Anne Berry - The Water Children

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. Her hair, threaded with wild daisies, speedwell and maiden pinks, is spread like an embroidered pillow on the green, green grass. Now she lifts herself up and folds her body over the man’s stretched out by her side. Light as dandelion seeds blown on a breath of wind, she bends to kiss his fair hair, the fine skin around the vivid eyes, the unlined forehead, then lets her lips brush his. The kiss deepens and his arms close about her, the two blurring into one another. Owen wants to ask where his mother is but he does not.

Instead he says to his father, ‘Do you want any help?’

And his father shakes his head, the wisps of greying hair flying about making him look like a mad professor bending over his marvellous new invention, the onion. With an effort he straightens his shoulders and summons up a gritty smile, a tracery of fine, brown lines cracking his lips.

‘I’ll call you when . . . when tea’s ready,’ he assures his son in wavering tones. Then, as the boy creeps from the room, he adds robustly, ‘We’re having . . .’ but he never finishes the sentence. As Owen mounts the stairs he hears him sob, and feels his own heart jerk in answer.

There is no tea that night. Owen sits upstairs in Sarah’s room on the balding, apple-green coverlet, as the darkness digests the small house. He resists its advance, leaving on the bedside lamp. He will not give way to tiredness and close his eyes. And, as if he is plagued with vertigo crouching on the ledge of a skyscraper, he will not look down either. He does not have to peek to know they are there, reptiles writhing about his bed. Their shadows glide like blue-grey fish among the sweeping ferns of her flocked wallpaper. Sometime in the night, or perhaps it is the morning, he hears the Humber Super Snipe return, hears it revving outside the window. But still he does not move, just follows the Merfolk as they weave and slide along the aquarium walls of Sarah’s bedroom. Later, the click of the front door sounds very loud in the orphaned house, and the drone of the milk float that follows it, almost deafening.

When he ventures out of Sarah’s room he finds his mother sitting on the stairs, a suitcase propped on her lap. He has to clamber over her and it is a tricky operation in the greyness. On a lower step he swivels round and, feet apart, legs braced, faces her. For a longest time their eyes lock. He wonders if, like him, she is thinking of the day they made the snowman together.

‘Where are you going, Mother?’ he asks in a small voice. He hears a noise and glancing over his shoulder sees his father, face crinkled like a used teabag, cheeks still stained with brown streaks, standing, hands in pockets in the lounge doorway. ‘Are you leaving, Mother?’

But his mother does not answer. And then a moment, a moment when a diver is on the edge of a high board, when he sways forwards, feels for the point of balance, and holds himself there. Owen listens to the sound of his own breathing, light puffs, and his father’s dragon breaths dragging painfully in and out. His mother inhales and expels air silently under her butter-yellow belted summer coat. The horn of the Humber Super Snipe shrills, and Owen and his father swing round to stare accusingly in its direction. After a pause it screeches again. The note seems more urgent now, more impatient.

When Owen looks back, his mother has risen and is clasping the suitcase. And the way she stares at the front door, is as if everything else in the cramped hall, the telephone table, the telephone, the coat stand, the man and the boy, are without any substance at all. One last time the car horn blares, and this, a long sustained beep that makes all their ears ring as if they have been roundly boxed. Owen steps aside so that she can pass by un impeded. She treads down the stairs, crosses to the front door and rests her hand on the handle. He is still riveted to the spot where she sat and so he does not see her glance back, not at his father but at him. Slowly she turns and starts to heft the case back up the flight of stairs. Outside, the engine that has been idling, leaps into life with a bellicose roar. Then it is the purr of a contented cat. And finally it is no more than a mouse scampering away, the horn a distant squeak.