The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Marian Womack

  Title Page

  Leave Us a Review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: The Ring / Surface

  Pearl

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  The Fable of Alira

  Arlo

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  The Fable of the Lady in White

  Pearl

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  The Fable of the Three Sisters

  Arlo

  21

  22

  23

  Part II: The Vessel

  24

  25

  Epilogue

  Then

  Now

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Marian Womack

  The Golden Key

  Leave Us a Review

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  The Swimmers

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789094213

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789095920

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First Titan edition February 2021

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © 2021 Marian Womack. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To Anita and Oliver

  PART I

  THE RING / SURFACE

  PEARL

  1

  This is a white and pristine room, no space for shadows. Soon, the glass vent will slide open over my face, and the music will start. The music is always the same: ethereal women, their voices reverberating, as if the recording had been made in a cave, or else the deepest conservation chamber of the Registry. I think it is music from before the green winter, not connected to us, nothing to do with us. But it is calming, reassuring. I feel this is why it has been chosen for the task of gently bringing me up into the world each morning: I am in the last throes of pregnancy, not meant to survive delivery. I am expendable.

  It is possible that today I will not see anyone. It is possible that a group of doctors will come to see me, loom over me and prod me, look inside my belly, the child magically appearing in the hovering monitors that float above my head; I sometimes can get a glimpse of its watery, amorphous form.

  It is hard to admit this, but I can’t seem to find within me any particular feelings about this creature, neither good nor bad, when I hear her heartbeat mediated by those machines. Perhaps it is not my fault. So much has happened to get here, to this point in time, to this moment, bad things and good; now I can only be a vessel for what will come. Like I said, expendable.

  Expendable is a good thing. It means that I will not have to worry beyond some point in time, a date that is clearly marked in the calendar. I am so exhausted at this point; there is so little that can be fixed by an elusive sleep. I just want it to end, to get her out. This suspended state, this waiting, is slowly taking away my will to live, my capacity to decide for myself. It’s easier not to question, it’s easier not to feel.

  I am not special. One more surfacer from the pile. There are many of us up here. But the child surely must be. At least I know she will be kept. It is possible that she will be reallocated to a ringer family, and will live happily ever after. No one has explained these things to me, what the steps are that will be taken, what is usually done. But I can imagine, infer things. I can only hope her skin is fairer than mine, more like her father’s, those things count for something up here.

  Is life better here, in the ring, than down there on the surface? How can I know? I haven’t really lived that long, I have never ‘lived’ up here. I have only been kept, prodded, examined. Not the same thing at all.

  There is a little table, and a chair, and if I climb onto the table I can look out through a round window. I can then see it, Earth, the surface where I belong.The green advancing, intent on devouring it all. The Three Oceans, brown and orange, home to the leviathans, cetaceans as big as old countries; their babies as big as houses, as big as Gobarí; their shadows sometimes distinguishable from up here… Yet I know that is not possible, not really. But there is a famous one down there, I know that. As big as a continent. A famous one. And I think I have seen it, its back gently pushing up the surface of the debris-covered water, the liquid swelling under its massive form. If I close my eyes, I can see myself swimming among them, exactly as Mother wanted me to. I see him sometimes as well, my father, although we never swam together. Or perhaps it is a mullo, a devil with his face.

  They say that sometimes the leviathans leave the waters and fly into space, and turn and twirl for a minute until they get bored, and then they go back into the ocean, splashing around, causing tidal waves which erase whole coastlines. When I am looking down onto Earth, my chest contracts sometimes. For a moment I cannot breathe. It is grief, I think.

  * * *

  Who am I? I am a child of the surface. I was born and raised in Gobarí. We left after Mother remarried, when I was still no more than a child, changed it for Old Town and the Registry. The earliest years of my life took place in the house, with only sporadic visits to Old Town; but all those happened while my father was still alive, and, try as I might, I do not remember much of those early expeditions. My knowledge of Old Town was punctuated by Father’s absence, by the deprivation it brought. Later, after Mother’s death, I would enter the Registry; again, I was unmoored. And then came Arlo and hope and disappointment, although perhaps not in that order. But before all that was Gobarí, and the forest, and Savina, and Eli. And swimming in the pond, and swimming in Kon-il; limbs loose, feet kicking, and my eyes avidly taking in all that was old and new inside the water: the dragonflies, the fireflies, a little mouse with its nose just above the oily surface. The greenery, falling languid over the banks, its overgrown leaves forming canopies on which to rest from the heat, and all the creatures visible and invisible—chirping, tweeting, roaring. I imagined myself safe inside the water, always had. It was a whole world to me, contained in a little spot, hardly noticeable from the sky.

