Olaf, it seemed, was another friend of Zozo’s we might have met in the Irish Harp.
I ran my finger along the loop of the bracelet. The outside was lined with a synthetic orange material.
It’s that waterproof stuff, you know, that the rescue jackets are made of. Gregor tapped the leaflet. It bothered me his tapping finger was moving so delicately, even languidly, that his bones were so very thin and fine. You know, he said, the jackets those migrants coming over in boats get given when they’re rescued.
I know, I said.
Live migrants, he added. Obviously. They came off live migrants. Olaf picks the jackets of the ones who come out live, dump the jackets on the beach as soon as they get to the shore.
Seconds later, after a mouthful of linguine, Gregor repeated this fact. I did make sure, he said, live migrants, as if I hadn’t been concentrating the first time.
I unhooked the bracelet, to get the feel of the clasp, then put it on again. The metallic fastener made a satisfying clinking sound as it closed and the memories rushed in. At the exact moment it clipped back on, the memories began to flow through me like a waking dream, scenes of flow and flood and ebb, a tide of memory so strong I had to get up from the table with my linguine untouched.
You feeling sick again? Gregor followed me to the edge of the restaurant patio.
I unclasped the bracelet and the images receded. I clasped it on again and the tide flooded back. I followed him back to the table as though nothing had happened, the bracelet in my hand.
It’s very special, I told Gregor, but I do like to wear colours that match. You know that.
That evening I had my loose blue dress on.
Later, I went on to the roof of our holiday flats to smoke a cigarette. Usually I say I have given up smoking but tonight was an exception. A huge orange moon just beyond its term hung like an omen in the sky.
I took the bracelet out of my dress pocket and fastened it around my wrist. The clip clinked shut and in the same instant the memories crashed over me like a breaking wave.
~
I remembered my first swim of the holiday, off our grey beach, a night-time swim under a pitch-black sky. I struck out into the inky dark waters and instantly lost my bearings, unusual for me. I often swim after dusk, always without mishap, but that night a week ago the water was choppy. Suddenly I noticed that the street lights on the Gran Via were beginning to sweep past at speed, or I past them, as if I were caught in a moving train.
I had put the memory out of my mind, yet here it was, the warm dark waters splashing against my shoulders, stirring, restless and pushing, the scatter of tiny droplets the wind combed off the top of the waves, their lightness mocking the force of the rollers dragging me along. Not under. I didn’t want to think under.
I remembered the long black shadows cast on the beach by the shore lights, and then the instant when the push of the tide on my legs became a pull, not the rhythm of the waves, steady, lulling, but something more insistent, something about under.
Then I was somewhere else, several metres down from where I had entered the water, the current half spinning me, and, suddenly again, I was past the headland at the end of the beach, and a submerged rock grazed my knee. I had not expected rocks, not this far out.
I could see the reflected street lights dancing over the surface of the water. I definitely couldn’t see under. I couldn’t see anyone on shore. There was no one to raise an alarm.
Did I think of Gregor? Not straight away. I don’t like to watch you swim, he always said, I’m not your parent. He would be somewhere on the street beyond, on a bench, head down, chin uplit, checking his phone, his thin fingers wandering spider-like over the screen.
There was just the current and me inside it, not quite under, definitely not yet under.
I struck out in the direction of the next beach, beyond the headland. A wave slapped me full in the face. I swallowed water, told myself not to cough. Another wave struck my ear so hard it rang. Then, striking out again, I felt hard sand under my feet.
I walked back to the first beach by way of the road, panting hard, my hair dripping down my back.
That was a short swim, said Gregor, looking up from his phone as I approached. For you. I thought you’d be gone ages.
It was lovely out, I said. There was a strong current. I had to swim quite hard.
~
The toddler I looked after two years back, a boy, his name gone from my memory. Up on the roof I remembered him, too. On holiday that year with my mother, in a beach apartment a lot like ours, the toddler and his parents in the neighbouring flat. The parents paid well for time in the afternoons to catch some siesta.
The boy and I were in the waves, paddling hand in hand. I used his bucket to catch up water and toss it out to sea. He liked the sparkles the droplets made and clapped his hands to see them, each time pulling away from me just an instant.
The wave came from nowhere. One second he was standing there in his blue-and-yellow-striped swimming shorts, clapping his hands. The next second I couldn’t see him and the milky wave was swirling around my thighs.
I threw myself flat into the water in the space where he had stood. I felt the rushing sliding sand the wave had unsettled. Nothing else.
I threw myself down again. Coming up that second time I saw a fragment of his blue-and-yellow striped shorts further down the beach balloon and disappear again. As I ran in their direction, the wave pulled back and he was suddenly in front of me, face down in the water, naked, his hands clawing the sand. I dragged him up, turned him round, and saw his eyes were open, his nose and mouth full of sand.
Sunbathers swarmed towards us. A woman took the child from me and laid him on his back on the beach, away from the water.
Doctor, she said over and over, Doctor. She put her hands on his chest, and her lips over his mouth.
Quickly she came up again.
Is OK, she said. Is lucky, is very lucky.
