Nano Day 06

It was like immersing her sun-warm body in ice, but she did not let it register. She pushed her eyes open, against instinct, searching against the sting of the water for the pale-fish flicker of flesh under water. He was there, a second away from her fingertips, a slow red puff like red smoke blooming in the water about his head.

She grasped him, a dead weight, seeing his drifting open mouth as she turned him, his hair moving like stands of sea-grass, his eyes half open with the whites floating behind the lids. She dragged him upwards, and surfaced like a cork pushing out of the water, every cell in her body yearning towards air and pulling her out of this alien depth. Her arms were around a body made slippery with wet and cold, his hair soaked and dripping, his skin blue-tinged, his chest deadly still. His nerves made no protest when she pulled him over the shale at the shore, and she saw him suddenly as if from far away – small, stark-ribbed and feeble, all length and limbs and crooked over toes, his hands lolling open like beached, dead fish. Her soul seemed to be leaving her body, her mind paralysed with fear –

and then the hands – the rough and blood-hot hands of the farmer, the scent of tweed long-years rubbed with lanolin and the lingering of tobacco – and him leaning over the boy and breathing his soul back into him, and coaxing her own back too as she saw that first urgent breath, and the wet vomit, and the shuddering of the sudden consciousness of cold.

'Bit bigger than a lamb, though,' were the first words the farmer said, shy almost, embarrassed almost that he had just kissed life into this trembling boy. 'Aye, he'll be fine,' – stripping his jacket from his arms and passing it over. 'Warm him up. He'll be fine.'

She stood, staring, the jacket clutched in her hands, making no movement, and the farmer took it back from her and used it first to violently rub warmth back into Idwal's skin, and then to wrap around him, the button done up with haste, pinning his arms to his sides. He looked ridiculous then, lying in nothing but underwear and an over-large jacket, his legs pale and thin and limp on the grass.

His eyes fluttered open, and he looked about, dazed, his eyes moving from Anwen's face to the farmer's.

'Yes, I saw you go in,' the farmer said, as if he'd been asked a question. 'Should know better than to jump into water like that.'

'Slipped,' Idwal murmured, trying to move a hand to his head, and looking down in confusion as he realised he could not move his arms.

He seemed pacified by the knowledge that he was buttoned into the jacket, and stopped trying to move. He looked upward now, towards where blood was seeping and diluting in the water that streamed from his hair, trying to see what was blurred and red at the edge of his vision.

'Slipped on that rock,' he said, and then coughed, choking suddenly as an in-breath sucked irritating water or bile back into his windpipe.

'I thought you were jumping,' the farmer said, conversationally rather than accusatively. 'Those rocks can be slippery – you need to watch them.'

Anwen closed her eyes, suddenly overcome with nausea as she saw in her mind Id stepping forward, perhaps leaning to look deep into the water, perhaps seeing an odd-coloured stone or a flash of broken pottery on the bottom – and then suddenly flailing, suddenly striking the water and his head crashing into a rock, and the depths taking him…

'I'm sorry,' she said suddenly, feeling tears about to burst out of her. She looked down the track, back towards the gate to the road, suddenly feeling small and stupid and caught in the wrong place. 'I'm sorry, we shouldn't have – '

'Everyone comes swimming here, del,' he said, putting an arm around her and squeezing, and she could smell his sweat, and the scent of tobacco thick in his clothes. She wanted to shrink away, but she dared not shrink from the man who had come to save Idwal. 'Come on, then. Amser mynd adre, rwan.'

He looked down at Idwal, pale and shivering and very silent, despite the strong sun that was seeping the cold from him.

'Do you think you need to see a doctor, lad?' he asked.

Idwal shook his head, slowly though, with his eyes closed as if the movement made him feel sick.

'Then we'll get you dressed, and I'll take you home,' he said. 'Lucky I've got the trailer on, isn't it? I was bringing some ewes back up the hill. Robert Roberts, isn't it?'

Anwen nodded numbly at her father's name – and then the tears burst out of her – and she helped Idwal to dry and dress in a blurred chaos of emotion, teasing his arms and legs into his clothes as she had when they were tiny, too caught up in herself to notice the farmer's attempts to help. And she was pulling her own clothes on over damp skin, and finding herself shivering, and walking with Idwal, who was stumbling as if he had raided their father's drinks cabinet. And they clambered into the small, rattling trailer that was hitched behind the tractor, sitting on sacking that masked sheep droppings and urine and the scatter of straw, and Anwen clutched Idwal to her like a baby and held a handkerchief to the seeping red wound on his head, and cried and cried.

