Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  It was one of the men he worked with at the art college who’d suggested we go and spend a month over the summer holidays at his cottage in Wales; he’d thought it would do us good to be away from our house for a bit. It wasn’t really his cottage, it belonged to his wife, and she had inherited it several years ago from a relative she’d never met. My dad’s colleague and his family had never even been to the cottage, and he’d suggested to my dad that, in exchange for a month’s free bed and board, he might like to look over the house and see what work needed to be done, and perhaps attempt some of the smaller jobs himself.

  My mother, of course, hadn’t wanted to go. She’d wanted to stay in our old house in the suburbs, sitting around in her dressing gown, wall-gazing, cigarette in one hand, the other hand up at her neck, scratching away at the place where her crucifix used to hang. When my dad first brought up the subject she’d brushed him off, said it was a stupid idea, and went back to staring into space.

  On one of the nights that I’d heard them talking about the cottage, Lorry had woken up crying and saying there were ghosts under his bed. I’d hushed him, stroked his forehead and told him that I loved him and would never let the ghosts get him.

  ‘Mummy don’t love Lorry,’ he’d said, his voice thick and nasal. Since he’d started talking, just after the accident, this was what he said the most.

  ‘Mummy does love Lorry,’ I’d said, stroking his curls back off his forehead. ‘Mummy loves Lorry very much but she’s just a bit sad at the moment. It’ll get better.’ The eyes that found mine in the semi-darkness were lit with such a deep and resolute trust that I’d felt the familiar sickness. I held him as he fell asleep, his breathing slowing down and becoming regular, nothing but a faint gurgle coming from his throat.

  I was going back to my bedroom when I heard my parents talking, and I stopped at the top of the stairs, just outside the bathroom. The telly flickered away, Morecambe and Wise lying in bed together, but my parents weren’t watching it, and the sound was turned down. My mother was sitting on the sofa, her shoulders hunched, one hand holding her dressing gown closed at her throat while the other clutched a cigarette between two fingers. Her nails were stained yellow.

  ‘Linda, it’s been nearly four months now. I know that’s not long in the grand scheme of things, but we have to allow ourselves to move on. You doing this…’ My dad waved his hand in the air in the vague direction of my mother. ‘You doing this doesn’t help anyone. It’s not going to bring her back.’

  My mother said nothing. She pulled her shoulders in a little bit more, her elbows resting on her knees in front of her, her mouth puckering as she took a drag on the cigarette.

  ‘So, we go to Wales for a month or so and see if a change of scenery will help. I’m not saying that you have to forget about her. All I’m saying is that going to a different place, without all the memories and the…baggage that come with this house, well, it might make you feel better.’

  At first, I’d thought my mother wasn’t going to speak, but when her voice came it was cold and quiet.

  ‘I don’t want to feel better, Clive.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray that sat on the arm of the sofa, her fingers grinding the stub down repeatedly.

  My dad sighed, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and went down on his haunches in front of my mother. He clasped her alabaster hands in his.

  ‘Can’t you see, we have to do something? For Nif’s sake, for Lorry’s sake. All I’m asking is that we go to Wales for a month. One month. Just until Nif needs to start back at school. We stay somewhere different for a little while, and see if that helps.’ My dad had run out of words; the effort had exhausted him. He sank onto his knees in front of my mother.

  ‘Pfft.’ My mother’s response was merely a harsh exhalation of breath. She tapped out another cigarette from her packet of Silk Cut. She lifted it to her mouth and lit it with her little silver lighter, the one my dad had given her, pulling the smoke harshly into her lungs. She didn’t look at my dad. I noticed that the wrinkles around her mouth were getting deeper, etchings radiating away from her lips.

  My dad stood up again and he put a tentative hand on her shoulder which she shrugged away. She leant forward and her hair hung down around her face in greasy tendrils. I couldn’t remember when I’d last heard her washing in the bathroom.

