The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  Despite the bleach, the smell lingered in cupboards and corners. Every so often, an anemone would appear overnight; she would find a translucent shrimp darting around inside an empty milk bottle. Sometimes, all the water in the house turned into brine and she lugged huge bottles of water home from the supermarket. The silence waxed and waned. Life bedded itself down again like a hermit crab in a bigger, emptier shell.

  Once in a while, Annie and her husband Westy came round to see Iris. They lived on the same street and came over when Annie had something she wanted to say or if she was bored. She could smell out bad news and liked to talk about it, her own included. Westy went wherever she went. He was a vague man. He’d got his whole Scout group lost when he was twelve because he’d read the compass wrong, so he was nicknamed Westy and it stuck – everyone used it, even his wife; sometimes Iris wondered if he could even remember his real name. When Annie dies, she sometimes thought, his mind will go, just like that, and mentally she would snap her fingers, instantly regretting thinking it.

  When she heard them coming up the path she would rush round the house, checking water filters, tearing thrift off the shelves. If she ever missed something, a limpet shell, a watery cluster of sea moss, Annie and Westy would look away, pretending not to notice.

  Last month, they came over on a Sunday afternoon. ‘I don’t like Sundays,’ Annie said, drinking her tea at scalding point. ‘They make me feel like I’m in limbo.’ She was short and spread herself out over the chair. She made Iris want to stoop over.

  It was damp outside and the kitchen windows had steamed up. Annie had brought over saffron cake and Iris bit at the edges, feeling she had to but hating the chlorine taste of it. She’d told Annie that before but she kept bringing it over anyway.

  ‘Don’t forget the envelope,’ Westy said.

  Annie shot him a quick look. ‘I’ll come to that.’ She glanced down at her bag. ‘Have you heard about the burglaries around King’s Road?’

  ‘I read something about it,’ Iris said. She crossed her arms, knowing that Annie was trying to ease into something.

  ‘Five over two weeks. All in the middle of the day. The owners came back to stripped houses – everything gone, even library books.’

  ‘Library books?’ Iris said. She saw that Annie and Westy were wearing the same fleece in different colours – one purple, one checked red and green.

  ‘Exactly. One of the owners said they saw a van driving away. They saw the men in there looking at them.’ Annie paused, looked at Westy. ‘Imagine going in there, seeing the bare walls, knowing that someone had gone through everything, valuing it.’

  ‘Their shoes,’ Westy said.

  ‘Everything,’ said Annie. ‘And no chance of ever getting it back.’ She stopped, waiting for Iris to speak, but Iris didn’t say anything. Annie reached down into her bag and got out a blue and gold envelope and put it on the table, cleared her throat. ‘Ever heard of Diving Belles?’ she asked bluntly.

  Iris didn’t look at the envelope. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. She saw Annie take a deep breath – she was bad at this, had never liked giving out gifts. Iris’s mind raced through ways she could steer the conversation away; she snatched at topics but couldn’t fasten on to any.

  ‘When Kayleigh Andrews did it,’ Annie told her, ‘it only took one go. They found her husband as quick as anything.’

  Iris didn’t reply. She tightened her lips and poured out more tea.

  ‘It seems like a very lucrative business,’ Annie said, pressing on. ‘A good opportunity.’

  ‘Down on the harbour,’ said Westy. ‘By the old lifeboat hut.’

  Iris knocked crumbs into her cupped palm from the table edge and tipped them into her saucer. The clock on the fridge ticked loudly into the silence. The old anger swept back. She could break all these plates.

  ‘A good opportunity,’ Annie said again.

  ‘For some people,’ Iris replied. A fly buzzed over and she banged a plate down hard on to it.

  ‘What you need is one of those electric swatters,’ Westy told her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble,’ Iris said. She gripped the sides of her chair.

  Annie pushed the envelope so it was right in front of her. ‘The voucher’s redeemable for three goes,’ she said.

  ‘It’s kind of you.’

  They looked around the room as if they had never seen it before, the cream walls and brown speckled tiles. A sea snail crawled over the window-sill.

  ‘I can’t swim. I won’t be able to do it if I can’t swim,’ Iris said suddenly.

