The Last Summer of the Water Strider (5 page)

Ray nodded.

‘The casket was perfect,’ he said, as if sensing Ray’s insecurities.

‘Thank you.’ My father looked genuinely lightened by this comment.

‘Raymond, I want you to know that if there’s any way I can help over the coming weeks and months, I will do so. These are not empty words. These are words spoken in all sincerity and
full intent. Please write to me if there is something. I am not on the telephone, as you know, but I will be there for you.’

Something struck true in Henry’s words, and I sensed that Ray, like me, was comforted by them.

Then Henry looked at me.

‘Hey, stupid,’ he said lugubriously.

‘Hey.’

‘You should come and see me. At the boat. In Somerset.’

‘Maybe.’

He looked at me askance, clearly doubting that I would do any such thing.

‘What did you sprinkle on the flowers?’ I asked.

‘Water blessed by the Dalai Lama.’

Ray looked sceptical. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘He gave it to me,’ Henry said simply. ‘Raymond, I’m sorry, but I can’t stay for the Scotch eggs and finger buffet. I’ve got a meeting in town about my book,
and it can’t wait. They’re already annoyed with me keeping them waiting by coming to this in the first place. Business, you know. Hard heads, cold hearts. But I hope you know my
thoughts are with you and will remain with you.’

Ray said he understood. Henry hugged him once more, shook my hand and tousled my hair. That was the last I heard of him for several more months.

S
hortly after the funeral I began to spend a lot of my time wandering the avenues and crescents of Yiewsley in the evening, half-heartedly trying
to sniff out mischief. I idly vandalized road signs and kicked cans at stray cats. Most dramatically, I was caught joyriding a car – an Austin Princess, still smelling of fresh seat leather
– that had been left unlocked in the street adjacent to ours. The owner – who had momentarily nipped inside his house, I later discovered, to retrieve a tin of driving sweets –
had left the keys in the ignition. I just took the car without a second thought. My father had taught me to drive, around the back of an abandoned gasworks, but I had never driven on a road.

The owner saw me juddering away – I hadn’t quite mastered the exigencies of the clutch – and immediately phoned the police. They were on the scene within minutes, when I had
put only a couple of streets’ distance between myself and the scene of the crime. I panicked, and didn’t have the sense to stop. There followed a brief and farcical car chase. I crashed
into the post of a creosoted fence after thirty seconds, denting the Princess and banging my head on the windscreen badly enough to need hospital attention. I ended up in front of the magistrates,
with the probability of juvenile detention. But my mother’s death, and a carefully elaborated head bandage, worked in my favour, and they let me off with a caution and a large fine, which my
father had no choice but to settle, not without bitterness.

It was early July. It was apparent to Ray that I had lost the ability to care about anything. In June, immediately after my mother’s death, I had failed to turn up for my History exam, out
of raw apathy. Once again, my bereavement got me off the hook – on compassionate grounds my school offered me the opportunity to retake it in September, a prospect that depressed me more than
my automatic failure. The two A levels I had completed shortly before my mother died, English and Physics, I felt were doomed to poor grades anyway. Furthermore, I had no plans to go to university,
simply because nobody I knew – other than Henry – ever had. I would take a year off, then busk it. I had not the faintest idea what I wanted to do for a living, but I assumed something
would turn up. My aspirations were pitched higher than Ray’s and the shoe shop, but not massively so.

My father, who was struggling to cope with the demands of his job through the dislocations of his grief, told me plainly that he couldn’t deal with me any more. The car theft, the flunked
A level, most of all my surly and uncommunicative attitude, came as an intolerable surplus burden on top of his attempts to cope with the loss of Evie and his new, onerous role as a single parent.
I was beyond making my standard response to being criticized – that my father was being selfish. Neither was I capable of registering the selfishness that I was displaying towards him. I had
lost all interest in both of us.

Then – as with the sweet peas, as if he had intuited it – a letter arrived from Uncle Henry, reasserting the sincerity of his offer to do anything he could to help. Duly prompted, my
father immediately wrote back to him and asked – without checking with me first – whether I could go and stay with him on the boat for the summer.

