The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

  Although Tyler wasn’t travelling alone, not any more. Nothing was said, but each time they tied up for lunch, it was somehow accepted that she would tie up too, just as it was somehow accepted that she would wander over to the Dragonfly with some oozing Époisses cheese…

  “Hey guys, this stuff is really stinking me out, I can’t possibly finish it on my own…”

  …And that Colin and his granddaughter would stroll back along to Sabrina Fair with a bowl full of cherries, “Delphine bullied me into buying these.”

  “I did not!”

  “She showed no mercy – help us eat them, please.”

  Nothing was said, though. There was no exchange of glances. Colin thought he must have misread her stilled expression of wonderment, which the dusk had half-revealed to him as they descended the Rochers du Sauccois, and he cursed himself for being a presumptuous old man whose imaginings had been inflamed by spending too long in the Burgundy sun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “What kind of a fucked idea was this?” Laroche swung round to face Michael. “Your kind of a fucked idea, that’s what it was. Gimme some help, will yer? You said do literacy. Fuck! Nobody mentions tests when you sign up. Nobody mentions written tests. Fuck!”

  “Well, if you want to work in the library…”

  Three steps and turn. Three steps and turn. Laroche was pacing up and down the tiny space available to them. “I don’t want to work in the library. Changed me mind. Don’t want to do no tests neither. You have no idea what you’ve got me into. Write something about yourself. Sod that! I’m down the hobbit shop with you.”

  “It’s only a paragraph.”

  “You write it for me then.” He stopped his pacing. “Ackshly, that’s not a bad idea.”

  “I can’t come into the room with you. Exam conditions.”

  “You write it out an’ I’ll copy it on me arm. Job done. Sorted.”

  “It’s life writing. It should be easy. It’s writing about what you know.”

  “I don’t have a life. Hadn’t you noticed?” Laroche stopped his pacing as what he had said caught up with him. “I don’t know nuffin’, besides.”

  “Write about what happened to you before you came in here.”

  “What? And get sent down for longer oink oink?”

  “Write about your childhood. Your best birthday. The first CD you bought. Keep it simple.”

  Laroche stood in the room with his hands hanging by his side. He looked like a cartoon sketch of a man: a few lines drawn and a bit of shading. “Thass wotch you think they’re looking for, eh? Them examiners. My first record was a breaking and entering when I was eleven. Criminal, not vinyl. My best birthday? Ooh, let me see. It’d probably be me ninth, when me uncle had a fiddle with me as a change from me step dad. That was a cracker.”

  Michael felt a small collapse inside himself – the ebb of optimism, of anything positive.

  “Will that do the job?”

  “I – I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

  “Nobody has any idea. Nobody has a fucking clue.” He sniffed and cuffed his bent arm over his face.

  Michael hesitated, then took a step towards him.

  “Don’t you fucking dare.”

  “I was only going to–”

  “Well, don’t. Save yourself the bother.” Laroche gave himself a quick shake. A shudder. “Oi Rosbif! Yer gotta man up!” He came sparring towards him, jabbing him in the ribs and the shoulder. “Thass wotch yer gotta do. Don’t let the buggers grind you down.”

  He landed another blow, then another, until in a fit of crazy sadness the two of them started shadow boxing, swiping and ducking and dancing, until they heard the turning of a key and one of the kangas slammed the cell door open wide.

