Hidden Depths

One of my favourite places in the world is just outside my hometown of Addingham, Yorkshire. The place I’m talking about is nothing like the town, though, despite its proximity. It’s unassuming, but not in the dull, schist pebble way Addingham is. On a good day, when sun slithers through the leaves and dapples the ground with green tinted light, and the air is saturated with the inebriating perfume of bluebells, it could even be considered beautiful. It’s also one of the most dangerous places in the world, but it saved my life, so I think it’s unfair to label it like that. The fact is, if treated with respect, Bolton Strid is nothing more than a natural marvel.

The Strid is part of the River Wharfe, a perennial, tributary river, draining into the much larger Ouse. While mostly a bog standard example of running water, Bolton Strid – contained in the functionally named Strid Wood – is an incredibly narrow section where the Wharfe practically turns on its side to squeeze through a natural rock formation. When viewed from the shore, the deadly, racing water is disguised as a gentle stream, narrow enough that even kids can leap across. Nobody knows how deep it is, but my dad used to warn me if I fell in I’d be dragged under the current and bashed against unseen, jagged rocks until I was fish food.

‘You’ll be fine if you’re careful,’ he’d say, before adding, ‘but Lord help you if you’re not.’

#

My family would often go to Strid Wood when I was younger, and Dad was still alive and mostly sober. We’d hop along with Mum, a perfect little family, chasing faeries and identifying plants, pretending to be lost in the wilderness even though our car was never more than a short walk away. It was an ideal escape, just sanitised enough to not be scary. Except for the Strid. When we’d walk past that little section of river, where it narrowed and tightened so the water was forced underground like a hidden predator, Dad’s face would lose its lines of laughter, his grip on my hand suddenly hard and icy.

Dad, a gregarious Philosophy lecturer at Leeds University with a penchant for theatre and Japanese culture (especially the whisky), had always taught me the value of nature, and this extended to my diet. I was vegan from a young age, an inherited choice, but one I never felt compelled to change. When it came to that sort of thing I thought Dad was always right, even as his hands began to tremor, his cheeks hollowed and reddened, and the rest of him took on a sallow tint that made his skin look like old wensleydale cheese.

Mum was a bit different. She’d not studied past her GCSE’s, or O-Levels as she called them, but had a postgraduate’s passion for literature, always teasing Dad that fiction was better than philosophy when it came to getting people to change their minds. She preferred the familiarity of town to the anonymous bustle of built-up areas and hated that she had to work in Leeds. However, like Dad, she loved careening from pub to party with friends. Or had loved it, before his life trickled away thanks to cirrhosis. In the weeks after his death she spent most of her time in bed, occasionally dragging herself to what we now call a ‘zero hours contract’ role at one of the betting stores in Leeds city centre.

He died when I was fourteen. Mum and I barely talked the days after it happened, mostly remaining in our respective rooms, his absence blanketing us in a suffocating silence. I didn’t even watch television, the thought of breaking the noiseless impasse with something as inane as Countdown almost sacrilegious. The screen became an empty, black space that reminded me of the presence we were missing. Like with the Strid, there was a sinister undercurrent to all this quiet, something painful I didn’t quite know how to parse out and was afraid to delve too far into. I did with my feelings about Dad’s death what he’d told me to do with the disguised stretch of water, and left them alone.

#

When most people who know about Addingham hear its name, they probably conjure up images of identikit suburban streets, befuddled, red faced OAPs, and hooded youths with too much time on their hands acting aggressively towards unsuspecting pedestrians. A standard English town, really. In the nineties, growing up vegan in a place like that was never going to be easy, but the vitriol I received for turning down bacon butties and ordering tea-no-milk was as barbaric as factory farming. Adults would generally give me a funny look when they found out, but the kids my age were merciless. Mostly I would get lumps of stringy, off-white chicken (or whatever other slop the canteen was serving that day) thrown at me. Occasionally, I’d be held down as bits of rubbery, overcooked steak were shoved in my mouth, grease seeping into my pores, leaving a stench that wouldn’t wash away for hours. The most egregious bullying took place around the backs of buildings or in secluded, barely utilised corridors, meaning the school wasn’t aware of it. I didn’t want to make it worse by being labelled a snitch, so I kept quiet.

