by Pip Adam
This was Doug’s choice. This was where they were leaving from. This was it. Elodie looked at Doug, waiting again, looking at her, and realised from her poor, confused, tired face that Doug hadn’t been leading the way at all. Elodie laughed loudly. Her wet hand covered her mouth and she sank a little, not finding ground with her feet. Floundered, the water coming in her eyes, nose, flooding her, choking the laugh out of her. She regained the surface and, smashing the water, shouted, grinning, ‘Good. Good.’ It wasn’t going to be easy. During the months ahead, she would look back on this dunking and pray for it. Good. Doug was huffing away in front of her, looking back at Elodie but behind her as well. Weighing up the shore and the distance to the rocks. Doug didn’t know the way. She’d been moving forward not to the water just to the smell of something.
‘There’s nothing back there,’ Elodie reminded Doug out loud. ‘Nothing, puppy. Not a feather.’ She looked to her right at the rocks, then to her left at the boats. The boats. There was nothing behind them. But there were boats still in swimming distance. There would be for a while yet, but she laughed at them. She was aquatic. Everyone knew. She was residually hairless, descended larynx-ed, encephalised – her fingers were wrinkling right now. She was of the water. Doug’s fur was getting wet and heavy. Doug had too many limbs. Doug needed a boat, but not Elodie. Elodie had her boat, she’d been living in it her whole life. She could feel the weight of the big body of water more and more the closer she got to the bridge. She would go under the bridge. When they got to it Doug swam, desperate, and scrambled up onto some rocks. Elodie could leave Doug, let her wander home, dry in the wind, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t send Doug back into incarceration. Not now she’d been free.
She swam to the rocks and pulled herself up. Wet clothes, wet hair. Doug made room for her. Then she walked to the side of the rocks that looked out on the sea, trying to find a way back to the road. Elodie followed, slipping on the uneven surface. Already angry at her useless legs.
The water was a long way away. If she jumped back in from here she wouldn’t clear the rocks. They would need to climb down and lower themselves in. Doug looked behind herself again and for a moment it seemed like she had found a way back to the road. But before she could, Elodie grabbed her and threw her, one-handed – more a shove than a throw – along the rocks and back into the water. Doug struggled to get back onto the rocks but soon Elodie was in the water again too. So inauspicious, she thought. This last shift from land to sea. No one to say goodbye.
Elodie imagined Carla had left from a beach, the sand in her feet, letting herself leave the ground gradually. Maybe that’s what made her come back. An easy start. Elodie would never come back. She was going now. Swimming. Swamped by the waves. Doug beside her, paddling, yelping, biting at her clothes, trying to pull her back. There was nothing behind them. As they moved away, it had disappeared like a mountain falling down. But Doug couldn’t see that. Doug tried and tried to climb onto Elodie, but Elodie batted at the dog, punching her in the snout finally and sending her reeling for a moment. Doug had to keep up. That’s what Elodie knew. If Doug came then maybe Carla would follow. But there was no point in thinking about Carla now. Carla had made her decisions. Doug and Elodie were leaving. Elodie spat.
The waves came from everywhere, there was no rhythm to them and every time she thought there was they’d surprise her. She was making better progress than the play of the waves would suggest. She was cold, but if she kept moving and below the water she was fine. Doug was falling behind. Further and further. Elodie didn’t look back for the dog but she could hear the dog was getting further and further away. Doug’s bark sounded like she was calling out for Elodie to wait, but that was probably just Elodie making things up, trying to attach herself to something when really she mustn’t be tethered – the dog knew she couldn’t slow down. Momentum was vital. She needed to stay warm and moving. There was only so far she could go invisibly. The sun would come up eventually.
The water held Elodie. Her hand slid past a piece of hair. Long human hair. Lost from someone on shore. Maybe someone out this far (Elodie’s feet wouldn’t touch the ground again), maybe someone walking on the street, running. People liked to run like they were still hunters. She couldn’t hear Doug behind her anymore and she knew straight away that Doug was done. She wondered if the dog would wash up on some shore close to where Carla was. That was it. The last tie to Carla’s journey. The last piece of Carla, the last thing that could help her. Elodie’s was a maiden voyage now. In her head she still held the story of the trip, but now Doug was gone. Doug, who Carla had only had for a short time but who had been told the story more times than Elodie had. Doug, the guide dog, gone. Sinking.
Human bodies weighed more than water. This was the problem. She’d stopped swimming now. The shore was getting further away. The tide must be going out. She didn’t know what that meant, but she was going out with it.
