Departures Read Online Free PDF

I’d asked him once why he’d never learned to swim, and he’d answered quite simply, I don’t like the water. I know in the absence of riptides and whirlpools the odds of drowning are very slight, but still I’m afraid of being pulled under, of stepping suddenly out of my depth. You must think that’s awfully silly, he’d said. Not at all, my father’d said. There’s no one I know who isn’t afraid.
    When I was younger, I’d spent a week on a peace camp with Catholics, one of several cross-community ventures to be held that summer in Ballyclare. The leaders who had organised it had stood each one of us on a four-foot stump the second day, had us fold our arms across our chests, close our eyes and fall backwards stiffly, into the arms of the rest of us below. I remember the sensation of gathering momentum, the surge of my heart and the heaviness behind—and then the clutch of many fingers, my clothes tightening like sheets snapped taut, and the hard heels of hands, buoying me up. A trust fall, they’d called it. There’d been twenty-eight altogether, fourteen of them and the same number of us, and we were almost through it when one of the boys had refused to participate. No one would do anything after that, and the rest of the week went trying to remember just how much each one of us had told the others, wondering what they’d do with the information, wondering if we’d given too much away.
    My own ears filled as his went below water. The sound of everything suddenly grew thick, as when I lay in the bath with my head submerged listening to the subterraneous whine of a tap in the kitchen, the soft, hollow whisper of my knee on enamel, or the low, cetaceous echo that answered when I knocked on the floor of the tub with my heel. I held my breath when I saw him go under, felt firespread from my heart to my lungs to the pit of my stomach, my whole body brimming with a flammable gas, my joints swelled, I could see only udders, old tubes of toothpaste, bakers in white hats filling pastry with cream, and I gasped. When I opened my eyes Eddie’s arms were reaching up through the face of the water, and I thought of a picture I’d seen of some famous fountain—Laocoon and his sons encoiled by serpents: their fingers, too, had been sharply angular, just so had the water around them heaved and churned. From the top tier the gods had looked down through the windows of heaven, and wide jets of water had streamed out from their mouths.
    Later, back in school, we’d tried it ourselves, the trust falling. There’d been no stump so we’d stood in a circle and taken turns being in the middle and allowing ourselves to fall back against the crowd. But part of the circle was weaker than the rest; it did not surprise me when at last I broke through. It seemed to take ages before I hit asphalt, and as I was falling I imagined them watching, caught off-guard by their error, observing the breeze in the force of my fall.
    He came up choking. Even as he left it the water dragged him down. He’d thrashed so much all three were sodden—Eddie, the minister, and the deacon as well. When they reached the shore with Eddie between them, my father was there, and together they lay him out on his back a few yards from the water. Then my sister got down on her knees in the sand beside him, and when she had loosened the clasp at his collar she took his chin in one hand, his nose in the other, covered his mouth with her own and kissed him, kissed him, till his eyes fluttered open and again he breathed.

Departures
    My father did the double the year that Harry died. By the same reasoning that led him to drive his brother’s car only on Saturdays because he had no license and was not insured, he worked only part-time to minimise his chances of getting caught. As a strategy for survival it worked remarkably well, and he could have gone on that way forever, had Harry’s