‘You looked in need of rescuing,’ had been his opening salvo. The sudden vastness of him, dark block against the lightning spill.
‘I can take care of myself,’ she’d responded, squaring shoulders, though he had only shaken his head.
‘Can’t leave a lady in danger, as my father used to say.’
He had driven her to the beach house that very night – three hours of frantic getaway in a vast September dark. She had let him carry her off, very much as a prize from a captured citadel, let him talk in circles about showing her this place he thought would suit her, a refuge from the pressures of the world. Holding her hand to steer her out of the path of some fox mess in the driveway, he had murmured, ‘Watch your step,’ in a manner both cautionary and imperative. He had kissed her in the hallway, led her out onto the deck.
Of course, divorcing had been different. No thunderstorm, only a spiralling wind.
+
She doesn’t sleep well. She tries honey, pulls up lavender from the bushes that straggle through the slats of the deck. Daniel has had the bed removed, yet still she sleeps within its confines, rectangular phantom in the centre of the room. From this pretence of space, she can play-act other nights, other weekends, when the house was furnished with more than the memory of things.
Midnight in a hot September, beat of moths against the overhead lamp. July, slick with sweat, Daniel mixing prairie oysters and complaining about his eyes.
A month after they were first married, they had driven up to the house in a sultry twilight, car lights on the water dimmed to white. Crashing in, stumbling to the bedroom, she had pushed him backwards, bared her teeth like knuckles, accused him of driving drunk.
‘Speak for yourself,’ he had snorted – the furtive joy of him, grabbing at her hair. ‘Orange juice all night. Someone had to be the designated driver if you were going to get all drunk drunk.’
‘Drunk drunk,’ she had repeated, enjoying the sound of it. The dense forgiveness of his expression, the hard clasp of hands on her waist.
In the morning, she had woken to a drifting of summer rain. Heavy arms around her, tricky to escape. Rolling out, she had considered Daniel, snoring gently, glaring in his sleep, as if in disapproval. She had known him then, seen his werewolf skin beneath the surface. Without waking him, she had left the room and wandered out onto the deck in her dressing gown, bare feet slippery on the slats. Beyond the sand, the water had frothed with animation, as though rising up to meet the rain. The tide had been on the wane, the beach filled with the everyday litter of ascophyllum, cuttlebones and beer cans. The spider crabs had emerged from their hiding places and made for the relative safety of the flats.
+
There has been no knocking since the third day, when someone from the offices of Daniel’s lawyer had driven down in a Prius and camped outside the house.
‘The point is to nip this in the bud,’ he had called through the letterbox, fanning fingers through the copper flap like some encroaching insect. ‘We can sort this out quickly and quietly. Call it a brief lapse in judgement. It’s been an emotional time. Tricky business, difficult decisions. No harm, no foul. Et cetera.’
Sitting at the bottom of the hall stairs, she had nibbled on salami and pictured Daniel’s lawyer – his almost uncanny hairlessness, as though he had been dipped in lye. At their last meeting, he had leant over the table towards her and she had watched a bead of sweat travel in a seamless line from his crown to the centre of his lip, where he had halted it with a quickly darting tongue. Do correct me if I’m wrong, of course, but both my records and my client’s testimony state that you have actually never worked, Mrs Carmichael. That you have in fact been dependent on the generosity of others your entire life – is this the case?
At the letterbox, the fingers had flapped, retracted, the voice behind the door becoming irritable. ‘Mrs Carmichael, I don’t know you but I can’t imagine any sane woman would want to be stuck with an injunction, let alone a charge of trespassing, and that’s what’s going to happen if you continue this stunt. If you just open the door and talk with me, I’m sure we can sort this out.’
Shrugging a shoulder, Nicola had crossed to the door – barricaded with a scuttle of chairs – and posted the remainder of her salami out through the letterbox before wandering away. (She regrets this gesture now, a little. With the ham on the turn, there is scant protein left amongst her rations.)
