The Last Summer of the Water Strider (2 page)

He was clean-shaven and clear-eyed. He moved fluidly, as if the nine-tenths of his body that were water dominated the grosser, material parts. When he said hello to me he looked me directly in
the eye for a long moment. I broke the gaze, then with a beckoning gesture of both hands, and a slight splaying of his arms, Henry tried to summon my father forward for a hug. Ray shrank before
him, confused. Henry capitulated and offered his hand instead, which my father half-heartedly took, then swiftly let go, as if Henry might be carrying a dangerous communicable disease. I remember
he called my father Raymond, rather than the accustomed Ray.

His hair was reasonably long, but well groomed and combed back from the brow, as if the wind had swept it and continued, somehow, to secure it there. There was a streak of grey like a
badger’s stripe running from crown to nape. If I tried hard enough, I could register faint traces of my father in his face – the slightly jutting ears, the nearly linked eyebrows
– but on the whole he seemed to be from a different genetic pool altogether.

He had in his mouth, unlit, a burnished cherrywood pipe, somehow managing the performance without appearing pretentious. When he spoke, the vowels were clipped, the consonants precise, like a
Third Programme announcer. He had been public school-educated until my grandparents’ money ran out – another source of resentment from my father, who had attended a local Church school
before leaving at the age of fifteen. Henry, on the other hand, had read Divinity at Cambridge, and been awarded a doctorate.

Henry gave a sense of being impressively cultured, punctuating his conversation with literary quotations and even repeating chunks of poetry from memory. During his visit he recited excerpts
from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and a few lines from Auden’s ‘1939’. This made my parents suspicious, as if culture itself were another dangerous narcotic that
would get you into trouble sooner or later.

Evie – Eve was her given name, but I never heard anyone call her anything but Evie – my mother, was a kind, lightly built, scared-looking woman with an ingrained defensive smile that
remained, even at rest and without company, as an after-image on her lips. This smile was stitched on to her face as she ushered Ray and Henry into the sitting room. I followed at a safe distance
– far away enough, I hoped, not to get dragged into any small-talk, which I found excruciating. Henry was offered a drink, a choice between a glass of Amontillado sherry or a dusty bottle of
London Pale Ale. The sitting room was furnished with Ercol chairs and contained a spindly, 1950s-style circular coffee table decorated with a pattern that suggested space satellites and circulating
planets.

Henry politely declined both the proffered drinks, even when pressed urgently by his nervous brother, and requested instead a glass of tap water, which Evie set off to fetch. Then he lowered
himself into a worn but comfortable green plush wing-back armchair – normally reserved for my father – with an air of entitlement, like a visiting bank manager.

I noticed that although he sat perfectly still – uncannily so, like a mime artist – his eyes rarely stopped moving, albeit lazily, around the room, taking everything in, holding the
images momentarily like a mirror then letting them go. Although his urbanity conjured in me a sense of shame in our surroundings – in the shape, quality and surfaces of our life – I
could detect no judgement in those eyes, only a quiet, analytical curiosity.

I could see why he made my parents uncomfortable. Without his ever saying a word, the apparition of Henry seemed to question everything my father stood for; and under Henry’s gaze I felt
that my parents’ life, as well as my own, reduced itself. Henry – I imagined – was viewing each of us through the wrong end of a telescope. It was obvious to me that Ray wanted
him out of the flat as quickly as possible. In the state of perpetual, sullen resentment towards my parents that I sustained myself in, it made me warm to Henry somewhat, despite my determination
to have nothing to do with the adult world and what I saw as its ubiquitous, suffocating hypocrisies.

I wasn’t sure that I entirely liked him, however; neither was I convinced that he liked me. He certainly made no effort to reach out to me, or accommodate my discomfort, which I signalled
by refusing to sit down and by doodling pointlessly with a blue ballpoint pen on the back of my hand. He seemed to find my behaviour – and everything else for that matter – faintly
amusing.

There was certainly a gentle humour about Henry, but with an undertow of gravitas, as if he commanded an Olympian view of life. This aura of unforced amusement was particularly disconcerting. He
made you feel foolish, without ever really trying to be anything but affable and dry. I’d never met anybody who occupied their skin so completely and comfortably.