The harbour was busy sometimes. Elodie had seen it. There were other swimmers, temporary swimmers. But not tonight, although it was probably morning now. There was no one for her to say goodbye to now that Doug was gone. But there were boats and buoys and plastic bags and a comb and an oily feeling which kept her warm. The surface of the water was thick with a rainbow of gasoline and grease that she could see even though it was dark. The moon was waxing gibbous. It was growing like a stomach in the sky. The greasy layer held the water down, but the waves broke through it and the birds wouldn’t be stopped. The sea was no clear thing. Elodie’s arms didn’t look the same, her legs were so far below, she leaned back, brought them out in front of her, to make sure they were still there. They were. The bump and the swell of the sea was interrupted by the wake from the dangerous goods ferry going to Waiheke, and a boat far off which was going fishing before dawn because the fish were biting. She looked up, lay back and the sky rolled over her. She looked for a long time until she was dizzy, rocked to and fro and up and down and round and round and round at speed and she dived down, for the first time, there was more hair, a single strand of someone else’s, pulled loose from the shore, it was attached to an elastic band, so it wasn’t the water that had pulled it loose, it was a hand, after swimming, when the wet hair tried to hold on but the hand said no and pulled it free with another handful of wet hair as well.
Underwater, there was also a fishing line bobbing, its hook was still attached to a float, holding it up but without commitment. It’ll still catch something, she thought. Do I want it? Should I take it?
Her hand reached for it and she had it and she played it over in her hand, underwater, watched it in the gloom, how it was when it was held down deep, when its float was useless. In the water she would be useless. In the water she deserved an advantage. She would need to eat. Not now, but soon. She would need to drink. She looked behind her, to where she thought the shore was, she was still underwater so there was nothing to see except more of the oily thick water and the sting it left in her eyes. She would be hungry and thirsty and she couldn’t drink salt water and she would sting and her skin would rot, so, surely she needed this small advantage? And then she needed air and she swam up, kicked hard, and gasped and another wave came, and she looked at the hook and it was so small and the float was so weak and she let it go and it was swamped by the next wave that came. She looked at the sky again and tried not to hear the hum of the traffic on the bridge and how it was becoming quieter.
‘I was pretty surprised myself,’ Carla had said that night, half drunk on sex, half asleep. The sea didn’t make any sense to Carla at all, but it made all the sense in the world to Elodie.
There was no other place Elodie should have been at this exact moment. It was a dark night, but not cold.
It was steamy when Carla had left – summer. Carla had laughed a little as she told it. An explosive laugh. Maybe that was all it was. That night she’d told Elodie, she’d had her eyes shut. Elodie knew it wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t been there at all – that this wasn’t a conversa
tion, but a very intimate story Carla was telling herself. ‘If it was just the heat,’ Carla said, ‘and some muscle memory about the beach on a warm day. Imagine if it had all been for that? Imagine if it had all been for that. For a bit of a dip, read wrong in a state of wildness. In a state of thinking something meant more than it did.’ Life was strange, but Carla’s seemed like the strangest. But maybe not. Not when she talked to other people. So the beach it was. The beach. The beach.
Elodie had loved her. Loved her when she first met her. Found it easy to be light around her, dizzy, naïve, kind. But hated the ease with which Carla ran off the event of her adventure. Hated that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Wouldn’t keep it to herself. Was telling Elodie this easily. Carla’s deep, dark secret. The only thing that Elodie wanted to know, and here it was, after one quick fuck – laid out in all its glory. Elodie was angry at herself for not going to Carla first. She wondered if Carla told everyone. If it wasn’t as secret as she thought it was. Then she hated herself because she realised, maybe, just maybe, and she couldn’t be sure of this, that she, Elodie, was actually the only one who didn’t know. Maybe when everyone said ‘when Carla went away’ they all knew exactly what they were talking about.
She went to all of them one by one. Tommy, Kurt. And listening to Tommy and Kurt – infiltrating them, watching them sleep, going through their things, curling them up quietly in her compliance, in her easiness – she had been led to Carla. ‘Carla went away,’ they all said – Tommy, Kurt, Sharona – and the way they said it made her think what they were really saying was ‘Carla got away’. They’d all be underwater soon. But not Elodie. Elodie wasn’t going to wait. Elodie would be there waiting for them. She’d seen Water World. Everything about how everyone was living terrified her. She wouldn’t miss a thing. That’s what Carla showed her. They all did, first Tommy showed her a little, then Kurt showed her nothing, but finally, having got nothing from Kurt, Elodie went to Carla and Carla showed her where to go. The sea would be the only thing left. And they were all from fish.
Carla wasn’t called to it. Elodie had to understand, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like some siren called her in. It was just an instinct. She had been driving once, Carla explained, in the South Island and suddenly she couldn’t remember which town she was in. It wasn’t like the town she was in looked like another town, just that the part of her that usually told her where she was switched itself off for a moment. It was as unusual and as usual as that. Like taking an eyelash out of a glass of milk. Elodie listened, seething. That was the way they all did it, everyone Carla’s age. Her mother did it. Just wandered around. Wandered into things. While she and everyone her age had to measure each thing. There was no space left for mistakes anymore, everything was held in the tightest balance. Elodie was thinking. Her body was swimming and she was thinking, thinking that thinking would stop her from noticing how deep she was, how she was swimming and her body wasn’t used to it and the dog, who was way stronger than her, had drowned. She breathed in a mouthful of water. But hadn’t she beaten the dog? Hadn’t she beaten the dog in a dog fight? Didn’t that mean she could beat the fish?
