by Sonya Taaffe
Cold locked around his wrist, arresting him as abruptly as he had fallen in the first place. He gasped out loud, then again because it was air in his lungs instead of water, and a voice far too close to his ear said tolerantly, “Steady.”
The hand that had caught him stopped just past the elbow in the water, bracing his weight like some impossible acrobatic trick. It looked like a prop, a mannequin’s severed limb. The sea-green veins and the tendons pulsed and tautened with life. It brought him up short when he recoiled, immovable as a bracelet of concrete; slightly wrenched and distantly unsure if he should still be panicking, Julian stared down into his own reflection and thought of the Lady of the Lake, Anna Livia Plurabelle, the shape-changing rivers of Ben Aaronovitch. He saw a column of bubbles pearling through the black water, heard the same voice saying with an edge of amused apology, “You might want to stand back.” It did not leave him time to ask, How?
He did not feel as if the world reversed, the canal tipped itself on end like a door of black mercury to let the drowned and the never-living through; her grip on his wrist tightened as the water convulsed in one rolling uprush as if some long-trapped sump of air had boiled to the surface and he saw her then, a lanky woman in a draggled shirt hauling out onto the towpath like a seal. She was coughing, half-kneeling, one hand planted flat on the bricks for balance and the other still shackled to Julian. When she let go, the warmth that raced across his skin shocked him as suddenly as a burn.
“Told you to stand back,” she whispered when she was done, her voice husky, broader than it had sounded from the other side of the water. Julian, sitting flat on his ass with the treacherous taste of lichened coins spreading through his mouth, said nothing. He was wishing with the uncomplicated strength of a nightmare that it had been him who stayed at home and Oliver who walked out, who knew how to talk to strangers. She did not look like his idea of—whatever he had thought she was, about to pull him one way or another through a pane of water he could have stood up in if sober; he could picture her easily in the pub he had just left, her earrings matching the skull-print wallpaper and her head nodding appreciatively to the heavy beats he could still hear caroming off the brickwork like explosions under water. Her long arms were tangled with tattoos in green and red and black, her swimmer’s shoulders broader than Julian’s even after two decades of T; she raked the dark, wet flop of her hair back from her forehead as he watched, showing the tight-shaved sides and another curl of sailor-blue tattooing in the pale crescent behind one ear. Water was still running from her rolled-up sleeves, the charcoal-colored cuffs of her jeans. The loose-laced boots she was wearing would have drowned her in deep water. He almost asked if they had.
He licked his lips, knowing immediately it was a mistake: the shower of canal he had caught in the face tasted worse every time he thought about it. “Thank you,” he managed instead, and she ducked her head in response, not quite shrugging him off.
“You don’t belong here.”
That startled a laugh out of him, shocky and combative. “I was born at BWH, where the hell do you think I belong?”
“Not here,” she repeated, and he caught her meaning this time. She had swiveled to face him cross-legged on the towpath, apparently unconcerned by the rain and her dripping clothes. When she blinked, he understood that the shine in her eyes was not an artifact of the streetlight. “Drown yourself anywhere else you like, but not on my watch.”
He had no answer for the cheerful, indifferent responsibility in her voice: it raised too many questions. He could not tell how long he was expected to sit here beside her, if he owed her the life she had saved or if running screaming into the night was the socially acceptable option under the circumstances. Rain was starting to trickle through his hair, cold and crawling and uneasy as if it were the canal’s currents combing over him; he shuddered abruptly and reached inside his coat for the half-empty packet of cigarettes he had been rationing at regretful intervals over the last year. Taking up the habit in his stagehand days had not impressed his university girlfriend and breaking it would not impress Oliver now, but he had promised himself that he would quit by forty and the summer was running out. A breath of smoke was more the illusion of warmth than the real thing, but it gave him something to do with his hands and an excuse to climb to his feet and take shelter underneath the nearest margin of slate roof as the rain thickened. When she waved a hand impatiently at him, Julian duly passed the cigarette over, but could not stop himself from asking in genuine curiosity, “Is that all right for you?”
