The river flooded and overran its banks, I don’t know how many times a year, it was when the great rains came. A sight: the pale brown water — so much of it — rising under cars, to their windscreens, rising and flooding roadways, the grey streets of Villiers, gardens, fences, right up to the porches of houses.

And then it retreated.

But the day I went swimming with my uncle was an ordinary day, an ordinary day for the river: a hot, still, summer day.

We put our towels on the great flat rock on the bank, there were other children and young people swimming. Their parents too, and other adults, like my uncle. I remember the warmth of the sun. Perhaps I was nine years old, it seems to me I must have been nine years old.

I didn’t swim much. I’d been taught to swim in the river by my father, but I’d never had lessons, the way children do now. I did some version of the dog paddle, the dog paddle they call it. I think that’s what I did.

My uncle took me out, we were splashing, splashing next to the other children and teenagers. They were people from Villiers, I knew some of them, they were all Afrikaners, that’s who lived in my town. We were one of the few English-speaking families in Villiers. They shouted in Afrikaans, kom, kom, in met jou, in met you, meisie, they shouted.

Perhaps I felt goaded, perhaps I did.

My uncle said, let’s go out farther. And I followed him, treading out into the stream.

I watched the other children recede, on the rock, in the shallows. I was farther out than them. I felt a bit of pride, then. I’m not a competitive person, why did I feel that? Perhaps because I was an only child, I was always aware of my aloneness, I felt other children had brothers and sisters, and I — I wished to assert myself as someone distinct. Something like that. I don’t know.

And then my uncle and I were afloat in the middle of the river. I could no longer feel the sand bottom that I knew the feel of, so well. My head was just above the surface of the water, its brownness stretched away on all sides, and I could see the pale greenness of the bank, the willows, which seemed distant, a line, merely, now.

And then the current became too strong for me. I was small, after all, my paddling was no match for the current. Uncle Bernie, I shouted. I say I shouted, but I imagine my weak, girl’s voice. My uncle was floating well, he was enjoying the water. Jackie, he called. No, no, I said, and he turned to see me now, a way away from him, down the stream.

I saw his eyes, then, and I remember, even now, the look in them. My Uncle Bernard.

It was a while, a long while it seems to me, that we struggled and were carried, both of us now, down the stream. The bank with its large flat rock where we’d started was nowhere in sight. Now there was only brownness, and pale green in a wavering line along both banks. And the sun, of course the sun, its flash, which was like an attack. I remember the glinting of my uncle’s dark, wet head, I kept my eyes on it.