Dark Currents

by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie

  And the ringing. I don’t listen to it, exactly. It’s all around me; a solemn, deep, endless tolling from all around me. It’s getting hard to imagine it ever stopping, but I still don’t actually listen. By now I’ve got a very strong feeling I don’t want to listen to it, just like I don’t want to think about the storm surge that tore us up under the water but hasn’t left a trace on the surface.

  But I can’t exactly help but think about the fact that now neither of our fully charged phones will turn on.

  She’ll have come up somewhere and just can’t find the boat in the fog; it’s amazing enough that I did.

  I yell her name some more.

  What if she’s blacked out down there and I’m not there to grab her?

  At that I’m out of the boat and under the waves again before I can even think. The water’s calm enough now and I spray streams of bubbles around as a signal. Plough my way deeper and I guess it’s shock and all, but God the water feels freezing now. My torch comes back on and every shadow and rock the beam catches looks like her.

  I really can’t swim properly – feel like a donkey’s kicking me in the chest every time I move my arms, and my left leg’s fucked somehow too. I flail my way to the surface again and shout some more except by now I’m kind of on the edge of hyperventilating or sobbing and I hate the way my voice comes out, almost as much as I hate those bloody bells, because it sounds just as hopeless.

  Then there’s a quiet, flat voice saying, “Lloyd.”

  Mel is sitting in the boat. She’s just there. Not gasping for breath or anything. Her knees are drawn to her chest and her skin’s covered in goosepimples and she’s looking straight ahead. Her hair is beginning to crinkle as it dries. There’s not a scratch on her.

  The bells aren’t ringing any more.

  I lumber up into the boat and stare at her. “Jesus Christ, Mel,” I gasp, when I can speak. “Where were you?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Are you okay?” And at this I either start shaking badly, or notice that I was shaking already. “Oh, fuck, Mel,” I stammer, reaching for her. “I thought –” I get her into my arms, and then I’m crying helplessly into her damp hair.

  It’s the relief, I think, the relief.

  Mel lay against me quietly, patiently. Then after a while she detached herself, started up the motor, and she took me home.

  I chattered like a moron all the way, trying to talk enough for both of us, also trying to get a handle on what exactly had happened. “That was fucked up,” I gabbled. “I kind of… saw stuff, under the water. It was like there was… someone, who –? And when I couldn’t find you, I kept hearing –? Did you hear the –?” No answer. “Did you – I mean, it’s just that – Mel, did you see anything?”

  “Nothing, Lloyd,” she said, sounding so tired. “Just water.”

  I was in bad enough shape that we clearly had to go to the hospital. Melanie drove me there and sat silently beside me, and her hand in mine was cold.

  “So what is that accent?” asked the doctor who was slapping my x-rays up on a lightbox.

  “Just Australian,” I said blankly, the way I’d say ‘Just English’ back in Oz, because who can be bothered with all the ins and outs of that.

  “Oh, I can hear it now!” she said. “You know, I was halfway to guessing Canadian, because when I think someone sounds American only not quite –”

  “I don’t sound American,” I said, ridiculously, like I’m back in high school. Look, no offence and all, but the two years in Seattle which comprised Mum’s shitty second marriage were not a good part of my life, and I didn’t yet know how grateful I’d end up being for them.

  Anyway, I’d got some excuse for being a bit shirty: two cracked ribs and a broken left fibula, besides an ample collection of gashes and scrapes. No diving for me for a while.

  I had no idea how long ‘for a while’ was going to turn out to be, but even at the time I felt I wasn’t as upset as I should have been.

  They checked Mel over too, because when they asked how long she’d been under, whether she’d lost consciousness or swallowed any water, she couldn’t give a clear answer. And I think even someone who didn’t know her could see there was something off. They shone lights in her eyes, listened to her lungs. They didn’t find anything wrong. They told me to keep an eye on her, like I wouldn’t have done anyway.

  Freedivers almost never get the bends. They can come and go as they like, no toll to pay for crossing so many times between water and air.

  Mel hadn’t got the bends, but she wasn’t ever the same.

  If I’d said, my wife never came out of the water, and the old Mel was here, she would have rolled her eyes and said “Oh the drama.”

  But frankly I can say whatever I want about the situation now.

  She couldn’t train. She had to pull out of the contest and she didn’t give a toss. “Who cares who can stay down longest,” she said dully. “It’s minutes anyway. Like you said.”

  “Mel,” I said to her, “I think we ought to get you back to the doctor’s.” She exhaled wearily and did that sort of fake-looking at me I was getting to hate: she’d turn her face towards me, but not quite meet my eyes, like I wasn’t supposed to notice she was gazing hopelessly at a point somewhere to one side and far beyond me. “I think you’re depressed.”

  “Wow,” drawled Mel, “I married a genius.”

  “Well, then, if you know you’re sick, you know you need help.”

  Melanie slumped deeper, letting her head down on the kitchen table like it was too heavy to keep up, and mumbled, “Fine.”

  “The hallucinations, Mel,” I said patiently. “Are they worse? Are they talking again?”