The child looked up at the sky, and made no noise. I sat beside him, and put my hand on his warm fat thigh.
Is your baby? she asked.
The wave came from nowhere, I gasped at her. Nowhere.
Nowhere, she agreed. It came from nowhere. He came back from nowhere.
I bundled the naked child in his towel, and took him back to the flats. If his parents had been there then, I would have told them everything. But they had gone to catch a cold beer at a café on the beach front. A note in black felt-tip was stuck on the fridge.
I dressed the child and wrapped him up tightly in a fresh towel. I don’t know why I wrapped him. For a while we sat together quietly on the edge of his bed.
All right? I asked him several times. All right? He nodded silently but I couldn’t be sure, not when thin streams of yellow liquid came from his ears, running down his neck, soaking the hem of the towel.
Later we sat and drew patterns on my legs with the black felt-tip till his parents returned.
They had enjoyed more than one cold beer and paid me extra for my time.
I gave back the extra, told them it was no trouble. I also said I was sorry but when I was changing the child on the beach, I’d left his swimming trunks behind by mistake.
Then I pointed out the weekend was coming up.
And so it is, the toddler’s father said pleasantly. Till Monday, then, LeeAnn. Sadly, as we told your mother, Monday will be the last day of our holiday.
The child raised his hand and said a sing-song goodbye. Bye-bye LeeAnn. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
I did not babysit the toddler again. There was a heatwave that Monday and the family decided to stay in. The father popped round before breakfast. He said they hoped they’d see us again next year. It had been a perfect holiday.
I asked him to give my love to the child.
Love back, said the father. You two had such times together. By way of answer I showed him the child’s loopy black drawings still marked on my legs.
~
Up on the roof smo
king, dragging warm clouds of smoke into my lungs, I also remembered Esme my school friend, Esme whom the river didn’t at first give back. A few months before our final exams Esme walked into the river that runs through our town and past her house, the same brown fast-moving river we’d watched on wet days from her living room when we were smaller. She had always kept her eye on it, even when we were playing, that huge silent river flowing by pocked with rain, sending its silver feelers across the road towards the houses.
Will the river ever come into the house? Esme would often ask her mother.
They’ll bring us sandbags before it comes, her mother said back, every time.
But I saw her pluck the long, brown slugs off the walls and the curtains and throw them outside while pretending to tidy. And each time she gave Esme a look, to check if she had noticed.
At Esme’s funeral three months later they said she had gone to where she was happy. I wondered how they could be sure. She’d left her coat behind, they said, folded neatly on top of her shoes standing side by side on the river bank, and a notebook open on a line of poetry she had copied out spread on top of that. Her dad held the notebook in unsteady hands. The river is a strong brown god. Rain had blotted some of the words.
She went in to see how it felt, I thought, the strong brown god. It was just as likely. She went to check the strength of the current, to test how fast it could push her along. Standing there in my pew at the back of the church, I imagined her floating spread-eagled, lying like a star on the rippling water. She went in to feel what it was like to float on a river in spate, I thought. She wanted to see the orange glimmers in the misty night sky reflected in the water, writhing like phosphorescent snakes. She wanted to know how far she could go, how far the water would propel her.
I knew how far. We all now knew. She went beyond the footbridge and the marina for small boats and our secret diving place where the smaller river joined the bigger and the reed beds just beyond that where the frogs spawned, and then the concrete wharf at the edge of the pub before the lock—the concrete wharf with the iron hoops at a reachable distance that she was aiming to grab, just in time, as we did every summer, with a quick upwards clasp, to pull herself out.
I thought it just as likely that she had gone out for a float. I was sure it was just as likely that she hoped to be back before long.
~
And then I remembered swimming out in the bay earlier today, far out, where it’s no longer possible to see the bottom, and thunk, my arm hit a bag of rubbish dropped off some yacht. I raised my head and saw in front of my nose something like a limb, grey-green, lumpy beneath the saturated and now translucent skin. I threw my arms back in shock and heard another swimmer come up on a bodyboard beside me.
Vale vale? he said, and then, in English, OK?
He reached out and dragged the bag on to his board. At the same moment a shoal of small silver fishes leapt over his arm.
Mounted on his board, the bag still looked like a drowned limb.
No worry, is not what we think, he said, and paddled on.
~
By now I had smoked two cigarettes up there on the roof under the orange moon and my head ached with tiredness. I unclasped the bracelet and at the same instant the memories running through me drained away. Downstairs I took the second dose of the morning-after pill I had picked up at lunchtime from the English-speaking GP. Better safe than sorry. Olaf’s leaflet about helping refugees with his bracelets had folded itself around the box of pills in my bag.
Gregor was lying on his back on the settee.
Gregor, I said, it’s over. We are over.
What was that? he asked, and tossed his head to the side. He flicked his fringe in just that way when he came up out of the waves after a swim.
You feeling OK? he said after a pause. It must have been the twentieth time that holiday.
Yes, I’m OK, I said. I’m just saying we should split up.
But we have that parachute ride booked, he said, as if putting a question to the light fitting. Tomorrow. Why don’t we stay together at least for that?
