The Last Summer of the Water Strider
Read The Last Summer of the Water Strider Online
Authors: Tim Lott
Summer of the
Water Strider
By Tim Lott
Memoir
The Scent of Dried Roses
Young Adult Fiction
Fearless
How to Be Invisible
Fiction
White City Blue
Rumours of a Hurricane
The Love Secrets of Don Juan
The Seymour Tapes
Under the Same Stars
The Last Summer of the Water Strider
First published in Great Britain by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Tim Lott 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of
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Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The right of Tim Lott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84737-304-5
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In memory of Alan Watts, 1915–73
Contents
I
t was one of the distant, lost afternoons of the 1970s when I first met Crazy Uncle Henry. The week, the month, the year – they don’t
matter. Henry taught me that. The divisions of the calendar and of the clock are nothing more than ripples sketched on water.
I was seventeen years old. I had heard rumours of Uncle Henry, but I had never actually met him. Visits weren’t encouraged by my father, and, so far as I knew, were never soli cited by
Henry either.
All I knew about Henry was what I could find out from my father when he dropped his guard – a rare event. It emerged then from time to time as a garbled bulletin. Henry was on the run from
the police in Mexico. Henry had made a ‘packet’ smuggling ‘pot’, but had blown it all on a sports car that he crashed into a tree in Cap Ferrat. Henry had hooked up with the
Maharishi Ji in Rishikesh and had converted to Vedantism. Neither my father nor I had much idea what a Vedantist was, but my father was convinced that it was in some manner disreputable, or
inauthentic – ‘a con’. Most recently, the story was that Henry was living on a riverboat in the West Country with a waif – a ballet dancer by some accounts, a singer by
others – who suffered from bouts of schizophrenia, or paranoia, or common-or-garden madness.
These dispatches were delivered to me by my father with a speck of reluctant amusement that was edged by a corona of disapproval. Ray worked hard and followed the rules. He smelled faintly of
leather and other people’s socks, and bore a slight stoop from undertaking too many fittings in the shoe shop he managed. He died at the age of sixty-three of a heart attack, selling a pair
of Doc Marten boots disapprovingly to an impertinent Goth who had goaded him about his display of buckled patent-leather loafers. He did the right thing all his life and as a result he never really
had a life. So the idea that his brother could profit from reckless and irresponsible behaviour offended his sense of natural justice.
Henry, two years older than my father – he had just turned fifty when I first met him – was, according to Ray, a ‘weirdo’. He’d trod the Katmandu trail, he’d
ridden the Marrakesh Express, he’d worked as a roadie for the Stones, he’d met Timothy Leary in San Francisco, he’d been on the Haight-Ashbury before it degenerated into a freak
show. Lately, he was claiming to have cleaned himself up and to be working on a Book That Would Change the World.
From the photographs I’d seen, he was physically impressive, long and lean with chiselled cheekbones and heavy-lidded, mesmeric grey eyes. It would have been impossible to guess, at a
glance, that he was my father’s brother – Ray was four inches shorter, with a face that was somehow deeply generic; you could imagine that there were thousands of Rays, but only one
Henry. The roundness and redness of middle age, the lank brown hair that was losing its struggle for purchase, the eyes that held no distinguishable colour at all, the softening of the angles of a
face that had never been very angular in the first place.
Henry, said Ray, never quite without bitterness, always had money. This good fortune, coupled with Henry’s recklessness, was another source of grievance for my father. Ray was not quite
sure where Henry obtained his alleged money – my father suspected it was from the rich, beautiful women Ray believed he consistently picked up and discarded like motes picked idly out of the
air – but he had managed to get through most of his adult life without a straight job.
It was my father who christened him Crazy Henry. So far as I know, no one else ever called him that.
Although I feigned indifference – my personality being scarcely formed, indifference was all I had in the way of psychological stock – I was intrigued when Ray told me that Crazy
Uncle Henry was coming to visit. I was looking forward to something – anything – that might interrupt the inertia of the passage of time in Buthelezi House, the very ordinary low-rise
council block in which we lived.
The name of the block belied its absolutely quotidian nature. A far-left council, infiltrated by Trotskyists, named the block after the Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, founder of the Inkatha
Freedom Party, who was in those days at least as well known a symbol of the South African struggle as his rival in the ANC, Nelson Mandela. Whether Chief Buthelezi was pleased with the honour
bestowed on him, I could not say, but certainly all the residents I ever met had their doubts, envying those neighbours in the more conventional Chesterton House or The Pines. ‘I mean, who
wants to say they live in Buthelezi House? It’s not exactly Hyde Park Gate, is it?’ was Ray’s view of the matter.
I didn’t really think of living in Buthelezi House as living at all. It was a process, a situation, that fell well short of life. Worse, there was no sense of latency – merely the
certainty of further stasis. It felt that it would be for ever. I sometimes wished it was violent, or crumbling, like some nearby council blocks – there was at least a certain grim drama to
poverty and decay. But it was well kept and respectable, with carefully tended communal gardens and lifts that worked.
It wasn’t only our location that oppressed me. The entire decade seemed to have got stuck somewhere, in the craw of something, choked off, the flow of air restricted. It was as if we were
waiting for a new time to bloom while the old one was on life support, waiting for the plug to be finally pulled. The cheap brightness of the 1960s was exhausted, but there was no sign that its
long vapour trail was ready to evanesce, leaving the sky clear for new beginnings. The stultification expressed itself in triviality: novelty records crowded the charts; adults dressed as children
in violently coloured dungarees and stacked cartoon shoes. Terry and June had replaced JFK and Jackie O as icons of the age.
My father warned me what to expect of Henry, despite the rumours of reinvention and literary aspiration. Henry was liable to be dirty, dishevelled and barely articulate. He would be high on some
psychotropic substance or other. He would inevitably ask for money, or a favour, since there was no other reason my father could imagine him coming to visit. Ray hadn’t seen Henry for fifteen
years – although he had received the occasional letter, and even more occasional phone call – but he had little doubt that his brother would be unchanged, that was to say, feckless,
self-involved and entirely out of touch with what Ray liked to think of as reality.
He would not necessarily be unhinged – my father had spoken to him on the telephone in the shop several weeks before, at which time the visit was arranged (we did not yet have a telephone
at home), and had reported him to be fundamentally coherent. But it was suggested that I would be unable to make much sense of anything he had to say. Ray’s theory was that the drugs would
have reduced his brain to residual tissue a long time ago.
When Uncle Henry actually arrived, one monochrome afternoon, on a late-winter day stillborn by a sterile, uncommitted sun, he was nothing like my father had described. As he stepped into our
bland, overly kempt hallway, he was wearing a verdigris-coloured Harris tweed suit and polished chestnut leather brogues of the kind that I had seen the landed gentry wear in nostalgic films. It
was clear that my father had expected tatty jeans, a scruffy beard and possibly a kaftan, and was taken aback by Henry’s businesslike appearance – even though the business might have
been that of a sturdy yeoman buying livestock at a village fair fifty years before.