by Pip Adam
She couldn’t summon the land, or anything from it. At first, looking back seemed like it would be dangerous, might open a gap for doubt to come in. And then it seemed there was so much for her attention in the moment that there was no risk of it. No. It wasn’t her mind Elodie was escaping from. She wasn’t running from anything. She was running to it. To the new way. The new animal they would all need to be. All she had to do now was stay alive. And not even that. All she had to do for now was come to the surface again. Every time she was swamped she needed to come to the surface again. One time. And then the next time. Doug was dead. Doug had sunk. Elodie needed to not sink.
She was freezing now, but it would get colder. She was making slow progress – maybe she was making no progress. But Elodie didn’t need to worry about progress anymore. All she needed to think about was coming to the surface. Coming to the surface would change her to what she needed to be. The sea knew what it needed her to be.
The water was salty. It bit at her but it held her up too. That was the thing. That was why she mustn’t escape from her mind. Her mind was her friend. Look at what had happened to Doug. Doug had sunk. She was a different type of animal and liquid thing. A thing that had been shaped by just getting up one more time. There was an animal deep inside her, growing at the same time as the animal Elodie dragged around her terrestrial life. While she wasn’t paying attention, an animal had been getting ready for the water and then she’d met Carla. And that animal – the wet one – had heard what Carla said. It had stirred to it, and remembered.
She could feel something changing in the sky. Not a lightening in colour but in weight, lifting up above her. She would need to look back. She needed to be far enough away from the coast. When the sun came up she was pretty sure she would still be invisible but she needed to be sure. She would need to turn around. Ahead of her was Rangitoto but she couldn’t gauge where she was and how far she’d come without looking back. So she looked back for the first time, and it was fine. She wasn’t as far as she wanted, but she was too far out to go back.
Looking in front of herself now, then to her right and left, she worked out which way she needed to go. She needed to get out of the harbour. She began to swim. Freestyle, one stroke, then the next, then she’d breathe. Most of the time when she turned her head the water would meet it. So she quickly turned to the other side, gasping, coughing, but she didn’t need to stop anymore. She could feel her skin puckering, changing, to improve her grip. She would need it when she was hungry, when she decided it was time to fish. Her body knew what to do, it had held on to what it needed for centuries – hundreds of millions of years. The only sting was from the cold, but she could feel her hands weathering. And her arms kept moving. For a rest, she swam underwater for a while. Then came to the surface to breathe and it seemed better. She could use her arms and her legs underwater and the swell was so much less. She didn’t have to be in the double world, part dry, part gravity, part sea. She felt like underwater she could move further and the breathing became a natural part of the stroke. Occasionally when she came to the surface she could hear gulls. They screamed at her. But she knew it wasn’t her. They were just everywhere getting on with their business. She wasn’t special out here. That was the mistake humans always made, they thought they were special, but out here she was hopeless. The sun would come up soon, and then she would have that to contend with.
She was thirsty, but it would rain again. She didn’t need to think about that. All she needed to think about was under water, surface to breath. Under water, surface to breath. She wanted to be out of the harbour before lunchtime. Elodie hit herself in the head. She needed to stop doing that. Time was over and the sun wasn’t even up yet. It could be earlier than she thought. Then one more stroke, and there was an emptying out of below and her stomach dropped like it did when she was on a swing as a child. The water was deeper. All thoughts about how and when and which direction left her for this one true realisation. She was in a channel, perhaps. She took a deep breath and let herself sink, eyes open. Her eyes couldn’t see much but they could feel the change, the water was colder, there was more depth underneath her. She looked down. There was only blackness with the odd hint of movement. Her hair told her she was moving, being carried along. It wrapped around her face and then worked its way free. It wasn’t her that was moving, it was the water around her. She was sure it was going out to sea, where she was going. Where she wanted to go. Then she came out the other side of the deep channel and there was another drag. The land seemed to attract the water and she would be in between land for a while yet. She needed to navigate her way out, sure that the deep held the key. On the surface she wiped her face, legs keeping her above water, always moving now, unless she was on her back. Her legs wouldn’t rest for long again. Wouldn’t sit or lie – perhaps on her back. Perhaps she could float on her back. Busy. Busy. Busy. She couldn’t think herself alive. There was no survival in that.
