Saltwater

by Jessica Andrews

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Jessica Andrews writes fiction and poetry. She grew up in Sunderland and has spent time living in Santa Cruz, Paris, Donegal, Barcelona and London. She has been published by the Independent, Somesuch Stories, AnOther, Caught by the River, Shabby Doll House and Papaya Press, among others. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing classes and co-runs literary magazine The Grapevine, which aims to give a platform to under-represented writers.

  jessica-andrews.com

  www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Sceptre

  An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Jessica Andrews 2019

  The right of Jessica Andrews to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 9781473682771

  Trade Paperback ISBN 9781473682788

  eBook ISBN 9781473682795

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

  For my mam;

  a glimpse.

  Prologue

  It begins with our bodies. Skin on skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us. I am wet and glistening like a beetroot pulsing in soil. Gasping and gulping. There are wounds in your belly and welts around your nipples, puffy and purpling. They came from me, just like I came from you. We are connected through molten rivers like the lava that runs beneath the earth’s crust. Shifting. Oil trapped beneath the sea. Precious liquid seeping through cracks. This love is heavy; salty and viscous, stinking of seaweed and yeast. Sweat is nourishing and so is that tangy vagina smell that later men will tell me tastes like battery acid. But there are not any men, not yet. For now our secrets are only ours. You press me to your chest and I am you and I am not you and we will not always belong to each other but for now it is us and here it is quiet. I rise and fall with your breath in this bed. We are safe in the pink together.

  Part One

  1

  My first dead body was my grandfather’s. My mother and I sat in the funeral home at his wake in Ireland for two days while people I had never met came to pay their respects. I moved to the back of the room because I thought the blue in his eyelids might pierce my skin if I sat too close for too long.

  The last time I saw him alive, he was in hospital. I kissed him goodbye and left the imprint of my lips lingering on his cheek. I wore bright red lipstick and it made his skin look grey. I tried to rub it away with my sleeve and he said, ‘Oh, leave it. I’ll keep it there, ’til you come back.’ I reached for his cold hand, fluttering on top of smooth sheets.

  2

  Before I came to Ireland, I was living in London. I was seduced by coloured lights hitting the river in the middle of the night and throngs of cool girls in chunky sandals who promised a future of tote bags and house plants. I thought that was the kind of life I was supposed to want. I worked in a bar every night while I figured out how to get there.

  3

  I never did go back to the hospital.

  During my grandfather’s wake, I looked for the trace of my kiss on his skin.

  I could not find it.

  4

  London is built on money and ambition and I didn’t have enough of either of those things. I felt as though the tangle of wires and telephone lines strung through the city were strings in a fishing net filled with bankers and nondescript creatives, shimmering in banknotes and holographic backpacks. I was something small and weak and undesirable. I was slipping through the holes and down into the deep underbelly of the ocean. I watched these people from my vantage point behind the bar. I noted the colour of their fingernails and the smell of their perfume and how many times they went to the toilet in one night. They did not notice me.

  5

  I am just another impossibility. Colourless. Unformed. You cannot imagine anything as fiercely small, as fiercely hungry as me. There is a splitting that has not happened yet. This is you before me. You are a daughter and not a mother. Not yet. And yet; there are invisible things drawing us close, even here. Fall into those molten afternoons, his hands all over your body. Spill towards me.

  6

  My grandfather was born in Glasgow. He and his brothers and sisters were small and soft beneath the tenement buildings. Their father went to the pub one day and never came back. Their mother died soon afterwards, ‘Of a broken heart,’ people tutted, shaking their heads and supping the tragedy from fingerprinted pint glasses. The children were shipped this way and that by strangers and well-meaning relatives. They ended up in an orphanage, where priests cupped and kissed them in terrible places.

  They had an Auntie Kitty who lived in a small fishing port on the west coast of Ireland. She sent for them and they stayed with her and slept in the hay with her animals, warm dung sticking sweetly to their clothes and matting their hair. They walked along the dirt roads to school with bare feet and broke in wild horses while they were light enough to cling to their backs without being thrown off. They raced through long grasses and swam in the rough sea and learned to light fires by rolling oily twists of newspaper and drying out kindling in the sun.

  Auntie Kitty rationed the hot water and made anyone who entered the house throw holy sand over their left shoulder, To Keep Away The Devil. Her husband was a major in the IRA and they housed members of Sinn Fein in their attic. In the springtime she marched around the garden with a pair of scissors, snipping the heads from any flowers that dared to bloom orange.

  ‘Just off out on me horse!’ she called as she wheeled her rusty bicycle down the hallway. She was a self-educated woman, and she taught my grandfather how to write and to read constellations in the salty night sky.

