No Filter

by Orlagh Collins

  The journey took almost twice as long as I’d planned, but at 9:24 p.m. I steer the boat into Deadmaiden’s Cove. It’s the only bay on the island’s coast with an actual shoreline, apart from the short beach by the harbour of course, but that’d be looking for trouble. For a brief moment I consider risking it and pulling the RIB in closer; I’ve seen Da do it, but I’m worried about the rocks underneath, so I cut the engine and we drift for a bit. It takes a few deep breaths before I’m steady enough to speak. ‘You OK?’

  She tries to stand up but the boat is still swaying ‘Think so,’ she says, sitting straight back down again and tying her hair up into a messy knot. ‘So this is the swimming part?’

  The more time I spend with Em, the more I reckon she’s a swan: unruffled above, but paddling like a mad yoke beneath. I’m not convinced by her calm cover. I shuffle along the boat and plonk myself down on the wide, inflatable edge beside her. I want to take her lovely head in my hands. I want to kiss the face off her. I want to scream out – hallelujah, man alive, we made it! But I don’t. I’m in survival mode, focused on the dry land before us. I grab a tent pole from under the tarp and plunge it into the water. My hand is fully submerged before it hits the bottom. ‘I’ll take her in a little further and we should be able to stand.’ I edge in closer to the shore and drop the anchor. I haul the two boogie boards out from under the tarp. I take the pole and twist myself over the side again.

  ‘That should do it,’ I say, packing up our supplies into their waterproof bags.

  ‘Shall I drag one?’ she asks.

  I shake my head. ‘Pass them down to me. That’d be great.’

  I start taking off my jeans, shoving them into the top of one of the bags. Standing in front of her in my shorts, I’ve to work hard to convince myself this is no time for feeling mortified. I lean over the side and begin lowering myself into the dark, cold water. HOLYMOTHEROFDIVINE JAYSUS, it’s FREEZING. I suck the shock back in, but my teeth start chattering like those joke shop ones you wind up.

  ‘It’s pretty shallow from here to the rocks. You OK to make it over?’ The words are clattering out of me and my breathing has gone mental but I’m so desperate not to put her off.

  She too is breathing in ripples as she hands over the boards. ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Want me to take your backpack on this?’ I ask, nodding at one of the boogie boards floating behind me. At least it’s what I meant to ask, before the clanking of delph inside my mouth chewed up the all the words.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ she says, somehow understanding and she begins passing the heavy bags over. Then she starts to unbutton her shorts so I turn away, wading through the icy water and dragging the boards behind me and towards the shore.

  I steal a look back and catch her long white legs clambering out of the boat.

  ‘Aghhh!’ she squeals as she hits the water. I’m moving backwards now, watching her. I can’t help but stare at the impossible vision of her in her dark knickers and denim jacket, backpack held high on top of her head. Seeing her stride through the subzero water so determined, makes me think of what Da said about those selkies in fairy tales, except this one here’s a total badass.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re here!’ she says with a shiver, shunting further down inside her sleeping bag. The air is cold now as we sit outside our newly erected tent. We’re drinking sweet tea with straight vodka chasers to warm us up – it’s working.

  ‘I won’t pretend I’m not impressed at how you pitched that tent. You should see us at Glastonbury. It’s tragic.’

  I want to ask her more about Glastonbury. I’ve dreamt of going to that festival since I was kid, but I expect it involves yer man Rupert, so I’m not going there. ‘It’s not that impressive. If it wasn’t so dark you’d see.’

  ‘It’s vertical,’ she says, her eyes travelling up and down, taking it in. She turns back and rests her chin in her hands. ‘How do you know your way around this place so well?’

  ‘Used to come here with me da. Frank, the old gamekeeper, would let us come over and explore. We’d have lunch together up on these cliffs. This is the wilder side of the island. There’s nothing much around here except the hardy old wallabies and a few mangy cormorants. Even the sheep and deer prefer to hang out down by the “big house”.’

  ‘Do these wallabies like … ? I dunno … are they dangerous?’ she asks, pulling on a thick pair of socks and arranging them in neat, precise folds down her shin.

