by Jan Carson
‘Days,’ she corrects. ‘It’s been three days.’
The enormity of this hits me. It’s almost too big to believe.
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘I’ve probably lost my job.’
‘Probably,’ she agrees.
‘I need to go home right now. I need to eat something. Then I need to go home.’
‘I’m coming too.’
‘You can’t come home with me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I hardly know you.’
‘It’s a matter of life and death, Jonny. If you don’t take me home with you, I’ll probably die here in this flat. Right here on the floor, wrapped up in this curtain. And you’ll be to blame.’
While I consider my options, reminding myself that good sense should no longer be seen as a measuring stick for decision-making, she passes me a tin-opener and the long-forgotten chicken soup. I eat it straight from the tin, using the flattened metal arm of the opener as a makeshift spoon. It tastes like wallpaper paste.
‘Besides,’ she says, dropping the curtain to slip into a pair of royal-blue decorator’s overalls, ‘you’re extremely lonely. You need something in your life aside from doctoring.’
‘I probably don’t even have the doctoring to fall back on any more,’ I mutter, between glutinous mouthfuls.
‘It’s settled, then. You need me. You’re taking me home.’
‘I don’t think I want to.’
‘Yes, you do.’
Instantly I change my mind. I very much want to take her home with me. This is one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. She has no belongings, besides a second pair of overalls, which she retrieves from the cupboard beneath the sink.
‘Toothbrush?’ I ask.
‘Never felt the need,’ she replies, and grins to expose a set of baby teeth, perfectly capped and kept like pearly headstones.
‘Underwear? Change of clothes?’
She shakes her head slowly, allowing waves of coal-black curls to flex and swoosh about her shoulders.
‘Shoes? Surely you have shoes? Everyone has shoes.’
She has no shoes. I rifle round the flat and find nothing resembling footwear, not so much as a casual slipper. I turn her feet upside down and examine the soles. They are sausage pink and unlined, perfect as a newborn’s. Though logic and eight flights of concrete stairs argue otherwise, though I’ve done my best to avoid podiatry, and I know there are reasonable scientific explanations for almost every bizarre occurrence, I suspect her feet are barely used. They are suspiciously unworn for a fully grown woman. I say nothing. Over the next nine months I’ll find myself regularly saying next to nothing while an avalanche of questions threatens to tip me over some terrible edge.
‘Right then,’ I say. ‘If you’ve got no shoes, I suppose I’ll have to carry you.’
I have never lifted another human being before, even as a child playing with other children. I pick her up and fling her over one shoulder. I’ve seen this in a movie about firefighters, possibly The Towering Inferno. I pass her my bag. Obsolete as it is, I feel a strange attachment to its parchment leather, its stout belly, the chlorine and carbon smell it seems to emit. I can’t leave it here in the empty flat. Thus balanced, we sashay downwards to the foyer. The weight of her is wonderful, a dull pain that burns louder with every flight of steps. By the time I arrive, panting, at the Renault’s door I’m drenched with sweat. I feel capable of building brutish things: ships and houses, railway lines. I could probably kill a man with my bare hands. I set her carefully on the bonnet. Her backside leaves an indentation in the sheet metal, a gentle hollow that will pool with water every time it rains. This mark will last longer than our relationship.
‘You’ve got three parking tickets,’ she says, plucking the little plastic packets individually from beneath my windscreen wipers. ‘It’s your own fault. You left your car for three days in a one-hour spot.’
‘I didn’t mean to stay,’ I reply.
‘Oh, I think you did, Jonny. I think you had every intention of staying.’
And, I have to admit, she’s absolutely right. I keep this to myself as I manhandle her into the passenger seat, forcibly buckling her in for she seems terrified of seatbelts, terrified of any kind of restraint. The dashboard clock reads 6:37. East Belfast is just beginning to wake. Straggles of sleep-deprived cleaners and factory workers huddle under the bus-stop hoods, smoking. A solitary bin lorry beats up and down the Newtownards Road, purposefully ignoring the congregations of wheelie-bins, worshipping, open-mouthed on every corner. The church spires stretch maliciously, as if intent upon piercing the clouds, and the rain obliges, descending in gloopy streams, smearing like syrup across the Renault’s windscreen.
