The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  But no, no ocean. And Mother loved the ocean.

  * * *

  I was ill when I came out of the shed, dehydrated. It turned out that the coolness inside had been a miscalculation on my part, and the little white thing, baking under the daylight, had got so hot I had passed out when they found me. I almost died of sunstroke that day. My mother was furious at me. I was old enough to know better, she said. It was true.

  After that day, Savina brought Eli. She was the daughter of one of her friends. We would go and sit by the pond together. This was my favourite place in the whole world, and I took her there immediately. Now I would not be on my own anymore. Now I had someone to be with, no need to mix with the beanie youngsters who locked me up on purpose, who were merciless and cruel. They knew things. They called my father a mullo, a tainted one; and I had nightmares of my father waking up in his tomb and coming to get me, the way mullos do. For my father had a bad death, the worst possible.

  So Savina brought Eli, and now I had a friend. A friend to bathe with in the pond. I did not know what friendship was, not really, but I was a fast learner.

  Savina and I spent the afternoons sitting around the kitchen table where we did most things, from peeling potatoes to skinning rodents, and eating the delicacies that she knew a growing child needed: mango-spread, rumbatán, green milky milbao. I had always known that other things went on in Savina’s kitchen. I knew this was where Savina sometimes practised her shuvaní magiks. She would say little prayers while skinning the rodents or dicing the rumbatán. Sometimes other women were there with her, helping with the incantations; or perhaps, I thought, being helped by her. One of them was Eli’s mother.

  One day, at noon, I walked into the kitchen as I did every day, and she was there, a woman I didn’t know, helping Savina throw things into the fire. Their faces were rigid, concentrated on the task. I knew they were performing some shuvaní ritual, and I looked on, fascinated. Perched on a chair was a sulky teenager who needed a wash, devouring some fried bananas. Eli looked at me furtively, as if I were the intruder, when Gobarí was my house, and Savina’s kitchen my kitchen. She continued staring at me oddly, as if willing me to leave, but saying nothing. I stood where I was.

  Later, we were sent out to entertain ourselves. It was so hot that day we couldn’t go anywhere, so we sat on the porch, sucking melon slices and spitting the black seeds out. Eli suggested that we go to the pond the next time she visited.

  After that Eli came back to see me often. We mostly sat around, eating mango that we had picked ourselves and chatting. I would invent stories to amuse her: those days I was reading about our shared constellations, the ones all children of the surface knew by heart. I would tell her stories about the fox, the three sisters, and Alira, the little bird ascending. When I didn’t remember exactly what the story said, I invented their endings, or mixed them with others. I could have spoken with her about other things, as friends are meant to do. I could have shared with her incidents from my life, our family. But I wasn’t as good a friend as I thought; I was selfish, wanted to keep some things private, only for me. I carefully avoided some subjects. My father’s death by his own hand, inside a NEST prison; my brother’s illness. Mother’s melancholia that was doubtless linked to them both. And how unhelpful, what a useless daughter I was to her. I was scared of being asked anything about those topics, so I kept us busy with the imaginary telling of the stars.

  Eli, on the other hand, was capable of sharing things with me, and I took it as a sign of our developing friendship. She spoke about her family often, had many brothers and sisters. The woman who had been with her in the kitchen that morning wasn’t her mother after all, but her older sister, who had looked after her since she was very little. I asked where her mother was.

  ‘Dead.’

  I should have known. We were looking after a patch of herbs that she grew on purpose to help her family earnings. Everyone collected wild specimens, but Eli had a knack for growing things, and introduced me to some new species. Eli would grow everything except flowers. She hated animals as well. Eventually, she shared the story of her mother’s death with me. Her family, she explained, had kept two stoats as pets. This had happened when I was very little, I hardly remember the incident. But as soon as she mentioned this I knew what would come next; the story returned fresh into my mind. The stoats had grown as big as the children, and attacked and eaten the smallest one, a newborn, barely a month old.

