Breathing Under Water

by Sophie Hardcastle

  You don’t have to look the same to be two parts of the same thing.

  Someone in the front row burps and several girls giggle. Pencils scrape against rulers, ballpoints stain paper, and when I hold my breath, I can almost hear a boy biting his fingernails.

  In the muggy air, my eyelids sag until my head tumbles down my chest and I wake with a quick, shallow breath. Sweat has gathered at the nape of my neck and I loop my hair up into a ponytail. It’s like dry seaweed, crispy with salt from last night’s surf – my third surf with Ben this week.

  Anything is better than nothing.

  Above the whiteboard, a clock ticks. I cover my ears with my hands, muffling the seconds, as I close my eyes and imagine being back there with him, sinking into a secret place where time does not exist.

  Mum arrives home with takeaway Chinese as the blue sky fades outside. ‘I got short soup and honey soy chicken, want some?’

  I nod and help her plate up the food in sticky silence.

  After dinner, I disappear into the shadows, strip in my room and climb into bed with my laptop, sliding beneath sheets that haven’t been washed in weeks. Flashing advertisements surround most of the blog posts. Lose Six Kilos in Ten Days!

  The first woman writes about how we stay around for seven days after we die. She says that some people stay longer if they have unfinished business, if they’re connected to someone who’s still alive. It means that they miss you, or that they’re trying to tell you something.

  Another man shares his experience of seeing his other half. Sometimes, when someone dies unexpectedly, they can visit us.

  I’m halfway through the notes when I choke on mike69’s post. This page is a load of •••t. When you die, you’re dead. Finito!

  Mr Mitchell corners me in the school corridor.

  ‘I’ve got Tim Tams.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I say.

  ‘They’re a new flavour, caramel.’

  I don’t budge.

  ‘And chocolate milk,’ he persists. ‘Double whammy.’

  I sigh, roll my eyes. ‘Fine.’

  In his room, Mr Mitchell gently closes the door behind him, takes a seat and tilts back with an earnest smile. ‘Please, sit.’

  ‘They’ve changed the couch.’

  ‘Nice observation,’ he says.

  The new couch smells of a vacuumed showroom, the fabric bright and synthetic.

  His smile slackens. ‘I’ve had three different teachers inform me you’ve fallen asleep in their classes.’

  I shrug and shift my weight.

  ‘Weight loss, dark circles beneath your eyes …’

  ‘Nice observations,’ I say.

  ‘You know, there are a number of ways we can address insomnia. There are exercises, strategies, even medications.’

  Reaching across the coffee table, I pour chocolate milk from the carton into a mug, rip open the packet of Tim Tams and sit back, slouching as I bite both ends off a biscuit. Fudge softens in my mouth; caramel coats my tongue. I slosh milk between my cheeks and biscuit becomes gooey chocolate. Swallowing, I lick my lips, wipe them on my sleeve. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  Mr Mitchell reaches down for a Tim Tam, bites into it and rocks back on his chair, munching on my question.

  ‘Like do you think clairvoyants are legit?’ I ask. ‘Or are they just hallucinating?’

  ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘I have never seen a ghost.’ Sipping chocolate milk, gazing out the window, he continues, ‘But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.’

  The bell sounds for the end of the period and I shiver. ‘Can I stay a little longer, please?’

  He nods and I take another biscuit.

  ‘Ghosts always look so scary in cartoons, but what if they’re not? What if they’re good?’

  ‘Like I said, I’ve never seen one.’ Mr Mitchell swirls his Tim Tam around in his mug. Crumbs float on a rich cocoa sea. ‘But from a psychologist’s point of view, I’d say seeing a loved one, for example, could help someone to work through their grief.’

  My skin is hot; I loosen my collar and tuck my hair into a bun. ‘So it’s possible … It wouldn’t mean you’re insane.’

  ‘Wow,’ he chuckles. ‘You’re throwing out the hard ones this morning.’

  I smirk. ‘You’re the one who made me come in here.’

  ‘Everyone has their own truth, Grace, and that means illusion and reality are sometimes impossible to distinguish.’

  I think of the horizon at midnight, the sky and sea blurring together.

