The Last Summer of the Water Strider (7 page)

Ray turned back to Henry. He looked faintly chastened.

‘Henry. Look. I appreciate this. I do. You’ve been gone a long time. I suppose I’m not sure I’m quite used to you popping up again. But listen. I’m grateful.
Really.’

He reached in his pocket and drew out a thin roll of ten-pound notes.

‘This is to see Adam through the summer. I hope it’s enough.’

‘Dad. Why can’t you just give it to me?’

Henry threw me a glance that required – no, requested – my silence. He took the money and put it in the pocket of his robe.

‘I’ll make sure he budgets wisely, Raymond, don’t worry.’

‘OK, then.’ He turned to me. ‘See? Your Uncle Henry agrees.’

I said nothing. There was an awkward pause, then Ray rested his hand on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure how to respond. After a few moments, I felt its weight lift, and Ray headed towards the
front door. Neither Henry nor I moved. Ray turned again before he left the room, as if to say something. His mouth opened, but no words emerged. He snapped it closed again and nodded, twice, as if
that settled everything. I raised a hand briefly in farewell.

‘Say goodbye to your dad,’ said Henry, surprisingly sharply.

‘Goodbye, Dad,’ I said. I looked at him standing in the doorway, forlorn.

‘Look after yourself, kiddo. Good luck, Henry.’

‘
Adiós
, Ray.’

Then he was gone. After thirty seconds, I heard the car start. There was the squeal of tyres, followed by the sound of the motor fading into the distance. Ginsberg reappeared, raised his head as
if to acknowledge the new status quo, then waddled briskly out again.

Henry came and sat back at the table with me. He reached into his pocket and handed me the wad of notes. I pocketed them.

‘Thanks.’

‘People should be free to make their own mistakes,’ said Henry.

‘Really?’

‘A cornerstone of my philosophy. “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” Blake.’

‘Blake who?’

My coffee was almost drained. I remained determined to be unimpressed. We sat in silence, finishing our dregs. Henry offered me a Lucky. I took it and he lit it for me. He smiled, as if he
considered some kind of deal to have been struck. I smiled too, for a different reason, silently sealing a pact with myself that I wasn’t about to be Henry’s stooge, or his disciple. He
was part of the adult world and as such was not to be trusted, however particular an example of the species he considered himself to be. Adults always let you down, with their parade of good
intentions, their self-sabotage, their brutal, unheralded transience.

‘Shall I show you round the rest of the boat?’

‘A boat’s a boat,’ I said, deadpan.

Henry laughed. I rose and followed him towards the stern. In the centre of the boat was the small staircase leading up to the second level. We walked past that to the two rooms beyond it, one on
either side of a small passageway. Henry opened the doorway to his right, to reveal an interior that was little bigger than a cupboard. There was a single mattress on the floor, a few blankets and
a chest of drawers. It was stifling. The room, however, acquired an atmosphere of romance from the large round porthole that looked out over the river.

‘This is the spare room. I have the occasional visitor.’

The room opposite, which overlooked the reach, was somewhat larger and altogether more pleasant. It was likewise dominated by a porthole, and contained a trestle table and an adjustable office
chair. The table surface was almost entirely obscured by scraps of paper, and in the middle of the mess was a sturdy old black Remington typewriter. There was also a chrome filing cabinet, a
multi-storey paper tray and a pin-board covered from border to border with scribbled notes, receipts, letters, snapshots – Indian temples, beaches at sunset – and ticket stubs.

‘This is my office. And this . . .’ Henry reached over to a drawer in the desk and pulled out a large pile of A4 papers, ‘is my book. This is what I do every day. I’m
near the end now.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Everything,’ said Henry, and put the manuscript back into the drawer.

He led me up the staircase to the upper level, which was smaller than the lower one, and contained only two bedrooms, Henry’s on one side and mine on the other, as well as a tiny
loo-cum-shower-room. There was also an entrance to the sun deck, where I could see the nubby towel on the back of the lounger moving in the breeze.