  “I said I’ll go,” she growled into the tabletop. “Isn’t that enough to get me out of this conversation?”

  “I just want to know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We,” said Melanie, “are not dealing with anything. And no, for your information, they’re exactly the same as fucking normal.” A spasm of ugly, bitter energy jolted through her, enough to get her head off the table but not more. “And why are you so interested in trying to fix me anyway. Just sit back and enjoy the crazy. This is what you signed up for in the first place.”

  This got me just as hurt and angry as, for whatever reason, she wanted it to, and maybe it would have been better to actually show it. But she looked so hollowed out and weary and frail, and I knew she was sick, so I just said very carefully, “That’s not true.”

  “You married a headcase to make yourself feel sane. You keep being so nauseatingly patient with me because you like a challenge. Well, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew with this one.”

  (There’s one argument that’s gone the rounds in my head ever since, believe you me.)

  “I want you to be okay,” I said at the time.

  “You have no idea what it would take to make me okay,” said Mel.

  Maybe I’m making it sound like it was all snapping and swearing at me. It wasn’t. That was the awful thing of it. Mostly, whatever I suggested, she’d listlessly do. Eat something, Mel. Take your pills. Why don’t you do some art. (Compliance on that one far slower and more laborious than everything else). She’d been back to the doctor’s, and she was on a waiting list to see a new shrink, and I was waiting for the meds to work, like they always had in the past, even if it took a lot of time and worry and fiddling about.

  A month or two later I decided her hormones were probably snarling things up and when they got back to normal things would settle down.

  I thought about going along to the doctor’s myself. Saying, “I might be having auditory hallucinations, doctor. I keep thinking I can hear bells ringing in the distance, especially when I’m close to my wife.” And I knew I was a hypocrite because I couldn’t ever bring myself to do it. I just looked up “tinnitus” on the internet over and over again and left it at that. Which meant that I couldn’t talk to Mel about it, even though sometimes my mouth f
elt stuffed with Melanie can you hear that, or Melanie something happened down there, didn’t it, tell me what you saw, tell me, tell me…

  Because if I ever did say that, then, well…

  When I wasn’t watching, or coaxing, or ordering her about, Melanie did less and less. As far as I can tell, when relieved of an audience to perform for she just sat by the window and stared at the Downs between our tiny house and the sea. She also spent a lot of time in the bath. I didn’t quite pick up what was weird about that for a while until I realised that when I went in after her there was never any steam in the air. She didn’t use the hot water.

  We couldn’t go to Boracay in November, in the end. Too much else going on. My leg healed and I thought about getting back in the water, but I didn’t feel right leaving Melanie behind and I really didn’t want to suggest she came along.

  I remember lying curled against her motionless back. It was maybe three in the morning. “Melanie,” I whispered, like she could even hear me. “Come back, please.”

  But she did. After a long, long time, she whispered, “I can’t.”

  She’d come back for me once. At least, she’d tried to. And it was getting pretty obvious by now that she thought it had been the wrong decision.

  In one of those stories, the flood doesn’t come to punish the town but to save it. Beautiful, virtuous citizens rejoicing as the water rises to take them home, and the invading hordes roar in and are entirely flummoxed to see their prey swept out of their reach forever.

  And yes, that one has the fucking bells still ringing under the fucking water and all.

  Okay, so here’s what I know happened.

  It’s not like I could stick to her all the time. I did have the old day job to worry about.

  I’m busy trying to figure out what the fuck these people have done to their SQL server. And then it I realise that the tinnitus that’s been ebbing and flowing through my skull for all these months has stopped, completely. The inside of my skull feels suddenly wide and bare and clean.

  Melanie had hired the same boat as before, which later washed up, empty, a few miles along the shore.

  She took her hated scuba gear, and no, I don’t think that was to make it look more like an accident. I think she wanted to be sure of getting out as deep and as far as she could.

  She didn’t leave a note. And she didn’t take a light.

  So no one was there and no one knows for sure, but here’s what I think.

  First of all, I think when she’d told me she’d seen just water, down there beyond the sunken town, I think that was true. I think she saw the wild expanse of secret space she’d always wanted, offered to her, empty of all the horrible traffic through her brain.

  I think, when she thought she’d gone far enough – or as far as she could, more likely – she pulled off her mask. Yanked the regulator from her mouth. Shrugged off the harness with the tank and peeled away her suit. And then waited, hoped, asked for another chance.

  After that I don’t know what happened.

  I know there shouldn’t be any doubt about what happens when a person vanishes into the sea. It’s self-explanatory. She was ill. She was ill, and it wasn’t her fault, and I couldn’t help her enough, and so she died. And anger is a normal part of grief and all of that, but after ten years I shouldn’t still be stuck on it.

  It would have helped, maybe, if we could ever have found her, but the human bones that wash up from time to time on that beach have never been hers, always turned out to be centuries old. Though the first time that happened it shook me up a fair bit.

  And there was this other thing.

  I was a wreck for a long time, of course. I had to go and see Mel’s mum in the nursing home, and ended up not even telling her what had happened, because she could only vaguely remember Mel anyway and didn’t know who I was at all and what was the point.

