by Pip Adam
She climbed it again. She was unafraid, all of a sudden, which was dangerous. She climbed over the rail and started to look frantically, knowing the comfort of the boat would catch up with her again. She shifted the body that was on the bridge, rolled it so that more of it fell apart. And there it was. There was no reason for a wetsuit to be on a fishing boat. She was sure it was a fishing boat, now that her brain was trying to take over again, trying to be boss. No reason at all, but here it was. Too big for her. She grabbed a filleting knife from the belt of the body and cut the legs of the wetsuit short. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t need her feet. If it came to that. The octopus didn’t have feet – or the shark, the fish – she would probably swim better without them. And her hands? She would need her hands, she couldn’t rip up the fish without her fingers. She couldn’t catch what the other animals left behind and she was pretty sure the dirt floating past wouldn’t keep her alive. She needed her hands to climb onto the place when she got there, to build, but there was nothing that could be done about that. She listed the things she needed: she needed her legs and her arms and her hands and the trunk, where all of her organs nested. She needed her head, it held her mouth and her ears and her nose. The brain she needed sat underneath the other brain in her head. She needed the skin on her head, and the skin on her hands. The wetsuit wouldn’t help with that but she could wash her face regularly when it rained, maybe her hands as well.
She stopped. She needed it to rain. If she got into the wetsuit wet in salt as she was, it would all be useless. It would be like being in a skin-dissolving container. She looked at the sky. She’d have to wait. She looked towards the horizon. She’d have to wait. She didn’t understand how the clouds worked but she needed fresh water to shower in.
Did she? Was she fooling herself? I’ll just stay until it rains. I’ll just stay until I dry. I’ll just stay. She was sure she needed to get rid of the salt water. Pretty sure. But she’d been sure before. Sure Carla would come with her. Sure the dog could swim. Sure. Sure. Sure. She was her own worst enemy. No one lied to her like she did. The deceiver, she thought. But was this deceit? Did she not actually belong on the boat? Was she, in fact, not the woman who could do this? She would have to wait until it rained.
She knelt on the deck, looking around at every sound that came. Hugging the wetsuit to herself. Perched, so she didn’t get comfortable. Like an anorexic. The bodies lying around her. Not cold. Beyond cold, but drying out. Drying out. The wind. The air was so dry. She had never noticed it before. She stood and looked out to the east again and then she saw it. A slow, huge mass of fog moved towards her and the boat. It could be rain but it was so close to the sea. She put her hand over her eyes. The sun was begging for a turn but the sky was still overcast. The mass moved so slowly but directly towards the rocking and the creak of the wooden boat. It was moving faster now. And then she was wet. Soaked, and completely inside it. Everywhere she looked was grey. The water tasted fresh. She was soaking. The fog rolled on, hitting everything in its path, and then it was gone. She watched it as it went. She pulled a T-shirt off the body on starboard side and rubbed away the fresh water. The T-shirt was wet too but it still took some of the water off her. Then began the struggle to get her wet body into the wetsuit. When she pulled it up her legs it took off another layer of skin in places. She just about dislocated her shoulder reaching back into it. Her arm was at an impossible angle, like the wing of a bird. Waving around trying to catch the hole in the wetsuit where the arm went. She stopped, exhausted. Checking again with herself if she needed the wetsuit.
She played with the thick rubber. This was her skin now. The boundary between her insides and the outside where everything lived and breathed. If her skin went away completely, then this was her new skin – this is what would hold her insides in and keep the outsides out.
She pulled her arm back again, further this time, twisted her neck right from where it started halfway down her spine, saw the armhole and threaded her hand, then wrist, forearm, elbow, bicep, until her armpit came to rest in the sleeve opening. It pushed on her. It wasn’t as big as she’d thought it was – or maybe she was bigger in comparison. It had been taller than her but now it was on, it was tight. It compressed her back into herself. All the open sores were contained now. Nothing oozed out anywhere except the opening on her head where she had run into the boat – this still bled slowly. She could piss in the suit but would have to work out something when she needed a shit. It would probably be all right. Everything had gone to liquid, the salt ran through her.