  ‘You don’t need to swim. You just sit in this bell thing and get lowered down,’ Annie said. ‘The voucher gives you three goes, Iris. You don’t have to swim anywhere.’

  Iris stood up, stacked the cups and plates, and took them to the sink. Soon Annie would say something like, ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ Her hands trembled slightly, the crockery clattering together like pebbles flipping over.

  After they’d left, she watched the envelope out of the corner of her eye. She did small jobs that took her closer towards it: she swept the floor, straightened the chairs, the tablecloth. Later, lying in bed, she pictured it sitting there. It was very exposed in the middle of the table like that – what if somebody broke in? It would be a waste of Annie’s money if the voucher was stolen. She went downstairs, picked up the envelope, brought it back upstairs and tucked it under her pillow.

  The reception at Diving Belles was in an old corrugated-iron Portakabin on the edge of the harbour. Iris knocked tentatively on the door. The wind hauled itself around the town, crashing into bins and slumping into washing, jangling the rigging on the fishing boats. There were piles of nets and lobster pots and orange buoys that smelled of fish and stagnant water. No one answered the door. She stepped back to check she had the right place, then knocked again. There was a clanging above her head as a woman walked across the roof. She was wearing khaki trousers, a tight black vest and jelly shoes. Her hair was short and dyed red. She climbed down a ladder and stood in front of Iris, staring. Her hands were criss-crossed with scars and her broad shoulders and arms were covered in tattoos. Iris couldn’t take her eyes off them. She watched an eel swim through a hollow black heart on the woman’s bicep.

  ‘Is it, I mean, are you Demelza?’ Iris asked.

  ‘Demelza, Demelza… Yes, I suppose I am.’ Demelza looked up at the roof and stepped back as if to admire something. There was a strange contraption up there – it looked like a metal cage with lots of thick springs. ‘That ought to do it,’ Demelza muttered to herself.

  Iris looked up. Was that a seagull sprawled inside or a plastic bag?

  Demelza strode off towards the office without saying anything else. Iris hesitated, then followed her.

  The office smelled like old maps and burnt coffee. Demelza sat behind a desk which had a hunting knife skewered into one corner. Iris perched on the edge of a musty deckchair. Paperwork and files mixed with rusty boat parts. There was a board on the wall with hundreds of glinting turquoise and silver scales pinned to it.

  Demelza leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘These are herbal,’ she said. ‘Every drag is like death.’ She inhaled deeply then rubbed at her knuckles, rocking back and forth on the chair’s back legs.

  Iris tensed her back, trying to keep straight so that her deckchair wouldn’t collapse. The slats creaked. She felt too warm even though the room was cold.

  ‘So,’ Demelza barked suddenly. ‘What are we dealing with here? Husband taken?’

  Iris nodded.

  Demelza rummaged around in the desk drawer and pulled out a form. ‘How many nights ago?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure.’

  ‘Spit it out. Three? Seven? If you haven’t counted the nights I don’t know why you’re pestering me about it.’

  ‘Seventeen thousand, six hundred and thirty-two,’ Iris said.

  ‘What the hell? There’s not room for that on this form.’ Demelza l
ooked at her. Her eyes were slightly bloodshot and she didn’t seem to blink.

  ‘If it doesn’t fit on the form then don’t trouble yourself,’ Iris said. She started to get up, relief and disappointment merging.

  ‘Hang on, hang on.’ Demelza gestured for her to sit back down. ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. It makes more sense anyway now I come to think about it. I’ve never known them to be bothered by an old codger before.’ She sniggered to herself.

  ‘He was twenty-four.’

  ‘Exactly, exactly.’ Demelza scribbled something down on the form. ‘But this is going to be damn tricky, you know. There’s a chance he will have migrated; he could have been abandoned; he could be anywhere. You understand that?’ Iris nodded again. ‘Good. I need you to sign here – just a simple legal clause about safety and the like, and to confirm you know that I’m not legally obliged to produce the husband. If I can’t find him it’s tough titties, OK?’

  Iris signed it.

  ‘And how I track them is business secrets,’ Demelza said. ‘Don’t bother asking me about it. I don’t want competition.’

