Louise Doughty - Black Water

The next two meetings were held in the kitchen, until Poppa decreed it was ridiculous. The kitchen was too darn small.

People would bring things on plates for the meetings, often — there was always food in Nina and Poppa’s house — and sometimes, Harper would hand round the things on plates. Once, as he was handing round some slightly undercooked cookies that collapsed as people lifted them from the plate, a plump man with large hands looked at Harper and said, ‘Say, son, where you from?’

‘My grandson is from Indonesia,’ Poppa called across the room, where he was standing talking to two men who were both smoking. ‘All the way across the world.’

‘How come you. .?’ the man began to Harper.

Poppa cut across him. ‘How he got here doesn’t matter. He’s here now.’ He gave Harper a smile.

It was only later, years later, that he realised that the whole time things were going right for him, they were going very wrong for Michael Junior and his mother: almost from the start.

They had jobs for a bit — his mother worked in a shop for a while, Michael a garage, but no job seemed to last, and sometimes they were both home for weeks at a stretch but they stayed in their room and if he asked Nina she would say, ‘They’re very tired, they’re resting. Don’t disturb them.’ Then they would be gone all weekend. One day, he went into their room when they were away; he was looking for a book he had been reading on their bed and, underneath the bed, he saw a tin box and a flat-shaped bottle on its side and a row of four or five glass tumblers that all looked sticky and, without understanding, he knew that these were bad things that had been hidden. He said nothing to anyone.

Michael was kind to him, when he was around. He sat on the steps leading down to the garden wearing a white undershirt and smoking, smiling his slow smile and tossing a ball to the end of the garden so that Harper and Jimmy could run after it together. Harper always let Jimmy win.

But there were the fights between his mother and Michael that took place in that bedroom when the door was closed. Michael’s voice was deep, patient mostly, until something crashed against the wall. His mother always started shrill and hysterical, right from the very beginning. They did it in the evenings after Harper had gone to bed, but he woke to hear it often.

One evening, when it was particularly noisy, Nina came into Harper’s and Bud’s room and sat on the edge of his bed, and stroked his hair back from his forehead. Bud was sound asleep in his cot. Harper had been lying awake for a while. Nina stroked him for a while in silence, then said, ‘They saw a war, Nicolaas, try and remember that, what your mother went through, what Michael went through in a different way, those of us older, those of us younger like you, it’s difficult for us to understand what they went through. They were just so young, and Michael saw some terrible things, I know, even though he doesn’t talk about them. He is. . well, it’s hard to explain.’

And then, one day, Michael wasn’t there any more, and Poppa stayed off work for a while — which was unheard of — and took to standing at the window in the front sitting room, just staring out into the street, his hands in his pockets, for hour after hour. Harper’s mother stayed in her room and wept and there were sharp words between her and Nina on the rare occasions that she emerged.

He began to wonder if Michael had died and nobody had told him, but when he asked Nina what had happened, she sat him down on the back step, which was where the difficult things often got said in their house, and told him that Michael had been unhappy for a long time, ever since he came back from the war, unhappy in the same way that his mother was sometimes unhappy, and that she, Nina, guessed they had got married hoping that their unhappiness would cancel each other’s out but instead it just made it multiply. Did he know that his mother sometimes took a few too many alcoholic beverages? He nodded. That much he had worked out. Well, Michael did too sometimes and they had sort of encouraged each other, which was obviously a bad thing. They both should have been with people who would have done the opposite. There had been a big argument when he had been at school one day and Michael had gone off to another city and it would probably be a very long time before they saw him again and it was making everyone very sad. It was particularly hard for Poppa, Nina said, because he saved people all day long and yet he couldn’t save his own son.

At this point, they heard, behind them, ‘Dubba! Dubba!’

They turned. Bud had crawled out of the open kitchen door and wanted them to watch as he stood unsteadily, a feat he had only just learned, before dropping to all fours again and crawling the small space over to Harper. Once he reached him, he levered himself to his feet again by grasping at Harper’s shirt, standing unsteadily for a moment like a tiny, genial drunk and then splaying both fat hands and bashing them on Harper’s head, a kind of fierce patting.

‘Hey Bud, cut it out,’ said Harper, smiling and remaining motionless to allow Bud to continue, and Bud laughed his throaty chuckle as if what he was doing was the funniest thing in the world.

Nina looked at them both and shook her head and said, ‘You two brothers got a lot more sense than the whole of the adults in this house put together. People say things are complicated but you two know they aren’t, they’re really simple.’

It was a Sunday afternoon when his mother told him she was going back to Holland for a bit, to see Aunty Lies. His first thought was that she was going to say he had to go with her — she had told him often enough that he was the centre of her world. The thought of being separated from Bud and Jimmy the dog, even for a few weeks, was more than he could bear.

But instead, Anika pressed him to her bony chest and said, ‘I know you’ll miss me so much, Nicolaas, but I need you to be braver than you’ve ever been. Things here have been really hard for me since Michael left and I need to go back home for a bit. Can you manage without me for a little while? It’s something I just have to do, things have been so mixed up here lately and you know how much I miss our Homeland.’ Did he? ‘I’m just going back to sort out a few things. Bud is still little and he’d get seasick if I took you both now, you wouldn’t I know because you’re really good about that kind of thing. You know, you’re the only man who has never let me down.’

With Michael and his mother gone — and neither absence given a definite end date — the house was calmer, although as Bud grew, that livened things up a bit. He was a toddler who ran up and down, everywhere, from the minute he could, both furious and amused at the same time: tight curls, light brown skin with a throw of dark brown freckles across his nose, as if he had been playing with a very fine paintbrush, a high piping voice that called Harper, ‘Nick-er-lus.’ Three syllables at least. Once he had learned to pronounce it, he would jump his small bottom up and down in his high chair at mealtimes, repeating it again and again if he did not have Harper’s full attention for one minute of the meal. ‘Nick-er-lus, Nick-er-lus, Nick. Er. Lus !’

‘You know, Nicolaas,’ Nina said once, when she was getting him to help her fold laundry. ‘That little boy thinks all the good things in the world come from you, like you’re a god or something. You should hear him when it’s time for you to come home from school.’

He was not a god. Nor was Poppa, the great lawyer who everyone admired so. If either of them had been a god, it would never have happened, that dreadful day three years later, in the bright sunshine, with the sun sparking off water clear as glass.