  As my grandfather grew he worked as a gardener, pruning rhubarb and thatching roofs and occasionally mending leaky plumbing. When he was old enough, he travelled to England on the boat with the rest of the boys, looking for labouring work. He helped to build the Tyne Tunnel, spending his days deep beneath the ocean, installing lights so that strangers could see in the dark.

  He found himself in Sunderland, among the crashing and clanking of the shipyards. He lived in a boarding house run by a gentle woman and her sharp and gorgeous daughter. He befriended Toni from Italy, who ate cocaine for breakfast and dreamed of running a café, and he shared a room with Harry from Londonderry, who played the spoons and had a crucifix tattooed across his chest.

  He liked Johnny Cash, horse racing and Jameson’s whiskey. He always wore a suit and carried a packet of Fruit Polos in his inside pocket. He was at home by the water with the rust and the metal.

  7

  I am living in Burtonport, a tiny fishing port in County Done
gal, on the north-west coast of Ireland. In order to get here, you have to travel through the Blue Stack Mountains. Time alters as you drive into them. They are brown and reassuring but appear blue in the shifting light, dripping navy and indigo into the valleys.

  When I was a child, my mother, brother and I spent dusky Augusts in Donegal. We felt safe when we had passed the mountains, cut off from the tumult of our lives at home. As soon as we arrived, my mother turned off her Nokia and put it in the glove compartment of her car. She didn’t switch it on until summer was over and we were back on the motorway.

  As a teenager I ran from solidity and stasis and shades of brown. I wanted things that flashed and fizzled. Now that I am here, beneath the peat smoke and the penny-coloured skies, brown seems like a safe place. I can crawl into it and swallow fistfuls of soil.

  8

  When my grandfather died I called the pub.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Deborah, but I can’t come in today.’

  ‘You what, babe?’

  ‘I think I need to go away for a bit.’

  ‘Speak up, will you? Line’s breaking up.’

  ‘I have to go to Ireland for a funeral. I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’ll come in and see you when I’m back in town.’

  I saw a chance and I grasped it. I texted my landlord and told him to keep my deposit. I put my books into boxes and gave all of my clothes away. I took the train north to my mother’s house, then we boarded an aeroplane and hired a car and now here I am.

  9

  I am creeping. The future unspooling. I am forming slowly inside you. Barely even an idea. There are so many ways in which you do not know yourself yet, blue-black and heavy like reams of crushed velvet. All the broken objects of our lives are stretched in front of us, gorgeous and unknowable.

  10

  My mother and I have inherited my grandfather’s small stone cottage, through the Blue Stack Mountains by the sea. It is tucked into a nook crammed with giant rhubarb and purple hydrangeas. There are wild potatoes and mangy kittens and clumps of shamrock clustered in the corners. The garden is very overgrown but if I climb onto the kitchen roof I can see the sea.

  We arrived to find that colonies of mould and specks of damp thrived in my grandfather’s absence. They were splattered across the walls and ceilings like a sludgy Pollock painting. Tiny worms and mites had burrowed holes in the wooden furniture. The drawers and cupboards were crusty with rust and the fridge stank of sour milk. The mattresses were crawling with bugs.

  In the months before my grandfather’s death, something between my mother and me was fractured. Her presence in my life had been solid and gold, then suddenly she was not there any more. I felt her pulling away from me. It hurt inside of my body, my intestines stretched and sore. I felt confused by love; the way it could simultaneously trap you and set you free. How it could bring people impossibly close and then push them far away. How people who loved you could leave you when you needed them most.

  We talked about practical things when she called me in London; when the funeral would be and how I would get there. We listened to the radio during the drive from the airport and at the wake we chatted to my grandfather’s neighbours and friends. It wasn’t until he had been buried and everyone had gone home to their brandies that we were alone together in the silent cottage. The distance glinted between us, sharp and dangerous. We sat on a sheet of newspaper on the floor and looked around.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked her.

  ‘Burn it,’ she said, blowing on a cup of tea.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘We’re going to have to burn everything.’

  ‘Burn it where?’ She paused.

  ‘In the garden.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘It’s the only way.’

  She gave me a look. I knew she was trying to teach me something, but I didn’t know if I wanted to learn it. I knew she wanted me to let go of things that did not belong to me, but I could not work out which things were mine. I did not know how much of my story I was entitled to take, and how much of the past I was allowed to leave behind.

  We lit a bonfire and it burned for three days. We fed it everything: the mattresses, the bed frames, the chairs, the rugs, the chest of drawers, the dishcloths, the wardrobe. Scraps of paper scribbled with his handwriting, pink betting slips, old photographs, boxes of tablets and thick-rimmed glasses, his spare set of teeth. I reread musty letters I had sent him and found forgotten Christmas cards lodged between radiators and walls.

