They had spent their time together watching movies and fucking and arguing about the movies they watched, which had turned out to be a thin but workable foundation on which to hang the best part of five years. She had loved him in a hot and cold way that relied on his eyes and his lazy way of doing things, the kindish planes of his wide-boned face.
The last October before the rain, he drove them down to the Jurassic Coast and they stayed for three days in a bungalow he had rented from his uncle. The previous week, she had had what her colleagues delicately described as a ‘turn’ at work – blank fall, bloody horror in her underwear – and he had skipped his evening shift to stay with her. The blood had been viscous and livid in the toilet bowl and she had cramped terribly – an ache just like her mother had claimed accompanies love. His mother was a midwife and had asked him loudly on the phone whether she had drunk a lot of alcohol or taken too many baths, done something foolish or intentional to cause this catastrophic wringing out. You tell me she knew she was pregnant, that you both knew. You have to appreciate what that makes me think. He had scrabbled to mute the speakerphone and later had suggested the trip as a way to distract them both.
She loved the bungalow for its proximity to the water, for its salt-frosted windows and the way it groaned and whickered like bones. During the days, she went on long walks along the beach and tried to isolate a clear emotion for the accidental thing which had bled out of her as if aware of how unwanted it had been. He left her there to swim in the water in his uncle’s wetsuit and when he emerged she wrapped him in a picnic blanket because it was all they had thought to bring. She found herself trying to apologise to him without wanting to, mulish sentences that started with I’m sorry I wasn’t ready and tapered off before but you don’t seem to mind. At night she took his hands and devoured them, kissed the tip of each finger and tried each knuckle with her teeth.
+
The night is mauve, deep lavender. Storm colours. They circle on the water, searching hopelessly for the best direction to avoid the rain. It is a Wednesday to end all Wednesdays – frantic winds against a thrashing tide. She is exhausted and fractious and terrified of the coming downpour, slaps at his hands when he fumbles an oar stroke. Keep going, we have to stay clear of the storm. He glares at her in a way he will apologise for later. Don’t give me orders. I’m tired of listening to you talk.
On nights like this, she finds she thinks of her mother at Christmas, reading to her from Under Milk Wood: the wide waters and moonless night, starless and bible-black, the deep dark falls and despairs and seas of people’s dreams. She has mentioned this to him before but he is Scottish where she is Welsh and he has never read it, and she doesn’t remember enough of it to recite. She wonders sometimes whether the text still exists anywhere, whether any of the sailors on any of the crafts they never approach might have been circumspect enough to grab a copy when the rains came or whether the collected works of Dylan Thomas are now universally drowned.
By little more than chance, they come at last upon a raked white outcrop which, on closer inspection, turns out to be the tip of an otherwise submerged lighthouse. It is some minuscule hour of the night. He leans forward over his oars and his voice, when at last he speaks, is fanged with nerves. A lighthouse means this was a shoreline, once. Maybe that means the storm won’t come in this far. She looks at him uncertainly but he is so tired the oars are slipping out of his hands and she has to jerk forward to catch one before he sets it adrift. The boat rocks with her movement and she leans back, holding herself awkwardly. Beneath the skin of her stomach she feels sudden pressure, a movement like a curling and uncurling that seems to follow the boat’s frantic tipping, stilling only as the boat stills. It occurs to her that she isn’t sure how she is going to give birth, out here on the water, though she shoves this thought aside with the oar which she heaves up onto the baseboards.
Sorry, he is saying now, shaking his head over the remaining oar still held loosely in his grasp, I’m too tired, I’m too hungry, I don’t think I can go any further. She shakes her head and makes a noise which isn’t an apology, though he seems grateful for it nonetheless.
They throw a rope out to the tip of the lighthouse – a painted iron finial like a candle on a cake – and tie themselves as fast as they can. They sleep like that, circling on a short cord around the drowned tower, ignoring the groan of creatures below. Things down there, growing.
