Underwater Breathing

by Parkin, Cassandra;

  “Let me try.” Suddenly Ella was between him and his father, her hair in his face and her scent in his mouth.

  “It’s okay, I’ll get him up in the end, but sometimes he gets a bit –”

  “Can you hear me?” She was patting gently at his hands, stroking them with the tips of her fingers. “It’s Ella. What are you so upset about? Maybe we can fix it.”

  “It can’t be fixed.” Their father turned his face up towards them, stricken with tragedy. “Some things can’t ever be fixed. I hurt her too much. I let her down. She took my car and she left me.”

  Jacob shivered.

  “But where has she gone?” Ella coaxed. “What happened to her? Can you tell me? And maybe we can go and find her?”

  “Ella, don’t. Please don’t. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “I don’t know. There’s something wrong with my memory. I can’t remember things any more.”

  “Ella, please, leave him be, he doesn’t know –”

  She was completely focused on their father now, her hands holding the sides of his face.

  “You can tell me,” she whispered. “You won’t be in trouble. I promise. Why did you move here? What were you scared of?”

  “Ella, stop it!”

  Her ferocious glare was so unexpected that he flinched. “Let him speak!”

  The silence stretched out.

  “I don’t really get out much at the moment,” their father said at last. “Bit busy with things at home. Jacob and I get on fine between us, but we don’t have a lot of time for going out.” He took Ella’s hand and squeezed it, then let it go. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name, pet, but I’m glad you’re here to help Jacob out. Jacob, we should get back to it, shouldn’t we?”

  “You’re right,” said Jacob dully. “Let’s get home, Dad.”

  He waited for his father to get a little ahead of them before speaking to Ella.

  “What were you thinking?” he hissed furiously, as soon as he was sure their father would not hear. “Upsetting him like that, and for what? What’s the point? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, that’s not good enough! He’s not well and he can’t help that. The last thing he needs is to be reminded. How could you be so cruel to him?”

  “Please don’t be angry. I just –”

  “Forget it, I don’t want to hear it.” The little-girl misery on her face tore at his heart – this was Ella, for goodness sakes, his sister. Fighting off the urge to forgive her, he reached instead for a piece of long-forgotten adolescent cruelty: the banishment he’d imposed on her whenever her puppy-dog dependence grew too much. “I’m sick of you. Don’t talk to me until I say. I don’t want to be around you right now.”

  *

  He made dinner for the three of them, revelling in his own righteousness. He was angry enough to break things, but he would do his duty. He put the plate down in front of Ella without looking at her, ate without acknowledging her presence. Then he took his father into the living-room and put on the DVD of Die Hard, the film his father constantly suggested and watched at least once a week. Ella could join them, or not; he didn’t care. He watched from the corner of his eye as she perched on the edge of the sofa, waiting and hoping for acknowledgement. She looked so young and lost that he had to look away before he gave in to his impulse to beg her to forgive him. When he looked back again, she was gone.

  Lost in his own thoughts, he forgot to watch the time or to look for the right moment to wrestle the older man up the stairs. By the time he thought to check, his dad had already fallen asleep. Now he’d have to try and wake him without waking him, wrestle him out of one sleeping-place and into another, and today had already been so long… Jacob realised he was on the verge of tears. He’d dreamed of this change in his life, and now he had it, what had really changed? He had wanted his sister to come home to him, so much, and now it was all turning to ashes.

  And whose fault is that? What’s the matter with you? Her mum’s abandoned her and you yelled at her. Twice. You’ll be lucky if she’s even still here.

  He left his father sleeping deeply and went upstairs. He’d been a bastard, but he could make it right. He’d make it right. He’d apologise. He knocked on the door of her room, waited, then opened it a crack.

  It was empty. But then he heard the faint clicking of water in ancient plumbing and knew instantly where she was.

  The bathroom was damp with years of disuse, a single forgotten towel curled over the cold iron radiator. Beneath the water, his sister lay flat and still, dressed in a navy swimming costume, her eyes closed, her skin blue-white. For the first time, he understood why his parents had hated them to play this game.

  “Ella!” He plunged one arm into the water, groping frantically. Her eyes came open and he saw her exhale, but the panic didn’t begin to subside until she sat up, gasping and shuddering, and rubbed the water from her face. “What the hell are you doing?” He reached for the towel, but it was set like a carapace.

  “Stay here,” he ordered her, and ran for the airing-cupboard.

  All his towels were threadbare now. Why had he not replaced them? Why didn’t he have something vast and fluffy to wrap his little sister in and keep her warm? He and his father were short of money but not that short. He could have found enough to buy something better than this thin faded greenish rag. Tomorrow he would drive into town and buy a whole bale of new ones. Back in the bathroom, Ella stood huddled in on herself, shivering.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “You don’t need to look after me.”

  He wrapped her up as well as he could. “Get yourself dry before you freeze to death.”

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I wanted to think.”

  “I was horrible earlier. I can’t believe I said that to you. I – it was all I could think about sometimes. You coming back, I mean. And now I’m fucking it all up like an idiot.”

