The Swimmer Read online

  ‘Actually, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I don’t much get on with him. We are…quite different.’

  He nodded and said no more, just fixed my light.

  Later, as we lingered over the halibut, I asked him tentatively about himself. How had he learnt to play the piano so well? The last light flickered on the leaves. I felt detached as though a part of me had been severed sharply from my body. The evening drew together as he spoke.

  ‘In my town, before I left,’ he said, ‘people were nice to me. They told me I had a talent.’

  He shook the hair from his eyes and smiled. He needs a haircut, I thought.

  ‘They said it sadly, as if they were really thinking, What a pity he’ll never get anywhere in this place. He’s just a Tamil boy. There are thousands of them.’

  ‘Is that why you left?’

  Again he shook his head. He had left, he told me, because of the war. Why else would anyone want to leave their home?

  ‘I am the only child of my mother,’ he said. ‘I have two cousins from my father’s side of the family. The cousin closest to me in age was in the year above me at medical school. One day he was asked to leave his course. We think it was because someone saw him talking to a journalist. After that, he worked as a male nurse at the hospital. No one dared teach him any more.’

  Ben paused and sipped his beer. I waited. His eyes had darkened.

  ‘One morning, my cousin went to the hospital to work as usual. He didn’t know the army had arrived to begin an offensive in the area. As he cycled up to the entrance, an army officer shouted to him to stop. So he stopped and started taking out his ID. The officer shouted at him to raise his arms above his head. My cousin tried to get his hand out of his pocket but wasn’t quick enough and the soldier shot him in the face. At point-blank range. Some of his friends saw it happen.’

  Ben stopped speaking and for an immeasurable moment the evening too became suspended in the spaces left by his words. I felt a small shock, like electricity, jolt through me.

  ‘At the same time this was happening, my cousin’s younger brother was at school. He knew nothing about it. An air raid started and planes began dropping bombs. No one had been able to get a message to my uncle’s house after the shooting. My aunt still had no idea her eldest son was dead. The head teacher at the school told the children to leave the building. The teacher decided to take them out the back way into the countryside, where he thought it would be safer. He urged them to go quietly and quickly, with him walking ahead and the children following in single file. But an army helicopter spotted them and started firing. The children broke into a run, heading for cover. My little cousin was the smallest child. He couldn’t keep up with the others. The teacher was screaming at them to hurry, but my cousin slipped. He must have been petrified. He was hit. They left him where he had fallen and when the air raid was over the teacher went back and found him. He was not dead. But when they brought him to my uncle’s house, he was senseless and this is how he has remained. I don’t think he will recover, and my aunt has lost her mind.’

  Shocked, I didn’t know what to say. Remnants of food lay on the plates.

  ‘And you?’ I asked, finally.

  He nodded and finished his beer. I had no more left, so I offered him a glass of wine instead. When he smiled his thanks a small dimple appeared in his cheek.

  ‘I am a qualified doctor,’ he said. ‘I trained during the short space when they dropped the restrictions, but after what happened my mother didn’t want me to stay in Sri Lanka. I had witnessed too many things. I knew how the innocent civilians were treated, how medical aid was withheld from the hospital doctors. I witnessed the way children had their limbs amputated, without anaesthetic, using only a kitchen knife. I had seen too much and because of this our family was marked. It wasn’t easy for me to leave. There were money difficulties too.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘It cost twenty thousand euros for the flight to Moscow. Then another ten thousand for the overland trip by lorry.’

  I was staring at him. What he was telling me seemed disconnected from what he was: a refugee-medic who played French jazz. And now, he told me, he would wait for asylum status. He had applied to the Home Office, two weeks ago.

  ‘They haven’t replied yet,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how long it takes.’

  He sounded confident and I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him that his application might be rejected or that he ought to plan for that eventuality. I began asking him.

  ‘Have you actually been to the Home Office?’

  He shook his head. I felt he didn’t want to discuss it. The farmer had sent the letter in for him, Ben said. The same farmer who was paying him a little cash and letting him sleep in the barn. It was all illegal, of course.

  ‘But how will they contact you?’ I asked, puzzled.

  It didn’t make sense.

  ‘At the farm. The farmer will let me know when the letter arrives.’

  ‘There are centres where you can stay,’ I told him, tentatively. ‘I think there’s one that’s opened in Norwich. At least you’d have a proper bed and food.’

  ‘That only happens when you are registered. I have to be patient, to wait.’

  There appeared no doubt in his mind that the letter would arrive any day now and meanwhile the only thing he missed was playing the piano. And the chance of a proper shower.

  ‘That is why I try to swim every day.’

  ‘Have you been here a lot, then?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head sheepishly.

  ‘I have only been coming here for a week,’ he admitted. ‘Before that I used to bathe in the river further upstream. But it takes longer to get to and there are others there. I wanted some privacy.’

  I digested this fact in silence.

  ‘You can come here any time,’ I said, finally. ‘And play the piano. No, really,’ I added, not understanding the look he gave me. ‘I would like that!’

  I wanted to tell him he could have a shower too, but it seemed too intimate a thing and I had an acute sense of his wariness.