Before turning the car I pause to look at her. She is silently folding herself into the passenger seat, her face barely visible above the peak of her knees. I like her best like this, quiet and compromised. While she holds her tongue I can order my thoughts, think in lines and strings rather than the cyclical swirls she stirs up inside my head.
‘She doesn’t belong to me,’ I tell myself. ‘I should leave her where I found her.’
I know this will not end well. In the silence I’m all for pitching her out on to the pavement.
‘Here,’ she says, lowering her knees to let her lungs unfold, ‘do you have a bath or a shower in your house, Jonny?’
‘Both,’ I reply, and throw the Renault into second gear. The argument is over. My head is once more spaghetti. I’m already planning to make her sleep on the left side of the bed, as far as possible from the door.
‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘Is it a large bath, big enough for me to be underwater if I fill it to the brim?’
‘I suppose. I’ve never tried. I usually take showers.’
‘Great. You can keep taking your showers and I’ll take the bath. I’ll feel much better once I’m underwater. You’ll hardly notice me around the house. I’ll just stay in the bath.’
And this is what she does for nine whole months, rising to the surface when the second trimester causes her belly to swell at an alarming rate. She is not happy. She wishes to be underwater, fully submerged, like an octopus or a submarine. At first it shocks me to see her pale face rippling beneath the bathwater, that thin line of bubbles rising from her nose and mouth. I sit on the closed toilet lid for hours, staring, waiting to haul her to the surface and perform mouth-to-mouth when her breath runs out. Her breath never runs out. She’s built like a kind of fish. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Eventually I accept this. I never get used to it. But I come to accept that she isn’t normal and I find a way to live with this.
Singing into my deepest sleep she demands a weightlifter’s belt, a force with which to petition gravity, something to keep her head perpetually bobbing beneath the waterline. I order one off the internet, and when it arrives, I fasten it firmly about her expanding middle. It is the only thing she will consent to wear. The lust has long gone out of her nakedness. I see her now as I see my patients or pictures in a medical textbook. Except, of course, when she wishes to be seen with lust. This is all in the way she words herself, ‘Come here, Jonny. I need you.’ Then I cannot have enough of her nakedness. Then, I am in the bath with her or on the bathroom floor, dripping. Afterwards I regret what we have done and wish we could be normal together, in a bed.
‘It’s best if I’m underwater,’ she explains, ‘I feel better underwater, but this damn baby seems determined to drag me to the surface.’
I spend hours, while she’s sleeping, riffling through medical textbooks. I google case studies and academic articles, searching for other human beings capable of flourishing on nothing but liquids, for adult men and women with skin as flawless as that of newborn children. I study hypnotism, mind tricks and examples of ordinary people coerced into unusual behaviour, those subject to Stockholm syndrome or brainwashed by cults and charismatic individuals. I find myself typing ‘Can human beings live underwater?’ into the search bar and wonder what the point of medical
school was, when everything lately has seemed to laugh in the face of science.
Of course I discover small snippets of her in many of these articles. Here, in the subsonic communication of bats and dolphins, is a possible explanation for the way her voice has a hook to it. The way it is impossible to hear fully, or resist with an ordinary ear. Here, in the smooth, unmarked heels of the South Pacific boat people, I find a precedent for her own flawless soles. Here are numerous freaks and addicts, mutated genetics and mental-health issues nodding towards her oddity. I collate them all in a hardback notebook, attempting to convince myself that there is a perfectly plausible reason for the way she isn’t normal.
But science is not wide enough to contain her. She is not just happiest underwater, or unmarked, or capable of melding thought with the slightest inclination of her voice. She is so much more than a series of individual symptoms combined. She has, for many months, been a force of bloody reckoning occupying my en-suite bathroom. All my careful notes cannot scratch the surface of how it feels to stand under her voice, stripped of all resistance, fragile, floundering, hoping she will not choose to destroy me. And, though I can’t admit it to myself, cannot even write the bad word down, I know exactly what she is, and there is no way to say this with science. Myth made flesh. Creature lifted from a story book. Siren she is. Wicked, matchless Siren, and I’ll be lucky to survive her or the thing she’s making in my bathtub.
