The Water Children. Anne Berry

of gold wires in the candle flames. He is swaying slightly on the balls of his feet, feeling suddenly dizzy, the burnt smell in his throat. He draws in his breath with wonder, hypnotized by the glistening crimson arms of the rhubarb stalks, the ruched crowns of buttery yellow and natal green, edging towards the light. The flames flicker as if stirred by his exhaled breath. Their grey felt shadows graze the rough shed walls, tall then short, short then tall again. He can see them etched on his eyelids, jostling one another in their struggle to escape the suffocating wooden womb. He inhales and takes the musty smoke-laced odour deep down into his lungs. He looks automatically to his left, a twin looking for his other half. But Sarah is not there. Wire-wool tears scour his eyes. He blinks them away, and then he sees the Water Child blazing in her place.

      Owen is visited by another memory that he omitted from his essay, the memory of a man who gave a brandy glow to his mother’s brown eyes. His name was Ken Bascombe. He was their next-door neighbour’s brother. He came to stay with his sister, Eileen Pope, one summer. He had sold his house in Surbiton and was emigrating to America.

      ‘Just a few things to do, one or two bits and pieces to sew up and then I’m off,’ he tells Bill, his deep, well-modulated voice bouncing over the garden fence.

      Bill has been digging. He always seems to be digging, as if one day he thinks he might unearth something precious. He has soil particles clogging his scant hair, and brown flecks on the lenses of his National Health glasses. And he has a smear of mud on one cheek and a patch on the other, like tribal war paint. He is a primitive native emerging from the jungle, ill-equipped with his garden weaponry for this meeting with tall, suave, sophisticated, civilized man. Owen is wearing a secondary school uniform, grey flannel trousers, a white shirt. He is sitting on the kitchen doorstep in the sunshine pretending to read, but really he is observing, he is observing his father and Ken Bascombe.

      ‘Oh yes,’ says Ken, adjusting his tie and smoothing back his own abundant, crisp, blond hair. ‘So many more opportunities to make money over there, set up new businesses, get things moving. No limits to what you can achieve in that brave new world.’ Bill leans on his spade and nods. He rubs the inside of a wrist over one cheek, another brushstroke of earth paint.

      ‘Sounds . . . sounds, well . . . super,’ he manages eventually. He is stripped to the waist. His skin looks as unhealthy as the raw chicken’s spread-eagled inelegantly on the chopping board in the kitchen, waiting patiently to be drawn and quartered. In contrast his nipples seem very pink. They look out of place, as if someone has stuck them on him, as if you could just pinch them off like milk bottle tops. He rolls his shoulders, uncomfortable in his plucked-poultry skin.

      ‘I tell you, Bill, all those things you dreamt of having, over there in the Big Apple, you can really attain them. They encourage you. Not like here, eh? Slap you down just for trying over here.’ As he talks he describes a big circle with his arms. Owen notices that his hands are shapely, graceful, long fingered, expressive as a musician’s, with very clean, neatly filed nails. He has never scratched about in the dirt, you can tell. He appears to prod the ceiling of the sky, as if he can dip into heaven whenever it pleases him. He gives a chuckle and his magnetic eyes sparkle. Bill’s answering chuckle is a mirthless, agitated cough that is gobbled back hurriedly.

      Owen’s eyes flick over the page of the book he is reading, Gone with the Wind, then back to the man. Ken Bascombe is wearing a suit. The fence cuts him in half but the portion he can see is very smart. A cream linen suit, a pressed, laundered shirt, a shiny, blue tie that matches the striking, frosty blue of his eyes. He is tall and handsome, and in his jacket he looks cooler than his father does with nothing on. Now he slides a hand in an inside pocket, produces a packet of cigarettes, and a gold lighter that catches the sun with a scintillating flash. He offers one to Bill who shakes his head. When he starts smoking, Owen squints at him and conjures Rhett Butler.