  A plastic singing fish leered down at Iris from the wall. She could feel tendrils of her hair slipping from behind their pins. She always wore her hair up, but once she’d left it down and nobody in her local shop had recognised her. When she’d ventured back she’d had to pretend that she’d been away for a while. She dug a pin in deeper. Was Demelza smirking at her? She hunched down in the chair, almost wishing it would fold up around her. She shouldn’t have come. She waited for Demelza to say something but she was just rocking back and forth, one leg draped over the desk.

  ‘The weather’s warming up.’ Iris said eventually, although it was colder than ever.

  Demelza said something through her teeth about seagulls and tourists then sighed and stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said. They walked to the end of the harbour. Small waves lifted up handfuls of seaweed at the bottom of the harbour wall. Demelza pointed to an old beam trawler. ‘There she is.’

  ‘There she is,’ Iris said. The Matriarch was yellow and haggard as an old fingernail. Rust curled off the bottom. It looked like it was struggling to stay afloat. Its figurehead was a decapitated mermaid and the deck smelled of tar and sewage. None of the other boats had anchored near it.

  Demelza took a deep sniff. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Without waiting for an answer she walked up the ramp and on to the boat. The diving bell was sitting on a platform next to the wheel. It looked ancient and heavy, like a piece of armour. For the first time, Iris realised she’d be going right under the sea. Picturing herself inside, she remembered a pale bird she had once seen hanging in a cage in a shop window.

  Demelza ran her hand across the metal. She explained how the diving bell worked. ‘See, when it’s submerged the air and the water pressure balance so the water won’t come in past the bench. The oxygen gets trapped in the top. Of course, modern ones do it differently; there are pipes and things that pump oxygen down from the boat. Apparently that’s “safer”. They have all this crap like phones in there but they’re not as beautiful as this one. This one is a real beauty. Why would you need a goddamn phone under the sea?’ She looked at Iris as if she expected an answer.

  Iris thought about comfort and calling for help. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘No one likes change, do they?’

  Demelza clapped her hard on the back. ‘My sentiment exactly.’ They walked back along the harbour. ‘Give me a few days to track any signs then I’ll give you a buzz,’ she said.

  Fifteen minutes passed inside the diving bell. It could have been seconds or hours. The hulk of the Queen Mary was dark and still. Iris noticed every small movement. A spider crab poked its head out of a hole. A sea slug pulsed across the keel. The seaweed swayed and rocked in small currents and, following them with her eyes, Iris rocked into a thin sleep, then jolted awake with a gasp, thinking she had fallen into the water, feeling herself hit the cold and start to sink. She hadn’t slept well the night before but it was ridiculous and dangerous to fall asleep here, to come all this way and sleep. She pinched her wrist and shifted on the bench, wishing Demelza had put some sort of cushion on it.

  Time passed. A ray swam up and pasted itself to the glass like a wet leaf. It had a small, angry face. Its mouth gaped. The diving bell became even darker inside and Iris couldn’t see anything out of the window. ‘Get away,’ she said. Nothing happened. She leaned forwards and banged hard on the glass until the ray unpeeled itself and disappeared. Her heart beat fast and heavy. Every time she glimpsed a fish darting, or saw a small shadow, she thought that it was him swimming towards her. She worked herself up and then nothing happened. Her heart slowed down again.

  Demelza was sure there would be a sighting. She said that she’d recorded a lot more movement around the wreck in the past few days, but to Iris it seemed as empty and lonely as ever.

  Something caught her eye and she half stood on the footrest to look out. Nothing – probably seaweed. Her knees shook, not up to the task of hefting her about in such a narrow gap. She sat back down. Even if he did appear, even if she made him follow the diving bell until Demelza could reach him with the net, what would she say to him on deck? What was that phrase Annie had picked up? ‘Long time no see’? She practised saying it. ‘Long time no see.’ It sounded odd and caught in her throat. She cleared it and tried again. ‘Actually, long time lots of sea,’ she joked into the hollow metal. It fell flat. She thought of all the things she wanted to tell him. There were so many things but none of them were right. They stacked up in front of her like bricks, dense and dry. She had a sudden thought and colour seeped up her neck and into her cheeks. Of course, he was going to be naked. She had forgotten about that. She’d be standing there, thinking of something to say, and Demelza would be there, and he’d be naked. It had been so long since… She didn’t know whether she would… Was she a wife or a stranger? She picked at the fragile skin around her nails, tearing it to pieces.