+
They cross ice floes. Struggle their way through a long sequence of Thursdays in which the horizon seems always to maintain an unchanging distance – white waters at the tipping-off point of the world. One morning, they pass a curious structure which on closer inspection reveals itself to be a kind of floating town. A tottering collection of huts are stacked like treehouses atop a wide central platform, insulated with sealskin and roped around with knotted flax and cheerfully incongruous bunting. The huts are joined together by rope ladders, as though the inhabitants of each little box might have made an easy habit of clambering up or across to a neighbour and knocking on the wall. Of course, there are no neighbours. The raft is deserted. They spend an hour looting the deck for jars of whelks and lichen and hacked-up turtle meat, though neither of them has the heart to clamber up to the huts and start foraging there.
Afterwards, they brave their little boat’s tilting to sit together in the stern, compiling a list of the things they miss. There is a curious tinge of competition to it, a friendly tennis match for which both nonetheless keep silent score.
I miss chocolate. I miss my hairdryer. Roast chicken. Newspapers. Paper money. Audiobooks. Fresh fruit. The sound of post arriving. Morning runs. Eating slowly. Cafetières. Frozen peas. The thought of going on holiday. Electric lights. Dogs. Wrapping paper. The way you used to look.
His face is a terrible thing to her now, weather-ravaged and unpleasant. It is as though a layer of him has come loose and is flaking away to reveal a tightness of salt; a sanding down of some hard central structure. She misses his old face – a grief she hadn’t expected. He’s handsome, in his way, her mother had told her, after they had first been introduced – coffee just the three of them one afternoon in May. He had excused himself to go to the bathroom and her mother had launched into a whispered skittle of impressions: I like his hair, I like his accent, I think he favours his left hand. Her mother’s approval had made her feel proud of him, like some precious item she had been clever enough to spot in a sale. When he had come back from the bathroom she had folded herself into his side and grasped his wrist while her mother asked if either of them wanted to split a slice of cake. He had smiled wanly at them both, bleary off a three a.m. shift. I’m sure he’s even better on top form, her mother had whispered in parting, souring the afternoon a little with guileless implication.
Sitting beside him in the stern, she feels the now-familiar swimming sensation in her belly and resists grabbing at his hand to ask if he feels it too. There is a sudden shriek of an oystercatcher, monstrously outsized, and he shifts backwards to watch it pass overhead. We should get moving, he says, and she knows he is growing increasingly anxious of the scale of things, above and below. Sometimes they see lights below the water, the bioluminescence of anglerfish and vampire squid grown too large and too close to the surface.
It occurs to her that all of them, birds and fish and sailors, have been out on the water too long. Her feet are growing webbed, although they don’t talk about that. Sometimes at night he takes his apple knife to the delicate membranes between her toes, but they don’t talk about that either.
+
When she was a child, she had inherited a ratty canvas tent which her mother had allowed her to drag down from the attic and sit inside. The thrill of a pretended journey had been enough to entertain her for days at a time, zipped up with her books and a beakerful of cranberry juice, imagining strange shadows dancing on the fabric walls. You liked it because you liked four walls around you, her mother told her later, you liked to have things where you could see
them – your little books and toys and pencils – to zip them up with you and keep them close. It was a point made without malice and accompanied by a shape drawn in the air with fingers – an encompassing square or circle intended to illustrate a room, a tent, a boat.
She had done this once in his flat. Years later, arranging blankets and pillows into a kind of fort. She had waited inside for him to find her, coming home late smelling of pretzels and cherry brandy, peeling open the flap of her makeshift tent with one hand. What’s this, then? He had clambered in beside her and she had put her hands in his collar, thumbed at his jaw, told him they were camping in the wilderness, the Arctic tundra, somewhere wide and flat where the sun only set once a month. Travel, change, interest, excitement, she had said into the dip of his neck, pack a bag. Wherever the wind takes us. They had been back from the Jurassic Coast only two days at this point. On the afternoon of their return, his mother the midwife had called to ask how she was doing, whether she was still cramping or spotting. She’s fine, he had said – his voice like bad weather in another country, profoundly distant and unconnected to her – I told you, it’s better this way.