  ‘Nah, they’re pretty shy. They’ll be in the bushes now. We’ll be lucky to see any in the morning if I’m honest.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, placing her newly socked feet back inside the sleeping bag. She pulls her knees in close and stares out at the endless moonlit sea poured all around us, like she’s drinking it in. I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the waves flailing about in the dark.

  ‘D’you get on with your mum, you know … like –?’ she stops.

  My eyes spring open. ‘Like what?’

  She takes a cookie from the box in between our legs and delicately picks off the chocolate chips. ‘Like you do with your dad.’

  I have to think about this. ‘Dunno. I mean, I don’t know if I know her, like I do me da.’ She nods like she understands. ‘She’s just my mam. Guess I’m a bit more like my aul fella anyway.’ I’ve never said this out loud and the words ‘like my aul fella’ spin around inside my head and it feels like the ground under me is moving. I’m suddenly desperate for this not to be true. ‘I’ve been having a look online,’ I say, trying to ground myself. ‘You know, after we spoke about the music stuff …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘But Da went to check the shipping forecast this morning and found all the pages about production degree courses open on the computer.’

  She looks up at me from under her hair. ‘Now he can find out about what you really want … without you actually having to tell him.’

  ‘Said it was for a friend.’

  Her hair whips around her face. ‘Why?’

  ‘I had to!’

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s not like your dad is really going to stop you following your dream,’ she says, looking at me, her dark, excited features tied up in confusion.

  I pull away, bristling. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  She sits up, looking genuinely hurt. ‘What wouldn’t I understand?’

  ‘Forget it.’ I snap and the air sours. It’s me. I can’t help it, but I instantly want to make it better. ‘Are you like your mam?’

  ‘I hope not,’ she bursts out. An uncomfortable smile takes over her face. It’s like she wants rid of it now but it’s taking too long to fade and we both have to wait for her mouth to slowly return to normal. ‘Mum’s kinda messed up,’ she says. Although she hasn’t moved, I feel her shift away from me. She looks up, taking the bottle from my hand. ‘I’ve already lied to you about it. It’s a horrible habit of mine. I’m usually better at covering it up but I suspect you might have noticed.’

  I want to see into her eyes but the light is so bad now.

  ‘She’s not on a course, Liam.’ She gives a short sniffle before taking a deep breath all the way up from her toes. ‘You see, she doesn’t really fall around or any of that obvious drunk stuff.’

  Her face looks unbearably tense and I suddenly wish I hadn’t asked.

  She looks away and holds her breath before letting it out slowly. It’s all shaky.

  ‘Sorry … if you don’t want to talk about it –’

  She lifts her head. ‘It’s not that, it’s just –’ she breaks off and begins to pick at the remains of the dark varnish on her thumbnail. ‘Apart from Kitty and maybe Magda, nobody really knows. Because we live in a certain type of house and I go to a certain school, people generally assume we’re this perfect, happy family. And I guess I play along. In fact, I do more than play along,’ she adds quietly. ‘I practically engineer it, like the more messed up things get the harder I work to pretend how idyllic it all is,’ she says, pushing a sharp burst of
air out through her nose. She stops and crosses her legs inside the sleeping bag, leaning her body forward into her lap, burying her face.

  Unsure what to do with myself now, I reach for the bottle between us. I’m thinking about taking a drink when Em goes to speak. ‘I’m not used to talking like this.’

  ‘You’re doing great,’ I say, bracing as the neat vodka bobsleighs through my insides.

  She grabs the bottle and takes a long slug, wiping her nose with her sleeve. I can’t work out whether this drink is a deliberate defiance given what she’s just told me about her mam but I can see a tear bulge in the corner of one of her dark eyes. She tilts her head back, refusing to let it out. I reach over and thumb the tiny swell of hurt from her soft cheek.

