The Face of the Waters, page 1
The Face of the Waters
The Face of the Waters
Tony McKenna
Copyright © Tony McKenna 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2022
ISBN: 978-1-83919-179-4
www.vulpine-press.com
For Joshua and Nathan Hudson
‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’
Genesis 1:1
Prologue
Mexico 1957
When the flood arrived, it was like nothing he had known. They had been driving in her beat-up truck, its engine sputtering, choking. Somehow it continued down the old dirt road, which ran those many miles from Ciudad Puebla to their village. The air had been hot and clammy, though that was not unusual. But there was something different about it that day; it seemed to tingle with an electric charge. Even though it was early afternoon, there was a strange purple glow on the horizon.
He played with his fingers and thumbs, squirming in the front seat, his small seven-year-old body sinking into the torn, sweltering leather. He felt wrong – he was hungry, yes, but he was used to that. This was something else. Something that shone in his eyes. Shimmered in his head.
He looked up at his mother. Her eyes were dark and unwavering, focussed on the road ahead, the sides of her mouth pinched in sour determination. He wanted to say something, to somehow give voice to the strange feeling swirling inside of him, but he knew better than to speak to his mother when she looked that way.
Besides, he could never find the words.
It came first in a gentle hiss, like the rustle of long grass when the sun was high in the sky. The sound began to build.
‘Escucha, Mamá, escucha! Listen, Mama, listen!’ The words had slipped from his mouth.
‘Escucha, Mamá, escucha!’ she parroted back.
She made the middle word – ‘Mama’ – sound pleading and pathetic, as she always did, her voice laced with a bitterness he knew well but still could not fathom. Normally it would be enough, a warning, but now there was that feeling in the air –it seemed to crackle – and that strange purple hue on the horizon had deepened, throwing a shadow across the top of the truck.
The word slipped out again: ‘Mamá, por favor.’
This time, she didn’t react straight away, but he saw her eyes tighten and knew it was bad. Nothing happened for a few moments. Then she took her right hand from the steering wheel and snapped it back, driving the knuckles into his nose. The pain was instantaneous. The soft cartilage in his nose had been damaged and split by her fists on many other occasions, so it didn’t take much for it to reopen. And yet the pain was worse because the previous injuries had never entirely healed. He wasn’t even able to scream. It was like being winded; all he could do was struggle for breath.
At the same moment, an almighty screeching sound almost caused his mother to swerve the truck off the road. Tens, maybe hundreds, of birds flocked across the near distance. One of them cracked the windscreen with a thud.
‘Puta madre!’ his mother spat.
But that hissing sound had grown now, and he looked past his mother and out through the window, in the direction from which those birds had come. The top of the nearest hill looked strange, as it began to shimmer and curl like it was not solid at all, and then he understood. His eyes made sense of it, as the dull brown tide of water – running as far as his eye could see – flowed over and spilt downwards in a long curling wave. On the one hand, it seemed like this was happening in slow motion; only when he blinked that wave of water was inexorably closer, and the sound had heightened. He went to say something to his mother again, only the blood had clogged his nose and drenched his mouth, and the fear he felt now was more than the whimpering, helpless fear he felt every day of his waking life. It was an absolute, paralysing sense of terror, for he was certain this was the end of the world.
She made a sound. When his mother finally caught sight of the water, she made a sound. An ughh. Not quite surprise. Not quite fear. Only a dull sense of bafflement.
And then the water hit.
All at once, it was as though the world was screaming. The rushing water, the thudding violence of the truck being upturned, the shattering of glass, and then all those sounds died as they were sucked under. The water flooded in, and the feeling of shock – the feeling of its cold – hit him, and the sense of the cold water, the blood from his nose, and the pounding of his temples all rolled into a series of shuddering images. He was choking and spluttering as the light from above dulled in a thick grey-blue.
He passed out momentarily. Then felt someone’s hands on him, pulling him. He felt the moment when his head broke the surface, gasping for air. They were flowing forwards now, the thick muddy tide carrying branches and dead animals and pieces of debris from houses and cars. He could barely keep his head above the water.
His mother held him up, her face grim and determined, pulling him along in her wake. He heard her breathing in harsh rasps and was aware of the anger in her eyes, as though this indecipherable chaos was merely one more attempt to undo her on the part of some demented cosmological power.
He did not know how long he was in the water. Eventually, he felt himself hauled out onto a small island of rocks. The sun had fallen out of the sky, and the last rays of light illuminated the tawny water, which flowed all around them. It was colder now, and he shivered, wet and damp. He sat on one side. She sat on the other. She had limped towards her resting place, and before the light had died completely, he saw the gash on her leg. It looked as thick and prominent as her lips when she would go out at night in her best dress and put lipstick on, which was blood red. He had always liked that. For it was in those moments when she was nicest to him. Sometimes she would even kiss him on the forehead before she left. Afterwards, he would touch his finger to that spot and look miraculously at the impression of red left on its tip.