Surprisingly, during that brief meeting, we managed to form the semblance of a bond. It was when my mother and father both left the room briefly – one to use the toilet (I noticed that
Henry looked slightly pained at the word ‘toilet’), the other to fetch a resupply of Royal Scot biscuits. This left Henry and me briefly alone.

He looked me up and down in the manner of a biologist studying a specimen. I was wearing a bottle-green grandad vest – three buttons at the top, no collar – and a pair of burgundy
loon pants, low on the hips, vast at the ankles and tight around the buttocks. I may have been wearing an absurd pair of platform boots with a wooden heel. I had vaguely imagined, before he
arrived, that Henry might see me as some kind of kindred spirit. But Henry looked very little like the scion of the counterculture that Ray had led me to expect.

He asked me, conventionally enough, how school was going. I told him I thought it was stupid. Then he asked me how I was getting on with Raymond and Evie. I told him I thought they were stupid.
He calmly lit his pipe, taking what seemed a very long time, and eventually puffed out a cumulus of blue, fragrant smoke. Then he gave me a curious look, and asked me what I thought of him. Taken
aback, I replied that I hadn’t had time to form a proper impression. This was not strictly true, as I was unable, despite my best efforts, to find him anything other than intriguing.

A silence fell, within which Henry seemed entirely comfortable. I began to hope for the return of one or other of my parents. Just to make a dent in the noiseless space, I asked him what he
thought of me. He inclined his head to one side, and answered, ‘Pretty stupid.’ But he said it in such a kind, wry way, it made me laugh. I tried to disguise it as a cough, but Henry
wasn’t fooled. In response, he laughed too. In contrast to my brief, high, anxious bark, his laugh came in thick, heavy waves, great booming reverberations, rich and purple-brown like old
port. When Mum and Dad walked back into the room a few moments later, we were still laughing, him taking the baritone, me the falsetto. A fresh shadow of resentment worked its way across my
father’s face. The frown lines around his eyes contorted into question marks. Ray and I rarely laughed at the same time, or about the same things.

Henry stayed for an hour or so in all. The longer he was there, the more uncomfortable my mother and father became, and the more the silences made pit-holes in the conversation, until the talk
almost entirely ran out of juice. The new supply of Royal Scot biscuits remained untouched, though Evie had pressed them on Henry twice. When at last he got up to leave, claiming, not inaccurately,
that he had overstayed his welcome, my father didn’t try to conceal his relief. His shoulders relaxed and for the first time he conjured what seemed to me a genuine smile.

It was never clear why Henry had come that day. When my father asked him, as Henry was making ready to leave, he said that it ‘seemed like it was time’. It was my first intimation
that Henry didn’t think like my parents, or most of the people I knew. I later found out that he felt no particular need to invent reasons for the things he did. He just did them, without too
much reflection and without regret. My father, I knew, found this irritating, since he, in contrast, overthought nearly everything. He was paralysed by fear of consequence. I simply found
Henry’s attitude bewildering. How could you ‘just do’ anything? Didn’t everything have a reason?

Henry offered me his hand as he left. I can remember the smell of his pipe tobacco – the mysterious inscription on the tin read
BORKUM RIFF
– and the gentle,
almost feminine clutch of his long fingers, with their buffed and rounded fingernails, as if very recently manicured. His palm felt dry and warm and I imagined it to possess the character of
sweetness in some way. It made me think, oddly, of cake.

In those days people, outside of formal situations, didn’t shake hands very often – it was considered rather ‘continental’. Henry made it seem very natural. He smiled at
me – as I remember it, after shaking my hand, he even ruffled my hair, thoughtfully pushing it back down into style afterwards. My father would never have dared do such a thing. Had he
ventured it, I would have shrunk away and he would have wiped his hand on his shirt afterwards – but it seemed quite acceptable, even reassuring, coming from Henry.

He made his way out to his car, which was of a shape and style I had never seen before, both domestic and faintly sensual at the same time (it was a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a swan among ducks
in the midst of the Morris Minors, Anglias and Cortinas that made up the inventory of vehicles in my street).

