The Last Summer of the Water Strider (3 page)

I kept working at it. I thought as it went on I would get more proficient, but I fumbled it even more. Because of my indecision, I kept changing my technique. One moment I would be breathing
into her as I pushed the torso down, the next when I let go. I improvised like this for several minutes. My mother remained stricken, falling further, deeper, it seemed, into immobility and
unconsciousness. I decided I had no choice but to leave her and to go and ask someone for the use of their phone.

I didn’t know anyone in our block who had a phone. But there were two neighbours, in the private houses over the road, who were connected to the telephones lines that were strung across
our street like social boundaries. One was to the south of the block – the Cartwrights. That was about two hundred yards away. One was to the north – the Gibbonses. That was only a
hundred yards away.

I was embarrassed to call on the Gibbonses. Old Ma Gibbons disliked me because I had once put a football through her front window and run away. She knew it was me – I have no idea how,
since she wasn’t actually at home when it happened. She had challenged me on the subject several times, insisting that I pay for the damage, but I always sulkily denied it. She was a heavy
woman, with a thin, mean mouth and a way of looking at you that squeezed out shame like a smear of perspiration.

Although Ma Gibbons and her phone were closer, I ran to the Cartwrights’ house. With every stride, I felt time sliding towards the irreversible. The house was fronted with a low brick
wall, a rockery and a short concrete drive. There was a handwritten note stuck under the doorbell announcing that it was out of order. I could see, through a ridged glass panel set in the front
door, the Union Jack they had framed on their hall wall. I could also see the outline of the red telephone on a small laminated shelf.

The door knocker was lightweight and cheap and jammed up with rust. It seemed to make no more noise than a pebble falling to the ground from a child’s pocket, so I starting hammering on
the glass panel with my fist. No one came.

I thought of breaking in, of smashing the glass. It would have been a rational thing to do. They would have forgiven me. I went so far as to pick up a lump of sandstone from the rockery with
that intention in mind, but let it drop from my hand.

I didn’t stop to consider how ironic it was that the custom and practice of politeness my mother had considered more paramount than any other virtue was now edging her towards a place
where manners had no purchase. Instead, I turned and ran to the other end of the street, back past the rude block of Buthelezi House, trying not to visualize my mother stretched out on the kitchen
floor. I guessed it was now more than five minutes since she had collapsed, and I had, effectively, done nothing. In fact, I had almost certainly made things worse by my incompetent attempts to
give artificial respiration.

I bolted up Ma Gibbons’ path and rang the bell. It produced a trembling and uncertain jangle rather than the more common
bing-bong.
She answered almost immediately. I don’t
suppose she was that old really, by today’s standards – no more than sixty-five – but she was already, despite her size, baggy-skinned, white-haired and carved with canyons of
wrinkles. She looked at me in astonishment, as if was I readying myself to attack her. Still in my pyjamas, my hair wild, my feet bare, I must have looked like a lunatic.

Once I had caught my breath and yanked out the bare facts of what had happened, she guided me into her front room, where she kept the phone. I was shaking so much that I dropped the receiver;
she retrieved it from the floor and told me in a crisp tone to sit down. But I remained standing, shifting anxiously from foot to foot and hugging myself for comfort. She made the 999 call herself,
only asking me to confirm the address and the spelling of my surname and of Buthelezi House. After she hung up, I refused her request for me to wait with her. She then said she would come with me
to Buthelezi House, but I insisted that she stayed put. The bubble of time I felt stranded in seemed too private, the air too thin, to support another inhabitant, however well-meaning.

I returned to the flat, where my mother remained inert and in precisely the position in which I had abandoned her. There was nothing to do but wait. I sat down on a kitchen chair and tried to
avoid looking at the space on the floor that she occupied. I understood that the second hand continued to orbit the face of the carriage clock on the windowsill above the stained-yellow sink with
its rubber-nippled taps, but it seemed to be measuring nothing whatsoever. There was just my mother and me, suspended in a continuous, strange, present moment. My sense of helplessness was like an
injury. I could hear my own breath, laboured, coming fast. It didn’t sound like my breath at all. I risked a look at Evie. Her face was the colour of the sugar that was spilt on the
floor.

