by Lucy Wood
Iris tensed her back, trying to keep straight so that her deckchair wouldn’t collapse. The slats creaked. She felt too warm even though the room was cold.
‘So,’ Demelza barked suddenly. ‘What are we dealing with here? Husband taken?’
Iris nodded.
Demelza rummaged around in the desk drawer and pulled out a form. ‘How many nights ago?’
‘I’m not exactly sure.’
‘Spit it out. Three? Seven? If you haven’t counted the nights I don’t know why you’re pestering me about it.’
‘Seventeen thousand, six hundred and thirty-two,’ Iris said.
‘What the hell? There’s not room for that on this form.’ Demelza looked at her. Her eyes were slightly bloodshot and she didn’t seem to blink.
‘If it doesn’t fit on the form then don’t trouble yourself,’ Iris said. She started to get up, relief and disappointment merging.
‘Hang on, hang on.’ Demelza gestured for her to sit back down. ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. It makes more sense anyway now I come to think about it. I’ve never known them to be bothered by an old codger before.’ She sniggered to herself.
‘He was twenty-four.’
‘Exactly, exactly.’ Demelza scribbled something down on the form. ‘But this is going to be damn tricky, you know. There’s a chance he will have migrated; he could have been abandoned; he could be anywhere. You understand that?’ Iris nodded again. ‘Good. I need you to sign here – just a simple legal clause about safety and the like, and to confirm you know that I’m not legally obliged to produce the husband. If I can’t find him it’s tough titties, OK?’
Iris signed it.
‘And how I track them is business secrets,’ Demelza said. ‘Don’t bother asking me about it. I don’t want competition.’
A plastic singing fish leered down at Iris from the wall. She could feel tendrils of her hair slipping from behind their pins. She always wore her hair up, but once she’d left it down and nobody in her local shop had recognised her. When she’d ventured back she’d had to pretend that she’d been away for a while. She dug a pin in deeper. Was Demelza smirking at her? She hunched down in the chair, almost wishing it would fold up around her. She shouldn’t have come. She waited for Demelza to say something but she was just rocking back and forth, one leg draped over the desk.
‘The weather’s warming up,’ Iris said eventually, although it was colder than ever.
Demelza said something through her teeth about seagulls and tourists then sighed and stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said. They walked to the end of the harbour. Small waves lifted up handfuls of seaweed at the bottom of the harbour wall. Demelza pointed to an old beam trawler. ‘There she is.’
‘There she is,’ Iris said. The Matriarch was yellow and haggard as an old fingernail. Rust curled off the bottom. It looked like it was struggling to stay afloat. Its figurehead was a decapitated mermaid and the deck smelled of tar and sewage. None of the other boats had anchored near it.
Demelza took a deep sniff. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Without waiting for an answer she walked up the ramp and on to the boat. The diving bell was sitting on a platform next to the wheel. It looked ancient and heavy, like a piece of armour. For the first time, Iris realised she’d be going right under the sea. Picturing herself inside, she remembered a pale bird she had once seen hanging in a cage in a shop window.
Demelza ran her hand across the metal. She explained how the diving bell worked. ‘See, when it’s submerged the air and the water pressure balance so the water won’t come in past the bench. The oxygen gets trapped in the top. Of course, modern ones do it differently; there are pipes and things that pump oxygen down from the boat. Apparently that’s “safer”. They have all this crap like phones in there but they’re not as beautiful as this one. This one is a real beauty. Why would you need a goddamn phone under the sea?’ She looked at Iris as if she expected an answer.
Iris thought about comfort and calling for help. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘No one likes change, do they?’
Demelza clapped her hard on the back. ‘My sentiment exactly.’ They walked back along the harbour. ‘Give me a few days to track any signs then I’ll give you a buzz,’ she said.
Fifteen minutes passed inside the diving bell. It could have been seconds or hours. The bulk of the Queen Mary was dark and still. Iris noticed every small movement. A spider crab poked its head out of a hole. A sea slug pulsed across the keel. The seaweed swayed and rocked in small currents and, following them with her eyes, Iris rocked into a thin sleep, then jolted awake with a gasp, thinking she had fallen into the water, feeling herself hit the cold and start to sink. She hadn’t slept well the night before but it was ridiculous and dangerous to fall asleep here, to come all this way and sleep. She pinched her wrist and shifted on the bench, wishing Demelza had put some sort of cushion on it.
