Into the Water 4 страница

I knew what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to confront her, didn’t want to hear any more. My fault? How could this be my fault? If you were unhappy, you never told me. If you had told me that, I would have listened. In my head, you laughed. OK, but if you’d told me you’d stopped swimming, Nel, then I would have known something was wrong. Swimming was essential to your sanity, that’s what you told me; without it, you fell apart. Nothing kept you out of the water, just like nothing could draw me into it.

Except that something did. Something must have done.

I felt suddenly ravenous, had a violent urge to be sated, somehow. I went back inside and served myself a bowl of Bolognese, and then another, and a third. I ate and ate and then, disgusted with myself, I went upstairs.

On my knees in the bathroom, I left the light off. A habit long abandoned but so old it felt almost like comfort, I hunched over in the dark, the blood vessels in my face strained to bursting point, my eyes streaming as I purged. When I felt there was nothing left, I stood and flushed, then splashed water on my face, avoiding my own gaze in the mirror only to have it fall on the reflection of the bathtub behind me.

I have not sat immersed in water for more than twenty years. For weeks after my near-drowning, I found it difficult to wash properly at all. When I began to smell, my mother had to force me under the shower head and hold me there.

I closed my eyes and splashed my face again. I heard a car slowing in the lane outside, my heart rate rising as it did, and then falling once more as the car sped off. ‘No one is coming, ’ I said out loud. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. ’

Lena hadn’t returned, yet I had no idea where to look for her in this town, at once familiar and foreign. I went to bed but didn’t sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I saw your face, blue and pale, your lips lavender, and in my imagination they drew back over your gums and even though your mouth was full of blood, you smiled.

‘Stop it, Nel. ’ I was speaking out loud again, like a madwoman. ‘Just stop it. ’

I listened for your reply and all I got was silence; silence broken by the sound of the water, the noise of the house moving, shifting and creaking as the river pushed past. In the dark, I fumbled for my phone on the bedside table and dialled into my voicemail. You have no new messages, the electronic voice told me, and seven saved messages.

The most recent one came last Tuesday, less than a week before you died, at one thirty in the morning.

Julia, it’s me. I need you to call me back. Please, Julia. It’s important. I need you to call me, as soon as you can, all right? I … uh … it’s important. OK. Bye.

I pressed 1 to repeat the message, again and again. I listened to your voice, not just the huskiness, the faint but irritating mid-Atlanticism of the pronunciation, I listened to you. What were you trying to tell me?

You left the message in the middle of the night and I picked it up in the early hours of the morning, rolling over in bed to see the tell-tale white flash on my phone. I listened to your first three words, Julia, it’s me, and hung up. I was tired and I was feeling low and I didn’t want to hear your voice. I listened to the rest of it later. I didn’t find it strange and I didn’t find it particularly intriguing. It’s the sort of thing you do: leave cryptic messages in order to pique my interest. You’ve been doing it for years, and then when you call again, a month or two later, I realize that there was no crisis, no mystery, no big event. You were just trying to get my attention. It was a game.

Wasn’t it?

I listened to the message, over and over, and now that I was hearing it properly I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed before the slight breathlessness of your delivery, the uncharacteristic softness of your speech, hesitant, faltering.

You were afraid.

What were you afraid of? Who were you afraid of? The people in this village, the ones who stop and stare but offer no condolences, the ones who bring no food, send no flowers? It doesn’t seem, Nel, that you are much missed. Or maybe you were afraid of your strange, cold, angry daughter, who doesn’t weep for you, who insists that you killed yourself, without evidence, without reason.

I got out of bed and crept next door to your bedroom. I felt suddenly childlike. I used to do this – creep next door – when my parents slept here, when I was afraid at night, when I’d had nightmares after listening to one of your stories. I pushed the door open and slipped inside.

The room felt stuffy, warm, and the sight of your unmade bed brought me suddenly to tears.

