Becher's Brook

‘David, do your legs hurt?’ Kara was staring at me from the double bed that she shared with our mother – who was applying her morning makeup in the bathroom); I lay groggy-eyed and stiff on the fold-up bed by the open balcony door, the nearly warm eight o’clock freshness waltzing in with smoked bacon, sea salt and the perfume of the sixteen-year-old German in the room next door - whose shadow I could make out against the whitewashed walls of the adjoining balcony.
‘What? My legs? Oh, yeah,’ I said, stretching and yawning, my eyes glued to the shadow. ‘Yeah, they ache.’
Kara closed her book, which was something brightly-coloured about American teenaged girls, and smiled gladly. ‘Mine are killing me,’ she said. ‘I was so scared yesterday, David, out on the ocean – you were really … brave.’
The shadow disappeared from the balcony and I sat up in bed, suddenly conscious of a horrible, paralysing sensation below the sheets. Kara was still smiling at me absurdly and her gaze was dazzling and uncomfortable. ‘No I wasn’t,’ I said, glancing around the room for something to cover up in. ‘It was a stupid thing to do anyway.’
I had a difficult time, when I was thirteen, adjusting to the prospect of imminent adulthood; I’m afraid to say that my sister Kara may have suffered the most from the consequent black-cloud moods and snapping, not least when we were required to spend long spells together whilst on our annual holidays in Tenerife, Ibiza or Gran Canaria: Unfortunately, it was at such times that the agonising realisation of adulthood’s crippling, expansiveness hit me the keenest and I felt the greatest need for imposing some kind of distance between us - perhaps it was because she was three years younger, perhaps because she was a girl, I don’t know – but there was little chance of procuring the required distance when the two of us were on a pedalo together in Majorca in the summer of ninety-three.
We’d set off vigorously into the sun, Kara’s little legs pumping the pedals more forcefully than mine.
‘Can we go out to that one over there?’ she might have said, pointing hopefully at some benign cluster of rocks with unbridled glee.
‘Dunno,’ I might have returned cruelly, ‘seems like too far to go in an hour; we’ll probably only make it halfway there before we have to turn back.’
Considering this, irritated or possibly hurt by my indifference to adventure, she pointed to the rim of the bay that was lined by unpopulated rocks which, though smaller and more accessible, still offered a possibility of unknown thrills. ‘Those ones?’ she said, her eyebrows raised, perching on hoped-for endorsement like an eager sheepdog in training. ‘They look like the kind of place smugglers might meet.’
I paused before acquiescing. ‘Hmmm. Okay. I suppose.’
I began to match Kara’s efforts on the pedals, then exceeded them, forcing her small feet to twirl round wildly. ‘Oi!’ she chastised. ‘Slow down; you nearly broke my foot.’
I tutted and regulated the speed.
The design of the pedalo - and every other I have encountered subsequently – was not particularly ergonomic and forced me to squirm in my seat as the hard plastic dug underneath my shoulder blades. I had adorned a T-shirt, at the bequest of my mother, to alleviate the sun’s mid-afternoon blaze - as had Kara; it concealed my plump frame and was welcome relief from the intermittent, blue icy blasts that shot from the ocean and tempted me to abandon this whole stupid bloody idea, no matter what protestations from the optimist to my left. Besides, the wind was loud and discomforting and the sun’s brilliant white glare against the electric azure was shrill: it all contributed to a confusing sensual overload of erratically intermeshed and wholly unclear sounds and images in my adolescent head – something that was becoming rather familiar - comparable to the mixed sensations I had upon encountering Kara’s friends in the hotel restaurant at dusk: all glowing limbs, flattered by white dresses and violent bouquets of sugary perfume (when just hours before they had been gangly children, plastered in high-factor suncream, playing tag in the pool). Then, as now, my mind became choked.
