River Heard from a Great Distance by Jeffrey Wilson

We had an alchemy available to us when we were young, Clyde and me. It turned the ground to lava and sticks into swords. We called it “The Game,” and flailing hand motions were its usual means of expression, as well as the wooden playthings we crawled on at school. Most anything could be metamorphosed for our purposes. The Game had rules — rules that were spontaneous, arbitrary, and binding. Legos took the treatment especially well.

Generally, Clyde was better with the bricks, but he was wasteful and prone to overly grand flourishes. Still, you couldn’t deny the effect. There were only so many grey bricks, and so building castle walls was a tricky business. It was it was my idea to use a line of yellow and red bricks, or even Duplo bricks, for structure.

But here we were, stumped by problems beyond architecture. We had lost the white ninja hood. It was unique among all our pieces, and a vital character trait. Worse, we were at Clyde’s house, and this piece came from one of the two sets that technically belonged to my brother. But he didn’t play with them enough and he was old anyway. Clyde thought it would be best to set the scene on top of his mother’s old leather and buckle chest that was playing coffee table to two right-angled couches, each draped with enormous white bedsheets. The setup was ideal for an acropolis or plateau tucked against two vast, snow-drenched mountain chains for The Game. The castle we’d half-built was on the floor with us, carefully placed on the green, uncushioned play rug.

Clyde was quick, and I always felt he was inaccurately designed given his contents. He had too much forehead put in than was strictly necessary and his eyes were far too dull for someone who wasn’t a seen-it-all policemen or a housewife eight hours into a reality TV binge. They were murky green dips in a field of freckles, which were strangely absent from his forever running nose. His hair grew in an even, deep carrot color that was so uniform it looked almost like extruded Play-Doh, and it had about as much shine. It announced him wherever he went. But he had a calm demeanor — bristling only against injustice. Though he had started wearing glasses like me, they were much thinner, his eyes much more keen — enough to catch grasshoppers better than anyone. If he got stuck on things, he was quick to defer to my judgment, and I did the same, so things flowed breathlessly when we conducted “The Game.” We came to our conclusions about the white ninja within moments. The white ninja was on the run and had to stay hidden.

It was always like that with the white-hooded ninja. A clever escape at the last moment, but without the hood, there was no disguise — and on top of the chest, looking out over the lush landscape, the four rivers, and the mountains — there was no escape.

The white hood was vital because it hid the ninja’s unique secret. The white ninja was a girl. This was remarkable, because it was the ‘90s, and girls had not yet been invented. Her face, printed on a yellow piece otherwise identical to her Lego comrades, sported lashes and red lips. In her ninja headband sat a red stone. Clyde had noticed that it matched the one on the King’s crown, and surmised she could only be the King’s daughter.

“But she’s special, and with a ninja outfit, she’s got to be a thief,” I told Clyde.

Breathlessly he carried the line: “The most famous thief in all the lands, she stole the King’s starry garnets.” We knew these gems were rarer than any others, because our teachers said they only came from two places: India and beneath our own feet.

“Of course, she’s the princess, no one else could get as close, and no one can explain how the white ninja does —“

“— How she gets into secret areas. But the things she steals don’t show up again.”

“Because she doesn’t sell them, or use them, she has a plan.”

“But now she can’t hide her face, so everyone would know.”

All she could do was stand at the edge and look out over the two-dimensional forests, the outline of the castle, her distant home. The Game had rules. Bareheaded, she was forced to flee.

“But the ninjas, the knights?”

“Her brothers.” Clyde said, and of course he was right, what else could they be? Seven or so of the King’s sons, sent in pursuit of the craftiest criminal the kingdom knew. At the cliff side they’d cornered her. Swords carefully snapped into small plastic claws and rotated. Clyde looked at me, worried what I might say next.

“Stand down, there’s nowhere to go!” Clyde said, and my hand hovered over the white ninja, guarding it.

“Put your hands up!” the brothers shouted, fanning out. With a look towards Clyde, I slowly tilted her arm upward, and then the other.

Clyde began to unhook the eldest brother from the ground.

With a wail, I knocked back Clyde’s hand and the brothers fell backwards, in awe of the wonders — the rushing, crackling sound of trees being uprooted, and a sudden whoosh. The Couch Mountains that loomed even above the plateau and the cliff side had all at once thrown up their great sheets of white snow, and the sun and moon and sky were all suddenly walled off by a white cloak of snow and a dark shadow.