Whether or not the threat to return with an injunction was a serious one, there have been no visitors since the first. Of course, there may well have been phone calls but she is thankfully in no position to say. She has, it is true, half-expected Cece to come chasing her, but perhaps her sister’s current lack of a car is owed something for that delay.
In the dining room, between marmalade-slathered crackers, she acts out scenes of high drama, imagining scenarios, gesticulating to the blank spaces on the walls.
‘What did you think you were achieving?’ her sister would say – her narrow limbs, ponytail cuffed in Hermès. ‘Daniel takes the beach house in the divorce so you immediately drive down and barricade yourself in? You know my children practise better conflict resolution than you.’
‘He doesn’t even want it,’ Nicola would reply. ‘He owned it before we met, he never used it. And yet now he’s threatening to sell it. Just because he knows I want it. He’s like a child who wrecks a toy he never plays with when his mother tries to give it away.’
‘That is ten-pence psychology,’ Cece would say. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. If anyone’s being childish here it’s you.’
‘You’re supposed to be on my side,’ Nicola would whine – whines aloud, too, in the dining room, to no one.
+
The jellyfish return again the next day. Flooding the shoreline in the early morning like a littering of plastic, the beach foul-breathed after a stormy night. The summer is becoming unpredictable, rain-swollen – a white, fetid season, filthy with cloud.
From the deck, Nicola watches the commotion. Teenagers with their phones out, filming videos of one another poking jellyfish with sticks. Towards the foreland, an elderly couple are walking arm in arm, in matching jackets. The woman is bent over, great chin and wattle hanging down beyond her breastbone. The man, though tall and relatively sprightly, walks bent over to the same degree, keeping pace with her halting step. As they approach a jellyfish, the man rears upright, just long enough to scout a clear path around the obstacle, before dropping back into his imitation hunch and towing the woman safely up the bay.
Throughout the morning, Nicola watches for the red-headed woman and her tethered child, although neither one appears. Around noon, a television crew arrives to shoot a brief piece – the hosts of a general-interest show Nicola half-remembers Daniel watching, talking genially to each other with their shoes encased in plastic bags. ‘Potential tourist attraction, yes – but is this plague symptomatic of something more serious, Cathy?’ – ‘Actually, Tim, I think you’ll find that “plague” is a word usually only applied to insects.’
Behind them, the teenagers dance about for the cameras, sticking out their tongues and waving until the director has to pause filming to ask them to settle down.
In the afternoon, she sits in the living room and tries to ignore her growling stomach. She is approaching emergency levels with her rations but the prospect of leaving the house to search for food seems only to invite invasion. If she were Cece, she would have brought a cooler. If she were Cece, she would have thought this through.
She sets up the plastic chess set and plays herself with a jumbled, Ludo-like approach to the rules, jumping bishops over knights and moving queens with abandon. Early on, Daniel had showed her a photograph of himself at a junior school chess tournament – ten years old, top-heavy with braces and a nose to grow into, sourly clutching a participation prize.
‘I hadn’t cracked the code yet,’ he had said, laying the chess set out between them, and she had loved him for his straight te
eth and strident nose and the fact that he couldn’t bear to lose at anything. He had taught her chess strategies and combinations, smacking her hands away from impulse moves.
‘There are safer ways to get there,’ he would say, time and time again, repositioning her pawns around the king. ‘You don’t have to be silly about it. There’s never any need to lose, if you only use your head.’
+
Daniel’s lawyer has a voice like unguent. As he speaks through the letterbox, she imagines him licking up sweat with the moist dark dab of his tongue.
‘Mrs Carmichael, I have here written instruction for you to vacate the premises no later than tomorrow afternoon. We’re not playing games here, girlie. This is legal imbroglio. You have to think about where you stand.’
He posts the papers and retreats, though regrettably she has now run out of salami to post back out. Picking up the collection of envelopes, she moves immediately to one addressed in Daniel’s handwriting, though the note inside is only a typed rehashing of all the offers he has made her over the past six months: the Alfa Romeo, a sterling-silver knife set, a collection of Danish miniatures, half the books, half the frequent-flier miles, all the jewellery free and clear.
