Salt Slow

by Julia Armfield

  I noticed that her body appeared to be holding up poorly. She leant up against the kitchen counter and her knee bent too far backwards – slink of tendons through fragile skin. The flesh around her fingers looked looser than it had an hour ago, the empty nail beds puckered grey. Occasionally, in the old days, I had looked into her ears when she was sleeping and wondered whether her soul might be visible, buried somewhere beneath her cochlea or the soft base of her eardrum. It was strange, now, to be able to look right through her in places – the deep places in her throat and ribcage where the skin had worn away to reveal her dark interiors, the opened hollows of her chest. I had always imagined her soul like a stitch in fabric, metallic thread in wool. Looking into her, I wondered where I could expect to find such a stitch or whether, like so much of what I recognised, it had simply come away from her body and been lost.

  What are you thinking, she asked me, and I found I couldn’t tell her that I’d missed her, though I had and also wished she’d go away. It’s terrible, when you won’t speak to me, she pressed, and I felt the bitterness, again, around the spaces in the conversation I refused to fill. It was terrible, she corrected herself, which felt to me like a cheap shot.

  +

  I had kissed a man, just once at a work event, and afterwards expected Cassandra to be understanding. I’m not sure why I thought this would be the case, really, except to say that I had never been with a woman before and had perhaps naively anticipated the same unconditional support I received from female friends. It didn’t mean anything. She cried when I told her and I was unconscionably irritated by it, demanding several times that she listen to me because she wasn’t hearing what it was I was trying to say. What I hear is that you consider us experimentation, she told me, that the norm for you is something else.

  I didn’t know what to say to this and found myself apologising out of sheer surprise at how suddenly I understood my own guilt. You have a mean streak, I thought in compulsive, mantra-like circles – a mental voice that was sometimes mine and often Cassandra’s. We didn’t speak for three days, during which time I became so panicked at the thought of losing her that I sent her a total of thirty-nine hysterically casual messages – a photograph of my breakfast, a quote from a movie, a long text about which of my trains had been delayed that day.

  Eventually, I lost all semblance of reason and went round to her house on a Thursday night to apologise, bringing with me a collection of offerings: a bunch of sunflowers and a pack of individual rice puddings. I told her I would try harder and that she should trust me because of that man in the gay club who had identified me as a trier in front of everyone there. I don’t think that was really what he meant, she replied, but I had amused her enough to let me in and, shortly afterwards, to let me kiss her on the blue recliner she kept in a pool of light beneath a standard lamp. I feel so much more myself, I told her, not quite knowing whether I meant at that very moment or more generally since the two of us had met. I ended up staying the night and all of Friday and enjoyed, in that time, a sense of something more decided or more certain, though in truth, had things turned out differently, I cannot say that I wouldn’t in time have gone on to ruin things again.

  On the Saturday morning, she kissed me and slid out of bed to go swimming, as she usually did, and did not return. She had no identification on her beyond the address scrawled into the side of her wetsuit, and police might never have known to tell me had I not still been in her bedroom when they knocked.

  +

  Catholic funerals are often preceded by an evening vigil known as the Reception of the Body. This is an event largely centred around close family – a brief service the night before the funeral, during which the coffin is taken into the church and those closest to the deceased are invited to gather together and pray the rosary. It is intended as a period of quiet and reflection but also allows family first sight of the coffin, in order to lessen the shock on the following day.

  My girlfriend, as I’ve said, wasn’t Catholic, and even if she had been, no one knew who I was to invite me to such a vigil, if there had been one to attend.

  +

  My phone continued to flash green, although my girlfriend appeared not to notice. She was coming apart at the sides by this point, visible through the eaten-up places in her clothes, an awkward unclasping of ribs that seemed to cause her no pain though it stung my shoulders and chest to look at it. I felt a sensation of panic, as though prompted by a timer, a tingle of frustrated tears. I knew a better version of the ghost story taking place in my kitchen would involve my apologising to her for attending her funeral as her neighbour, for not introducing myself to her family and for informing my own parents that I couldn’t see them that weekend because a colleague had died. I knew another, more satisfying ghost story would end with revenge wreaked and a filmic wind sweeping my girlfriend’s ashes away.

  As it was, I spoke badly, stumbled against her baleful expression. I told her I was sorry for not being better or for not trying harder and she looked at me with eyes that were a haunting all their own, whatever she might have said to the contrary. I told her I had rested on the comfortable truth of my limits and she nodded her head in a way that felt cruel and palliative all at once. I pressed my face to her chest in the too-soft place where the skin was still intact and felt I understood the way the surface of the world is thinner in certain places. That these places are where the strange, true things escape.

  We didn’t talk much more, though she laughed when I said something flippant about not having anything for her to sleep in. In the morning, I told the woman messaging me on the dating site that I couldn’t talk to her just yet; I was sweeping the bones of a girl I had loved off the kitchen floor.

  salt slow

  They find the lobsters in white water. Bobbing belly-up, claws thrown out, like a strewing of tulips. That they float is unsurprising. The salt is heavy here – dead sea, its bodies buoyant. In the thin morning, the lobster shells gleam a slick vermilion, spreading southwards like a bleeding on the tide.

