They did the washing-up together, Louise washing and Katie drying, because the dishwasher was broken. Louise remembered saying that it was all right, that she could do it herself if Katie had homework, and that Katie had said, ‘It’s all done.’ Louise remembered that every time Katie took a dish from her to dry, she let her fingers brush against her mother’s for just a moment longer than she needed to.
Except now Louise couldn’t be sure whether she remembered those things at all. Did Katie lower her eyes, look down at her plate? Did she really grip her glass more tightly, or let her touch linger? It was impossible to tell now, all her recollections seemed open to doubt, to misinterpretation. She wasn’t sure if this was down to the shock of realizing that all she had known was certain was not so sure at all, or whether her mind had been permanently fogged by the drugs she’d swallowed in the days and weeks after Katie died. Louise had gobbled pills upon pills, each handful offering hours of blank relief, only to be plunged freshly back into her nightmare on waking. After a while she came to grasp that the horror of rediscovering her daughter’s absence, over and over again, was not worth the hours of oblivion.
Of this, she felt she could be sure: when Katie said goodnight, she smiled and kissed her mother the way she always did. She hugged her, no closer or longer than usual, and said, ‘Sleep tight.’
And how could she have done that, knowing what she was going to do?
In front of Louise, the path blurred, her tears obscuring her vision, so she didn’t notice the tape until she was upon it. Police Line. Do Not Cross. She was already halfway up the hill and was approaching the ridge; she had to take a sharp detour to the left so as not to disturb the last ground that Nel Abbott ever stood on.
She lumbered over the crest and down the side of the hill, her feet aching and her hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, down to the welcome shade where the path passed through a thicket of trees at the edge of the pool. A mile or so further along the path, she reached the bridge and climbed the steps to the road. A group of young girls was approaching from her left and she looked, as she always did, for her daughter amongst them, searching for her bright-chestnut head, listening for the rumble of her laugh. Louise’s heart broke again.
She watched the girls, their arms draped around one another’s shoulders as they clung to each other, an entwined mass of downy flesh, and at their centre, Louise realized, was Lena Abbott. Lena, so solitary these past few months, was having her moment of celebrity. She too would be gawped at and pitied and, before too long, shunned.
Louise turned away from the girls and started up the hill towards home. She hunched her shoulders and dropped her chin and hoped that she could shuffle off unnoticed, because looking at Lena Abbott was a terrible thing, it conjured terrible images in Louise’s mind. But the girl had spotted her and cried out, ‘Louise! Mrs Whittaker! Please wait.’
Louise tried to walk faster, but her legs were heavy and her heart was as deflated as an old balloon, and Lena was young and strong.
‘Mrs Whittaker, I want to talk to you.’
‘Not now, Lena. I’m sorry.’
Lena put her hand on Louise’s arm, but Louise pulled away, she couldn’t look at her. ‘I’m very sorry. I can’t talk to you now.’
Louise had become a monster, an empty creature who would not comfort a motherless child, who – worse, so much worse – could not look at that child without thinking, Why not you? Why weren’t you in the water, Lena? Why wasn’t it you? Why my Katie? Kind and gentle and generous and hard-working and driven – better than you in every possible way. She should never have gone in. It should have been you.
The Drowning Pool, Danielle Abbott (unpublished)
Prologue
WHEN I WAS seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning.
But that, believe it or not, is not where all this started.
There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial, primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.
Since I moved to Beckford in 2008, I have swum in the river almost every day, in winter and in summer, sometimes with my daughter and sometimes alone, and I have become fascinated by the idea that this place, my place of ecstasy, could be for others a place of dread and terror.
When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning, but I had become obsessed with the Beckford pool long before that. My parents were storytellers, my mother especially; it was from her mouth that I first heard Libby’s tragic story, of the shocking slaughter at the Wards’ cottage, the terrible tale of the boy who watched his mother jump. I made her tell me, again and again. I remember my father’s dismay (‘These stories aren’t really for children’) and my mother’s resistance (‘Of course they are! They’re history’).
She sowed a seed in me, and long before my sister went into the water, long before I picked up a camera or set pen to paper, I spent hours daydreaming and imagining what it must have been like, what it must have felt like, how cold the water must have been for Libby that day.
As an adult, the mystery that has consumed me is, of course, that of my own family. It shouldn’t be a mystery, but it is, because despite my efforts to build bridges, my sister has not spoken to me for many years. In the well of her silence, I have tried to imagine what drew her to the river in the dead of night, and even I, with my singular imagination, have failed. Because my sister was never the dramatic one, never the one for a bold gesture. She could be sly, cunning, as vengeful as the water itself, but I am still at a loss. I wonder if I always will be.
I decided, while in the process of trying to understand myself and my family and the stories we tell each other, that I would try to make sense of all the Beckford stories, that I would write down all the last moments, as I imagined them, in the lives of the women who went to the Beckford Drowning Pool.
Its name carries weight; and yet, what is it? A bend in the river, that’s all. A meander. You’ll find it if you follow the river in all its twists and turns, swelling and flooding, giving life and taking it, too. The river is by turns cold and clean, stagnant and polluted; it snakes through forest and cuts like steel through the soft Cheviot Hills, and then, just north of Beckford, it slows. It rests, just for a while, at the Drowning Pool.
This is an idyllic spot: oaks shade the path, beech and plane trees dot the hillsides, and there’s a sloping sandy bank on the south side. A place to paddle, to take the kids; the perfect picnic spot for a sunny day.
But appearances are deceptive, for this is a deathly place. The water, dark and glassy, hides what lies beneath: weeds to entangle you, to drag you down, jagged rocks to slice through flesh. Above looms the grey slate cliff: a dare, a provocation.
This is the place that, over centuries, has claimed the lives of Libby Seeton, Mary Marsh, Anne Ward, Ginny Thomas, Lauren Slater, Katie Whittaker, and more – countless others, nameless and faceless. I wanted to ask why, and how, and what their lives and deaths tell us about ourselves. There are those who would rather not ask those questions, who would rather hush, suppress, silence. But I have never been one for quiet.
In this work, this memoir of my life and the Beckford pool, I wanted to start not with drowning, but with swimming. Because that is where it begins: with the swimming of witches – the ordeal by water. There, at my pool, that peaceful beauty spot not a mile from where I sit right now, was where they brought them and bound them and threw them into the river, to sink or to swim.
Some say the women left something of themselves in the water, some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.
Erin