  “I should have told you properly. But I was afraid to. I didn’t think you’d believe me. But I want to tell you now.”

  “Can we get you warm at least? Come on, it’s cold in here.”

  “No, let me talk, please. Do you remember why we used to play the underwater breathing game?”

  “Of course I do. You were frightened of the sea. You thought you could learn to breathe underwater.”

  “But we only played it when they argued. So we wouldn’t have to hear them. But we heard them anyway. He used to shout about – ”

  “I know! I know. They used to argue. But that’s all in the past now, there’s no point trying to decide whose fault it was.”

  “ – he used to shout about how hard he’d tried to keep us safe,” Ella continued patiently. “And he never wanted Mum going off by herself. And now she’s disappeared.”

  He took a handful of the towel draped around her shoulders and began to scrub at her arms, trying to get the blood flowing again. “But she hasn’t disappeared. She’s just gone off somewhere. That’s what she said in her note, isn’t it? She’s fine. She’s having some time to herself.”

  “But she hasn’t, she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t leave me!” Was the brightness in her eyes rage, or tears? “I need to show you something.”

  He followed her into her bedroom and watched in perplexity as she knelt by the doll’s house.

  “Don’t you think you should get dressed first? What are you doing?”

  She lifted the doll’s house and moved it carefully aside. In the clean patch of carpet left by the movement were three stacks of paper that she gathered carefully into a single pile and held out to him. The sight of the handwriting made him feel sick.

  “What is this? Is it letters or something?”

  “It’s her book. She wrote a book, she worked on it sometimes during the day and she kept writing it after we –”

  “She wrote it by hand? Not on a laptop? Why would she do that? Who does that?”

  “Please read it. I need you to read it.
And then you’ll understand and you’ll see what I mean.”

  He looked at the thick stack of paper, and swallowed. “Ella, it’s a whole book, it’ll take me hours.” Every word on those pages had been written by the woman he had once called Mother. He didn’t even want to touch it. “Can’t you tell me what it’s about?”

  “It’s hard to explain, it’s a really strange story, but I think it’s about a woman who’s being stalked. She’s trying to get away from her husband. Only he keeps following her, all the time he follows her. So eventually she makes a plan to run away, leaving everything she loves behind, even her –” Ella swallowed fiercely – “even her daughter. She’s going to become someone else, so he’ll never find her. And now she’s disappeared. And she left me behind.”

  “Ella, it’s a novel. Writers make stuff up, that’s what writing is.”

  “But what if it isn’t made up?”

  He wasn’t sure where to begin.

  “After we left you,” Ella continued, “we moved house all the time. Every six months or so we’d find somewhere new. It took me a long time to realise not everyone lived that way, she tried to make it seem normal, but in the end I realised. She was afraid of someone finding us.”

  “And you thought the person she was scared of was Dad?”

  “At first I did. And I thought, well, if he’d found her all the other times, all the times we moved I mean, he must have some way of doing it. I thought if I came here and talked to him, maybe he could help me find her this time as well.”

  “But you know he can’t have,” said Jacob. “Don’t you? I mean, even if he wanted to he couldn’t. You’ve seen what he’s like.”

  “But what if Mum was with someone else, before, and he was the one trying to find her? That would explain everything, wouldn’t it? Why we had to move so often, not just after-wards but before, before we came here. Why we even moved here in the first place. And why – Dad – ” the word sounded strange coming from her. He hadn’t realised until now how reluctant she was to speak it. “Why he’s so paranoid all the time about people breaking in. I know how this sounds, I do. But both of them, Jacob? Both of them convinced someone’s trying to get them? That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

  She really believed this, he realised. Was this what had happened to her, in those days when she’d been alone, trying to make sense of her abandonment, waiting for the woman who was never coming back? He’d never guessed how much was going on inside her head.

  “Ella, I can see how you got to this. I can. But really – think about it for a minute.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I do get why you want this to be true. No, please, I really do. She left me too, remember? She left me too. I know how much it hurts.”

  “I want to find her,” Ella said, her voice trembling. “That’s all. I don’t mind if she doesn’t want to come back or anything. I want to know she’s safe.”

  So she hadn’t come back for him after all. He tried to swallow his hurt. What must it have been like for her? To come to this house she had hated, hoping to meet a man who she thought had hounded her mother for years, on the slender chance that he could help her?

  “Were you scared? To come here, I mean?”

  “A bit. Well, a lot. I know how stupid that sounds. You must think I’m insane.”

  “Of course you’re not insane. You were on your own for days, anyone would start wondering.”

  “You know,” said Ella hesitantly, “when I came here, I didn’t know you’d be here too. I thought you’d have left years ago, and it would be Dad on his own. And then you came outside.”

  He could feel the warmth of her smile glowing like a burning coal in his chest. Impulsively, he put his arms around her. Her weight against him felt unfamiliar, and her skin was very cold. She clung to him for a minute, then suddenly pushed him away.

  “I’m sorry.” His heart was knocking against his ribs. “I didn’t mean to – ”

  “It’s not that. It’s just I’m all wet.” She scrubbed roughly at the ends of her hair with the towel.

  “You’ll freeze if you stay in that costume,” he said.