Clyde beat at the sheet falling all around him with his fists, “No way!” It lurched and bounded above us, and I took care to snatch the white ninja from on top of the chest, tucking her into my pocket. I leaned against the now bare couch as the sheet settled, and the chest and the carpet with its forests was whited out by what we’d made into falling snow.

***

Clyde’s house was a foreign country, with a rhythm and vocabulary all its own. Lunch, a Spartan affair, was called supper. The house matriarch, Martha, always ate with us. She and I could never quite see eye-to-eye on this business of supper, which for her was usually a few apple wedges, wasabi peas, and buckets of black coffee. Supper was just something “to tide you over” which I might have understood, if every day there weren’t a few cookies served, or a dab of pumpkin custard spooned out from a pie, leaving behind a sad wet crust.

Martha was the root of Clyde’s red hair, and hers — faded to an amber color with the years — hung in a mass of curls from which she was forever pulling forgotten rollers. These would be deposited in a haphazard trail on surfaces around the house throughout the morning. She kept the box on the supper table, alongside the pamphlets, papers, files, magazines, and coffee cups.

The house was unfinished. Its walls were lined with vertical planks of smooth golden brown where it wasn’t drywall. The dining area was one such space, boasting a huge window jutting out with two smaller windows framing it. “I feel like I’ll fall out of it sometimes,” Martha would say as she leaned an envelope against the glass. The window held a little too much outside than seemed possible. Looking out you could see the unfinished deck and the side of the vast aluminum shed where a small saw mill occasionally made noises of agony that dislodged birds from nearby trees. Where the green stopped, the yellow hayfield stretched out, rising to a lower hill and the dark line of trees that hid the blue of the lake in their wispy upper branches. The further hills with their Tamaracks fronted taller mountains with white tops.

She asked what Clyde and I were up to, and he started to tell her, still giddy, about how the white ninja had nearly gotten caught. Clyde explained what he had understood without my ever saying — that the white ninja wore the color to show her mastery over snow, and that with the starry garnets nearly anything was possible — especially when you wanted nothing else but freedom. Martha, however, had a parent’s ear and stopped him short.

“What with the sheet?” She rose and turned her head towards the living area, revealing a glinting curler.

“I keep this sheet on the couch to keep it nice until the walls are up,” she said, setting down her coffee on the table and moving over to the couches and pushing aside the castle and the brothers in their line. She grabbed the sheet and gave it a dramatic smack in the air — I saw a light spray of dust. Some of it, most likely, my own skin. “I know it’s not finished, but how about we move your toys down to your room after supper?”

“Actually those are my Legos,” I said. Clyde looked concerned.

“Oh, well bring them down and remember to keep them sorted.” Martha said.

Clyde huffed. “We can’t move down there yet there’s just a bed.”

“You’ll have more room to play,” she said. I nodded. It seemed plausible.

“The castle is up here though, and we’re not finished,” Clyde continued, with a confidence that had always baffled me.

“Just take it down sweetie.” To this, Clyde gave her one of the incredulous looks available only to the young. Faced with blinding ignorance and injustice he closed his eyes and said, with a certain Sicilian’s tone —

“Inconceivable! We didn’t even finish this one.”

Martha laughed. Clearly she viewed this as irrelevant and I receded into my soup.

“We’ll need a different castle,” I said.

Clyde stuck his tongue against his cheek and signaled uncertainty with his eyebrows.

“The snow. Now that there’s all the snow.”

Clyde finished the sentence. “It all has to melt. The valley’s like a bowl.”

I took my last spoonful of celery and lifted up the soup bowl, letting it list and heel on an imagined current in my hand, and said, “The white ninja can finally sail away. The rivers have to go somewhere. Everybody will have to get on boats.” I saw clearly ships cresting over the backs of grumbling fish the size of mountains, but just making it past before the monsters receded into dark waters.

Martha, clearly not listening, began to talk over us.

“It’ll be good if you bring it down before Evan gets here. Then you guys should go outside. Look, see that elk right on the tree line?” She pointed out of the huge window. I never saw these animals until they were right in the center of the fields, even as my glasses improved at casting life in the correct resolution. Clyde’s keener eyes came from her. Martha could point things out before they even came out of the woods, somehow, and with a quick glance through binoculars could comment on the number of baby deer or notice a deformed club on the antler of a familiar local elk.

