Diving Belles

by Lucy Wood

  ‘You should sort a few of them today,’ he said. He leaned down to get his keys. ‘You said you’d do them months ago.’

  Maddy picked up the egg she’d hidden so she could pretend to pull it out of Russell’s ear – a little trick she’d been practising. But he straightened up too quickly and she was left holding out the egg like an offering. ‘I found an egg,’ she said.

  Russell looked at it for a second, frowning. The name badge pinned to his shirt was missing an ‘s’. Underneath it said ‘Jem’s Discount Hardware’. He kissed the top of her head, briefly, lightly. ‘Remember the boxes, OK?’ The door swung shut and locked behind him.

  The kitchen clacked and hummed. Maddy switched on the radio. A song started playing then dissolved into static. She adjusted the frequency but the static got louder. It sounded like waves hissing and breaking. She missed living near water, missed the sea with a terrible ache, like hunger – she kept imagining that she could smell it in the house, this morning particularly, even though it was so far away. She turned the radio off.

  The kitchen clacked and hummed. Russell’s plants were wilting in their yoghurt pots. What type of seeds were they? Sweet peas? Cress? Maddy watered them but the water pooled on the dry soil and wouldn’t sink in. She thought: out of yoghurt, great oaks will grow. Then, to the empty kitchen she said, ‘Out of yoghurt, great oaks will grow.’ She didn’t know anyone in this town.

  She picked up plates from the draining board and put them in the cupboard. She got a handful of spoons and forks and opened the cutlery drawer but there were receipts and bills crammed inside. They’d moved in together eight months ago and she was still opening the wrong drawers, sliding her hand up and down smooth walls to find a light switch. The flats above and below were empty. The landlord said he might sell the whole place soon. If he found a buyer he’d let them know, give them a month before they had to move out. Maddy squatted down to open the bottom drawer and saw damp footprints on the floor.

  They were boot prints, big and criss-crossed with sand. They hadn’t been there before. They went across the kitchen, through the living room and into the hallway. The front door was still shut and locked. She stood up slowly and picked up the bread knife. She almost put it down again because there was something about holding a knife that made her feel more scared. A tip for an emergency started to go round and round in her head: ‘If you are near water, get in and keep your head down.’ What emergency was it for? Bees, probably. A swarm of bees.

  There were noises coming from the spare bedroom. It sounded like ripping cardboard. There was low muttering. Maddy walked forwards quietly, hearing every footstep against the carpet. She stopped in the doorway and looked into the room. There was a pale, gaunt man sitting cross-legged on the floor, rifling through the boxes. His clothes and skin were wet and dripping. There was sand everywhere. His skin looked waxy, almost blue in places, and she knew immediately that he was a ghost by the strange restlessness he’d brought with him into the room, a restlessness and a clamouring, as if he had just disturbed a colony of nesting seabirds.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maddy asked. She stayed by the door, lowered the knife.

  ‘Sorting it,’ the man said without looking up.

  ‘That’s my stuff.’

  ‘It was left here.’ He took out a vase and tested its weight. A faint, damp handprint bloomed on the glass then slowly evaporated.

  ‘That’s my stuff,’ Maddy said again.

  ‘I don’t think so. It hasn’t been touched for a long time.’ It sounded like he was speaking from inside a cave – his voice was mournful and had a hollow echo. He had wide, bony shoulders and a matted beard covering wind-chapped skin. His eyes were faded, colourless. All the fingers on his left hand were curling inwards, as if he were clutching an invisible heart.

  He was sorting everything into two piles. He put the vase on the biggest pile and then looked in another box. The vase was old and made of thick, green glass. Someone in Maddy’s family had found it washed up on the beach. There was a smooth, raised pattern on it. Maddy couldn’t remember what the pattern was, but she could feel her own five-year-old fingers running over it.

  ‘That bit,’ the man muttered. ‘Those bits, not that.’ He pulled the beads off an old pair of flip-flops, her mother’s, the wicker soles cracked and spooling dust. He put the beads on one pile and the soles on the other. There was a photo album open on the floor next to him. There was Maddy’s old house in sepia, run down even then, sprawling, all sagging roof and damp walls, eroded by the wind. There was her own face staring out of an upstairs window; there she was again, aged seven, climbing the magnolia that grew outside her bedroom, the flat grey sea in the distance.