Remembering liquid, she bent to the deck of the boat and licked some of the condensation the fog had left. She looked at the bodies again as she lapped up the water that sat in drops on the deck. Everything too still to break the surface tension and free the fresh water to puddle.
There was nothing useful left in the bodies. All nutrition, all liquid had gone. The birds wouldn’t touch them and she shouldn’t either. Eating a dead one of yourself seemed wrong. She licked the deck again, shifting her gaze to a centimetre in front of her nose.
Perhaps she should wait until it rained properly. Get her strength back. Quench her thirst. People died of thirst long before they starved to death, long before the elements got to them. She could be warm. She had conquered the cold but she needed water. Fresh water. She looked out over the sea that stretched out in all directions. So much useless water. She sat down. She had the wetsuit on both her legs and one arm. The free arm soaked in the air, knowing it would be the last time until Elodie reached the island. Until she lay on that, walked on that, felt dry in its air. Maybe she was too tired to go on. Maybe she should stay on the boat, throw the bodies overboard, and then sail it to a shore somewhere. A refugee in a wetsuit. She’d be given one call and she’d call the embassy. That’s what people did in these situations. Or she’d call Carla. Carla would organise it all. Or maybe Elodie would ring Tommy, because Tommy had the money to sort it out. She looked at the sky.
The fog had passed. She could see it if she craned her neck, lifted herself at her core. She should stay on the boat. She stood and looked over the rail. The octopus was gone. She couldn’t see it anywhere. She was alone. Finally. She stretched her last arm back and it slid through the wetsuit sleeve. She bent, rounded her body like she was ashamed, and fitted the pin of the zip into its box, struggling slightly with her swollen, messy hands but getting there and pulling the zip up. Straightening again to standing as the zip did up. There was no reason for the wetsuit to be on the fishing boat, but it was, and now it was on her. She didn’t believe in anything but fate and natural selection. Species that survived took advantage of things. She wasn’t going to be tricked into wondering what it meant that the wetsuit was there. She wouldn’t be lulled into a false sense that something was looking after her. The only thing that looked at her was the dispassionate sky and it looked at everything with the same gaze. If something could be looking after her, then it could be looking after the octopus and the water that wanted more than anything to drown her and drop her to the bottom of the sea, to increase its height by the tiny displacement of the space her body would take up.
There was nothing there but the wetsuit. Nothing. She spat at the boat, to get the foul taste of the air out of her mouth. ‘Fuck you,’ she said to the bodies, to the boat, to herself, and dived into the sea again. She noticed straight away that the wetsuit gave her more buoyancy, and she didn’t miss the octopus at all. Her face was still open to the water so she could still feel the warmth that was miles away. Distance had no meaning. Not even the word, distance – it sounded strange in her head. She didn’t need to think anymore, she was in the water now. The quiet, vast sea. As she dived under, her ears stopped and all she had was the sound water makes as you swim past it. She swam through a large pile of seaweed that had come free from the bottom. It would grow again. She knew that. Someone had told her. It was still alive even though it had been pulled out.
She knew they were in a bad shape. She had to se
e the island for herself. It had a mystical quality – when she asked other people about it, people who should have known, there was real confusion. So many different versions. Some said it was there, others said it wasn’t true at all. Carla was the only person she knew who had been there and she’d said it was real, she’d said it was there. She’d said it was huge; it’s ours, she told Elodie, we need to own it. Elodie and Carla were the only ones in the room when she said it. That’s what she’d meant by ‘we’, she’d meant it belonged to Elodie and Carla. No one else. It was theirs. But Elodie couldn’t wait for Carla. Carla had promised Duey she would stay, probably. Carla was comfortable. Making money, paying rent, buying things, working – adding to it all. So Elodie would go by herself. Get the place ready for everyone. Be its first architect, its first city council. Someone had to do it, but it wasn’t a chore. She wanted to go. Her arms swung over her head. None of it mattered, just the swinging. Not the getting there, just the splash, splash, splash, breathe.
