Underwater Breathing

by Parkin, Cassandra;

  A blinding sheet of light flashed across her eyeballs, followed a few moments later by a crack of splitting sky. The sudden brightness and the blind darkness that followed reminded her that Ella would be standing in the tower-room, watching for the light. Mrs Armitage had once liked to imagine the tower-room as a bedroom, remote and romantic with specially made furniture fitted into curving stonework, but Ella had told her that it was a bathroom, cold and draughty and banned from use for reasons Ella herself was unable to explain.

  Had she left the light on? She couldn’t be sure. She could go inside and check, or she could stand here in the rain for another minute and retrace her steps this evening until she was sure, and save herself the journey. Her days blended into one another sometimes. It was hard to keep track of the small differences that separated the undertakings of any particular Tuesday from those that came before or after. But with a little effort she would remember. It wasn’t that she was reluctant to see the photograph of her husband that she kept by the bed. It was certainly not that she was remembering the night she had stood on the cliff and watched the rough surface empty of all vessels and known, even before the knock on her door, that the boat had gone down with all hands and he wouldn’t be coming back. It was simply a good discipline to force herself to summon up, not the pale vague recollection of what she would generally have been doing at a certain time in the evening, but the small vivid details that would place her in that particular fragment of time.

  She allowed herself to stir a little, to look at herself and see what evidence she could find. She was wearing the scarlet jumper that lived at the very back of her drawer and which she chose only rarely, because the colour didn’t suit her but its warmth was unparalleled. That meant she must have been upstairs since the wind veered sharply around to the North-East and the clouds swallowed the sun like wolves. And now the lock turned in her mind and she had the whole memory; she’d gone upstairs to fetch an extra layer, turned on the light even though it was not really dark enough to need it yet, taken down the blue vase that lived on the sill of her side-window and pulled the curtains as wide as they would go. Ella, stand-ing in her tower like a medieval prisoner, would see that Mrs Armitage’s house was still standing. Mrs Armitage, she always called her, never Araminta, possibly because she had never invited Ella to call her Araminta. Thank God the child had never attempted Auntie.

  In the part of her garden that had once been eleven feet from the cliff-edge and was now where she had re-installed her fence, the slice of panel that made a thin, barely-visible gate was shaking. There was a bolt along the top that, if she shot it home, would make her garden impregnable to walkers, but she chose not to bother. There was only one invader she feared, and a few centimetres of salt-rotted wood had no chance of keeping it out. Perhaps it was the wind, battering away at the weakest point of the barrier. She refused to give in to the fancy that it might be her husband, returned from the sea to reclaim his bride. What the sea took, it never gave back. She looked away again and stared steadily out into the storm and relished the numbness in her face and hands, the rain that dripped off her nose and darkened the concrete beneath her feet.

  The gate flew open, then slammed shut once more. The wind must have got behind the panel, amused itself for a moment with trying to tear it from its hinges. If she was given to imagining things, she might imagine there was someone creeping up the garden, someone turned slick and smooth by the storm, their features soaked off their face and their hands blindly reaching out towards her. If she was given to imagining things, she would be frozen to the spot with terror –

  But she was not given to imagining things, so she simply stood and stared and waited, and after a minute the ghoul resolved herself into a woman she recognised. Ella’s mother, Maggie.

  “I saw your light and I knew I had to come here,” Maggie said, no greeting, no apology. They might have been meeting by appointment in a quiet hotel dining-room, dressed in expensive dresses and crimson lipstick and elegant white gloves. “I can’t be in the house with Richard when there’s a storm. Not even one in a teacup. Do you have teacups? Can I come inside and check? I’m a bit confused, I think it must be the weather we’re having.” Her laugh was high and uncertain. “Do you find that? Do you get confused by the weather we’re having?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s been a long day, I don’t really know what I’m saying. Can I come in or will I get blood on your carpet?”

  “I don’t know. Are you bleeding?”

  “I feel like I might be but I’m not sure. Can you see any blood? Or is it the rain? I’m very cold, is that a sign of blood loss do you think?”

