Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  I’d never told anyone about this before, and now I’d started talking I couldn’t stop.

  ‘I remember my mother in the kitchen when she told me. She’d made a cup of tea and sat down opposite me, on the other side of the table. She told me that God had decided that we were going to have a new brother or sister in our lives. That we’d all been patient and had waited and prayed until God had decided that we were ready, and now it was happening. In a few weeks, the baby would be born and I would be a big sister.’

  ‘Your mum doesn’t look the religious sort,’ Mally said, looking up from his plimsoll.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She doesn’t look like the church-going type, that’s all. I mean, you’ve seen all the people round here who go to the chapel. Your mum’s different.’ He shrugged.

  ‘She doesn’t go to church anymore,’ I said. ‘She gave all that up when Petra died. She said that if God existed he was a bastard and she took off her crucifix and threw it into the canal. She’s never been back to church since.’

  ‘What about you? Did you ever go to church?’

  ‘I used to go sometimes, with my mother. Before the accident. I used to like the peace of the church, sitting there in the cool and the dark and the quiet. It was…soothing, I suppose.’

  ‘So, were you ever, you know, confirmed?’

  ‘No. My mother wanted me to be but my dad put his foot down. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him stand up to her. He said I should wait until I was old enough to make up my own mind and do it then if I still wanted to.’

  ‘So, your dad’s not religious then?’

  ‘He never has been. He and my mother have this unspoken agreement that they just get on with things their own way. Some people believe in God, I suppose, and some people believe in nothing.’ I shrugged. ‘And some people believe in something else.’

  ‘And what do you believe in?’ Mally had pulled off a strip of the rubber from his shoe and was holding it in both hands and stretching it. I thought about telling him about the Creed, how it had found me exactly when I needed it, but I just smiled and shook my head.

  ‘So God gave your parents a baby, then?’ Mally said and the sarcasm in his voice was clear.

  ‘I suppose so. Or at least that’s what my mother said at the time. I was pleased, really I was. I was excited about being a big sister and helping my mother with a new baby, and I counted down the weeks and watched as her belly got bigger and bigger until one day her waters broke in the kitchen, this puddle of liquid that just appeared on the floor, and she just stood there, leaning on the worktop and clutching her belly.’ I could picture my mother as she had been then: graceful, excited. Happy.

  ‘My parents had arranged for me to go next door when this happened, and we stood there in the dark with my dad ringing and ringing the doorbell and there was no answer. It was raining, or sleeting or something like that, and really cold and we got soaked to the bone waiting for Mrs Akhar. In the end, we all had to go to the hospital, my dad, my mother and me.

  ‘I remember how the car wouldn’t start at first, and my dad had to get out and fiddle under the bonnet. Then it started and we drove to the hospital and I’ve never seen rain like it. The windscreen wipers could hardly keep up, and my dad had to sit forward in his seat so he could see out. It’s funny, but I remember that better than any of the other things that happened.’

  The sun was nearly all the way up now, and the sky had taken on the light of a new day.

  ‘What did happen?’ The piece of rubber Mally was stretching broke in two and snapped back against his fingers. He dropped it.

  ‘When we got to the hospital I was made to sit on a chair outside the labour ward while my dad and my mother went in. I remember I was given a book—Little Red Riding Hood—by one of the nurses and I was cross because it was too young for me, but still I read it from cover to cover, over and over again, for hours and hours. Sometimes the same nurse would come and give me an orange or a biscuit or a glass of milk.

  ‘The thing that I remember most about the hospital is the screaming. I’d never heard my mother scream before, and when it started it was the worst sound imaginable. Eventually my dad came out. He was crying—happy tears, I think—and he said that I had a little sister. He hugged me and then he went back in to the ward again. Then lots of stuff started happening all at once. Bells were ringing and more nurses came, walking quickly, not quite running but definitely in a hurry to get somewhere. I remember thinking please make that not be for my mother or my sister, please make them be OK and for all this commotion to be happening for someone else. But it was for them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was a problem. All this time they’d thought there was only one baby, and so when Petra was born they thought that was it. It was only when my mother carried on bleeding that they examined her properly and they saw that there was another baby.’

  ‘Lorry?’

  I nodded. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken, uninterrupted, for that long, and I felt lighter as a result, but also afraid that by letting the words out into the world I’d never get them back again. Was this how it had felt for my mother, all those times I’d waited for her as she sat in the confessional box with Father Declan?

  ‘So, what happened?’ Mally was pulling again at the rubber from his plimsoll, stretching it out and letting it snap back into place.

  ‘They got him out. He was small, a lot smaller than Petra, and the doctor told my dad that he’d probably been getting less of the nutrition, that Petra had been the stronger twin and in a way, had been starving Lorry of food and maybe oxygen. They thought he wouldn’t survive, he was so small. But they kept him in hospital and he managed to pull through. My mother took Petra home and left the nurses to look after Lorry. She said that she thought it best if she gave her attention to one of the twins, and that when Lorry was better then he could come home and she’d look after him as well. I remember thinking that was a bit odd.’

