Probably Monsters

by Ray Cluley

  I open my eyes.

  The sea is incredibly clear. Carlos is swimming below me, waiting for me to pull myself together. I keep one hand spread across my mask and regulator but with the other I put my forefinger to thumb and raise the other fingers in an okay. He returns it. Then he turns about on himself and dives.

  I take my hand from my facemask slowly. Everything seems to be all right. Behind me, above me, the rusting hulk of the boat is a dark metal whale tethered to the ocean floor by a length of oxidized chain. If I stick close I won’t lose my bearings.

  Below me, Carlos is little more than a pair of red shorts and kicking legs. The soles of his feet are much lighter than his skin. I follow them down.

  We must be thirty metres or so down when he starts turning rocks, sending up swirls of sand in his search for red gold. I realize we don’t have the spears, but then I don’t think Carlos had really expected me to go through with the dive. I swim close behind, watching him.

  Eventually, Carlos turns and beckons me before jabbing his finger spear-like at the seabed below him. He points to a creature more mottled brown than red and when he flips it over I see a hardened underbelly as pale as corpse skin. Its tail beats a Morse code of distress at the ground, raising clouds of dirt around it as spiny front limbs grasp at nothing but water. Antennae waver and legs kick and again Carlos stabs in its direction with a pointing finger, eager for me to make a catch. I scissor my legs once, twice, and I’m there, reaching for the lobster before it can right itself, grabbing it around the body with unprotected hands.

  Its legs wrap around my wrist and forearm. The forked tail that had been beating at the sea floor now pounds against the inside of my arm. I’m thinking of the facehugger creature from the Alien films as it clings to me, sharp points scratching my skin in panic or anger, and I shake my arm, shake it, shake it, trying to get the damn thing off. Its long front spiny claws slice the water around it blindly, conducting crazed music I can’t hear, and I’m afraid to bring my other hand in to pull the creature off. I swim back to where the Rojo Tesoro chain rises from its anchor. The lobster is wrapped around my forearm. I’m sucking anxious breaths now through my regulator. I move my legs in quick nervous kicks and at the chain I scrape the lobster against the rusting metal. Flakes fall like scabs, but so does the lobster. It twists as it descends, landing feet first, and immediately scuttles to the safety offered by a split volcanic rock.

  A sea-salt sting of fire and I notice the lobster’s tail or maybe one of its legs has drawn a long line of blood from my forearm. It disperses into the water like thin red ink.

  Carlos dives to where the lobster has disappeared and reaches in blindly, either brave or foolish. He pulls it from hiding by its tail and, taking up another rock from the seabed, bashes it once, twice. Broken, limp, he brings it up to me. He is smiling. I can tell from the way his mask is lifted on his cheeks, the delight in his eyes. If it wasn’t for his mouthpiece, he’d be laughing. I’m suddenly thankful we don’t have spears, not when there’s a policeman up on the boat.

  The Nicaraguan points up, directing me to make my ascent, then frog-legs his way to where his friends wait, no doubt eager to tell them of the tourist’s fright.

  If it’s meant to goad me into following, it doesn’t work. I don’t have the same complacent disregard for decompression sickness, or the ignorance of it. I’ll be heading up at the recommended rate of ten metres per minute. My story will not need a firsthand account of mermaid song.

  A glance at my wrist reminds me I have no watch. It’s tucked in my sock in my shoe on the deck. It’s waterproof, so I don’t know why I took it off. Without it, I count down from sixty, spiralling my way up and thinking of how safe the lobster must have felt for a brief moment, hidden away from the world.

  It falls past me. The armour of its head has been caved in and its spread legs are limp in the current it makes going down. It lands in a cloud of silt and suddenly the water around me is very cold.

  Above me Carlos is wide-eyed, fighting with something I can’t see. He wraps himself around nothing but water, clutching his stomach. He strains his neck and spits his mouthpiece out in a rush of bubbles.

  I can swim to him if I make a rapid ascent myself, but before I can even decide I feel my own limbs freeze. Dr. Mendoza said nothing of temperature change. Nor the sensation of being held. Yet I feel something, someone, wrap cold limbs around my own, someone who is a wet net of long hair and clammy skin and sagging breasts and my inhalations carry the taste of smoke. Like a cigarette burns somewhere in my oxygen tank or mouth hose.

  The sensation is easy to give in to. I curl around myself, taking a position I knew for the first nine months of my life.

  Above me, a bubbled cry from Carlos reminds me of his pain. I look to see him still struggling and suddenly it’s easy to pull away from whatever holds me.

  I swim to him, grab him, and bring him up out of the water.

  S

  As soon as I surface there are shouts and overlapped voices of alarm from the crew of the Rojo Tesoro. Everyone is leaning over the side, and four men have their arms outstretched, reaching for Carlos. I strip him of his mask and tank, letting it sink, as two, three men jump into the water. I sweep the mask off my own face and knock aside the mouthpiece. Between the group of us in the water we manage to raise him enough that the others can get a hold. Two men have one of his arms, another has his other arm by the wrist, and someone unseen on the deck is hauling him up the side of the boat by a rope.