  There’s a loud sniffle. ‘She might only be in the next room, but she’ll have slipped away somewhere. Usually I’ll just get on … do my homework, forage through the fridge and go to bed. On the rare night Dad’s not in London, I’ll cook dinner. Sometimes I even pretend Mum made it – it’s not that big a deal. But,’ she says, letting out another shaky breath, ‘the day before I arrived here, I found her on the floor. She’d tried to disappear and be gone, like … forever gone. She tried to die, Liam.’

  I take her hand, holding it in mine, where it flutters, delicately like a frightened bird. It’s cold now. Neither of us says anything but we move together silently. As she shivers next to me, I’m suddenly feeling her pain like it’s my own.

  ‘I’ve never been scared like that before. I honestly felt like I was fighting for both our lives.’

  ‘You saved her?’

  She nods. ‘I had to resuscitate her. It took twenty-two elephants before she started to breathe. But once I saw she was alive, I wanted to shake the life back out of her. I swear, Liam,’ she says, covering her mouth with her hand and moving her head from side to side. There’s a tremor in her breath and I squeeze her other hand, not knowing what else to do. ‘I know it’s so bad, but it’s like I still can’t shake the anger.’

  I gently press her head on to my shoulder and wait for her breathing to calm. After another sniffle she lies down, flat on her back and I notice the quivering slowly settle.

  I jolt when she pulls me down beside her. ‘C’mere,’ she says. ‘Check out the stars.’

  Despite what she’s told me about her mam, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited by this closeness and by the truth and possibility of our whole adventure. Maybe I’m a little drunk too. ‘You’re not gonna ask me if I can see the bloody Big Dipper?’

  She elbows me. ‘D’you mean you can’t see it?’ She leans in, pointing furiously upwards. ‘Look, up there! It’s the Plough.’

  For a second she has me. ‘You can see that?’

  ‘The big twinkly ones, left of the black hole?’

  I dig her back and she dissolves into giggles beside me. I smile broadly into the darkness. ‘I don’t understand astronomy. Sometimes it’s nice not understanding stuff though,’ I say, looking down at her. ‘Like you.’

  ‘There’s no real mystery, trust me,’ she says, moving in closer. We lie like this: Emerald and me, side by side, looking up at the night. I can safely say, between the twinkling sky above and the swell of contentment rising in my belly, this whole night is a feckin’ mystery.

  Her hand pats at the ground until it finds the biscuit packet. She props herself up on her elbow and picks chocolate chips off another cookie.

  ‘Why d’you do that?’

  ‘Helps this go down,’ she says, taking the vodka bottle to her lips, but she lowers it without drinking and disappears off into her thoughts – that way she does.

  ‘It’s all so exhausting,’ she announces, from miles away inside her mind.

  She’s looking at me now like I should somehow understand what she’s on about. ‘What is?’

  ‘All that … look-how-good-my-life-is thing. You know, that front. Basically pretending to be someone else.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing now?’

  ‘No!’ she says, slamming her hand on to the trampled grass between us before slowly straightening a few of the individual blades she’s just squashed. ‘S’what I usually do though. I’m that over-edited photo, the one you’d never upload without softening the edges and filtering out the flaws.’

  ‘Those flaws and edges are what make you you, you eejit.’

  She rolls her dark eyes at me. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. You are who you are. That was obvious about you, instantly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like, Liam. What I look like, what I say or what I do – everything is judged. It’s like at any moment of the day or night I can see a live, up-to-the-second barometer of how much people dislike or like me, which, according to my best friend’s Instagram, was 148 people the last time I looked!’

  ‘D’you really care what some bitches from school –’

  ‘I am one of those bitches,’ she says, pulling her legs out of the sleeping bag and hugging them tight to her chest again. ‘That girl, Iggy, the one I told you about who was left naked and humiliated a few weeks ago. I had a chance to stand up for her, to uphold her story, and I didn’t take it. I was the only one who could do it and I didn’t. And Iggy knew,’ she says, pausing to catch her breath. ‘She knew I knew and still said nothing, that’s the worst of all.’

  I’m sucking my teeth thinking of what to say back. There is something in her eyes I recognise. I’m not sure what it is but I know it.