  Then, very slowly, my mother seemed to find a new strength from somewhere. She pulled herself up, her back straight and her shoulders upright. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible in the darkened living room, and I strained from the top of the stairs to make out what she’d said. Behind her, Eric and Ernie’s silent sunshine dance came on.

  ‘She should be here, though, shouldn’t she? This is where it happened and this is where she should be.’ I was surprised at how reasonable my mother sounded. My dad had his head in his hands and he let out a sharp breath of despair.

  ‘She’s not coming back, Linda, and that’s the truth. She’s never coming back and we have to move on and think about Nif and Lorry.’

  My mother sat for a moment, her eyes unfocused, her breathing shallow and controlled. The hand holding her dressing gown closed started twitching, stroking away at the hollow at the base of her throat, and it was as though all the strength she had been building up suddenly dissipated, and she slumped back down again and gazed blindly at the TV. Even from where I was sitting I could see the desperation in my dad’s eyes, but my mother refused to look at him. She sat there on the brown Draylon sofa, deflated, her shoulders sloping as if she’d pulled herself inside out. She looked small, like a child, and defeated.

  Sitting at the top of the stairs, conscious of the bathroom behind me, I felt a little stab of satisfaction. This was all my mother’s fault.

  Over the next few weeks, my dad worked on my mother, gradually wearing her down, until eventually she gave in. Since the accident, she’d lost her resolve, and the feistiness I’d always known her to have had disappeared. It was as though someone had taken a photo of her before the accident but it hadn’t been developed properly, like it was underexposed and she was perpetually held in shadow. She resembled her old self, but always there was a fog hanging before her, a veil partially obscuring her that wouldn’t lift, no matter how hard my dad tried.

  Two.

  The smell of the honeysuckle was stronger now, trapped in my nostrils like glue, when my dad shone a torch on the key-hole and fumbled with the keys. A scrape and the door swung open. I was holding Lorry. He’d stopped crying by then, but had his head buried in my shoulder and he was snivelling and whimpering. He was heavy, too heavy for me to carry for very long. I had the treasure bag over my other shoulder and was eager to check the relics, to make sure they hadn’t been damaged during the journey. The torchlight played over the walls, seeking a light switch, and flashed onto the faded pattern of the wallpaper, obscured here and there by blooming patches of damp. Finally, a click, and a futile light.

  There was a faint smell hanging in the stagnant air, overlaying the honeysuckle, something acrid but not altogether unpleasant. The smell of somewhere that hadn’t been lived in for years.

  A bare bulb hung from the ceiling and a staircase rose up to darkness on the left. There was a white plastic telephone attached to the wall, the same as the one we had at home. Next to it hung a small mirror. Scuffed floorboards were covered in the tiny tell-tale pin pricks of woodworm. Another door was set off slightly to the right and was closed, although a very faint halo of pale light showed around its periphery. The kitchen. My dad unlatched the door and we stepped through, Lorry’s head lolling against my shoulder.

  The torch lit up a butler’s sink set against the wall in front of us, chipped and ancient. A bright strip light flashed into action and I saw that the inside of the sink was grey, limescale-streaked and unscrubbed. Next to it sat a decrepit fridge, and there was an ancient black range cooker hunkered under an enormous stone mantel on my right. Facing the sink was a window, dust and fingerprints clouding the
myriad tiny panes. An old wooden sideboard leant against the wall next to the cooker, but apart from that, a scrubbed pine table in the centre of the room and the four chairs that surrounded it were the only pieces of furniture.

  ‘Here we are then.’ I couldn’t tell if my dad was trying to encourage us with forced jollity, or if his statement was simply the result of resignation in the face of what he’d landed us with.

  My mother stood in what had become her customary pose, one hand wrapped tightly around her waist, the other worrying away at the base of her neck. She was looking at the floor.

  ‘Yes. Here we are then.’ Her voice was quiet and gave away only a hint of the reproach that I knew lay within it. My dad put his hand on her shoulder and she looked up at him, and for a moment I thought there was a softening towards him. For a moment, it was like the old days, and I felt like an intruder in their intimacy. My mother even forced out a small, tight-lipped smile, before she shrugged my dad’s hand away.

