Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  At first I couldn’t persuade him to go into the water, and he pleaded with me to let him sit on the side and only put his legs in. After a while I lost my temper and I picked him up and waded into the water with him. I dumped him in and he fell over and cried and said he hated me. I dragged him up onto his feet and pushed him in further until he was in up to his belly, snivelling and whimpering. I could have made him go in further, the water at the base of the tree looked very deep, but I pulled him back and made him rub his hands over his legs and his arms, sloughing off the dirt and the bits of gravel that were still embedded in his knees.

  When he was clean I gave him a towel and made him sit on the bank. I put my arms around him and kissed the top of his head. The sky was the colour of a sapphire, and it should have been beautiful, sitting there, just me and Lorry under the gaze of the sun. But the heatwave had become intolerable since we’d arrived in this village that had tucked itself away from the world at the bottom of the valley. It was as though the high sides of the valley walls amplified the intensity of the sun. I felt scrutinised by the heat, violated, and this made the dark, gaping water under the oak tree look even more inviting.

  I took off my shorts first. I folded them and placed them on the bank next to where Lorry was sitting. I took off my t-shirt quickly and put that with my other clothes. I didn’t wear a bra. I slipped my pants off and covered myself with my hands and waded straight into the water. I went in as deep as my hips, drawing in a breath as the cold water lapped at me. I waded in further, as far as my belly, and the swirling stream stroked my hips. The cold rose around me and caressed my back and my arms. Under the water, I circled my hands over my stomach and my thighs, imagining the dirt dissolve and be carried away by the stream. My hands rose up my body and brushed over my nipples, hard beneath my palms.

  That was when I saw the boy.

  He was behind the tree, about six feet away from me. I could only see the top half of his face; the rest was obscured by the tree trunk. His eyes were deep-set and dark-shadowed and the hair which sprang from the top of his head was mousy and tangled.

  My arms flew around my shoulders, an instinctive attempt to hide my nakedness. I glared at him, glad of the water that covered the rest of me. The boy stood up and watched me for a moment; all the while I could feel the heat of the sun on my naked shoulders. Then he grinned and winked, and gave me a thumbs-up. He started walking away backwards, all the time looking at me and smiling, then he turned and ran off, back the way Lorry and I had walked, the long grass whipping at his jeans, his bare back gleaming pale in the sunlight.

  Hunkering down, I scuttled to the river bank and grabbed my towel. I threw it round me like a cape.

  ‘Lorry wanna go home.’ My brother’s voice was a whine through the silence.

  I pulled on my clothes, the fabric snagging against my wet skin, and then I dragged Lorry to his feet.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘We’re going.’

  The cars had all gone from outside the chapel when we got back to the house, but my dad was standing on the other side of the lane, leaning on the fence that ran along the front garden of the little cottage. It looked like he was talking to someone on the other side, leaning forward with one hand jammed into his back pocket. As we approached, I could see that it was a woman.

  She had on a bubblegum-pink bikini and her skin was nut-brown, like she’d been sunbathing for weeks. Her hair was blonde and curly and held up in a ponytail on the top of her head. Little tendrils had got loose and sprang around her face. There was blue eyeshadow lighting up her eyes and she was wearing lipstick. She could have been a dancer on Top of the Pops.

  She stood with one hand on her hip and in the other hand she had a bunch of flowers and leaves that looked as though it was already starting to wilt. They were both laughing, but stopped when they saw me and Lorry, and my dad raised a hand at her and walked towards us.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Her name’s Janet,’ my dad said. He was smiling the big oafish grin he used to have back in the old days. ‘She’s our next-door neighbour.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘And she’s a non-non-conformist.’

  It took a little while for me to work it out, but then I saw the sly smirk on his face and I realised that he’d also seen the chapel-goers arriving that morning.

  ‘She’s not one of them,’ he said, nodding towards the chapel. ‘And she’s got a son.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘He’s about the same age as you, I think, and he might be able to show you around.’