  ‘I couldn’t stand up to my closest friends.’

  She shakes her head like she thinks I’m about to tell her it’s all OK, that anyone would have done the same in her position, but I know she doesn’t want to hear that and besides, it’s not necessarily true. ‘Guess you understood the consequences.’

  She sits bolt upright. ‘That’s not a good enough reason not to do something.’ I’m looking at her now, leaning her left cheek on her knee and staring at me sideways. ‘He calls me Scout, you know?’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Dad,’ she says. ‘When I was little we’d spend Saturday mornings together at the library on top of Waitrose. We’d stretch out on our old green sofa afterwards, him reading the FT and me acting like I was immersed in my new books. Mostly I just chewed Percy Pigs and daydreamed.’ She stops and looks at me straight on. ‘I was ten when I pretended to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t understand half of it, but I got why Atticus Finch was the most courageous man alive. From that day he was Dad and I was supposed to be Scout, the little girl unafraid to speak out. Part of me believed I’d really grow up to be like her. But I haven’t, have I?’ She eyes me warily. ‘What are you staring at?’

  It’s not that I haven’t been listening. I have, but I’ve somehow managed to lose myself in her face while doing so. I opt for the truth. ‘The tiny freckles, dusted over your nose like icing sugar.’

  As she shakes her head her hair falls out from behind her ears, hiding her face.

  ‘And,’ I say, lifting her chin, ‘the way your front teeth kind of cross and your canines are really pointy.’

  ‘Liam!’ she cries.

  ‘It makes my stomach flip to see that smile of yours.’ She tries to stop it happening, but her lips part and the sides of her mouth crawl upwards against her will. ‘There it is! I’m getting pretty fond of those flaws, just so you know.’

  She laughs now, nice and wide but then quickly it’s over. ‘You know, I watch my friends and everything they do seems so easy and natural and I feel so far away, even when I’m right there with them. It’s like sometimes I don’t even know how to do normal stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like having fun and –’ She doesn’t say any more.

  I look at the moon bouncing on the water and listen to the waves tug at the edges of the cliffs below. For a few minutes I allow the energy of their magnificent roar to propel me forward and next thing I’m pushing myself up off the ground, extending my arms out to her i
n one glorious swoop of mad motion. ‘Stand up!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give me your hand.’ I take her into my arms and hold every inch of her that I can against me.

  ‘What are we doing?’ she says through clenched teeth, like a ventriloquist, hardly opening her mouth. I push her gently back, still holding both our hands together and swing them, and us, from side to side.

  ‘We’re dancing,’ I say, jiving in and out now. She moves with me but of course she can’t hear the music playing inside my head. We sway there under the moon, just us, dancing in its spotlight. I start clicking my fingers in 4/4 time, doing the bass tabs of amazing percussion like I’m Phil Lynott himself. Letting go of her hands, I move around her the way Da does around a dance floor at a wedding, or around the kitchen table if he’s had a few.

  She’s staring at me like I’m a total mad yoke but I can’t stop myself. I’m blissfully murdering the incredible song, half wondering whether I should wrap it up, when I realise she’s begun to move, twirling around me, lost in her own song too. I’m watching her pat out a drum beat on the arse of her shorts when I catch the lyric she’s singing into the vodka bottle. Fleetwood bloody Mac, I’m sure of it. Sacred heart, there’s no holding back. I raise my imaginary guitar to the sky and music flows out of me, only Thin Lizzy has finished and it’s my own words pouring out now.

  ‘I wish you could see you the way I do,

  Your all-knowing look cuts right through,

  You see the truth when I’ve no clue …’

  I slowly open my eyes to discover she’s no longer dancing and it’s just me, dribbling out the last words alone. I never got further than the third line so I stop and stare back at her: she’s watching me with that exact look, the one that rearranges planets, gravity and all earthly reason.

  ‘I like it,’ she says, pulling me down to the ground and leaning back on her elbows. ‘What’s it about?’‘The first time I saw you, flinging fistfuls of angry rocks into the Irish Sea –’

  She sits up before I finish. ‘You saw that?’