She was too far from shore to get any real bearing but she was sure, now. The lights of Devonport. Tommy’s parents asleep in their large bedroom, curtains open so they could see the sun come up. Their sun. A sunrise only they could see. Boats moored close by.
Elodie would need to decide again soon. Would she take a boat? She knew she had a long way to go. Knew her body wasn’t ready, wasn’t able to make it. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live, but live aquatically. Like this, primitive, back to the water so that as the ocean levels rose she would find a new home in them. A boat would help. But there was something about the boat that troubled her. It would be easier to begin with, but that half in, half out life wouldn’t do in the long run. She needed to be in the water, of the water. She wasn’t sure she could make it work on the water. All of a sudden she would be worried about being forced into the water. That the boat would fail somehow. But at the moment she was there – where the failing boat would leave her – and there was no fear of it. There was fear of what would happen later in the water, of what was in the water, but the fear of being in the water was gone and it seemed like the biggest fear, the one that had held her back for all this time. After Carla told her.
After she knew this was a way, she’d gone to a swimming pool, thinking she would get in shape, get ready, but it terrified her. As soon as she realised she couldn’t reach the bottom of the pool she’d thought of the edge of the pool and panicked and sucked for air before her head was turned and found only water and gasped and then tried to stand up and couldn’t and that was why she didn’t want a boat. She was moving faster. In the channel, she could take time to lie back and rest, watch the sky go by, and she felt happy.
On a boat she would always think about turning back. On a boat she wouldn’t fully surrender. On a boat she would still be an out-of-the-water thing – terrestrial. But where she was now, the gulls sounded different in her ears, she was where she was most scared of being and nothing could touch her. Everything could touch her, but only if it had gills, slimy skin, or teeth, only these things could touch her, and the fishing boats and helicopters. But she knew that.
And now finally she realised she couldn’t go back. The current had her. Lying on her back, she was being pulled out to sea. Out of the corner of her eye she saw North Head and felt herself slip through the points of land that pushed into the sea. As if they were the jaws of a bird or a large reptile, she felt herself come out of them, free from the stomach, like they were spitting her out into the large, cold water. Then her body turned a corner and she was in between Rangitoto and the North Shore beaches. Her ears were underwater, she let her arms fall below her, she kicked occasionally but only to stop her legs from sinking. What she heard was the water but in it she imagined what she couldn’t hear. Noises from houses. Alarms going off. The sunrise was still so far away. The noise of the people sleeping. She still pictured them.
She didn’t understand the new creatures she lived with. She was frightened. She wasn’t animal enough. They were everywhere, she suspected. Her heart would
race every now and then when she thought of them. Pictured them far below the greens. Everything felt safe when it was black, but she knew they didn’t sleep. They didn’t care about the change in light. They lived so far down, some of them, that light wouldn’t even touch them. They felt changes in the tide, not changes in the light.
Her eyes were useless here. Her eyes had been so important, her eyes had fed her and clothed her and given her the self-respect she needed to understand how bad it all was. Her eyes chose the right tone of base and the right shade of lip. They would be useless here. She would need her ears. She would need her skin to tell her how deep she was, which way the current flowed. And it flowed.
