Anne Berry - The Water Children

And so they missed the 1969 festival. She wasn’t sorry. The music was more his thing. He’d introduced her to it. Though it was true she enjoyed the way that, similarly to the purge of the sea, sometimes it drowned out her voice, Mara’s voice. But beyond this bonus, it was just background noise to her. You smoked, you floated, you made love or fucked as the mood took you, and it jangled away, shredding the air. She appreciated it with a kind of detachment. Not like him. He entered into it as a monk might renounce the world and vanish into a monastery. He submerged himself in it, was liberated, regenerated, reincarnated he would have claimed, in the waterfall of its undulating notes and chords, in the sweet, sour, salt, bitter psalms, in the penetrative shudder of it.

After hearing about Woodstock he was doubly determined that they make the 1970 festival. And just to ensure she did not jeopardize the trip, he kept the van steered well away from the coastline and the inclement sea. Once it was confirmed that Leonard Cohen would be performing, nothing would have prevented him from going. He set about it with the fervour a disciple might have dredged up to see the risen Jesus.

Naomi tried to share in his excitement, but her blood was dulled. Did he think she was an idiot? Mara was an all-seeing, unforgiving deity. ‘Walt is tiring of you,’ came Mara’s voice now, her buried twin, her black inner doll. ‘He is taking his pleasure elsewhere. You can smell the sex on him.’ She scraped and worried and clawed at Naomi’s scabs, until the wounds bled afresh. ‘He’s planning to leave you, did you guess? He’s thinking about going home, going back to America, to San Francisco. Alone. He’s going to offload you. He’s made up his mind to jettison you like rubbish.’

The camper van had been playing up, so Walt insisted that they travel on foot to the Isle of Wight. They left it on a gypsy site nearby, taking with them rucksacks and a small blue tent they had picked up second hand. In truth, their fun bus was in a decline, like an elderly relative in poor health whose every day brings some fresh woe. The carburettor was blocked, a gasket had blown, the starter motor needed replacing, the exhaust was falling off, and the rust was so extensive that you could glimpse the road in a few places.

‘All we need is for it to pack up and ruin things,’ Walt said, screwing up his worried eyes, and drawing down his eyebrows at the prospect of such an unthinkable outcome. To end up tinkering with the van while a god was descending from his cloud onto the Isle of Wight, or more likely from a helicopter, well, it didn’t even bear thinking about. After a heated dispute they left on the Saturday, finally managing to board the 3:45 p.m. ferry from Portsmouth, arriving at the Festival site at Afton Down two hours later.

‘Well, we’ve missed Joni Mitchell,’ Walt said, peeved. ‘I told you we should have come on Thursday or Friday at the latest.’ Naomi, who hadn’t really felt like coming at all, chose to ignore him. They set up camp on Desolation Row, overlooking the stage.

‘I feel like a pioneer,’ Walt said, grinning. ‘A pioneer building a log cabin on the great prairies. Only it’s a tent.’ He looked to Naomi to share the joke but she remained po-faced. ‘We can enjoy the show from here for free. If we feel like it tomorrow we can get tickets, go into the arena and get up close and personal, eh?’

Naomi nodded. She gazed about her. The people just kept flocking in, as if a dam had burst, a dam of people cascading into the fields and onto the slopes until they were chock full with tents. They looked just like wooden building blocks spilled over the yellowing grass, blue and orange and green and red and white. The stage was a pale hump in the distance. The surrounding marquees provided hopelessly inadequate facilities for the hundreds of thousands of tired, hungry faithful, struggling with groundsheets and guy-ropes. The air was filled with the strains of music, with the collective murmur of the masses of jostling bodies, wreathed in beads and flowers and hats and scarves. And it was dense with the fragrance of incense and hash.

‘The atmosphere is wild, just wild,’ Walt told her, miming playing electric guitar. ‘You can trip on this alone. Who needs drugs?’ But despite his protestations it seemed he did. He produced some purple hearts, gave one to Naomi and took one himself. Discreetly she pocketed hers. They wandered about the canvas city letting the music possess them. Walt began chatting to some Americans, two men, Kelwin and Alan, and a young woman, Judy, she said her name was. They joined a queue, bought cups of soup, and sat cross-legged, companionably sipping it together. All but Naomi. She had lost her appetite.

She examined Judy with her contrasting eyes. In her blue scope she observed that she was pretty, a few inches taller than herself. She itemized her clothing. Leather stitched boots, purple tights, an A-line dress with a V-neck and fitted sleeves. The material was a colourful pattern of dotted ovals, which looked vaguely like a frog spawn. Her brown scope took particular stock of her hair. Though mostly a golden yellow, it had lots of other shades in it, streaks of brown and strawberry blonde and red. It mantled her shoulders, hung down her back. The scarf tied round her head made her resemble an Indian, an Indian squaw. She wore a thick silver band on the middle finger of her left hand, and occasionally glanced down at a watch on her wrist.

Now Naomi felt Walt’s eyes veering between them. ‘He’s comparing you,’ Mara said. She looked down at her own boyish flares, her tight T-shirt. ‘He’s thinking that you have no tits, that Judy is shapely, feminine. He’s thinking that she is young, unspoiled, and that you are old, used.’

They stayed together, all five of them, although their tents were pitched some distance apart. They strolled into the woods, climbed a huge tree and hung off its branches as if they were Christmas baubles. They made a campfire with a few sticks and sat around it talking. They smoked some hash, and the shorter of the men, Kelwin, with buck teeth and frizzy hair, offered round a bottle of red wine and some small white pills that he vouchsafed were good stuff, the finest. Naomi pretended to take one but she tucked it in her cleavage. When the bottle came round she mimed having a swig but hardly wet her lips. They were all too far gone to notice. Mara cautioned her that she needed to keep a clear head.

As the night drew in around them Naomi studied Walt, the way an artist might study a model. She saw him put his arm around Judy and murmur into her hair. Her different coloured eyes followed the stroke of his hands on her legs in their purple tights. Chin lifted, she saw him trace the lines of the ribbed cotton. When he found the zips on her boots and started rhythmically pulling them up and down, her eyes were riveted. She registered the tenderness with which he touched Judy’s face. The brush of their lips scalded her own. She could feel the black tide of Mara rising up, as Walt pushed Judy back on the grass, and laid his head on her full breasts.

‘I can hear your heart,’ he said. ‘Boom, boom, boom.’ Far away the music played, and his head bounced as Judy giggled. ‘You have the crisp unworn fragrance of brand-new clothes,’ he said. Naomi scrutinized them through the pathetic little fire. Walt cupped one of Judy’s breasts. ‘Your nipples will be pastel pink, like sugared almonds. Kissing them will be like sucking on small, hard, sugared almonds,’ he rhapsodized. Kelwin and Alan laughed raucously at this and exchanged lewd looks. Alan ran a hand down Naomi’s spine, tried to make a nest for it on the swell of her buttocks. She sat like an ice sculpture and hexed him with her wild eyes. And he rose, rubbing his thighs awkwardly, as if they were soiled, and went to collect more firewood.