The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘Does it look awful?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘It looks like it hurts.’ Did it feel hot under my thumb or was that just her skin? ‘But you’re still as pretty as ever,’ I said, feigning a jokey tone that didn’t come out that way.

  A whistle then, coming down the path, and Linda, Joan and Sarah ran into the clearing, breathless.

  ‘What are you two lovebirds up to?’ Joan teased, as I dropped my hand and rocked back nervously.

  Camille turned around and the girls gasped and hovered, twisting her to and fro, studying her injuries as I hung back, shivering. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I fell down the stairs.’

  ‘Well, Linda has something that will make you feel better,’ Sarah said, unhooking Linda’s bag from her shoulder to proudly show off a bottle of gin in one hand and orangeade in the other.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘It was a present from Geoff,’ Linda said with a put-upon sigh. ‘Although I know he stole it.’

  ‘Stole it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ll never know. We’ll drink it and send the bottle down the river.’

  ‘With a message inside it?’ Sarah asked, lolling back on the grass.

  ‘Yes, to your true love,’ Joan said, swooning heavily on top of her so that she squirmed.

  ‘You’re already wet – did you take photos already?’ Joan asked me, letting Sarah go and tugging at the hem of my dress.

  ‘I just went for a swim.’

  Linda was now pouring equal parts orangeade and gin, an unorthodox combination, into the single cup she had brought with her. ‘It’s a little early for booze, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Joan asked. ‘You still in a mood from me waking you up?’

  I took a few gulps from the cup before passing it to Camille without looking at her, the slide of her fingers against mine making me pull my knees up to sit. ‘I had a weird moment earlier, when I was in the water. I thought there was someone watching me from over there.’

  ‘Some creep, you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, I was probably just imagining it.’

  ‘Linda, with me,’ Joan ordered, standing up. She stripped off her cardigan and marched towards the water.

  ‘You know, if anyone is in a weird mood today, it’s you, Joan!’ I called out.

  ‘Maybe!’ she called back, hissing as she stepped into the water. ‘I just woke up this morning and thought, fuck it! Fuck. It.’ She lifted her arms. ‘We’ve only got two weeks left and I want to enjoy this summer. To enjoy every day. To have my own life, you know. And if they want to ruin theirs,’ she added, with a careless sweep of her hand that didn’t fool any of us after another embarrassing display at dinner last night, ‘then they can.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ Linda said, following her in her dress.

  ‘I knew you’d get it,’ Joan said, and lunged to kiss her on the cheek.

  ‘Oh my God, it’s like having a puppy,’ Linda said. ‘Get in the water with you, cool yourself off.’ She pushed her down and the two of them play-fought.

  I remembered the camera then and took two blurry pictures of two grappling girls, two competing Ophelias, shrieking and turning the river into a maelstrom.

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ Joan insisted, spluttering. ‘We need to catch whoever’s there.’

  She tugged Linda towards the other bank and they ran into the woods, deep enough to disappear from our view, hooting and shouting. Telling the intruder to ‘Fuck off, will you!’ Telling him they were going to get him.

  ‘They’re mad, the both of them. And they can’t even blame sunstroke,’ Sarah said, lying back, smiling like a cat in the warmth.

  ‘You don’t want to go and join them?’ I asked.

  I hadn’t looked at Camille straight on since the others had arrived. I kept remembering the feeling of her breath on my palm when I touched her jaw. She had downed the first cup herself and half of another strong one before passing it around. Now the edges of my body were starting to go fuzzy and it was harder and harder not to turn and look at her, not to touch her.

  ‘I’d rather not. What if the madness is catching?’ Sarah said, as the two girls in the woods graduated to shrieking, their voices echoing against the trees, as if the wood itself were crying out. ‘Do they realize their noise is just going to draw attention? That we’ll get some poor local bumbling through trying to find out who’s dying? And then they’ll see one of us in the water and have a heart attack.’

  ‘That’s how rumours and myths start,’ Camille said. Her book was propped open over her middle as she stared at the sky, the fingers of one hand gripping the ground. ‘A group of girls, shrieks in the woods, damp footprints.’