  We shuddered as the duvet went up in a flash and took hammers to the dining room table. We emptied bin liners filled with socks and underpants into the flames. I liked watching the sofa best. The upholstery burned in jagged shapes, leaving the wooden skeleton standing on its own for a moment, naked and shy.

  Plasticky smoke gathered in the trees.

  ‘Are we allowed to do this?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘Probably not,’ she replied. ‘It feels good though, doesn’t it?’ She squeezed my hand. Our faces were hot from the flames.

  We cleaned the house as the fire razed the garden, clearing the cupboards and scrubbing the sinks. We sang along to the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, bleaching the kitchen counters until they were bright white and dazzling. I covered my mouth with a scarf, trying not to breathe in black smoke. I didn’t want tiny pieces of my granddad’s clothes and furniture to settle in the back of my throat.

  ‘Let’s get some taties on this fire, eh, Luce?’ she joked, stoking the embers with my grandfather’s walking stick. I looked at her. She had mud streaked across her forehead. I felt the sharpness between us soften a little, as though the edges had been rubbed smooth. She laughed.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. It’s only stuff, you know.’

  11

  The debris of my grandfather’s life landed on our clothes and in our hair. It coated our skin. I learned that the drifting bits of ash are called ‘fire angels’. After a house fire, they are considered to be very dangerous because they can reignite the blaze. They are small and fragile, but they are still smouldering.

  12

  When I was a toddler, my mother, my father and I went on holiday to Tenerife. We stayed in a hotel for non-Spanish-speaking tourists, whose name translated to ‘Hotel Dead Donkey’. There was a cockroach infestation and they climbed up the walls as we slept, their hard bodies glittering in the moonlight.

  Days passed in a haze of hair braids and Mini Milk ice lollies, cold and smooth against my sunburned lips. I loved the rubbery smell of my inflatable crocodile and the bitter taste of sun on my skin. We went to the beach one day and I paddled in the sea in my white T-shirt, while my mother and father watched from gritty beach towels on the shore. I waded in up to my waist and squinted in the sunlight. I watched the waves dapple my arms and legs and shrieked as the droplets caught the light. I heard an angry noise and turned towards a small motorboat filled with strong, tanned men in fisherman’s caps moving steadily towards me. I froze in fear and turned to see my father’s arms making big white arcs in the water. He scooped me up.

  ‘My kid!’ he shouted at the men. They laughed and waved their arms nonchalantly.

  ‘No problem.’ They smiled. ‘No problem.’ Their teeth were so white against the blue sky. I lay wrapped in the beach towel for the rest of the day, savouring my escape.

  13

  My mother left Ireland after the burning. Things were still not right between us. I knew she was trying to teach me something important, about how to be in my life, but I was too angry with her to listen.

  I am not going back to London. Once I craved the speed and proximity to a centre, the sense that something was always about to happen, just out of reach. The city was a shape that could not be classified, shifting and moving, infinite possibilities hanging from the streets like fruit. Now, when I think of the city, it is in rectangles and squares; impenetrable shapes with fierce elbows, sh
utting me out.

  I have been dreaming of tube tunnels, smoky and choking. I am feeling my way through them, touching the walls. I am straining my eyes for a glimpse of my father, who is lost somewhere in the darkness, always just out of reach. I am calling for my mother and my voice echoes along the tracks.

  14

  Redness cracking. Fissures forming. You are falling towards us, rich and syrup-soft. Flesh roiling. Bones shifting. Tongues over bellies and fingers in wet places. Salt stains the mattress; seeps into places where hands cannot reach. Tissues twisting and saline dripping into something new. Sink into the thick of us. The peach pit slick of us.

  15

  My mother is beautiful. At twenty years old she had long, dark hair and something untamed about her. She wore floral jeans with leather belts and men’s shirts knotted at the waist. She played her Marc Bolan record with the leopard-print label over and over as she hairsprayed her perm to go out at the weekends. She drank lager and lime and sat with her elbows on pub tables, dimpling her cheeks at the local boys and smuggling secrets in her eyes through the smoke.

  16

  There were moments when London felt like it belonged to me. Lying in the dew on the top of Telegraph Hill after a party, apricot leaking across the skyline. Cycling through traffic in the summer wearing a thin dress, one hand on my handlebars and the other trailing through the air, clutching invisible threads. Dancing in a dirty warehouse with sweat dripping between my breasts like syrup and my friends twirling shapes around me.

  I think perhaps that is the allure. London pushes you further and further to the edges and when you feel like you are about to fall it lets you know, just for a moment, that you have found a place where you belong.