  The man sifted through the boxes slowly. He picked up a fragile teddy, shook his head and threw it on the smaller pile.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Maddy asked. The bear had been her grandmother’s. It had two black buttons for eyes, a missing ear. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Poor stitching,’ the man said. ‘You wouldn’t get much for it.’

  Maddy went over to the pile and picked the bear up. It was silky and musty. She breathed in its mothball smell. She had forgotten exactly what was in these boxes. When her parents had sold the house and moved away – for shops and people near by, they said, for dry air – they had packed light, deciding almost overnight to leave everything behind, start again.

  ‘It’s all become such a burden,’ her mother confided, her voice suddenly wavering, old. ‘It all piled up.’ She shook her head, amazed at how it had happened. ‘Get rid of it for us, Maddy, OK?’ But instead, Maddy had dragged the boxes to the flat, promising Russell she’d sort it out over the next few days. She remembered the front door of the house shutting and locking for the last time behind her. She’d left her coat inside and only realised later.

  ‘No good, no good,’ the man said. There was an oil lamp next to him, big, with a brass handle.

  ‘Who are you?’ Maddy asked.

  He got up, unfolding his legs stiffly. He was tall and stooping. He went over to the window and looked out and a layer of condensation appeared on the glass. ‘It’s hot,’ he said. The smell of sea and beaches lingered around him: a rusty tin kind of smell, a whisky and rock-pool smell, damp wood and salt and old seaweed.

  Maddy watched drop after drop of water running down the window. Find water and keep your head down, she thought. ‘Who are you?’ she asked again.

  ‘William Penna,’ he said. ‘Begat of Mary and Samuel Penna, begat of Nora and John Penna, begat of Simon and Selina Roberts, begat of Rachel and Hugh Roberts, begat of William and Theresa Draper.’ He sighed. His front teeth were chipped and broken. ‘Wreckers,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘I can’t go back yet, I can’t go back yet. Where am I?’ he said. ‘Where’s all the water?’ He craned his head out of the window. There were roofs then fields to the horizon.

  ‘Maybe you could go back,’ Maddy said. Go back, she thought. Go back.

  ‘It’s too hot. Getting hotter. The beach. People everywhere. More and more people. Music and food and people. All in the sea, all over the space, the cliffs,’ the wrecker said. His face darkened and he carried on pacing. ‘They shouldn’t be there,’ he said. ‘There’s not enough space.’ He looked exhausted. He unfolded an old garden chair and sat down on it. Water sloshed over the tops of his boots. ‘Where am I?’ he asked again. Maddy thought she could hear waves rolling over and seagulls cawing inside his throat. He sat in the chair and stared out of the window.

  Hours passed. The light began to fade. The wrecker didn’t move. Eventually, Maddy came back in and packed up the boxes tight.

  The wrecker lit his lamp and put it in the kitchen window. It was bright, but up close there was no warmth to the flame. You could put your whole hand in it. When the wrecker left the room, Maddy leaned over it and tried to blow it out, but the flame didn’t even flicker.

  Sand drifted on to carpets. The flat heated up. Russell’s plan
ts turned brown. The wrecker paced restlessly. The air around him was thick and humid and charged, as if he had just come indoors from walking in stormy weather. He watched daytime TV. He liked horse-racing and chat shows. He swapped the toothbrushes and the razors around in the bathroom. He sat among Maddy’s boxes and looked through them, endlessly.

  ‘Why is he here?’ Russell whispered to Maddy. ‘Why here?’

  The TV flashed and blared. The wrecker looked at Russell from the other side of the room. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Where’s all the water?’ He ran a bath and stood in it for hours. Salt dried to crystals in the corners of his eyes.

  Nights stretched and grew longer. The wrecker had nightmares about drowning. Maddy lay awake listening to him thrashing, hacking up water, sending sand and stones thumping into the floor.

  ‘You didn’t say he drowned,’ Russell said. ‘I thought it was something else.’ He was almost asleep, cheeks flushed, arms and legs flung out akimbo.