I have fifty per cent shares in this child. I suspect it is caught in some sort of pre-natal wrestling match, a junior Jacob oscillating between the human and the divine. The human element, I reassure myself, seems hell-bent on making it to the surface. She costs me hundreds of pounds in hot water. The gas bill goes through the roof. Even in early April, while the city swelters beneath a pre-season heatwave, she demands piping hot bathwater.
‘It’s a luxury,’ she admits, ‘my only luxury, Jonny. It’s not like I’m costing you much in food or clothes.’
This is true. Save the daily drum of Saxa added to her bathwater, and the gas bill and, of course, the loss of a stable income, she is a cheap date, a kind of overgrown goldfish. She only ever consumes liquids, water, juice, custard, tinned soup, continuing to insist that anything more solid will stick inside her and never come out. I’ve no idea if this is normal for her sort. It’s not the kind of thing we covered in medical school. For months I live from hand to mouth, existing on Pot Noodle, cheap whiskey and the sound of her singing melodically in the upstairs bathroom. I read the Bible from cover to cover as a means of filling my time and find nothing, not a single line of helpful advice, on the subject of intoxicating sea creatures. I give up on the Bible and work my way through a box set of The Chronicles of Narnia. Even this seems a little too much like realism.
I watch her expand. Her hips and thighs swell against the bathtub sides. Her hair is like sea grass shuffling in the water. Her fingertips are prunes and raisins now. The dome of her stomach breaks the water’s surface, belly button dilating, like the inverted funnel of an old-fashioned gramophone. When she sleeps, as she often does, head resting on the bathtub’s bottom, her breath swims to the surface in glassy, marble burps and I whisper into her belly button, hoping the baby might have its ear inclined towards the outside world.
‘What sort of a creature are you?’ I ask the unborn thing inside her. It’s my one and only question. No answer is forthcoming. Considering her mother’s condition, the baby is remarkably quiet. I am a father now, no longer a doctor. I dread the advent of a tiny monster. A baby is almost as hard to imagine.
When the moment comes I am fast asleep, drooling over the living-room sofa. Behind me the television is chattering. It has once again become a thing I talk to as if it is another person in the room. Between the television and the sleeping I don’t hear any of it. No screaming. No laboured breathing. No howls of dreadful pain. Nor do I hear her leave. Once she is gone, it is hard to believe in the strangeness of her. She is just another person who has upped and left me. She is gone but still stitched into me, smarting every time my mind catches on the thought of her.
I try to convince myself that she was just a regular woman. But I can’t seem to skim over those unmarked heels or her always wanting to be underwater. The way I couldn’t say no to her, would let her bite and claw me ragged even when my body yearned for softness. The magic of her. The way she could pinch my will and twist it, easy as a blink. How it hurt, real gut pangs, like being stabbed each time I tried to resist her. No, she wasn’t normal. There was nothing ordinary about her. Siren she was. Irresistible, intoxicating Siren.
I know I can never speak of her in this way. How to say, ‘I have been seduced by a mythical creature’? How to make the unbelievable true? It would help if she’d offered me a name, a back story, even the smallest sliver of information about her past. But she’s left me nothing to prove her real. Nothing but the salt line crusting round my bathtub. Nothing but the memory of my whole body clenching, as if punched, every time I looked at her pale Ophelia face blooming through the bathwater.
I find the baby in the kitchen sink, half filled.
I read insecurity into the six inches of sink that remained unfulfilled. In the nine months of our mutual acquaintance I had never known her to hesitate. She must have hesitated then, leaning over the draining-board, scrutinizing her newborn daughter for the assurance that she was one hundred per cent hers, capable of all necessary aquatics. In the end she’d held back and filled the sink halfway. Perhaps she saw me in the cut of my daughter’s shins, the way her second toes curled into the third, the frowning eyebrows, which, even in her earliest moments, threatened to avalanche her tiny face.
