Underwater Breathing

by Parkin, Cassandra;

  “Fair enough.” His father rubbed at his hair distractedly. “So, will you send me the invoice, or – ?”

  “I’ll see you out,” said Jacob hastily. “Back in a minute, Dad. Okay? I won’t be long. If you hear someone moving around, it’s just me or Mrs Armitage.”

  “You don’t need to treat me like I’m ninety, you know,” said his father.

  “I know, I’m sorry. So I’ll just be a minute, yes?”

  He followed Mrs Armitage into the kitchen and towards the back door. The cliff-edge had crept closer over the years, but she still insisted on taking the cliff-path back home. I’m not afraid of the sea, she always said on the few occasions he’d brought this up. When the time comes, I’ll be ready. The smell of something savoury came from the oven.

  “I put dinner on for you,” Mrs Armitage said.

  “Oh! Thank you, but you didn’t need to –”

  “No, I know that.”

  “So how has he been?” he asked, desperate to hold onto this small amount of adult company.

  “The same as he always is.” She took her rucksack from the kitchen chair where she always left it. “As long as he knows it’s me, he’s perfectly pleasant to be around.”

  “So he hasn’t been violent or anything?”

  “Of course he hasn’t.”

  Jacob waited, as he always waited, to see if she would ask him anything more about this, but she simply adjusted her rucksack on her shoulders. She’d long ago made clear the limits of what she would and would not do to help him, and of precisely how much care she had for his welfare.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then,” he said.

  “Yes. But it’ll be the last time until September.”

  “No, I know that, I haven’t forgotten.” As if he could have thought of anything else for days and days; the dreadful weight of these six weeks of aloneness with his father, with no one to share the burden.

  “You don’t have to keep doing this,” said Mrs Armitage. It was the closest she would ever come to sympathy.

  “Yes I do.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re perfectly entitled to have him put into some sort of –”

  “He’s my dad,” said Jacob, firmly.

  He wanted her to argue some more, not because she had any chance of persuading him but because the arguing would prolong the time until she left him. But she simply shrugged.

  “As long as you remember it’s your choice to live this way.” She turned away and reached for the door handle, as if they’d been discussing nothing more important than whether Jacob needed milk, or could last till the morning. He reminded himself that this was only fair. Mrs Armitage owed him nothing.

  “See you tomorrow morning, then,” he said. “If you still want to, I mean.”

  “It’s what we agreed,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

  In the kitchen, he opened the oven door and found crusted chicken breasts baking in a foil tray alongside two plump jacket potatoes. He decanted two portions of frozen peas into a bowl, started the microwave, laid out the knives and forks and glasses of water. Then he went back to the living-room door.

  “Dad? Dad, it’s just me.”

  They ate in a silence that Jacob supposed could be de-scribed as companionable. The food provided both focus and distraction. Fully occupied and with his senses engaged, his father seemed, for once, rooted in the present. Jacob left the table for a moment to get another glass of water. When he returned, his father was holding a piece of the chicken breast up to the light so he could examine it more closely.

  “This coating’s pretty good,” he said. “Some sort of herbs, is it? And breadcrumbs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s lovely. We should have it again some time. What? What are you laughing about?”

  “I’m not laughing, Dad, I’m smiling. I’m really glad you like it.” They had this dish at least twice a week. It was one of his father’s favourites, and while the memory of what he’d eaten would soon slip away from him, the glow of satisfaction would help his mood for the rest of the evening. “We’ll have it again soon, shall we?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” His father glanced down at his plate. “D’you know, I can’t think, just remind me, Jacob, what day is it again?”

  “It’s Monday.”

  “Shit! Is it? Christ, Jacob, did I go to work this morning? Oh my God, I didn’t –”

  “Are you ready for some pudding, Dad? We’ve got some cakes, really nice ones.”

  “Don’t interrupt me. I won’t have rudeness out of you, do you hear?”

  “No, Dad, you’re right. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

  “I won’t have it. Not now. Not ever. Bad behaviour is never acceptable.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He had the physical strength to manage his father but not the will, and he was too tired to think of a way to distract him from what he honestly thought was his parental duty. That was the hardest part. The knowledge that his father was only doing his best. “I won’t do it again, I promise.” He glanced wildly around the kitchen for inspiration. “Why don’t I do the washing-up to apologise? And you can sit in the living-room and have a break.”

  His father’s gaze flickered for a minute.

  “Oh, Jacob. You’re a good lad. But you have to learn, we all have to learn…”

  “I know. So why don’t I do the washing-up by myself? Make myself useful.”

  His dad sighed. “Okay. You do the washing-up and we’ll call it quits.” He looked uneasily around the room. “Just remind me, mate, what day is it again?”

  “I got some cakes for pudding.” Feeling like an inept magician trying to stop his audience from glimpsing the assistant behind the curtain, Jacob fumbled on the worktop for the box containing the toffee Danishes.

  “Those look good. You shouldn’t be spending your money on stuff like this, though, son. It’s my job to look after the bills, not yours.”

  “I don’t mind, I wanted to. Shall we eat them in the living-room?”