The rocks seemed inordinately far away and the speed of our humble transport, as the pedals forced the paddling mechanism to chug and flutter beneath, was pathetic. We reached our destination surprisingly quickly, however, and ceased to pedal as the waves bobbed our vessel gently forward into a small bay. The sound of the wind diminished to a gentle swish and the ensuing quiet (and return of sensual equilibrium) enhanced the tranquillity of the little bay at which we had arrived. It was truly peaceful. The brash and dirty resort beach from where we had come was an autonomous miniature model in the distance that went on happily without us. Below us swam slender silver fishes, some of them up to six inches long and solidly grey – each anonymous one an undeniably more worthy find than the paltry effeminate roach that was the sole fruit of my one angling adventure - which had taken place on the Norfolk Broads the previous summer with the help of a benevolent friend of my father’s:

‘Now I’ve brought you Carl’s rod,’ Larry had said, ‘but I’m not entirely sure it’ll hold up - could be there’s not the necessaries in there. That boy!’
‘It’s fine, thanks.’ I had said, standing redundantly at the back of the car in long, muddy grass as Larry grappled with the array of equipment that was gradually emerging from the boot. ‘I’m sure it’s absolutely fine, Larry. Thank you.’
‘Well, we’ll see, my boy. Worst comes to the worst we’ll have to do some DIY on it – I’ve got plenty of odds and sods amongst this lot.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. Thanks.’
‘Bloody horrible day for it, mind,’ Larry had said, squinting at the clouds, his hand shielding his eyes like a visor from the absent sun.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not great,’ - then, remembering - ‘but it’s great to be able to do this. Thanks, Larry.’
We had shivered and cursed and I had overcome squeamishness to hook maggots; we had waited and yawned and willed orange floats to plunge that grudgingly obliged, after several eternities, to yield two baby roaches. Each was lithe and colourful though scrawny and was thoroughly welcome bounty; however my surrogate role model had experienced difficulty in freeing my catch and had inadvertently scrambled its jaw with the merciless half-inch hook. I had shaken in the rain and returned to his company car unsure of the degree – if there was indeed any – of our success. It only occurred to me much later that I mightn’t have been the only member of the party that felt a terrible sense of failure and regret that day.

These thick-girthed Majorcan fish were no Norfolk roaches. They chomped at unwitting plankton on the sand beneath and darted like bullets when our shadows obscured them. It seemed incongruous to me that they should be so brazenly at ease within the open shallows, so flagrant in exposure of their bulky little bodies in an environment in which anonymity rather than physical supremacy should surely be the ideal design.
The sun made the water sparkle all around us and was beginning to melt our skin. After securing the pedalo on the sandy bank, we disrobed and slid into the shallows.
‘We could jump off those rocks over there,’ suggested Kara. ‘The water’s probably deep enough.’
‘No,’ came my inevitable reply. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
She looked at me, squinting slightly against the sun and twitching her small nose. I turned away and dived down into the water. A few long strokes later, I emerged and glanced around: she wasn’t there. Suddenly I flinched as a hand grabbed my ankle and then Kara came up laughing, her eyes sparkling and expectant.
I twisted away, erupted ‘Kara! Just…’ She was smiling at her prank, inviting me to. ‘No!’ I swam off again a little way, jaws clenched shut, screaming expletives from within; my skin was crawling and I smashed the still water clumsily with a burning, misshapen fist.
A minute or two passed silently. The netted lining inside my baggy shorts chafed; I ran a finger around the waist band; the flesh at my hips, in thick, peach folds, was becoming ungainly. Kara swam up to me again slowly, stopping a couple of feet back; she eyed me cautiously, again twitching her nose. ‘I hope Mum doesn’t want to go on a walk tonight,’ she said.
My eyes were fixed on my palm which I had submerged just below the surface where I studied the cadaver-like whiteness of its flesh. ‘What do you mean? Of course she will; when hasn’t she?’
‘I dunno; I just wish we didn’t have to, that’s all.’ She was desperate for me to admit something: something to bring us closer so that maybe we could go back and play one of those fun games that I used to make up at the cemetery where we’d be wolves or something; or escaped prisoners or magical children; just children; something to tie us together; couldn’t we just have that?
‘It makes her happy. We’ve just got to put up with it.’