Despite my silence Dad knew something was up, although I doubt he guessed the severity of it, or he might have been more hands-on in his response. As it was, his way of helping me to deal with whatever problem he thought I had was to introduce me to meditation, telling me how it was possible to train my mind to enter a state of total control in even the most stressful situations. But whenever I’d sit in a silent room with him and let tendrils of incense wrap themselves around me, I could never concentrate like I was supposed to, a rogue itch or uncomfortable pain in my arse cheek ruining my focus. But Dad’s efforts weren’t totally useless; when he was alive, the closest I came to forcing my brain into doing something like meditation was during these bullying episodes. Sometimes it felt like my mind was a muscle I could twitch and tense to force myself to exist outside the horror, like it was happening to someone else, but that freedom was sporadic. Most of the time it was horrible. The seconds would slow down, each moment imbued with a combination of pain and shame and fear that gummed up the gears of time.

The bullying got a bit better as I started at the Secondary Comprehensive in nearby Skipton, but a lot of others from Addingham Primary ended up there, and by that point certain boys had reputations they didn’t want to see eroded. My preference for cultural pursuits over things like football and girls didn’t help, either. One boy in particular, James, had it in for me, like his hatred had been channelled my way by some external force.  It was only me, too. In our homogenous, working-class school, I was the easiest target. I was the most different. I was the most unnatural.

#

Rivers run throughout the world and have been at the heart of countless civilisations. We harness their power all the time, damming them, forcing them into estuaries, and even leeching off them to create canal systems to ply our trade and make life easier for ourselves. But we can never really control them. The Thames Estuary, the Hoover Dam – one long rainy season or a few hundred more years of gentle erosion, and suddenly all that bound power is unleashed. Most importantly, unlike us, the river has time. That’s what makes it free. Free to go where it wants, to wreak havoc or save lives. A freedom that’s the opposite of growing up in a shitty, boring town in North Yorkshire, surrounded by communities that have been left to shrivel up and die because successive governments were too busy diverting funds to their friends in big cities.

#

After Dad died, all the bullies except James backed off, streams of punches drying up under the glare of pity. I thought James’s continued hatred was strange since our parental situation was now kind of reflected, only a few ripples stopping perfect symmetry. Even though we were as far from friends as possible, around here that didn’t mean being complete strangers. So, I knew his father had worked in one of the last coal mines to close, Allerton Bywater, and his mother had died before he’d moved here, during our last year of primary school. It was just the two of them, like Mum and me.

James had made me lose plenty of sleep over the years. I’d often spend hours ensconced in a membrane of cold sweat at the prospect of seeing him the next morning. Even so, I hadn’t thought him too different from the other bullies, other than the fact he was a bit of a loner. But after Dad’s death it was like he’d tasted blood in the water. Nearly every time he saw me he’d go for me, usually just a quick smack but sometimes more sustained treatment, his reaction seemingly as natural as sediment stirring in the rain.

A fortnight or so after Dad’s funeral he had to be pulled off me by some other kids. Although most of that incident was a flash of red and white, I can clearly picture the loathing in his eyes, hard and cold and unbending like deep winter. I’m certain if he hadn’t been dragged away, he would have kept going until I was in the same state as Dad. I spent the next week hiding the purple oceans on my face, unable to eat much more than soup. Mum was easy to avoid, and the teachers didn’t say anything: I wasn’t the first nor last to come into school with a bruise-smudged face.

At that time, all I knew of James beyond his basic biography was him pinning me down at lunch and forcing sliced, processed ham down my gullet, then beating me senseless because the bile that filled my mouth splashed onto his hand. I didn’t know anything about his homelife, other than his father could usually be found at The Sailor, spending his dole on pints of bitter and the fruit machines. Now I know about the beatings, neighbours kept up by sharp blows on fragile skin that sounded like water slapping rock, whimpers seeping through the walls like damp. But at school, he was the aggressor. He had the power.

Our Secondary school was the sort of institution that crammed thirty-five kids into a twenty-capacity classroom and had to have two lunchtimes so everybody could eat, so when I started skipping class a few weeks after Dad passed nobody seemed to notice. It wasn’t like I contributed much, anyway. For my first few days of seclusion I spent my newly acquired free time in the toilets, reading magazines or taking in the graffiti that lined the stalls. The scent of urinal cake quickly started to soak into my dreams, so I decided to try another tactic: when I left for school in the mornings I’d not begin the forty-minute cycle west to Skipton, but instead head up Bolton Road, away from town and against the flow of the Wharfe.

The first time I did this I ended up in Strid Wood. Being greeted by the fresh scent of sessile oak trees was like donning a cloak of nostalgia, which is probably why I found myself pedalling there the next day, and all the schooldays after that, brain on autopilot, floating me somewhere positive. During the week the trail was mostly empty, but I always brought a change of clothes with me in case someone saw my uniform and grassed me up to school. Because of this I remained undisturbed for nearly a month.

