The Water Children. Anne Berry

      ‘Again,’ she cries enraptured. ‘Again, Owen.’

      She isn’t telling him he is brave, but . . . well, it is near enough. For a while he knees it. Then a sudden gust of wind grabs it and runs with it towards the sea, so that he has to give chase. Behind him he hears Sarah call.

      ‘Owen! Owen! Owen, don’t go!’

      ‘I’m only getting the ball. I won’t be a second,’ he throws back over his shoulder.

      ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’

      When he catches up with it, he glances back, just to make sure that Sarah has stayed put. But he need not have worried, she is sitting exactly where he left her, prattling to herself, counting on her fingers, and staring around her, wide eyed. They are not beach dwellers. In fact he can only remember going to the seaside a couple of times before. No, this is definitely a holiday outing, and an unusual one at that. Home is Wantage in Oxfordshire. His parents seem much happier hiring a caravan or camping and sitting in a field of green grass, than coming into close proximity with the sea. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that his father is a gardener, or that his mother doesn’t like the sand. She complains that it gets into everything – clothes, food, even your hair. She’ll start complaining today, he’s sure of it.

      Owen hasn’t learnt to swim yet. There has been talk at his school of taking the older classes to a pool, and giving them proper lessons. But nothing has come of it so far. His parents are always promising to teach him, but how can they if they are nowhere near the sea? He keeps pleading with his father to take him to the local swimming pool, so that he can learn there. Actually he has thought about this quite a lot. Having all that time alone with his father, with him showing Owen what to do, even touching him, putting his arms and legs into the right positions. He is looking forward to this more than he can say, because his father doesn’t seem to like to touch him very much. He prefers to slap Owen on the back or shake his hand as if they are not related, as if Owen is an adult too. And even this physical contact makes him go all red and embarrassed. He knows what his father thinks, that embracing him is unmanly, that hugging your son is a soppy way to behave. So in those intimate moments he clears his throat, or starts talking about a new plant or taking cuttings or something. Though he isn’t at all embarrassed about hugging Sarah, Owen notes. Of course his mother does put her arms around him and give him a peck on the cheek, pretty well every night. But it is sort of automatic, as if she isn’t thinking about it. Whereas with Sarah all his mother’s hugs, his father’s too, really, are kind of whooshes, like the sudden flaring up of a flame.

      In any case, his father always seems too busy to go to the swimming pool. They have been once or twice but he just seemed restless and bored, and when Owen didn’t take to the water the way a duckling would, he was impatient to go home again. And that impatience, that sense that his father knew he was going to fail, made it come true. It was like being cursed, him looking at the big clock-face on the wall and folding his arms. And the next thing Owen knew was that he was spluttering and choking, and feeling a belt of panic tightening about his belly, so that he really believed he might drown, right then and there, with his father watching. They hadn’t got as far as learning the swimming strokes so there wasn’t very much touching – well, hardly any at all, if Owen is truthful.

      It is while he is thinking about this, while he is dribbling the ball and picturing his father holding him up in the water and saying encouraging things like, ‘Well done, terrific, you’re going to make a racing swimmer one day, my boy’, that he notices his mother. She is a long way off up the beach, running towards him shouting something. But he cannot decipher it because the wind is making a whirring sound in his ears, and besides, she is too far away. Still, there is something about the untidy way she is moving that makes him stiffen, and feel a bit empty and sick inside. It is a sort of headlong fall, nearly tripping up in her haste every few steps, and even though she must be out of breath, shouting in sharp bursts, rather like the screeches of the seagulls.

      And then a flint arrow lances his beating heart and turns it to ice. He remembers. Sarah. He spins round. The stripy windbreak seems miles away, and as small as a postage stamp. How can it be that he has come so far? What was he dreaming about? But then he knows that, doesn’t he? And he can see the beach mat blowing away beyond it, bumping the sand and flapping, like a wounded bird. Surely, surely, oh please let it be true, Sarah is tucked up safe behind that buffeted stamp of canvas. Of course she is; she is sitting behind the windbreak happy as can be, precisely where he left her. Where he left her. The words clang in his head. Where he left her. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ Even though he is barely a few years older than his sister, he knows in some kind of dreadful, intuitive, grown-up way, that her plea will never leave him. He is as good as branded with it. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’ This is the sinister dread that takes hold as he sprints. And because he is lighter and not sinking into the sand, he is much faster than his mother.

      He is good at running. He even won the twenty-five yard sprint at his last school’s sports day. He recalls how proud he felt, his chest heaving with it, as he neared that ribbon. Then breaking through it, and turning round breathlessly to look for his father in the crowd of parents. And the disappointment, like a paperweight sinking in his stomach. His father had wandered off to talk to the school caretaker. He could see him by the trees at the edge of the field leaning over a bush tweaking the leaves. He had missed it. He had missed Owen’s victory.

      But this is a different kind of race, a horrible race, one that you aren’t sure whether you want to win or not. He can hear his mother’s shrieks now, big ugly sounds, like the ones he hears in his head when the witches and monsters speak in stories. And he can hear the name too, screamed again and again.

      ‘Sarah! Aargh! Aargh! Sarah! Sarah!’

      And then he is rounding the windbreak and screaming her name too. But she isn’t there, only the sailor’s white hat without her in it. There is a small pile of sand, and he thinks he can detect the lines where Sarah has drawn in it with her stubby fingers. And her scrap of pink blanket is peeping out from under it too, that horrid smelly thing that seems to be impregnated with an incredible power, sending his sister into a serene trance each time she rubs it rhythmically over her lips. But though he peers hard at it, she doesn’t appear. He keeps barking her name, as if in all likelihood she will suddenly rise up from under the sand. She will be like the sand creature in a book he has read, Five Children and It. And any moment she will spring up and shimmy the glittering grains off her, giggling at the great game.

      Out of the corner of his eye he sees his mother streak past and hurtle down to the sea, and then straight into it with the waves breaking over her, and her behaving as if she cannot feel them. He rushes after her, rushes into the water, as far as he dares to go, knowing he is unable to swim. Then he runs up and down, the way he has seen dogs do sometimes when they are nervous of getting wet. And his mother keeps bobbing up like a seal, gasping out words as though a saw is grinding on her throat.

      ‘Sarah! Sarah! I can’t . . . can’t find Sarah!’ And Owen thinks stupidly, as salt spume strikes his eyes, making him wince, why is she searching for her there in the wide ocean, why is she trying to fish for Sarah? Then under again and up, a gulp of breath, another dive. A long beat and she explodes from the water, fixing Owen for a second, her brown eyes slitting with the salt bite, or is it something else? ‘You stupid boy! You stupid, stupid boy!’ Then down again, and for the longest time, it seems to Owen, the stupid boy, darting to right and left as if blocking a goal. And up to spit out once more, ‘I told you to watch her. I told you to stay with her. I told you, I told you, I told you, you idiot!’ And her face all ghastly and coming apart like a mirror breaking, and her ribbon undone and the wet hair streaming over her eyes, and stuffed in her mouth.

      Then suddenly his father thundering past him, like the charging rhinoceros he saw on his last birthday at London Zoo, only pausing to kick off those shiny shoes. The two of them now, both seals together, one, an arc of grey, one of yellow, white and turquoise, looping about each other. And his father’s straw hat bobbing on the water, bobbing so gaily on the water that Owen wants to tear it to pieces. And finally his father bursting triumphantly from the waves with something in his arms, something that is Sarah. He dashes out of the breaking surf