  I had even been in Eli’s house, and had a vague recollection of going with Savina to visit her mother when she was pregnant with the baby in their shack on the outskirts of Gobarí, and she had lain on her back, Savina letting her pendant drop over her full belly. If it moved in circles: a baby girl. If it moved like a pendulum, right and left, right and left, it would be a little boy. The pendant had predicted a girl.

  How cruel, to be born to that fate.

  Savina had said nothing when she heard about the stoats eating the child, I did remember that. She left the bread she was kneading on the table, and went out of the kitchen in silence. This had impressed me a great deal. The woman, Eli’s mother, killed herself shortly after. She walked into the forest one morning on her own, and that was that.

  Even if I knew the story, I let Eli tell it to me, from beginning to end. There was something in her inflexion, in how she shared the knowledge, that made me realise that she needed to tell it, to share it at that point in time and with her new friend, and so I let her. Eli and I had this in common: her mother and my father had both killed themselves. The knowledge made me feel closer to her; warmed my heart a little. Finally, I had found someone who might understand. But I said nothing, even then.

  We took to bathing in the pond that winter, Eli and me, normally after eating. One morning she suggested that we do so naked; it had been difficult to dry our clothes after each bath, even in the hottest autumn weather. We started swimming next to each other, and soon were embracing each other in the water, our legs interlocked, and I felt a strange passion. We kissed often after that, long and hard kisses. I liked kissing Eli; but one day she stopped it all abruptly. We were hiding among the eucalyptus trees. Our kissing practices, as Eli called them, had increased in intensity quite quickly. She got up suddenly, took my shirt and put it on, and she left me there alone, hiding between the bushes. I just could not stop thinking of her little breasts, of the unexpected wetness. I did not know what was happening, as I started to pant, and I felt such jolt of guilt and pain and sweetness and joy, all together and at once. All I knew was that I didn’t want that feeling to stop.

  The stone hit me hard, and when I looked up Eli was back and, from the way she was looking at me, I knew that she wanted to kiss me again. But she also had that stubborn look on, like that first day in the kitchen, and I knew that she wasn’t going to move any closer. She threw another stone, the perfect parabola floating in mid-air until it hit me, again, drawing blood this time.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She bent down to pick up another stone.

  ‘Eli! Stop that!’

  I dodged the stone.

  That’s when it happened. When I realised she had always known it all; all of them, all the beanies, had probably always known. For she started calling me names, saying my mother was insane, and that my dad was mullo, that he had killed a little girl and was in Hell now; and that he was going to come for me one day and drag me deep into the forest, deep into the jungle.

  That he was going to come for me, for his little blue bird. I could not believe she knew that my dad had called me that. And I realised: they all knew everything.

  I bent down and took a stone myself, but she was already leaving, taking my clothes with her.

  * * *

  Eli did not give me back my clothes, but that didn’t bother me. Fabric wasn’t particularly abundant, but somehow I put together a grown-up outfit. It all came out of trunks, boxes, suitcases; things that had been packed perhaps even before I was born. Rummaging in those trun
ks wasn’t exactly like rummaging in family memories, scenes and stories once cherished, now half-forgotten. My life did not need those; my life needed rules, certainties, knowledge, in order to survive. But this particular puzzle I had willingly avoided. Was Eli right, when she said that Father had killed my little beanie friend, the blue-haired girl? I knew I would not dare ask anyone, neither Savina nor Mother. I knew I would not ask because I knew it was the truth. Of course it was. It had been a scandal. He had killed a little girl, and then he had kidnapped me, presumably trying to dispose of me as well. But why had he done those things? What did he expect to achieve?

  I was thinking about my new outfit, matching faded garments from a previous life, but the story from the past was threatening to burst to the forefront of my consciousness. I started to cry, and the tears were warm upon my cheeks.