  The woman was babbling nonsense, swaying on her feet. How had she made it from her house to this one, with the wind tugging at her and the cliffs ready to crumble? Mrs Armitage toyed for a moment with the idea of going inside and slamming the patio doors shut and closing the curtains to shut out the blue eyes and blue flesh and pleading expression, but Maggie held her hands out in entreaty and Mrs Armitage, not liking to be touched, stood a step away from the doorway, then cursed under her breath as Maggie took this as an invitation to stumble over the threshold. Once inside, she stood apathetically, water pouring from her clothes in long silvery strands, eyes fixed on Mrs Armitage. Whatever blind force had driven her this far seemed to have burned itself out.

  She could put Maggie back out into the rain and let the cliffs take her. She could march her through the house and send her out the front door towards the road. But then, both of these actions would make her complicit in whatever came next. There was no help for it. Maggie was in her house now. She had definitely become her responsibility. She sighed and squared her shoulders.

  “Stay there and don’t move. I’ll get you a towel and some dry clothes.”

  She hurried around the tiny bedroom and tinier bathroom, assembling what she needed. Her whole house felt cramped and crammed with the knowledge that there was an extra person in it. Maggie was standing exactly where she had left her, frozen in place like a statue. When Mrs Armitage put her hand on her arm, Maggie leapt beneath her touch.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” In spite of herself, she softened her voice to make it gentler, less threatening. “I won’t hurt you. You need to get undressed and dry yourself off and then put these things on.”

  Maggie was pitifully underdressed. Her thin long-sleeved t-shirt was transparent with water and her jeans were plastered to her legs. When she pushed off her trainers, they squelched, exposing long slim feet, sockless and dyed blue and purple with cold, or perhaps with bruises. Her fingers scrabbled uselessly at the edges of her t-shirt.

  “My hands won’t work,” she whispered. “I’m so cold. Is this my clothes? Or am I taking off my skin?”

  “Fine, I’ll help you. Put your arms up.”

  Mrs Armitage peeled the t-shirt off in one smooth slick movement. Maggie’s skin was mauve and mottled, scratched and battered, the shape of her slender and lithe. A body so vulnerable in its bruised beauty that it seemed to invite the viewer to touch it roughly and damage it further. Mrs Armitage set her teeth and wrestled with the fastening of Maggie’s jeans, tearing a fingernail on the zip but finally getting enough purchase to tug it down. Her fingers and nails left red tracks on the younger woman’s flesh as she wrestled with the uncooperative fabric, trying and failing to leave the plain black cotton pants in place. Maggie stood like a martyr and let Mrs Armitage do what she liked. Her expression was frightened but compliant. Her ankles felt small and breakable in Mrs Armitage’s hands.

  “There,” said Mrs Armitage. “Now dry yourself off.” She held out the towel. Maggie took it and dabbed briefly at her skin. “No, rub hard. Get the blood moving. I’m not doing it for you, you’re not a child. And then put those clothes on. And then come into the kitchen and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  Maggie reached out and stroked Mrs Armitage’s cheek. “You’re wet too.”

  Mrs
Armitage was too startled to push her away.

  “We’re the same, aren’t we? We’re both cold and we’re both made wrong inside our heads. Did you know you’re made wrong inside your head? Sometimes I know, but sometimes I forget. The strange thing is that when you remember that you’re made wrong, somehow that helps you behave normally again. It’s only when you forget who you are that you turn into your real self. That’s why I had to come here. You know all the time who you are, don’t you?”

  “I’d like you to stop talking now. In fact, if you don’t stop talking, I’m going to make you go back outside again.”

  “You should take your clothes off too,” Maggie said, so calmly that Mrs Armitage wondered if she’d imagined the words coming out of her mouth. “We’re both wearing the wrong skins for the weather. Is that the ocean coming for us?”

  The ground shivered in distress. For a moment, the land outshouted the water.

  “It’s the cliff,” said Mrs Armitage. “The cliff, that’s all.” She peered into the dark. “I think my fence has gone again.”