Henry’s room was full of intriguing objects: jade Buddhas, Japanese watercolours, a ceremonial sword and an ink and pen set – ‘For calligraphy,’ he explained. There was a
silk screen, which served no obvious purpose. His bed had a painted headboard which showed a snake consuming its own tail, and was covered with a large green embroidered coverlet, the sheen of
which suggested silk.

My room overlooked the river through a square window. The bed was a single, with an iron bedstead and a continental quilt with a plain white cover. There was a pillow with a matching coverlet.
There were two folded towels on the bed and a purple beanbag on the floor. The floor itself was laid with battered cork tiles. There was a small wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a tiny pine desk
with a sloping lid that looked as if it had been salvaged from a schoolroom. A matching chair stood in front of it. Adjacent to the desk was a sink with an unframed mirror over it. The room had
little in the way of decoration, but it was full of light, and somehow profoundly friendly. I liked it, and thanked Henry for it. He told me I was welcome.

We fetched up what there was of my luggage. Henry finished the cigarette he was smoking, apologised to me, and said that he knew it appeared terribly inhospitable, but he had set himself a very
strict work schedule and needed to stick to it, despite my arrival. He promised to make up for it later in the evening. He asked if I could amuse myself for a couple of hours while settling in and
allow him to complete his work for that day. Then he left, without waiting for an answer, tugging on his beard with one hand and blithely scratching his buttocks through the material of his robe
with the other.

I started to put my possessions into the drawers and the wardrobe. After a minute or so, I could hear the clatter of his typing from the office downstairs. The typing was as repetitive and
irritating as the birdsong that I could hear outside my window. I wanted to feel happy, but I felt afraid – not of Henry, but of boredom, and nothingness, and the slow, dead tug of water
against a vessel that could never be launched.

I lay down on the bed and drifted into sleep.

W
hen I woke, there were rich, unfamiliar smells permeating the air. They were spicy and exotic. This made me feel nervous. I had been brought up on
plain food. My mother rarely stretched herself imaginatively beyond spaghetti bolognese and my father, after her death, had never offered me anything other than toast-related snacks, precooked
pies, chops and plain boiled veg.

Outside, the first gutterings of dusk were encroaching on the aerosol blue of the sky. It seemed I had slept for several hours. I could hear Henry clunking around in the galley. The odd molecule
of Calor Gas drifted up the staircase, reminding me of the camping holidays my parents had compelled me to participate in when I was a child. The sulphurous, fartlike smell brought back thoughts of
wind and rain, cold showers in the morning and long walks across chilly fields and stony beaches in the afternoons.

I pumped some cold water from the tank and splashed my face. In the light reflected from the river, I looked different from the image that was presented to me every morning in Buthelezi House. I
saw myself as raw, as if a layer of skin had been stripped from my face. I looked young. I never thought of myself that way any more.

The clunking stopped and a few seconds later, Uncle Henry appeared at the doorway. He was wearing faded jeans, a T-shirt with the emblazoned words
FILLMORE EAST
and a
pair of battered brown open-toed leather sandals. His hair was slicked back behind his ears. In his hand was a tumbler of red wine, which he held out towards me. I was confused that it was in a
tumbler. In my experience, wine always came served in a stemmed glass, and was never offered to anyone under eighteen.

I took it and downed it in a swig. I didn’t say thank you. Henry nodded, as if acknowledging something too obvious to be spoken, and informed me that dinner would be ready in about twenty
minutes. Then he left the room.

Half an hour passed. The sun had fallen very low. There was a deep, hazy dusk. I was reluctant to leave my room. The existence of other people in the world seemed an imposition. I looked through
the window at the dark water, and dreamed of slipping under it.

I heard Henry’s warm, sandpapery voice calling up to me. I rose, still in bare feet, and slouched my way downstairs into the main room. It was very warm. The table was laid with deep-red
‘ethnic’ ceramic kitchenware.

‘Moroccan,’ said Henry without turning round, as if he had sensed the question in my gaze.

There were silver knives and forks that bore hallmarks and the patina of age. There was a crystal wine goblet in front of one place, and a tumbler in front of the other. Remaining silent, I duly
sat down in front of the water glass. Henry informed me politely that I was sitting in the wrong place – he was the one who was drinking water.