  ‘Ooh, I just got the shivers,’ Sarah said, laughing at herself.

  Linda and Joan emerged from the trees. They had leaves sticking to their legs and their hair was snarled, their cheeks pink.

  ‘Here come the wild women,’ Sarah intoned.

  Linda waded through the water and crawled out towards us, lying down in a sprawl, panting.

  ‘Who’s got the camera?’ Joan asked, standing in the middle of the river.

  ‘I do,’ Camille said, taking it from my limp grip.

  I risked a glance at her and she smiled at me, lopsided because of the bruise.

  It was too hot; I felt dizzy. I lay back and shut my eyes. The sun turned my eyelids an orange-red, revealed the tiny veins.

  I heard a splash. ‘Does it matter that I’m smiling?’ Joan asked. ‘Can I still be tragic and smile?’

  ‘Of course you can. Just ask my mother,’ Linda murmured.

  ‘Ouch,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You know, if we’re copying the painting,’ Camille mused, ‘Ophelia shouldn’t even be looking at the camera, at us. We should be watching her unseen. She shouldn’t really be aware that she has an audience. So I don’t think it matters. But the flowers,’ she continued, ‘they should mean something, like in the play.’

  Like forget-me-nots, I thought hazily, sitting up on my elbows, blinking at the light.

  ‘What do roses mean?’ Linda asked.

  ‘They mean love, obviously,’ Joan called out.

  ‘What do all these mean?’ Sarah asked, holding up the bunch of flowers we had gathered from the meadow and a few wilted stems stolen from a neighbour’s garden. She gave them to Camille who peered closer.

  ‘Carnations mean different things depending on their colour. White for luck, pink for a mother’s love, yellow for . . . disappointment.’

  I leaned over to pick up the camera she had set down by her feet. I couldn’t bear suddenly not to take a picture of her, bruised but still lovely, frowning at the bouquet in her hands, a little unsteady on her feet. She looked down at me as I adjusted the lens. She was standing too close to the sun, I thought, and the picture would be washed out with light, but I didn’t want to stop her and make her move and I couldn’t move either, my body felt so heavy.

  ‘Knapweeds look like thistles so I’d say they mean loyalty, bravery. Anemones mean . . . forsaken love, death. Sweet Williams mean gallantry, noble heroic love.’

  ‘You should write a book about that, or start a business. Send coded messages through flowers,’ Sarah said. ‘Everyone’s starting a business now, we don’t have to work for the man. Peter is, something to do with records.’ Peter was the third of the boys staying at the cottages.

  ‘Hey, what do buttercups mean?’ Linda asked, twirling one around her fingers.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Happiness,’ Sarah suggested, ‘warm summer days, egg yolks.’

  ‘Did no one bring food?’ Joan asked, walking over to us and shaking her head so her wet hair sprayed icy droplets.

  ‘Did you have to bring that up?’ Linda asked. ‘Now we’re all going to get hungry.’ She changed into the dress that Camille had brought with her, a gown we had decided was suitably Elizabethan but was really more peasant sack and which we had all been adding b
its to – embroidery around the neck and hem, ribbons and tucks at the sleeve. It had an empire-line waist that made Linda’s considerable bust look jealousy-inducing. After her turn, she handed the soaking wet dress to Camille to put on.

  I watched her back as she got changed, telling myself I was only looking for any more injuries, or to compare her body to mine as we all did. Her underwear was threadbare and old-fashioned, childish, but it felt mean to notice that. Her hair was thick and straight, swaying against her spine as she moved. She had dimples in her lower back, and the curve of her backside made me feel something obscene.

  I looked away and ripped up a clump of grass. ‘Any gin left?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, did I not say we have another half-bottle?’ Linda said with a nonchalant flick of her hair.

  ‘Linda, you are so cool, you know that?’ I said after taking a few gulps of gin neat, feeling the burn of it in my gullet like something necessary.

  ‘I try,’ she said.