“Who’s Evan?” I asked.

“My cousin.” Clyde said. His eyes were dull as ever, but his voice spelled disappointment. He had cousins and relatives all across Mica Flats.

Mica Flats was the dry plateau of hayfields knit through with forests that perched to the south of Coeur d’Alene, the lakeside resort town where Clyde and I both went to school in a neighborhood called Ironwood Square. Mica was “zoned ag,” as Martha would proudly say, and she talked a lot to us about unincorporated and incorporated zones and secret well rights and acre plots and things. Really she just talked a lot in general — usually without stopping and almost always using words like “heavy metals” and “watersheds” and “ombudsman” that were unique to her own dialect. Her house overflowed with papers — water rights, topographical maps, and petitions.

Before supper, Martha would pull her papers off the table and make us wash our hands, an obsession of hers. My hands flaked from so much soaking and caustic soap. I had always had dry skin.

“When you were born,” my mother said to me once, “I thought you were a lizard, you were so dry.” The sentiment often lingered at the back of my head. When I awoke to a dusting of what looked like sand in my bed, I imagined slithering off skin along a forest floor.

Martha stepped outside to move a hose that was always spraying around the yard. She talked about how important it was to keep the grass green, and about droughts, even as she walked onto the porch we could see her mouth still moving through the glass. She never stopped talking.

She often stepped out, but still spoke to us at length about the evils of tracking in dirt. There was something in the ground, something in the accumulation of heavy metals. The phrase was so lovely I often repeated it to myself — something in the accumulation of heavy metals — though I never quite understood what it meant. For her, it meant don’t track in dirt and leave it outside for the grass and the trees to pull up out of the ground.

With no traditional cookie after supper, Clyde and I began to put all the Legos into a paper bag, crushing them so that they crumbled, with a certain glee.

“I think the King spends all his treasure to build the boats,” Clyde said.

“He’ll have to take something magical along with him,” I replied. “Something that he has that no one else does.” In stories kings always had one little thing that made them special — a sea monster on call or a golden fleece or a particularly attractive wife.

“He’ll spend all the gold he has and take all the books and food and he’ll put it in the boats. He’ll take it and the knights will help everyone onto them. Oh, and he’ll take one stone from the castle too.”

I nodded, as the people streamed out of the castle, crowded onto boats and scattered into the bag. “Wait, a stone? Doesn’t she have all the garnets?” I asked, pulling the white ninja from my pocket and dropping her into the bag.

“It’s the foundation stone.” Clyde spoke with a certain authority. He picked up a small book from the floor nearby; it had the English throne with a rock set into the seat as if to block a toilet. “Like this one.”

The implications were numerous. “So the white ninja was wrong! The King’s powers —”

Clyde nodded. “It’s everything.” We proceeded to pack, silently communing about the brilliant double bluff. If she’d stayed, the white ninja might have learned that it was a plain looking rock that had all the magic, but like a fool she’d ran off with ordinary garnets. Questions darkened my mind — how did she call up the snow then? Was she simply that powerful?

The mood passed. It was then that Evan walked in the door. He was tall and had the healthy look of a kid who climbed trees. Clyde introduced us as we all walked downstairs with the Legos, which Evan looked at, wary.

“So you’re Clyde’s friend?” Evan asked. He had brown hair, lightly tanned skin and hips like a snake.

“Yeah, we go to the same school. So you’re Clyde’s cousin?”

“Yeah. Do you guys want to go outside?” Evan asked. As he walked, he seemed to vibrate with energy and disrupt the air around him.

“We’re playing The Game. Do you want a Lego character?” Clyde asked, but Evan bounced on his feet with anxiety, and clearly misheard, because he let out a judgmental “pft.”

At the bottom of the stairs, I realized that Clyde’s house was even less finished down below. A rec room without carpet was a sea of boxes and hangers covering a queen bed and various shelves put up against cold cement walls. A small patch of a pool table’s baize surface was visible beneath a box labeled “walnuts” and a pile of the wooden planks that lined the walls upstairs. Clyde’s room was open to this, where a door might have gone. His room had a cement floor covered with play rugs like the one upstairs. He had a bed pressed against the wall and nothing else inside yet, so the room was vast and open.

“This looks crazy,” Evan said. “Like we’re underground.”