I perched on the edge of it, picked up your pillow, crisp slate-grey linen with blood-red edging, and held it against me. I had the clearest memory of the two of us coming in here on Mum’s birthday. We’d made breakfast for her, she was ill then and we were making an effort, trying to get along. Those truces never lasted long: you tired of having me around, I never failed to lose your attention. I’d drift back to Mum’s side and you would watch through narrowed eyes, contemptuous and hurt at the same time.

I didn’t understand you, but if you were strange to me then, you are utterly alien now. Now I’m sitting here in your home, amongst your things, and it is the house that is familiar, not you. I haven’t known you since we were teenagers, since you were seventeen and I thirteen. Since that night when, like an axe swung down on to a piece of wood, circumstance cleaved us, leaving a fissure wide and deep.

But it wasn’t until six years later that you lowered that axe again and split us for good. It was at the wake. Our mother just buried, you and me smoking in the garden on a freezing November night. I was struck dumb with grief, but you’d been self-medicating since breakfast and you wanted to talk. You were telling me about a trip you were going to take, to Norway, to the Pulpit Rock, a six-hundred-metre cliff above a fjord. I was trying not to listen, because I knew what it was and I didn’t want to hear about it. Someone – a friend of our father’s – called out to us, ‘You girls all right out there? ’ His words were slightly slurred. ‘Drowning your sorrows? ’

‘Drowning, drowning, drowning …’ you repeated. You were drunk too. You looked at me from under hooded eyelids, a strange light in your eyes. ‘Ju-ulia, ’ you said, slowly dragging out my name, ‘do you ever think about it? ’

You put your hand on my arm and I pulled it away. ‘Think about what? ’ I was getting to my feet, I didn’t want to be with you any longer, I wanted to be alone.

‘That night. Do you … have you ever talked to anyone about it? ’

I took a step away from you but you grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Come on, Julia … Tell me honestly. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? ’

After that, I stopped speaking to you. That, according to your daughter, was me being horrible to you. We tell our stories differently, don’t we, you and I?

I stopped talking to you, but that didn’t stop you from calling. You left strange little messages, telling me about your work or your daughter, an award you had won, an accolade received. You never said where you were or who you were with, although sometimes I heard noises in the background, music or traffic, sometimes voices. Sometimes I deleted the messages and sometimes I saved them. Sometimes I listened to them over and over, so many times that even years later I could remember your exact words.

Sometimes you were cryptic, other times angry; you repeated old insults, you dredged up long-submerged disagreements, railed against old slurs. The death wish! Once, in the heat of the moment, tired of your morbid obsessions, I’d accused you of having a death wish, and oh, how you harped on about that!

Sometimes you were maudlin, talking about our mother, our childhood, happiness had and lost. Other times you were up, happy, hyper. Come to the Mill House! you entreated me. Please come! You’ll love it. Please, Julia, it’s time we put all that stuff behind us. Don’t be stubborn. It’s time. And then I’d be furious – It’s time! Why should you get to choose when to call time on the trouble between us?

All I wanted was to be left alone, to forget Beckford, to forget you. I built a life for myself – smaller than yours, of course, how could it not be? But mine. Good friends, relationships, a tiny flat in a lovely suburb of north London. A job in social work which gave me purpose; a job which consumed me and fulfilled me, despite its low pay and long hours.

I wanted to be left alone, but you wouldn’t have it. Sometimes twice a year and sometimes twice a month, you called: disrupting, destabilizing, unsettling me. Just like you’d always done – it was a grown-up version of all the games you used to play. And all the time I waited, I waited for the one call I might actually respond to, the one where you would explain how it was that you behaved the way you did when we were young, how you could have hurt me, stood by while I was being hurt. Part of me wanted to have a conversation with you, but not before you told me that you were sorry, not before you begged for my forgiveness. But your apology never came, and I’m still waiting.

I pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table. There were postcards, blank ones – pictures of places you’d been, perhaps – condoms, lubricant, an old-fashioned silver cigarette lighter with the initials LS engraved on the side. LS. A lover? I looked around the room again and it struck me that there were no pictures of men in this house. Not up here, not downstairs. Even the paintings are almost all of women. And when you left your messages you talked of your work and the house and Lena, but you never mentioned a man. Men never seemed that important to you.