Diolch i ti, Iesu… slurred through her head, the tune of the children's prayer ridiculous in the context but refusing to leave her mind. Am y diwrnod hon…

She was thanking Jesus for what? For what about this day, as she clutched Idwal to her chest and sobs racked through her, and the clattering and jerking of the trailer took them closer and closer to home? Thanking him for almost taking Idwal from her, for a stupid second's accident that could have stolen his life and left him no more than driftwood in the bottom of the pool?

Idwal was silent and cold, and he leant against her as if he was tired beyond words, and she held him, and shook, and pressed her lips to his hair like a mother with a baby.

'Oh, Id,' she murmured. 'Oh, Id, Id…'

She smelt the smell of him – the smell of wet hair and the iron tang of blood and the smell of cold water on cold skin. It was the most beautiful smell in the world, for it meant he was real, and alive, and pressed against her, and she would never stop holding him in her arms.

Something jerked inside her. Something pulled and burned, and she wanted to hold him closer than was possible.

Two bodies cannot occupy the same space simultaneously…

Hysteria was taking her in waves. What a stupid time for physics to intrude in her brain… Stupid… She wanted to be in Idwal, and around him, and to protect him like a shell from every hostile thing in the world. She wanted to kiss the blood from his forehead and seal the split with her lips, and for her arms to stay about him and to never be asked to let go. In a year she would be gone… In a year life would take her away from him. She never wanted to be away from him, from every inch of his precious skin and blood and bones, from his acorn tan and his peat-coloured hair and his dark, unfathomable eyes. He was hers, and she would not let him go, no matter what Poseidon or Neptune or God himself wanted to snatch him from her.

******

He should see a doctor… He should see a doctor…

Anwen hovered on the landing, hovered at the edges of the kitchen, hovered on the threshold of Idwal's bedroom with her eyes on the bed and her eyes on the plunge where the stairs went down. She was powerless. She felt powerless to wield any influence in the house, and she watched her parents talking with anxiety tight in her chest and her lips held closed over her thoughts.

Their father, used to being a doctor of sorts to sheep and sheepdogs, used to shortening the lives of unfortunate hens and determining foot rot from sprains from breaks that would require the shotgun to put right – their father leaned over Idwal's bed and touched the bruise on his head with tender fingers, and stroked his blood-matted hair back from his face, and looked carefully into his eyes and spoke to him with great purpose.

'I think he's fine, love,' he said confidentially to their mother in the kitchen – and Anwen hovered in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, her ear turned to their voices, her ear turned to Idwal's room. 'He had a blow, and some water in the lungs, but he seems fine.'

'He's clear enough,' their mother said. 'He's making sense. But An said he was down for – a minute at most?'

There was a silence that spread through the room and pooled at the bottom of the stairs and pressed at Anwen's ribs and heart, and stiffened her finger joints and teased at her mind. A silence of voices, a silence when she could hear them moving, but they did not speak.

'I'd rather have a stethoscope on those lungs,' their father said, and then the silence continued.

And then, 'You know the number,' their father said finally, and Anwen heard her mother move towards the hall – and she stepped back in silence, up a number of steps, and sat in the semidarkness with her chin in her cupped hands, listening.

She heard the dial of the phone turn three times, and she could hear the pause, with ringing faint through the receiver, and then her mother spoke, and the doctor was called, and the muscles in Anwen's body slumped, and she buried her face in her hands.

******

It surprised her that the doctor examined her, checking her for shock and for cold and asking her questions about what had happened all the while, and how Idwal had been. She was shocked, perhaps, but her mind was turned towards Idwal. She hovered again, on the landing, while her mother and father and the doctor were in Idwal's room – and then they came out, and although her mother's face was pale and distracted with worry, there was a faint smile there, and their father was holding their mother's hand with a warmth he did not often show.

'Just for observation,' the doctor was saying. 'For seventy-two hours, I should say – the hospital will let you know. There's a degree of concussion, and in cases of water inhalation – '

Anwen stood back against the wall, apparently invisible. She could see Idwal through the crack of his part-open door, and he turned his head and caught her eye, and smiled. He raised a hand, weakly, in a thumbs up, and she let the wall support her spine.

She heard his mother mention an ambulance, and the doctor saying, 'I don't think so – by the time it takes to get here you'll have him in hospital. You take him off now…'

And Anwen was left alone in the house, and she went into Idwal's room and stood there, watching as the car made its slow way along the pitted drive to the road, the sun beating down on its roof and the world around in equal, thoughtless measure.

How sinister sunshine was…

She turned away from the window as they passed through the gate and turned into the lane. She was facing Id's bed, its brown, masculine blanket rucked and untidy, the white sheet rippled like water. She made the bed, assiduously – and then she sank down on it, face first, her nose buried in the blanket and in the scent of it, the wool warming the front of her body as the scent of Idwal rose around her, and she felt alone as she had never felt before.