  It is a Wednesday, or what they choose to call a Wednesday. In truth, they have long since lost track. The numbering of days has been gradually sacrificed to more pressing concerns; the counting up of cans and bottles, the maintenance of nets, the catching and drying out of fish and strange crustaceans. Time, in its clearest sense, has been abandoned somewhere in the long sleeps and the hourless drifting. Months are all alike on the water, seasons marked by little but the clarity of the light. They label their days as they find them, names to correspond with the poem his mother used to recite to new parents on the obstetrics ward – Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Days of hard squalls and difficult rowing they call Saturdays, days of sunnier aspect they designate Mondays. Thursdays occur only when the horizon seems so distant as to be impossible. There are very few Sundays.

  The day they find the lobsters is a bitter one, curling up at its edges like the pages of a book dropped and hastily retrieved from water. He is faint with hunger, ulcers on his tongue, and the ravenous panic with which he leans over the side to grab at the floating bounty is to her a kind of relief. For the last few days he has been listless, dark weight in the stern, and she has found herself growing increasingly uncomfortable. They try their best to ration, bottling anchovies and drying strips of cod to store in papery stacks beneath the seating slats, but their stores are meagre, their little boat a constant rattle of empty space. He has always been quiet, was never voluble even on land, but the vast silence of his hunger is a different thing – stoppered and involuntary, as though his mouth has grown a skin. She has seen him on occasion, hunkered at the gunwale, chewing reflexively on the collar of his jersey. She can look at him in lean times and see nothing at all but teeth.

  The lobsters are dead, of course, just like everything that floats on the surface of these waters. They have come across this countless times; the schools of black seabass and bobbing jellyfish, the upturned rafts and coracles that they p
illage for remains. I wonder what killed them, she will muse, and he will shrug a shoulder. Who cares. It was like this when they found the eels, the criss-cross mile upon mile of them, knotted nightmare like a glistening web. He had dismissed the sheer insanity of the scene – the plaited heads and bodies – and simply reached out to disentangle them with the flat blade of an oar.

  What’s the name for a group of lobsters, he asks now, dumping an armload at her feet. You know, like a school or a smack. His sleeves are soaking to the elbows, fingertips already splitting from the salt. She tells him it’s a risk and he laughs his usual brief laugh, takes up his apple knife and slits a lobster from tail to sternum.

  +

  A long, wailing motion across the sky. The birds are growing larger.

  They drift through fields of dead coral, knocking against husks of petrified crabs, their white meat eaten away. They don’t talk much about the shape of her, the way she has to wear his jumper now as her own no longer fits over her belly. It has been some time since the issue became obvious to both of them, the long sickness followed by the hard weight at her hips, but without a reliable means of counting the days, they can only watch and wait. She is no longer seasick, although the motion of the boat gives her bad dreams – thoughts of the ocean overspilling the sides of their craft and getting into bed with her, damp fingers against the small of her back.

  He tends to fall quiet again after they find food, although it is a different kind of quiet, a digesting calm that doesn’t bother her as much. Sated, his pupils take on the blown-out look she recognises from when they were newly in love and this heartens her, in an odd way, though she knows it has nothing to do with her. She occupies herself as best she can, sands the base of the boat where it is growing sticky, patches small sections of net. They repair and rebuild as required – like Argonauts, piece by piece and always in motion, an ongoing act of damage limitation with nowhere to stop and make berth. Only once, so far, has the boat sprung a leak, and when it did they worked without speaking, she shovelling water with an empty storage jar whilst he patched the hole with the last of the silicone caulk. Afterwards, he had leant back in the stern and covered his face for several minutes, breathing like the sound of something rising through packed earth. She had shifted awkwardly along the edge of the boat to sit beside him. It can be hard, sometimes, for them to come together, the boat’s nervous balance easily upset without one of them each at bow and stern to keep it even. Moving is an act of faith, eyebrows furrowed deep. They cross the centre and hope things won’t upend.

  The birds are gulls and guillemots and frigatebirds; reeling and heavy-chested, the awkward cramp-necked camber of creatures grown out of their natural frames. They are oversized, bloated to albatross proportions, wings like the canvas-backed windcheaters she remembers from days on the beach. Across the tall white scaffolding of sky, they stagger like drunks, unused to their own dimensions. They have grown, she suspects, to make up for the suddenness of water and the sink-down disappearance of safe places to land. There is almost nowhere, these days, for a flying thing to come down, little but the brief outcrops of sunken headland and the abandoned crafts on which cormorants throng like massing insects, piebald and slick as pitch. Bigger wings, she knows, are a necessity over the ocean as it is now. Bigger wings make it easier to stay airborne for weeks at a time. She watches with nervous eyes when they appear, tallies up different species with a notch of chalk along the baseboards and tries, with a flattened palm held up to the horizon, to keep track of how much larger each bird is than the last.

  He talks mumblingly about fashioning a kind of butterfly net, catching and eating a seagull with a salted seaweed crust. She ignores him for the most part, packs her cheeks with lobster roe.