There was one though, wasn’t there? A long time ago, there was a boy who was important to you. When you were a teenager, you used to sneak out of the house at night, you’d climb out of the laundry window, drop down on to the river bank and creep around the house, up to your ankles in mud. You’d scramble up the bank and on to the lane, and he’d be waiting for you. Robbie.

Thinking of Robbie, of you and Robbie, was like going over the humpback bridge at speed: dizzying. Robbie was tall, broad and blond, his lip curled into a perpetual sneer. He had a way of looking at a girl that turned her inside out. Robbie Cannon. The alpha, the top dog, always smelling of Lynx and sex, brutish and mean. You loved him, you said, although it never looked much like love to me. You and he were either all over each other or throwing insults at each other, never anything in between. There was never any peace. I don’t remember a lot of laughter. But I did have the clearest memory of you both lying on the bank at the pool, limbs entangled, feet in the water, him rolling over you, pushing your shoulders down into the sand.

Something about that image jarred, made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a while. Shame. The dirty, secret shame of the voyeur, tinged with something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on and didn’t want to. I tried to turn away from it but I remembered: that wasn’t the only time I’d watched him with you.

I felt suddenly uncomfortable so I got up from your bed and paced around the room, looking at the photos. Pictures everywhere. Of course. Framed pictures of you on the chest of drawers, tanned and smiling, in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, on skiing holidays and on beaches, with your daughter in your arms. On the walls, framed prints of magazine covers you shot, a story on the front page of the New York Times, the awards you received. Here it is: all the evidence of your success, the proof that you outdid me in everything. Work, beauty, children, life. And now you’ve outdone me again. Even in this, you win.

One picture stopped me in my tracks. It was a photo of you and Lena – not a baby any longer, a little girl, maybe five or six years old, or maybe older, I can never tell children’s ages. She’s smiling, showing tiny white teeth, and there’s something strange about it, something that made my hair stand up on end; something about her eyes, the set of her face, gives her the look of a predator.

I could feel a pulse in my neck, an old fear rising. I lay back down on the bed and tried not to listen to the water, but even with the windows shut, at the top of the house, the sound was inescapable. I could feel it pushing against the walls, seeping into the cracks of the brickwork, rising. I could taste it, muddy and dirty in my mouth, and my skin felt damp.

Somewhere in the house, I could hear someone laughing, and it sounded just like you.

AUGUST 1993

Jules

MUM BOUGHT ME a new swimming costume, an old-fashioned one in blue-and-white gingham with ‘support’. It was supposed to have a kind of 1950s look to it, the sort of thing Marilyn might have worn. Fat and pale, I was no Norma Jean, but I put it on anyway because she’d gone to a lot of trouble to find it. It wasn’t easy finding swimwear for someone like me.

I put on a pair of blue shorts and an extra-large white T-shirt over the top. When Nel came down for lunch in her denim cutoffs and a halter-neck bikini, she took one look at me and said, ‘Are you coming to the river this afternoon? ’ in a tone which made it obvious that she didn’t want me to, and then she caught Mum’s eye and said, ‘I’m not looking after her, OK? I’m going there to meet my friends. ’

Mum said, ‘Be nice, Nel. ’

Mum was in remission then, so frail a stiff breeze might knock her over, her olive skin yellowed, like old paper, and Nel and I were under strict instructions from our father to Get Along.

Part of Getting Along meant Joining In and so yes, I was going to the river. Everyone went to the river. It was all there was to do, really. Beckford wasn’t like the beach, there was no funfair, no games arcade, not so much as a mini-golf course. There was the water: that was it.

A few weeks into the summer, once routines were established, once everyone had figured out where they belonged and who they belonged with, once outsiders and locals had mingled, friendships and enmities established, people started hanging out in groups along the river bank. The younger kids tended to swim south of the Mill House, where the water moved slowly and there were fish to catch. The bad kids hung out at the Wards’ cottage, where they took drugs and had sex, played with Ouija boards and tried to conjure up angry spirits. (Nel told me that if you looked hard enough, you could still find traces of Robert Ward’s blood on the walls. ) But the biggest crowd gathered at the Drowning Pool. The boys jumped off the rocks and the girls sunbathed, music played and barbecues were lit. Someone always brought beer.