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘My dad and I would go to visit Lorry in hospital—every day, this tiny bundle of skin and bones lying in the incubator. I remember my dad reaching in a finger and stroking Lorry and the nurse seeing him and telling him off and my dad getting angry with her and saying that was his child in that box and he’d touch him if he wanted to. I think that’s the first time I ever saw my dad get really angry.

  ‘After a few weeks, Lorry was strong enough to come home. My dad and I went to get him from the hospital, and I remember being really excited, and thinking that now we had a chance of being a proper family, that now I had not only a sister, but a brother too to help my mother look after.

  ‘When we got back to the house with Lorry that day, my mother didn’t even bother coming to meet us at the door. My dad let us in with his key, and called out to her. We went into the sitting room, and there she was, sitting on the sofa with Petra on her lap. She was feeding her, and singing to her. It was a song, a counting song that she used to sing to me when I was little. I thought she’d get up and come and pick up Lorry, her little boy, be pleased to have him home, but she didn’t. She just said something about how he must be allowed to sleep, and that the car journey would have worn him out.’

  I waited for Mally to say something, but he didn’t, so I carried on.

  ‘I should have known then that she was never really going to love Lorry, that Petra was all she needed. It took me a few months to realise this, and it came to me gradually. It was like when you get a cold and you can feel it building up over a few days and you know that there’s nothing you can do to stop it and that very soon you’re going to feel terrible. That’s what it was like. And that was when I guessed that she’d never loved me either, and that was why she needed God to give her the perfect baby she thought she deserved.’

  I couldn’t believe I was telling Mally all this when I’d known him for little more than a week, but there was something about him, something that begge
d you to put your confidence in him.

  The sun was fully over the horizon by then, a flaming ball threatening us with the knowledge of the oppressive heat it would bring later in the day.

  ‘From then on, my dad looked after Lorry, or we dropped him off with Mrs Akhar from next door when my dad was teaching or had a commission he couldn’t put off. When my dad started to get known a bit more for his sculptures, and things got busy for him, I did more for Lorry. I stopped going to school as much, which was fine as I couldn’t stand it, and I fed Lorry from a bottle and waited for him to grow up.’

  Sitting there in the early morning light I felt exhausted. I thought again about the church we used to go to, and sitting in the shadows while my mother asked God to give her a baby, watching as people slipped out of the confessional, having told the priest their sins. I wondered if they felt like I did now, unburdened yet shameful, having put into words the deeds they thought they should keep as mere thoughts.

  ‘Two crows I see, good luck to me.’ Mally’s voice broke the silence.

  ‘What?’ I was impatient with him, and I said it sharply, the consonant sound clipped as my tongue clicked against my teeth. I wondered if he’d even been listening to me.

  ‘It’s a saying from round here. Goes way back, back to when they were superstitious, even more superstitious than they are now.’ He snorted out a laugh and then he pointed at a log a little way off. Two crows were perched there, their heads hunkered down into their necks. Mally lifted the camera and aimed it at the crows. It clicked.

  ‘The locals think that if you see one crow it’s bad luck. Kind of like a bad omen and it’ll bring terrible things and doom and gloom to you and your family. But if you see two crows together, the second one balances out the bad luck from the first one.’

  Despite myself, I was interested.

  ‘You mean it reverses the bad luck? Stops the bad luck from taking hold if you see another one?’

  ‘Something like that, yeah.’ He was looking at the front of the camera, waiting for the photo to appear, and he’d lost interest in what I was saying. I persisted.

  ‘So a bit like, say, if you broke something and it brought bad luck to you but then you broke something else to cancel out the bad luck? A bit like that?’

  He was looking at me strangely now. His hand was shielding the sun from his eyes, but he was still frowning.

  ‘I suppose so. What are you getting at?’

  ‘So, like, I don’t know, say if someone you really cared about, someone you loved and never wanted to hurt, say if they injured themselves and you knew that the only thing you could do to ward off the bad luck would be to make them hurt themselves again.’ The words were all coming out in a rush now, and I had to pause for breath.

  Mally was sitting up straight now. ‘What’s got into you?’ he asked.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s my turn to show you something.’

  Seventeen.

  The morning we left for Wales I helped my dad pack the trailer. We hadn’t needed to take much, as we were only planning on going for a month, but my dad had all his stuff for sculpting, which took up most of the space.

  He went out after breakfast to pick up the trailer. He had arranged to borrow it from a friend of a friend, and had left me alone with my mother for the first time since the accident. He gave her a dose of Valium before he left, said she’d be asleep and that I was to leave her alone and just keep an eye on my brother.

  After he’d gone I checked on Lorry, who was in the playpen in the living room, watching Rentaghost with the sound turned down. He had his thumb jammed in the corner of his mouth and didn’t even look at me when I walked past.

  My mother was lying in bed with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Her face was white, almost as white as the sheet drawn up around her chest, and there were deep shadows carved into her eye sockets and under her cheekbones. Her dark hair was fanned out on the pillow and the tendons on her neck were taut and stiff. If her eyes had been closed she would have looked like a corpse waiting to be buried, except that the sheet over her chest rose and fell a tiny amount with each breath she took.