  Mr Mitchell folds one leg over the other. ‘Can I ask why you’re so interested?’

  Planting my mug on the table, I grab my schoolbag and make for the door, turning at the last moment. ‘You should ask for your old couch back. This one’s shit.’

  There’s a line in the girls’ bathroom. Several year tens are clustered in front of the mirrors with tubes of lip gloss and mascara brushes. I dive into the depths of my brain for the name of the blonde standing in front of me but find nothing. We’ve had class together since kindergarten.

  Nearing the front of the queue, the nameless girl turns and sees me. ‘Hey, Grace,’ she says, waiting for a hand dryer to turn off before continuing. ‘How are you?’

  Leaning against cool tiles, sticky with hairspray, I realise I’ve reached that point – the point where people are no longer afraid to ask me how I am and aren’t going to kick themselves for asking when they realise what they’ve just done.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. We’re at the front of the line now. As a girl flushes and walks out of a cubicle, I motion toward it. ‘That one’s free.’

  ‘Oh, uh, thanks.’

  Another door opens and I rush in, sitting down, slumping on the toilet seat, fully clothed. There are dirty shoe marks and ripped toilet paper littering the tiles and a sanitary bin filled to the lid. I rummage through my bag for my phone and Jake picks up on the third ring.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, his voice croaky, as if he has only just woken up. I check my watch – 11.42 a.m. – and assume he probably has.

  ‘Can you please come and get me?’

  The night is so still the sea has turned to glass. As I dip my toes in the water, a wave kisses my ankles. I close my eyes as I wade through time and my mind starts to drift with the tides. During the day, we see ourselves relative to others. We know our place. But out here, cloaked in shadows, my place in the universe is impossible to define. I am stardust, and yet I breathe.

  He’s waiting for me out in the line-up.

  ‘Hey, Gracie.’

  I sit up on my board, the swell rocking my body like a baby in a cradle, stars freckling my skin. Ben asks me about my day, and even though I’m sure he already knows, I tell him about Mr Mitchell and the new flavour of Tim Tams. I tell him about my ghost research.

  ‘Well,’ he laughs. ‘Are you a sceptic or a believer?’

  I shrug. ‘Does it matter?’

  Basking in moonlight, he smiles. ‘I’m a part of you.’ Then he asks me where I was last night.

  I tell him I was at Jake’s house, and that I let Mum know – that much is true. Then I tell him how we watched a thriller and ate a pizza we found in Jake’s freezer, still in its box. ‘The use-by date was three years ago,’ I laugh, ‘but we figured it would be fine, being frozen. Plus that shit has so many preservatives …’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  We rise on a swell and sink back down. I look back to shore, the whole town still, as if under a spell.

  ‘Jake hates thrillers,’ Ben says, ‘and his DVD player is broken.’

  I smirk, considering how pointless it is telling lies to Ben, whether he’s a figment of my imagination or an all-knowing ghost.

  In truth, I was high last night before I even got to Jake’s house. I spent most of the evening wedged on the couch between two guys with greasy hair, stubble and ripped jeans – guys I’d met at some point at a house party or in a garage or alleyway.

  Jake didn’t know where h
is mum was, so we sat in his lounge room with the curtains drawn, dropping ash everywhere and spilling beer on the floor, clouds of green smoke filling the hours. When we heard scratching coming from the ceiling, Jake found a flashlight and with a wicked grin suggested we investigate.

  The walls of the attic were like stale bread, flaking and covered in mould. There probably hadn’t been anyone up there since the house was built. Where I touched wood, I left handprints in the dust. After a few minutes, we found the trespassers – a mother possum with raised hackles, backed into a corner, guarding her two babies. ‘Aw,’ Jake giggled with bloodshot eyes, crawling toward them. ‘Come here, poss, poss.’

  She hissed and growled, trying to ward him off.

  Suddenly, we heard a crack, a split, and Jake and his torch disappeared through plaster. He landed with a thud so heavy it shook the house, and as my hands clenched around a wooden beam, I held my breath.

  Moments later, laughter ripped through the house. ‘I’M ALIVE,’ he shouted.

  I heard him crawl across the floorboards, calling for us to jump down through the hole. Falling, I landed in a pool of hysterics. Jake shone the torch on his face.

