The Water Children. Anne Berry

Mara from the warmth of her bed. He took her to his small room, and told her as he lifted off her sleeping shift, that he needed to examine her, to seek out the marks of sin, to test her for evil. If she cried out the big hand was slapped over her mouth until she thought, just as Walt had, that she would suffocate. And when it was over the voice rasped that if she ever told anyone, she would go to hell, drown not once but for eternity, in a pit of molten flames.

      And when she returned to her bunk, her skin bruised and crawling, the wet, musty smell of him on her, in her, she curled up in the dark forest and listened to the sounds of the others, The Blind Ones. The coughs and sighs and sniffles, the creaks of the wooden bunks as their occupants stirred, the rattle of windows, the thin whistle of the wind. She hugged her knees and imagined what it was like to be in hell forever, roasting in its fires. She imagined all of her, her organs, her flesh, licked with flames, consumed, until all that was left of her was the black crisp of her wicked heart.

      On the third night after her ordeal she crept from her bunk, barefoot, holding the rough cotton of her shift between her legs to sop up the blood. She slipped through the doors like a shadow, and stumbled in the twilight. She trod grass and gravel, twigs and grit. She felt her way to the steep path that led down to the beach. She heard both her names spoken in the ‘shush, shush’ of the sea. Naomi. Mara. Naomi. Mara stepped onto a plain of cool grey sand, the pads of her feet sinking into it.

      ‘And she said unto them, “Call me not Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”’

      As she neared the sea it greeted her with a cheer. Raising her head, she saw something that made the charred lump of her heart leap – its long blue smile faintly lit by the push of dawn. And then she was running, peeling the bloodied shift off, over her head, and running heeled with exultation into the icy water.

      Chapter 4

      Sixteen-year-old Owen has been set an essay for English homework, the topic ‘Childhood Memories’. It begins rather well as he lists remembered sensations. Sucking milk so cold from gill-sized bottles through paper straws that the ice splinters pricked his tongue and raked his throat. Sitting in a wicker chair that creaked and pinched his thighs when he shifted position. Eating jam sandwiches that stuck to the roof of his mouth. Squashing a tomato in his hand and feeling the juice of it ooze from between his closed fingers, and the seeds plant themselves in his sticky palm. Smelling the manure that had just been dug into the earth at his father’s allotment, as he stepped into the Cimmerian gloom of his rhubarb shed. He records his first sight of the blush-red rhubarb stalks poking up lewdly from the tangle of dowdy brown roots.

      When he has finished the assignment he creeps into Sarah’s bedroom and sits on the side of her bed, feeling as if he has stepped into a time warp. Nothing has been changed in here. The space, Sarah’s space, is petrified in time. A clock stopped with Sarah’s last breath. His mother never opens the bedroom window. She wants the air that her daughter inhaled, that inflated her small spongy lungs, sending oxygen whizzing around her four-year-old body before she exhaled it, to remain trapped in the jar of this room. It is the reason that she slips speedily in and out, slamming the door with haste. Once inside the airtight hallowed place, she rations her own breathing, moves to new positions where she hopes that the air has not yet been recycled, and very slowly lets the snail of it slide into her. Look, this air, this air here, in the corner, inside the cupboard, at the back of the bottom drawer, this has not been tampered with. This is virgin. This is Sarah’s. She scrabbles about on her knees, and her head and shoulders disappear inside an empty drawer, so that she looks as if she is sticking her head in an oven, as if she is attempting to gas herself.

      Both Bill and Owen have seen her do this, and both have guessed her motive as she rolls about on the floor, buries her head under the rag rug, or stands on tiptoes on a chair, her respiration at a turtle’s pace. Someone who was not there on the beach that day, someone who did not hear the words, ‘Don’t leave me, Owen,’ someone who didn’t see Sarah dredged up from the ocean bed, vampire white, eyes cemented shut, that someone would not have known. They would have surveyed Ruth Abingdon contorting her body into cramped gaps, or stretching giraffe-like to lick the ceiling, and they would have said, ‘That woman is mad; she should be taken to a locked ward.’ But Bill and his son Owen were there, and her behaviour does not seem so bizarre to them.