As the sun came up she was coming out the other side of Rangitoto. The dawn bloomed pink, the water lightened and lapped. There was a choppy wind that woke up the surface, spitting it into whites in some places. Elodie was cold, deep inside. Her blood had given up on her extremities and had gone deep inside her, pooling around her organs, but it was no use, she was freezing. It felt different from how she had expected it would. When she first came into the water it was sharp, like the pricking of hundreds of tiny sharp things. Then it had dulled to an ache. Her joints shrinking and hardening into a vice grip which hummed and shouted out if she stopped moving. Now it was over. She would never be warm again. She was shivering. Her brain was changing, making her shake. Her breathing, even her deepest gasps were shallow, but she stayed awake. Her body was tired but she knew if she just kept swimming, she would keep swimming. She went below the surface, looked around. A school of fish swam close by, could they not hear her shudder? It was like her body was shouting out to them, ‘Over here.’ ‘Cold human over here.’ ‘Meat, in desperate shape.’ But, they swam past, on their way, in their work. If she just kept swimming too.
She should have got fatter. She could see that now as she looked around the water. Thought of the bigger mammals. She was fat, but she should have eaten more. Maybe she needed to be older. She should have eaten more. But the time for that was over. She shuddered as she came to the surface and couldn’t remember for a second which way she was going. Then she went down again. Confusion. Confusion was going to get her. There was a piece of her calling out to the rest of her, from far away. Millennia back. ‘She was doing all she could now.’ That was what this part of her wanted to say from under all the rest of her brain, from underneath millions of years of evolution.
She was moving to warmer water. This was why she needed to be so cold. Being this cold, she would feel the slightest change in temperature. She would feel it and she would go towards it. There was seaweed underwater that waved her on. Her hair would keep her warmer. It would keep growing, the hair on her head, she could wrap it round her throat. Keep that part of her warm. So the blood going to her brain would be warmer. Somehow her core was heating up. The shivering would come and go, her old brain said. But she wouldn’t die, because she knew how to be here. At least, part of her did. It would be fine. Elodie swam on, stronger. She could feel north in her heart, feel it pulling her towards warmer water.
She was cold for a reason. It had always been for a reason. In the city, on land, it hadn’t seemed that way. When she was upright she would go inside, put a jacket on, pull it over the front of her. Her heart, her liver, her lungs – parts of her that just ticked over as she moved around. Parts of her that were never in danger. Now they screamed for attention. There were no thoughts, only the gasping for breath and the way her heart pounded just inside her ribcage, trying to fibrillate itself over the shaking, trying to regain order. Now soft. Trying to force every other organ into sleep, pulling blood from other parts – it was a bully. It tried to run the show with its pulse, pulse. It withdrew support and harped on. Elodie’s arms kept pounding on, her legs were slower but her arms kept rotating in their joints, pulling her through the water, holding her above it. Her body was heavier than water. This was what she had to overcome. If she wasn’t able to get to the air, everything else wouldn’t matter. The lungs told the heart that. They swelled big and wide, taking up more and more room. Falling into a rhythm. Elodie drew deeper and deeper breaths. The oxygen pushed the blood and the blood kept her arms wheeling and her head turning for more air. The wind had picked up. She hadn’t seen a boat for a long time. She pushed her way through a flock of gulls bobbing on the surface. They called out at her, loud red beaks, flapping wings, and when she didn’t react they settled again. Some flew just above her, dived at her arms, then her head. Sharp claws caught in her hair. Without stopping her kick she swiped at them with one hand. The gull worked its way free. Barked at Elodie to call herself out, to make the noise that told them what she was. She had no voice – no noise that needed to be made here. She dived down and swam deep, eyes open. Through green and murk and more fish splitting their school for her to swim through. She would never be alone again. There was so much of everything, here.
The dust that floated past her was teeming with small geometrics that expanded and contracted in the tide then were eaten by something bigger. She opened her mouth and let some of them in, swallowing the salt water with force, pushing it into her stomach. When it rained she would need to drink. She could feel she was sweating, her salt was leaking out into the salt water. She was made of salt. The changes were so small, she just needed to creep herself up slightly on the pH scale, then she could drink salt water. She didn’t need to worry about that. There were some things she could change and some things she couldn’t and she knew that, realised she had always known that. Some things could change in a lifetime, some things couldn’t. There were easier ways to kill herself, so she knew it wasn’t about that. She was hungry.