“We are underground,” Clyde said, setting down the Legos in the middle of the room.

“Come on guys, I don’t want to play Legos. I don’t want to be down here. Let’s go outside,” Evan said, bouncing up and down on his feet.

“You just got here. Didn’t you walk here?” I asked.

“Yeah?” Evan had clearly missed my point.

From upstairs we heard a sudden shriek.

“Evan! Did you just track dirt in the house?”

Within minutes of meeting him, Evan proved his uselessness to me with an outpouring of passion. I knew better than to talk to adults, let alone talk back. Clyde could at least try — however ineffectual. But Evan simply had no filter, and insisted he did nothing wrong.

“No I’m clean!” he shouted up.

“Evan, did you take your shoes off?”

“No, I don’t have to.” A ludicrous claim to anyone who knew Martha.

He got us all in trouble, and we still had to go outside. There was nothing to play on, and nothing of interest outside Clyde’s house except scenic vistas and an old ship’s propeller, covered in rust until it had turned into a chunk of something like red coral. There was farm equipment we were forbidden to touch, and occasional wandering cats that weren’t quite kosher. Martha told us to walk around, and talked at length about dirt and the need to wash up. Worst of all, Martha was, for all her clutter, a clean freak. Boxes and papers clogged every pathway — but hands were washed and rewashed and surfaces constantly sanitized. If you were outside in sandals you had to wash off your feet in a bucket before you even got the privilege of washing your hands. Nothing irritated my skin more than the washing.

But wash we did, because Evan was unavoidable, sprouting up at every opportunity when I was over at Clyde’s house. His parents, divorced but living close by, were forever ferrying him and his sisters back and forth, and Martha often acted as the intermediary. Evan’s discomfort among Legos and Clyde’s dusty bedroom required constant forays outside, and thus washings and rewashing of hands and feet —when the summers came Clyde and I began to meet Evan on his own terms, gave in rather than fought, and got to spend our afternoons at Evan’s house on the lake.

Evan’s grandmother, another node in the Mica Flats web, kept a family retreat on the lake, a little cabin up a crisscrossing path of planks down a muddy hill. A single dock protruded from the rocky shore and into the small inlet — a bay lined with similarly small docks and hillside family houses. Where Legos bored him, trees and water and wind restored him. I waddled, too tall for my age, ankles too weak to support me squarely. Evan sprinted. But both of us outpaced Clyde, who often wandered off to gather sticks and would catch up systematically with impressive bursts. For Clyde and me, the outside was never really fertile ground for The Game, not when compared to a good Lego set.

It was here that we grew calloused feet, walking along the stones. When we stepped on a sharp one, not uncommon every couple of days, we spat on our hands and rubbed at the puncture. It was our intuition that saliva healed wounds.

Evan, as he always did, darted in and out of the water. I feared the effect it might have on my skin, but my parents often said I ought to risk it. Martha, though, had forbidden it. For reasons written somewhere in her scattered papers, we weren’t allowed to swim in the lake. She let us walk along it only because her own nostalgia demanded it.

“Let’s go out to the raft!” Evan cried, shedding his shirt and skipping over the surface of the shallow water. Clyde would stand mute, shaking his head, and I would wade a little bit into the water. There was a little line of sand part way in, an improvement over the jagged stones. Clyde sprung up with the unmistakable look of an idea.

“What if the boats finally found a city?”

“The King and his daughter, you mean?” For a long while now since abandoning their drowning kingdom, the citizens had been acting as pirates — swashbuckling, but not particularly violent in our case, because the nature of sea combat was still a little unclear to us. Clyde had made their passage vibrant, describing the boat and its carvings. I had made it perilous, busying the waters with sea monsters.

“Guys! Come on!” Evan was pulling himself onto the raft, still tied to the end of the dock, and wiping the water from his eyes. He called out again in confusion. “Guys?”

“What kind of city?” I asked, happy to ignore Evan’s rule breaking.

Clyde called to Evan. “Come back, we’re playing The Game.” Turning to me he began, “A port, but it’s abandoned, so it’s just empty.”

We watched Evan put his hands together and launch into the water. The raft, older even than our fathers, was three logs held together by metal bands, at once rusted and worn smooth in parts, and knotted together with a green muck. When Evan jumped, it dipped almost all the way into the water, and bobbed up again in his wake and drifted out into the lake.