  “Why not?”

  “So why don’t you sit down and eat yours while I wash up?”

  He saw his father safely through the door, pulled it closed so he’d know if he started wandering. Then he filled the sink with hot water and piled in the plates.

  He took his time over the washing-up, putting off the moment for as long as possible. He’d heard only silence from the living-room, but he checked to make sure the door was shut anyway. Then he went to the fridge and filled a mug with milk. He stood still for one moment more, trying to tell himself he still had a choice. What was it he was always telling his students? It’s never too late to change your mind. But of course that wasn’t true. He had already made his decision.

  With quick, furtive movements, he took down the box of herbal teabags from the top shelf. Beneath the brownish paper packets of powdered liquorice was a long white box of with a pharmacist’s label on it.

  He popped two tablets from the blister into a spoon, hesitated, then popped a third. It had been a long week. Then he put another spoon on top of the first, and pressed down hard. The tablets yielded beneath the pressure, crumbling with a satisfying little pop and creating three perfect starbursts of powder. He tipped them into the milk and stirred rapidly until they dissolved. Then he took the bottle of whiskey hidden in the Weetabix box and added a furtive slug. Do not drink alcohol, the label on the pill packet shrieked. He put it back in its place behind the teabags without looking at it, and took the mug to the microwave.

  In the living-room, his father had once again stationed himself by the window, staring out at the long orange fingers of light that reached blindly towards him through the branches of the apple tree. When Jacob opened the door, he steeled himself for the clenched fists, the look of fear; but when his father looked at him, he saw only tenderness.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come and look at this view.”

  Jacob joined his father at the window. The light was so low and br
ight that he had to squint to see anything at all.

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” his father said. “All ours.”

  Did his father see the garden as it was now? Or did he still see it as it had been when time stopped for him?

  “Not much chance of anyone coming in that way,” his father said with satisfaction. “Not unless they’re bloody Vikings, anyway.”

  “And there’s no Vikings round here as far as I know.”

  “We’re lucky.”

  Jacob clenched his fingers tight around the mug and made a fierce wish for this moment to last for ever. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “It’s nothing, Dad, just the floorboards moving. They do it all the time.”

  “There’s someone in the house.”

  “Dad. Shush.”

  “I’ll check upstairs, you check downstairs and give me a shout if you find –”

  “Look, how about I check and you sit down and drink this?” He held the mug out where his father could see it. The cheap, sweet, smoky scent drifted into the space between them.

  His father looked at the mug suspiciously.

  “Is there whiskey in this? It smells like it’s got whiskey in it.”

  “Just a bit. I thought you might like it.”

  “You’re not supposed to touch my – oh, well, never mind,” his father said wearily. “You meant well. Can’t make a habit of it, though.” He looked around the room. “What was I going to do? I was going to do something, I’m sure I was…”

  “You were going to lock the front door. I’ll do it. Don’t worry.”

  “Getting a bit forgetful,” he muttered with a sheepish smile. “First sign of old age.” He looked again at the mug, then sat down in the chair that faced the garden and took a large gulp.

  Jacob lingered over the locking of the door, wanting his father to finish his drink with no distractions. Soon it would be time to start chivvying him upstairs to bed before the diazepam turned him into a shambling zombie.

  But for now, let his father enjoy his drink in peace.

  An hour later and their unequal skirmish was complete. His father, unbathed but with his teeth clean and in some approximation of pyjamas, lay in a drugged slumber in the bed he once shared with his wife. Jacob had a new tender spot on his shoulder where his father, bewildered and frightened, had landed a brutal punch as he flailed and struggled to escape the bathroom, but at least there was nothing that would show above his clothes, and no blood. Downstairs, he got out his laptop. Checked the living-room door was closed. Took out the photograph that never left him. His little sister, her face serious as she stared warily up at the camera, and behind her, her arms around Ella’s waist, her chin on Ella’s shoulder, the woman he’d once called mother, laughing as she knelt to fit herself into the picture. He would have liked to cut the woman out and throw her away, but she and Ella were intertwined.

  He began, as always, with Facebook. He typed her name into the search box. Ella Murray.

  He already recognised many of the results, but clicked on them anyway, just in case. What would Ella look like now? She’d been blonde as a child; it was likely she would be blonde still, but you never knew –

  But none of the girls whose profiles he studied looked back at him with the face of his sister.

  He tried again with his mother’s name. Maggie Murray yielded nothing that looked possible. Margaret Murray. Daisy Murray. Meg Murray. An abundance of women, mostly on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Would she have left the country? She’d destroyed their family and broken his father, who knew what she might do next?

  But if he let himself consider the idea that Ella was living under another name or in another country, he’d go mad. Better to simply try his less likely search terms, Ella Winter and Meg Winter. She’d never used her married name before, and after leaving her husband would be a strange time to start, but he always had to try.

  He knew many of these faces too – had begun to feel as if some of them were even friends of his, whose lives he’d dropped out of for a while – but he went through them carefully anyway. Then, the sudden shock of novelty: a woman whose profile picture showed her sitting on a park bench, a teenage girl beside her. For a moment, he thought he saw something familiar in their faces.