  ‘I would like to clear your garden by the river in exchange. And maybe you would like the grass cut?’

  His face became closed. He looked suddenly stubborn. I could see it was necessary for me to accept the offer. Only then did he relax. He told me that he felt as if he had been walking through a page of history. To have his country’s history inscribed on him was a disquieting sensation, he said. I was appalled by his matter-of-factness.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘It feels like years!’

  In fact it had only been about four months. He was moving in some mysterious current of destiny, quite alone, as alone as a man dying, he told me. And travelling with him was the soul of his dead cousin.

  ‘It has been a long journey,’ he said softly, folding his hands together, intertwining the fingers. His voice belied the sorrow in the words. His wrists were slender. Once again I began wondering how old he really was when, without warning, he told me another story. That of the journey.

  ‘The air in the lorry was stale. After a while it became difficult to breathe and some of the women started to cry. We were banging on the sides, begging for the driver to stop, begging for air.’

  I shuddered. He had sat in this way for hours as day and night became indistinguishable and the miles fell away unnoticed. It felt as if he were travelling through nothing but unbending time. On and on from one horizon to the other. The truth was, he no longer felt in the world.

  ‘I tried to imagine the sea,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But it was useless.’

  The darkness in the lorry had blanked out every thought except that of trying to breathe. Even his grief at the last glimpse of his mother’s face had been blotted out, and in this way he had travelled, across endless land, feeling ever more mortal and insignificant as he went. Like the swimmer he was, he had moved further and further from the shore, until at last he understoo
d the meaning of ‘no return’.

  ‘I have crossed a line,’ he said. ‘Even if my application for asylum fails, I know that I have crossed that line.’

  I stared at his young, still unfinished face and saw how his experiences would slip into the fabric of his features. It would happen slowly, unobtrusively at first, but then one day someone would take a photograph and suddenly the change would be noticed.

  ‘There was not a single one of those miles that was not filled with memories,’ he said, very softly.

  He was frequently conscious of not wanting to die. Which was not the same as wanting to live, he said. Then, just as he had thought he was on the brink of death, the lorry began throwing them out, one by one.

  England had come to him in this way. Cold air filled with the smell of seawater. He remembered breathing deeply, thinking he would never again take breathing for granted. And, turning, he had seen the sea and his heart had filled with such longing for his home that he realised why it was considered a sickness. All that first day he had walked, keeping the sea in his sights, never knowing where he was until at last he found himself on the outskirts of a town. He had been the only one of the original group in the lorry who spoke English and he supposed this had saved him, although from what, he did not say. He never found what had happened to the others. He walked all night and finally stumbled on the farm. Now all he wanted was refugee status. The farmer had registered his letter and Ben had kept the proof of postage, along with a copy of the letter itself. I didn’t know what to say. It was simply a question of waiting, he told me.

  ‘I’m not able to earn enough money until I get my papers.’

  It worried him that his mother knew nothing of his whereabouts. The farmer had given him stamps and paper and he had written home, but he didn’t know if the letter had even got to her.

  ‘Look,’ I said, swallowing, ‘you can have some stamps. Why don’t you write, giving this address?’

  He glanced at me with a faint smile, shaking his head. Again I sensed an iron stubbornness, lurking.

  ‘You are kind, but you can’t do this. You don’t know who I am. Let me do those jobs for you, first.’

  There was an awkward silence. It was growing dark, he needed to get back, he told me.

  ‘I can’t come tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’re going to the sea to pick samphire. I don’t know what time we’ll finish.’

  I wanted to tell him to be careful of the tides. I had read somewhere there weren’t any tides in the Indian Ocean and that people there had no idea of the dangers they brought. But I could say nothing.

  ‘Look,’ I said instead, hearing my own voice as it repeated itself, ‘come any time you like. I work late. If the light is on, come in. I’ll leave the kitchen door open.’

  ‘You don’t lock your doors, do you?’

  I laughed.

  ‘We wouldn’t have met if I had!’

  He smiled instantly and I felt another jolt. His smile went on for longer than I had expected, exuding some other kind of life that I had no knowledge of. He rose then, and helped me take the plates into the kitchen as if it was the most natural thing to be doing. This too unnerved me, so I turned my back as I filled the sink with water.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said when we had finished the washing up. And then he left.

  I watched from the upstairs window as he walked away. The grain tower’s black shadow stretched over the earth, far into the fields, and now his shadow moved towards it, joined in and parted again. All of it felt like a dream. I was aware of feeling both transfixed and weary at the same time. And then an inexplicable happiness, seductive and heavy, rose within me for the second time that day. But because of the mysterious suddenness of this emotion, because of the moonlight and the wine, the sense of having witnessed something of his journey, and after my own emotional famine, I was frightened.

  Too much too quickly, a voice repeated in my head. Life is not like that.

  4

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 26TH. TO BEGIN WITH his story kept reverberating in my head and I could not stop thinking of the way he had talked about his home.

  ‘On my last afternoon I noticed all kinds of things,’ he had said. ‘Things I hadn’t cared about until then.’