“A sunken city,” I said, my eyes fixed on the arch of Evan’s arm pulling him through the water. “In the water, on a —“

“A shoal,” Clyde said, in the careful way he read things from the dictionary.

I immediately thought of the propeller that Clyde had in his yard, turned to a deep red chunk of coral by rust. The City of Rust slipped into our view, a patch of brown water where the rusted stones and bones of the city were sleeping. Martha’s words passed through my mind, something in the accumulation of heavy metals. From on high, the water of the lake looked blue, but somewhere it was green with copper and beaded with the foundations of fallen buildings, red with rust.

When Evan came back to the shore, he was upset that we were talking about such things. He’d brought a stick from somewhere offshore.

“Why don’t we just swim?”

“We can’t ask until my mom comes down,” Clyde said. This was the deal, but it took greater forces than we knew to get Martha and Evan’s grandmother to stop talking, as they were both the type made itchy by silence. Anyway, the answer was foretold by Martha’s papers. Evan began to twirl the stick around with his hand. It was beautifully balanced, knotted with a sickle-like bend, and heavy for its size. Better than anything Clyde ever found. He wielded it like a caveman with a femur. Evan started, “Maybe I’m like, the one guy who’s still in the city — you know? Like, they can find me there and I tell them about it.”

“Why was the King looking there though?” Clyde asked.

I pondered this and said. “I think …”

A cloud briefly passed between my mind and the City of Rust. “He’s looking for Evan’s character.”

“So he knows about him?” Evan asked.

“Yeah, he hears a rumor — he’s looking for his daughter.”

Clyde’s face brightened. “The white ninja.”

“You’re making me a girl?” Evan asked.

“Well, maybe you can be another character,” I said, though Clyde and I rarely changed track once we got started. “The King. He had a daughter, but she got lost.” I added, “She got stolen.”

Clyde had caught the thread. “So he’s not just trying to find a place for his people, he’s looking for her? Even though he realized she tried to steal the foundation stone?”

I hadn’t thought of that, but suddenly things came into focus. Helen of Troy had been my model, but somehow Clyde hit the mark more squarely.

Evan pouted. “I’m not going to be a girl.”

“You could try, she’ll be super powerful though. She’ll have magic that she learned in the City of Rust. I think there was a fire there that burned it down. It wasn’t the City of Rust, it was Ironwood.”

Evan moped, continuing to swing the stick, sending sprays of water out.

“Why Ironwood?” Clyde asked.

“Accumulation of heavy metals,” I said, accenting the syllables slowly. “The city got rich because the trees there suck up the metal from the ground.”

Evan examined the stick curiously at this news, and Clyde caught onto the theme quickly.

“The metal in the trees? Like, tree rings in the wood, but they’re metal all the way up?”

“Yeah!” I said. “When autumn comes, the Ironwood leaves rust, and turn redder than red.”

Evan stopped and started a few times. “Stop talking about trees, I don’t want to be a girl.”

“And the Tamaracks have gold in them,” Clyde said.

“Cherry Trees have copper.”

“The city would cut the trees and make tools from the metal. It’s the best metal there is, because the trees are magic.”

“Guys who am I going to be though?” Evan interjected, but we pressed on.

“You can make wands out of the wood, but it’s hard, no one else can do it. The heartwood is the very best, it can be made into anything,” I said.

“So when the city burned down, it was all covered in rust, and the wood on the trees all burnt away, so there were just rusty metal points and stuff,” Clyde added.

I nearly jumped with excitement. “He has to get the secret from someone who knows how, and he has to find his daughter to forgive her, and she even knows about the place, so it’s perfect.”

Clyde got straight to the point as we walked along the shore. “Because that’s where she’s being hidden? Who took her?”

“Maybe someone wanted her garnets, or worse.”

Evan raised the stick, and ran in front of us, facing us and walking backwards along the beach while he waved the stick. “Guys, this sounds cool but I don’t want to play a girl.”

“And he finds her in the city, and he saves her?” Clyde asked.

“But his daughter, what’s her name?”

“I don’t know, but I bet she escapes in the belly of a big fish!”

“Guys! I don’t want to play a gi—” Evan was nearly shouting, he threw the stick, and the curve caught my arm precisely with a sharp thwack. Evan kept stepping back, yelling, but his voice croaked suddenly, and we both heard an incongruous squish.