  The pond was where I liked to play best. I went there often. Muddy water flowed into it, clouding it dark. The stench was unbearable. I grew up imagining it bottomless, and that quality meant it exuded some mystery as well. Some of the beanies believed it to be a holy well, with hidden caves twisting and turning beneath the surface of the water. They said that an alicanta lived there, a basilisk, and they swore that some
days you could see her about. To me, the pond was no more than a place to pass the time, although that would change. After I met Eli it would start to mean something different: her love for swimming in its cloudy embrace, my made-up tales for her about the trees and the stars, a place that was ours and ours only. The pond was protected by the cool shadow of the pine trees, with their pungent smell at the height of summer. The smell of almond flowers prevailed as well, forever dying under the sun. They always seemed to have bloomed so long ago, that was why the smell made me feel giddy, as if I were about to pass out. But it was also comforting. The heat, heavy and sticky; the solid air condensing around you. I could catch glimpses of the sun through the branches above me, and little white sparks covered my vision. The forest pulsated, you could feel it stirring up in the morning, going to sleep at night; a living thing. You were safer then, when the forest rested. You could almost feel it, breathing regularly, sleeping, perhaps.

  Some people called the forest ‘the jungle’. After the green winter, it had grown rich in many species previously unknown to the region, the Mediterranean and the tropical mixing in a wild, feverish embrace. The jungle grew more each year, its flora mutating constantly into larger and more impressive exemplars, some deadly if they caught you unawares. A vine could target you and twist itself around your body until you were dead. An oversize leaf could hold a great blob of poisonous sap, ready to drop it on you at the exact moment you passed by. A carnivorous orchid could attack you. And this was only the plants: no one knew which new animals might be encountered each day; they mutated so rapidly that it was impossible to know what was going to emerge from beneath the shrubs and the trees.

  Despite all this we rarely went to Old Town. Gobarí was my home, with its crumbling walls and its mouldy porch, and those flowers and bushes and trees, all closing above like a roof. The Venus flytraps as big as a small child, the vines and the tendrils that moved like the living things they were. And those strange days when the sky was green, blue, electric. We did not know it then, what it meant, when the blue surge of light blotted up the sky; most people still don’t know. The day would have been atypical, even in a place like the forest. You could sense it: the animals refusing to make an appearance, the odd silent birds. And the greenery twisting and twirling around you, as if it were on edge. Then, at dusk, the sky an ominous purple, followed by the blue light dancing over us, caressing the stars and the constellations when night fell. At the time, I thought the sky was going to collapse upon us, finally devouring all the monstrosities that lived with us in the forest. Now that I know what the light means I can only feel sadness at my past ignorance.

  After one of these events, the forest would grow a little, but never engulfing Gobarí. At the beginning of the property, the green stopped abruptly. At night, I closed my eyes and thought of trees and the vines and the branches, advancing towards the house, and I could hear the shrieks of so many creatures, unnamed long-ago-mutated things that now came back to feed on us. But I couldn’t have slept anywhere else; the smells and the odd noises and that feeling of oppression, of not being able to breathe… To me, that was home. The forest gave us everything we needed: wood, for fuel and building things, and the cork that furnished the insides of the vessels; plants and flowers and vines and shrubs, and we ate them, we cooked them, or we transformed them into remedies and potions; and wild animals, surreal creatures that changed so quickly that they could never be trapped by any taxonomy, and were wilder than the forest itself, the only meat we consumed. It was fair that they in their turn consumed us, that the forest gobbled up a beanie child now and again, advancing towards a settlement and making it disappear from our world.

  At the pond I was surrounded by flowers and plants of many different colours. I could see rabbit’s bread and the sierra poppy Eli liked to collect in thick bunches. Pale flowers grew on the bank, and close to it some silver sage. Savina would know all their properties. Love-in-a-mist, mournful widow, oleander. It was poisonous. The prettiest flowers usually are: she had taught me that when I was very little. Never, ever, succumb to hunger if you don’t know what you are eating. Her first rule of many.

  Gobarí wasn’t like the wall, not by a long way. It was a late twenty-first-century construction, the vestige of a lost civilisation, brick and sand and mortar. No one understood why it still stood, situated as it was in the middle of the overgrowth. It had survived the green winter that devoured everything in its wake; it had survived floods and extreme cold and extreme heat. It had survived all the darkness that came after. The storms that hit against its walls every rainy season, but which did not seem to erode its crumbling buttresses, as if some kind of unspoken contract mediated between the house and the elements. Gobarí had always belonged to Mother’s family: an old family, one with certain rights and a ruin in the middle of nowhere. They had been allowed to keep it.