Our mother, a sun worshipper by day, felt the urge to experience a minor degree of culture después de cena, much to our chagrin. We would eat in the hotel restaurant and then head out into (what seemed to me) the Spanish wilderness. Once outside, the paving soon gave way to dusty tracks alongside which malnourished (and, I was assured, rabid) cats in extended families wailed eerily, evoking in us sympathy and terror. Mum was determined to discover obscure ocean panoramas, quaint white and blue harbours or naïve Catholic chapels, and occasionally she would be satisfied. In order to placate her entourage, however, she would be forced to accede to the sampling of ring-a-dinging amusement arcades, of which Kara in particular was so fond, where we would play ‘shufflepuck’ as Mum stood patiently in Marks and Spencer stole and faux pearl necklace; her visible displeasure at the polysonic bleeps and jingles, flashing lights and clanking of machinery made me uncomfortable about remaining long in such vacuums; but Kara had no such reservations and would take the lead role in procuring us episodic visits to Funkytime or ¡Animacion!. Just as a glorious hilltop vista blossomed, we would pester to cross the road to the bustling bazaars where imitation football shirts, in cheap, shiny fabric, of Barça and Juve and Manchester United could be purchased for two thousand pesetas. Kara’s eyes would seek hollow porcelain troll figurines, sporting incongruous humanistic expressions and seashell bikinis, whereas I would be enthralled by incomprehensible smoking paraphernalia, crude T-shirts emblazoned with drug references and shocking pornographic playing cards. Each stall, from which emanated much-too-loud Europop, would be manned by black-eyed wolves, all stubble, sweat and garlic, vying for my mother’s trade; they would be accompanied by their daughters, perhaps my own age, with sun-bleached hair and skin so deeply browned by near-constant sun-exposure as to make them look almost artificial. These girls would display wild birds screeching in miniature wicker cages and would stare from the corner of their eyes in ways that were unfamiliar and unnerving, betraying an unwholesome promiscuity - my hair would stand on end and I would seek out my mother. At various points along the hot roads and lanes, families would be hounded by timeshare salespeople. Paternally deficient and hence a flimsy gamble for the sharks, my own family would escape – which perversely aggrieved my mother - only to be fingered by ‘lookie lookie men’ pushing oversized wooden elephants, fake divers’ watches and sometimes replica knives in ornate sheaths that would leave me transfixed (once, uncharacteristically hopeful, I asked my mother if she could see her way to letting me have one of these knives – “just a replica! Far from dangerous” – but of course such acquisitions remained the stuff of dreams). Before heading back, we might stop for a Coke in a glass bottle with a paper straw at an overcrowded, air-conditioned café, where an English expatriate would play renditions of Eagles songs on a Casio keyboard, interspersed with blue jokes - not so far over my head that I wouldn’t feel acute embarrassment and shame as my mother tutted. Sometimes such men – silver-haired Glaswegians with multiple crows’ feet slashed into leathery orange faces - would take a particular interest in her and would approach, initiate conversation and tell further jokes at which Mum – ever the conversationalist – would graciously laugh , inducing the veins in my temples to throb fit to burst.
These evenings presented to me European absurdity in all its unfamiliar, exciting and terrifying glory. The nightly walk was not the part of the holiday that Kara or I enjoyed best and we would pester for an early return so that we could rendez-vous with new friends from Bradford, Ongar or South Shields who would line the edges of the disco floor drinking virgin cocktails with sparklers and plastic flamingos protruding from within.

‘Laura and her brother will be going to the disco.’ Kara said as I floated decadently, manoeuvring my limbs in slow motion though the crystal water. ‘Laura’s brother’s really nice.’
‘Seems like a bit of an idiot to me.’
‘I think you’d like him.’
I had always found it awkward befriending people on holiday, although making new connections was the most satisfying part of the whole fortnight. Kara had no problems and would just walk straight over to someone and precociously join in their game, only to assume leadership of the group within minutes. I would observe the goings on from the sidelines until a friendship could be garnered in a non-obtrusive way - perhaps by someone asking me to play pool or by Kara faux-subtly initiating a meeting on my behalf. Although I found her interventions painfully embarrassing, I was truly grateful when she successfully orchestrated them.
‘I’m glad that Mum’s getting on with Laura’s parents though,’ I conceded.
‘Yeah. Don’t get stuck playing cards with them again tonight, though: come and play …hang out …with us.’
I said nothing, but glanced along the horizon. I don’t say ‘hang out’, Kara. The wind perked up; I re-tied the string on my swimming shorts. A gull screeched. ‘Perhaps we could pedal out to that rock after all,’ I said.