~
High up over the wrinkled sea the next day, the parachute gondola swayed us back and forth. Gregor held my left hand in his smooth, thin-boned right. Far ahead was the motorboat dragging the parachute cord. The boat painted a white arrow on the dark-blue water.
From the gondola, the umbrellas and bathers on the grey beach looked bigger than I had imagined. And the Gran Via and the whitewashed beach resorts beyond ours further away. The long shore and the wide sea didn’t give perspective. Below, there were one or two small vessels, floating as if airborne on the water, and a boat drawn up on a neighbouring beach, painted blue and white, and a white cruise liner far out to sea.
Quietly I pulled the bracelet from my shorts pocket and clipped it on. Till now I hadn’t dared. Then I looked straight down beneath us at the beach where we swam, at that small boat close to shore, just the one small boat moving in the waves.
The people in the boat looked dark against the glistening water. They were wearing bright-orange rescue jackets but the rest of them was dark. The dense afternoon light sparkled around their reaching arms.
I leaned forward to see better. I saw one of the people in the boat jump out. I saw him lose his footing, flounder, then right himself. I saw other people on board crowd forwards. Alone, the man began to drag the boat up the beach. One metre, two. Then others jumped out to help him. There were three or four dark figures in orange silhouetted against the diamond-bright water. The sunbathers lay on their towels with their eyes closed.
Look, I said, that boat!
What boat? said Gregor, following the direction of my pointing. I can’t see a boat.
That boat, I said again, pointing with my bracelet-encircled arm. Those people.
Gregor looked. He peered. He did try to peer.
It’s the people trying to make it across, I said. Look, they’ve nearly made it.
Gregor looked again, straining forwards. The gondola rocked.
Look, I said again, they’re running across the beach.
I can’t see a thing, Gregor said.
I unclipped the bracelet. When he quit looking I put it back in my pocket.
The motorboat took a looping turn and our gondola swayed some more. I let go his hand. The wind began booming in the parachute.
Next time a friend of yours goes night-swimming, I said to Gregor, shouting over the noise, Keep a look-out. People who go out to sea usually aim to come back.
Of course they do, said Gregor. When did I ever say otherwise?
He pushed his weight against the back of the gondola, so that it tipped nearly upside down and we were pitched face forwards, our straps pulling us back. The sea spread out above us like the sky.
So, he asked, turning directly to me, are you going to give me a second chance?
A drowning person doesn’t get a second chance, I said.
~
The minute we touched down at Gatwick I said I’d walk by myself into the airport building. I hadn’t returned to the subject of breaking up, but I still wanted to walk by myself.
Whatever you want, Gregor said sullenly.
Drinking usually made him sullen. In the departure lounge he had treated himself to a summer oferta: two pink gins for the price of one. And then two more. I suspected he meant me to have at least one of them, but I’d already said I wasn’t drinking.
I made my way up the gangplank and along the airport’s scuffed grey walkways, single, unencumbered. I looked back but he was nowhere in sight. At the first refuse bin I passed I paused. It was one of those cylindrical bins with a big rectangular mouth. I pulled Olaf’s bracelet out of my pocket, hula-hooped it around my closed finger and thumb. But I kept hold of it.
The next day I wrote to Olaf’s email address to order a box of ten bracelets. There was a tear-off section at the end of the leaflet for the purpose. In the white box for Further Comment I said the bracelets were meant for my fr
iends, one each. I asked him, though, to consider varying the colour. Neon orange didn’t go with everything. Blue or green bracelets would also be good, I wrote, or any other colour really—anything to break up the orange.
Paper Planes
TODAY, A TUESDAY AFTERNOON Johnny and his grandmother are playing with paper planes—or, rather, he is making them and letting her hold them in her lap. Some planes are stacked on the table beside her, a collapsed ziggurat of white fragments.
The grandmother was once called Jane, though no one calls her this any more. They call her Grandma or Mrs Dent. Her two children Susan and David both call her Grandma. Johnny is Susan’s child.
Johnny and his grandma are in her favourite corner—she on the stained armchair, he on the footstool beside it. Both the armchair and the footstool are nested in the dormer window of her new nursing-home room. Around the walls stand more upholstered chairs along with a pouffe and a few side-tables loaded with framed photographs, small lamps, decorative tea cups, a sea-shell collection.
This is not how the things stood in her former apartment. There, she liked her things set out in tasteful clusters and groups. Nothing stiff, nothing straight, she would say, adjusting angles, rearranging cups, scooping the shells into piles.
But now this place is her home, Susan and David tell her. This room. They say it over and over again, as if she might forget. This room and the tiny en-suite bathroom leading off it, full of obstacles that bruise her whenever she uses it, its basin, shelving, towel rail, all poking out at her—this crowded space is now her new home.
Cooked meals arrive on time, three times a day, but delivered food doesn’t smell like home. Till someone reminds her she leaves the meals standing under their stainless-steel covers exuding their heavy gravy odour. Even the breakfasts smell of gravy, even that lasagne lunch right there, sat on the glass-fronted bookcase by the door, its cover half off, its edges crisping.
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