I want to think the child is clearly mine. I cannot see an ounce of myself in her. I wrap her in a wad of kitchen roll and a cautionary layer of tinfoil for I remember this will keep the heat in. I cannot, in the moment, remember anything useful learnt at university. A series of child-sized footprints in the flowerbeds beneath the kitchen window suggests her mother is long gone. My head is glacial. My lungs are on fire. I pour myself a glass of whiskey and, with no proper infant receptacle forthcoming, place the baby inside the largest of my saucepans. Her skin is the colour of sliced salami. Her hair, coal-toned and gleaming, is concentrated around her face in thick curls. Like question marks.
It is hard to call her beautiful but she belongs to me. I feel less the failure just watching her sleep. I have made a solid half of her – arms or legs, back or belly, fingers or toes. Fifty per cent of her is mine. I haven’t abandoned her. I have found her floundering in the kitchen sink. And saved her. I fully intend to keep her for eighteen years at least. I wonder if this is something like being in love. It isn’t as urgent as I’d imagined love would be. The closest thing I can compare it to is physics: a sense that one thing must naturally lead to the next. There is no feeling involved. It is as inevitable as gravity.
I can’t think of a name for her. But there is plenty of time for that.
For one day I am the happiest man in East Belfast. Then I start wondering what will happen when she speaks.
5
The Difficult Son
Peel back the years. It is 2001, a month before September the eleventh. In East Belfast the children have two solid weeks of freedom left. They are acutely aware of the first day of term. It is like a small death looming on the horizon. They are sucking the marrow out of every remaining holiday moment. Up with the birds and down with the streetlamps. They’re never inside. They’re always filthy and knee-greened with grass stains. They’re happy as children should be. Sammy has three children: Mark, who is eight years old, Lauren, who is seven, and Christopher, who is just five and still carries a comfort blanket.
It is not a particularly hot summer, but it is dry, and his children have no interest in television. They are, every waking moment, outside. Sammy watches them from the kitchen window kicking footballs and playing Wimbledon over the clothes line with ancient tennis racquets and balled-up socks. On those rare days when
the temperature crawls close enough to twenty to approximate heat, Pamela gets him to blow up the paddling pool. The children run in and out of the lukewarm water tracking cut grass and mud behind them until they’re bathing in liquid the colour of cold tea. By five they are goosebumped and shivering but still reluctant to come in for their dinner. When they eat they shovel the food into their mouths and barely give it time to hit their stomachs before they’re speed-saying, ‘Thank-you-for-my-dinner-please-may-I-leave-the-table.’ Then they’re up and out of the door with a choc ice in hand. That is what passes for pudding during the summer months.
Every afternoon the neighbourhood kids circulate through the Agnews’ backyard, like downtown buses: wee Jonno and the twins, Mikey M and Mikey B, Lydia, Maureen (whose parents are older and dress her like a spinster aunt), and Stevie, from the top of the road, who has his right arm in a cast from playing cricket. Their bikes are abandoned in the Agnews’ drive, wheels still spinning as they hit the ground, handlebars twisted awkwardly, like soldiers dropped dead on the battlefield. Sammy picks his way through the carnage to the garage. The bikes are a bloody nuisance but he cannot get the rage up.
This is everything he’s ever wanted for his children: outdoors and innocence and friends from nice families, with parents who still live together, who don’t believe in guns. His children are the most popular kids on the street. This has something to do with there being three of them. Boy, girl, boy, with only a year sandwiching one child to the next. A kind of condensed energy comes off them so they’re like magnets for all the other kids. Sammy is happy when he sees his children being children. The roar inside him falls silent as he stands on his back doorstep, passing out plastic cups of orange squash, and ice pops. It settles down but doesn’t ever go away.
He is worried about Mark. He is never really worried about Lauren or Christopher. They are good kids. They rarely warrant his concern, and when they do, it is an entirely normal kind of anxiety focused upon high fevers, wet beds and brief spates of biting. Mark is different. Mark has never bitten. Even as a very small child biting was beneath him. So much more damage could be done with a dinner fork pressed into another child’s thigh. Aged three, he’d held another boy’s arm against the radiator until it blistered. Afterwards he called it an accident and everyone, even the boy’s mother, had believed him. There was a thing he could do to adults with his eyes, like a baby deer. Sammy hadn’t believed him. He recognized the way his son’s eyes could turn. Like marbles or cold milk. He knew the child was already considering what he might do next.