  Among the discarded, packed up things, I found other mementoes. Old-fashioned ImagePods where we all smiled and danced and talked to one another. My parents with a couple older than them, I think it might have been neighbours of ours, here in the sierra, and some images stranger still, of Mother accompanied by this very lady, dancing on the shore. It looked like Kon-il.

  When she was younger, my mother had been a swimmer. The remnants of an old, pre-Winter religion, or so it was thought, the swimmers gave themselves to the embrace of the Three Oceans. As with many other doctrines, they had been persecuted for centuries, and now operated underground, in secret. Their act of defiance was directed against all ringers, all techies, against those who had believed in techno-fixes to solve our predicament, against the people who lived outside of the planet, against those who had built the Barrier. The Barrier protected us from the Three Oceans, and even looking on the other side was forbidden by our lords and masters, orbiting above in the sky: not only illegal, but also a heresy. The swimmers believed humanity did not deserve to separate itself from the destruction it had created. Swimming away, to die among the waves, was the highest form of protest they enacted. To die for their beliefs, to atone for humankind’s transgression in destroying the planet, to offer themselves in return.

  A swimmer could be a normal, even prominent, member of society. One day they would be gone, leaving a note behind, or simply their sign somewhere: a crude image of a fish drawn in one single line, and which resembled the mathematical sign for infinity. And then their family would know. Their sudden absences, the space they left behind, would be all their families were left with.

  My beanie friend had disappeared from my life suddenly, so had my deceitful father. Now, Eli was gone from my life in equally sudden fashion, but I told myself that I didn’t need her. I felt as if my childhood had ended, and I was a grown-up now. I started despising our recent secret encounters in the bushes after our swims, when only a few days before I had looked forward to them expectantly. It was something intimate, private, ours. But now I felt older, wiser. I suddenly remembered that I had a family, people to care about and protect. People who needed me.

  With my new outfit on I went to look for my mother. I had not been inside her drawing room for weeks, but I knew that people came and went from there sometimes. Somehow, even trapped here, Urania’s allure meant that people gravitated towards her, and at least a couple of times a week there was some sort of courtesy visit.

  That was how I found out we had new neighbours. There was another house, near Gobarí. It had a bad reputation, and no one talked about it. I knew why: its previous owner, my mother’s friend from the ImagePod, was a swimmer, but one who had gone all the way, who had offered herself, and never returned from the ocean’s dark embrace. Sadly, the abandoned house had been set on fire by some delivered beanies after the Act freed them, and the property stood for a time like a dead thing crawling over the sierra, with shut windows like shut eyes. They called it Benguele, the demon-house.

  ‘Pearl! What in the Three Oceans could you possibly be wearing?’

  I looked around me at the group that sat quietly with Mother, sipping cool milbao drinks: juicy, sweet fruits liquidised by hand, usually by servants. They were a mark of distinction, but a fake one in our case: we had no servants anymore to make them for us. We had Savina, to help us pretend. I saw the visitors all wore the ordnance white country-issue outfits, with tight neat pockets and compartments, zips and Velcro openings. Their white boots were miraculously clean, although the outside of our house was a long stretch of mud because we had no one to keep it in check.

  Who were those people? What were they doing in our house?

  Mr Vanlow had taken the neighbour’s house, it seemed. He explained this while laughing at its nickname. Benguele, Benguele! he repeated, sipping his milbao and smiling at Mother. He was explaining all the repairs that he was doing after the fire: the roof and the walls, and how he planned to use the dug-up orchards. He was an elegant man, wearing ringer outfits, although he did not look at all like a ringer. He was tall and imposing, with an easy laugh and short cropped hair going grey at the temples. His outfit was as white and shiny as those of his blond companions, friends from the Settlement whom he was entertaining in his new house.

  ‘You should come and shoot pheasants with us!’