  ‘I’m naming the possum Hercules!’ he declared. ‘Grace, you get to name the kids.’

  Between bouts of laughter, I managed two names. ‘Connie and Button.’

  Ben looks across the water at me, his face twisting, teasing. ‘Button? What kind of a name is Button!’

  ‘It’s cute!’ I argue, splashing water at him.

  As ripples fade, he looks at me seriously. ‘You’re scaring me, you know.’

  ‘Scaring you? Ben, you’re dead. Shouldn’t I be the one who’s scared?’

  ‘But you’re not scared – you’re not scared of anything. Maybe that’s the problem.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I say, glaring.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Stop talking to me like this.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says, and asks me what else is new, as if he’s just been away on holiday and is checking in on the latest gossip.

  I try to think of my life on land, of the heaviness, the slog. It’s like trying to recall a dream, summoning only dribs and drabs, but he listens with a keen ear as I jump from one story to another, skipping foggy details, unable to explain the in-between.

  I remember Mia once telling me a story about a woman with a disorder that made her switch between two personalities. She would talk and act like a five-year-old child, even responding to a different name, until she switched back to her adult self. As her illness worsened, she spent more and more time as the little girl. I wondered at the time what it would be like to be her. I wondered what it was like when the surreal became her reality.

  I feel the currents tugging on my ankles and clench my hands, grabbing fistfuls of sea and salt, for a moment believing that if I grip the ocean tight enough, I’ll stop the tides from pulling me to shore.

  I press my eyes hard against his skin, the slant of his jaw, the scar at his hairline where Jake tackled him and he split his head open on a stick.

  I look at Ben’s lips and wonder if Mia’s memory is failing her. I wonder if she wakes in the middle of the night in a panic because she’s forgotten the shape of his nose, or how his arms felt around her.

  My heart pulses in my throat. What if I really am insane? When I start to heal, will these delusions fade away? Will I too start to forget the way his tongue bends around certain letters, his laugh?

  I scrutinise every inch of his torso and broad shoulders, his cowlick, the curve of his eyebrow and the position of the mole above his collarbone, checking to see that his earlobes are the free hanging kind that cut up slightly like mine and Mum’s, not the ones that attach completely to the jaw like Dad’s. I pocket every detail, locking them away.

  Ben cocks his head to one side with a crooked smile and eyes like the sun, as if his head never flew through a windscreen, as if this night has become day and my life on shore is nothing but a nightmare.

  ‘I just don’t understand,’ I say at last, stars falling silently around me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How you’re here, how I can see you.’

  ‘Do you remember when we used to play hide and seek with everyone when we were younger?’ he asks. ‘How we’d always find each other first, how we always knew where the other was hiding when no one else could?’

  I nod, a lump wedged in my throat.

  ‘Well, I think it’s like that.’

  Thirty

  THE PADDLE

  This night is cool for October. A northerly breeze earlier in the week has brought in undercurrents, chilly like dark blood.

  ‘Your first exam is in five hours …’ Ben says.

  ‘I know,’ I say, rolling my eyes. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  He scoffs. ‘You haven’t done an hour’s study. Probably not the smartest decision.’

  Kicking, I pivot my board; lie flat on my belly and stroke toward an oncoming wave. As I paddle over the lip, I hear him call out, ‘Good luck!’

  ‘Luck?’ I say under my breath, rising to my feet, swooping down the face.

  I don’t believe in luck.

  In the kitchen, Monty licks salt crystals off my calves. Mum rushes down the stairs in a floral-patterned dress and stands on the spotted gum floorboards wriggling her legs into a pair of stockings.

  ‘Pop some toast into the toaster, please, love.’

  I cut two slices of Turkish and put them in to toast before hopping up to sit on the bench, a bowl of cereal in my lap. The milk tastes a little sour, so I try to scoop flakes of wheat bran up off the surface without any liquid.

  ‘Your hair’s wet,’ she points out. ‘Did you go swimming?’

  ‘Nah, just showered.’

  ‘Didn’t hear the shower.’ She pauses for a moment, then pulls her hair into a ponytail, shrugging off my comment, and scuttles to the front door to fetch her shoes. ‘How’d you sleep? Nervous?’