He waved through the open car window, still with his pipe poking from his mouth, inclining it slightly downwards in farewell. Then there was the blare of the exhaust pipe, a cough of backfire,
and he took off at what seemed a dangerous rate of acceleration.

For all the impression he had made on me, his light and colour faded like an expiring firework. Buthelezi House had that muffling effect on all experience. Even memory was submerged in a
grey-green tide of non-eventfulness which I believed would never withdraw.

But it did, and when it did, I looked back on that drowned banality as a blessing. It was all, really, I knew of innocence.

T
en months after Henry’s visit, my mother and I were having breakfast together. With her carefully bobbed hair, mail order-catalogue clothes
and a perpetual pinafore that miraculously never showed a stain, she lived her life by principles of kindness and self-sacrifice towards my father and myself, qualities that both of us took
entirely for granted. Evie always had a worried look on her face, because she was, in fact, perpetually worried – about nothing in particular and therefore everything.

I had one A-level paper left to sit – in History – and I was way behind in my revision. My thoughts that morning were all of the First World War and its causes. My studies seemed to
ask of me why wars in general happened, a conundrum that I considered insoluble. As I ate, I was chewing over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and weighing its effects on the future
against those of the Triple Entente. I barely registered – as usual – my mother’s presence. She was sitting in front of me with a copy of the
Daily Express
, eating lumps
of old white bread spread with large chunks of peanut butter – peanut butter was possibly her only strong preference in food, always the crunchy variety – and she didn’t look like
she was enjoying herself. But she hated waste, so she would always eat anything in the larder or fridge, even if it was going off, rather than throw it away. I had seen her scrape mould off any
variety of provisions, declaring its effects to be harmless, even beneficial.

I heard a small sound, rather like glottal stop without a word to make it manifest. It was enough to make me look up. On my mother’s face, an expression had fixed itself that made her look
even more worried than usual.

For once her anxiety had a cause. She seemed unable to breathe. She pointed frantically at her throat, then began clawing at it with her fingernails. She seemed like she was about to vomit, but
didn’t.

I was in the midst of taking the final bite of a Danish-bacon sandwich. Her fist, holding a butter knife, was suspended in mid-air, as if an invisible force was supporting her wrist while the
rest of her was collapsing. Then the knife fell, and she followed it. I waited, numbly, stupidly, for her to get up, but she didn’t move. I could not tell if her chest was still rising and
falling under her pinafore. Her right arm had become jammed awkwardly under her torso.

Her eyes bulged like pale green grapes invaded by tendrils of red veins. Her face, in contrast, was draining of colour. She didn’t move or speak. It all happened too quickly for me to be
frightened. I rose, knocking my plate to the floor, where it shattered into two symmetrical fragments. Ketchup smeared the tiles and for a second I thought about fetching some paper towels to wipe
it up. I even reached down to pick up the plate, before letting it drop again, understanding finally that there was a more urgent task to be undertaken.

Having no phone, I considered running to the kiosk on the corner, but it was unlikely to be operative. It was always being dismantled by vandals. I knew because I was one of them. Instead, I
bent down and freed my mother’s arm from under her. She grunted, but otherwise remained insensible. Her eyelids fluttered, revealing yellow-white underneath. If she had had a heart attack
– which I for some reason assumed – I knew that if the brain was starved of oxygen for more than a few minutes, it would suffer irreparable damage.

I bent over Evie and put my lips to hers in order to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I had done a safety drill in swimming class as a child – that would have been about six or seven
years previously – and I only slightly remembered the technique.

Her lips were warm, but bluish in tinge. I could taste saliva on them, and felt a shamed revulsion. I blew, feeling as ridiculous as I was panicked. I straddled my mother, there on the kitchen
floor. I pressed down on her ribcage. But I wasn’t sure at which point I should apply pressure. When I was breathing into her? Or when I stopped breathing into her? I didn’t know what I
was doing. But I kept on doing it – doing something, anything that might have an effect, that might restore the suddenly precious safety and predictability of my life. I could feel my mother,
lumpen, beneath me. I felt certain that her respiration could be repaired, even though she had made no noise or movement since I had freed her arm.