Camilla Grudova
Our Cousin Henry
Our cousin Henry left the family house with no possessions but his water shoes and wetsuit when he decided to live in a loch. He squatted among the reeds—taking shits and tearing apart bulrushes—and spent an unnerving amount of time underwater. Did he want to be a crocodile, a fish, a duck? We couldn’t quite ascertain what animal he was trying to emulate, but he copied them all, diving under the water’s surface, skimming across it like an insect, wading with his eyes and forehead visible, flapping his arms to create miniature waves.
We joined him for swims initially, donning our own wetsuits, luring him onto shore with delicious lunches: pork pies spread with piccalilli, beef broth, trifles, radishes, and sherry. He ate with us greedily. We asked if he might come home for supper, but he returned to the water saying he had many things to do and see in the loch. We guessed at what he ate when we were not there: we found duck feathers on the banks, vomit with fish bones, pebbles, and seaweed.
As time passed, Henry’s hair became thin and gray, slicked over his pale head. He shivered constantly, yellow bile dripping from his nose and mouth. There were holes in his wetsuit: his penis stuck out, shriveled and blue, and his anus was visible, unsightly and red, leaking green diarrhea. He stopped talking, his only method of communication a slow, deep burp that seemed to imitate a frog.
The loch was a popular place for dog walkers, fisherman, and boaters, but Henry harassed them all. He burped at children, killed spaniels, turned over boats. Warning signs were erected—an image of a man squatting—and a wildlife conservation group tried, unsuccessfully, to catch him with a giant net because he was upsetting the biodiversity of the loch. His feces, urine, and dead skin caused a poisonous, turquoise algae to grow in slimy lumps. He no longer trusted us, no longer joined us for lunches no matter what food we brought. We waved thin slices of roast beef like flags so that the smell might reach him.
There was also the problem of his former sweetheart. She screamed at Henry from the edge of the loch—stomping her green, rubber boots—to return to her, to get married and buy a country house for them and the children she wanted. She set up a little, brown tent where, in the mornings, she made herself bitter coffee on a Bunsen burner and wrote Henry letters that turned sodden and indecipherable when she threw them in the water for him to catch, which he did not.
She yelled that she despised him, but she still loved him. Her father came to the loch to have a talk with Henry, calling him a terrible cad for the way he’d treated his daughter. Henry only burped at them with the indifference of a cold-blooded creature, and they wept at the sight of him copulating with ducks and tearing fish apart with his hands. We did not like the sound of his sweet- heart’s screams and cries, disruptive to picnickers, and married her off to a distant cousin who had the same eyebrows and large hands as Henry.
We soon hired professional anglers to go out in boats with us, sausage rolls and pieces of cake hanging from fishing lines, along with the more traditional worms and bits of raw pig flesh. A warm Range Rover, full of blankets, waited for a rescued Henry, a first aid kit prepared for the necessary but painful cut to his lip from the angler’s hook. But still, Henry eluded us.
The wildlife conservation group continued to complain—reintroduced otters had disappeared from the loch, one of their brown skins found floating in the water like a lost fur scarf, blood on Henry’s hair and scratches on his face evidence of their deathly battle.
We had no choice: Henry couldn’t go on living in the loch, and he wouldn’t return to shore. We got our guns and dogs and set out one early morning when he would be sleeping. As he lay curled upon a rock on the opposite side of the loch, we took shots. He woke up and tried to swim away, but his wetsuit was al- ready in fresh tatters from the bullets. He groaned in agony like a seal. The dogs retrieved his body, wet and heavy. What a beautiful face he had, we remembered, seeing him up close. It was such a similar face to ours, but he was no longer one of us.
We dressed him in his best tweed suit and displayed him in a glass box with plastic vegetation at our hunting club. Under the box, we mounted a brass plaque with the day he was shot. We vowed to engrave it with a scientific-sounding Latin name, though we never got around to it. Occasionally, our cousin Henry took our notice among the stuffed partridges and salmon, and we would remark “how sad” or “funny that” before returning to other topics, to our puddings and our drinks.