  Maggie smiled conspiratorially. “Maybe the octopus wants it for his garden.”

  “Maybe he does.” They were both beginning to shiver now, Mrs Armitage because her wet clothes were sucking her body’s heat from her skin, and Maggie because she was naked. “I’m going to get changed upstairs. You should put on the clothes I fetched for you, before you freeze.”

  “Ella says sometimes you put on another skin and then you turn into a seal. Did you know she believes that?”

  “That’s because Ella’s a child. Children say a lot of silly things. She’s thinking of my scuba gear.”

  “If you put your scuba gear on now and never take it off you’ll always be ready when the water comes for your house,” said Maggie, and the shiver that crept down Mrs Armitage’s spine was not only from the cold.

  She groped blindly for the bannister, her eyes still filled with the strange sight of Maggie’s damaged beauty. Up in her bedroom, she turned the photograph of her husband to face the wall, not liking the feel of his eyes moving over her body, the body that had aged in all the ways his had not.

  In the kitchen, Maggie sat and watched with eyes as wide and innocent as her daughter’s as Mrs Armitage, newly armoured in fresh garments, put Maggie’s clothes in the tumble-dryer and filled the kettle at the sink. The silence was awkward for a few moments, but Mrs Armitage refused to cover it over with idle conventional nonsense chatter. Instead the words she could have spoken (I’ll get the kettle on and we’ll soon have a nice cuppa do you like milk sugar weak or strong biscuit no really you need the sugar) jangled and clattered about her head for a while, then dissipated, leaving behind a different kind of silence that felt less like awkwardness and more like companionship. She filled two mugs with tea, thought about putting milk and sugar on the table but chose instead to make Maggie’s mugful the identical twin of her own. The lack of words continued, the hum and turn and pause of the tumble-dryer slow and languorous like bees on a summer’s day, a stark contrast to the cold chaos of the outside world. They sipped their tea and looked warily at one another, and Mrs Armitage tried not to mind that, even though the clothes she had lent Maggie fitted her dreadfully and should have looked ridiculous, the other woman was still beautiful.

  “He gets so frightened,” Maggie said at last.

  Mrs Armitage waited for more.

  “Frightened and angry. And when he’s angry he doesn’t know where to put it all.” She sighed. “So he puts it inside me. Inside and outside and in my lady’s chamber. You know how men are. He’s not good with storms.”

  “You shouldn’t let him if you don’t like it. You don’t have to.”

  “But I feel so guilty. It’s all my fault, that’s the thing. He gave up everything for me, for me and Jacob and Ella. He had a good life before he met me, and what does he have now?”

  “How would I know? I don’t know anything about him.”

  “He used to have a very normal life before he met me, you see. We met in a pub. I was running away from my husband, and he was running away too, but we both knew we’d have to go back home in the end. Only we met each other and de-cided not to. So we had to run away together. I’m not making any sense.”

  “Not really, no.”

  “You have to keep moving when someone’s looking for you. But we thought we’d be safe here. Only then I saw him at the bus stop and I wasn’t going to tell Richard, but he always knows when I’m keeping secrets, and he knew straight away, and he made me tell him and then he was frightened. Because we don’t have anywhere else to go now, this is all we can ever have. We were the only ones in the world who wanted it and what happens if we don’t want it? We spent all our money on the house and we’ll never sell it because no one wants to buy it.”

  “Why do you need to sell the house to get away from him? I don’t have any money to give you,” she added, in case this was what Maggie was asking for.

  “The thing is, when you’re so close to something, you can’t always see it properly. It’s like I’ve got my face pressed right up against his chest and I can’t see or feel anything but him.”

  Mrs Armitage could think of nothing to say, so she kept silent.

  “Your silence is very beautiful,” Maggie said. “Is that why Ella comes to see you? Does she sit here in silence and look at you?”

