Brian Church

Brian Church is Caroline’s father and a figure through whom Lucy Fly’s childhood curiosity about other countries collides with sexual violence, death, and uncertain memory. Locally imagined as Russian, he is later identified as Dutch; after his death, Lucy sees him again in a canoe along the shore, in a scene that leaves his return suspended between haunting and perception.

Identity and Introduction

Church lives in the small village where Lucy grows up, where his foreignness makes him conspicuous. People at the Co-op say he is Russian, and Lucy believes that when he came to Britain he took the English name Brian Church. Caroline insists he is British, although Lucy hears a foreign accent. Lucy privately invents another identity for him, imagining his real name as Boris Chekhov and associating his gravelly voice with spies and vodka. The later newspaper account corrects that fantasy: Church came from the Netherlands, not Russia.

Lucy’s interest precedes their direct encounter. She listens to him speak with shoppers about bread prices, hoping to hear him talk about Russia, but he never does. When she visits his house carrying a geography project, she searches the room after he leaves for objects that might match her imagined Russia, such as Russian dolls, ballet shoes, or bearskins. Her attention is directed less toward the man as he is than toward the foreign life she believes she can read in him.

Assault and Lucy’s Interpretation

During the visit, Lucy follows Caroline upstairs and waits outside the locked bathroom. Church comes out after using it, drying his hands on his trousers, and apologizes. Lucy stares into his eyes, imagining that they contain the life and country she wants to understand. He looks puzzled, then follows her into the bathroom and sexually assaults her. When Lucy leaves the house twenty minutes later, she is sore and has the imprint of a tap on her thigh.

In the weeks that follow, Lucy privately calls herself Olga and believes she has become half Russian. She imagines that she is pregnant and names the supposed baby Natasha. These beliefs express how she tries to make sense of what has happened by folding it into her earlier fantasy about Church’s origin; they do not change the fact that he has assaulted her. The story later reveals that the Russian identity she had built around him was mistaken.

Death at Sea

Caroline fails to come to school one morning, and Lucy learns that Church had gone to sea in his canoe the previous afternoon and had not paddled back. His body washed ashore that evening. Lucy describes his death as suicide, though the account gives no further explanation of why he went out or what happened on the water. The newspaper report that follows supplies the correction to his background: he was Dutch, not Russian.

The death abruptly breaks the frame of Lucy’s imagined pregnancy and identity. She recalls moving from feeling half Russian to feeling half dead, and discovering there was no baby. Church’s death is therefore both a concrete loss of life and the event that leaves Lucy confronting the emptiness behind the story she had made of him.

The Canoe and the Haunting

Years later, while walking beside the sea in the morning, Lucy sees a canoe that had not been there before. Looking only from the outer edge of her left eye, she recognizes Church paddling parallel to her. He waves in a friendly manner, and his paddle moves quickly and silently, yet he stays beside her as she walks for about a mile. Lucy avoids turning to face him directly, afraid that he might disappear; when she turns to retrace her steps, she allows herself only a quick glance toward the water.

The encounter is presented through Lucy’s perception, not confirmed as an objective return. Its details bring the earlier death back without resolving it: Church is again at sea in a canoe, close enough to wave, yet not available to be confronted directly. When Lucy tells Teiji about the assault and Church’s death, Teiji draws back slightly at the mention of the suicide; Lucy notices only that her face has gone cold before she falls asleep. Church thus remains central to a memory in which fascination, violence, and a spectral reappearance cannot be cleanly separated.