This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (13 page)

You watch the fish flick its tail beneath you, stopping and starting through the sea-grass, and you curl your body across the surface to keep pace, the sun hot and sore across your back.

It happened once, last year, at a party after the exams. In the back garden, kissing against the wall of the house, and for what must have been only a few minutes there was nothing but the taste of her mouth, the movements of her hands, the press of her body. And then she’d stopped, and kissed you on the cheek, and walked unsteadily into the house, and nothing had been said about it since. It might have been nothing.

The soft wet bite of her lips, the trace of her fingers, the thin material of her skirt in your hand, the weight of her warmth against you. It was probably nothing at all.

You look up out of the water, turning to see if she’s reached the top of the path. Maybe she’ll hang back and wait. You’re further out than you realised. It would be good to head back now, to pull yourself up on to the concrete ledge, let the sun dry the water from your back while you gather your things together and hurry along the path to join the others. You pull your arms through the water, feeling the pleasant stretch of the muscles across your shoulders and back. You kick with your legs, hard, and your feet and shins slap against the surface, and you realise how long it’s been since you last swam properly like this, actually covering a distance. You should do it more often, you think, stopping for a moment to tuck the snorkel into the headband of your mask, spitting out a mouthful of seawater. You launch off again, enjoying the way your body cuts through the water, the air on your back, the sea sliding across your skin. The snorkel slips out of place, spilling water into your mouth, and you have to stop again, coughing, to clear it from your throat.

You see the others on the path, and you see a bus passing along the road, and you see the birds hanging in the warm air rising up against the side of the hill.

You take off the snorkel and mask. They’re getting in the way, and you’ll get back to the steps quicker without them strapped to your face. You try swimming with them held in one hand, but they slap and splash against the surface and drag you down, and you’re not getting anywhere like that so you stop and tread water for a moment. You’re further out than you thought.

The afternoon’s quieter now. No one’s jumped from the outcrop for a while. The teenagers on the ledge have started to gather their things together and drift back up the long twisting path to the road. The girl reading a book on the other bathing jetty has gone. The back of your neck feels as though it might be starting to burn. It probably would be good, after all, to catch the bus with the others. You think about just dumping the snorkel and mask, but it seems a bit over the top. There’s nothing like that happening here. There’s no problem. You can’t be more than a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty yards from the shore. You tie them to the drawstring of your swimming shorts instead, and swim on.

This morning, in the old town, ducking into an art gallery to escape the glaring heat, you’d found the city’s war memorial, unmarked on the tourist maps. It had looked like another room of the gallery at first, and you’d drifted into the circular space expecting more vividly coloured paintings of wheat-fields and birch-woods and simple peasant-folk labouring over ploughs. But there were no paintings, only photographs. Black and white photographs from ceiling to floor. Row after row of young faces with dated haircuts, thin moustaches, leather jackets and striped tracksuit tops. The photos were blown up to more than life-size, and one or two had the inky smudge of a passport stamp circled across them. There were names, and dates, and ages: twenty-two, fifty-seven, fifteen, nineteen, thirty-one. There were candles burning on a table in the middle of the room, a bouquet of flowers, a ragged flag. Some of the boys in the photographs had looked the same age, and had the same features, as these teenagers jumping from rocks and squirting water at girls, boys who would have been half the age they are now when the war happened. You wonder if any of them lost older brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers. You wonder whether any of them remember much about it; if they duck into that cool, whitewashed room every now and again to remind themselves, or if they prefer instead to leap from high rocks into the warm ocean, to ride motor-scooters with the sun browning their bare chests, to lie with long-limbed girls in the scented shade of aged and twisting trees.

Perhaps when you get back no one will want to go to the trouble of laying the food out on the terrace and clearing it all away again. Perhaps you’ll all go to the pizzeria down by the dockside and sit at a table on the street, picking the labels off cold bottles of beer while you watch the old women offering accommodation to the tourists coming off the boats. Perhaps Jo will catch your eye and keep you talking until the others have moved on, and shift her chair so that her leg touches yours.

Swimming with the mask and snorkel tied to your shorts is worse than holding them. They’re dragging out between your legs like an anchor, pulling you back. You stop and tread water again, breathing heavily. You only paid a few pounds for them. They can go. You can always tell the others you left them behind by mistake. You unpick the knots and let them fall away. They hang in the water for a moment, lifting and turning in the current. You watch them sink out of view, and realise you can’t see the bottom.

The others are at the top of the path now, and one of them leans out to look down at the ledge where your things are still gathered in a heap. You wave, but whoever it is turns away and steps through the gap in the railings, crossing the road to join the others at the bus stop, out of sight.

You take a breath and swim, fiercely, lunging through the water, blinking against the salt sting, heaving for air, and there’s a feeling running up and down the backs of your legs like the muscles being stretched tight but you keep swimming because you’ll be there soon, climbing out, pulling yourself back on to solid ground, and you keep swimming because there’s a chance that the current has been pushing you away from the shore, and you keep swimming because this isn’t the sort of thing that happens to someone like you, you’re a good swimmer, you’re young, and healthy, and the rocks aren’t really all that far away and it shouldn’t take long to get there and there isn’t anything else you can do but now there’s a pounding sensation in your head and a reddish blur in your eyes and a heavy pain in your chest as though the weight of all that water is pressing against your lungs and you can’t take in enough air and so you stop again, for a moment, just to catch your breath.

