The Water Children - Anne Berry

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out of the tent on her hands and knees like a dog, leaving them to worm their way from their sleeping bag and into their clothes. They emerged from the tent, hands clasped, to find her still attending them. She did not look vengeful, or angry, or jealous, just blank, a blank page.

      ‘Hello again,’ Judy said, relaxed. And she leaned forward and kissed Naomi lightly on the cheek. Walt followed suit.

      ‘Naomi, have you been with us all night?’ Walt wanted to know. She nodded.

      ‘Are you all right?’ breathed Judy. She had her scarf in her hand and had begun folding it, running a thumb and forefinger along the fabric edge as if creasing paper to make a fan. She tied it around her head. Then, ‘Do you want to take Communion? Come with us.’ And she clasped Naomi’s hand in hers and felt the rough nails scrabble against her palms.

      When they got close enough, the priests – there were two of them speaking into a microphone in resonant sing-song tones – ushered them forwards. Judy looked very earnest as she took the silver chalice. She focused on her reflection in it before she took a swallow. Walt mimicked her example. He glanced round to locate Naomi and saw that she was frozen. Her arms were slung about her chest, hands plunged into her armpits. She was staring at one of the priests, her expression haunted. He was robed in satin, the dark material patterned with huge swirling flowers, wide white cuffs on his bell sleeves. He was elderly. A side parting navigated its way through untidy grey straggles of hair. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on a large nose, which was latticed with broken red veins. His head was down, one hand lifted stiffly in blessing over the plate of wafers.

      The other priest, taller, less ostentatious in black, was pouring the wine into a second chalice. Suddenly Naomi spun on her heels, shoving her way through the communicants and fled. For a space she walked aimlessly. For a space she merged with a group who were all leaping like grasshoppers to bat about an enormous orange balloon, on the scale of a hot-air balloon but lacking the buoyancy.

      ‘Man, this is great,’ said one guy, his shoulder-length brown hair lashing about as he jumped. ‘Don’t you just want to do this forever?’

      She realized, startled, that he was addressing her. She was standing on tiptoes and lowered herself carefully. She made no reply. She was tiring of the pointless game. ‘I’ve won,’ she said.

      ‘Oh, far out! You’re a riot.’ She fixed him with her individual glare and he stopped springing about like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout. ‘Wow, your eyes are amazing. Like two separate women in one. Want to go somewhere?’ he propositioned bluntly. She gave her hesitant mechanical blink and stalked off.

      She joined a queue, shuffling forward patient as a cow, and was rewarded with a slice of melon, a hamburger, a pint of milk. She ate hungrily, drank thirstily, licked the cream off her top lip. Re-energized, she stepped into a wall of foam and leapt about, making believe she was inside a cloud. It was mildly amusing. It made her feel sexy, the foam on her skin and people looming out of the whiteness. She’d like to have fucked Walt with all that foam splitting and flaking around them. It would have been like screwing in a giant snow-globe.

      ‘But then he’s probably busy fucking sweet little Judy right now,’ she mumbled under her breath.

      She wasn’t in the mood to trampoline on clouds after that, so she spent a period staring at a plantation of rubbish. It seemed to be burgeoning right before her, dividing, doubling, a cancer spreading. It stank, its rank odour permeating the air. She wondered if anyone else saw the astonishing beauty in this living monument to decay and death. Then it was the evening. She materialized out of the throng and sat beside Walt and Judy on the grass. They heard Donovan, Ralph McTell and the Moodies. She decided that she would never forget the Moodies, the music from that incredible Mellotron seeming to wrap around them. It came from everywhere and nowhere, reverberating off the slopes, bouncing off the canvas gables on Desolation Row. The huge darkness was pegged with stars, the air was a mêlée of scents, of grass and hash and dew and people, and yes, even here, garbage. She was a drop in an ocean of people, pulled by the currents of music.