  ‘Are you going to take Camille’s photo?’ Joan asked me.

  ‘I’m too dizzy,’ I replied, trying to take on some of Linda’s casual mien and not reveal my unease that Joan might have sensed something between Camille and me. Even though there was nothing to sense, I told myself fizzily.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Sarah said.

  I heard her directing Camille, and the soft wet sounds of her in the river, and within a minute I gave up on lying down with my eyes closed and went to sit on the bank. This was about art, I told myself stubbornly, about my project. About art school. It wasn’t personal.

  ‘Not dizzy any more?’ Joan asked.

  ‘No. Back off, will you? You’re hovering like a mother today.’

  ‘Ouch, all right,’ she said, crossing her arms and returning to Linda’s side. ‘Someone’s PMSing.’

  Camille’s eyes darted between Sarah holding the camera and me. I wondered what a photo of that would look like, if I could look at that photo and know by her gaze how she felt about me, save it, keep it.

  Linda was more attractive, Sarah more womanly and Joan more striking, and yet it was Camille I was drawn to. It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Who are you?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘I’m Hero,’ Camille said.

  ‘Who?’

  She sat up in the water, brushed wet ropes of hair from her face. ‘Can I have a sip?’

  Linda staggered over to her, holding the cup for her to drink as Camille clasped her hand around hers. I was suddenly viciously jealous.

  ‘Hero and Leander?’ Camille said, once Linda had returned to the bank. ‘Hero was a priestess who lived in a tower, and her lover Leander would swim across the Hellespont each night to see her, guided by her lamp. But one stormy night the lamp went out and he drowned. When Hero saw his body she jumped to her death to be with him.’

  ‘Oh, to meet a real boy who inspires that kind of devotion,’ Sarah said with a sigh.

  Camille frowned. Because Sarah was making a joke of it? I couldn’t tell. Sometimes I felt I had no idea what Camille was thinking at all, that she was unknowable.

  ‘Do you think she regretted it, when she was falling?’ I asked.

  I was stuck on the picture of it, of Hero walking all the way up her tower, around and around those worn steps, her trembling hand on the wall, weeping and wailing. Climbing up just so she could jump from it and make her death something spectacular, something that meant more than just swimming out and deciding not to keep afloat. Maybe it was because she knew the gods were watching her, that someone would one day record her story; maybe that was the only way she could tell her own story, not being a man who could write it down.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Camille said and tipped onto her back.

  ‘They say that people who jump do regret it,’ Linda said. ‘But I heard that drowning doesn’t hurt.’

  It seems strange to say that until this moment we had never spoken of the actual act of drowning. We had discussed what a drowning girl looked like, why she was there in the water, what she was trying to say, but not the actual drowning, the mechanism of it, of lungs filling up with water.

  In most of our images our faces were still above the water, just like in the paintings, because how could we look lovely if you couldn’t see us, how could you know without our expressions what our bodies meant? And how could we think about the messy reality of dying when the river gave us back to our bodies, made us feel embodied, cradled, held, consoled.

  ‘That’s a myth,’ Sarah said. ‘They used to tell it to sailors’ wives to make them feel better.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Joan swore.

  We were all sitting on the bank now. Were we thinking the same thing looking at Camille floating in the water, her arms gliding in and out so that the dress billowed out into wings, were we imagining her struggling, the water sliding down her gullet, her face turning blue?

  ‘It’s just a story,’ Camille said, standing up with a rush of water, as if sensing our concern. ‘Like all the other stories.’

  ‘I mean, I’d rather drown than, I don’t know, stab myself,’ Joan said as Camille approached us. She held out her hands and helped Camille up out of the water. ‘At least with drowning you don’t actually have to do it, you just have to stop swimming or put heavy things in your pockets or something.’

  It was the moment just before drowning that we tried to record, I thought, the moment when the girl decided to give herself to the river, not the one afterwards when the river had taken her. We didn’t know yet that the boundary between the two was treacherous, gossamer, liquid.