Henry phoned the shoe shop the day Ray’s letter arrived in Somerset to say that I would be welcome. He gave his address and told my father to bring me down right away that weekend. He
lived alone on the houseboat; there was no schizophrenic ballet dancer. There wasn’t much to do where he lived, Henry said, but he was sure that he and I would find something to amuse
ourselves.

Ray informed me that I should pack up my things on Saturday. He would drive me to Henry’s on Sunday. After that weekend, school was finished for the summer.

Ray would immediately return to London, and I wouldn’t see him, or Buthelezi House, again until the autumn. I would have a chance to revise for my History A level, which I would then
resit.

I made no resistance. Any course I chose – or was compelled to take – would, I was convinced, have the same lack of significant consequence.

On the Saturday I packed, neither raising objection nor showing any enthusiasm. Most of my possessions fitted easily enough into my nylon sports holdall and a couple of plastic
supermarket bags. There were six pairs of Y-fronts, a pair of brown Speedo swimming trunks, some cut-off Wranglers, patched, bleached and faded. There were several washed-out T-shirts which had
long ago lost their shape, some of them bearing the names of bands I liked or slogans of which I approved. One bore an image of Hollywood killer Charles Manson with
I AM ONLY WHAT
YOU MADE ME
.
I AM ONLY A REFLECTION OF YOU
inscribed beneath, in letters that appeared to drip blood.

An ancient, battered, green-painted suitcase, steel with rivets, held a couple of bulky towels and a lump of cheap soap. Also Converse basketball boots, black socks disfigured by bobbles, some
unattractively fresh brown leather sandals that my dad had got on staff discount from the shop.

I put a canvas military-style jacket and a bum freezer with a fur collar on top of the pile. I also had a Slazenger shoulder bag for bits and pieces – a Swiss Army knife, a transistor
radio, a bag of spearmint chews and a copy of
ZigZag
magazine. There was also a wooden apple crate, which had once held Cox’s Orange Pippins, containing a selection of my favourite
LPs – Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin, Leonard Cohen, and a few others of a likewise introspective and lugubrious nature. Set against these melancholics were a number of heavy-metal albums,
including
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
by Iron Butterfly, the first Black Sabbath album, MC5’s
Kick Out the Jams
, and
Deep Purple in Rock.
There was a small portable record
player, with chipboard case, vinyl-covered, with a hinged lid and a broken catch. I sealed it shut with Sellotape.

Other than basic toiletries – a bottle of Eau Sauvage aftershave my mother had bought me for Christmas a couple of years back, plus toothpaste and a ragged toothbrush – that was more
or less it. I also had my most prized possession, a spick pair of yellow-lensed aviator-style Foster Grants, which lent me the essence, so I believed at the time, of a seasoned veteran of Laurel
Canyon in the Hollywood Hills rather than an ordinary teenage slob from the London exurbs.

After much lobbying by my father, I agreed to pack my revision notes and History textbooks – although I had little intention of applying myself to them. My entrenched listlessness was
apparent in the food stains on my clothes; the slouch of my shoulders; the silent, accusatory contortions of my mouth. My examination materials sat lumpen, a jumble in a single plastic bag, the
corner of one History primer penetrating the thin polythene like an unwelcome fact piercing an untenable theory.

The journey to Uncle Henry’s houseboat took nearly four hours. The temperature stood at eighty-three degrees and when we stopped for a roadside picnic – trestle table set up in a
lay-by, carbon monoxide from passing juggernauts spicing our luncheon-meat sandwiches – I noted that there was no wind whatsoever, other than displaced air from speeding traffic.

The boat was moored on a tributary of a tributary of the River Severn, some ten miles or so outside Bristol. Ray and I passed the time more or less in silence. At one point he tried to engage me
in a game of red car/blue car, but the competition expired from lack of engagement on my part after several minutes. I can’t remember anything else about the journey except the smell of the
car – a mud-coloured five-year-old Ford Anglia, already spawning carbuncles of rust at the wheel arches. My father, who had also become somewhat careless and dilatory of late, had
inadvertently left a half-eaten banana under the passenger seat for several days. He had removed it before we set off, but the interior continued to reek of the sweet, decaying pulp throughout the
overheated, rickety journey. The windows were open to cool the interior – and purge it of the odour – so the sound of the air pushing past rendered conversation difficult. Not that we
had anything to say to one another in the first place.