  ‘Toast popped,’ I say and watch her hurry back to grab her breakfast. She smears butter across the bread, collects her stack of books from the end of the bench and dashes toward the door, then halts and spins, running up to me and planting a kiss on my cheek.

  ‘Good luck, honey. Sorry I can’t drop you, I’m already so late!’

  I look down at my cereal. The bland flakes are now soggy and sinking in a sour pond. I hear Mum’s old Range Rover pull out of the driveway, the clutch grinding, and just like that, my mum is gone.

  Hopping off the kitchen bench, I pour my breakfast down the drain and wonder how different this morning might have been.

  They’ve converted the school assembly hall into a huge exam room, perfect lines of desks and chairs standing to attention. We wait by the doors at the back of the hall while our teachers lay exam papers on each of the desks. All around me, students cling to their study notes, eyes running back and forth over their essays and quotes, scratching words into the bone walls of their skulls. One girl whispers to another, ‘I drank four coffees last night, didn’t get to sleep till 3 a.m.!’

  Several students are gathered around paper sheets tacked to the wall, checking their seat numbers. I weave my way through the cluster to check mine, scrolling down through the list to W. The paper is crumpled and has fingerprint stains on the corners and suddenly I notice they’re the same sheets that were tacked to this wall for our trial exams several months ago. Nobody has bothered to print new ones. His name is there in bold above my own – Ben Walker, row 9, seat 11.

  ‘Ouch!’ a girl whines as I push past, as I step on a guy’s foot, as I charge into someone else’s shoulder.

  ‘Grace!’ Harley grabs my sleeve, pulls me close.

  I slap his chest, shoving, grunting, ‘Get off me!’ I make for the hallway.

  My laces have come undone and strands of hair fall in my face as I bash and kick on Mr Mitchell’s door. He opens it and immediately steps aside. ‘Come in, come in.’

  I collapse on his ugly couch, my body foldi
ng in two, head dropping between my knees. Hot tears drip onto the carpet. ‘Please, don’t make me, tell them I can’t sit it, tell them I can’t, I can’t do it.’

  ‘Grace …’

  ‘No. No. I can’t. Please don’t make me, please!’

  He waits as I sob, my chest heaving, shoulders shaking. He waits until there is nothing left inside me.

  ‘I won’t make you do anything.’

  He waits until I sit myself up, elbows on knees, palms cupping my wet face.

  ‘Can I get you something?’

  Shaking my head, I watch him sink back in his chair as he acknowledges that Tim Tams and milk won’t even touch the sides of this ache, not today. I wrap my arms around my body the way I used to when I was small and my stomach hurt. Above, the ceiling seems to press down. ‘Can we please open a window?’ I ask.

  He jumps up. ‘Of course.’ The sky outside is grey and a cold breeze blows in.

  Mr Mitchell pours me a glass of water and places it on the table in front of me. ‘How ’bout this,’ he says. ‘You surf. Imagine how the tide touches your feet.’

  My lips quiver, but I close my eyes.

  ‘Imagine you’ve got your board and you jump into the water, how you duck-dive, how amazing that feels.’

  I frown.

  ‘Bear with me,’ he says. ‘I want you to imagine paddling out the back, all the waves that thunder toward you, and how each and every time, you dive deep beneath. You know you will surface, inevitably.’

  I can feel the ocean combing through my hair as he continues. ‘No matter how many times you have to dive beneath, you’ll keep paddling, okay? That’s how you’re going to make it through.’

  I open my eyes and he smiles at me.

  ‘That’s how you survive.’

  Jake is waiting on the verandah when I get home. He sparks a match, the tiny flame curling around the end of his joint. ‘How was it?’ he says as I flop down beside him, landing in a heap.

  I tell him how I wrote my name in the boxes on the front sheet in lower case and they’re meant to be in upper case, so I had to be given a whole new exam booklet and how that seemed like such a waste. I tell him how I finished forty-five minutes before the end of the Advanced English exam with a three-paragraph essay and a half-page creative writing piece and had a nap on the desk while everyone else scribbled away.