Only now, the red and the thickness was something else entirely.
She saw him looking.
‘What are you staring at?’ she snapped, but her voice was weaker now.
He wanted to say something. Only he could never find the words.
He woke up in the night. He watched her. She was snoring softly.
The next day the water was still flowing. He looked out across it. He felt a moment’s happiness because he was on an island, which meant he could go exploring. He looked out across the brown water and into the distance. The water seemed to flow and flow until, at some point, it reached the hazy blue of the firmament above.
He returned to his mother. She was lying by the same rock, looking up, glaring at him.
‘Why don’t you do something useful?’ she said. Her voice sounded weaker still.
He thought about the question. He resolved to do something useful. He gathered up some moss and green plants and brought them to her. He didn’t know exactly why. Perhaps they were magic. The shaman talked of such things. She looked at the offering contemptuously and closed her eyes. There was a strange smell coming from her. He thought it might be coming from her leg. Those red lips had now grown a scale of seeping yellow across them.
It was night again. He didn’t know how that had happened. He heard a sound and peered up. Underneath the stars, he could just make out the shape of her face. He could see it moving. She was eating. He crawled forward, his swollen belly suddenly throbbing with hunger. He saw her eyes gleam the moment she caught sight of his movement. He could smell both her leg and the sodden burrito she was biting into. He couldn’t say for sure, but somehow, he knew she was looking at him with that same bitter sharpness – ‘Escucha, Mamá, escucha!’
From within the gloom, a small packet hit him. He picked it up, soft and meaty. He devoured it at once, panting in pleasure.
‘I’ve always given you everything. And you have always just sucked it up. Like a little animal.’ Her voice was strangely bereft; she was making a statement of fact.
Moments later, she was snoring again.
He could see she had shit herself. He didn’t want to look. He had done his own business on the other side of the rocks; she could no longer move. His eyes were drawn to the trickle of her faeces dribbling down her diseased leg. She had not said anything for a while. But now, the grey film across her eyes seemed to disperse – she was conscious again, shrewd. She saw the moment of his realisation, his comprehension – the fact that she had soiled herself.
Her lips crinkled in a genuine smile. ‘Doesn’t pretty baby wanna give his mama a huggy wug?’
Sometime later, it was night again. In the darkness, crabs scuttled across the rocks; he could see their zigzagging shadows in the black.
He awoke suddenly when he fel t the smooth sleekness of a snake sliding over his legs, its scales still damp with fluid. His beating, bursting heart felt as though it might break.
He felt her eyes on him again. The stench from her leg pervaded the air. She tried to sit up, but she couldn’t quite do it. She reached out an arm. She stabbed her hand at him through the gloom. She belched and gurgled.
Finally, her voice arrived, low and subdued, yet filled with terminal poison. ‘You …’ she rasped. ‘Do you know what you are?’
He drew closer instinctively, but he did not know what he was. He did not say anything. But she continued as though triumphant, as though this was something she had waited a whole lifetime to say.
‘You,’ she said, ‘are a … rape baby!’
She giggled.
He blinked.
‘Do you know what that is?’
There was a strange intensity to her voice, and part of him thought that she might actually be telling him something nice. Part of him wanted to cling onto that more than anything, for he had become so tired. He thought that neither of them might ever leave this place, and he desperately wanted her to tell him something nice because he felt so frightened.
At a deeper level, there was something wrong in that voice, in that word. ‘Rape’ – he did not know what it meant, but it sounded like something sharp and awful. The way she’d said it was both bitter and gleeful.
Again, he wanted to say something, needed to say something, only his voice died in his throat.
When he woke up, the sun was burning his eyes. Those small crabs were there again, but this time they were moving in and out of the wound in his mother’s leg. Only, she was no longer moving. Her face was washed out and grey. He pulled himself up, swiped the crabs away, went to say something to her, one final time, and finally, the words arrived:
‘Te amo, Mamá! I love you, Mama!’
He had heard other children say this to their mamas, so it seemed like something he should do.
The night came so quickly once more, and the hunger was unbearable. He tried to catch the crabs, but they moved too fast, and he was so slow and tired.
The following day he crawled towards his mother’s corpse. He was crying, but there was no longer any moisture in his eyes. Her mouth was open, her teeth bared.
He pulled on her arm. ‘Mamá, por favour! Ayudame. Mama, please. Help me.’
Those grey eyes were dissolving. Creatures had worked on them in the night. The smell from her wound was less pungent now, even though her leg throbbed with activity.
He brought her palm to his face – she would never have touched him with such tenderness in reality. He pressed her fingers against his skin.
‘Ayudame, Mamá!’