  Alarmed, I realised he was talking to me. I shook my head, murmured my thanks; but I was feeling ridiculous at that moment. I looked at myself. I had been proud until the second I entered that room of my makeshift adult clothing, which I had arranged on purpose as if I was going to do a Jump: the sacrificial long skirt, which I imagined white, and knew now to be yellowish; the dark shirt and the flower crown sitting on my head. I had plaited it myself, and I wasn’t good at plaiting flowers. I felt suddenly embarrassed.

  But Mr Vanlow smiled at me, not unkindly.

  In the middle of this neat, hygienic group of people sat Urania, my strange, beautiful mother, striking as a rare bird. Even with her shabby clothing and long, oily hair, she was the most elegant thing in that room.

  * * *

  He came often to visit us, this new neighbour. He grew fond of Mother, of course, concerned himself with her well-being and enquired about Aster, my little brother. Mother was always talking about sending him to a doctor in Old Town, and she confided this to Mr Vanlow; but we all knew there were no cures for him there, that the kind of genetic treatment he needed was only available in one place: the ring.

  Mr Vanlow had connections with the stratosphere settlement. He wasn’t a true starborn but had spent time up there. His father had served under a well-known politician, and they had been among the lucky ones who emigrated. He had been back down sometimes, moving at ease between the Upper Settlement and the planet’s surface. And now he was back for good, he said to make his fortune.

  Over the months that followed, he often spoke about his contacts up in the ring, and how they could help the child. How he would send him up there to be cured.

  ‘Will we all go, Papa?’

  By that time I called him Papa, because Mr Vanlow and Mother had married. It happened shortly after that first visit. It couldn’t have been more than a few weeks later. He had been very taken with the beautiful woman, marooned in Gobarí, a crumbling island in the middle of the extreme green. He won her over quickly. First, he lent her a hovering vehicle that worked properly, and Mother flew every evening to parties and picnics and what-nots. She often went to Old Town, and to the wall, and to the ocean. She thought we didn’t know, but we did. And every time she left, I was scared that she would not come back. I stayed behind, alone with Aster, without Mother, without Eli. Only Savina to keep me company.

  Savina took pity on me, and let me spend the long afternoons with her in the kitchen, helping with her shuvaní recipes. I would powder the spices, mix the herbs, and throw them inside the enormous pot.

  When had Savina come to live with us? It was impossible to know. She seemed to have been there forever, since I was a baby. My dad gave her to my mother as a present, many years before the Delivery Act was passed. But even after the Act’s passage she had decided to stay wi
th us, or rather with Mother. She had been taken from her village when she was a child, taken to Old Town to serve with a family of techies, that much I knew. It had been a hard life for a child. The mother of the techie family had been a cruel sort of woman, and Savina had hardly been fed. She explained all this to me as if she were telling a fairy story.

  ‘They had a compound on the wall itself; the father was an engineer. And one day, I saw the ocean on the other side from there. There were no windows on that side of the construction, no way of looking over that side of the Barrier back then! But I was lucky.’

  She had found herself up on the roof one day. Mere chance; some technician needed something fetched, and she was the closest servant around to take it to him.

  ‘So, there I was, on the highest point of the wall!’ It was difficult to imagine Savina atop the massive structure that protected us, defined our existence. She had taken a peek, of course; only one, though it was forbidden in those days. I would never forget what she said to me: ‘There was no ocean, not really, but a sort of mushy pulp, stretching as far as my eyes would go.’

  ‘A mushy pulp?’

  ‘Yes, millions of shiny things floating over the surface of the water, covering it all, like dead brown crabs, the corpses of millions of them.’

  ‘What colour was the ocean?’

  ‘Ah, I’m not very sure, child. Brown, yes, a dull brownish colour, on account of those dead crabs I guess.’

  Many years later, during my apprenticeship, I would learn the reason for this indeterminate brownish colour: a collection of soft translucent debris that glimmered prettily under the sun. It was the plastic that we had been trying to keep out with the Barrier, which had come to serve this primary purpose, although it had been conceived to do something very different, to protect us from the waves generated by the leviathans. So, it was the plastic, and not the corpses of crabs as Savina had said.