  It was impossible to hide my curiosity.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  But he had been unable to say and when pressed spoke reluctantly only of sunlight and how sad it was in the afternoon. He had noticed the way the bats flew out at sunset, two by two, swooping low, and the smell of the hibiscus and, later on, the sounds of the rain on the galvanised roof, thundering on and on before stopping abruptly. The conversation had marked me in the strangest of ways, for all of it was outside my experience. There remained, too, the business of the Home Office. Without telling him I searched the Internet for information, but all I came up with was the government party line; smug, determined and unmovable. Next I discovered other sites protesting against the treatment of illegal immigrants but they too were vague and unhelpful. There was nothing I could do. The truth was I had never taken much notice of the things written about asylum seekers.

  On Saturday morning Jack rang unexpectedly. He had decided to extend their stay for another week. He sounded vague.

  ‘How’s Miranda?’ I asked, but he ignored the question.

  From this I suspected he was networking rather than spending time with his family. Same old power-hungry Jack, I thought wearily, party politics even when on holiday.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘try to enjoy the weather, at least.’

  He surprised me by laughing. Whatever he was up to had put him in a good mood. For the rest of that day I buried myself in my work. I had woken in the middle of the night with another, newer, poem spilling out. Poetry is for me both a creative and thinking process. Perhaps this is why I am so slow at producing anything. The new poem was, predictably enough, about my swimmer. I worked steadily all morning. At lunchtime I made myself a plate of salad and cheese and went outside with a tray. The sun was at its highest and the garden was hazy and bleached by heat. Once again I walked down towards the river and sat on the bank watching the water.

  ‘We hardly have time to raise our heads when the trains pass,’ Ben had said.

  An image came suddenly into my mind. I had been on a train on my way up to London as it flashed past a level crossing. Looking up, I had seen the low-lying watercress fields in the distance, caught in a burst of sunlight. A few workers in orange jackets had straightened up to shade their eyes and watch us pass. Somehow I had felt they were all immigrants.

  On Sunday I began to feel a little melancholy. It was blisteringly hot and the only fan I possessed was old and rather slow, making more noise than cool air. My poem was going well enough, but the heat made it impossible to concentrate for long. By mid-morning I was exhausted. The hours stretched endlessly ahead and, unusually, I regretted my lack of friends. I stared aimlessly out of the window. On an impulse I decided to go into Aldeburgh, to visit Heather.

  The sight of the sea lifted my spirits a little. Ribbons of seaweed threaded the shingles, light refracted on the waves. Ahead on the horizon two white-funnelled boats moved slightly. Across the sparrowcoloured beach, here and there, were buried smooth white stones. I began filling my pockets and a bit further on I found an exquisite seashell washed up by an unknown tide. I stuffed the shell in my pocket. A line kept turning slowly in my head. People of no account, no name, no documents, no graves…

  Heather was standing in front of her farmhouse, talking to a man as I drove up. Hera, her black Labrador, barked once and bounded towards me.

  ‘Ria! Hello! This is John Ashby,’ she called. ‘He’s a journalist. Maria Robinson, our local celebrity poet!’

  I winced.

  ‘Why don’t you join us for some tea in the garden, John?’

  The man put away his notebook and glanced at me.

  ‘Thank you, but I won’t, if you don’t mind. I’m due back at the office, really.’

 
; There was a tiny pause. I saw him exchange glances with Heather.

  ‘But many thanks for that info,’ he added, nodding at her. ‘And I’ll be in touch if there’s any other news.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked as we went inside.

  ‘Oh, he was just passing,’ she said easily. ‘Wanted to ask me some questions. I’ve known John for ages. He used to come and talk to me about the Ipswich murders some years ago. You won’t remember them, they were all drug-related. It was when you were with Ant. Come into the kitchen, I’ll make a cuppa.’

  ‘What’s he trying to solve now?’

  Heather looked at me solemnly.

  ‘Well,’ she said, her hand hovering over the kettle, ‘for a start there’s been another dead calf. Did you know that?’

  I shook my head. She had an air of slight amusement, I thought.

  ‘Oh, Ria, honestly! You live on another planet. The calf was left on the roadside near one of the farms—not ours, thank God—with a swastika drawn in blood.’ She had moved towards me as she spoke and her eyes were round and sparkling. ‘So you see!’

  ‘What?’

  I was nonplussed.

  ‘Well, first there’s the three calves,’ she said, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘Then there was the woman at the circus with her passport stolen, and now more animals have been killed. It’s obvious, isn’t it? There must be a terror cell somewhere around here. Like Clem said.’

  She’s mad, I thought. But at the same time I felt uneasy.

  ‘Why, if there are terrorists around here, would they want to make themselves known by killing animals?’

  ‘I know. That’s the missing link. But I’m working on it! I’ve talked to your brother; he agrees.’

  ‘Jack? You’ve talked to Jack? What? Did you call him on the boat?’

  ‘Well, yes. Why not?’

  ‘Why not? Why not?’ I wasn’t aware that I had begun to shout. ‘Because he’s a right-wing fascist. He’ll wind you up.’ I paused abruptly, then asked, ‘Do you often talk to him?’