I would have preferred to stay at home, indoors, out of the sun. I’d have preferred to lie on my bed and read, or play cards with Mum, but I didn’t want her to worry about me, she had more important things to worry about. I wanted to show her I could be sociable, I could make friends. I could Join In.

I knew Nel wouldn’t want me to go. As far as she was concerned, the more time I spent inside, the better, and the less likely it would be that her friends would see me – the blob, the embarrassment: Julia, fat, ugly and uncool. She squirmed in my company, always walking a few paces ahead or lagging ten behind; her discomfort around me was obvious enough to attract attention. Once, when the two of us left the village shop together, I heard one of the local boys talking. ‘She must be adopted. There’s no way that fat bitch is Nel Abbott’s real sister. ’ They laughed, and I looked to her for comfort, but all I saw was shame.

That day, I walked to the river alone. I carried a bag containing a towel and a book, a can of Diet Coke and two Snickers, in case I got hungry between lunch and dinner. My stomach ached and my back hurt. I wanted to turn back, to return to the privacy of my small, cool, dark room, where I could be alone. Unseen.

Nel’s friends arrived soon after I did; they colonized the beach, the little crescent of sandy bank on the nearside of the pool. It was the nicest place to sit, sloping down so that you could lie with your toes in the water. There were three girls – two locals and a girl called Jenny who came from Edinburgh and had gorgeous ivory skin and dark hair in a blunt-cut bob. Although she was Scottish she spoke the Queen’s English and the boys were desperately trying to get off with her because rumour had it she was still a virgin.

All the boys except Robbie, of course, who only had eyes for Nel. They’d met two years before, when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and they were a regular summer thing now, even though they were allowed to see other people the rest of the year because it wasn’t realistic to expect him to be faithful when she wasn’t around. Robbie was six foot one, he was handsome and popular, he played a lot of rugby, his family had money.

When Nel had been with Robbie, she sometimes came back with bruises on her wrists or the top of her arms. When I asked her how that happened, she laughed and said, ‘How do you think? ’ Robbie gave me a weird feeling in my stomach and I couldn’t help but stare at him whenever he was around. I tried not to, but I kept looking at him. He’d noticed it now and he’d started to stare back. He and Nel made jokes about it, and sometimes he’d look at me and lick his lips and laugh.

The boys were there too, but they were over on the other side, swimming, climbing up the bank, shoving each other off the rocks, laughing and swearing and calling each other gay. That’s the way it always seemed to be: the girls would sit and wait and the boys would mess around until they got bored and then they’d come over and do things to the girls, which the girls sometimes resisted and sometimes didn’t. All the girls except Nel, who wasn’t afraid of diving into the water and getting her hair wet, who relished the rough and tumble of their games, who managed to walk the tightrope between being one of the boys and the ultimate object of their desire.

I didn’t sit with Nel’s friends, of course. I laid out my towel under the trees and sat down alone. There was another group of younger girls, around my age, sitting a little way off and one of them was a girl I recognized from summers past. She smiled at me and I smiled back. I gave her a little wave, but she looked away.

It was hot. I longed, then, to go into the water. I could imagine exactly what it would feel like on my skin, smooth and clean, I could imagine the squelch of warm mud between my toes, I could see the warm orange light on my eyelids as I lay back to float. I took my T-shirt off, but that didn’t make me any cooler. I noticed that Jenny was watching me and she wrinkled her nose and then looked down at the ground because she knew that I’d clocked the disgust on her face.

I turned away from them all, lay on my right-hand side and opened my book. I was reading The Secret History. I longed for a group of friends like that, tightly knit and closed off and brilliant. I wanted someone to follow, someone who would protect me, someone remarkable for her brain, not her long legs. Though I knew that if there were people like that round here or at my school in London, they wouldn’t want to be friends with me. I wasn’t stupid, but I didn’t shine.