After a while, my breathing returned to normal. My fear had consigned itself to a place of suspension. I had stopped shaking. Instead, I started to find it puzzling that this immutable presence,
partially out of sight on the other side of the table, this continuation and source of my very self could behave in such an improbable fashion. I felt a flash of anger towards my mother, as if she
had deliberately chosen to do this to inconvenience me. To embarrass me. I had no template for how to behave in such circumstances. In all honesty, I wanted to make myself a cup of hot chocolate,
but it seemed disrespectful. It was also peculiar – I never drank hot chocolate, it was my father’s particular treat. Yet I felt it would be obscurely comforting.

I shifted chairs and looked down on her, like a god. I felt myself becoming more and more motionless within – not out of calmness, but in a state of weird congealment, as if an epoxy had
been added to a glue.

When the ambulance men arrived I remained sitting there, still wondering whether or not to make myself that cup of hot chocolate. There was nothing else on my mind: it was an unsolvable koan.
When the doorbell rang, I remember wondering who it might be. I only realized that it was the ambulance when I became aware of the flashing blue light stroking the kitchen window.

The two medics didn’t take long to work out what I, at some level, knew already, although they put on a small performance for my sake – chest compressions, an injection of something
or other, mouth-to-mouth, even paddles to shock the heart back into function, which made my mother jump like a frog I had once seen on a dissection table when an electrical current was put through
it.

One of the medics muttered, regretfully, that it was a shame they hadn’t got there earlier. He looked not much older than me – a novice, I supposed. I remember asking him, while his
more senior partner was distracted, how late was it? How late?

‘A few minutes earlier, then . . . perhaps . . .’

He allowed the sentence to trail off when he saw his senior glaring at him reprovingly. The older man no doubt understood how many of the scenes he was called to held suspended within them the
seeds of regret and self-punishment, interest on the inescapable debt of grief. The torments of decisions not taken, the revenge of the past on the present.

But now it was too late for me, just as it was too late for my mother. The koan was solved. I had killed her. My stupidity, my lack of decision, the ludicrous flight to the Cartwrights instead
of Mother Gibbons had robbed my mother of any chance of survival.

She hadn’t – it turned out – had a heart attack at all. She had been choking on the peanut butter and stale white bread – number one choking risk for adults, I later
discovered – and had fainted from lack of oxygen, and only then suffered a coronary. I actually knew the Heimlich manoeuvre. If I had used it instead of trying to give her a mangled version
of the kiss of life, I was sure I could have saved her.

They wheeled in a steel gurney and laid her gently on it, as if she could be made comfortable in some fashion. It was simply more theatre. I remember thinking that they might as well stuff her
in a sack.

It was just after she had been loaded on to the trolley that my father arrived. Ma Gibbons must have phoned him. I hadn’t thought to do it myself.

He was not numb and still in the way I had been. He didn’t seem to notice I was even there. He became immediately hysterical. I had never seen him in anything like this condition before.
He screamed and wept. He fell to his knees. Then he rose again, threw himself across my mother’s body and had to be gently pulled away.

It disappointed me. It was no way to behave.

They found the Amontillado and offered him a glass. He knocked it back and demanded another. After the scene had played itself out – the quiet words of meaningless consolation, the request
that he place himself ‘safely’ upon a seat – the reality of the situation was clarified to me. The pile of matter on the trolley was simply that – a rapidly decaying heap of
organic waste.

I remember wondering what caused decay. Was it the action of micro-organisms and bacteria? Or was there something implicit in the nature of organic matter that returned to dust by its own
volition, a structure collapsing, like a building with its foundations removed falling in slow motion?

Then they took my mother away. Ray was still sobbing and calling her name. Shortly after she had gone, he fell into silence. He and I spent much of the following hours simply staring at the
floor and not saying anything. Death snatches the words right out of your throat. Language shrinks and becomes too diminished to be of any use.

