Floods spread out like a bad feeling, getting everywhere you could imagine. They did so by stealth, bringing fear, as though a murderer was on the loose, not just an extra ten square miles of water. Rivers crossed smaller rivers and absconded with them. Water crossed roads in broad daylight, right in front of cars, like lollypop ladies leading groups of school children. A trickle at first. By evening, impassable roads.
And there, in the middle of this brown water, was the relatively clear pool. You could still see down to the deep riverbed and the little round mound with its two pigtails.
They drifted over it looking for Mrs Grimmond’s dog, Debbie Painter telling the story.
‘In those days you couldn’t follow Rome. But this area was strong in the faith.’
The flotilla moved over the submerged gardens.
‘They held secret services in various places. Dangerous to attend.’
Something like iron railings passed under his boat. The primary school. Half the village a mangrove swamp. Every few strokes something would show through. A white line from a playing field. A park bench. The menu board from the pub.
‘A spy caught the girl at a secret mass.’
Oars pulled him away from the story-telling, heading towards the curled, impoverished branches of birches and holm oaks. A set of rugby posts rose beyond.
‘Just awful’.
The feeling of danger seeped into him.
Around the bend, he had gone with Polly Seaburn one night, in their teenage, where the force was lethal. With or without floods. The feeling of awfulness spread its wet brown insurgency. Only now could he see the timeframe of awfulness. You mistake it in youth. You do not know how long it takes. Poly Seaburn stood there on the thin plank between different howling layers of water, looking at him.
‘A tiny room. No bigger than a coffin. They hid the priests there in times of danger. The girl must have hoped …’
Behind him, the boats had gathered in a little circle, occupants looking down at the piece of alleged skull, with plaits, on the riverbed.
Polly Seaburn had wanted to dive for it.
‘It’s never a skull’, he told her.
She still lived in the village. Pushed in a wheelchair by a man from Zimbabwe.
The feeling of awfulness lapped at his boat. Water got through the fibreglass, though it looked dry. Maybe it ran down the oars. His shoes and socks felt wet.
*
The village story of the catholic skull on the riverbed was one item of false lore he decided to campaign against.
‘It’s a piece of coconut shell fallen in the river’, he told two boys. ‘Some loser was hanging it in his garden to feed the robins and starlings. The string broke and it fell in.’
Such was his sway over the youths of the village, the theory caught on. Other teenagers came to point down to the deep part of the river, parroting his words.
‘Look, there! That’s a bit of coconut shell. You can see the husk. It’s not hair at all.’
Then Polly Seaburn was heard laughing.
*
He waylaid her on All Saints’ Lane. She went that way twice a month to cut the grass at the church.
‘Are you religious?’
She walked on as if he was not there.
‘I said, are you religious?’
She shrugged. ‘No more than anyone.’
‘I’m interested in why you believe village stories about skulls on riverbeds.’
She walked on, and began getting the lawnmower out of the verger’s shed. He caught up.
‘Are you stupid? Why would you believe it’s a skull?’
‘Why would you believe it’s a coconut shell?’
She bent down to fit the grass-catcher.
‘There are houses around here with priest holes. Catholics were persecuted in this area.’
‘But you’ve never been close enough to be sure it’s a human skull’, he shouted above the racket.
‘Perhaps we should dive down one day.’
*
One day. They made the bet, but that day was forever on the horizon. Far away until the night on the weir.
By the old blockhouse, as he wandered, he saw pram tracks in the mud. Only later did he wonder if they were tracks of a wheelchair. He stood on the plank in the weir and watched the force of the water create vapour where she’d jumped.
They pulled her out where an old cattle trough stands full of dents, as though used for military target practice. A girl’s body, half-fish, dragged onto the lawn. A man performing CPR while the woman phoned ambulances. The piece of skull slipped from her fingers into his. It is still in his possession.
For several years he said it was clay, a curve to it that could be from a bowl as well as a skull. He took it with him to university where he learnt in a phone call that Polly Seaburn was paralysed and did not talk. He got a First, and became a junior fellow, moving gradually from college to college, from fellowship to fellowship, getting deeper into a small place which was what his teenage mind had always wanted. A small place with secret doors, though you did not open them with a magic word. Not normally, anyhow. Learned men and women became his friends. The fragment was given, at one point, to a scientist who verified it was human and sixteenth century. He kept it in his desk drawer.