  Carlos is screaming. When they heave him over the gunwales his legs swing limply up and over. I hear them thud to the deck even from where I tread water, even over the urgent cries of the men and Carlos’s pain. Or at least I think I do. I imagine I do.

  A rope ladder clings to the rusting hulk of the boat like strange symmetrical seaweed, green and forever wet from always being down. I pull my way up, which is no easy task with the oxygen canister on my back. The adrenaline spurs me onward and upward.

  “Lopez!”

  I can’t see him. I shrug out of the straps and the regulator whips up against my face as it all drops. The men surround Carlos, each of his limbs in several hands. He’s being carried from one side of the boat to the other like a soaked sack of grain.

  The motor launch roars to loud life and Lopez beckons me to hurry.

  One of the men grabs me before I can pass.

  “Sirena! Sirena!” he says. “Did you see it? Mer-maid?”

  Carlos is dropped into Lopez’s boat and he doubles up with a mournful sound of anguish, knees to his chest, arms around his abdomen.

  The man who has my arm holds me with a lobster grip – he’s seen part of an answer in my face – but I manage to shake him off.

  Lopez leans on the throttle and the lurch sends me sprawling beside Carlos. He is arching his back, turning on his side, curling up, trying to get a position where the pain can’t find him.

  “Now you can write your story,” says Lopez over the roar. He means no insult by it.

  I have no reply other than to ask where we’re going. Lopez tells me the same clinic I visited yesterday and then neither of us say anything more. He keeps us running with the waves, cutting a desperate channel towards land. We leave the Rojo Tesoro behind but bring a mermaid with us, buried in the flesh of Carlos. It twists him into various agonies the entire way.

  S

  From surfacing to clinic takes little more than two hours. There is a good chance Carlos will be all right.

  I’m put in the chamber with him. I’m okay, but I surfaced quickly too. Even trained navy divers who ascend properly go through decompression every year, just in case. Besides, the damage isn’t always visible.

  Carlos is in a great deal of pain for much of the process, but it subsides. Eventually he speaks to me. He tells me he saw her.

  “She told me it was go
odbye. But it was not goodbye.”

  He has a thank you in his eyes but seems without the English to express it. What he says is, “And you did not say goodbye.”

  He refers, no doubt, to my presence in the chamber with him, or maybe he saw something of my own struggle, but he thinks only of mermaids. I nod, for he would not understand my disagreement.

  The answer seems to please him and I’m thankful when he turns away. The ocean I’m filled with leaks from me in quiet tears. My whole body feels gritty with dried sea water. I rub it all away with my palms, shedding salt like a skin I no longer need, and settle back against the curvature of the chamber wall and finally manage to sleep.

  S

  Back at Eliot’s, I watch the white lines of the sea push up to the sand, and then push up to the sand. I don’t see the waves retreat. Sitting in one of his creaky old chairs, I smoke the last of my cigarettes. The last of the packet, and the last I will ever taste. It’s a promise I feel able to keep.

  “Lopez took money from Pablo.” Eliot glances at me and I explain, “The owner of the Rojo Tesoro.”

  He nods and passes me a drink, sitting down beside me. “He gives the money to me.”

  “What’s it for?”

  Eliot takes a deep gulp from his drink. He looks exhausted and I realize I haven’t been the only one feeling tired.

  “They have a demon for everything in this country. For mental illness, for bad weather, for poor harvest.” He makes a gesture to indicate there are many others. “The problems are real ones. La Llorona of legend weeps for her drowned son, but so do many real women. The demons are real but they are unemployment, poor medical care, lack of education.” He makes that same gesture; there are many others. “People give Lopez money to not do things. Lopez gives me money to do what I can. To get rid of these demons.”

  “Then Lopez is a good man.”

  “He is.” Eliot makes the sign of the cross in the air before him with his beer bottle. “I thank God for him.”

  It’s not enough for me, so Eliot gives me more.

  “When Lopez was a boy, his father went out to dive and didn’t come back. At first, people said he finished work as normal. Then they said he did not show up and must have run away and left his family. One day, a man explained what really happened. The water demon. They didn’t take Warner’s father to a clinic because there weren’t any and they didn’t take him to a hospital because they couldn’t spare anyone; they were all diving. They held him on board and later, when the others were gone, cast him back into the sea. The man was quadriplegic by then.”

  Eliot doesn’t look at me. My reaction is obvious enough without seeing it. After a few moments, I ask, “Is his picture in there?”

  Eliot nods. “Kervin Mendoza’s father, too.”

  “How you can live surrounded by all of them?”

  “I’d see them anyway, even if they weren’t there. Hear them, too. But I can go on when they can’t. They make me go on.”

  And I realize, he hasn’t brought me out here to write a story. Or he has, but it’s not only that. He’s brought me here to show me those walls, to introduce me to others who have suffered, and lost, and who get on afterwards.

  He confirms it.