  “I’ll get changed in a minute.”

  “You know I’m so, so glad you came back, right? Even if it was just to try and find her.”

  “Of course it wasn’t just to find Mum! I was looking for you too.”

  He felt as if he’d been given a box of diamonds. He wanted to say I love you, but the words sounded alien in his mouth. How often did siblings tell each other that they loved each other? It would be as pointless as saying We’re both alive. He would save this moment in his back pocket to examine later, when his work for the day was done.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said instead, and went downstairs to rouse his father from his awkward, slumped slumber in the chair and help him upstairs and into bed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  2008

  “What are you doing?”

  Ella had stood in the doorway to his bedroom for a few long minutes – so long he’d almost forgotten her again. He sat in a patch of sunlight, a Chemistry textbook open but ignored on his lap, making the most of the months where he could sit in here by himself without paying the price in bulky layers and frozen fingers. When autumn came, he’d have to make the trade-off between being warm and being alone, but for now, he revelled in the fierce yellow light and his own company. He’d played with Ella all morning, had got her breakfast while their parents murmured and shuffled overhead, made sure she got dressed and found her crayons and paper. He was sixteen years old and he had exams to prepare for. Surely he wasn’t expected to entertain her all the time?

  “Revising for my exams,” he said, without looking up.

  “Is it hard work?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “I drew you a knight.”

  “That’s nice. Aren’t you doing lessons today?”

  “But you’re not at school,” said Ella, surprised.

  “But I’m still working. And you need to do your work too. Why don’t you go and ask Mum what you’re supposed to be doing?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Wake her up.”

  “I’ve tried. It didn’t work.”

  It was nearly eleven o’clock. There was no way their mother was still asleep. It was Ella being Ella, and preferring to be with him. It was sweet in a way, but in a lot of other ways it was completely irritating.

  “Well, why don’t you take her a cup of tea or something?” He turned a page in his book, carefully not looking in the direction of the door. She’d give up in the end. She always did. After a minute, there was a flutter of paper, and then the sound of small footsteps. He risked a glance up. She’d put her picture on the floor inside his room, and left.

  He returned to his book, but it was too warm to concentrate. He tried to let his thoughts drift, but he was sitting in the wrong position somehow, or the sunlight was now too bright. He got crossly to his feet and went to collect the picture Ella had left for him.

  She’d drawn the two of them, as she always did. They stood on a brown cliff, himself very tall, and Ella very small and squashed up. He held an inverted cross that was presumably a sword, waving it towards the blue wave towering over their heads. Beneath it Ella had written:

  Thank you for keping me sayfe

  If he didn’t look for her, she wouldn’t bother him again. She understood when she’d been dismissed. He swore, put his book down, and went to find his little sister.

  She was teetering on a chair in the kitchen, stretching for the teabags. Beneath her, the overfilled kettle wobbled and bubbled and sent up scalding plumes of steam. He grabbed her firmly under the armpits, put her on the floor and reached for the teabags himself, swallowing his mental image of what might have happened if he hadn’t come in to stop her.

  “I’m making a cup of tea for Mummy,” Ella said.

  “I can see that. You do know you’re not supposed to touch the k
ettle, don’t you?” The boiling water spurted and slopped as he poured it cautiously out. Ella watched wide-eyed. “See that? It’s too full to pour properly. That could have been your arm.”

  It was his fault for telling her to make their mother some tea, but of course she wouldn’t say that; she never blamed him, even when he was wrong. Together they climbed the wide front staircase to their parents’ room.

  Their mother lay as serene and beautiful as an enchanted princess, lovely even with her eyes shut, because then you had the chance to appreciate the delicate fringe of her eyelashes, the perfect swoop of her brows, the curve of her cheekbones. Her hair sprayed out across the pillow. She must be the only woman in the world who could look utterly beautiful without any effort at all, without even the benefit of consciousness.

  “Mum.” He put the mug on the bedside table, and shook her shoulder gently. “Mum, it’s nearly lunchtime. We brought you a cup of tea.”

  She sighed, and opened her eyes.

  “Jacob.” Her smile was unfocused and brilliant. “Hello, my lovely boy. How are you? It’s a beautiful day.”

  “It’s nearly lunchtime,” he repeated.

  “There’s nothing more beautiful than sleeping in the daytime,” she murmured. “It’s like eating in bed, or stealing flowers from people’s gardens. Do you think Adam and Eve stole flowers in Eden? Perhaps that’s why God was angry.”

  “I’ll make lunch,” Jacob said. “What would you like?”

  “I’ll just have an apple,” she said, and closed her eyes again. “In a little while.”

  “Mum.” He shook her again, but she was gone, vanished beneath the surface, leaving only her lovely form behind. What was she thinking, sleeping so late? Was she ill? Stroking a strand of hair away from her face, he found a small ring of dull black bruises circling her wrist.

  “Is Mummy hurt?” Ella reached out a finger. Her hands needed washing. “Is that why she’s so tired?”

  “She’s fine,” said Jacob.

  “But –”

  “I tell you what,” he said. “Let’s make a picnic and go and have an adventure.”