No Mark Upon Her Read Online Free PDF Page B

motion,
graceful as dragonflies, skimming the surface of the mercury-gleaming river, and
the sight had gripped and squeezed something inside him that he hadn’t known
existed.
    All that afternoon, he’d watched, and in the
dimness of the evening, he’d pedaled slowly back to Tottenham and returned the
bike, ignoring the taunts of his mates. The next Saturday he’d gone back to the
river, drawn by something he couldn’t articulate, a longing that until then had
only teased the feathery edges of his imagination.
    Another Saturday, and another. He learned that the
boat place was called the Lea Rowing Club. He began to name the boats; singles,
doubles, pairs, quads, fours, and the eights—if the singles had made him think
of dragonflies, the eights were giant insects, moving in a rhythm that seemed
both alien and familiar and that made him think of the pictures of Roman galleys
he’d seen in school history books.
    And they talked to him, the oarsmen, when they
noticed him hanging about. He was tall, even then. Awkward, scrawny,
black-haired, pale-skinned even at summer’s height—all in all, not a very
prepossessing specimen. But although he hadn’t realized it then, his inches had
made him rowing material, and they’d been assessing his potential.
    After a bit, they’d let him help load the boats
onto the trailers or lift them back onto the trestles that waited in the
boatyard like cradles. One day a man tossed him a cloth and nodded at a dripping
single. “Wipe it down, if you want,” he’d said. Other days, it was a wrench to
adjust the rigging, oil for the seat runners, filler for the dents in the
fiberglass.
    By that August, he’d become the club dogsbody, his
mates forgotten, his dull terraced street subsumed by the river. He learned that
the burly-shouldered man who gave him chores was a coach. And when one day the
coach had looked him levelly in the eyes and handed him a pair of oars, the
world had opened like an oyster, and Kieran Connolly had seen that he might be
something other than a poor Irish kid with no future.
    The Lea—and rowing—had given him that. His coach
had encouraged him to join the army. He could row, Coach said, and get an
education, too. And so he had done, training as a medic, rowing in eights and
fours, and then in the single scull that had been his true love since that very
first day on the Lea.
    What neither he nor his coach had foreseen in those
halcyon days before 9/11 was that the world would change, and that Kieran would
see four tours of duty in Iraq. On the last, his unit had been taken out by an
improvised explosive device, and he had been the only survivor.
    There’d been nothing left for him in Tottenham when
he came home. His dad had been taken by cancer, the house sold to pay his debts,
although Kieran had managed to salvage his father’s woodworking tools. After
that, he couldn’t bear to go back to the Lea, to meet anyone he had known, or
who—worse still—might offer him sympathy.
    So he’d bought an old Land Rover and drifted round
the south of England, sleeping in a tent, always drawn by the rivers, but unable
to imagine what he might do or where he might fit.
    Then, early one May morning, two months after his
discharge, he’d stood on Henley Bridge, watching the scullers, feeling as
insubstantial as a ghost.
    Later he’d walked through town, intending to buy
some supplies, and he’d seen the advert for the boatshed in an estate agent’s
window. It had seemed like a spar held out to a drowning man.
    A few weeks later, now the proud owner of the
one-room shed, he’d moved in his few possessions, bought a used single shell,
and begun to row for the first time in years. It was, he thought, like riding a
bike—once learned, never forgotten. His body, still healing, had protested, but
he’d kept on, and slowly he’d grown stronger.
    There was a small fixed dock that allowed him to
tie up the little motor skiff he’d bought, and the boatshed’s small