Tim Parks - Rapids

Max had hung Wally from the brim of his straw hat. The talismanic bear swung from side to side at every bend. Mandy insisted that everyone buckle up their safety belts. No exceptions! The slalom course was almost thirty miles away. People had slept badly. Caroline had cried off altogether. Don’t you think ‘sort out the men from the boys’ is a pretty sexist expression, Brian was enquiring of Clive. I mean, women don’t even get a look — in. Anyway, the boys are usually better than the men, Phil boasted. It was the drooping eyebrows that gave him such a gormless look. Oh you think so too, do you, dearie, Max cried. The minibus pulled its trailer along the Bruneck — Brixen road. Amelia and Tom had their heads bowed over the BCU’s manual of correct recovery strokes. They seemed seriously absorbed. Vince felt his stomach tight. He had had to crap twice before departing. The course has sections that are grade four, Amal told him solemnly. That means there’s only one line to take through the rapid and you have to get it right. Or kaput! The Indian boy smiled. Why do I feel so determined, Vince wondered, to be on this suicide trip tomorrow? What do I have to prove?

About four hundred yards of river had been carefully reorganised to present more or less every troublesome whitewater feature: a stopper, a hole, a couple of daunting waves, rocks in the most trying places. Being dam — fed, the water levels were fairly constant. Criss — crossing over the river was a system of wires from which perhaps forty slalom gates were suspended so that their red— or green — and — white posts were just clear of the water. But this extra subtlety, the weaving back and forth in a set course among obstacles, was for the long, slim slalom boats, the experts. All you have to do, Clive explained earnestly— but he in particular had slept little and badly— at least for the first two runs, is to show me that you can break out of the current at every single eddy on the course, then break back in again without any trouble. Okay? We go down in groups of four. At the bottom you get out and carry your boats back to the beginning again. Keith will be stalking the bank taking notes and giving advice.

Vince ran his fingers round the rim of the cockpit to check that the spraydeck was sealed. The tab was out, ready to pull. He was with Mandy, Amal and Phil. At once he sensed he would have felt safer in a group with one of the two instructors. The water rushed down, grey and gleaming, to where they sat ready on the low bank. But of course, not to be with an instructor was a compliment. The pour — overs were larger and fiercer than any they had run before. There were places where even a small mistake would lead to getting pinned against a rock. It’s years since I did something as tough as this, Mandy muttered. She was checking the strap on her helmet. Slalom courses are always a doddle, Phil said knowledgeably. They’ve taken out any sharp stuff you could hurt yourself on, haven’t they? Nobody ever gets killed. He seemed disappointed. You lead, Vince told Amal. The Indian boy launched himself from the bank.

Pointing upstream, Amal ferried from the bank to the first rock and signalled to Vince to follow. First his finger indicates the person who is the object of the message, then the place he has to arrive at. As Vince moved out, Amal was already leaving his small refuge to drop down behind the first spur. One by one the group followed. First in the eddy, then back into the flow and through a fierce stopper. Take it close to the left, Keith was shouting from the bank. He had his arm in a sling. Right against the rock! The rocks are your friends!

Vince raced down. The deceleration as you punched into the eddy, raising the bottom of the boat to the still water, was fearsome. At the third he misjudged and was pulled over by the inertia. He rolled up on the second attempt. It was freezing. The cold gripped his head. He was excited. He signalled to Mandy to follow and broke back into the current again. As the least likely to come to grief, Phil was at the back to pick up anyone who got into trouble.

Certainly beats banking, Vince told Mandy at the bottom when they’d completed the first run. Once again, the concentration required and the physical effort had cleared his mind of all pain. You looked good, Mandy said. She had taken a couple of photos from eddies. Pretty dull, Phil thought. He wanted to play in the big stopper. They heaved the boats onto their backs and trudged up to the top.

On the second run, Amal tried a ferry — glide just below the stopper. It has a hole as well! Keith warned them from the bank. It’s grabby. They are behind a spur of rock looking upstream into a fierce churn of white water beneath a drop of about three feet. A cold spume fills the air, causing small rainbows to form in the bright sunshine. The world has a glitter to it, a powerful presence. Everything is immediate. Just downstream of the white water, the surface is irregular and turbulent and there must be a point— you know this— where if you push too close to the froth, the backflow in the stopper will begin to pull you in. The boat will sink and spin in the soft, oxygenated water. But to make it over to the eddy that Amal has spotted way on the opposite bank, you can’t let yourself drift too far down. You must ride close to the stopper and its deep white hole. Amal steers his kayak out into the stream. His ability to set the angle and edge of the boat is uncanny. With no effort, he glides across.

Vince follows. He’s too vertical, pointing straight upstream. The hole begins to pull. He back — paddles, suddenly loses almost ten yards, but fights his way across with a huge expenditure of effort. Panting, relieved, he signals to Mandy to come across and join them. There’s room in the eddy for all four. They can regroup. As she looks across to him, Mandy’s face is grim and Vince guesses at once that she isn’t going to make it. The woman is hunched. Her posture betrays her nerves. She is here for the group, Vince is aware, for the companionship that expeditions like this can offer a single woman in middle age, for the photographs and fun.

Mandy’s first tentative stroke leaves the tail of the boat still anchored in the eddy. Before she’s halfway across, she’s lost at least twenty yards to the current. Barely breaking the surface, there’s a stone in the middle of the river here. She could rest the bow of her kayak behind it, take a break, decide what to do next. But she hasn’t seen. She isn’t thinking. She drifts against the stone sideways, paddling like mad. It surprises her. With the unexpected contact, the bow is shifted the other way, back to the left bank. She fights the shift, but half — heartedly. The river has got her now. Grey and bouncy, the current swirls towards a smooth black boulder by the bank where it piles up in a tense cushion before being forced back into the centre to plunge down the next drop. All this would be easy enough to negotiate if taken face on, but Mandy is pointing upstream. She is still trying to turn the boat back across the flow when the current pushes it sideways onto the boulder. Immediately she’s pinned, the underside of the kayak against the rock, the water crashing on the spray — deck.

Vince is watching all this from the safety of his eddy on the opposite bank, thirty yards upstream. He sees the woman try to brace her paddle against the oncoming water to keep her head up. He has a picture of the blue helmet, the orange paddle — blade. But it’s only a fraction of a second before she’s down. Now she will pull out and swim. She doesn’t. Arm in a sling, Keith is scrambling down the bank. But there are thick brambles between himself and the rock. He can’t get to it. Mandy is still under. Amal! Vince looks round. The boy is locked away from the stream by Vince’s boat. Vince looks for Phil. Incredibly, he is fooling around in the hole. He’s let his kayak be sucked in and is throwing the boat this way and that, tail up, tail down, in the spongy water. He hasn’t seen anything. He can hear no screams.