Free Waterland by Graham Swift Page B

what was in that bottle. I know where that bottle came from. Guesswork forms conclusions (which don’t quell fear). So Dick comes home from seeing Mary and goes out again with something in the pocket of his windcheater. He waylays Freddie near the footbridge. He knows that Freddie, like his father, never refuses a drink, and though Dick is never known to drink himself, he offers him something special – a beer like no other. With the result that Freddie, who can’t swim anyway, will be in no state to save himself. ‘Freddie want drink?’ They sit on the footbridge. For good measure, before pushing him in, Dick hits him with the empty bottle. On the right temple. Then Dick throws the bottle into the river too. And, like Freddie, the bottle floats downstream …
    I take the beer bottle and carry it, unseen, beyond the obstacle of the sluice, meaning to throw it in once more, to float away for good this time, perhaps to float all the way to the sea. But at the last moment something stops me. I thrust it inside my shirt and smuggle it up to my bedroom. And that night, as I go to bed and Dick goes to bed, I do something I’ve never done before. I take the old rusty never-used key to my room from a hook on the wall and lock the door.

8
About the Story-telling Animal
    I KNOW what you feel. I know what you think when you sit in your rows, in attitudes of boredom, listlessness, resentment, forbearance, desultory concentration. I know what all children think when submitted to the regimen of history lessons, to spooned-down doses of the past: ‘But what about Now? Now, we are Now. What about Now?’
    Before you a balding quinquagenarian who gabbles about the Ancien Régime, Rousseau, Diderot and the insolvency of the French Crown; behind you, beyond the window, grey winter light, an empty playground, forlorn and misty tower blocks … And around you this stale-smelling classroom in which you are suspended, encaged like animals removed from a natural habitat.
    Now. What about Now?
    Price pipes up – one of his numerous attempts to subvert the French Revolution, to disrupt disruption – and says: ‘What matters is the here and now.’
    But what is this much-adduced Here and Now? What is this indefinable zone between what is past and what is to come; this free and airy present tense in which we are always longing to take flight into the boundless future?
    How many times do we enter the Here and Now? How many times does the Here and Now pay us visits? It comes so rarely that it is never what we imagine, and it is the Here and Now that turns out to be the fairy-tale, not History, whose substance is at least for ever determinedand unchangeable. For the Here and Now has more than one face. It was the Here and Now which by the banks of the Hockwell Lode with Mary Metcalf unlocked for me realms of candour and rapture. But it was the Here and Now also which pinioned me with fear when livid-tinted blood, drawn by a boat-hook, appeared on Freddie Parr’s right temple, and again when, after a certain meeting with Mary Metcalf, I hid a beer bottle in my shirt and, retiring to my bedroom, locked the door.
    And so often it is precisely these surprise attacks of the Here and Now which, far from launching us into the present tense, which they do, it is true, for a brief and giddy interval, announce that time has taken us prisoner. So that you can be sure that on that July day in 1943 your juvenile history teacher ceased to be a babe. As you may be sure that when during the French Revolution the hair of Marie Antoinette, who once played at Little Bo-Peep and other childish pranks in the gardens of Versailles, turned, in a single coach journey from Varennes to Paris, white as a fleece, she was aware not only of the Here and Now but that History had engulfed her.
    Yet the Here and Now, which brings both joy and terror, comes but rarely – does not come even when we call it. That’s the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are