But it was better to dive and then surface – like a dolphin or a whale. She’d seen them on YouTube. Seen them coming to the surface, blowing hard, getting rid of the water away from the holes in their heads that they breathed through. She did it now as she came to the surface. Blew hard out her nose, then spat out her mouth and breathed in, and then they would dive again and she dived again. Not as deep as she had been. The wetsuit made her float more, she had to kick hard to get down as deep as before. Kick very hard. So she stayed close to the surface. Occasionally the birds would come back again. Ducking at her. One bit at her head with its beak as she was swimming. She was travelling very high in the water and it wouldn’t do. The clouds were clearing and the sun was coming out. She could feel it warm on her head and her shoulders. Her arms weren’t out of the water long enough for them to get warm. She slowed every now and then. She would need to eat again soon.
That was her head. Her body wasn’t hungry at all. She needed far less than she thought. Her mind wanted food, warmth – more than what she needed. The whole of Auckland relied on it. More food. More clothes. Clothes were the worst. Food was shat out when it was done but clothes, they changed just because it was time to change, just because the season was over, and then they lay there, going nowhere, clogging up the world. Everyone relied on it. Tommy, Kurt. Elodie.
Elodie relied on it. There was money all around Elodie. Elodie’s father was a politician. He’d been a rich banker before he became a politician. People wondered why her father had left banking for politics. People had theories, most of them involved love of power. But she suspected her father liked being well known. He loved being liked and he was very well liked. People wanted what he had. He was a smart man. A self-made man. His mother had been a refugee. She’d come a long way. Not by sea. Probably by sea. Elodie never knew her grandmother, or not that earlier version of her. Elodie knew the perfectly tailored, dark version of her grandmother. The one who wore soft wool suit jackets, her hair black and long, while everyone else’s grandmothers had theirs short, set and tidy. Her grandmother set her hair, too, but in heated rollers. Her hair fell past her shoulders. Elodie’s mother wore her hair long as well, but it was gentile-thin and a clean, cool brown, so much lighter than her grandmother’s. Elodie’s grandmother would have had opinions about Elodie’s mother’s hair.
Elodie kept her hair blond for years. Maybe that was where it started – the pulling away, the sideways glance of distaste. She was never photographed with her father. Even though he insisted. She’d say, ‘You don’t want that.’ And if he pushed further, she’d lightheartedly brush it off. ‘Tell them there is no daughter. Tell them I’m dead.’ And she’d peck her father on the cheek and walk out the door. There was money all around her. A better woman would have tried to do it by herself. But she wasn’t that better woman. Hadn’t been. She’d asked and asked and was given to and given to. And then pretended like she hadn’t. That was the worst thing about her. It probably wasn’t the worst thing about her, but one of the awful things about her was that she hated Tommy. Hated him. But their fathers went to Honolulu together. Sailed in the harbour in the summer. She was exactly the same as him. She would become a politician too. When she got to the island, when the others got there, she would be the prime minister. No one expected it from her, but she’d have it. She’d smiled her way into the background of every important conversation. Got Tommy to tell her Carla had got away. Got Carla to tell her where she went. Got Doug to show her how to get there.
That was her superpower. Making herself invisible and unimportant. She’d gone to the same expensive private school as Tommy’s sister, but in the glare of her kindness and joy, he’d forgotten. No one remembered where she was from. That was why she didn’t want to be photographed with her father.
Her hair was dark now – it had been for months. No one noticed. It was long. It swam around her head. In front of her eyes, often. Sometimes when she went to the surface it would almost choke her. It was brittle now when it was in the air. In the water it swam around her like seaweed, but in the open air, when she stopped or came up for a breath she could feel it swelling and hardening to breaking. Nothing changed in her outlook – water, sky – but as she got used to it she noticed it changing, so she came up often to rest, to see what it was up to. In the nights she began to distinguish the multitude of shades of dark, to hear the sea sleeping, to know exactly when the dawn was about to break. During the days she felt the way the sea warmed slightly on the surface, and it told her how much longer the sun would be up.