  Maddy sat up and pushed the covers right off. The room was so hot. Through the window, orange stripes of headlights and street lights bent into the room. She still wasn’t used to the strange patterns the lights made as they swung across the bed and the wardrobe. ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ she said. The wrecker had touched the side of his head carefully, moved his hair aside to show her a dark bruise.

  ‘Know … exactly …’ Russell mumbled, each word running into the other. He turned on to his stomach, reached out and held her ankle.

  ‘You’re going to sleep,’ Maddy said, looking down at him, at the smooth curve of his back, at the freckles on his arms. He knew she didn’t get to sleep easily. A few years ago, at the beginning, he would sing to her, low, quiet songs, his voice beautiful and unexpected. He used to pull the covers over them and sing.

  The wrecker flailed out and something clattered on to the floor. His chest heaved and rattled.

  ‘Russell?’ Maddy said. She touched his warm shoulder, then lay back down. She pulled the covers over and then pushed them off again. What she wanted was for Russell to sing for her, something slow, something bluesy. Instead, he pulled up the sheet and went to sleep, his breathing turning slow and regular, leaving her marooned sleepless in the bed, half-imagining it was her fighting for breath, half-imagining the covers as a dark roof of water.

  ‘We’ll be glad to get rid of the place,’ her father had said, running his hand over cracks that he couldn’t afford to fix, disguising doubt with the stern, disapproving voice her mother hated. ‘Should have done it years ago, I suppose.’ The wind came in straight off the sea, beat branches against the house. A whole tree had fallen through a window one spring.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Maddy had said to him, already feeling lost, cast adrift. She’d thought her parents would live there for ever, and so had hardly been back in the five years since moving out. Whenever she’d packed her bags, hauled them between towns and flats, her old house was there in the background, solid, stable as a beacon.

  The wind had whipped in harder, lifting tiles on the roof. ‘It’s the sound of angels running,’ her father had once told her.

  It was too hot to concentrate. The freezer groaned and laboured. Wave after wave of heat rolled in. Maddy put her feet in a bowl of cold water but it didn’t help.

  ‘Try to keep the windows open,’ Russell told her, halfway out of the door. ‘They were all shut when I got back yesterday.’ He had started leaving for work earlier and earlier, pillow creases etched on to each cheek.

  The wrecker was in the spare bedroom, muttering, sorting. The room had become a nest of his smells and noises – smoke, seaweed, the wind moving across water – and they seeped out into the rest of the flat, hung across it like low fog. Maddy was aware of every sound and movement, every box opening, every object lifted out and inspected. ‘The windows,’ she said finally, but Russell had already gone. She sat there, listening. Boxes opened, coins or marbles were tipped on to the floor, wood clacked against wood. She pushed the chair back and got up, went through the kitchen and down the hall, leaving behind a trail of wet footprints.

  ‘The bird pictures,’ she said. The wrecker was sorting through paintings of birds: jays, owls, woodpeckers, all with small heads and mean, staring eyes. She had never liked them, used to walk past them quickly if she was ever alone in the house.

  ‘Gold in the frames,’ he said.

  Maddy nodded. She reached into one of the boxes and lifted out a bunch of keys. They were all different sizes and weights. There was one for each room and window, spares, a heavy key that didn’t fit any locks in the house, a hotel key, kept for years and never thrown out. The key to her mother’s diary, tiny as a leaf. ‘Open it,’ one of her friends had dared when they’d come across it, but Maddy couldn’t bring herself to. She took each key off the ring, held them in her palm, laid them out in size order.

  The wrecker looked at the keys carefully, then picked up the rustiest one. ‘There’s a town underwater,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it. There’s a whole town under there. Streets and houses and water and trees.’

  ‘Where?’ Maddy asked.

  ‘A flood. Water everywhere. A whole town. Bubbles coming up out of chimneys.’

  ‘Where?’ she asked again.

  The wrecker looked at her and shook his head. ‘Doors and windows float away,’ he said.

  ‘He might have murdered people, Maddy,’ Russell said quietly. The wrecker was in the living room. They could hear Grand Prix engines screeching round a track. ‘You know what that lamp’s for, don’t you? For luring boats on to rocks. He will have robbed them. He’s a thief. How do you know he isn’t a murderer?’ He traced the knots in the kitchen table, glanced towards the living room. He smelled sweet, of soap and sun cream.