‘My heart bleeds,’ Cece had said, looking over a similar list only weeks after the divorce was first floated. Slicing blue cheese. Smear of apricot jam at her lip. ‘He takes the car so you only get the other car. He takes the credit cards so you only get the gold bullion and the diamond mine.’
She takes the envelopes through to the kitchen and wanders out onto the deck. For the fourth or fifth time, the jellyfish have flooded the shore, but this time the men from the clean-up crew have hit upon the idea of building a bonfire. Not far from the headland, a great tower of bodies is forming – headless, shapeless things stacked one and another, the flimsy outlines of creatures drained of all substance, souping down into the bedrock of the shore. The television crew has returned and is filming a walk-and-talk along the ridge of the dunes. ‘And what I believe we can expect in a matter of minutes, Cathy, is an inflagration potentially unlike any we have seen before.’ – ‘A conflagration, Tim. Inflagration isn’t a word.’
Nicola watches the small crowd milling around the bonfire, men heaving shovelfuls onto the pile. The fire, when it goes up, is a faint and queasy blue, filling the air with the smell of something boiling. On the deck, Nicola folds in half the typed page she is still holding and finds a further scribble in black biro overleaf.
Nicola for God’s sake, grow up
She is out of food, except for crackers, which have grown soft from being left unwrapped. With nothing to occupy her, she falls asleep on the floor of the bedroom in the early afternoon. She dreams first about her wedding: the prawn cocktails in martini glasses and Daniel swinging her around to ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. Cece had given a speech about her little sister – We always knew Nic would find someone dependable – and Nicola had tried to make her own toast, although at this point, the dream changes and she imagines herself a jellyfish – a blind thing, tearable as paper, sinking down beneath black water on a moonless febrile night.
+
Before their father died, he had called her the princess, the precious cargo. Pressed his hands together and mimed an attendant’s bow.
‘There is a lack of self-preservation about you,’ Cece had said, midway through their father’s funeral, ‘which is frankly a vanity. You assume other people will care enough to look after you.’
In asking for a divorce, Daniel had told her he knew that it was at least partially his fault. Leaning over with his hands on his knees, he had spoken to the floor of the deck, explaining that he hadn’t considered the pitfalls inherent in really taking ownership of someone. She had told him, as she had that first night at dinner, that she could actually take care of herself, though he had only shaken his head once again and taken his ring off, easy as pie.
+
In the evening, Nicola leaves the house and walks down the narrow jag of path onto the beach. The bonfire has burned itself out over the course of the day and what is left is only skeletal. A coil of indigo smoke. The shore is quiet, clean, the way it had been when Daniel first walked her down it, holding her hand and her elbow to guide her over divots in the sand. She navigates her own way now, turns her ankle only briefly on the slope.
Up over the dunes, she can see the deck that wraps around the house, the plates and cups she has left there, the dressing gown she has abandoned to the back of a chair. Daniel’s lawyer will not, she imagines, appreciate the mess when he returns tomorrow, nor will he appreciate the empty house or the fact that she has left the front door open, thrown the windows wide on both the north and southern sides, left the key under the mat.
The evening is soft now, wheel of night gulls on the water. In her bag, she has the Russian dolls from QVC, the egg timer filled with coloured sand, the machine for counting change. The pottery cat she has had to leave behind, being too unwieldy to lift.
It is just after ten in the evening, no particular rush to be gone. She sits down in the sand, a spot just beyond the wrack line, and works idly at the ring on her still-swollen finger, turning it round in fruitless circles, never raising it above the knuckle. There will be more jellyfish. Later, washing up in the tight apple-light that follows dawn, a product of the early tide. When they come, she will still be here, salt-rimed from a night on the shore. She will lay herself down, await the convocation. Jellyfish beaching against her arms and legs, the crest of body on delicate body. They will cover her, glove her hands, circle her ankles. Dependant on species, it can take a jellyfish up to fifty minutes to die once out of water. In the thin lifeline of a waning tide, that time can be easily tripled. Nicola will stay with them well into the morning, their pulsing bells like so many painful hearts. Blanketed, almost head to toe, she will feel the tide recede. Her fingers will come to feel a touch gelatinous at their points, softened along their webbing. She will imagine herself sinking down, becoming something less than solid, spilling insides onto the sand.