Time passed. A ray swam up and pasted itself to the glass like a wet leaf. It had a small, angry face. Its mouth gaped. The diving bell became even darker inside and Iris couldn’t see anything out of the window. ‘Get away,’ she said. Nothing happened. She leaned forwards and banged hard on the glass until the ray unpeeled itself and disappeared. Her heart beat fast and heavy. Every time she glimpsed a fish darting, or saw a small shadow, she thought that it was him swimming towards her. She worked herself up and then nothing happened. Her heart slowed down again.
Demelza was sure there would be a sighting. She said that she’d recorded a lot more movement around the wreck in the past few days, but to Iris it seemed as empty and lonely as ever.
Something caught her eye and she half stood on the footrest to look out. Nothing – probably seaweed. Her knees shook, not up to the task of hefting her about in such a narrow gap. She sat back down. Even if he did appear, even if she made him follow the diving bell until Demelza could reach him with the net, what would she say to him on deck? What was that phrase Annie had picked up? ‘Long time no see’? She practised saying it. ‘Long time no see.’ It sounded odd and caught in her throat. She cleared it and tried again. ‘Actually, long time lots of sea,’ she joked into the hollow metal. It fell flat. She thought of all the things she wanted to tell him. There were so many things but none of them were right. They stacked up in front of her like bricks, dense and dry. She had a sudden thought and colour seeped up her neck and into her cheeks. Of course, he was going to be naked. She had forgotten about that. She’d be standing there, thinking of something to say, and Demelza would be there, and he’d be naked. It had been so long since … She didn’t know whether she would … Was she a wife or a stranger? She picked at the fragile skin around her nails, tearing it to pieces.
On the first dive, Iris had got a sense of how big it all was, how vast; emptier and more echoing than she had thought possible. It made her feel giddy and sick. She had presumed that there would be something here – she didn’t know what – but she hadn’t imagined this nothingness stretching on and on. She shuddered, hating the cold and the murk, regretting ever picking up the envelope from the table. The silence bothered her. She didn’t like to think of him somewhere so silent.
As she went deeper, small memories rose up to meet her. A fine net of flour over his dark hair; a song on his lips that went, ‘My old man was a sailor, I saw him once a year’; a bee, but she didn’t know what the bee was connected to.
She saw something up ahead: a small, dark shape swimming towards her. Her stomach lurched. It had to be him – he had sensed her and was coming to meet her! She pulled on the cord, once, hard, to stop. The bell drifted down for a few moments then lurched to a halt. Iris craned her neck forwards, trying to make him out properly. She should have done this years ago.
He came closer, swimming with his arms behind him. What colour was that? His skin looked very dark; a kind of red-brown. He swam closer and her heart dropped down into her feet. It was an octopus. Its curled legs drifted out behind as it swam around the bell, its body like a bag snagged on a tree. She had thought this octopus was her hus
band! Shame and a sudden tiredness coursed through her. She tried to laugh but only the smallest corner of her mouth twitched, then wouldn’t stop. ‘You silly fool,’ she told herself. ‘You silly fool.’ She watched its greedy eyes inspecting the bell, then pulled three times on the cord. A spasm of weariness gripped her. She told Demelza she hadn’t seen anything.
‘I thought you had, when you wanted to stop suddenly,’ Demelza said. She took a swig from a hip flask and offered it to Iris, who sipped until her dry lips burned. ‘Wouldn’t have thought they’d have been mid-water like that, but still, they can be wily bastards at times.’ She turned round and squinted at Iris, who was sitting very quietly with her eyes closed. ‘No sea legs,’ Demelza said to herself. ‘You know what the best advice I heard was?’ she asked loudly. ‘You can’t chuck them back in once they’re out.’ She shook her head and bit her knuckles. ‘I had a woman yesterday, a regular. She comes every couple of weeks. Her husband is susceptible to them, she says. So she goes down, we net him up and lug him back on to the deck, all pale and fat, dripping salt and seaweed like a goddamn seal. And all the time I’m thinking, what the hell’s the point? Leave him down there. But she’s got it in her head that she can’t live without him so that’s that.’