  “When I met your mother she was an angry woman because your father left, but she was a funny woman too. It was like losing her husband made her more determined to be happy. This is like that, in a way.”

  I nod politely, but I can only remember—

  “When she became bitter,” Eliot continues, voicing my thoughts, “it was to push people away. I didn’t realize at first, and then I did and it hurt. But she did it because she didn’t want to pull people down with her. Like a ship, when it sinks, pulls down the survivors if they don’t swim far enough away.”

  He looks at me, and it’s that look I don’t like but do at the same time. “You didn’t swim far enough afterwards, and you still haven’t. Not quite.”

  If I hadn’t already realized this in the decompression chamber, I’d be doing it now. Eliot has waited for me to do it slowly, taking away the last of the pressure by telling me how I feel, albeit more eloquently than I ever could.

  I smile, a genuine smile, a grateful smile, and despite my time in the clinic there are still a couple of tears left.

  “Ah,” he says. “There.”

  I laugh, wiping them away, and we look out at the sea together. Moving forwards, moving forwards, up the sand.

  “That poem you like, how does it end?”

  He knows how it ends. He’s looked it up by now, that’s why he asks. But I answer him anyway.

  “‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown.’”

  Eliot shakes his head. “It does not need the last three words. The last three words are wrong.”

  I laugh at his correcting a Nobel prize-winning poet, but I agree. I know what drowning feels like. It doesn’t need water. And human voices, if they say the right things, can save you.

  “Eliot, do you have a pen I can borrow?”

  I can feel him smiling in the dark, and we watch the sea caress the sand.

  “That man in the poem, Mr. Prufrock, he was a coward, wasn’t he?” Eliot says.

  My answer to his question is the same as his answer to mine.

  The Festering

  Ever since she was a little girl, Ruby had whispered her secrets into the top drawer of her desk. It had been a present from her dad, somewhere for her to make things because that was what she liked doing. He’d taught her how to make papier-mâché masks. They were easy to make. You mixed flour and water and dipped strips of newspaper in and then stuck them on a balloon and when it dried—pop!—you had a curved solid shell for a mask. Cut it to shape, add more papier-mâché lumps and bumps for facial features, maybe cut eyeholes, and then decorate it with paints, glitter, stickers, whatever. She had lots of craft stuff. There was a cupboard under the desk next to where her legs went where she kept old newspapers and phone directories, and there were three normal drawers on the other side for her pens and scissors and everything else, but best of all there was the secret drawer that pulled out from underneath the desktop. That was what her dad called it, the secret drawer, so that was what she used it for.

  Now in her early teens, Ruby still used it for her secrets. Sitting at the desk, head bowed, it was easy to pull out the drawer and quietly drop her words into it. And as she spoke, the thing inside it grew. Not much, but enough that she noticed.

  She noticed it more and more these days because it was getting too big for the drawer.

  S

  Mum had made her a sandwich to take to school. The crusts were still in good shape, probably because the bread was getting old, but the middle had been squashed by attempts to cling-film it and jam pressed against the wrapping in wet smears. It did not look appetizing. She’d throw it away at school. Mum would never know.

  “I’m off,” Ruby said.

  A sound came from the bedroom that might have been goodbye.

  “Maybe you could go get a job or something,” Ruby added quietly. She was less careful with the door, slamming it shut behind her.

  The corridor was stale with the smells of old dinners cooked by people in the other flats, and there was no natural light until you got to the stairwell, just the dingy dry flicker-light from dusty fluorescent bulbs. One of the doors, number fourteen, had a grubby area around the handle as if the occupant never used it, only pushed the door with dirty hands. Ruby didn’t know who lived there. She didn’t know any of them really, except for Mr. Browning at number twelve. She’d seen the others, though. Most of them looked like weirdoes and she wondered if she lived in a place that housed mental people who weren’t mental enough for hospital, or rehabilitated criminals or so
mething.

  There was a line of post-boxes by the front door and Mr. Browning was checking his. He sang to her his usual hello, “Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby,” as if knowing the song proved he was still young, though he must’ve been thirty-something. Ruby didn’t like the Kaiser Chiefs but she never said so. She smiled, because Mr. Browning was all right. She knew him pretty well because he looked after her when her mum went out. Mum still called it babysitting.

  “Morning Mr. Browning.”

  “Phil.”

  “Yeah, Phil. Sorry.”

  It was a recent thing, this change from Mr. Browning to Phil. Ruby liked it. It made her feel older.

  “Off for another great day at school?”

  Mr. Browning—Phil—was a teacher. At a different school, thank God. That would have been well embarrassing.

  “Yeah. They’ll fill my brain with knowledge and I’ll have to wipe over it later with YouTube and Hollyoaks.”

  He laughed. “Couple more years and it will all be over.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  He opened the door for her. “Bingo night tonight,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  He smiled at her in a way that made her want to go back upstairs and whisper to her drawer.

  S

  “Did you eat your sandwich?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Mum.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Jam.”

  She often tested Ruby like this, which meant she knew the sandwiches were crap. She released twin streams of smoke from her nostrils. “And?”