  On the first dive, Iris had got a sense of how big it all was, how vast; emptier and more echoing than she had thought possible. It made her feel giddy and sick. She had presumed that there would be something here – she didn’t know what – but she hadn’t imagined this nothingness stretching on and on. She shuddered, hating the cold and the murk, regretting ever picking up the envelope from the table. The silence bothered her. She didn’t like to think of him somewhere so silent.

  As she went deeper, small memories rose up to meet her. A fine net of flour over his dark hair; a song on his lips that went, ‘My old man was a sailor, I saw him once a year’; a bee, but she didn’t know what the bee was connected to.

  She saw something up ahead: a small, dark shape swimming towards her. Her stomach lurched. It had to be him – he had sensed her and was coming to meet her! She pulled on the cord, once, hard, to stop. The bell drifted down for a few moments then lurched to a halt. Iris craned her neck forwards, trying to make him out properly. She should have done this years ago.

  He came closer, swimming with his arms behind him. What colour was that? His skin looked very dark; a kind of red-brown. He swam closer and her heart dropped down into her feet. It was an octopus. Its curled legs drifted out behind as it swam around the bell, its body like a bag snagged on a tree. She had thought this octopus was her husband! Shame and a sudden tiredness coursed through her. She tried to laugh but only the smallest corner of her mouth twitched, then wouldn’t stop. ‘You silly fool,’ she told herself. ‘You silly fool.’ She watched its greedy eyes inspecting the bell, then pulled three times on the cord. A spasm of weariness gripped her. She told Demelza she hadn’t seen anything.

  ‘I thought you had, when you wanted to stop suddenly,’ Demelza said. She took a swig from a hip flask and offered it to Iris, who sipped until her dry lips burned. ‘Wouldn’t have thought they’d have been mid-water like that, but still, they can be wily bastards at times.’ She turned round and squinted at Iris, who was sitting very quietly with her eyes closed. �
�No sea legs,’ Demelza said to herself. ‘You know what the best advice I heard was?’ she asked loudly. ‘You can’t chuck them back in once they’re out.’ She shook her head and bit her knuckles. ‘I had a woman yesterday, a regular. She comes every couple of weeks. Her husband is susceptible to them, she says. So she goes down, we net him up and lug him back on to the deck, all pale and fat, dripping salt and seaweed like a goddamn seal. And all the time I’m thinking, what the hell’s the point? Leave him down there. But she’s got it in her head that she can’t live without him so that’s that.’

  ‘Maybe she loves him,’ Iris said.

  ‘Bah. There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ Demelza said. She laughed and laughed, barking and cawing like a seagull. ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ she said again, baring her teeth to the wind. ‘Plenty, fish, sea,’ she muttered over and over as she steered back to the harbour.

  On her second dive Iris heard the beginning of a song threading through the water towards her. It was slow and deep, more of an ache in her bones than something she heard in her ears. There was a storm building up but Demelza thought it would hold off long enough to do the dive. At firsr Iris thought the sound was the wind, stoked right up and reaching down into the water – it was the same noise as the wind whistling through gaps in boats, or over the mouth of a milk bottle, but she knew that the wind wouldn’t come down this far. It thrummed through the metal and into her bones, maybe just her old body complaining again, playing tricks, but she felt so light and warm. The song grew louder, slowing Iris’s heart, pressing her eyes closed like kind thumbs. It felt good to have her eyes closed. The weight of the water pressed in but it was calm, inviting; it beckoned to her. She wanted to get out of the bell, just get up and slip through the gap at the bottom. She almost did it. She was lifting herself stiffly from the bench when the song stopped and slipped away like a cloud diffusing into the sky, leaving her cold and lonely inside the bell. Then the storm began, quietly thumping far away like someone moving boxes around in a dusty attic.