On the bed, in their makeshift tent, they had made love in an unhurried way – his fingers, her wishbone legs. She had felt a tenderness at her hips, somewhere deep and sore, a pulling and releasing as if on some internal bell rope, and afterwards she had rolled away from him and kicked savagely at the hanging blanket until the whole structure came down on their heads. It had started to rain that night, sea rain that crusted the bricks of his apartment building like a gritting of lye, and they had slept thrown away from each other on opposite sides of the bed.
+
The whirlpool is a great, grinding Charybdis – teeth in the ocean and no clear way around it. The current is wild, dragging them in with an insistence that is something like pleading, and she screams at him to pull the boat around. He does so with the near inhuman strength of panic, wrenching them backwards with a heave of oars. She tries to help him, uses her hands – their new and delicate webbing forming paddles in the water. She watches as a bobbing school of silver mackerel is whisked past them, churning down towards the vortex.
They have to row a solid mile before they feel free of it and when they finally stop, his hands are cut to pieces by the handles of the oars. They sit panting together, bow and stern, trying to regulate their breathing against the slack easing of the current. The sky is the pink of fingertips, a tender colour. It had been a Sunday until they drifted into danger.
She looks at him and sees him lean down to wipe his shredded hands on the baseboards. His hands leave marks, twin smears which, to her, create the illusion that some sea thing has scrabbled its bloody way across the bottom of the boat before either heaving itself back overboard or being stopped in its tracks. She is overwhelmed with tiredness. She feels heavy and stretched all over, worries increasingly that whatever is growing inside her may be slowing or running out of space. She refuses to look at the bare skin beneath her clothes, isn’t sure what she might see pressing up against the surface of her stomach.
From the floor of the boat, he looks up and squints at her, as though seeing something quite contrary to what he had expected. She meets his gaze, wants to say that where there is a Charybdis, there ought also to be a Scylla, but it seems an unwise thing to invoke.
+
When it happens, it doubles her up on the baseboards, a thrashing of legs and flexing hands like the beginnings of a curse. It is early morning, bruised about the eyes. She had never read baby books at home, had barely paid attention in biology, yet her body seems to follow some strange internal rhythm that feels numbered and learned by rote. The pain is overwhelming, a vast ooming, waves over her head. Lurching forward from the stern to grab at her, he sets the boat rocking with a frantic jolt that makes her grit her teeth and beat him back. What do I do, he asks her, trying to hold her hand but finding it webbed and intractable.
The pain thickens and floods, a clenching like knuckles interlocked with knuckles, and she finds herself screaming and trying to bite her lip all at once. Black wetness, a taste like copper on her tongue. The boat careens and she finds herself thinking with a sudden sort of lunatic panic that they haven’t yet labelled the day. It is too early still, too quiet to tell whether the morning will stretch its legs into a Monday or a Wednesday. The pain hits her in a fresh tide and she buckles down off her elbows, clawing fingers into the baseboards and into the skin of her own knees. A heave, a dark weight and the urge to push back against it. She clamps her tongue between her teeth until her mouth floods.
When it finally comes, it comes out writhing and not right. Too long and too thin and something less like legs and more like tentacles. It has eyes, ears, a face that recognisably echoes hers from certain angles, but its skin is not skin and its movements are the increasingly frantic thrashings of something drowning in air. A sound like a night on the ocean seeps, liquid, from the sides of its mouth. She is too dazed to react, still wreathed in pain. She finds she can only stare at the thing now careering wildly, struggling itself in useless spirals around the bottom of the boat. It is mottled all over, its movements so like the swimming motions she has become used to feeling inside her that she registers a twinge of recognition. As it shifts onto its back, she notices its spine, the dark ridge of red along the centre of its body, and she remembers the shape that had bled out of her once before – the almost-form of the thing she had not wanted inside her and hadn’t known how to safeguard or to mourn.
