Into the Water(10)
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
IT’S A FUCKING weird place, Beckford. It’s beautiful, quite breathtaking in parts, but it’s strange. It feels like a place apart, disconnected from everything that surrounds it. Of course, it is miles from anywhere – you have to drive for hours to get anywhere civilized. That’s if you consider Newcastle civilized, which I’m not sure I do. Beckford is a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history. And all through the middle of it there’s this river, and that’s the weirdest thing of all – it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river.
There’s something a bit off about the DI, too. He’s a local boy, so I suppose it’s to be expected. I thought it the first time I laid eyes on him, yesterday morning when they pulled Nel Abbott’s body out of the water. He was standing on the river bank, hands on hips, head bent. He was speaking to someone – the medical examiner, it turned out – but from a distance it looked as though he was praying. That’s what I thought of – a priest. A tall, thin man in dark clothes, the black water as a backdrop, the slate cliff behind him, and at his feet a woman, pale and serene.
Not serene, of course, dead. But her face wasn’t contorted, it wasn’t ruined. If you didn’t look at the rest of her, the broken limbs or the twist of her spine, you’d think she’d drowned.
I introduced myself and thought straight away there was something strange about him – his watery eyes, a slight tremor in his hands, which he tried to suppress by rubbing them together, palm against wrist – it made me think of my dad on those mornings-after-the-night-before when you needed to keep your voice and your head down.
Keeping my head down seemed like a good idea in any case. I’d been up north less than three weeks, after a hasty transfer from London thanks to an ill-advised relationship with a colleague. Honestly, all I wanted to do was work my cases and forget the whole mess. I was fully anticipating being thrown the boring stuff at first, so I was surprised when they wanted me on a suspicious death. A woman, her body spotted in a river by a man out walking his dogs. She was fully clothed, so she hadn’t been swimming. The chief inspector set me straight. ‘It’ll almost certainly be a jumper,’ he told me. ‘She’s in the Beckford Drowning Pool.’
It was one of the first things I asked DI Townsend. ‘Did she jump, do you think?’
He looked at me for a moment, he considered me. Then he pointed to the clifftop. ‘Let’s go up there,’ he said, ‘find the scientific officer and see if they’ve discovered anything – evidence of a struggle, blood, a weapon. Her phone would be a good start, because she’s not got it on her.’
‘Right you are.’ As I walked away, I glanced at the woman and thought how sad she looked, how plain and unadorned.