Into the Water

When they drag her to the bank, she is crying.

“Again!”

Someone is calling for a second ordeal.

“She sank!” a woman’s voice cries. “She’s no witch, she’s just a child.”

“Again! Again!”

The men bind her again for the second ordeal. Different this time: left thumb to right toe, right thumb to left. The rope around her waist. This time they carry her into the water.

“Please,” she starts to beg, because she’s not sure that she can face it again, the blackness and the cold. She wants to go back to a home that no longer exists, to a time when she and her aunt sat in front of the fire and told stories to each other. She wants to be in her bed in their cottage, she wants to be little again, to breathe in woodsmoke and rose and the sweet warmth of her aunt’s skin.

“Please.”

She sinks. By the time they drag her out the second time, her lips are the blue of a bruise, and her breath is gone for good.

Monday, 17 August

NICKIE

Nickie sat in her chair by the window, watching the sun rise and burn the morning mist off the hills. She’d hardly slept at all, what with this heat and her sister prattling in her ear all night long. Nickie didn’t like the heat. She was a creature built for cold weather: her father’s family came from the Hebrides. Viking stock. On her mother’s side they came from the east of Scotland, driven down south hundreds of years ago by witch hunters. The folk around Beckford might not believe it, they might scoff and scorn, but Nickie knew she was descended from the witches. She could draw a direct line all the way back, from Sage to Seeton.

Showered and fed and dressed in respectful black, Nickie went first to the pool. A long, slow shuffle along the path. She was grateful for the shade offered by oak and beech. Even so, sweat prickled in her eyes, it collected at the base of her spine. When she reached the little beach on the south side, she took off her sandals and went in up to her ankles. She reached down and scooped up handfuls of water, splashing it over her face and her neck and her upper arms. Time was, she would have climbed up to the cliff top to pay her respects to those who had fallen and those who had jumped and those who were pushed, but her legs just weren’t up to it any longer, so whatever she had to say to the swimmers, she would have to say it from down here.

Nickie had been standing on pretty much exactly this spot the first time she ever laid eyes on Nel Abbott. It was a couple of years back and she’d been doing just this—having a bit of a paddle, cooling off—when she’d spotted a woman up on the cliff. She watched her walk back and forth, once and then twice, and by the third time there was a tingle over Nickie’s palms. Something wicked, she thought. She watched the woman crouch down, lower herself to her knees and then, like a snake slithering on its belly, manoeuvre herself to the very edge of the cliff, her arms dangling over the edge. Heart in mouth, Nickie cried out, “Oi!” The woman looked down, and, to Nickie’s surprise, she smiled and waved.

Nickie saw her around quite a bit after that. She was at the pool a lot, taking pictures, making sketches, writing things down. Up there at all times of night and day, in all weathers. From her window, Nickie had watched Nel walk through the village towards the pool in the dead of night, in a snowstorm, or when bitter rain lashed down hard enough to strip skin from flesh.

Sometimes Nickie would pass her on the path and Nel wouldn’t flinch, wouldn’t even notice she had company, so absorbed was she by the task at hand. Nickie liked that, she admired the focus of the woman, the way her work consumed her. She liked Nel’s devotion to the river, too. Time was, Nickie liked a dip in the water of a warm summer’s morning, although those days were behind her now. But Nel! She swam at dawn and dusk, in winter as in summer. Though now she thought of it, Nickie hadn’t seen her swim in the river for some time, not for a couple of weeks. Longer, maybe? She tried to remember the last time she’d actually seen her in the water, but she couldn’t, thanks to her sister chattering in her ear again, clouding her mind’s eye.

She did wish her sister would shut up.

Everyone thought Nickie was the black sheep of the family, but really that was her sister, Jean. Throughout childhood, everyone said Jeannie was the good girl, did as she was told, and then she turns seventeen and what do you know, she joins the police. The police! Their father was a miner, for Christ’s sake. It was a betrayal, that’s what her mother said, a betrayal of the whole family, the whole community. Her parents stopped talking to Jean then, and Nickie was supposed to cut her off cold, too. Only she couldn’t, could she? Jeannie was her little sister.