It is only at a noise from the stern, a grunt followed by the scraping of some heavy object being lifted, that she manages to raise her head. As if from a great distance, she sees the way he is standing and what he is about to do to the thing between them. She opens her mouth to protest and finds her tongue too deeply bitten to cooperate. He has clubbed things before – large fish and great grey moray eels which he has heaved aboard with his hands and hammered at with the flat of an oar until they ceased their struggling. She knows the way his body moves before he does it, drawing in like a wire spring twisted up to full contraction before he raises his arms to beat something down.
+
When they had first fallen in love, she had kissed him with an intensity which imagined him already halfway out of the door. A grasping period – nights spent holding him overlong and too tightly, the ravenous dig of fingers into skin. Over time, this sense of frenzy had eased as she had gradually grown more confident in his staying power. It had still been easier to sleep with one hand at his wrist, but the depth of her panic had subsided a little. Most mornings, it had been possible to wake up without immediately reaching for him across the centre of the bed.
They had been together four years when she had realised she was pregnant; something she realised very quickly, almost within days of it happening. She had known her body better back then, attuned enough on land to its rhythms and weathers to notice when something was out of synch. In telling him, she had grasped at his arms and apologised and he had said very little, only releasing himself from her grip with an absent wriggle and asking, it seemed a long time later, what it was she wanted to do. That night, she had slept in strange hot fits on his futon and woken in the red-eye of the morning to find herself alone, realising after several bleary moments that he had left the room and closed the door behind him. She had lain where she was a long time that morning, tracing idle lines across her stomach and ribs and listening to him moving about in separate parts of the flat – boiling the kettle twice and leaving it, testing the smoke alarm, talking dully on the phone.
Ultimately, of course, she had only been pregnant a grand total of three months and seven days, that first time around. Even so, the memory of that morning had persisted well beyond the bleeding. A very slender sort of betrayal, the deliberate absence from a room.
+
They float. A stretch of unlabelled days. The base of the boat grows tacky with blood and very quickly begins to smell. A predatory wheeling of birds
.
Without the energy to return to the bow, she remains where she is, presses her webbed hands flat against the sides of the boat as though holding herself in place. The silence swells like something bloated and threatening to spill. He sits in the stern, holding loosely on to the oar he so recently used as both club and shovel, to beat down and to heave overboard. The violence seems to have left him as swiftly as it rose, though the smell of his damp hair is an acrid reminder. Sweat. Relief and irritation. A strange reminder of nights when he’d come home from the bar wet through and complaining of rowdy patrons. Glass in between his fingers from breaking up fights.
Her mind wanders. She murmurs snatches of Under Milk Wood, finding she remembers more easily now as though a block has somehow loosened in her mind. She thinks of her mother at Christmas. The smell of pear cider and cinnamon, the rattle of objects wrapped in tissue paper and placed beneath trees.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind
The boat groans, heaves over the back of some vast passing creature. They hold tight and braced to capsize, but the boat only tilts for a moment before coming down again, unscathed.
+
They have seen all kinds of creatures since they first set out, one washed-out morning when they woke to find it no longer possible to cling to the land. They have passed over the heads of sea monsters, fleets of twisting cuttlefish, sea bream and Humboldt squid, dead cod and dead oarfish, miles of knotted eel floating on the ceiling of the sea. They have seen colossal things, antediluvian, too close to breaking the surface. Great Loch Ness fins and tails. They have witnessed the way things have stretched and mutated. There are things down there, growing. She had briefly been one of those things herself, although now she is once again her old size and shape, dwarfed in the endless increase of the sea.
The eyes are something they have never seen before. Perhaps the last thing – lambent pupils on the water. It is a night crested grey and navy and the creature which rises before them moves in a way she immediately recognises. The swimming motion she had felt in her insides and later witnessed in the bottom of the boat. It is the same but different, unimaginably larger. Tentacles the colour and consistency of candlewax. Elongated, sheen-skinned body and a face which seems to bear some unsettling resemblance to her own. If she squints, she can make out the place at the crown of its head where the oar was brought down, the battered point from which he scooped it up and tossed it overboard, bare minutes after it was born.
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