‘Maybe she loves him,’ Iris said.
‘Bah. There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ Demelza said. She laughed and laughed, barking and cawing like a seagull. ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ she said again, baring her teeth to the wind. ‘Plenty, fish, sea,’ she muttered over and over as she steered back to the harbour.
On her second dive Iris heard the beginning of a song threading through the water towards her. It was slow and deep, more of an ache in her bones than something she heard in her ears. There was a storm building up but Demelza thought it would hold off long enough to do the dive. At first Iris thought the sound was the wind, stoked right up and reaching down into the water – it was the same noise as the wind whistling through gaps in boats, or over the mouth of a milk bottle, but she knew that the wind wouldn’t come down this far. It thrummed through the metal and into her bones, maybe just her old body complaining again, playing tricks, but she felt so light and warm. The song grew louder, slowing Iris’s heart, pressing her eyes closed like kind thumbs. It felt good to have her eyes closed. The weight of the water pressed in but it was calm, inviting; it beckoned to her. She wanted to get out of the bell, just get up and slip through the gap at the bottom. She almost did it. She was lifting herself stiffly from the bench when the song stopped and slipped away like a cloud diffusing into the sky, leaving her cold and lonely inside the bell. Then the storm began, quietly thumping far away like someone moving boxes around in a dusty attic.
Iris waited, shuffling and sighing. She felt tired and uncomfortable. Her last dive. She wanted tea and a hot-water bottle. It was chilly and there were too many shapes, too many movements – she couldn’t keep hold of it all at once, things moved then vanished, things shifted out of sight. She was sick and tired of half glimpsing things. It had all been a waste of time. She cursed Annie for making her think there was a chance, that it wasn’t all over and done with. She would give the dress away and after a while she would see somebody else walking round in it. Her glasses dug into her nose.
She felt for the cord, ready to pull it and get Demelza to haul her back up. She had never felt so old. She stretched the skin on the backs of her hands and watched it go white, and then wrinkle up into soft pouches. Her eyes were dry and itchy. She saw a flicker of something bright over to one side of the wreck. It was red, or maybe gold; she had just seen a flash. Then a large shape moved into the collapsed hollow of the ship, followed by two more shapes. There were a group of them, all hair and muscled tails and movement. They were covered in shells and kelp and their long hair was tangled and matted into dark, wet ropes. They eddied and swirled like pieces of bright, solidified water.
Then he was there. He broke away from the group and drifted through the wreck like a pale shaft of light. Iris blinked and adjusted her glasses. The twists and turns of his body – she knew it was him straight away, although there was something different, something more muscular, more streamlined and at home in the water about his body than she had ever seen. She leaned forwards and grabbed for the cord but then her throat tightened.
No one had told her he would be young. At no point had she thought he would be like this, unchanged since they’d gone to sleep that night all those years before. His skin! It was so thin, almost translucent, fragile and lovely with veins branching through him like blown ink. She had expected to see herself mirrored in him. She touched her own skin. His body moved effortlessly through the water. He was lithe, just as skinny, but more moulded, polished like a piece of sea glass.
He swam closer and she leaned back on the bench and held her breath, suddenly not wanting him to see her. She kept as still as possible, willing his eyes to slide past; they were huge and bright and more heavily lidded than she remembered. She leaned back further. He didn’t look at the bell. Bubbles streamed out of his colourless mouth. He was so beautiful, so strange. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
There were spots on her glasses and she couldn’t see him as well as she wanted to. She breathed on the lenses and wiped them quickly. Her hands shook and she fumbled with them, dropping them into the open water under the bench. They floated on the surface and she bent down to scoop them out but couldn’t reach. Her hips creaked and locked; she couldn’t reach down that far. One lens dipped into the water and then they sank completely. Iris blinked. Everything mixed together into a soft, light blur. She peered out, desperately trying to see him. He was still there. He was keeping close to the seabed, winging his way around the wreck, but everything about him had seeped into a smudgy paleness, like a running watercolour or an old photograph exposed to light. He was weaving in and out of the train carriages, in through a door and out through a window, threading his body through the silence and the rust. Iris tried to keep him in focus, tried to concentrate on him so that she wouldn’t lose him. But she couldn’t tell if he had reappeared from one of the carriages. Where was he, exactly? It was as if he were melting slowly into the sea, the water infusing his skin; his skin becoming that bit of light, that bit of movement. Iris watched and waited until she didn’t know if he was there or not there, near or far away, staying or leaving.
