,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a shock –’

  ‘No. We have to call someone –’

  ‘Back at the house,’ she said. She started away – and I knew that she didn’t believe me. She was remembering how I’d seemed when I came back from England, and she was already deciding that I wasn’t well. Because, of course, there was no other explanation for what I had seen. No explanation at all, in fact, apart from delusion.

  I didn’t know what to say. She was right, of course. It made no sense to linger on the shore, gazing out at the empty water – but I didn’t want to go back. That was like giving up. Like letting go of a drowning man’s hand and turning away as he slid beneath the surface. I looked out to where the boat sat bobbing in the water. How could it be so calm, after what
had just happened? How could it be so beautiful? ‘But can’t we do something?’ I said.

  Mother didn’t answer. Somewhere off to the side, I heard a noise – a soft, sweet call, like a bird in the near grass – and I turned. I half expected to see Maia out there among the willowherb, or on the bank of the stream that crossed the beach a few metres further downshore, but there was no one. It was utterly still. I turned back to Mother. ‘But can’t we do something?’ I said again, but my voice was thin and far off, even to me, and she would have known that it wasn’t really a question.

  She answered, though. I don’t know what she believed at that moment, but I suspect she just wanted to get me back to the house. She didn’t believe anyone was in physical danger – though she was worried that I might be experiencing some kind of psychological crisis and the best way of dealing with that was to get me home. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to do here.’ She shook her head. ‘We have to go back to the house.’ She smiled sadly – a smile that reminded me of the early days, when she would get me ready for bed and tell me stories from one of her big picture books. Stories about heroes or street urchins who made good, stories with no darkness in them at all.