It would be good if all her hair broke off. None of the fish around her had hair. Hair was for the land. Whiskers, maybe, or spines, but hair was useless in the water. It was keeping her cold, not warm, and she had no feeling in it. No control over where it went, how far it reached out. Cats’ whiskers were as wide as the widest part of them. That’s how whiskers worked. The shark was smooth. Octopuses could fly. Fish that swam in schools past her were rough with scales one way but smooth if they went forward. The crabs stayed low, the jellyfish flugged. She was wrong in the water. But she deserved it. It was worth it. All things told, she was wrong on the land as well. They had to build houses and cars and didn’t walk and wouldn’t eat what was in the ground. They had to make changes there, too. Needed technology so badly, so why not be here? Away from all that. Food-like substances. That’s what they ate.
Food was just a chemical. Her mind was hungry but her body was strong. She was living off what the octopus didn’t want. The dirt she sifted through her teeth. She needed so much less than her mind told her. She hadn’t looked at a cellphone since she’d left hers on the street. She had no shoes, no clothes. She’d taken the wetsuit but ... but ... she had no excuse for the wetsuit except she did not want to die, wanted her skin to stay on her body. She’d found the wetsuit and ripped it from the ghost boat and put it on, but she’d found it. Her mind tried to justify it but it didn’t need justification. The wetsuit was on her and was hers. It had been there and she had had the means on that day, at that time, to take it, and it was hers now. Wasn’t that how things worked? Wasn’t that the way the whole system was placed? If you had the means, you could have it. If you didn’t have the means, you had to change things around you until you did have the means. That was how it worked. That was what her father stood for, and her mother. Her grandmother was less sure, had seen what happened when people with the means took things.
Elodie swam, arm over arm. If she ever told this story to anyone that is what it would be: I swam arm over arm. I swam for a long way.
The water changed. It was so much deeper than it had been. She could feel the pull of the deep and when she looked down she could see the darkness was so dark. Her splashing was tiny. Things came past and past. Occasionally she thought she was there but she wasn’t. She would swim, arm over arm, without much interruption. Day. Night. Day. Night.
She was getting faster and the darkness the wetsuit gave her gave her a new presence in the water. She could lie in the water
very still and the fish would come close. Not all of them, just the ones on the outsides of the schools. Were they slower than the others? She could catch them. In her hands. Her peeling, weeping hands. She did need them, but then she snapped her head forward and caught a fish with her mouth. Were they sick? Is that why they were at the edge? Is that why they trusted her? Had they seen a human before? Did it even matter?
Her ears became accustomed to the water. She heard better now. If the water moved rapidly enough past her nose she could smell it. In the air the insides of her nose stung. She relied less and less on her eyes. There was really no need for them. Her face, so ruined now by all the elements, felt everything. Even the parts of her which were covered in the thick wetsuit could gauge pressure so much better. She could feel when there were fish close. Through all the swell. She was reading the movement in the water better than any of her other senses. When the octopus came back he didn’t surprise her, she could feel him coming well before she could see him. She wasn’t so concerned now with which way was up. She had felt quite sick to begin with, the not being able to find down. The loss of down. The complete lack of any geography. No hills. Nothing but horizon. Nothing but nothing. And even that was changing. She was starting to understand the travel of the sun, the play of the wind. Even the waves started to get some semblance of a shape, a ground. A map. There was no pattern to it. It wasn’t like that, but they were distinct. Each one different in size but similar in shape. She was able to adapt her swimming rhythm to each variety. Some she could swim under. Others were better to stay on the top of. Some swamped her regardless, but she wasn’t as worried about them as she had been. She was becoming part of the sea again. Carla hadn’t said that would happen, but she had all but insinuated it. Carla was gone now, though, and Tommy, and Elodie was here in the sea and swimming to find them all a new home.