Dad told me Nietzsche once said: “Your bad love of yourself makes solitude a prison for you.” This was true in the toilets, where the unseen remnants of other people’s waste weighed on me and horrible thoughts cascaded through my mind. However, the rhythms of the Wharfe washed away the most hateful parts of my internal monologue, and the air by the water was fresh and clear. Breathing it felt like an ablution. Here, in the pseudo wilderness, solitude was a friend. Which was probably why James decided I shouldn’t be allowed to have it anymore.

#

Dad was the one who taught me that rivers have been vital for us thriving as a species. It’s absurd to me how nobody talks about this, despite our language being rife with river talk. In English, the word ‘rival’ comes from having to fight for water access; ‘arrived’ from boats floating down the river into town; and ‘derive’ from forcing water through a small passage – kind of like the Strid. India’s breadbasket, Punjab, is named for the five rivers that cross it. And that’s just ‘river’; if we include ‘brooks’ and ‘streams’ and ‘becks’, or look at other languages, it’s clear that a surge of words springs from our rivers and flows right into our daily speech.

‘I have learned from the river too – everything comes back,’ Hesse wrote in Siddhartha. That might be true of the Ganges, but if something drops in the Strid it won’t come back, even if the person who lost it reaches nirvana and waits around for eternity.

#

I heard James shouting before I saw him. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I recognised his hulking frame, unsettling against the tranquil backdrop of creeping buttercups and fen violets. My bike was chained up in the direction he was coming from, so I immediately sprinted off into the woods. I’d only been there a few minutes, so it was likely he’d followed me from home. By that time I was so used to my routine I would arrive on autopilot, unaware of what else was around me. Looking back, I can’t help but think his only release was lashing out at me. When I took that away, he must have been desperate as an addict to get it back.

He was on two wheels, gaining on me, and there was no path off the main trail. While I was sprightly and knew my way around, I was sure he’d catch me in the tangle of plants and roots if I went offroad. His savage strength would allow him to tear a clear path while I would have to meander through obstacles.

Every time I twisted my neck back to look at him he got a little bigger. My feet faltered, scraped the rocky path, kicked up more dust than air. I stumbled. Fear rumbled from deep within me and exploded in a tsunami of adrenaline, smashing through the previously impenetrable cage of grief that I’d been locked in for weeks. I landed my next few steps awkwardly, my soles slapping the path arrhythmically like the death throes of a fish out of water. But I landed them. I was still moving forward, and that was all that mattered.

The sound of blood pumping flooded my ears; my breathing became panting. The stumble had cost me some speed, and soon I could hear the clicking of his wheel spokes, even over the deafening sounds of my body trying to keep going. We were deep in the trail, unlikely to be found.

In the weeks since Dad had died, even during the beating where James had been pulled off me, his passing had coloured everything. Fears of abandonment and destitution, and the feeling something had irrevocably changed for the worse, had dulled the world. Nothing in it seemed to have a spirit anymore. Songs I’d once felt a soulful connection to no longer resonated; books I’d loved were dense and impenetrable. I was afraid my grief had let me in on an unpleasant secret: that life simply wasn’t worth the emotional pain you might endure during it.

However, as James corralled me into further isolation, I wasn’t thinking of Dad. My throat was so dry it felt like it had been gritted. My pace was slowing, legs aching as if I’d been plunged into freezing water. I turned around once more, despite what it did to my speed and balance, and saw James just a few feet away. He would catch up any second. A new fear was driving me. A deep, primal fear. The kind of fear that made me desperate to live.

I don’t know if it was luck or instinct or a sort of inexplicable fate that led me to the Strid. I’d like to think it was the latter, the kind of fate reminiscent of a smattering of pebbles dropping into a small stream millions of years ago and directing it so it flowed towards one valley instead of another. The kind of fate that created rivals and allowed for arrivals. Regardless of what made me do it, I turned off the path and my strides got choppier, smaller. I had to get this right.

#

Brecht has a quote about rivers, how we’re always talking about the violence of the running water but not the violence of the banks that keep it in place. The banks of the Strid are just a couple of feet apart, lined with grey rocks that are covered in slippery, verdant lichen that shines in the sun and blackens under shade. It’s easy to imagine children sitting there and paddling their feet in the dark water that speeds by. Like the most dangerous things in life, the banks mostly aren’t a threat. Until they are.