He had steeled himself against the chill of her touch, but not her answer. “You’re not telling me there’s an ecosystem where you are? We actually managed to pollute the—” He could not say otherworld or afterlife with a straight face, absurdity teetering on the edge of terror; he settled for shaking his head and whistling, as if it were too much for words, and watched a slow wry smile cross her face.
“Where I am is here, and I wouldn’t drink a pint of that water if I were you.”
She took another drag, almost down to the last stubbed ember. Julian had more than half expected the lit end to sputter out at her touch, doused by the water still sliding between her fingers in a clear constant fringe; it would not, he was sure, taste of rain. He had found himself eyeing her slicked hair as if it were duckweed. But he could hear nothing of water in her voice, nothing of rising levels or ratcheting gears, and she flicked the cigarette butt into the litter bin as carelessly as if she were human, slouching back to Julian afterward with her hands shoved in her pockets, aimless as any other weeknight flâneur. Oliver, he thought, would have followed her down the towpaths, tracing the city’s cuts and windings with the same studiousness whether they led to a map of the secret world or a shallow-draft grave. You’re never curious about this city, he had flung once at Julian, more in confusion than real accusation. You talk about everywhere but here. Why don’t you move, if you don’t care about it that much? He had never lost the Maritimer accent that sounded most to Julian like some kind of Irish, salt-bright as the sea between Waterford and St. John’s, but he had fallen in love with Birmingham long before his slightly daunting directness and his unironic affection for everything from ZX Spectrum games to the musical comedies of Gracie Fields had coaxed Julian out of his libraries and late nights, cautiously blinking at a good thing, trying not to wait to screw it up. You can love it enough for both of us, he remembered saying, and Oliver’s pale, sharp face—a trickster look and a metabolism that Julian envied—cracking into its crooked smile. It had been difficult once for either of them to stay angry for long.
Across the canal, a new spill of gig-goers was emerging into the beer garden, the old wharfside crane angling its shadow above them like an overbuilt Catherine wheel. The music echoing after them had changed for something more classically alternative, strutty drum fills and male vocals in tight harmony; one of the figures against the railing looked suddenly familiar enough to Julian that he was glad of the night and the water between them before he placed her. Now that she was no longer keening from a stage at banshee pitch, the vocalist from the third band looked like just another civilian in a short denim skirt, boots, and jacket, her arms taken up with a transparent bubble umbrella and some kind of instrument case, either a viola or a violin. Her hair had taken the gel lights like talc, a crown of bleached white-girl dreads; he watched them toss in a laugh that he could not hear, bidding some kind of farewell to the rest of the group beating a retreat from the weather before she turned back to the canal, twirling the umbrella a little. There was no one else in the beer garden, no one on the rain-smoky red bricks of the curving wharf. She stooped and did something he could not follow through the rain and the vertical bars of the railing, straightened into the umbrella’s bell again. One hand hovering like an aerialist, she set one foot on the boards of the picnic table, then on the top of the green-painted rail.
Julian said before he knew he meant to, “Aren’t you going to stop her?”
“No.�
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“But she’s going to fucking jump—”
“Yes.”
When he glared up into his companion’s face, he saw her smile, not as if she were enjoying a joke at his expense, but one that had nothing to do with him. She looked like an enforcer with her sinewy arms folded across her chest, the dark fabric of her shirt silken with water. The vocalist was balancing on the railing like a punked-out Mary Poppins, holding tight to the umbrella as she wavered above the Flapper’s luminous, rainfuzzed reflection. Julian could not believe that no one inside had seen her from one of the upper windows, that nobody would run out and pull her back, one of her bandmates, a passing server; he wanted to shout, but he did not want to startle her into slipping. The next thought touched him like slimy weed—what if he interfered in her drowning only to enmesh them both in something worse, a Samaritan spanner in the works of a watery bureaucracy he could only imagine as less essentially benign than the pearly Technicolor of A Matter of Life and Death? He felt again the cement-cold grasp on his wrist, pulling down this time. The girl on the edge of the canal raised her eyes to his, distinct and terrible as an accident seen through field glasses, too close for comfort and too far to help.