Cassandra After
The fact of my girlfriend’s return was incontestable. She sat on my sofa and dripped water onto the rug. My mother had always told me it was better not to answer the door between midnight and three a.m. Strange neighbourhood, she would say, sounding more paranoid than she meant to, buy a deadbolt, keep your curtains shut.
It is a Jewish custom to cover mirrors with cloth after a death but I was Catholic by birth and agnostic by trickle-down and checked my reflection compulsively before answering doors. The night my girlfriend knocked, my face in the glass was like newsprint, inky around the eyes and under the collar. She stood there on the doorstep in the clothes in which she’d been buried, chucked me under the chin the way she used to do and told me I looked like I hadn’t been sleeping. Bad for the skin, darling girl. Stop drinking coffee. She had been dead six months and her skin was coming away from the bone, although she seemed not to notice this.
The Catholic Church traditionally designates three stages of mourning – heavy, half and light. My girlfriend had once joked that this sounded like the branding on sanitary towels. Half mourning, for your three-day flow. Well into the nineteen-fifties, Catholic widows had been expected to observe a year of heavy mourning, followed by six months each of half and light mourning, during which they could only wear clothes in black and white mixtures, soft greys and occasional mauves. I read this in a book on funeral etiquette I had borrowed from the library, noting also a caveat in ‘Spousal Grief Procedure’ that provision could be made to lessen the mourning period if the widow found someone she considered a viable suitor after the passing of a year. I had held on to the book some months past its return date and had started receiving irate messages from the library by the time my girlfriend came back.
The issue, of course, was that she had been buried and now she wasn’t, although this could be said to be the case for a lot of things. I had once been a practising Catholic and now I wasn’t. Not u
nlike my religious conviction, her death had simply lapsed. I let her in and left her sitting on the sofa while I microwaved some Chinese rice and poured pineapple juice into a glass. It was her comfort meal – grease and bromelain. She had often lectured me on pineapple’s anti-inflammatory properties, how it helped prevent cataracts and heart disease. Taking the rice out of the microwave, I noticed I had scribbled the word teeth on my hand to remind myself to brush them. Since my girlfriend’s death, I had developed the habit of going to bed unwashed and waking up with my tongue furred over and tasting strangely of iodine.
She raised an eyebrow when I handed her the food, although she ate obligingly and only seemed a little abashed when a mouthful lodged in her throat and had to be coughed back up. No digestion, she said, by way of explanation, sweet of you though. I sat on the coffee table and faced her, taking in the mud on her sleeves. I registered a distant sort of alarm, a feeling which arose like obligation, like the pressure to clap at the end of a performance, regardless of its merit. Fear sat only gently at the base of my spine, waiting for a reason to climb a little further. She wriggled a shoulder at me – see something you like? – and the exposed tendons around her collarbone squeezed and released.
+
Once, at a book launch, I leant up against a table stacked with queer literature and knocked a plastic glass of wine to the floor. Steady on, she said, a stranger then – faux-leather trousers, emblematic of a perfect self-possession. She perched on the opposite end of the table and nudged a toe into the spreading pool of wine. Do you know the author, she asked, nodding towards the crowd now formed around the woman signing copies, or do you just like to make scenes in bookshops? She was taller than me, swimming cap of blonde hair. I was wearing a trouser suit – not my usual look, just something I was trying – and I often wondered afterwards whether she would have spoken to me if I’d been dressed differently. She told me her name was Cassandra and pulled a looning, prophetess expression, which made me laugh. She scribbled her number inside her copy of the book being launched and handed it to me. When I opened it up later, I noticed that she had already had the copy signed, her number inked beneath the author’s scrawl of Cassie, I could never have done this without you.
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