      Owen glances about him, his gaze settling on the small, mahogany, free-standing bookcase. There are several titles of Noddy, a collection of fairytales with lovely illustrations that Sarah liked to trace with a chubby finger, while her father or her mother or her big brother read to her. His eyes rove the room and take inventory. The white enamel paintwork on the cupboards has yellowed with age. The curtains, a pink floral pattern, have been bleached long ago by the sun. The rag rug that his mother made for her daughter has faded too. Sarah’s cuddly toys are piled up on the pillow, a small teddy, sunflower-yellow with a black button-nose and a balding head, a floppy rabbit, its long ears lined with peach felt, and a golliwog whose stuffing can be peeked through a splitting seam on his foot. The worn scrap of her comfort blanket is kept folded in a lacquer jewellery box on the bedside table. There are more toys in a box at the end of her bed.

      The contents of the wardrobe he knows by heart. He is confident that he can faithfully reproduce every dress and skirt, every cardigan and jumper and coat, every blouse and vest and pair of pants, her dressing gown and folded pyjamas. The socks have a drawer all to themselves. They nestle there like rows of white mice, some with lacy cuffs, or bows, or motifs of lambs and baby chicks. The shoes are polished. That is something his father deals with under the heading of ‘Caring for Sarah’s Kit’. Everything must be ordered for a surprise inspection one morning, one fine morning when they will chance to open her door a crack and see the spill of Sarah’s light-golden curls on the pillow. You can smell the polish when you fling wide the cupboard doors, and see the shoes standing to attention like soldiers on parade. They shine as his father’s did that day on the beach, the day she died. And there are tiny wool slippers, and a small pair of wellington boots, bottle green. Sarah’s smell is still here too, though like the curtains and the rag rug, its hallmark lemony heat grows fainter by the week.

      His mother comes in every day, religiously, as if attending a daily service. Owen has seen her coiled like a rope on the bed, her knees drawn up, her face pressed to the pillow, to the toys, sobbing dryly. She would prefer Owen not to enter Sarah’s bedroom. She has not expressly banished him, but he has grasped this from the cross engraved on her brow, the downward pull of her mouth, the jump of the nervous tick in her cheek when he approaches the door. So he tries to resist the urge to spend time with Sarah, or at least to put it off until the need has become so strong that he cannot help but succumb to it – as he does now.

      Sarah’s last words to him are caged in his head. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ They clang like a heavy chain. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ They make his scalp feel tight and his brain throb. Sometimes it is only the prick of a needle trying to winkle out a splinter, a nagging pain that, although it makes him irritable, is just about tolerable. But sometimes it is an ice pick hacking away in his skull, over and over and over, until the agony of it is unendurable. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen!’ When it is like this he is prepared to do anything to make it stop. He visualizes the ice pick driving into the sentence and cleaving the words apart. Owen. Don’t. Me. Leave. Don’t. Leave. Owen. Me. Leave. Owen. Don’t. Me.

      He drives the heels of his hands into his eye-sockets. But it is no good because after a second they begin to reassemble. The word worm wiggles and wiggles the shape of the sentence back again, and then Sarah calls out even more loudly, enunciates ever more clearly, ‘Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen! Don’t leave me, Owen!’ And it sounds as if Sarah is right here next to him. There is the stranglehold of her arms belting his waist, and the fairy-dust hair brushing his chest, and the feathery lashes tickling his flesh.

      His attention is distracted by the apple-green candlewick bedspread. It is looking threadbare now, as if the moths have gorged themselves on it. Actually it is not the moths but his mother who is responsible for the damage. Her busy fingers have pulled the cotton cords from it so many times that it has de veloped chronic mange. He shuts his eyes again and this time he is besieged by an image of