Her face was wet white paper and black water streaming, her eyes the phosphorescence of rotting shells. He could not see what had become of the violin case, but the umbrella was ragged struts and rust, ribbons of gelatinous plastic curling in the wind like questing tentacles; she held it with hands of crisp packet and orange peel. Whoever had worn those clothes before her, they were filthy with mud and smears of algae, crumpled and swollen in the wrong places for a human shape. Her smile widened on a mouth of glass marbles and tarnished rings. Only her hair had not altered, chalky as bones in a tangle of freezing trash—beer bottles and bicycle chains, bin liners and concert flyers, the wheels of shopping trolleys, needles and nails and the charred sticks of fireworks. Julian’s mouth opened, drawing breath for a scream or a long, long silence, and the garden’s light gleamed on the clear bubble of her umbrella, the white knots of her hair. Her face was a sketch at this distance, lifted away from him toward the houses opposite. She took a tightrope walker’s step onto plain air and hit the water without a splash.
In the quiet of the rain and the muted thump of the music, Julian said, “You stopped me.”
“Yes.”
“Because I don’t belong here.”
“That’s right.” She glanced down at him not unkindly, a tall woman about his own age who was not, he was very sure then, either of those things. She was smoking again and he did not ask where she had gotten the cigarette from: fished it up from the canal-bed, plucked it out of time. She said, deadpan, “It’s not healthy, that water.”
“Fuck,” Julian said breathlessly, and spun away from her just in time.
People were always throwing up outside of pubs, he thought, no one should look twice at him for it, but he felt achingly conspicuous, retching on his knees like an eighteen-year-old with more machismo than sense. When he finally slumped back on his heels, head tipped back to the rain blowing into his mouth, he was surprised to find she had knelt down beside him, the cigarette in her hand glowing like a barge light. “It’s okay,” he mumbled, even though it was not and he could not be sure it ever would be again, “I’m okay,” and she nodded once, as if that were all she needed to hear. He closed his eyes, seeing again half an arm in darkened water, a face like a storm grate in a downpour. Opening them with an eff ort, he found she had already stepped away.
He wanted to see, in the glittering furl of lights from the Flapper, that she had the profile of a Roman statue, some known strangeness he could put a name to—Coventina, Arnemetia, Sulis. He could not make even the concepts fit her. Her eyes were the color of old sodium streetlight on sandstone and iron, her tattoos moss and red brick and coal. He would never have glimpsed her at a holy well; in a river, he would have drowned. Half over her shoulder, she gave him a careless wave, as if she expected to see him next week for the pub quiz, and stepped off the towpath without ceremony. He heard a choking drag of breath, a tidal implosion of water. Ripples spread in rain-linked rings, fading before he could even be sure of their epicenter. The door of the canal was closed.
There was still music faintly pulsing over the water, but he did not know if it was the same band; a crowd shifting out onto the brick-walled street, breaking up in the rain, but he could not swear that they were all people. Alive, at least. If he got home in one piece, Julian could not see how he could ever leave again, knowing that the face of any stranger, from bank tellers to trainspotters to the new receptionist at the clinic, might be a mask of drownings, the dredge and patchwork of the canals. How he could ever again come within sight of the Birmingham and Fazeley, knowing the water itself could see him. Perhaps he could take Oliver’s advice after all and leave, finally, the city that had always felt like home in the same way that his parents had felt like family, demanding, endurable, unchosen. His hands were cold in the rain; it took him too long to dial the number, tiny keys sticking on the ancient flip phone he had staved off replacing for years, in no small part because its dropped calls and declined texts made a good excuse for not picking up. He did not know if Oliver could still teach him to love the city, or at least not to fear it. Outside of edgelands and museums, Julian had never had much luck with that.