Finding the boat was not easy. Henry had posted Ray a small, hand-drawn map, written on the back of a ‘Visit the West Country’ holiday postcard which featured on the front a yokel
dressed in sackcloth sitting on a farmyard gate, chewing straw and holding a stone bottle of Somerset cider. The map appeared to have little connection with the actual topography we were
experiencing. We turned off the main road, as suggested by the diagram, then on to a B road, then on to a back road, then a mile down what was little more than a dirt track. Any confidence that we
could possibly be in the right place drained away. There was no sign of habitation of any kind.

The rough land we were travelling across – the Anglia creaking and complaining and Ray looking anxious about what effect the terrain was having on the crankshaft – gave way to a
small but dense wood looming in front of us. Then the wood was above us, forming a carapace. The vegetation was growing wilder by the yard, looping out from the trees as if intent on discouraging
strangers.

It seemed that we were destined to come to a dead end – the track becoming narrower and narrower, the wood and brush thickening exponentially – but then, just as my father was about
to back up and retrace our path, we burst through a row of overhanging trees, one of which scraped the roof of the Anglia with a ratcheting sound that made my father wince and curse. We found
ourselves facing an isolated riverbank. Moored flush against the bank was a houseboat, bobbing slightly in the gentle swell of the water. Parked ten yards in front of us was Henry’s Karmann
Ghia.

The wooden boat was constructed on two levels, with sides roughly painted in what I thought of as English green, since it was the dark-seaweed hue of sheds and wooden gates and front doors
throughout rural England. Three round porthole-style windows, with horizontal sash divisions bisecting them, were set on the lower level. There were two smaller portholes at the first-floor level.
At the prow, a hand-painted legend in Chinese-style script announced the name of the boat –
Ho Koji.

The roof of the upper storey seemed to be set slightly at an angle, presumably in order to facilitate the run-off of rainwater. This gave the boat a rickety, off-centre air. There was a
decorative crenellated awning attached as a fringe to the first-floor-level base, also green, but punctuated with alternating leaves of white. The aft of the boat, at its furthermost point, where
the cabin and steering wheel might be located on a sea-going craft, held two rectangular windows, which faced us as we sat regarding the boat silently. The car, now unventilated by passing air,
heated up quickly to an uncomfortable level, and I climbed out, my trousers stickily unpeeling from the vinyl seat. Ray continued to sit behind the steering wheel, the motor still running, staring,
as if unable to take in his brother’s unconventional living arrangements. I don’t know what he had expected – pebbledash, perhaps, or carriage lamps.

The front door, centred between the two rectangular windows, sat behind a small deck which supported two large ceramic pots containing delicate, red-leafed trees – which Henry later
identified as Japanese acers – on either side. The door was intricately carved with birds and flowers, and painted a livid purple which clashed somewhat with the serenity of the surrounding
green gloss. Somehow the whole construction had the feel of a gypsy caravan, although it was much larger than any caravan I had ever seen. Both stern and aft were squared off – it clearly
wasn’t a boat that was built for river cruising. There was a sun terrace on the higher level, framed by a white rail at waist height. A lounger was stretched out on it, the canvas material
decorated with wide blue and white deckchair stripes. A ragged, nubby white towel was draped over the angled back.

The feeling of the boat was homely. Although I couldn’t think of it as beautiful – it was too blunt and squat for that, and the paint was flaking badly in places – it fitted
into the surroundings very naturally, snugly negotiating the space connecting land and water. Another white metal rail, which appeared to be newly painted, since it was much brighter than its
yellowing counterpart at the upper level, stretched around the entrance deck, with a gap where the gangplank was attached. The gangplank was set at a right-angle, a short stretch out over the
water, then a longer section leading off to the left on to the boat, creating an L shape. There was a single metal chimney protruding from the roof.