  Forcing himself to stay calm, he clicked onto the profile photo and studied it intently. The shot had been taken from a distance, the colours of the grass and the huge rhododendron bush behind them dominating the shot, and it was hard to see their faces clearly. Nonetheless, he zoomed in as far as he could, dwelling for slow intense minutes over the curves of their cheeks, the shading of their hair. When he looked more closely, the likeness that had briefly caught at his heart dissolved and disappeared; the woman’s figure was too heavy, the girl beside her too young. But if he looked away from the screen to the photograph and then back again, flicking his eyes casually over the image rather than staring directly at it, he thought he glimpsed something.

  Both the girl and the woman wore sunglasses that hid half of their faces. The girl’s were large and tinted pinky-brown, almost wider than her face; the woman’s were hearts with thick white plastic rims. They must have swapped for the photo. Of course the girl was too young, but it might be an old picture, perhaps uploaded when she first joined and never amended. He clicked onto her profile to see what else he could discover, but the page was empty. No workplaces to show. No schools or universities. No places. No relationship status. A small clutch of friends whose profiles revealed nothing he could use.

  His heart thumped in his chest. That might be about right. It really might be about right. That was exactly what he might expect.

  Except, a cold voice whispered to him, it’s not. She wouldn’t join Facebook. You know she wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t let Ella join either.

  But Ella was seventeen years old now, old enough to rebel. Ella might be out there looking for him right now. He went back to the photo of the woman with her daughter on the park bench. The more he stared, the less the two people on the bench looked like the ones he sought. It was no good. Another false alarm.

  His phone vibrated against his leg, the alarm a stern re-minder that he couldn’t lose his entire night to his search. He’d learned the hard way that the shockwaves of sleeplessness would make the next few days almost unbearable. He had only another ten minutes to check his other sources, not because he thought he’d find anything but because he knew he wouldn’t sleep without it. Working quickly and efficiently now, he scrolled through his bookmarked selection of databases, checking the names and likely locations with the automatic efficiency of a skilled office worker. Nothing; nothing; nothing. Another night of not knowing. Or, perhaps, another night gone before the one when he would finally find them.

  Wearily, he began his pre-bed routine: checking the doors and windows were locked, checking his photograph was back in his pocket, checking he’d hidden his laptop. Before he went to bed, he peeked in at his father, deep in the arms of chemical sleep. He thought the other man was too far gone to be aware of the door opening, but his dad stirred and sighed, then lifted his head from the pillow.

  “That you, Jacob? Had a nightmare? Get in w’me if you want.”

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “You sound upset. You’re not crying, are you?” His dad was half-awake now, fighting the downward pull of the sleeping tablets. “You lie down here w’me, I don’t mind. C’m’ere, love.”

  The sheets smelled of sweat and fabric conditioner, their usual midweek scent. Thank God his father hadn’t yet started pissing the bed. Thank God they were stuck on the plateau and not sliding down the slope towards disaster. One day there would be another crisis, another chunk out of his father’s crumbling defences, but until then, they would endure.

  His father patted sleepily at Jacob’s shoulder. Jacob turned obediently onto his side and let his father lay a protective arm over his arm and chest. He wondered how old he was in his f
ather’s mind at this moment. His father’s breathing began to slow again, his breath warm against the back of Jacob’s neck.

  He lay quietly, listening to his father’s breathing, counting in his head. When he reached five hundred, he slipped out of his father’s embrace and crept next door to his own room.

  Chapter Four

  2007

  Mrs Armitage heard them before she saw them – a family party whose voices stirred a faint sense of recognition.

  The salt and wind had taken their toll on her fence, and there were several places where the knots had fallen out of the wood. Lowering herself slowly to her knees, she took a careful slantwise peek through the knothole.

  She could see mostly legs and plastic carrier bags cram-med with towels and tinfoil parcels. She watched the feet for clues. A man; a woman; a younger man. Then, at just the right height for her to make eye contact, a face. The girl she’d rescued from the beach. Ella. The identities of the other three fell into place. A small mystery solved.

  Enjoying her new role as a spy, she sat back on her heels and listened as they passed, to a casual chatter so inane it could hardly be called conversation. Exclamations over the thick brown sea (“It’s probably the mud”). A dispute about how long they’d been walking (“We left at six minutes past, so it’s seven minutes.” “Yes but we don’t know where in the minute, so there are some seconds as well.” “Ella, does it matter that much? Really?”). And the parents, inevitable as a Greek chorus; “Kids, come on, keep up, stop dawdling!” Nothing to draw her back to the knothole for a second stealthy glance. She looked anyway, and found herself staring straight into Ella’s face.

  “Jacob, look.” Without the fence, Ella would be close enough to touch. “There’s an eye in the fence.” A little finger burrowed curiously through the knothole.

  “That’s a knothole, Ella.” His voice took on the artificially enthusiastic tone of an older child explaining something to a younger one. “You know when a tree grows a branch? When they cut the tree into logs, the branches leave a sort of circle behind, and that’s called a knot. Only sometimes they fall out.”