The phone was ringing; he hoped it meant Oliver was reaching for it, closing the latest Peter Ackroyd or pausing the episode of classic Who. The canal eddied beneath its oilskin of light and Julian tried not to watch it, as he tried not to feel the blood in his veins. He hoped that Oliver’s face, when he came to find him, would be wet and shining only with the rain.
for Mattie Joiner
THE CREEPING INFLUENCES
She came out of the peat like a sixpence in a barmbrack, her face shining like wet iron between the spade-edge and the turf, the bright rusty plait of her hair broken like a birth-cord around her neck. Jimmy Connolly swore, and Dan Wall crossed himself, and thin-faced Sean MacMahon gaped like someone had shoved him by the scruff of his neck to a keyhole, all consternation and wanting to see more. And me? Mid-cut, I stopped with my spade half-stuck in the green-tufted earth and stared until my back hurt, forgetting to step forward into the slice or straighten up to save myself the pain. The sky was a racing grey, the land brown as strong tea and talkative with water all around us. The bones of her arm and shoulder were clean as bronze hairpins where Jimmy’s spade had stripped off the fragile tissue, wadded it like old tin foil against her breastbone. Otherwise she might have been sleeping, tucked up in the pillowy bogland with the sedge snug at her chin.
“Oh,” Sean said then, recovering, “Roddy’s found his sweetheart,” and all of us laughed, jokers at the graveside. Her eyelids were their own silver pennies, closed.
After that it was talk of museums and universities, while we peeled the peat from her wounded shoulder and the crushed hollow of her throat. She was twisted in the black slices, squashed in on herself like a discarded paper bag; exposed to the scudding summer air, she gleamed like an elver in an eddy of mud. Even flattened strangely under the tarnished skin, her features were peaceful, long-eyed, her lips sealed in a dreaming curve. She would not stay that way for long if we left her to dry with the rest of the stacked sods—and God knew if packing her in peat again would save us much time. Bolder in defense of a dead girl than I had ever seen him on his own reluctant behalf, Sean was all for ringing the National Museum as soon as we got our day’s pay, no matter whether it was an archaeologist or a policeman they sent from Dublin, anyone who could disinter her from the bog without ruining the frail preservation of her body further. “And tell us where she came from, maybe, who—killed her,” and we heard a click of half-swallowed words before he went on with the sentence, as though it were impolite to mention it out loud.
“Sacrifice,” said Jimmy laconically; he had done a little reading, he explained, some years before when turf-cutters like ourselves turned up a
skeleton in County Galway that was not a recently missing person, but an accidental drowning nearly five thousand years old. “To the heathen gods of ancient Ireland, for luck in the harvest and fine healthy children. She’d have been a beauty in her day, back before the Romans, that was. Anything less than the best and they’d have been cheating their gods. You can think a moment how kindly their gods would’ve taken that.”
He sounded like a professor even in his sweat-banded collarless shirt and mud-streaked dungarees; looked like one, tall and black-haired, his harsh-cut face planing itself down to bronze with the lengthening days. Sean and I were nodding when Dan Wall, who I would never have guessed read a book unless it was full of bets and long shots, snorted and spat deliberately onto the turf.
“Ballocks, Connolly. She was a whore. An adulteress, and her man caught her at it—he pinned her down in the bog to punish her, see?” We could see the leather twisted into the silver-black of her flesh when he pointed it out, tanned as foxily as her hair and tight as a garrote. He scratched a little at the peat over her breast, carving the butter-black sod away: it was not bone arching under his fingers, above her ribcage, but slim withies of some water-stiffened wood. “Tell me that’s an honor, dumping a pretty girl like a sack of shite out in the middle of this mire. He had to hate her. He couldn’t bring himself to break her face, but he made damn sure not another man’d see it after him. Cut another yard and we’ll find the man she did it with, I know that.”
Sean was bristling, but Jimmy only looked over mildly, once at Dan and once at the girl with the curve of one wrinkled breast just showing under the muddy tines. “Sure, you should be working for the Gardaí,” he said, and then Sean was arguing again about the National Museum, or anyone within a day’s drive of Croghan who might know about the ancient strangled pagan dead, and Jimmy was half-listening to him, having plainly already made up his mind to agree, and Dan was gazing angrily down at the tar-cast dead face beneath us, as if he were the man she had hurt.