“A book where people change their skins and turn into animals and disappear? You thought that might help you find your mother?”
“Don’t you laugh at her,” said Jacob.
“I’m not laughing at her,” said Mrs Armitage. “I’m trying to help her see. But since you ask, what do you think? Was your mother writing about her own life?”
“I suppose she might have been. I mean, magic realist writers often use fantasy elements to explore difficult themes –” He stopped himself, embarrassed. “I’m sounding like a teacher.”
“So stop it! Think like a human being for once, not a reader. The man who stalked her, could he be real? Is it even possible?”
“Well, no, not exactly the way she wrote about him, I suppose, but –”
“But,” said Ella, “it wasn’t only Mum. Dad knew about the man too. He did! He talked about him! Didn’t he?”
“Yes. He did!” Jacob heard the triumph in his voice. “They both saw him. That’s why we moved so often – because he was looking for them, and they couldn’t let him find them. They used to talk about it sometimes – well, they used to argue really – after we were in bed.”
“And does that seem likely to you? That a man would hunt your family for years, stalking your mother? Did you never wonder why your parents didn’t go to the police?”
“Well, because – because – I mean, I suppose –” There had to be a flaw in this somewhere that he wasn’t seeing. Mrs Armitage was right. Going to the police was the logical thing to do. Why had that never happened?
“Because Dad was making it all up,” said Ella. “I know you don’t like me saying this, Jacob, but it’s the truth.” She raised her hand to her mouth, caught hold of a loose peeling of skin next to her nail and tugged sharply with her teeth. A bead of blood bloomed in the wound. “Maybe the man was real once, but not by the end.”
“Dad saw him.”
“He said he saw him.”
“And why would he do that?” Mrs Armitage was watch-ing them intently, willing them both to see something that remained beyond Jacob’s grasp.
“Because he thought the man was real,” said Jacob stubbornly. “He wouldn’t deliberately upset her, not ever. He loved her.”
“Because he wanted to make Mum afraid,” said Ella. “He was afraid she was going to leave him. And whenever he thought she was getting restless or making plans, he used to tell her he’d seen the man again, and she’d be so frightened –”
“He was trying to keep her safe!”
“How was he keeping her safe?” It was a shock to see Ella angry. “By giving her stuff to make her sleep all the time and telling her someone was coming to get her? He damaged her. She never got over it. Even after she’d left him she was terrified he’d come after her.”
“The problem with you, Jacob,” said Mrs Armitage, “is that you put too much faith in your father. And you – ” she nodded at Ella – “have too much faith in your mother. Imagine this story wasn’t written down. Imagine it was someone sitting here, talking to you. Imagine a woman, sitting here, telling you that she was being pursued everywhere by a man who could change his face and that sometimes she thought he swapped places with her husband. What would you think these things mean?”
Jacob shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“That’s because you’re not imagining it. Do as I’m telling you, Jacob. Imagine that exact moment I described. Close your eyes if it helps.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. It had been so long since he’d seen his mother that her image had been replaced with the single picture he’d kept. She had never been a real woman at all, only ever an image in a photograph of his sister, frozen in that one moment of laughter. Mrs Armitage’s gaze never left his face.
“I don’t know why you’re asking me this,” he said, ex-asperated. “I mean, it’s not someone telling me the story, it’s something that’s been written down. And writing’s different, the rules are different. Of course none of it could happen in real life. You’d have to be mad to think it could.”
Mrs Armitage’s eyes glittered. “Say that again.”
“You’d have to be mad to think it could happen? Well, of course you would, but –”
“Yes. You would. You would have to be very, very mad indeed. Your stepmother is mad, Jacob, and she always has been. Didn’t you realise, either of you? Didn’t you ever suspect?”
The stove clicked and bubbled. The rain rattled against the roof. A draught of wind crept around the back of Jacob’s neck and raised the little hairs there.
“She isn’t,” said Ella.
“Of course she is. There never was a man stalking her. Not while she was with your father. Not after she left him. It was all in her mind.”
“No.”
“Yes. You know that’s the truth, my dear, you just haven’t been ready to face it yet.”
“But she saw him! She did! I wasn’t even allowed to have my photograph taken at school –”
“And did anyone else ever see him? Did anyone come to the door? When your mother said people were following you, did you ever see the same person twice?”
“But she looked after me. She took me to school. She had jobs. She organised places for us to live. She can’t possibly have been –”
“She did her very, very best for you, Ella. She wasn’t perfect, but she loved you very much. She looked after you as well as she could, for as long as she could. And then, as soon as she thought you were old enough to manage by yourself, she left you alone.”
“Stop talking about her as if she’s dead! She’s not dead.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe she’ll come back to you when she can. Or maybe she thinks you’re better off without her now. But I promise you, living or dead, your mother is in no danger from the man she wrote about. He never existed outside of her head. And your father knew it. But he loved her anyway. He was trying to keep her safe, but from herself.”
“But why didn’t he get some help for her? Surely she would have been better being looked after in a hospital?”
“Because he loved her,” said Jacob. “And he thought he was the only one who could look after her properly.”