Countless Stones
Rita could feel it in her toes; it was always the toes first with her. They were heavier and they ached and when she reached down to touch them they felt harder and colder than usual. She moved them around in the bed but it didn’t take the edge off. The middle of each toe had already turned into stone and the weight of them reminded her of the marbles she and her brother used to play with – grannies, kings, cat’s eyes – so that she could almost hear the soft clicks the marbles made when they hit each other. The top layer of skin had started to dry out and soon it would harden like that brittle layer of sand that bakes and hardens on a beach. And then there was the first pang of the craving for salt that she always got when this happened.
How long did she have? About ten hours. The whole thing usually took about ten hours. It was slow, but not slow enough that she couldn’t feel it if she concentrated: each skin layer seizing up and turning into stone from the inside out, a sort of tightening, a sort of ache, a sort of clicking as stone was added to stone, as if someone were building a house inside her.
It was a Sunday morning and it was early and dark. The clock on the shelf read six. Rita lay in the warm dent of the mattress. There were a lot of things that she had to do but she didn’t get up straight away. Through the wall, the woman next door shifted and laughed quietly in her sleep. The heating clicked on. She would need to turn that off, or set it for an hour in the middle of the day to stop the pipes freezing. It had been a cold winter. Most mornings there was ice inside the windows. Rita had an extra duvet and she had bought an electric blanket which could be switched on one half at a time s
o she didn’t need to heat the empty side of the bed if she didn’t want to. She liked practical things like that – she had a bottle of hand soap that could be used without water and jump-leads small enough to fit in a handbag.
A car drove past slowly. It had been snowing on and off for the past week. All along the street, snow was piled on cars and trees, all blues and purples and greys, and small icicles hung off the branches like the ghosts of leaves. Everything seemed quieter in the snow, quieter and further away, so that, lying there in bed, Rita had the vague feeling that if she got up and opened the curtains she would see that the world had packed up and moved on without her during the night. It was only a vague feeling though and she turned her thoughts to other things: jobs she needed to do, her plants, salt. When she was thinking like that, Rita often said words out loud, so that now she said ‘lights’, now she said ‘teeth’, but then she clenched her jaw because she didn’t want to think about her teeth turning into stone; the awful, dry crumbliness of it.
She swung her legs out of bed and pulled thick socks over her feet. She went downstairs and into the kitchen. Before she did anything else, she got a glass of water and tipped salt into it and drank it down, crunching up the thick sediment at the bottom. She switched on the radio. ‘Don’t delay,’ the end of an advert said. ‘Visit Lighting World for all your lighting needs,’ said another. She’d read somewhere that a man had bought a lamp from there and it had caught fire. The smell of burnt plastic followed him for days. The news came on. ‘More snow is expected. Temperatures reaching down to minus ten in places.’ Rita filled up the kettle and put it on. There was a cold breeze from nowhere and suddenly she was up on the cliffs with the other standing stones, watching a buzzard rising and circling on its huge spread of wings. Then she was back in front of the kettle again and it had boiled.
She drank her tea and made toast, which she ate cold and dry. She rinsed the plate, never wanting to wash up outside of work; crumbs floating around in water could put her off food for days. Afterwards she checked the fridge to see if there was anything in there that would go off if she was away a long time. There wasn’t much: a portion of lasagne she’d been planning to have that night, a block of cheese, half a yellowing onion, milk. She didn’t know how long she would be away. There were people from the town who had been standing up in the circle for years – five, twelve, thirty. Rita had changed three times before and each time it had lasted less than a month. But you could never be sure. There was always the possibility that next time it would be for much longer. After a while, somebody would let themselves in and turn off your heating, your boiler. They would tidy things up and sort out the post on the doormat. They would turn off your fridge.