Nel shone.

She came down to the river sometime in mid afternoon. I heard her calling out to her friends, and the boys calling back to her from the top of the cliff where they were sitting, legs dangling over the edge, smoking cigarettes. I looked over my shoulder, watching as she stripped off and waded slowly into the water, splashing it up against her body, enjoying the attention.

The boys were coming down off the clifftop now, through the wood. I rolled on to my stomach, keeping my head down, eyes fixed firmly on the page, the words a blur. I wished I hadn’t come, wished I could slink away unnoticed, but there was nothing I could do unnoticed, literally nothing. My shapeless white bulk didn’t slink anywhere.

The boys had a football, and they started to have a kickabout. I could hear them calling for passes, the ball slapping against the surface of the water, shrieks of laughter from the girls as they got splashed. Then I felt it, a stinging smack against my thigh as the ball hit me. They were all laughing. Robbie held his hand up and ran towards me to get the ball.

‘Sorry, sorry, ’ he was saying, a wide grin on his face. ‘Sorry, Julia, didn’t mean to hit you. ’ He picked up the ball and I saw him looking at me, at the red, muddy mark on my flesh, pale and marbled like cold animal fat. Someone said something about a big target, yeah, you couldn’t hit a barn door but you can’t miss that arse.

I went back to my book. The ball hit a tree just a few feet away from me, and someone called out, ‘Sorry. ’ I ignored them. It happened again, and then again. I rolled over; they were aiming at me. Target practice. The girls were doubled up, helpless with laughter, Nel’s shrieks of mirth loudest of all.

I sat up, tried to brazen it out. ‘Yeah, okay. Very funny. You can stop now. Come on! Stop it, ’ I called out, but another one was taking aim. The ball came towards me. I lifted my arm to protect my face and the ball slapped against my flesh, a hard, stinging blow. Tears pricking the backs of my eyes, I scrabbled to my feet. The other girls, the younger ones, were watching too. One of them had her hand over her mouth.

‘Stop it! ’ she shouted out. ‘You’ve hurt her. She’s bleeding. ’

I looked down. There was blood on my leg, trickling down the inside of my thigh towards my knee. It wasn’t that, I knew right away, they hadn’t hurt me. The stomach cramps, the backache – and I’d been feeling more miserable than usual all week. I was bleeding properly, heavily, not just spotting – my shorts were soaked through. And they were looking at me, all of them, staring at me. The girls weren’t laughing any longer, they glanced at each other open-mouthed, halfway between horror and amusement. I caught Nel’s eye and she looked away, I could almost feel her cringing. She was mortified. She was ashamed of me. I pulled my T-shirt on as quickly as I could, wrapped my towel around my waist and hobbled awkwardly away, back along the path. I could hear the boys starting to laugh again as I left.

That night, I went into the water. It was later – much, much later – and I’d been drinking, my first ever experience of alcohol. Other things had happened, too. Robbie came to find me, he sought me out, he apologized for the way he and his friends had behaved. He told me how sorry he was, he put his arm around my shoulders, he told me I needn’t feel ashamed.

But I went to the Drowning Pool anyway, and Nel dragged me out. She pulled me to the bank and hauled me to my feet. She slapped my face hard. ‘You bitch, you stupid fat bitch, what have you done? What are you trying to do? ’

WEDNESDAY, 12 AUGUST

Patrick

THE WARDS’ COTTAGE hadn’t belonged to the Wards in almost a hundred years, and it didn’t belong to Patrick either – it didn’t really seem to belong to anyone any more. Patrick supposed that it probably belonged to the local council, though no one had ever laid claim to it. But in any case, Patrick had a key, so that made him feel proprietorial. He paid the small electric and water bills, and he’d fitted the lock himself some years back after the old door had been smashed down by yobs. Now only he and his son, Sean, had keys, and Patrick saw to it that the place was kept clean and tidy.