  ‘I had an aunt who killed herself,’ Sarah said. ‘She took pills.’

  ‘Why?’ Camille asked, pausing from wringing out her hair.

  Sarah shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s one of those family secrets. No one talks about it.’

  ‘Right, well. Gin makes us morbid, good to know,’ Linda declared, but we were too pensive, too in our own heads, to laugh as we trailed our feet in the cold river water.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Maeve’s parents have an argument in their bedroom before dinner. The shape of the upstairs hall means she can hear every word spoken, the little barbs they fling, in her own bedroom where she lies on the bed with her legs propped up high on the wall.

  She’s trying to sink herself into the memories of what happened with Stuart, how he touched her and looked at her, how it felt, but the voices keep bringing her out of it, making her limbs restless, making her want to kick at the wall.

  ‘How was I supposed to know you had booked someone to come around to look at it?’ her mother is saying to her father. ‘Am I psychic?’

  ‘I think you’d like me to be,’ he replies. ‘You’re quiet and moody and then you lash out like this. And I’m supposed to read your mind and know what’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Ruth,’ he says firmly, and Maeve pictures him putting his hands on her shoulders, switching to his rational tone of voice. We’re all adults here, he seems to want to say at these moments. ‘I know the hospital this morning brought up a lot of stuff for you, a lot of memories.’

  ‘A lot of guilt.’

  ‘You made the decision not to see your father when he was in hospital, and that’s something you’ll have to deal with. We all have things we regret.’

  ‘What the hell,’ her mother states, voice shaking with a rare kind of fury that has Maeve on her feet and deciding to leave her room for somewhere further away. ‘Are you saying you didn’t agree with me? Because you said nothing of the sort at the time. You told me I was doing the right thing—’

  ‘I was supporting you,’ her father begins, as Maeve runs along the hall and into an open door, the junk room, closing it behind her.

  She can’t hear words any more, just a murmur.

  So it was her mother’s decision that they were estranged then, not his, Maeve thinks bitterly as she looks around a room filled with her grandfather’s old, forgotten things; that the man who gifted h
er the polished jewellery box with its twirling dancer never had the occasion to buy her any more presents or, more importantly, to spend time with her, to get to know her.

  At the beginning of the summer, the thought of leaving home made Maeve want to lie down and never get up again – she hadn’t had enough time being a child, she wanted to be looked after, to stay with her parents – but now she feels only an aching desire to leave. At university, she thinks, rifling through an open box of books (biographies of politicians and military leaders mostly), no one would keep tabs on her. No one would care if she met with Stuart. But if the tests come back and she is ill again, if she has to go back to hospital and back to chemo and loses her hair, if they have to ask her brother to donate bone marrow again, as if she’s some kind of vampire feeding off her family, consuming them . . .

  She’s not sure she’ll have the strength for that. If it happens again, maybe it’s the universe telling her she’s not meant to be here, to survive.

  She stands at the window, staring through the handprints on its dusty surface to the lawn and the fields beyond, the rise and dip of the land, and thinks about running across it, running away. But then you can’t run away from your body, can you, she thinks. Georgia certainly couldn’t. Georgia who felt like a sister to her, a cleverer, more daring sister, who sat down for the first time next to her in the hospital school and drawled, So, what are you in for? and declared at the end of the short school day that they were going to be best friends, That all right with you?

  Fine, Maeve had replied, bemused and half in love.

  And how did Maeve repay her friendship in the end? By telling a nurse that Georgia was making herself sick, vomiting after meals, even though the metabolic disorder that had put her in the children’s hospital was doing enough by itself to undermine any nourishment she swallowed down.

  They’ll put me on a feeding tube, you know that, Georgia had hissed, wounded, vicious, her eyes wide like a trapped animal. They’ll put me on surveillance around the clock, I won’t be able to shit without them standing over me. I won’t be able to decide anything about my own body. Who are you to do that? Who gave you the right? Just because you like it, she had spat, being sick and babied and looked after, letting everyone make all the hard decisions for you. You’re a child, a spiteful child.