The Water Children - Anne Berry

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and cold, like marble, against Catherine’s hot, damp one. She drew back, stood, took one last long look at Rosalyn, into her frightened, uncertain blue eyes, and left.

      Chapter 3

      The summer solstice. Stonehenge. 1965. The sun rising. The shared intake of breath. And the shadows lengthening on the scrubby grass. She’d been coming here for this since she was seventeen. It was what you did when you were a traveller. You followed the light. Now she was twenty-five. That meant she’d been roaming for eight years, falling in and out of company. Forever on the move. Naomi Seddon the nomad. She wondered what would happen if she stood still, if she gave the blackness inside her time to come bubbling to the surface. I am like one of those Russian dolls, she thought. If you pull me apart at the waist you will find another doll within, a black doll, Mara. She stared at the mysterious stone giants huddled in the middle of nowhere, like a gaggle of gods. Glancing about her, she could see that some of the onlookers were praying, and some were singing, and some were chanting. So she fell upon the words the priest had spoken to her when she arrived at the home, renaming her. They were all that remained of him under her skin.

      ‘And she said unto them, “Call me not Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”’

      She reached out a hand to the towers of rock. The feel of their solid flesh was chill and rough and lumpy under the pads of her fingers. She scratched them with her bitten nails and listened to the reassuring ‘scrit, scrit’ of their reply. And then suddenly she was aware of the tall man at her side, the unruly brown, shoulder-length hair tethered messily in a loose ponytail, the moustache that drooped down at the edges of his mouth in a way she thought delightfully old fashioned, like some romantic poet. The hint of sensual, full lips partially concealed under it. The dark-blue eyes perpetually amused by some private joke, the irises sparkling as they reflected the rising sun. All set in the slightly hawkish, predatory face. He slung an arm casually about her shoulders as if he’d known her forever, as if they’d journeyed there together, as if they were an old married couple. Then he pulled her round to face him, bent, moulded his large frame to hers, and kissed her as if they were not an old married couple, as if they had only just met, as if the powerful animal attraction between them made words superfluous.

      Later, when she wandered back to his van, after they drew the faded olive-and-yellow curtains, slipped out of their dew-damp clothes and fucked so sweetly that she wanted to weep, he took a huge breath and made a present to her of his speech. He dropped onto his back and rolled her over until she was on top, lifted her up into the saddle of him, his fingers almost meeting as he circled her narrow waist with his broad hands. And while his penis, still stiff and glistening, teased her open sex, he spoke.

      ‘You have nice eyes. Different colours. I like that.’ She could feel him begin to jut, feel him butting into her an inch or so, no more, then withdrawing, and again, until she felt her own thighs clenching, the greedy muscles contracting in welcome. ‘I’m Walt,’ he breathed, his moustache quivering. She gazed down at the geology of his body. Well built, a labourer’s physique, the muscles – arms, abdomen (she glanced back over her shoulders), thighs – were hard, the contours clearly visible through the nut-brown hue of his flesh. There were springy curls of hair on his chest, legs, and around his groin and scrota, mingling with her own black bush. He was American, his voice a bass, luxurious and creamy, a voice that hugged you, that opened you up, that plundered you with an affable smile earning your groan of acquiescence.

      ‘I’m Naomi.’ He lifted her up, and as he did so eased himself in a few inches further, making her fit him. In response she emitted a sound that was more than a mew and less than a growl. He took another bellows-ful of breath, and through her half-shut eyes she saw the barrel of his chest heave. In unconscious mimicry she drew in the tincture of nicotine, oil, sweat, and the hint of fungal spores wafting from the rolled-back blankets.

      ‘Naomi,’ he said, all that breath of his spent recklessly on the three costly syllables. He pushed his way deep inside her, and deeper still. ‘I can feel the end of you, Naomi,’ he said, and she smiled because she doubted the truth of this, as she absorbed the tartness of his feral scent.

      Now, four years on, he was still thrusting into her, satisfied that he had plumbed her depths, that he had found his way to the source of her rivers, that he had possessed her entirely. And why should she spoil the delusion? It was a good life that she had with him, travelling from city to city, through green fields, along open roads in his VW camper van, with the psychedelic flowers winding over the tricoloured bands of its paintwork. Red, white and blue, for the Stars and Stripes. She liked the large skies, the dialogue of the windswept trees. She liked the smell of rain, the feel of it on her skin, in her mouth, sliding down her throat. Its taste altered subtly, so that sometimes it was salty, oily, smoky, sometimes it smacked of industrial machinery, had that tang of metal about it, the bouquet of belching, tall, grey chimneys. She liked to step out of her clothes and let it sluice over her body, finding out her hidden places, a far better detective than Walt would ever be, she acknowledged privately to herself.

      But she loved the sea, the slap of the icy, bleak, British sea – the only antidote she knew for the blackness. They sought out the sea weekly. Walt said that the salt was an antiseptic, that it did for a shower, that it was better any day than trying to wash your feet in the basin of a public convenience, then wipe your armpits and your groin on a scrap of dripping paper towel that was coming to pieces in your hand. He believed it even served as a mouthwash, that as you gargled it cleaned teeth and gums, both. But it was the dirty core of her that she wanted purified. Only the stinging assault of the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the English Channel, and the big brother of them all, the Atlantic Ocean, could cleanse her. The sea had knowledge of her that Walt lacked. It understood that chained within her there lurked a gothic monster.

      While Walt wallowed like a hippo, or lay on his back and blew a fountain of brine up from his sodden moustache, while his penis shrivelled with the frozen caress to the nub of a rosebud, she opened herself up to an altogether more satisfying kind of intercourse. She would swim out a few yards, her stroke an un expectedly athletic crawl for such a slight woman, her arms scything through the water in mathematically executed arcs. Then, very deliberately, she would open her thighs as wide as she could, letting the sea rush into her, and in its carnal exploration confirm what it already suspected, that that was not the end of her, just the beginning.

      She could recite the names of the many places they met, like a woman naming the hotel rooms where she and her lover carried on their stormy, illicit affair. Durdle Door, Chesil Beach, Skegness, Saltburn-by-the-Sea, Fishguard, Tenby, Falmouth, Camber Sands, Eastbourne . . . On and on, they tripped off her tongue. No matter how far they wandered, eventually on this great island they encountered the sea. She didn’t tell Walt how she felt. She kept her sea fever to herself. After an encounter, her skin felt chafed with salty friction, her body battered with cold, her eyes streamed and her vision was misted. But the filth had been strained out of her and she was shriven, a sanctified vessel. Their last swim in Studland Bay had left her with the flu, her temperature rising steeply, until she felt so dizzy she could not stand up. He said it was just a cold, insisted that once she got to the festival she’d soon recover. But she’d been adamant.

      He’d removed the back seats of the van long ago. They slept wrapped up in blankets on a bit of blue-and-beige carpet he’d lifted off a skip. Now she huddled so deep into this, that all that was visible of her was her long black hair streaming out like a troll’s – witch’s hair, he liked to call it in jest. He tugged a strand, and for answer she gave a yowl that seemed to slash her raw throat like a knife. He lifted his hands in surrender and backed off, sulking with a joint in the corner of the field where they’d parked. Here, he attracted the interest of a herd of Friesian cows, their expansive nostrils huffing in the unusual aroma, their ears twanging off the flies, their soulful eyes rolling.

      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

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