  I thought of the boy at the stream and must have blushed, because my dad put his hand on my shoulder and rubbed the back of my neck. I shrugged him off.

  ‘Who’s the woman?’ my mother demanded, as soon as we’d got through the door. She was standing just inside the porch, waiting for us. She was still in her dressing gown and her hair lay on her shoulders in two greasy hanks.

  For a moment, my dad’s smile looked as though it was going to slide away, but then he found it again and he took my mother’s hand in his. It was white and worm-ridden with veins.

  ‘She’s our neighbour and she’s not from here and she doesn’t go to chapel and I think you’ll really like her.’ His words all came out in a rush and he looked embarrassed, like a small boy.

  I looked around the garden for Lorry and saw that he was sitting in a flower bed, rubbing his hands in the dry earth and excavating dead flowers. His clown doll lay on the ground next to him, grubby and forlorn.

  ‘Really, Linda, you’d like her if you’d only let yourself talk to her.’ He scratched his head. ‘Just try, eh?’

  He looked down at my mother’s hand, sitting still like marble in his own. She shrugged and pulled her hand away. My dad sighed and pushed gently past her and went into the kitchen. I went to see what Lorry was doing to the flower bed.

  The other thing about the Creed is that it makes you do things you might at first think are wrong. For instance, if you drop a cup on the floor and it smashes, you must drop another cup with the other hand to cancel out the negative energy, to make sure that nothing bad will come of it. It’s a case of matching the opposites, of finding equilibrium, so that bad luck doesn’t breed more bad luck.

  So, when Lorry pulled up the dandelion, already withered in the heat and half-dead, and the red ants scattered out, angrily zig-zagging across the dirt, I had a feeling that there was only one way this was going to go. At first, he just scratched at his right hand, incredulity stamped on his face, rubbing away at the palm. He held it out to me, and I saw that a scattering of red dots had already appeared. Then he started moaning, and finally he was sobbing as he scrubbed away at his hand.

  ‘What happened, Lorry?’ I asked. Even though I knew the answer, I needed him to say it.

  ‘Ants, Nif. Bite me,’ he managed to get out between sobs, angry and annoyed all at once.

  ‘Nasty ants,’ I said, and pulled his hand towards me, palm upwards.

  ‘Nif make better.’

  ‘Nif can make it better,’ I said, and very gently, I took hold of his arm and pulled him towards me. Slowly, I wrapped my arm around his shoulders and then very quickly I grabbed his left hand and pressed it, palm down, onto the hole left by the dandelion, where the ants were still streaming out. He tried to pull his hand back, but I was a good deal stronger than he was and I forced his hand down, feeling him flinch and squirm as the ants started to bite.

  He looked at me in disbelief, the shock at what I had done clouding his pain. I felt the usual bubbling mixture of excitement and nausea when this happened, but I knew that repeating an action, creating balance, was the only way to stave off the bad luck. It was why I’d had to rub the gravel into Lorry’s other knee on the night we’d arrived, when he’d fallen out of the car.

  Finally, I let him go.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I had to do that. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘You horrid, Nif.’ Lorry was snivelling and rubbing his hands together and walking in circles arou
nd the small dirty lawn. ‘You horrid an’ I’m gonna tell Daddy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lorry, but Daddy doesn’t care,’ I said, and as soon as the words came out I realised they were true.

  Five.

  Sunday lunch was a paltry affair. We’d only brought a few bits and pieces of food with us in the car, and even if there had been any shops nearby, they would have been closed. We had some stale bread which we made into toast, and we ate that with a can of baked beans and some cheese. The fridge was old and worn out and didn’t work very well in the heat, so the cheese was sweaty and rubbery. The milk had turned into chunks, so we drank our tea black.