In the end I made myself a cup of hot chocolate. I remember how extraordinarily good it tasted.

M
y father did not stage much of a recovery. Once the hysteria had faded, it appeared he had lost something essential to his proper functioning. He
became withdrawn and monosyllabic. I never saw him eat anything after that, other than the occasional biscuit or dry piece of toast, more often than not charred. His grieving was appalling for me
to behold, as if I had lost two parents rather than the one. But the feeling of grief I was waiting for never really arrived. If I felt anything at all, it was anger – overwhelming,
inarticulable, directionless. If my father was reticent, I became stony and silent.

A few days after my mother’s death, we went shopping for coffins, or ‘caskets’ as the funeral trade insisted on labelling them. This task struck me as obscene, but I
couldn’t quite bring myself to condemn my father to facing it alone. Even in his grief, he worried about being taken for a ride – ‘They get people when they’re at their most
vulnerable’ – so we visited several to see if we could get the ‘best deal’.

The funeral directors we saw all seemed more or less out of the same mould – men, grave, with smiles forensically scoured to remove all trace of happiness. Solemn acceptance and quiet
resolution seemed to be their stock-in-trade. At the first one we visited, we heard a sharp, brief burst of laughter from a back room. The man behind the counter ignored it. I couldn’t help
but imagine the backroom staff making jokes over the corpses – fooling about with the cosmetics they used to render the cadaver ‘lifelike’, or rearranging the anguished facial
features into comic expressions.

I had entered some psychological space I had never encountered before – a place of suspension, of non-feeling, of robotic movements that merely signalled the presence of life, rather than
vitally representing it. My father and I flicked through the catalogues of coffins in the way my mother used to pick through the Grattan catalogue to order winceyette pyjamas or
‘authentic’ Toby jugs. The colour reproduction in the second funeral director’s catalogue was lurid – it reminded me of those Chinese-restaurant menus that illustrated the
dishes with brazen photographs of flayed ducks and unholy intestinal parts.

We delayed the final choice until we made our third call, the Co-op funeral store. It was, unlike the other two, much more reminiscent of a practical, no-nonsense shop front. My father and my
mother both trusted the Co-op because it was collectively owned and they were Labour voters – though Ray, I knew, had talked of switching because of ‘all this union nonsense’.
Evie tried to shop at the Co-op whenever she could and collected Co-op Dividend Stamps, which could be redeemed for a discount on goods. The stolidity of the brand appealed to my father, and he
made approving noises as we entered: ‘This is the sort of thing that’s much more my mark.’

The man who greeted us was of the same stamp as the other two, but his suit was more informal – carbolic-soap grey rather than black – and his smile somewhat less mechanical. He
didn’t seem to feel the necessity to be unduly sombre – brisk and workmanlike was his pitch. I liked his face; it was that of a butcher anxious to show you some new batch of chops he
had just got in fresh from the farm.

My father seemed reassured by his demeanour. His name was Flaherty, although there was nothing of the Irish in his accent. After we had gone through the pleasantries, condolences and so forth
once again, we were offered the catalogue. On the first two occasions Ray had picked through the pages as if they were sacred, a book as holy as the Bible some anonymous vicar would be reading from
when the actual ceremony took place.

Now, though, he was seasoned, and he flicked through purposefully, pausing over the cedar, the oak, the burnished teak. But it was clear that he was becoming exhausted by the whole process. He
had no idea what to choose, it occurred to me – in fact he couldn’t choose, because to do so was to acknowledge further that his wife was truly gone.

After he had considered, reconsidered and procrastinated for almost ten minutes, I noticed Flaherty furtively checking his watch, although he remained studiously polite. I leaned over to the
page my father was on. He had been staring at it for some time. It contained the cheapest caskets – white pine, utilitarian, a good twenty per cent cheaper than anything else in the book.

‘What do you think of these?’ he said gently. It felt as if he was asking me to help choose a piece of expensive furniture for the front room.