Vertigo
Page 7
As an alternative, we look forward to the trapped repetition of shore, the unfamiliar house, the road between. Again and again we will flog fun from that exchange, or something we’re willing to call fun, after which we will begin to hurtle toward something else—the Christmas holiday, the Easter holiday—never any rest. When we arrive we will find they add velocity to whatever drives us forward.
It’s September next week, and summer’s already turned its back. Already, the weather’s stopped being accountable. There will be few more beautiful afternoons when we can turn outside from the spaces we have made, spaces that have become unbearable. Summer is a platform from which to think about the fall. In summer, some men see more of their families than they do all year, others stay in town with colleagues, with women who cannot leave town … Sometimes, often, you do not holiday with us, or you leave early … work … How have I lived those times you left? In abeyance. I thought it would be freedom, without you: it is not. The thing that I have with you is pegged to different parts of my body. When I move, when you move, one of them tugs, and others slacken so I don’t feel I am tied in those places, though I am.
In one month it will no longer feel like summer, and I do not want to go into the dark again.
I go back into the sea because there is nothing else to do. Or, there is, but I do not do it. When I reach the harbor there is a sign. It says, do not bathe, and do not swim the channel à cause des something, des courants etcetera, à cause des bateaux. I did not see a sign like this on the other side of the estuary. There is a ferry, though it doesn’t go for hours. I have no money, but if I wait, if I tell the boatman my situation, I might persuade him to take me …The light of the lighthouse blinks, then the lights on the boats, one by one. I look out from under eyelids puffed by salt-water. I have seen harbors before—in Nice, in Marseilles—but none so narrow as this one, so difficult to get into or out of. I walk back to the beach and walk in to the sea. It is my choice.
Shall I tell you what it is like to drown? It is very calm and quiet. I step over from the blue to the ink-colored water. I cannot see beneath me. I had never been afraid of the sea, had not understood people who were. That was because I had only seen its surface and had seen things that float on it, like boats, and seagulls. The surface of the sea is round when viewed at eye level, like the horizon, like the earth. It tips, flat as a plate, each time I do, both hemispheres reorienting around me whatever my angle. The two hemispheres are unequal. The lower hemisphere is cold. I do not know what goes on there. It is vast, and in it is 90% of my body, which is kicking.
In the hemisphere above, in which things seem more varied—the sky, the land, the buildings, the people on the beach—is my head. Having made myself so very available I’m virtually concave, will I sink or swim? Depends which way up you place me. Pretend it’s fiction. Pretend you are drowning. Or pretend not to be drowning, because maybe you are. Though it’s difficult to tell, the outcome will be identical.
I say “you.” Of course I mean “me.”
Far away, a small motor-boat turns in my direction and although it is a very small boat and very far away I am unable to see anything above the underside of its prow which prompts the idea that there is no reason anyone on the boat could see my small dark head which I can hardly get above the level of the waves. Though the boat is small, it is big enough to kill me, if it does not see me. I tread water, going neither forward nor back … then there are a few moments.
There is the moment I think I will stop and wave so that the boat, steering toward me, is less likely to kill me, inattentively. But I do not, because I have already thought this will not work, and this thought has cost me some energy. Instead, I continue, for a moment, to tread water, knowing that though this may prevent me from going forward into the path of the boat, I will lose more energy. Then—partly because it is less risky, and partly because I cannot stop myself—I shout in a small voice: no! no!
The boat turns toward the shore. As my life now concerns only the circle of water around me, these moments recede quickly into the past. The boat turns toward the shore and the danger is years away. I was not the same person then, or I am not now. In front of me is the same struggle for life. The thing to do is to pretend the entirety of under-the-water is not happening, or is happening to someone else, or that—no—that the context in which it is happening is entirely different, or that each movement made cannot be made otherwise, or—even better—to put it out of my mind, to find it boring.
But if I died …
The salt meniscus that curves under my bottom lip: if it were to curve over, if it were to become what is inside as well as outside me. And that is all it is a matter of. The thought of drowning used to smell of chlorine. Now it smells of salt. Each death is specific. And the fear during death is nothing like the fear of death at other times. My fear is of this specific death.
I can see the people on the beach who are lying with their toes toward the water. They are not very far away, but they are not looking in the right direction to see my head. On my head is my mouth, which is above the water-line, and with which I could call to alert someone on the beach to my drowning. But my mouth is connected to my lungs, which, being below the water line, are cold, and so constricted by the weight of water as to make the action of shouting difficult. If I stopped swimming to tread water enough to raise my head, if I inflated my lungs enough to call to them, I would no longer be able to pull against the current, and then the shouting would not be loud enough, not in the right language, and do no good, and, even if they are good people, and attentive, they may not be able to act in time. If I drown, whose fault will it be? The fault of the waves, the lack of a sign, the fear inspired by the sign, lack of sufficient muscle? Does it matter whose fault it is? But there is not much time to regret other people, their actions or inactions. Isn’t drowning itself enough for one day?
Here we are, in the present, me in here and you, with the children, on the other side, two among others. We have got this far and we are not mad. We are not drunks or drug addicts (though perhaps we should be). We do not shout in the street, and when you stand next to us on the bus we do not smell bad. We are not murderers, or rapists, or pedophiles. We are adulterers probably in no more than thought. We do not take things without paying at the self-checkout tills in supermarkets. Some of us don’t even jaywalk. We don’t steal milk from other people’s doorsteps, even when our own has gone; and if we see a cheap lost necklace in the street, we drape it over a nearby wall or post so it won’t get crushed and so that the owner will be able to see it if she comes back that way to look for it.
Despite everything, we are good people, who can hardly live in this world that continues almost entirely at our expense. The best thing is to keep on moving arms and legs, and watch the waves, almost as though moving forward. In this way, despair turns quickly over to happiness, and back to despair again. And, if you reach the beach, walk back across it like everything is fine, toward your family who would not like to see the abyss you have just swum over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Walsh is a British writer and illustrator. Her writing has appeared in magazines including Granta, Narrative, and Guernica and has been anthologized in Dalkey Best European Fiction 2015, Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015, and elsewhere. Her story collection Fractals was published in the UK in 2013, and her nonfiction book Hotel was published internationally in 2015. She writes literary and cultural criticism for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The National, is the fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, and created and runs the Twitter hashtag #readwomen, heralded by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers.”
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