  We carried on exploring, going from room to room. From the kitchen, a small corridor led to a tiny living room, the space taken up by a sagging old sofa and two armchairs. I put Lorry down on the sofa and he curled himself up into a foetal position and stuck his thumb in his mouth. I turned on a table lamp, expecting it not to work, but it came on and in the faint light it emitted I could see a bookshelf: a couple of bibles, their black leather covers curling with age, and several hymn books, their pages friable and so thin as to be translucent. All were in Welsh.

  ‘Nif!’ My dad’s voice cut through the silence.

  I retraced my steps to the back hall and saw that there were stone stairs leading down to a small wooden door that stood ajar.

  ‘Nif, I’m down here. Come and see.’

  I held on to the iron handrail as I made my way down the steep steps. This room was caught in the same twilight that inhabited the garden, a barely-there glow of gauzy light that found its way in through the corrugated plastic roof. My dad was standing in the middle of the room, the torchlight bouncing around as he took it in. I put my hand up to the side of the doorway and found the light switch. I saw the same bare breeze block walls that I had seen from outside and realised now that this was the single storey extension attached to the side of the cottage. Evidently it had been earmarked by my dad for his studio.

  ‘It’s got natural light from the roof, and even running water.’ My dad didn’t turn around, but I could hear the enthusiasm bubbling in him as he spoke. ‘In winter, it’ll be horrendous—cold and wet and miserable—but just for a month it’ll do.’

  ‘It’s great,’ I said. ‘Exactly what you need.’

  ‘This is where the wheel’s going.’ He raised one hand towards the centre of the room. ‘And the sink’s over there, and when we’ve got your mum settled in I’ll fetch the shelves in from the trailer and all my bits and pieces.’ When he turned around his face shone with the excited glow of a child, and I saw for the first time that he held the bust of my mother in front of him, clutched to his chest.

  I wandered back into the hall and poked my head round the living room door. Lorry was still there, exactly as I’d left him, thumb jammed in his mouth and fast asleep. I crouched down next to him and pushed the hair away from his eyes.

  In the last couple of months, he’d changed. His legs were getting longer, and he was filling out. He was talking now and could use the toilet like other four-year-olds. It was as though the accident had forced him to grow up, to shake off his infancy and become a child.

  In the kitchen, as I’d expected, my mother was sitting at the table, her fingers rubbing away at her skirt. The window was now completely black, the patch of concrete outside invisible and only my mother’s face reflected in the glass, a white oval suspended above an invisible body. She appeared to stare straight ahead, out into the garden, but her eyes were unfocused and blank.

  My dad and I roamed the house, inspecting bedrooms and the small dingy bathroom. I was pleased when he said I could have the room in the attic, the one with the little arched window I’d seen from the road.

  It was tiny, more like a box room than a bedroom, with a sloping roof and wooden beams, but it was cosy and quiet and away from the rest of my family. I had been right about the curtains: they were ripped and dangling loosely from the rail by a few remaining hooks, so I took them down and bundled them up into a parcel.

  The furniture in my room was sparse. A hard, narrow bed faced the window, with no sheets or pillow, and I was glad I’d brought my sleeping bag. Built into the wall on one side of the bed was a cupboard, and a chair stood on the other side, under the slope of the eaves. It looked like a school chair, one of those hard, wooden ones that was built for economy rather than comfort. On the far wall, next to the window, a small stone mantelpiece capped a tiny fireplace.

  The window was hard to open, and at first I thought it had been painted shut, and resigned myself to a night of sweaty, restless heat, but then with enough pressure I managed to get the latch up and it swung open. I could see the chapel we’d passed on our way into the village. The night had come in fully now, and the chapel’s windows were silvery in the moonlight.

