Tim Parks - Rapids

Oh come on, Adam laughed. If you treat everything as a deep and mysterious secret we won’t be able to talk about anything at all.

Vince saw Michela’s hand gripping Clive’s now. He sighed. He pursed his lips. I’ve been involved, of course, in negotiating and renegotiating loans to Third World countries. What can I say? Actually the bank directors do think a lot about the human consequences of their decisions. It’s a complex situation.

What’s complex, Clive cut in, about people dying of hunger? You should be ashamed of yourself.

Ease off, Clive, Mandy said.

By the way, Keith put in, check out those Wops! A pair of young Italian women were wriggling back to back. The band played with more enthusiasm.

On the other hand, Vince went on, as a bank, our primary responsibility, inevitably, is towards our shareholders. He stopped: I wish we were discussing my paddling problems.

Perhaps we are, Clive said.

Oh come on! Adam looked up from his phone. Michela was grim. She took the tobacco herself now. Her fingers were trembling.

When we’ve finished, I’ll explain, Clive insisted.

Okay, Vince said. I’ll give you a typical example. So, a large organisation, maybe even a country, asks us, in consortium with other banks most likely, to extend them a loan. A big loan. We know that this country needs money to develop its economy and improve its people’s lot. So we agree, having negotiated certain collateral of course and despite the fact that we are accepting a lower rate of interest than usual. The client is creditworthy we tell the shareholders. Then something happens. The government changes. There’s a drought. They start a war. They make a disadvantageous contract with some multinational commodities set — up. The currency market shifts. They spend the money on arms. All of a sudden we have a debt crisis and our shareholders are looking at losses. Now the question is, how far can we be charitable on their behalf? That’s not why ordinary people invested their money in our bank.

All you’re saying, Clive said. He had to raise his voice because the music was louder now. All you’re saying is that the normal, comfortable mechanisms for accumulating fortunes have broken down. Tough bloody luck. But when you’re looking at kids with swollen bellies and maggots in their lips, there’s only one real question: How can I help?

Vince hesitated. A fourth beer was before them.

And how have you helped, Adam cut in. He had a light, sardonic smile. What have you ever done?

Come on, Adam, Keith said. Chill.

From what I gather you go to a demonstration and shout your head off, but then at the same time you’re setting up your own little business in the tourist trade, which is what kayaking is in the end.

Adam’s even voice was barely audible above the throb of inane music. The Italian girls had attracted others to the dance floor. The instructor had a hint of a smile at the edge of his mouth, as if what he was saying were not offensive at all. When I teach kayak, he went on, two evenings a week on the estuary, I do it free, for underprivileged kids, in my spare time. You’re making money and pretending you’re involved in some cause to save the world.

There was a very short pause. As in a collision on the road there was a split second in which everybody realised that they were involved in some kind of accident, without yet knowing how serious.

Enough, let’s talk about tomorrow’s paddle, Keith said determinedly. I was saying to Clive, I think it might be time to split up into two or three groups around ability levels.

Clive had climbed to his feet. He reached across the table and slapped the chinless man hard across the face. Clive has a knotty, powerful arm, a solid hand. Adam fell sideways against Amal. The boy held him. Something clattered to the tiled terrace floor. The phone. A beer glass had gone over.

Prick!

Michela stood and pulled him back, put her arms round him.

Clive! Mandy shrieked. For God’s sake!

He pushed the girl away, stepped backwards knocking over his chair, and walked off. Michela fell back and burst into tears, crouched by the table. Stupid, she was shaking her head. Stupid!

From their scattered tables the other campers were watching. One of the Spanish children was hiding behind Mandy’s chair. Amal picked the phone from the floor and wiped the beer off it with the front of his T — shirt.

Since those people were killed, Michela got out, in Milan, he’s been so tense. She stifled her tears, sat on a chair. Vince was in a trance. He felt exhilarated, upset. Only now did he notice there was beer dripping in his lap.

If he’s broken my phone … Adam began. But the mobile was already beeping with the arrival of another message.

I’d better go and talk to him, Keith stood up.

Later, it turned out that Adam’s sister — in — law in Southampton had given birth to a healthy little boy. They should have been celebrating.

Vince watched Amal. This was the Rienz below Bruneck, a broad brown swirl of summer storm water rushing and bouncing between banks thick with brushwood, overhung with low, grey boughs, snagged in the shallows with broken branches that vibrate, gnarled and dead, trapped by the constant pressure of the passing flood. A hazard.

Amal sits alert and relaxed in his red plastic boat. They are ferry — gliding, crossing the river against the current. The Indian boy waits his turn in the eddy, chatting with the others. The boats rock and bang against each other. Someone is humming the hamster song. Then one firm stroke and the prow thrusts into the flood. The leading edge of the boat is lifted to meet the oncoming water. The current is wild and bouncy, not the steady strong flow of the narrower torrent, but the uneven tumbling of scores of mountain streams gathered together in the lower valley and channelled into a space that seems to resist their impetuous rush. The water piles on top of itself. It comes in waves, fast and slow.

The hull of the boat lifts. Amal has sunk his paddle on the downstream side as brace and rudder. Without a further stroke, the diagonal steady, the trim constantly adjusted, the kayak is squeezed across the flood and, without apparent effort, slides into an eddy against the further bank. The boy sits there steady, helmet wreathed in willow twigs. What is he doing that I can’t?

Vince is familiar with the notion that kayaking is an activity where words, instructions, will take you only so far. In her first bossy excitement at having finally persuaded her husband, two years ago, to take up a sport, Gloria had given Vince a book, the BCU handbook, that taught all the strokes. There were diagrams, photographs, tips. Vince studied them. The stroke that most concerned him then was the Eskimo roll. He hated the embarrassment of having to swim out of his upturned boat and be rescued, perhaps by a twelve — year — old girl or a sixty — year — old man, on the muddy shore of the Thames Estuary.

But text and diagrams were not enough. He who understood the most complex accounting procedures at a glance, who oversaw the foreign activities of one of the world’s top ten financial institutions, could not get his mind around the co — ordinated movement of hands, hips and head that would take you from the upside — down position, face blind and cold in the slimy salt water, to the upright, sitting steady again, paddle braced in the wavelets, the stinging breeze in your eyes. Even when he learned the movement, when he began to come up nine times out of ten, it was still as if some conjuring trick were being performed, something subtracted even from the most attentive gaze, an underwater sleight of hand. Only that now it was being performed through him. Whatever his motives for starting the sport, he knew that this was the reason he had continued, not the health advantages his wife nagged him about for so long, out of love, no doubt (she feared the businessman’s thrombosis), but this stranger business of his body having learned things that his mind would never know, the idea of access to a different kind of knowledge; and, together with that, an edge of anxiety. There was always the tenth time when you didn’t come up and didn’t know why. All at once, he found he needed this excitement.