  I’d taken Lorry into the kitchen after the incident with the ants, and looked in the cupboards for something to put on the ant bites. I vaguely remembered that people used bicarbonate of soda for things like that, but there wasn’t any. Instead I found an ancient bottle of vinegar, the screw top crusted and brown. I used one of Lorry’s bandages and soaked it from the bottle, and pressed it onto each of his hands in turn. The smell of vinegar filled the kitchen.

  One of the good things about Lorry, one of the things I liked most about him, was his willing acceptance of everything that happened to him as an incontrovertible fact. He didn’t ask me why I’d forced his hand onto an anthill to make the ants bite him, or why I’d then done my best to alleviate the pain I’d caused. It wasn’t a question of him having forgiven me, he just accepted it, and didn’t ask questions, which meant I didn’t have to make anything up.

  We ate in silence, except for the sound of Lorry chewing and my mother’s occasional harsh cough. When we’d finished eating, my mother lit a cigarette and I carried the plates to the sink.

  ‘We need to get some water from the stream for washing up and stuff,’ I said, mostly to my dad, but I was hoping my mother was listening as well. ‘And the toilet hasn’t been flushed in ages and it’s starting to smell.’

  ‘No need,’ said my dad. ‘Janet says there’s a well in the field behind the chapel. It’s her field, and she says we should just help ourselves. Fresh water, straight from the spring. Means we don’t even have to boil it before we drink it.’

  At the mention of Janet’s name, my mother’s mouth puckered around her cigarette, but she remained silent. I could tell that there was a fight brewing between my dad and my mother even though no-one had said anything. There was that static in the air, like before a storm, the sort that only dogs can detect. That was what I was like with my parents.

  ‘Nif, can you take Lorry and go and fill the bottles up? There are a few more of those gallon containers in the studio you could fill at the same time.’ My dad pushed his glasses up his nose as he spoke.

  ‘I’m not taking Lorry with me.’

  ‘Fine. Do what you want. Lorry can come and sit in the studio with me.’ He looked at my mother, as if expecting her to disagree or complain or perhaps even concur with him, but there was no response. She just sucked on her cigarette and blew the smoke out in one long stream. She looked haggard and had lost the glow she’d found the night before when she’d talked about Petra.

  There was a time when my mother was beautiful, and she knew it. She used to have a radiance, a luminescence that drew people to her like moths around a candle. When my parents used to have parties, everyone would surround my mother and she would laugh and throw her head back and shine a light onto all the people around her. The men would be enthralled, and would gather round, tongue-tied like small children.

  It was the same when she came to my school. In the mornings, once the twins had eaten their toast and cereal and she’d got Petra dressed and I’d seen to Lorry, we’d all walk the hundred yards or so to Mrs O’Riordan’s house. Mrs O’Riordan lived in one of the houses on the new estate, the houses that had been built to cover the waste ground that had lain there since the previous houses were demolished by bombs in the war. Mrs O’Riordan was Northern Irish and had a burr that could sharpen knives, my mother said, but she would look after Lorry while my mother was at home with Petra and I was at school and she didn’t charge very much.

  Once we’d dropped Lorry at Mrs O’Riordan’s house, my mother and Petra and I would walk the short distance to my school, and she’d watch as I went through the dark green iron gates on my own, and then she’d disappear in a cloud of perfume and a swish of hair, Petra clutching her hand and toddling along beside her. Some of the older boys, sitting on the wall by the gates, used to look out for her, and once or twice they wolf whistled. She never looked round, but she would brush her hair behind her ear and draw her shoulders back, and a slight swagger would attach itself to her normally staid gait.

  And it wasn’t just the boys, either.

  At the last parents’ evening, just before Petra died, my mother came on her own as my dad had a meeting after work. She sat on the side of the desk in Mr McPherson’s office and her long legs dangled down and swung against the shiny wooden table leg. I remember feeling faintly embarrassed for Mr McPherson, who couldn’t stop looking at her legs and seemed to be flirting with her, despite the fact that he was married and had five children.