  There was a cottage, even tinier than ours, that I hadn’t noticed when we’d arrived. It was set back behind a patch of lawn fronted by a rickety picket fence and a gate that was hanging off its hinges. The gable end faced the side of our cottage, and there was a tiny attic window set high up that mirrored my own.

  I placed the treasure bag down on the bed and pulled out the shoe box. I took off the lid and then I picked out each of the relics and inspected them in turn.

  The robin’s egg, tiny and sky-blue, I unwrapped from its cotton wool nest and placed in its own eggcup on the mantelpiece.

  Then the magpie’s egg, slightly bigger and greenish-blue and mottled: that too had a special eggcup.

  The duckling’s bill and bone were wrapped in tissue paper. When unwrapped, this had to be folded and made into a pillow for them.

  The blue, freckled blackbird’s egg had its own eggcup too, even though, like the others, it was barely visible when put inside.

  Finally, I unwrapped the feathers of wren, the penultimate relic and obtained only that morning. I lifted them carefully from the folds of their silk scarf and placed them at the end of the row. I left a space at the end, on the far right-hand side. It wouldn’t be long. I allowed myself a silent congratulation. The mantelpiece made a perfect altar. It was just what the Creed demanded.

  When I went downstairs, my dad had already started unpacking the trailer, and the hallway was full of boxes. We’d only brought the things we really needed for the month we’d be at the cottage: clothes and bedding and my dad’s sculpting stuff.

  We took a few minutes to explore the contents of the sideboard. A drawer held random items of cutlery. There were bone-handled knives and forks and ornate spoons with elaborately patterned handles and tarnished bowls. Inside the cupboard there were a few assorted glasses and some plates, all with different patterns and all chipped in places, and some with the faint tracery of cracks that comes with age. There were tea cups and mugs, and again most of them were chipped but some were elegantly curved and made of thin, translucent china. The tea cups were stacked, one inside another, and as I reached for them they tipped and the top one fell to the floor and smashed. Shards of china scattered across the flagstones.

  ‘Careful, Nif,’ my dad said. ‘That’s not our stuff, remember?’ He shuffled out to the hall with an empty box; that was my chance.

  I checked that my mother still had her back to me and, using my left hand, I picked another of the china cups from the top of the stack and tapped its rim against the flagstoned floor. It made a small but satisfying crack, and when I tapped again, chips of porcelain flew off. It wasn’t for me, I told myself. It was for the Creed. It needed to balance out the negative energy. Carefully I put both broken cups into a bucket that serviced as a bin.

  Lorry staggered into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and frown
ing. I picked him up and inspected his filthy legs. The dried blood on his knees from where he’d fallen out of the car was crusted and brown and mixed with tiny pieces of gravel. His bandages were filthy and starting to unravel.

  ‘Shall we get you washed, Lorry?’ I asked him. ‘Shall we get you nice and clean and into your pyjamas?’ He nodded drowsily. My dad came back in, carrying more boxes, but when he saw Lorry he put them down and took my brother from me. He sat down with him at the pine table.

  My mother stared out of the window, contemplative, calm.

  I thought I could wash Lorry at the kitchen sink, and got his bag of stuff from the hall. I got everything out, the cloths and towel, his ointments and bandages and his pyjamas, and arranged them on the table.

  I turned on the tap and a silverfish darted out and scuttled across the sink before slipping down the plug hole. A gurgle and then nothing. My dad got up, hoisting Lorry onto his hip, and peered into the sink. He tried the other tap. Nothing happened.

  ‘It’s the drought.’ My mother’s voice sounded suddenly loud in the quiet of the kitchen. ‘I read it in the paper. There hasn’t been any running water out here for weeks now. Everyone’s having to use the wells and boil up the water from the streams and the rivers. We’re not in the city anymore.’ It was the most my mother had said in weeks and she sounded satisfied and smug. My dad cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ll just have to make a few adjustments then. We’ve got a couple more bottles of water in the trailer, they’ll do for now. It’ll be a bit like camping, an adventure.’ His voice was perfectly even, but I knew he was struggling to stay calm. My mother snorted.