  Mrs Armitage considered this. She was often silent when Ella visited, but that was because Ella herself filled the air with a rainbow hum of words, endlessly describing, speculating, wondering, until mere words were no longer enough and she was forced to reach for the felt-tips and paper that had appeared, like overnight mushrooms, in Mrs Armitage’s kitchen one day. She could have made herself remember making the special and unwanted trip on the Tuesday bus into the nearest market town, the slow precarious choosing in the stationery aisle of the supermarket so vast it felt more like a cathedral than a place of business, the fumes that gathered like smoke in the interchange where everything had been improved and redeveloped and she had to look and look and look to find the right vehicle to take herself home again, the way the cold glass of the window felt and smelled against her cheek as they jolted back home to clean air and mud and silence, and when they finally got home she was so relieved she left her shopping bag on the bus and had to chase foolishly after it to flag the driver down and reclaim her prize.

  She could have remembered all of this, but she chose not to. Some things were private. She didn’t want Maggie reading her thoughts in her face. As it was, the other woman’s eyes were darting slyly around the kitchen, alighting on first one thing, then another.

  “Is that one of Ella’s drawings? Can I look?” Mrs Armitage opened her mouth to say no, but Maggie was already out of her seat, reaching for the sheet of paper stuck neatly to the fridge door. Her hands were regaining their dexterity and her fingers did not tear the paper as she picked delicately at the Sellotape that held it in place.

  You can look at it perfectly well where it is, Mrs Armitage thought, but did not say. It was too late to stop her anyway, the paper was already coming away from the door. Maggie smoothed it flat onto the table so she could examine it. Why did you take it off the fridge door if you’re only going to put it on another flat surface? What difference does ninety degrees make? Don’t you think there’s a reason art galleries hang the pictures on the walls? Ella had drawn the image that, Mrs Armitage knew, haunted her dreams. The house she lived in crumbling into the ocean. She and her brother crumbling with it. The water reaching up to fill their mouths and ears and lungs. The boat below the water, where Ella had never been, but had somehow still conjured.

  “Everything’s falling,” said Maggie. Her fingers rested on the figure that lay waiting in the water. “Is this a person? A person who’s drowned?”

  That’s a seal. Or maybe I should say that’s me with my true skin on. Ella drew me there because I told her my house would go first, so I’d be waiting in the water for her. That’s h
ow she comforts herself, that daughter of yours; with the thought that a strange woman who goes around wearing the wrong skin will be there to catch her when she falls.

  “And that’s her,” said Maggie, her finger resting on the small falling figure with the long strands of yellow hair, “and that’s Jacob. She loves Jacob. If it wasn’t for Jacob I don’t know what she’d do. She’s frightened all the time. Do you think she knows? Do you think she knows we’re in danger, all the time? Does she know that I’m frightened too?”

  She’s frightened all the time because you brought a little girl who’s afraid of deep water to live in a house right next to the North Sea.

  “You think it’s my husband I’m frightened of,” said Maggie unexpectedly.

  “Well, isn’t it?” she asked, startled out of her silence.

  “Sometimes. But it’s not his fault. He’s only doing his best. Were you frightened of your husband too? Is that why you invited me?”

  “I didn’t invite you, actually. You came here by yourself.”

  “You left a light on for me, I saw it from across the cliff. I was running away from my husband, because I was afraid of what he was going to do. Isn’t that terrible? He loves me and I love him but I’m still afraid of him. Is there a way you can stop being afraid of someone you love? You’d think they’d have invented something by now. Sometimes I think maybe I’ve already invented it, but then I put the knife away and the idea goes again.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I used to be a whole person, but then I grew Ella and some of me went into her and this is all that’s left behind now. And I don’t think what’s left behind is enough, not for me to stay alive, properly alive. I’m like a zombie, but only Richard’s noticed, and he won’t come outside when it’s raining, he’s afraid of the cliffs. So then he tries to fill me back up, he’s trying to turn me back into a whole person, only sometimes he tries too hard and it hurts and then I have to run away, only it’s always raining. I think it’s been raining for years now. Will the whole world flood? Perhaps we should build an ark.”