  I stood there for a while, watching her, thinking about Petra. I tried to match my breathing to hers, timing each inhalation to rise at the same time as hers did, and to exhale when she did, but her breathing was too slow for me, and I found myself struggling for air.

  After a while I closed the door and went downstairs again.

  It turned out that the man my dad had arranged to borrow the trailer from had forgotten all about it and gone out, so it took my dad ages to track him down and get the trailer back to our house. Finally, he got it onto the drive, and together with the car it took up most of the space. It was backed-up tight against the flower bed, which was devoid of any plants, all of them withered and dead from the drought. The plastic netting which my dad had tied against the wall to train clematis was now a graveyard for dead foliage, the neglected tendrils hanging in limp fingers.

  I helped him fit other bits and pieces in the trailer around his potter’s wheel and tubs of clay. We managed to fit in a few boxes of kitchen stuff and big gallon bottles of water. We worked in silence for an hour or so.

  It was as we’d finished packing the trailer, and had started to secure the tarpaulin over the top, that my mother’s voice emerged through the open bedroom window. It wasn’t unusual for her to wake up and start shouting, and my dad hardly flinched, although I could see that he was trying hard not to meet my eye. He finished tying down the tarpaulin, then went in through the front door.

  I had already noticed the wren that morning, and I watched it as it sat on a low branch of the rosebush. Now it was back again, all puffed up, its feathers fluffed out, stumpy wings with mottled stripes standing out from both sides of its body. There were tiny flashes of white over each eye, and it looked as though it was raising its eyebrows, asking me a question. It was chirruping out a song, its beak opening and closing as it turned left and right. A gobby, cocky little bird.

  It hopped down and started scratching at the dust of the flower bed, occasionally flitting in and out of the holes in the plastic netting.

  I moved towards it, but it didn’t fly away as I’d expected. It stopped scratching and pecking and looked me straight in the eye. I wondered if it had a nest nearby. I edged closer, my hand out, palm upwards and flattened in a gesture of submission, as I’d seen my dad do with Mrs Akhar’s cat. The wren just kept on looking at me. It didn’t move, didn’t even look away. I moved closer, inch by inch, and wondered if I might actually be able to grab it.

  When I was about a foot away from the wren, it suddenly panicked. It hopped backwards a couple of times and then darted to the side, tucking its dumpy brown body through one of the holes in the plastic netting that had been meant to train the clematis.

  The holes in the netting were too small for it to squeeze through easily, and it got stuck, one short wing sticking out at the side, trapped by the plastic. I moved closer to it and it tried to move away from me, but its trapped wing prevented it from flying away and it pulled and fluttered. I was so close by now that I could see its eye, the pupil dilating and contracting like the beam from a lighthouse.

  As I reached out my hand to pick it up it flapped even more, and I could see that the plastic netting was twisted around its wing. When I knelt down and my fingers closed around the bird, I could feel how small its body was beneath the puffery of its feathers. Its breastbone was sharp and hard, and when I pressed a finger into the space beneath I could feel its heart battering in its chest. With one hand I held it, and with the other I tried to untangle it from the netting. It was no good. I was clumsy, working one-handed, and the netting had got wound tourniquet-tight around the top of the wren’s wing, where it joined its body, and the bird’s struggles had only made it tighter.

  I was starting to get annoyed with it. Its beak was open now, its tiny tongue darting in and out as it panted in panic. If it would only stop struggling, I’
d be able to get it free.

  It was my mother who made me do what I did next. Her scream came bursting through the bedroom window, setting the air fizzing with nervous energy and my heart almost burst in my chest. My arm seemed to move of its own accord, pulling backwards, dragging the stupid wren clear of the netting in one swift movement, without me even thinking about it. I saw that I’d managed to free the tiny bird, that I was clutching it in my hand and that even though it was still panting and its eyes were still flashing, it was free.

  Then I saw the feathers, still trapped in the netting, a collection of short, hard feathers about an inch long, joined at one end. But they weren’t just feathers.

  They were the bird’s wing.

  We left about an hour after that. My mother had calmed down enough to allow herself to be dressed by my dad, and had been put in the passenger seat where she sat nervously rubbing the fabric of her skirt. I’d cleaned the sores on Lorry’s legs and changed his bandages for him, and he was sitting in the back seat, behind my mother, leaning against the window with his eyes half closed, his clown doll jammed between his knees. My dad was doing a final check of the house before we set off, closing windows and double-locking the front door.

  He finished locking up and was about to get into the car when he seemed to hesitate. He went to the back, to the trailer, and rummaged around for a bit. Then he opened my door and handed me the hessian-wrapped package.

  ‘Probably best if she sits on your lap, eh? Safer that way. Less likely to get damaged,’ he said.

  I put the treasure bag on the floor, careful to hold it safely in place between my feet, and took the bust of my mother. It was heavy and cold and I thought I could feel the dampness coming off it, even though I knew that under the hessian it would be wrapped in plastic.