  +

  When they first met, he had fixed her a Dark and Stormy and told her there was no charge. She had frowned at him, used to the condescending flirtations of bartenders – hollow winks thrown just north of her shoulder. She had pressed her debit card on him, eager to avoid the embarrassment of taking a joke literally, and he had raised an eyebrow in response. I said no charge. Shouting over the music. I’m hitting on you. Blue eyes, a deep drenched colour. Even before the boat, he had smelled like the sea.

  The bar will be underwater now, of course. The university towns drowned quickly – porous stone, too much paper. The night he had stood her a drink it had been raining, though not the hard, drumming rain that came later (salt rain, sky-wide). She had abandoned her friends to sit perched all night on a bar stool, bare legs painful on the vinyl, and he had invented cocktails for her; whisky blends with ginger beer and star anise and lemons, glasses cinnamon-rimmed and stuck with orange rind, spills of vanilla essence and Coca-Cola and Earl Grey tea. Sticky-drunk, she had stretched her arms across the surface of the bar, palms up, and showed him the places where, as a small child, she had burned herself sticking her hands into an oven to snatch at her mother’s coffee cake. Impatient, she had said and he had licked her wrist and shaken tequila salt over it.

  Later on, she had watched him wipe down the bar with a dishcloth, the sudden tawdriness of things in closing-time light. Sweeping peanut shells into a large plastic container, he had asked her to come home with him, leaning forward to pluck a highball glass from her hands.

  +

  It can be strange, on occasion, to remember that they are not the only ones left. Easier, in some ways, to picture themselves entirely alone – owl and pussycat – and with no hope of rescue. In truth, there have often been boats; slim horizon shapes, usually rowing boats or dinghies, though occasionally they will spot a speedboat, outboard motor cut to bits. Only once have they come across a yacht, listing hard to starboard and eerily deserted, ghost ship surrounded by a shivering cloud of octopuses, clogging the transom and dragging themselves aboard with enterprising tentacles. They taste with their skin, she had said as they slunk up alongside, watching the liquid squeeze of one octopus as it felt its way up over the bowsprit, I read that somewhere.

  As a general rule, they do not approach strangers. The few obviously peopled crafts they have spotted appear instinctively to keep a distance and they follow this etiquette. They are not altogether sure why they maintain such caution, except to say that the few fellow sailors they have encountered at close quarters have been those they have come across upturned from their vessels and bloated with seawater, boats plundered for their stores by other passing ships. She has turned bandit once or twice herself, although only after checking that whatever poor unfortunate soul they have come across is beyond help.

  A small fishing skiff, painted purple, its crew shaken out like sardines from a tin. She had made him row a wide circle around the craft, tapping at each bobbing sailor with the tip of an oar like a spoon against egg before she would allow him to draw up alongside and heave a pile of freshly pleated net from the deck.

  A long narrowboat, incongruous on open water, its lone blue-jerseyed captain flung halfway out over the port side, stove-in scalp like the hump of a fist punched through plasterboard. She had leant out from her side of the boat and pressed two fingers on his neck, very near the wet whitish mess of the wound, waited long minutes for any sign of life before she set about dragging the jersey over his head.

  She had hung the jersey out over the bow to air for several days and had finally exchanged it for the one she was wearing with a sigh of luxury, despite its crispy sundried texture and the long bloodstain that rimmed its neck like extra stitching. Its previous owner had been a large man and it was a relief to pull it down thickly over her stomach, to hug herself around the middle and feel a heavy weave of protection over the life growing inside. She hasn’t counted her months well, has no way of knowing how many more jerseys she might need to steal. On land, it would have been enough to notice a sudden change in mood, the taste of iron on her tongue, but out here on the water she is uncertain of her body, had only realised what was happening when there was nothing to be done but wait until the end.

  From hi
s corner of the boat, he does what he seems capable of doing; parcels her off the larger half of whatever food they come across, rows always in the direction of more equable weather. For the large part, he ignores the issue, inasmuch as he says almost nothing on any subject. He shivers in his undershirts when she borrows his jumpers and doesn’t seem particularly bothered one way or the other.

  He is better at night, softer. She thinks of it that way: with the dark, tenderness. He moves carefully into her end of the boat, rests his weight against her. They will talk, sometimes, as though they were at home, invent new episodes of television programmes they used to watch together. He misses cigarettes and bread and butter, she misses the smell of shampoo. He will describe it for her over and over – vanilla and chemical cleanser and coconut – and she will kiss him hard, though his face is swollen and his lips are splitting at the sides. They are both lunatic on salt water. They sleep distractedly with the weight of her belly between them.

  +

  Before, he had lived on a street that passed beneath a railway bridge and the gnash of the late-night overground was the soundtrack to their early time together. He had lived the way bartenders live, on an unsprung futon amid a junkyard of coffee cups, and she had spent her first weeks with him in a state of constant agony from sleeping on such an uncomfortable bed. Fall in love with someone who makes you ache, her mother had always told her. When I fell in love with your father my appendix exploded. I think it was the stress.