*
Polly Seaburn, in red and white striped t-shirt dress, belted neatly, comes out of the Red Lion with an older man. The white of her legs showed off. The little dots of shin hairs, newly shaven. He blushed with jealousy. The man looked so much older than the village schoolboys. But to his surprise, she waved at him. The man looked too, bemused, saw a boy, nothing significant. He was grateful for that wave.
His mind often goes to that older man at the Red Lion. Polly forcing the bet that night, after so long when they let it lie. Did that man with his motorbike, and moustache, and mullet have any bearing on it? Had he done anything that would make her want to go under a million gallons of water travelling at a zillion metres per second?
She bet he would not dare dive with her from the weir, and touch the skull on the riverbed. He bet his best friend he would kiss her by the end of the summer.
‘You still believe in folktales?’, he would jeer, cycling past. ‘You still know everything?’ she would yell back. But never in a million years did he expect her to jump.
*
‘So this young Catholic must have got stuck in the priest hole. She couldn’t get out.’
His boat floated away without the need of oars. The cold depth of the real river under him, the alarming strength of the current.
‘Centuries later they renovated the place. Filled the nooks with concrete for insulation. This part collapsed.’
The seven arches of Sutton bridge loomed up, shockingly transformed. No more than eyebrows because of the high water. It looked like a monster rising up to spy on him.
‘Then, in the 1920s, the whole buttress fell off. Straight down into the river. You could see the girl’s skull on the riverbed. Poor thing.’
‘Professor!’ Debbie Painter was calling and waving. He rowed slowly back over the playing fields and sunken bike racks. ‘They’ve found the dog!’
*
His words still echoed. ‘It’s not skull, it’s coconut!’
He was in the garden, looking to see if the flood had receded. Returning to the back door he heard voices. A strange accent.
‘It would be naaace for you to see an old freeend. Do you good.’
He went back into the house and through the window, saw a black man, holding the handles of a wheelchair. The occupant he could not see.
Of course, those years in the wheelchair would have changed her. He didn’t want to see.
The bell rang softly again. Stock still, holding his breath, a hunted animal.
‘Oh, well’, came the far-travelled African voice. ‘He caaan’t be in. We’ll traai later, hey.”
*
Often he would take the piece of skull from its drawer and lay it on his mahogany desk, and look. Dull, brown-grey bone reflected on shiny black-red Indian wood. He would see the tiny holes in the broken edge of the skull and consider that everything in the world is made of holes at one level. Old though the desk was, the bone was older. While the tree that made the desk still stood and grew, the skull fragment was under the living skin of a teenage girl. The fragment would lie on the desk, the shine of the mahogany taking the reflection into extended directions. At last, he felt sympathy for the religious girl who once contained that bone, and who had died hiding in a small space from which she could not get out.
He saw the Zimbabwean carer sometimes, in the distance, energetically pushing in all weather. The tracks he would find in unexpected places. Sometimes they came to his front door.
It was getting dark when at last he rowed quietly back to his flooded garden and tied the boat up. At the back door he saw a light on in his study. One of the standing lamps he preferred now. They had waited all this time. There in the cosy amber glow he saw the two figures, a black man and a fat woman he did not know, in a wheelchair, gazing at the fragment of skull on the mahogany desk.
‘Nnnnngh.’
An appalling noise came from her when she saw him. ‘Nmmmrrr.’
He watched a fleck of spittle creep from the corner of her mouth like the froth at the edges of the river in the flood water. He could not make out her meaning in the slightest. Then she waved across his study, as she had that time at the Red Lion. The carer began turning the wheelchair towards the door.
Jeremy is an English writer living in Didcot, Oxfordshire. He has worked as a librarian, TEFL teacher, barman and removals man. Short stories in Idle Ink, Reflex Fiction, and other zines, in Home (Dinesh Allirajah Prize s/l) Earthless melting pot (Words with Jam) competition anthologies.
Twitter/X: @HinchJeremy