      ‘Judy, we were always meant to be together,’ Walt declared. ‘Come back to San Francisco with me?’ And when she did not reply, only smiled, he asked her to give him her address, her phone number.

      ‘You’re a treasure,’ she said as if he was an adorable puppy she didn’t want to keep. Then, ‘Goodbye.’ She kissed him on the cheek and Naomi as well, and shimmered off, losing herself in the heaving mass. Walt’s face cracked as if it was a nut split open in a nutcracker. He was hardly aware of Naomi, of the bottle she handed him.

      ‘Jimi Hendrix,’ she said.

      ‘Foxy Lady,’ he replied, gulping the drink she had handed him. He grimaced. ‘What . . . what is it? It tastes like air freshener.’ But such was his thirst that he drained the bottle anyway.

      After a time she said, ‘You’re tired.’

      As if she was a hypnotist and he was her subject, he nodded obediently. Instantly he was exhausted, worn ragged. He needed to sleep. Jimi Hendrix seemed far away, a blur of pink and orange, a flash of silver around his neck. He wanted to hear the end but he hadn’t the will to keep awake. Then Naomi was helping him back to the tent. ‘I want to see . . . see . . . Je . . . Jethro, Jethro Tull. I want . . . want to see Joan Baez. Naomi? Naomi?’ He waved his arm and stumbled. Distantly he knew he was losing co- ordination, control. ‘Was there something . . . something in that drink?’

      ‘Don’t be silly.’

      ‘Na . . . omi?’ he slurred.

      ‘Yes?’ she said, a clear bell sounding through the fudge of his speech.

      ‘Don’t let me miss Leonard. Don’t let me . . .’ He broke off, remembering he had to breathe. ‘Don’t let me miss Leonard Cohen. I must . . . must hear Leonard.’ Someone was turning the volume down on his voice. The effort of making himself understood was too great. ‘Mm . . . mm . . . Na—’

      ‘I hear you,’ Mara, the black doll inside her, said. ‘Don’t worry, Walt, I’m going to take care of you.’ Now she was helping him into their tent and he was falling on his sleeping bag. ‘I’m going to make you comfortable.’

      ‘You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re . . .’ She stroked his brow, drew her hand down his face, closing his eyelids as you might a dead man’s. His mouth fell open and his body went slack. She made a tight roll of her sleeping bag, and then held it over his mouth and nose. Using all her strength, she pushed down for long minutes, until her knuckles were white as lard and her hands ached. She only removed it when she was absolutely sure that he was dead. She pressed her fingers into his neck and felt for the pulse in his carotid artery. None. Walt’s blood was stagnating. Already his cells were breaking down, decaying, until all that he would be fit for was to be buried in the rubbish plantation. She sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork for a couple more minutes. She was grinding her teeth, the pestle-and-mortar grating punctuated by small satisfied grunts. She listened to her own eulogy for a bit and reminisced about her life with Walt, good and bad. Then gradually the tent impinged on her mix of thoughts. She didn’t like it, and he had been going to leave her alone in it while he lay with Judy.

      She wished that they had brought the camper van. She felt safer in the van, shored up in the van. She could lock the doors and no one could get in. No one could pull her from her bunk in a sleep so deep that it felt like a trance, no one could grip her small hand in theirs, crush it between their strong adult fingers like a closing vice, and drag her through a forest of bunk beds where The Blind Ones slumbered. The Blind Ones chose to be sightless. Images played before their eyes, then vanished, never to be recalled. They were present, ever present, their eyes glowing but they witnessed nothing. Did you see? Did you see what happened? Mara wanted to scream at them, at their blank pudding faces. But she knew they would only turn their empty eyes on her and shake their heads. No, they did not see Father Peter creep past like a malignant ghoul in the thick darkness, Father Peter who in the daylight made them press their hands together and pray for forgiveness of their sins. In the sunshine with the sea breeze salty in their nostrils, he told them that they were

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