  ‘Only boats that were already wrecked,’ Maddy said. The air in the flat was so thick it was difficult to take a breath.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He told me. They were desperate. They were all poor.’

  ‘When’s he going to leave?’ Russell asked. He leaned towards her and touched her hand. He had bitten all his nails. ‘Maddy, I …’

  The wrecker appeared suddenly in the kitchen. Water dripped off his clothes and on to the floor. He stared at them with his pale eyes.

  Russell cleared his throat. ‘Those are good boots, William. Where did you get them?’

  ‘They’re mine.’ The wrecker walked over to the table and slumped down in a chair, sticking his legs right out. ‘Prevailing winds, onshore, moon almost full, high tide in a few weeks,’ he said. ‘Water warming up by degrees. High pressure after high pressure.’ He sighed loudly. ‘Moon almost full.’

  The washing machine drained with a loud gurgle and started to spin. The wrecker got up to look. The clothes were flinging themselves against the sides. He was following the spinning so intently that he pitched forwards, knocking a plate off the table and breaking it in half. ‘This is a sinking ship,’ he said, looking down at the plate.

  Damp appeared on the walls. It crept up in slow increments, a line of seaweed marking its highest point. Maddy started to watch it, and every time she checked the water had risen, millimetre by millimetre.

  There was a hose-pipe ban. A leaflet with advice for coping in a heat wave was delivered to every house. Water is essential, it said, stay hydrated.

  Maddy put on her headphones and listened to her latest audio file. It was an interview with a group of women about what they liked to drink on a night out. ‘Wine,’ she typed. ‘Cream.’ She listened for noises coming from the spare bedroom. She couldn’t hear the wrecker, she couldn’t hear if the boxes were being opened. The door of her old house swung shut and locked behind her. The women talked over one another and laughed. Someone said they wanted to go and dance. There was a faint static buzzing underneath the voices. Maddy took the headphones off and adjusted them. The static got louder. The file leapt and peaked with noise.

  A slow, deep voice started to speak over the interview. ‘Visibility moderate or go
od, occasionally poor,’ it said. ‘Rain and drizzle and then fair.’

  The wrecker walked through the kitchen and the voice got even louder. The women’s voices were drowned out completely. ‘Some squally showers,’ the voice said. ‘Wind north-westerly, three or four.’

  The static hummed and then roared.

  She struggled in her sleep, sinking deeper and then rising back up with a gasp, almost awake. Her sleep was flimsy, broken, as if someone was throwing stones into water. Minutes seemed like hours. Through the wall, the wrecker flailed and hacked up salt.

  ‘Huh?’ Maddy said. ‘What?’ She turned on to one side and then the other. Russell’s body was too warm so she lifted his arm, rolled away from him and lay at the edge of the bed.

  Light from the wrecker’s lamp spilled under the door. Shapes bled into one another, grew. The walls shifted. She could hear noises from downstairs: voices, footsteps, someone laughed, a door opened and closed, outside the window a magnolia tree creaked. The sea rolled over and over.

  In the morning, she didn’t know where she was, or, for a second, who she was lying next to.

  Another meeting to type. ‘Management,’ Maddy wrote. ‘We’ll go under if this doesn’t work.’ Her eyes felt tired, heavy. Static droned in the background but she carried on typing. She followed the rhythm of the voices, the static washing over her.

  After a while, she noticed that the recording had stopped. She took her hands off the keyboard and looked over what she’d written.

  ‘Viking: visibility moderate to poor. Prevailing winds, moon almost full. Water warming up by degrees. Virgo, Pisces, the little bear. What are they saying on that ship? Two to three, three to four, four to five. Some squally showers. Footprints across the beach. The highest tide in centuries.’

  It went on and on for pages. Maddy read it twice then played the recording again. It spoke of tides and empty beaches, of the wind finding ways through solid rock. Maddy could feel herself standing on an empty beach, cold sand under her feet, nothing but water in front of her. She was still listening to it when Russell came in. He put his cool hands on her shoulders. ‘Sea state calm,’ she told him.