  I spent most of my time in the little meadow by the pond, among the eucalyptus plants. It was rich in wild orchids. I had heard somewhere that they could be literal aliens, fallen from some distant planet. They were odd and beautiful, and their names were odd and beautiful: the bug, the bee, the lizard. Frightening, unreal. Orchids were my favourite plants. Eli hated them. She would look at them, terrified. And then she would say: ‘Those horrid things!’ Little by little, the story emerged: the orchids in Gobarí were like miniature versions of the flowers that had killed her grandparents.

  ‘How do you know that’s true?’

  ‘There were witnesses. They were at the bank of a river, the Guadin. The tendrils surrounded them. They spent ages dying, minutes and hours.’

  She explained this with a serious face on, as if she had learnt to live with the horrid knowledge. But I could sense some intense feeling underneath, as if she were trying very hard to remain composed, when in truth she was as horrified as anyone. I knew it then, that there was a hardness inside her.

  Me, I could live with the greenery, I could navigate the forest. I could anticipate a sudden change in the landscape, a passing moment of danger. I could sense new noises, interpret the metamorphosing terrain, an intimate knowledge of the space, developed somehow from early childhood. Allowed to roam freely, I had to look after myself from very early on. Animals scared me more than plants. Some of them made me think of demons, crawled scratchily up to the surface of the Earth to torment us. I knew this knowledge was one of the few things that remained from when Father was with us. He would insist on passing this on, books and diagrams and conversations that would always end in this one lesson.

  ‘Never venture somewhere if you hear a call you don’t recognise. Never make friends with a small animal: its mother may come after and eat you. Never go into the forest when the birds are not singing; never go when their shrieks are so loud that they are all you can hear.’

  And so on. I would be sitting next to him, my childish senses picking up a hidden current, something underneath. I have a clear recollection of my mother asking me to be quiet because my father was around, and I now know that the moods of the house depended on his moods, that he expected us to be cheerful and happy if he was, and to be subdued and out of sight when he was morose. I now wonder if I internalised this fear of animals because he was the one teaching it to me, and I was scared of upsetting him or something worse. Was I scared of animals, or was I scared of him?

  Many years later, when my father was already dead and in the ground, one morning I was waiting for Eli at the pond, by the water, and something happened. A hare came out of nowhere. She was so beautiful, orange with streaks of yellow all over her body. But she was also as big as me, and obviously much stronger. The hare got up on her hind legs and heaved her body up, looking at me with curiosity. Her head tilted softly, as if she were asking a question. She stretched her body up even further. I realised she could kill me with a bludgeoning of her powerful front arms. I took a step back, and of course a branch cracked under my feet. The hare did not like the noise.

  She opened her mouth, showing me her point
y teeth, and hissed loudly. I knew she was marking her territory. I thought of Father. If I didn’t make any sudden moves, I would be safe. Hares can be impressive creatures, but you are usually okay if you treat them with the same caution you would take with the larger centipedes.

  Something moved through the eucalyptus trees; a rustling sound of branches and leaves being pulled aside. Someone was approaching the pond.

  The hare turned in the direction of the disturbance with another sudden hiss. Her eyes as open and big as her mouth as she prepared to attack the intruder.

  I grabbed a branch lying on the floor; it was thick and heavy. I moved swiftly, bludgeoning the hare just before she could attack Eli. Next thing I knew, I was staring at a beautiful pattern of colours I couldn’t for a second make sense of. And then it hit me: I was looking at the hare’s brain pouring out of her head, mixed together with a dark red liquid.

  I stayed where I was, spattered with the warm blood. I was trying to think of anatomy lessons, the circulation of the blood. How to put it all back, all that patchy learning, first aid, basic cures, herbals. Those things all surface children needed to learn, in case we were one day sent up to the sky. How to put it all back? The thought, like a flash: you cannot put it back. The brain would stay there, on the ground. I looked at Eli, her head round, and in place.

  The hare jerked horribly. I kneeled down close to her, and beat her until she stopped moving. Perhaps a couple of times, three, four.

  I was panting, covered in blood and sweat. I looked up to the hot sky, white dots still clouding my vision.

  Eli was staring at me, at the hare, at the branch that I dropped.

  ‘Thank you,’ was all she could muster.

  But I had an odd flavour in my mouth, as if I were remembering something from long ago. It was the metallic taste of the hare’s blood, splattered over my mouth, horribly. I saw my father in my mind, coming towards me. Towards us: me and a little beanie girl. She used to be my friend. She was dead now.