Bloody big mouth on her, that was her trouble—didn’t know when to keep it shut. After she quit the police and before she left Beckford, Jean told Nickie a story to make her hair stand on end, and ever since Nickie had been biting her tongue and spitting in the dirt, murmuring her invocations to protect herself, every time Patrick Townsend crossed her path.

So far it had worked. She was protected. Not Jeannie, though. After that business with Patrick and his wife and all the trouble that followed, Jeannie moved to Edinburgh and married a useless man and together they set about spending the next fifteen years drinking themselves to death. But Nickie still saw her now and again, she still spoke to her. More often, recently. Jeannie had become garrulous again. Noisy, troublesome. Insistent.

She’d been chattering more than ever the past few nights, since Nel Abbott went in. Jeannie would have liked Nel, would have seen something of herself in her. Nickie liked her, too, liked their conversations, liked the fact that Nel listened when Nickie talked. She listened to her stories, but she didn’t heed her warnings, did she? Just like Jeannie, Nel was another one who didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.

The thing is, sometimes, say after a heavy rain, the river rises. Unruly, it sucks back the earth and turns it over and reveals something lost: the bones of a lamb, a child’s Wellington boot, a gold watch encased in silt, a pair of spectacles on a silver chain. A bracelet with a broken clasp. A knife, a fishing hook, a sinker. Tin cans and supermarket trolleys. Debris. Things with significance and things without. And that’s all fine, that’s the way of things, the way of the river. The river can go back over the past and bring it all up and spit it out on the banks in full view of everyone, but people can’t. Women can’t. When you start asking questions and putting up little advertisements in shops and pubs, when you start taking pictures and talking to newspapers and asking questions about witches and women and lost souls, you’re not asking questions, you’re asking for trouble.

Nickie should know.

By the time she’d dried her feet and put her sandals back on and walked oh so slowly back along the path and up the steps and over the bridge, it was after ten, it was almost time. She went to the shop and bought herself a can of Coca-Cola and sat down on the bench across the way from the churchyard. She wasn’t going to go in—church was no place for her—but she wanted to watch them. She wanted to watch the mourners and the rubberneckers and the bald-faced hypocrites.

She settled herself down and closed her eyes—just for a moment, she thought—but when she opened them again it had started. She watched the young policewoman, the new one, strutting about, twisting her head round like a meerkat. She was a watcher, too. Nickie saw the folk from the pub, the landlord and his wife and the young girl who worked behind the bar, a couple of teachers from the school, the fat dowdy one and the handsome one, sunglasses covering his eyes. She saw the Whittakers, all three of them, misery rising off them like steam from a pot, the father all hunched up with grief, the boy terrified of his own shadow, only the mother with her head up. A gaggle of young girls honking like

geese, with a man following behind, a face from the past, an ugly face. Nickie knew him but couldn’t place him, couldn’t fix him in her mind. She was distracted by the dark blue car swinging into the car park, by the prickle on her skin, the sensation of cool air on the back of her neck. She saw the woman first, Helen Townsend, plain as a brown bird, emerging from the backseat of the car. Her husband climbed out of the driver’s seat, and from the passenger’s side came the old man, Patrick, straight-backed as a sergeant major. Patrick Townsend: family man, pillar of the community, ex-copper. Scum. Nickie spat on the ground and said her invocation. She felt the old man turn his gaze towards her and Jeannie whispered, Look away, Nic.

Nickie counted them in and she counted them out again half an hour later. There was some sort of kerfuffle at the door, people bumping into one another, pushing past one another, and then something happened between the handsome teacher and Lena Abbott, a word exchanged sharply. Nickie watched and she could tell the policewoman was watching, too, Sean Townsend stalking around head and shoulders above the rest. Keeping order. Something got missed, though, didn’t it? Like one of those con tricks, when you take your eye off the ball for a second and the whole game changes.

HELEN TOWNSEND

Helen sat at the kitchen table and cried noiselessly, her shoulders jerking, hands clasped in her lap. Sean misread the situation completely.

“You don’t have to go,” he said, placing a hand gingerly on her shoulder. “There’s no reason for you to go.”