Only sometimes the door was left unlocked and, if he was perfectly honest, Patrick could no longer be certain he had locked it. He’d begun to feel, more and more over the past year, moments of confusion which filled him with a dread so cold he refused to face it. Sometimes he lost words or names and it took him a long time to find them again. Old memories resurfaced to breach the peace of his thoughts, and these were fiercely colourful, disturbingly loud. Around the edges of his vision, shadows moved.

Patrick headed upriver every day, it was part of his routine: up early, walk the three miles along the river to the cottage, sometimes he’d fish for an hour or two. He did that less these days. It wasn’t just that he was tired, or that his legs ached, it was the will that was lacking. He didn’t derive pleasure from the things he’d once enjoyed. He still liked to check up on things though, and when his legs were feeling good he could still manage the walk there and back in a couple of hours. This morning, however, he’d woken with his left calf swollen and painful, the dull throb in his vein persistent as a ticking clock. So he decided to take the car.

He hauled himself out of bed, showered, dressed, and then remembered with a snap of irritation that his car was still at the garage – he’d clean forgotten to pick it up the previous afternoon. Muttering to himself, he hobbled across the courtyard to ask his daughter-in-law if he could borrow hers.

Sean’s wife, Helen, was in the kitchen, mopping the floor. In term time, she’d be gone by now – she was head teacher at the school and made a point of being in her office by seven thirty every morning. But even in the school holidays, she wasn’t one for a lie-in. It wasn’t in her nature to be idle.

‘Up and about early, ’ Patrick said as he entered the kitchen, and she smiled. With lines crinkling around her eyes and streaks of grey in her short brown hair, Helen looked older than her thirty-six years. Older, Patrick thought, and more tired than she should be.

‘Couldn’t sleep, ’ she said.

‘Oh, sorry, love. ’

She shrugged. ‘What can you do? ’ She put the mop into the bucket and propped it upright against the wall. ‘Can I make you some coffee, Dad? ’ That’s what she called him now. It had felt strange at first, but now he liked it; it warmed him, the affection in her voice as she sounded the word. He said he’d take some coffee in a flask, explaining that he wanted to go upriver. ‘You won’t be anywhere near the pool, will you? Only I think …’

He shook his head. ‘No. Of course not. ’ He paused. ‘How’s Sean getting on with all that? ’

She shrugged again. ‘You know. He doesn’t really say. ’

Sean and Helen lived in the home that Patrick had once shared with his wife. After she died, Sean and Patrick had lived there together. Much later, after Sean’s marriage, they converted the old barn just across the courtyard and Patrick moved out. Sean protested, saying he and Helen should be the ones to move, but Patrick wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted them there, he liked the sense of continuity, the sense of the three of them being their own little community, part of the town and yet apart from it.

When he reached the cottage, Patrick saw right away that someone had been there. The curtains were drawn and the front door was slightly ajar. Inside, he found the bed unmade. Wine-stained glasses stood empty on the floor and a condom floated in the toilet bowl. There were cigarette butts in an ashtray, roll-ups. He picked one up and sniffed it, searching for the scent of marijuana, but smelling only cold ash. There were other things there, too, bits of clothing and assorted junk – an odd blue sock, a string of beads. He gathered everything up and shoved it into a plastic bag. He stripped the sheets from the bed, washed the glasses in the sink, threw the cigarette butts into the dustbin and carefully locked the door behind him. He carried everything out to the car, dumping the sheets on the back seat, the rubbish in the boot and the assorted debris in the glove compartment.

He locked the car and walked to the river’s edge, lighting a cigarette on the way. His leg ached and his chest tightened as he inhaled, the hot smoke hitting the back of his throat. He coughed, imagining he could feel the acrid scrape against tired and blackened lungs. He felt suddenly very sad. These moods took him from time to time, seized him with such a force that he found himself wishing it was all over. All of it. He looked at the water and sniffed. He’d never be one of those who gave in to the temptation to submit, to submerge themselves, to make it all go away, but he was honest enough to admit that sometimes even he could see the appeal of oblivion.

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