  Slashed myself up a bit on more than one occasion, even though I tried very hard not to, because I was extremely worried about getting to the point where I’d have to check myself in somewhere and, well, I had responsibilities.

  My own mother was pretty great about clearing the old place out and finding room in her little flat in Forest Hill, while I looked for somewhere new. I couldn’t stand living so close to the sea.

  But I’d lived half my life in the water. I’d loved it far longer than Melanie. I dreamed of the sea constantly (I still do) and they weren’t all bad dreams. Eventually I got to a point where though I didn’t want to dive anywhere Mel and I’d been together ever again, I started to think a big group dive somewhere nice and sunny with a lot of coral and colourful fish wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe back home (I was starting to think of Oz that way). Maybe the Yongala, maybe Heron Island.

  I wasn’t quite ready for that. But then one of my old mates got engaged and a lot of the guys, many of whose names I can no longer remember, accumulated for a stag weekend in Dorset, and after a bit of coaxing I went too. And they all did a great job of not being weirded out by the presence of The Widower. And on the hungover second day there’s a plan to head down to the beach and go surfing. It’s summer again, and actually legitimately boiling, not just “hot for England”, and I think: I can manage this. I’m no great shakes as a surfer, but you can’t grow up near an Australian beach without some idea of how it works, and the swell here wouldn’t challenge a baby. And it’d be a nice compromise, to be on the sea but not in it.

  And it was beautiful for a while, flying over the water, in a glittering veil of spray, and tumbling off once or twice and coming up laughing among the rest.

  And then I’m a little further out, just sitting on the board, legs dangling in the water, feeling the sun on my skin.

  Then a small hand yanked hard on my foot.

  More from the shock than anything, I went straight under.

  I wasn’t wearing goggles and my eyes shut against the salt on instinct. I didn’t open them. But I could feel her, the water quivering and sighing with her, and her hand making a mischievous grab at my arse, her arms sliding over me, her lips on the back of my neck, and if I could just open my eyes and see her…

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, I couldn’t.

  So then, because I had to, I shook myself free, swam back to the beach, walked straight up it without once looking back, got in the car and drove away. I didn’t say a thing to anyone. And the only time I’ve even seen the sea since then was when I flew over the Atlantic on my way here, and I didn’t more than glace at it then.

  On the way home I had to drive through a village which was humming and shimmering with ecstatic church bells and I had a panic attack and nearly crashed the car.

  It turns out ditching your whole life is a lot easier than it’s made out to be, provided you’ve really made up your mind. I didn’t do it as thoroughly as Melanie had, but I quit my job, and got on a plane, and figured out most of it at the other end, and I never came back. I have various ready-made answers to the “Oh and what brings you to Kansas” question, but have more sense than to come out with the truth, i.e: “it’s the furthest possible place from an ocean where the locals still speak English.” And so thank god for Mum’s crappy second husband, and the hitherto useless technicality of my American citizenship. It made it all so much more convenient. But I’d have found a way to transplant us to the middle of China if I’d had to.

  By now at least some of the reasons why I don’t want to talk to you about this, and why I’m still so pissed off with your mother, should be obvious. Bailing out on me’s one thing, but what about you? And God knows it’s not fair, but how can I help but wonder if she ever really tried, if she was just waiting out the months until November, one hand listlessly draped over her swelling belly as she stared out at the crest of the Downs. Serving time until she could swim away and leave us both to it.

  And if I’m not insane, if I’m the tiniest bit right about what happened in Dorset, then how dare she? How could she think I’d leave you?

  Forget that. There’s
just the fact that even putting the best possible spin on the whole sorry business, it’s not exactly cheerful, and I don’t want to upset you or scare you.

  But there’s the other thing, and the worst thing. What if it didn’t scare you? What if you’d understand more of it than I do?

  You were there too, that day, swimming deep in the dark inside Melanie, though we didn’t know it yet. Whatever happened to us, whatever I thought I felt look at me, what if it saw you too?

  I knew I should never have caved on that above-ground pool you begged so hard for, no matter that it’s a glorified paddling pool. I found you there a week ago, sitting cross-legged at the bottom, open-eyed, looking up through the water at the sky.

  And yesterday morning you were standing staring out of the bathroom window, eyes full of dreamy haze. You said, “Look, Daddy, it looks like waves,” and I followed your gaze at the billows rolling across a silken green ocean of unripe Kansas wheat. And you smiled and tilted your head, as if across all these thousands of landlocked miles, you could hear the summoning bells ringing under the sea.

  Follow this link to read the author notes

  In Tauris

  Una McCormack

  We saw them before they saw us. They came from the south, along the coast road. There were two of them. The day was hot and they struggled to make progress. They each carried packs and bronze pistols. We watched their approach through steel spyglasses. (We have many machined tools, which we use at need.)

  As they came closer to us, they acquired individual characteristics. This can make matters harder, and so it should. One of them was shocked; wandering the dark valleys that lie beyond despair. On a bright sunny day, this, more than the weapons, signalled danger. On the other hand, he was near the end.