The sun was ferocious but neither of us had an aversion to the heat. We pedalled on, our legs getting tired, and when we were coming close to our destination, glanced back at the beach.
‘I can’t believe we’ve come so far,’ said Kara. ‘Mum’ll be worried about us.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s perfectly safe; I don’t know why she always has to worry about everything.'
‘I know,’ Kara replied, ‘It’s not like we’re little kids.’ I may have smaned. ‘It’s good how she lets you have beer now though.’
‘It’s not beer,’ I returned. ‘It’s just shandy.’
‘Will you let me have some?’
‘It has got alcohol in. You can’t have any.’
‘Would it get me drunk?’
I sighed, ‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps. If you drank enough of it. I haven’t been drunk on it. You’d be well drunk if you had real beer.’
‘Have you had much?’
‘I had lots at Tom’s house. His dad lets him have it.’
‘I won’t tell Mum.’
‘You’d better not. Not that she’d mind. She probably knows anyway.’
As the rock drew closer, we seemed to be approaching more rapidly than we had the little bay; the pedalo was not so much bobbing as bouncing and we began to rock violently from side to side; what’s more, we seemed to have less control of it and there was no sandy beach to ground ourselves on. I began to worry about how this would turn out and considered turning us around, but we were approaching very fast and there must be rocks leading up to the surface, I thought, that we could get stuck on. I glanced at Kara: she too was worried.
‘Let go of the steering,’ I said. ‘I’ve got it. If I can swing it round, we’ll slow down.’ But the pedalo still lurched forward, despite my efforts to turn it. The rock grew closer still and it appeared that we would crash within seconds. Glancing up, I saw for the first time just how big this folly was – it must have been thirty, forty feet high and a dense black, like the smouldering stump of a tree. Kara grabbed my arm - she had to reach as the vessel was fairly wide – and she screamed; the noise was the same as the screams I’d heard countless times on water slides, in playgrounds, on wet Sunday afternoons at home as we played boisterous games up and down the stairs; but the grip of her hand was tight on my arm and I realised that there was a difference this time: she was sincerely scared.
‘David! We’re going to crash! Are we going to die?’
‘It’s okay,’ I said, feeling my feet slip from the pedals. ‘It’s all right; we’ll be all right…hold on.’
When the crash came, we were both slung forward. For a second, things went blank.
The same tranquil swish of the wind that had greeted us at the bay had returned and, apart from the bouncing of the waves, everything was peaceful. There followed, however, a thunk as the pedalo again bashed into the rock. I began to think of the damage we were causing to our craft - Mum would have to become entangled in an argument with a Spanish trader who would curse her and demand money; she would argue and stand her ground; Kara and I would stand helpless as embarrassment, guilt and responsibility would scratch through my veins and throb in my brain
‘Kara!’ I shouted. ‘We’ve got to get the pedalo away from the rocks. Kara! Can you hear me? We’ve got to get away from the rocks. Are you okay?’
I had expected her to be crying; I had feared that she would be injured, but she rose from the foot-well of her side, looking alert, serious, but not hurt.
‘Okay; okay David.’
We both returned to our seats and I again told her to leave the steering alone and just pedal. We both pedalled as I tried to force the pedalo around, but the waves were too strong and negated our efforts.
‘I’ve got to push us off the side of the rock, ‘I said, getting up. ‘I’ve got to stand on the side of the rock and push us out and you’ve got to pedal as I do it. Kara, can you do that for me? As I push us, you pedal hard: as hard as you can.’
She looked at me fixedly, her brow furrowed.
‘Please don’t get out of the boat, David.’
‘I’ve got to; to push us out. You’ll be okay; just pedal when I push.’
‘Okay; okay then.’
I scrambled to the side of the boat and put my flip-flopped feet on the hard rocks. It felt unnerving to be out of the pedalo, with Kara remaining there alone, looking so small. I tried to gauge how hard to push and at what point I would have to jump back in and made a half-hearted attempt; the waves pushed the pedalo back against the rocks with another thunk.
‘I’m going to try again, and this time pedal like crazy!’ I said. ‘One, two, three…’ As I pushed, a serendipitous movement of the waves got beneath us and carried us away from the rocks swiftly and elegantly. I clambered back to my seat and sat down, though the process was difficult as my pedals, which were connected to Kara’s, were spinning violently round.