She dived, still moving forward, still moving towards the warmer water, still going in the right direction. She wouldn’t falter. Didn’t need to. Wouldn’t be still, wouldn’t stop. Her eyes stung but were becoming better underwater. She looked around and down for the first time. The water was deep. The light only got so far. There were animals all around her. Small, but swimming together so they looked large. Was she a hunter? They came close sometimes. If she floated very still, they came very close. But she wasn’t fast enough. Maybe she would be one day, but right now she was sure she wouldn’t be fast enough. One school in particular seemed to be swimming with her and her gut told her it was good to keep them close, not chase them away, for later, for a time when she was fast enough. But she was hungry now. She opened her mouth again. The water was dusty. She closed her teeth on each other to form a grille and forced the water out of them and then in again, swallowing when her mouth was at its emptiest. People ate dirt. She’d seen it. Some people didn’t stop eating, ate everything they wanted, and some people ate dirt. The ones that ate dirt got small and their stomachs swelled but she wouldn’t eat dirt for long. There were some living things in the water, and she could move and eat like this. She could swim and eat all day like this and that would be enough.
The cold was gone now. She knew it was still there but it wasn’t distracting like it had been. The shiver was part of her rhythm and her teeth, now engaged in sifting food, didn’t chatter anymore. Slowly, everything she’d had to try hard at, to concentrate on, was becoming automatic. The wrong and unusual was becoming normal. Like it did for the people who ate dirt. Like the people who safety-pin their eyelids open so they can keep their jobs in the factories. Like the people circled by drones. Everyone gets through. There’s an animal in all of them that wants to survive. Elodie could feel hers. All the other things were stripping away, the standing upright, the wearing clothes, the work – her arm swung past her ear, this was the real work. What they were made for, really. The new comfort. The machinery of the body. The hump, hump, hump of the arm, the moment. This was how the real work was. So little mattered, but what did matter mattered a lot.
The sun was high in the sky. She stopped for a moment above the water to look around. Her eyes were worse out of the water now, but there was nothing around her. She had left land at last. For a moment the
fear in her fought upwards, clawing to get out of her stomach, tapping loudly, trying to get a line to her brain. Be afraid, it tapped out, in a code from the land. For fuck’s sake. But even it knew it was too late, and softened. There was no way she would get back to land.
Elodie breathed out, let herself sink upright, her feet falling, knees over ankles, hips over knees, ribcage, neck – an extension of her spine, head. Arms falling gently beside her. She sank but stopped when the water hit her forehead, just above her eyebrows. This was how heavy she was, slightly lighter than water. But it was absolutely useless. She couldn’t sleep like this. But she wasn’t tired. The cold energised her, the movement. She felt like the dust in the sea had fed her. Her skin had stopped stinging, or had it swelled so much and stung so high that it had pushed over into another sensation? She wasn’t sure she could read pain anymore. Like time and cold had no meaning anymore. As she bobbed upright, she looked at her hands. They were bloated and wrinkled and it was hard to bend them. The skin was cracking open at her knuckles. It excited her to see her blood. She sucked at it, it was warm and tasted of iron.
If she got very hungry she could eat one of her fingers. She didn’t need all of them. Or her toes. They were useless. A flat foot would be better for kicking. There would be more power in a foot without toes. But she wasn’t hungry. The old part of her that worried about later, that tried to plan, it was fusing with the new part of her. Any time she thought about the future she came up with the strangest ideas. She was sure she could breathe the sea. She would be fine if she sank. It would be slow and would drift away. But she wasn’t tired. Something solid brushed past her leg. Was this it? ‘Is that you?’ she called out underwater. ‘The thing to kill me? My food chain mother?’ It was large, then small, then large again, and close and then far, then it swam past her again. It wasn’t hungry, either. Its eyes were shining slightly. She watched it again, and again it came close. Then she realised they were looking at each other. Neither really recognising the other.