One of the boys, in the memorial photographs, had had a look in his eyes. Startled. As though the flash of the camera had taken him by surprise. As though he had known what was coming. The plaque said he was seventeen. You wondered what had happened. If he really had seen it coming. You’ve seen pictures of an old fort on a nearby island, the walls spotted with bullet marks, the entrances surrounded by shallow craters, and you imagined that boy crouching on the roof, or in the shaded interior, holding an old rifle in his shaking hands, listening to the encircling approach of men and equipment through the trees and bushes outside. You imagined him listening to their taunts. Wiping the sweat from his eyes. Avoiding the glances of the men left with him. Wondering how they had all ended up in that place, what they could have done to avoid it, what they were going to do now. Knowing there was nothing they could do.

A bus stops on the road at the top of the hill. The others must be getting on it by now, rummaging in their pockets for change and wondering how much longer you’re going to be. When you get back they’ll all be sitting out on the terrace, watching the yachts gathering in the harbour for the evening, listening to children playing up and down the back streets behind the apartment. You’ll take a beer from the fridge, hold the cold wet glass against the back of your sunburnt neck, and ask where the bottle-opener is. No one will be able to find it at first, and then it will turn up, under a book or a leaflet, or in the sink with some dirty plates, and you’ll flip the top off the bottle and take your seat with the others.

You swim some more, and there’s a feeling in your arms and legs as though the muscles have been peeled out of them, as though the bones have softened from being in the water too long, and you can’t find the energy to pull yourself forward at all.

You turn on to your back for a few moments. A rest is all you need. It’s been a while since you swam in open water like this, that’s all. A few moments’ rest and you’ll be able to swim to the rocks, to the steps, and climb out. You’ll be able to hang a towel over your pounding head until you get your breath back, dripping water and sweat on to the sun-bleached concrete, feeling the warm solid ground beneath you. You’ll be able to gather your things and make your way along the path, pulling on your shirt as you go. And the grasshoppers will still be calling out, and the air will be thick with rosemary and pine. The sandy soil of the path will still kick up into dusty clouds around your ankles. Your swimming trunks will be dry by the time you get to the top of the hill, and you won’t have to wait long for a bus. And while you stand there the sea will be as calm and blue as ever when you look down over it, drifting out to the horizon, reaching around to other bays, other beaches, other villages and towns, other swimmers launching out into its warm and gentle embrace.

And this will be a story to tell when you get back home, sitting under the patio-heaters at the Golf Club bar, looking out over the cold North Sea and saying it was a nice holiday but I nearly never made it home. Or later this evening, sitting at some pavement café in a noisy bustling square with tall glasses of cold beer, telling the story of how you’d almost swum out too far. How you’d had to dump the snorkel and mask. It was a close one, you’ll tell them. I called out but you didn’t hear. No one heard. Best be more careful next time, someone will probably say; even when the water looks calm there are still currents. Just because it’s warmer than back home doesn’t mean you can treat it like a swimming pool, they’ll say, and you’ll laugh and say, well, I know that now. And everyone will go quiet for a moment, thinking about it, until the waiter comes past and you order another round of drinks. And raise a silent toast to all the good things. The cold wet glass against the back of your sunburnt neck. The trace of her fingers, the soft wet bite of her lips. The juice of an orange spilling down your chin. Music, and dancing, and voices colliding in the warm night air.

You swim, and you rest. It won’t take long now. It’s not too far. You look up, past the headland and into the next bay along, and you swim and you rest a little more. Sometimes it happens like this.

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Supplementary Notes To The Testimony Of Appellants B & E

Bassingham, Haddington

i.  Bassingham is a small village situated on the eastern bank of the River Witham, upstream from the major population centre of Lincoln. Agriculture was the major economic activity in the area, along with a range of small businesses associated with the sector: repair-yards, feed merchants, packing-houses and the like. The agriculture was predominantly arable, with a range of cereal, salad and root crops; there was also, prior to the period in question, a sizeable dairy and beef industry in the area, with cattle grazing mainly taking place on the low-lying fields along the river valleys. The population of Bassingham, when last surveyed, stood at 700, although the figure is probably now lower. There are two public houses, a church, and a bridge which carried the road towards Thurlby and Witham St Hughs. The rebuilding of the bridge is nearing completion at the time of writing. There are currently no official school buildings. During the period in question, with formal education suspended due to security concerns, the majority of children in the area were engaged in assisting older family members with the movement and management of livestock, in addition to more informal occupations such as swimming, ball-sports, courtship rituals and evacuation drills.

ii.  Not proven.

iii.  Haddington is a small hamlet of residential and agricultural buildings, situated approximately 300 metres north of the River Witham and a mile south of the ancient Roman road to Lincoln, known as the Fosse Way, which is now a major highway. Satellite imagery suggests that the walk from Haddington to Bassingham would take approximately 45 minutes, via either the Thurlby Road or Bridge Road bridges. It would also be possible, and within the stated context significantly safer, either to cross by the weir at the end of Mill Lane or to ford the river at one of its narrower points and make one’s way to Bassingham’s outskirts through the low-lying fields in which, reportedly, the crops sometimes grew to above head-height.