We pedalled not straight away from the rocks, but around them, leaving a ten-foot distance. I looked over at Kara, whose eyes were pointing ahead – she was beaming. I too smiled and an uncontrollable laugh was emitted from my lungs which she immediately responded to; we glanced at each other and pedalled on, laughing.
‘We’ll have to be getting back,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Kara.
We steered the pedalo around the panel of rocks, leaving a very safe margin, relishing the smooth butteriness of the clean, clear water. However, as we came to the furthest stretch of the rock formation, I stopped pedalling and Kara followed. There was an odd change in the water. On Kara’s side, the water remained a clear, bright turquoise - when the waves were less busy, you could make out the sandy seabed deep below - but on my side, which was facing out to the ocean, the water was darker. The more I looked, the darker it seemed; it was the deepest, most solid inky blue I had ever seen and there was nothing visible below it, just a vast, dense mass of deep, deep blue.
‘My god,’ I whispered. ‘Can you see this, Kara?’
‘What is it?’ she said, still smiling brightly.
‘The ocean. It’s black.’
It was a remarkable sight. Somewhere beneath our pedalo was a shelf that dropped mercilessly from the crisp silver and blue of the bay to the rest of the ocean. The shift in perspective trapped my breath and made my stomach sink. ‘It must be because it’s so deep.’
‘Yeah, it’s really dark isn’t it?’ Kara returned, unsure of what had triggered the apparent awe in my voice. ‘Do you think there’s sharks?’
‘There’s sharks in England; there are sharks everywhere.’
‘No there isn’t. Where did you hear that?’
‘It’s just something I picked up,’ I said. ‘Anyway, that’s not the point. There’s all sorts down there; you can’t begin to imagine what’s down there.’
‘Come on, David, let’s get back.’
‘Remember what Mum said about Becher’s Brook?’ I said, recalling something that had troubled me recently.
‘What?’ Kara said, gazing back towards the beach.
‘It’s this jump at the Grand National. The horses have all these jumps to do. This one: they jump, only the ground on the other side is lower than the side they’ve just jumped from - I think, she said lower - anyway, don’t you think that’s cruel? Kara?’
‘Yes, David.’ She replied soberly, staring straight into my eyes.
‘And people pay to see it! They don’t understand, the horses. Why would they? It’s bad enough that they’re forced to run around this track, but then someone goes and changes the ground that they’re running on.’
‘It’s awful, David.’ Kara was paying attention now; she could see that I was upset and she was trying to help; it made me want to shut up but I was compelled to make her understand.
‘Some of them break their ankles, Mum said. They break their ankles coming down because they don’t understand; they’re not prepared. Do you know what they do to horses with broken ankles?’ My voice was getting louder. ‘Do you know what they do to horses with broken ankles, Kara?’
‘Stop it David, I don’t want to know!’ And with that she shut her eyes, put her fingers in her ears and began shouting ‘la, la, la!’ I wanted to yank her hands away and twist her head round, force her to listen, but the passion began to dwindle; we’d got along okay today, don’t spoil it now.
After a short while, she cocked one eye open and gauged that the crisis was over. She stared at me and smiled. ‘Come on, David; let’s get back.’
But I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare at the dark expanse. It seemed so infinitely huge that, although it was there before my eyes, it was utterly incomprehensible. Though the shock of encountering the sudden, violent drop had floored me, I considered pedalling out there in a kind of vertigo sufferer’s will to jump but the thought was too terrifying; besides, it was not safe, especially for Kara. I imagined how we would look from a distance if our dinky contraption was out there, so totally miniscule and irrelevant.
Kara touched my arm for the second time that afternoon and my eyes turned away from the ocean to her, and beyond her where the beach was peppered with human life, where people huddled in quarrelling families, where my mother was sunbathing on her own.
‘Come on, David, let’s go. We’ve seen enough.’
‘All right; yes, let’s go. It’s too much.’
Kara was silent for most of the journey back as our legs strived in unison, creating a cyclical rhythm. My mind, meanwhile, was trying desperately to make sense of the deep that I had teetered on the edge of; it had shaken me and I had been terrified, but I began attempting to break it down in my head and try to conceive what existed in that realm of apparent emptiness and the more I imagined it all the more frightening it became.