As she coughed, sank, choked, Elodie could suddenly feel it. Like some old memory of how she used to be millions of years ago. As she struggled for air, some part of her, deep under the part of her brain that said nothing but ‘you need to breathe, you’re in trouble’, at the moment of crisis, that non-verbal, ancient part of her translated the sea as home. She stopped struggling, trod water, and stopped caring that she couldn’t breathe. Breathing would take care of itself. Bobbing still in the tide, not moving at all, still choking, feeling the weight of herself, sinking slightly, she started to take off her clothes because she knew she wouldn’t need them for a long, long time. Clothes weren’t right for her. They didn’t belong to the animal she thought she was. The animal she was becoming, the animal which was uncovering itself under her. She wasn’t choking anymore and the sea lifted and dropped her, still with no more care, but she was quieter in it, anonymous, and it couldn’t find her.
Her trousers caught on her feet. ‘Parts of my feet will never hit the ground again,’ she thought. Then she raised her arm out of the water to take off her sweater and thought, ‘Parts of me have never felt the air.’ She was living in a shell. And what of the other body? The one inside her. She tried to listen deep inside, but listening was pointless. She tried to feel for the liquid and softness that was under her skin. Why so wet? She tried to remember the rocks and how dryness felt.
Her geography was awful. She had no idea where this body of water she was in went to. Where something dropped here would end up. Her mind had let her down. She tried to stop it for a moment, to feel the weight of the fleshy thing that made her thoughts. The fluid that moved around it. The bone that held it in. She shook her head from side to side, quickly, seeing if she could make her brain hit the sides of her skull. Maybe she could shake it out, make it quiet. But it was soft and safe. All of her was. The dry air she breathed in.
She had tried to hold her breath once. Once, when she’d given up on suicide. She’d got too depressed for even that. The effort it would take: running a bath, finding a hose. So she lay in bed late, and tried not to breathe, but you always breathed. The body is stronger than the mind. The mind is a result of the machinery of the brain. The by-product of it running. The extra energy. As soon as she passed out, she would start breathing again. It was like that. Life.
The water was cold. It had held onto the heat of the sun for a while, but it had let it go now. The air was dark, or what her mind called dark. Her pupils dilated without her needing to think it. Thinking did not control her eyes. She could feel the hairs on her arms lifting against the cold and then flattening under the weight of the water. Or what her mind called water. What was the use of that? She said ‘cold’ and everyone heard ‘cold’. What was the use of that? She wanted to be away from her mind. She wanted to be in her body.
Carla had said this was at the bottom of it: that she didn’t trust her mind anymore and she didn’t want to live like that anymore. The sea seemed like the only place she could be away from her mind. If it was hard for her body, then her mind would shut up. Elodie doubted this. It seemed too easy. It sounded like a mind’s answer, not an answer a body would come up with. It was an answer bogged down and trapped for all the years Carla had had to think about it.
Naked, now, Elodie kept swimming away from the land. The water was so close that closeness became a useless word. It wasn’t just in the larger holes – nose, eyes, ears – but between each strand of hair and then, microscopically, inside her skin, in the creases where her fingers bent, and under her nails. A wet face wiped with a wet hand, scraping the water away from eyes, and then a wave came and her eyes were squinting again, closing against the sting, but she was desperate to hold them open, needed them to work – to change. So she could see the next wave, but it was too late and from another direction. It came across, rocked her side to side with a rhythm she couldn’t quite catch. ‘One, two, three,’ she counted. ‘One, two, three.’ And was unsure whether to swim or lie back. I’ll need air, she thought, but what was thought? Did her animal need air? Or her lungs, or her heart? Did her kidneys need air? What was air?
Another wave came and this time wasn’t ready to break, so it rolled her high and then low again, where another wave broke over her – eyes, ears, nose – the back of her throat, burning up high in the wrinkled place where she thought her nostrils ended, but she didn’t look back. It’ll be gentler deeper, she thought. The surface will be smoother. There’ll be nothing for it to break against. She could see it. The swell, like something underneath it was trying to get out, like it could barely hold everything that was under it, pushing. Is that a shoulder? The shoulder of a very large woman. The shoulder and the top of her arm, pushing against the surface. Somehow the giant woman under the sea was not strong enough, but it was never a problem of strength. It was will. ‘Push,’ Elodie shouted. ‘Push!
I’ll show you with my arm. See how easily it comes out of the water and into the air. It slides out, from being held tight to held by nothing. The air. Not even noticing it, my arm.’ The end of her arm and her hand, her watch still on but not working anymore, all its works inundated. No other jewellery. Her arm and her legs below her, treading, strong and tossed in the oily swell. She could still hear the land. Someone was shouting. They had lost someone, it could be their dog. They shouted and shouted and shouted for it, and they got quieter, maybe because the dog was found, maybe because they were walking away, maybe they were running and Elodie was further out now. She wouldn’t look back. She looked forward to helping the big woman, the huge woman break the surface. She must be 50 feet tall, she must be huge. It must be deep where she was. Elodie didn’t know anymore. But this was the place of very big women. Her face stung – her eyes. But not for long. She was sure of that.