In the silence that followed, Jacob reached for Ella’s hand, telling himself it was a brotherly gesture of solidarity. The shape of her bones was so perfect beneath the skin. Her bitten nails, the chirpy beetle-blue nail polish that had flaked off in patches, were so poignant they hurt his heart. He’d found his soulmate, but there was no future for them. How could they ever get married? What would they do if they wanted children? How were they going to live? How could anyone live with the dreadful beauty of what had grown between them? She was thinking the same as he was: he could feel it through her skin. There was no hope for either of them. He felt Mrs Armitage’s gaze on him, and looked up at her defiantly.
“It’s time,” she said.
“What?” Jacob’s head was spinning. “Where are we going?”
“You’re both wearing wetsuits. Where do you think you’re going?”
“But isn’t that because we were soaking wet? I thought we were going to wait here until the storm passed over?”
“She’s going to take us out in the boat,” said Ella. “Aren’t you?”
“What?” Jacob laughed. “No, of course she’s not going to take us out in the –”
“Yes, I am.”
“You are bloody well not. What are you thinking?”
“Why not?”
“Because – because – well, look at the state of the weather!”
Mrs Armitage’s expression was almost eerily calm, as if Jacob was the peculiar one for objecting. “I know. The storm. It’s dangerous. But this is the only way I can help you.”
“We don’t need your help!”
“Of course you do. You’d both have stayed on that beach until you died of cold if I hadn’t made you leave. I can show you a way to solve everything. But you have to trust me. Unless you want to leave now?
You’re not prisoners, you’re free to go.”
Ella’s hand was warm and real in his. Perhaps falling in love with her was the only real thing that had ever happened to him. If they drowned, at least they’d be together for ever. When he looked at Ella, he saw his own thought written on her face.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”
As they slithered through the rain to the pontoons that writhed and shuddered and tried to throw them off, Jacob heard another deep rumble. Was that thunder? Or was it the sea, taking his house for its own?
Even in the shelter of the marina, the boats were like restless sleepers. Out in the bay, Mrs Armitage’s motor-launch rode the swell like a seagull. Sick and terrified, Jacob and Ella clung together in the wheelhouse where Mrs Armitage stood.
“Where are we going?” Ella asked. Her throat was hoarse.
“To see my husband.”
“But – he’s – isn’t he dead?”
“Yes. Drowned on the bottom of the sea. Along with his best friend. When the world turns stormy, there’s no better place to be. Put those BCDs on.”
Jacob stared at the diving gear lashed against the wheel-house wall. “How does it go on?”
“The way you’d think it goes on. Ella, you’ve done this before, help him. I need to watch the GPS and keep us afloat. You’re reasonably bright children, you’ll work it out.”
He thought about arguing. But why bother? They’d come this far. Why not follow this madness through to its end? He kept as still as he could while she helped him, wincing when a tip of the boat sent her shuffling across the deck. The weight against his shoulders was immense and unexpected. How did Ella stand it?
“Is this right?” he asked.
Mrs Armitage glanced at them indifferently. Despite the pitching of the waves and the sickening sensation that the boat was about to spill over, she balanced effortlessly, seemingly a part of the boat she was steering. “Close enough. You’ll need weight belts as well. In that crate. One each.”
“I can’t. I’m too heavy. The boat’s moving too much.”
“You can and you will. Ella, take that torch.”
Feeling as if he was carrying an extra person on his back, he wrestled with the crate. The weight belts dragged at his hips. “What about you?”
“Now your flippers. No, not that way, the other way. Spit in your mask, it’s fogging up. Watch Ella, she’ll show you.” Holding tight to the ropes strung along the edge of the boat, Mrs Armitage made her way over to them and fumbled at the tanks on their backs. “Gloves on. That’s right. The valves are open. Get ready. We’re nearly there.”
“But aren’t you coming with us? Aren’t we supposed to go down and come up at a certain rate? How long do we have? How do we breathe? What if we get lost?”
Her smile was bright and dreadful, and he realised with a shock that Mrs Armitage was, in her own way, as mad as she claimed his mother was.
“I won’t need diving equipment. I don’t think we’ll meet again, so I’ll say this – it’s been interesting getting to know you both. By the way, Ella, here’s one last thing you need to know: you look absolutely nothing like your father.”
“But –”
“Regulators in,” said Mrs Armitage, and jammed a rigid plastic plug against Jacob’s teeth. “Breathe out as you go down. You’ll have about an hour, but the deeper you go and the faster you breathe, the sooner the air will run out. If you decide to come back, do it slowly. At least two minutes from the bottom to the top. I’m sorry I can’t do any better, but we’re simply out of time. Say hello to my husband and my lover for me.”
Then a hard hand pushed at the centre of his chest, and Jacob was falling backwards, over the side of the boat and down into the water.
I try to sew together the edges of my life, but it keeps tearing apart again. I think maybe it’s the bits of my skin that aren’t strong enough any more, because if you keep picking and unpicking at the places where you’ve sewn yourself back together then eventually the fabric unravels and you’re left in pieces on the floor. There’s something sharp and true hidden in all this mess, like a needle in a haystack. We had sex in a haystack once, when I was still running and he was still keeping me hidden and we couldn’t let anyone see us, in the days before we were married. I remember the way the straw scratched the back of my neck like needles.
