“This isn’t… pagan, is it?” she asked.
“It’s all relative,” I replied after a moment of hesitation, reasoning that this would be the least offensive but most honest answer. Mrs Mikeda didn’t look satisfied; but neither did she complain. I struggled to lift Dana up, supporting her by one arm across my shoulders and half-carrying, half-dragging her out into the biting cold river.
I walked out until the water came up to above my waist, and the mass of it had taken up most of Dana’s weight. From a muddy islet in the middle of the river, a heron regarded me with something resembling bird-brained displeasure that another creature was on its patch. Beyond the little tangle of trees and birds’ nests that made up the heron’s home, a large white boat chugging back from Hampton Court Palace had drifted to a gentle cruise, the tourists leaning over to photograph the odd spectacle of Dana and me in the river, while the driver called out, “Hey, you OK?”
“Baptism!” I replied cheerfully; on the bank Mrs Mikeda flinched even at this much profanity.
The boat moved on by, a handful of the tourists waving and whooping cheerfully as it did. Behind the trees on the opposite bank, the sunlight was dimming to a pinkish burn across the sky, stretching out the shadow of each trunk across the water.
I risked wading a few more yards out into the river, the sediment at the bottom swirling in a gritty cloud around my toes.
“What happens now?” called out Mrs Mikeda from the bank.
“Turn of the tide!” I answered in my best optimist’s voice. “Gotta have some magic in that, right?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’m trying to save your daughter’s life within the tenets of the Orthodox faith. I haven’t a clue!”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing then…”
“Do you have the time?”
“What?”
“The time? It’s freezing out here!”
She looked at her watch. “Six forty-three.”
“Near as dammit,” I muttered, more for my reassurance than hers. I brushed Dana’s wiry hair from her face. Her skin had a pale greyish tint, and around her chin and across the hairline were patches of dry scratchy flesh which were increasingly starting to resemble tar. I leant down so my lips were a few inches from her ear and whispered, “If you can hear me, don’t be afraid. The tide’ll carry it all away.”
“What are you doing?” Mrs Mikeda could make her voice carry like it was a boulder tossed by a giant.
“Don’t be alarmed!” I called back. “Any second…”
… a tugging around my ankles…
“… any second…”
The heron, which had been watching the entire affair with a disinterested look on its unimaginative face, flapped into the sky…
“Oh, stuff it,” I said, pinched Dana’s nose shut with my fingers, took a deep breath and dropped both her and me under the water.
Thames water was once, so I had been told, toxic. Not just slightly unpleasant to drink, but actually lethal to fall into, a straight-to-hospital case. And although news reports still complained about disgusting messes in the water, nowadays these were more about the trash people threw in and the occasional suicide’s body dragged to the surface, rather than the raw sewage defining much of the river’s previous four hundred years.
So it was with a good degree of confidence that I pushed Dana down head first into the water, then let my knees bend and ducked my shoulders down after her. I let the water rush over her head and mine, let it shock my ears into an icy humming, let it tug at my hair and inflate my clothes around me to the size of a hippo as giant air bubbles crawled from under my shirt to pop and burst above my head. Dana didn’t struggle, didn’t squirm; all I had to do was hold her down against the bed of the river against the pressure of her natural buoyancy, and watch the bubbles roll out between her lips. As I held her down for five, ten, fifteen seconds, through the water I could hear Mrs Mikeda screaming, a strange, deep overhead rumble; also the distant
Dana exhaled. Her breath was a thick black stain in the water, slipping out to get tangled in the tide and sucked slowly past her towards the estuary, dozens of miles away. A thin metallic shimmer drifted out of her hair, whose strands started to drift loosely around her head. Grey, tarlike flakes spun away from her face, revealing clear, human skin beneath; the colour rose in her cheeks, her fingers twitched and, at the last, a moment before my lungs were going to burst, her eyes opened; and they were distinctly, irrefutably human, and just a bit beautiful.
I pitched her up out of the water just as she started to kick like a drowning person, and held her upright as the water ran off her face and out of her nose and she coughed and hacked and spat liquid, her hair tangled across her face like seaweed caught in a rudder. Mrs Mikeda was already halfway to us, up to her hips in the river, shouting incoherent curses in Russian; but at the sight of her daughter she stopped dead, hands going to her mouth and shoulders shaking. In the water around us, the clouds of trapped magic that Dana had accumulated drifted and faded into the river, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked up at me with her own senses.
She said, “Uh…”
I said, “Hi.”
Mrs Mikeda said something obscene.
She said, “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so. Have we?”
“Did you just try to drown me?”
“Do I look like I just tried to drown you?” I asked as water dripped off the end of my nose.
“Where is this?”
“Twickenham.”
“What the hell am I doing in Twickenham?”
“Do you think this is really the place to discuss it?”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Matthew. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, looking round at the water flowing around us. “I guess it must be.”
Mrs Mikeda’s friend had left blankets in the back of her car that smelt of wet dog, but we weren’t about to complain. We sat on the edge of the open car boot and ate fish and chips while Mrs Mikeda went in search of a Woolworths that might sell something warmer and fluffier to wrap around her shivering daughter. It took a while for the conversation to get going, but when it did, Dana Mikeda was pretty much to the point.
“So. Twickenham.”
“Yes.”
“I hate Twickenham,” she said, spearing a chip with a savage thrust of her little wooden fork. “I get lost. Always end up in Isleworth, and that’s like Wales.”
“How is it like Wales?”
“One guy gets on a train to Swansea, one guy gets on a train to Isleworth, and you can bet the guy going to Swansea gets there first.”
“I see.”
We watched the sky fade to a pale cobalt blue, and the lights along the riverside start to come on.
“Some shit, huh?” she said finally.
“Does your mother know you swear?”
“Would you like to hear it in Russian?” she asked sharply.
“I’ll live.”
“You’re… what? Like an exorcist?”
“Me? Hell, no. Sorcerer.”