  “Which of you is going to Education?”

  ~~~

  Laroche came back from his exam whistling.

  “Took yer advice, Rosbif. For me life writing question I wrote about the first CD I ever nicked.” He whistled a few more notes, executing a sideways shuffle, with a bit of beat boxing to finish off. “The first CD wot I ever nicked was Now That’s What I Call Music 53. I wrote about the standout track The Ketchup Song. What it meant to me oink oink.” He flung himself down in his chair, “Reading and comprehension tomorrow,” he said lugubriously.

  “Why didn’t you write about – what you told me?”

  “Yesterday’s news.”

  “But if the authorities knew, it might make a difference – mitigating circumstances. When it comes to your trial.”

  Laroche gave him a scornful look. “You’re such a noob, Rosbif.”

  “It might help.”

  “You and your wossname circumstances. Half the crims in France would be out on the street instead of inside if that counted. We’ve all got our – you know, wotch you said. Ask anyone in ’ere if their ol’ man, or their neighbour, or whoever, didn’t try their luck. When they stop doing it, you know you’re one of the big boys. Moving quickly onwards…” he said, “Woss the first CD you ever… bought?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The day that Amandine fell into the lock began in speckled sunshine under clouds so perfectly formed that they looked as if they had been cut out and pinned onto the sky. It started with Tyler knocking on the Dragonfly’s cabin door, bearing three plates of scrambled egg and lardons.

  “Hangover food. Go on, try some. The French really know how to do bacon – not that watery stuff we get at home – this is the real deal.” She licked her fingers. They had moored the night before near the village of Coulanges, “So much red wine, so little time,” she’d carolled as they’d set about putting to the test more Burgundy appellations than perhaps they should have done.

  Colin emerged blinking a little, already on nodding acquaintance with his headache, “Ouch. Maybe some coffee first…”

  “Nope, it’s got to be a fry up. Research has shown that a cooked breakfast is the best cure. Coffee will make it much, much worse: all those stimulants…”

  Still in her sleeping bag, Delphine pushed the food around her plate. “Amandine doesn’t like these oeufs…”

  “Well, has she tried them?” demanded Tyler briskly, poking her head into the cabin.

  Delphine regarded her with uncertainty. “Ah mais non,” she shrugged.

  “Then she must,” she swooped down and removed the monkey before her owner could protest, settling her in a corner of the deck with a saucer of scrambled egg on her lap. “If she likes it, you might find that you like it too…”

  Delphine would not allow herself to be convinced. “She prefers pain aux raisins and at the weekends sometimes she has brioche with jam.”

  “Lucky old Amandine.”

  Defiantly, the child picked out all the bacon bits and ate them one by one, ignoring the egg, just to emphasise her point. Colin, who in his time had learned hard lessons about choosing which battles to fight, leaned over.

  “I’ll have that if you don’t want it,” he said scooping her egg onto his own plate. “Breakfast in the fresh air – there’s nothing to beat it.”

  They set off in convoy, the David and Goliath of the waterways, the agile Dragonfly nipping ahead then making showy turns, flashy figures of eight, killing time while Sabrina Fair made more sedate progress behind them. Delphine squealed as they went hurtling past the barrage at Basseville, where the canal crossed the Yonne, tangling the currents, slewing their light boat close to the weir’s edge. One lock later and they were back on the river, not much more than a stream now, haemorrhaging water over a spillway, the banks unkempt and tousled, also spilling green: easy going for the Dragonfly, but a navigational nightmare for the peniche. Tyler made her way through inch by ponderous inch.

  “Why do we have to wait?” grumbled Delphine.

  “Because it’s friendly,” he answered, frowning. “Because she might need a hand. Pick some flowers, why don’t you? I can get you right in close to the bank.”

  She turned and regarded him witheringly.


  “You could dry them in the sun and then send them on a card to Papa…” He tailed off. She occupied less space when she was sad, he’d noticed that. Now she drooped, staring at some tiny insects as they strafed the bows of the boat, then looking beyond them to where the bank curved round, the river ahead empty as absence. He watched her rouse herself; she stretched out over the verge, wobbling slightly as she reached to pick a buttercup and then a poppy and then something blue that he didn’t know the name of, private and apart from him.

  By the time Sabrina Fair came prowling up behind them, the cabin roof was strewn with crucifers and mignonettes and doubtless several different kinds of wort, none of which Colin recognised, their wafery leaves contracting in the heat. They made their way in uncompanionable silence through the outskirts of Clamecy, until he gave in to the compulsion to tell her something about the town, although he knew she wasn’t interested, that it annoyed her to hear.

  “You see that funny chapel over there? The book says that it is the first example of the use of reinforced concrete in the whole of France.” Sometimes he appalled himself, but even so, on he went, and on, and on, and on.