Evan jumped, his arms flailing, and fell into the water. I grabbed at my arm and looked down at my feet. There on the ground and smeared partly on Evan’s foot, was a slimy mound of wet feathers—a bird’s buckled wing and gleaming entrails. Along the shore we saw a few spots where fish, dull and bright, were lying dead.

Evan was hurt. I felt the blunt pain in my arm flare up. Clyde took a step back, examining the odd mash of feather and scales, lapped by waves.

“Clyde, go up to the house, and keep your mom there.”

“I’ll go tell her!” Clyde said, already running to leave. Evan whimpered.

I cried out, “No! Don’t.” Clyde’s eyes locked with mine. Between us we communicated nothing about the City of Rust or the white ninja, wherever she was.

Evan tried to stand but stopped. On his side, a red gash was clearly expanding. Behind him a shard of rock glinted red. Clyde vanished up the hill.

I spat three great wads of saliva into my palm, and pressed my hand hard against the red wound. My arm was weak with its own pain. His head fell a little, to rest heavily on mine, and I heard low, whimpering breath as I called up more spittle and worked my lips.

When my hand was wet and red I pressed my lips against his side, and fed out dribbles of saliva. Evan yelped, grabbing my head with his hand. Hot like a live coal, I felt the blood in my throat. Evan’s face was wet with tears when I pulled away. I covered the red mark with my hand again and pressed hard.

“Push against me, but hold still.” Evan did so, weakly at first, but then with greater strain, until the hot brand of his side against the pressure of my arm melted into a shared numbness.

As the blood rusted on my lips, the heat dissipated. Evan and I sat there with synchronous, sharp breaths, shuddering. We turned and watched the lake water run slowly up the rocks and roll back down.

Eventually, I felt Evan’s chest move as if it were a part of my own hand.

“I think,” he said, looking back to the point of conjunction, “It’s sticky.”

I examined the wound. It was brown, and my hand looked matted with crust and slime. Evan sniveled, it was redder still underneath. We disentangled, and he sat stiff a while.

Finally, without speaking, Evan rose and took me by the arm. We walked to the water.

With my cupped hand, I fed water over Evan’s wound, and the red streamed down his side, but it didn’t stain his dark shorts. He sniffed up a few last tears and wiped his face. His left arm moved with hesitation. Clyde had seemed to vanish.

“It’s sore,” Evan said.

“But it’s not bleeding.” The cut was bright again, but it looked smaller now. He looked at it carefully, still holding himself up with a hand on my shoulder. I saw my own bruise, tender, where he was leaning on my arm.

“We’re in so much trouble. Why do you guys never do anything but play the stupid game? Martha’s going to blame me!” He said, and carefully he lowered his hand from my shoulder and wet it in the water, sucking in air slightly as his torso lowered.

“Don’t if it hurts,” I said.

He shook his head, and brought up a wet hand and wiped the blood from my lips.

“It got on your chin.”

“Can you walk?”

Evan stood for a moment, inhaled deeper and longer than he had been, and hobbled across the rocks. As he stepped up onto the dirt and the grass he moved more easily, and he walked in a circle for a bit while I washed my face.

I told Evan to put on his shirt, but briefly I held it up and blew on the scab. His stomach tensed, but he understood. Carefully he lowered it down, and we pressed it lightly and pulled it up again to see. It wasn’t stained.

“If you come back to Clyde’s house you can keep your mom from seeing. Martha’s got a bunch of band-aids and stuff in her bathroom too.”

“So I should just ask to sleep over?”

“Yes. Nicely. Don’t mess it up. If you do we’ll get in trouble.”

“We’re already in trouble, we shouldn’t have even gone in the lake. What about your arm?”

“I know,” I said, and tugged at my sleeve.

We walked slowly up the hill to the house, where Martha was waiting with Clyde and Evan’s grandmother. I raised the point of Evan coming back to Clyde’s, and Clyde looked at me with concern. The women looked at each other, and asked if Evan had finished any chores. He hadn’t, but he admitted this meekly. The change in attitude was its own triumph. On the ride back in Martha’s car, she asked if Evan felt sick. I answered for him, saying he had finally, really been worked out by swimming all day. Martha tutted, but wasn’t surprised. Gravely, she asked if we’d tried to swim.

I told her about my dry skin and being born a lizard.