#

I landed on the other side after my leap, heart thundering like rapids from the chase. I want to say I remember the feeling of flying over the Strid, a kind of reverse Icarus getting away from danger, but that would be a lie. I was too busy trying to avoid one horror to focus on the other. Turning off the path had granted me a few seconds but James was already well on his way, pedalling furiously over rock and undergrowth, bike frame vibrating on the uneven ground so he looked blurred. He glanced at the Strid and bent forward, pumping his legs even harder to gain the speed to ford it. I knew what would happen next, but my warning lodged in my throat. Or I held it there. No matter how many times I replay the moment, I still can’t figure out which, like I’ve locked myself out of my own memory.

The last time I saw James – anybody saw James – I didn’t catch his face, which was dipped forward as he tried to maximise his speed. A part of me thinks it was screwed up in anger, or some other violent emotion that matched the riverbanks he spent his final moments on, but I’ll never know. As he got right to the edge, I closed my eyes. I heard a crash, a splash, and a quick return to the uninterrupted babble of water flowing by. I opened my eyes to see froth spitting up from where he must have dropped in. I took in a lungful of air, then leaned against a tree and slumped down, well away from the slimy green rocks. For the next few minutes I tried to pinpoint exactly where he’d plunged in, to see if the bubbles of his last few gasps would rise and pop. I thought the spot would be marked by death, but it looked like any other part of the Strid: murky, bar a few gleaming, bending slivers of light where the sun hit the water at the right angle.

The only things breaking the silence were the water speeding by and the rapid chirping of a wood warbler, one of the species Dad had always been most excited to hear during our sojourns in the woods. It carried on and on, but I didn’t try to look for its lime green hue among the branches, my gaze remaining focused on the Strid. After a while of staring, my brain finally managed to empty, though I didn’t feel like I was in control of anything. Instead it felt like there was nothing left to be in control of. Even the bird stopped its trilling song.

Eventually, I carefully jumped over the Strid again, making sure my footing was sure before I pushed off. I returned to my bike and began the journey back to school. I didn’t see another person until I passed Bolton Abbey, where there were a few mothers with young children wandering about. As I cycled down the A-road towards Skipton, I rhythmically repeated ‘him or me’, each leg pump worth one word, until the idea was burned into my thighs. I did this even though what had happened felt unreal, like I’d been watching the events unfold in some watery, rippled reflection of my life instead of the actual thing.

I got in just as my lunch was supposed to be finishing, then spent the rest of the day in the toilet, reciting the mantra. The only thoughts that passed through my mind were those words and the memory of how the light glimmered and bounced off the Strid in the moments after James had fallen in. Even so, I was glad that Mum hadn’t recovered enough from Dad’s death to greet me when I came home. If she’d have said anything, even just an innocuous ‘hello,’ the truth might have tumbled out.

The next week was full of streams of gossip trickling through the town until we were saturated. I remained quiet, the impulse to say what had happened lessening by the day. A desire to tell the truth occasionally swelled, but when it did I’d force myself to think of the undulating streaks of light that textured the water of the Strid that day. Then the emptiness I’d felt after the incident would return, and anything else I was feeling would be quelled.

A fortnight or so after the incident, James’s father was led away in cuffs, stories of his temper spreading, rumours about him eating the body to get rid of evidence ridiculed but widespread. I started showing up at school regularly, and although I was never popular, the outright bullying remained a thing of the past. Mum even began showing signs of life again, like making hot breakfasts for us, or flicking on the television when I got back from school so that the dulcet tones of Richard Whiteley filled the room. Everyday stuff that had evaporated under the initial intensity of her grief.

I left that school for college in nearby Ilkley two years after Dad died. By that point nobody had mentioned James in months, though thoughts of what had happened to him would pull their way to the front of my mind like the tide coming in. With that said, reminders of that day – the clicking of bicycle spokes, certain road signs on Bolton Road, that sort of thing – drew me into that empty state less and less as time dragged on. As far as Addingham was concerned it was case closed, and I had no reason to dredge up the past. James’s dad was released due to a lack of evidence, and nobody else was indicted. The official story was he’d run away, and the police were never going to be that bothered about finding the son of an alcoholic former miner.

However, every weekend until I eventually left to study Philosophy and English at the University of Kent – as far away from Addingham I could get without leaving England – I would go to the Strid and watch the water a while. Sometimes it was sleek and silky in the sun, and other times the huge drops of rain would plop onto the surface, exploding in a powerful shimmer. Yet, no matter the weather, I could always sense the awesome power of the beast, constrained by the violence of the cage.

Sandeep Sandhu is a writer from London. His fiction, poetry, and literary criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Rejection Letters, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other publications. He was a Prose Editor at the anthology From Arthur's Seat, and is currently working on a novel.

Published May 2 2022