  “Have you got some card?” she asked him suddenly. They were just entering Les Jeux lock and he was doing his usual trick with the boathook, looping their line over a bollard set high above them on the quay while the Dragonfly skittered over the water that the peniche was churning up behind them.

  “Hold on a sec–”

  As the lock keeper closed the gates and started to wind the paddles to let the water in, Colin was busy dismembering a box of rice that he found in the kitchen locker.

  “This should do just the job,” the cardboard was off-white, flecked with grey. He handed it to her. It was one of their rules that they never had the cabin door table up when they were doing manoeuvres, so she squashed herself onto the bathroom locker beside Amandine, who was still staring pitifully at the saucer of scrambled egg in her lap.

  The Dragonfly bridled and started jibbing at her line, becoming frisky as the water swelled beneath her. Delphine selected a pencil from her pencil case and stared hard at the cardboard, the expression on her face sombre, then she swept her hand once across the card as if readying herself to begin, sending Amandine flying over the side.

  Looking back, Colin might have expected some filmic, slow motion effect to kick in the way it is supposed to in moments of crisis, but everything happened so fast: the little monkey was splayed over the surface for a matter of seconds as the saucer of scrambled egg hit her in the neck, forcing her under with dizzying speed.

  “Amandine!” shrieked Delphine. “Amandine!”

  Before he could stop her, before he even knew what was occurring, the child flung herself off the boat into the lock, just as the sluice gates opened to release more water into the chamber. All he saw was her arms scissoring the air as she disappeared.

  Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

  She surfaced a few feet from the Dragonfly with a saturated scream. He had the boat hook hooked over the lock ladder and hanging from the end of it he leaned as far as he could, reaching and stretching for her, his feet skidding on the deck, his fingers grasping and grasping at nothing.

  “Colin!” He would never forget her gargled cry, as if the river was already rising in her throat.

  “Grab my hand – come on Delphine, grab my hand. You can do it. Come on!” A convolution of the water swept her towards him and for a moment he thought he had her, his grip slippery on her wrist, but the turbine effect spun her away so that she slipped from his hands like a piece of soap. Briefly he glimpsed the twist of her skirt like rag in the current.

  “Delphine!” he shouted, “Delphine!”

  From above his head flew the life buoy, slung by the lock keeper, who was now racing back to close the sluices on the front gate. The water was roaring in Colin’s head like grief. Another revolution brought his granddaughter close to the surface, her skin already the colour of reeds. One of her feet breached for a second and he heard a splash as Tyler, wearing a life jacket, plunged over the side of Sabrina Fair and struck out for the drowning girl.

  He couldn’t bear to watch and he couldn’t look away. He saw Tyler searching intently, calculating the water’s torque, swimming around to where she figured Delphine might next appear. As the sluices closed again, the current turned back on itself, sucking inwards. The lock was unnaturally calm and still, sated, the only movement an apostrophe to the main event, an afterthought: a small eddy close to the rear gate, around which the child’s body swirled listlessly one last time.

  “It’s OK, it’s OK, I’ve got her,” the damp acoustic of the chamber circulated Tyler’s words, passing them from wall to wall, so that he couldn’t be sure that he had heard them right, but the next moment she was swimming backwards in his direction, her hands cupped under Delphine’s green grey chin and muffled up inside him he remembered her insisting but water is blue. The sea’s blue, isn’t it? It’s a fact and he knelt down, leaning out to receive her from the river and somehow Tyler delivered her, as glistening and limp as a newborn, into his arms.

  She lay on the deck as bedraggled as litter, her limbs tumbled carelessly and he turned her onto her back. He crouched over her, trying to make out if she was breathing, and then began pumping both hands on her chest, because he must do something, anything, and he had a fleeting recollection that this was the kind of thing you did do, to drowning girls. He couldn’t bring himself to look into her face, with its terrible oxidised colour, and was transfixed instead by a cigarette butt caught in her hair. There was lipstick on it and he was appalled by its casual redness and wanted to untangle it and throw it away, but he knew that he must keep pumping and he looked instead at a leaf that was snagged there too, and a twig, and drops of moisture that still clung like cobwebs, and he kept on pumping.

  Then, without warning, Delphine burped like an old man and her head cracked against the deck in a spasm of surprise. She started to choke; half sat up and was very, very sick.

  Tyler, who had streaked round the boat to the ladder in the lock wall and was climbing up it, shouted down, “Put her in the recovery position, lay her on her side…” but Colin couldn’t let go of her and thought that he never, ever would. He held her in his arms, rubbing her back as if she were a baby and she retched again and again and then she started to cry.