He brought over an earthenware pot and started to dole out the food. I know now that it was Thai green curry, though I had no idea at the time. I registered that there were leaves in it, and
stared it at grimly. Henry served out his own portion. He replaced the cooking pots, sat down opposite me and raised his glass in a toast. I rather awkwardly raised my wineglass.

It occurred to me some twenty minutes later – through the haze of several more glasses of wine – that Uncle Henry might be queer. My prejudices informed me that queers liked cooking
and wine and art. He was childless and unmarried. My father talked of him as a womanizer, but I had no reason to think my father’s information in any way reliable. He had invited me, a
seventeen-year-old boy, on to his boat for the whole summer with no obvious motive, other than a professed compassion and out of a supposed respect for a family connection that he had shown no
traces of previously in his life. The attempts to win me over – giving me Ray’s money, offering me cigarettes and red wine – suddenly appeared to me as suspect.

As I sat there, I became uncomfortably convinced that he was going to try and take advantage of me. I shifted uneasily on my chair, and stared at the French loaf I had been picking at in lieu of
eating my supper.

Henry indicated with a wave of his hand that I should eat. He had finished his meal and I had barely touched mine. I noticed that his fingers were very long and delicate, displaying several
elaborate rings, more evidence in my mind, now, of his homosexuality. I shook my head. I said I didn’t much like it. He asked me how I knew I didn’t like it when I hadn’t tried
it. It was one of those trick questions my parents used to ask me when I was a kid. I didn’t answer.

I swigged at my wine again. I suddenly felt unprotected, and in a strange place where I did not know the rules.

‘Which team do you play for?’ I said, slurring slightly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Are you that way inclined?’ I said, struggling to find a way of putting it delicately. I was vaguely aware that I was lifting these euphemisms from sitcoms I had watched. ‘I
don’t particularly mind if you are. I just want to set the record straight.’

‘Which way inclined is that?’ Henry raised an eyebrow. He clearly knew what I was talking about and was teasing me. The knowing expression on his face sent a bolt of irritation
through me.

‘What I’m asking is: are you queer?’

I immediately regretted the brutality of the question. But Henry simply took a swig of his water and smiled at me, apparently unconcerned by my rudeness. He made no reply. This annoyed me more
than his teasing.

Convinced now, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that Henry was, as I thought of it then, a sexual pervert, I rose, went back to my room and sat mutely on the bed. I felt very hungry and I
had to admit that the smell of the food was actually extremely good. But I wasn’t prepared to surrender, although I had no idea what it was I would be surrendering to, or where the lines of
the battle had been drawn.

Just before I fell asleep, I heard Henry call to me from outside the door.

‘Goodnight, stupid.’

‘Stupid yourself,’ I muttered, this time not loud enough for him to hear.

T
he first few days I spent on the
Ho Koji
were unremarkable. I was bored in Buthelezi House and I was bored on the boat.

My History revision books sat in a pile in the corner, still untouched in their plastic supermarket bag. I passed the time dozing, listening to music or reading pulp in one form or another
– I liked science fiction and Henry had found a pile of DC and Marvel comics somewhere and dumped them on my floor. I read a lot of Superman adventures. It struck me at one point as
significant that green Kryptonite, the only thing that could kill Superman, was actually a piece of his home planet that had broken off and floated into space.

His own home was the only thing that could destroy him.

During that first week, Henry made no special attempt to accommodate or entertain me. He was neither hostile nor particularly convivial. He ventured a few exploratory queries about school,
friends and so on, but he didn’t press very hard when I proved consistently reticent. I was determined not to display any positive signals that might encourage him in my seduction.

The days were long – and there was no television to watch in the evening. Henry showed me the larder and the fridge, both of which were well appointed with eggs, cheese, bread, butter and
all the staples. I was left to fend for myself.

To pass the time, I sunbathed on the upper deck during those first, hot days. It was a pleasant enough kind of boredom. There was no requirement for any activity here – Henry seemed to
expect nothing of me at all except that I remain reasonably clean and tidy. One of my few virtues was that I was someone who liked order and almost instinctively cleared up after myself.