  All that had changed since the accident. Now she was dull and plain and bitter.

  I went to get the water bottles from my dad’s studio. The sun that flooded through the plastic roof had made an oven of the whole room. My dad had been working on the bust of my mother before lunch, and he’d sprayed it with water to keep the clay pliable, but left it uncovered, presumably intending to work on it again that afternoon. He’d been working on the mouth, I could see, and the wrinkles on the upper lip and at the corners were now more prominent, more pronounced. Just like in real life.

  When I got back to the kitchen I saw that my parents had taken their argument upstairs, so I stole a cigarette from the packet that my mother had left on the table after lunch. I knew she’d never notice. I grabbed a box of matches from one of the drawers on my way out.

  It was a relief to see that the gates outside the chapel were padlocked again when I got there, so that I didn’t have to find an excuse to avoid walking through the cemetery, and I looked around for another way of getting into the field. There was a scrappy bit of hedge to the right of the chapel railings, set up on a bank, and I managed to crawl through, scratching my legs and arms a little bit. The raw scrape of thorns against my skin felt good. It was refreshing.

  The well was close to the hedge at the bottom of the slope, and the side of the valley reared up in front of me. A couple of spindly trees stood a few feet up the incline, their leaves shrivelled and yellow, their branches still stretching to the heavens, as if praying for rain, or like children, their arms outstretched, begging for their mother to pick them up.

  There was the blue plastic bucket like my dad had said. There was the sheet of plywood, weighed down with an old brick, presumably to keep the animals and dirt out. I chucked the brick to one side and prised the plywood up with my fingers.

  I expected woodlice to be scurrying around in the dirt underneath, but there was only the spring of grass, slightly greener where the plywood had been and less parched by the sun. The well was just a dark hole in the ground, and I couldn’t see how deep it was. The bucket had a long rope tied to the handle, so I chucked it down and heard a splash. I could feel it sinking, and when I thought it was probably full I started to pull it back up, bit by bit. It was heavy and by the time I’d got the bucket to the top my t-shirt was glued to me all over with sweat.

  I did this over and over until the four bottles I’d brought with me were full. Then I chucked the sheet of plywood over the well and kicked the brick on top of it. I was flaming hot now and as well as the sheen of sweat on my back there was a flush on my arms and legs, and the saltiness of my sweat made the scratches from the hedge sting. I drank some of the water, the heft of the gallon bottle making it spill over my face and onto my hair and chest. It was different to the water at home, which tasted plasticky and fake in comparison. This water tasted of earth and organic matter and dar
kness. I lay on the grass and closed my eyes.

  In a moment the world turned orange, and little prickles of light danced in front of me. I knew that as soon as I opened my eyes the world would return, brighter than before and colour-saturated. I could still see the shape of the sun even with my eyes closed, a colourless fluorescent disc stark against black.

  The black became blacker and my eyes sprang open. A shadow was passing over me. I couldn’t make out a face or any features. It was just a head, silhouetted against the bright blue sky. I shot up onto my elbows and shuffled back a bit, trying to create some distance between me and this person. With one hand, I shielded my eyes and there stood the boy from the stream, his face nearly hidden by his long hair as he looked down at me. The sunlight was reflected by his sunglasses and his eyes were obscured. He was smiling.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I felt stupid, lying there, all sweaty and wet.

  ‘Nothing. Watching you,’ the boy said. In that first word of his I could tell he was an outsider. It sounded more like ‘nuffing’ and there was no sign of the Welsh lilt I’d been expecting. He took off the sunglasses and stood there, leaning over me.

  I struggled to my feet so I could look at him face-on. He was about the same height as me, and his eyes were deep set and looked as though someone had smudged them with their thumbs. He grinned, displaying two rows of tiny, very white, teeth.

  ‘You’re trespassing,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re trespassing,’ he repeated. ‘This is my field.’

  I snorted. ‘Only if your name’s Janet,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye. His grin had become a smirk.