  ~~~

  He made it through the lock, barely conscious of what he was doing. Delphine was lying in her wet clothes on her bunk and he held the tiller at arm’s length so that he could sit as close to the cabin door as possible and he checked up on her so frequently that the Dragonfly tacked treble the distance to the port de plaisance and was, for the first and last time, overtaken by Sabrina Fair.

  Tyler was standing on the bank to receive their ropes. “You need to get the kid to a doctor. I’m sure she’s fine, but you need to get her looked at.”

  He nodded. He discovered that he was shaking and to conceal the fact busied himself retrieving Delphine from the cabin. She was stiff with shock and he found it extraordinarily difficult to lift her through the narrow hatchway because his hands were fumbling and it seemed to him that the Dragonfly wouldn’t keep still beneath his feet.

  “She’ll be fine,” said Tyler with anxious encouragement.

  He nodded.

  “Would you like me to come with you?” She was still in her life jacket, the scent of the Yonne rising from her damp T-shirt and shorts in a bracing, just got back from a dip way. Delphine, sodden and waterlogged, lay heavily against his chest. He shook his head.

  “No, I’ll – I ought to–” he swallowed, gathering the child closer to him. “Thank you.”

  Tyler shrugged.

  “For what you did.”

  “It’s nothing,” she smiled her fugitive smile, which was too sad to sustain itself for long. She glanced in the direction of the town. The air was turbulent with things unsaid: “I wouldn’t hang about…” she said gently.

 
Another strange town, another taxi ride, another hospital. He made it his mission to keep talking to Delphine. “There’s a wonderful museum here,” he began, “The Romain Rolland Museum, it’s got all sorts of…” and then, mortified, he stopped himself. She was shivering and her teeth were chattering. He wrapped her close. It could have been Michael he was holding. “I remember taking your dad to hospital. He was a bit younger than you are now and he cut himself on a glass at his birthday party. On his actual birthday! Can you imagine that?”

  She shook her head, almost the first response that he had had.

  “And another time I had to take him when he stood on a weaver fish in Cornwall. You’ll be keen to know what a weaver fish is, I expect,” he went on, gazing down at her, throwing her a line so she could keep up. “They hide in the sand right by the sea shore and if you step on them they sting you hard.”

  She half listened, but it was as if she were still beneath the water, floating beyond his reach, so he kept talking, to save himself as much as her. He told her how they bought Michael a cassette player and one day found him threading his willy through the sprocket of a cassette of Old MacDonald Had a Farm (Old Madonna Had a Farm he called it) in the hope that talking about his boy, though it touched on old wounds, on raised red scars, would draw the heat from the emotion of the moment, that the past might be an antidote to the present, an anaesthetic.

  ~~~

  “Are you able to be exact about how long your granddaughter was unconscious?” the doctor asked. He wanted to keep her in overnight for observation and some function tests.

  Delphine levered herself upright on the trolley. She looked around the examination cubicle as if she had only just realised where she was, then lay back forlornly against the pillow. “I don’t want to stay–”