Soon I’ll be the woman in the mirror, that older colder woman who nobody loves, walking through the fields with her gloves on so nothing can touch her skin. I need to set everything in my life free first, leave behind all the things I thought I loved so I can go back to my home, like the woman in the fairy-tale I heard once but never really understood. Her husband tried to keep her skin from her but she found it in the chest. I tried to open up my chest once, but it hurt too much and I couldn’t find the key.
He tried so hard to keep hold of her, to keep her locked away, but her veins were full of sea-water and she was always bound to get away from him in the end. You can’t keep hold of water, it slips through your fingers. He was always the shapeshifter but now it’s my turn. I’ve been writing this book for so long I thought I would never finish it, but I think this is the end at last. I’ve written all the words I have in me. So now, all I have to do is to draw a picture of a woman who is nothing like me, and then the picture will come to life and she will stay behind and take care of my life while I slip away to somewhere nobody will ever find me.
Chapter Twenty-one
Now
At first there was nothing but shock and blackness, and the gasp of his lungs as the water slapped him in the back and then drew him under. He felt himself sinking, began to panic, realised he was holding his breath, and fumbled for what Mrs Armitage had told him before pushing him over the side. Breathe out as you go down. But what if there was nothing else to breathe in? He shut his eyes and forced himself to exhale, then sucked frantically at his regulator. Air filled his lungs. He exhaled again and let the weight take him down.
The chop of the water vanished almost immediately. To his surprise, he realised he felt safer and more secure below the surface of the waves than above it. He’d been here before, after all; they both had. All those nights in the bathtub with the water filling their ears, trying to be as still as possible, as quiet as possible, listening out for the slow steady count in the corner of the room. One and fifteen. One and sixteen. One and seventeen. When he closed his eyes he could imagine he was there once more. When he opened them, Ella floated in front of him in a bubble of torchlight, her hair drifting like seaweed.
He blinked inside his mask, tried to make himself understand that this was real, it was really happening. Above their heads, the storm raged, and their house might fall into the sea, but they were safe below the water, for as long as their breath could last.
Where should they go? He had some idea they were supposed to descend slowly to avoid bubbles of gas getting trapped in their blood; or was that only on the way back up? If only they could stay forever.
Ella pointed the beam of light down towards the bottom. The water was soupy and silty, stirred up by the storm, but perhaps it would be clearer further down. A minute later she was slipping slowly through the water, propelled by the slow flick of her flippered feet. He hesitated a moment longer, then followed her.
The feeling was extraordinary. He’d been set free from his two-dimensional crawl across the earth’s surface. He wanted to laugh, but wasn’t sure if it was safe. A large silver-brown fish cruised across his vision, hesitated as if surprised to see him, then swam on. When he came to rest beside Ella, he could make out the dim raggedy shape of something that looked unmistakeably man-made, resting on its side, half-sunk into the mud.
As they grew closer to the wreck, they could see the out-lines more clearly. The boat was in a shape that Jacob vaguely thought of as denoting a fishing boat, with an enclosed wheelhouse and a long deck. It wore a fringe of weeds and shells, and fat clumps of anemones put out delicate tendrils. If they stayed here be
neath the sea, they’d have their own garden. They could live in the wheelhouse, spear fish as they passed. They swam on, Ella slightly ahead of him, a stream of bubbles rising up behind her. Then she came to a slow halt, paddling frantically to try and slow her momentum, the light wavering over the surface of the boat.
The wreck was already occupied. Two tumbled collections of bones, browned with algae and stirred by the movement of water and the nosings of curious fish, so long in the water they could be mistaken for the first slow beginnings of coral, for the curved branches of seaweed. But there was no mistaking the smooth round dome of the skulls with the black caves of the eye sockets turned upwards towards them. And there were all little fishes swimming in and out of our eyes, and crabs crawling over our heads. The nightmare she’d described so many times to him, the terror that had haunted her childhood.
But it was not them, not yet. They were still alive, still breathing. These bones were the bones of the two men who, Mrs Armitage believed, were dead because of what she’d done. Why had she risked all their deaths and the safety of her boat to send him down here with his sister to look at this? If she’d wanted to keep them safe, she would have let them stay on land. Instead she’d forced them out into the storm and into the deceptive peace of this alien place where they were almost certainly the only two humans for hundreds of miles. No one knew they were here. No one would come looking for them. If they stayed here, they would never be found.
It was a replaying of his own fantasy. If only we could be alone somewhere no one would ever find us. If only we could leave the world behind. And the darker thought that had come to him as they set off into the storm. If we die now, at least we’ll be together forever.
That was what Mrs Armitage had done, the help she was offering them. She’d sent them down here so they could die.
Was this what they wanted? What was there left for them back on dry land? His father, locked in his hotel room and awaiting discovery by the housekeeper. His job, which he had never loved, and which would only become less lovable with time. His house, which might be already gone. A life without love.
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