      His mother comes out into the garden to take the washing down from the line. She crosses to the fence holding her empty basket in her arms, and chats easily to Ken Bascombe for a while. Her tone is such a low lisp that he cannot hear what she is saying. His father hangs back, looking oafish. After a few minutes his mother puts down the basket and rests her weight on one leg, the other leg bent back at the knee. She leans over the fence and smiles archly. She accepts the offer of a cigarette, although she knows her husband does not like her smoking. And Ken Bascombe, who will soon be travelling on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean to America, places her cigarette between his lips, holds his own to its tip, inhales deeply, and when it is lit hands it to her. Owen, thinking about how high the price of freedom was for the plantation slaves, notes that unusually his mother’s hair is brushed and loose. She has abandoned her apron too, something unheard of when performing her household tasks, until today, that is. Her cotton-print dress flutters in the gentle breeze, so that her son becomes aware for the first time that his mother has a body, a slender waist, shapely hips, full round breasts. For the rest of the day his mother sings.

      She is still singing weeks later. Now she takes rides in Ken Bascombe’s Humber Super Snipe. The car has a top speed of nearly 80 m.p.h., she tells her son. It is a rich maroon colour, as if red wine has been sloshed all over the exterior, and it has real leather upholstery. Owen has sniffed the pungent animal scent of it. But he has declined the frequent invitations from Mr Bascombe, asking if he might like to take a spin in it. His mother’s spins have become so frequent that Owen imagines her as one of those twirling ballerinas. Round and round and round she goes. And he wonders if she will ever stop.

      She arrives home later and later in the evenings still spinning, with her hair secured under her Liberty paisley scarf, newly bought sunglasses concealing her eyes, her cheeks flushed red as ripe strawberries. There is a funny smell that seems to cling to her too, a briny, fishy scent that reminds Owen unnervingly of the Merfolk. And her skin is pimpled all over as though she is cold. She sits in a dream on the staircase, slipping off her sunglasses to reveal dewy eyes, and easing the knot of her scarf with quaking fingers.

      Then one night his father is in the kitchen scraping the vegetables for the tea that has now become a late supper. He has been listening for the door, ears pricked for his wife. Owen watches him carefully shave a potato, so that the peeling hangs unbroken, like a single muddy ringlet springing from a creamy white scalp. Then, while the pans are bubbling on the stove, Owen sees him fold the washing soporifically, smoothing out the wrinkles in the different fabrics. He stabs the potatoes with a fork, and deciding that the flesh is still resistant to the tines, busies himself guiding the carpet sweeper, push and pull, forward and back, as if he is practising a dance step. Owen, trailing him like a wan ghost from room to room, notes his brow slackening with the repetitive motion. His eyes have filmed over too as they trace the monotonous licking of the carpet pile, the ritual cleaning thorough as a mother cat washing her kitten.

      The next day Owen comes home from school to find his father sitting at the kitchen table. He has fat, brown tears streaming down his face. He must have been rubbing it and the tears have mingled with earth, he realizes. His father is crying tears of clay, his nose dripping brown mucus, his quick, flighty breaths finding the grains of soil in his flaring nostrils and catapulting them out.

      ‘Hello, Father,’ Owen says.

      He blinks his bloodshot eyes at his son in astonishment, as if having to remind himself that he did not drown as well that day on the beach. He seizes an onion from the sorry mound of vegetables by the chopping board, and brings it speedily to his eyes.

      ‘Peeling onions,’ he mumbles thickly. ‘You mustn’t mind me. I’m just a novice. I’m afraid your mother’s the expert.’ He takes a sudden desperate breath and then bites down, the way Owen has seen wounded soldiers do in war movies to stop from crying out in agony.

      Owen’s doubting eyes flick to the papery, copper skin of the uncut onion. He wants to ask where his mother is, although he knows. A series of fleeting images chase through his head. His mother sitting in the front seat of the Humber Super Snipe, windows down, the wind in her hair, eyes shining, screeching in exhilaration as the powerful car swings round a hairpin bend in the road. Then the same car parked near the Ridgeway, and his mother and Ken Bascombe walking up a sloping path, hand in hand. Lastly, his mother looking eerily beautiful, lying flat on her back following the drama of the swirling clouds.