He smelt the tips of her fingers, the fragments of the burrito she had eaten days earlier. In desperation, he sucked those fingertips for the last scraps of flavour. He was so hungry. He was starving.
And that was when his teeth pushed into those fingertips a little harder.
One
Mexico 1991
It was raining. The hot summer shower fell on the parched concrete of downtown Puebla City, throwing up a vaporous mist. The nasal sounds of dry, angry horns from the traffic-clogged streets broke against the thick hot air. The water pattered against a large grey building, a monotonous lulling sound – something one wasn’t quite aware of but at the same time couldn’t quite tune out. Outside, the pall of the clouds threw a strange shadow onto the building. Though it was only a little past noon, the normal graduations of light to dark, which demarked the passing of the day, had been thrown out of kilter; it seemed as though time itself was not quite on its axis. The air was nervy, charged with static; it felt the way it did in the hours before the coming of a storm, only the clouds in the sky were sluggish and low-hanging, fissured with muted light.
The intermittent buzz of the stuttering air conditioning provided little relief against the stultifying air. In exasperation, some of the police officers threw open the large windows, while others pressed paper flannels soaked in tepid water against fissured sweaty brows. The weather was so close that it seemed to cling to bodies; clothes, hair, skin. The moisture slickened beards and eyebrows. Squeaked in the smalls of backs. Nestled in the crevices behind knees.
There was no respite. Phones at the desks shrilled incessantly, and nerves frayed. Commands were uttered in taut toneless voices, and pulses in temples quickened and throbbed. One young man, though, seemed impervious to it all. Brown eyes shining with lively anticipation, he came bounding up to an older, heavier set man whose stocky frame was compressed into a cheap, faded, and ill-fitting suit.
‘Hombre! You have to check it out. This fucking woman! You have to see it for yourself, man! Can you second me?’ the younger man said.
Armando looked at him. José Luis was twenty years his junior, and sometimes he felt the age difference. Today, even more so.
‘What have you caught? What’s the case?’
The young man whistled through his teeth, his lips crinkled in a crooked smile. He peered at the other shrewdly.
Armando’s voice came in a murmur. ‘Por favor, chico, it’s not the weather for games. You expect me to go in there cold?’
‘I’m just bustin’ your balls. It’s a domestic, a bullshit complaint, that’s all. No tech, no prep. But this woman, Jesús Cristo, you gotta take a look at her.’
When Armando arrived at the interview room, two women were sitting at the desk.
One was small and young with a pale white peach-shaped face, pretty but fragile. The silk black of her dress hung thinly over an androgynous body, and her whole physical bearing was turned inwards in a perpetual flinch.
The other woman had the same colouration, the same dark, moist eyes, but the resemblance ended there. It was like seeing a moon on the far side of a planet; this woman was vast – reams of billowing fat staggered in layers of undulating flesh, out of which pushed a head festooned with thick, greying hair and jowls of soft doughy skin. She had been marked up – one eye was swollen purple and black, and a big yellow bruise marred the side of her face. The nostrils of her reddened puggish nose flared, indignant but mournful.
‘I’d like to present you with my colleague, Detective Armando José Maria. He is an expert on … social and domestic issues, having spent many years in Mexico City University doing various case studies …’ José Luis looked at Armando knowingly. His eyes twinkled at this piece of ridiculous fiction. No one in the lower ranks of the police force had a degree.
But the larger woman sniffed and drew herself up as though mollified by the seriousness with which the police were treating her case – a detective no less.
José Luis gave a supercilious smile. ‘So, if you will just tell him what you told me, from the start.’
‘I … I … the motherfucker, this sordid hijo de puta … that I call my son-in-law …’ Her voice came out in a claxon blast, which seemed to reverberate the air and echo in their ears. It was almost cartoonish – nasal and husky before building to its whiny crescendo.
Armando inwardly winced; he had knocked back the best part of a bottle of whisky the night before, the heat making it hard to sleep. The hard, bright light of morning had arrived early and remorseless, his sweat-soaked sheets still clinging to him. His hangover, coupled with the screech of her voice, made the interview difficult to sit through.
But she continued. ‘He has been insulting my daughter. He calls her all the names, muy grosero, and hits her too. But she is my blood, and I will not stand for it. So, I tell him as much. And when I am not expecting it, the cabron clocks me with an iron!’
José Luis turned his eyes to Armando, struggling to fight off laughter.
But Armando couldn’t feel the humour in it. Her voice was like a rake being pulled across his head. He rubbed his eyes and looked at her again. The sheer bulk of her – she was more beast than woman, a hulking, sagging cow who had birthed a weak, pallid calf and was now trembling with instinctive maternal rage. Eyes wide, tongue lolling, her whole body drenched with sweat and fury.
Armando felt a sudden sense of profound sympathy for the son-in-law; it must have felt satisfying to bludgeon this great ox with the iron. He was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner.
