Underwater Breathing

by Parkin, Cassandra;

  “How about I row for a bit and you –”

  “No!” Mrs Armitage’s bark shocked him into instant stillness, frozen foolishly in the act of rising from his seat. “Sit still. I told you, we’re too low in the water. If you start wandering around you’ll tip it. Sit back down. Slowly.” Jacob sat back down. “That’s better. So. Why did your parents buy a house that gets more worthless with every year that passes?”

  “I think it’s what they could afford,” said Jacob, shocked into honesty. Mrs Armitage laughed.

  “It’s not a bad place to live. Quiet in the winter, but some people prefer that. Not so good for teenagers, of course.” She rested the oars once more. “The tide will carry us in now.”

  “See, Ella?” Jacob smiled encouragingly. Ella rewarded him with a small stretching of her rosebud mouth. “Nearly there.”

  Another few strokes. Another break. How deep was the water now? Jacob willed himself to sit still and wait. Mrs Armitage peered down into the water, frowned, rowed another few strokes.

  “Right, that’ll have to do. Sit tight. Don’t try to get out until I say.” In a slither of neoprene, she slipped over the side and stood thigh-deep in water. “There’s a shelf in the bottom just here, so be careful.” She held Ella as Jacob clambered awkwardly over the side. The water came well above his knees, but when he took a step towards the shore it was just as Mrs Armitage said: a sudden shelf that dropped the water level from his thighs to his calves.

  “There’s a path at the top of the beach,” Mrs Armitage told him. “It takes you along the cliff to the end of your garden.” She turned her gaze towards Ella. “It goes right past my house, so you could use it to visit me, if you liked. Or you can walk back through the village if you prefer. That takes longer.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m sorry your house is going to fall into the sea,” said Ella.

  “Why?”

  “Because then you won’t have your house any more.”

  “Then I’ll live in the sea where I belong,” said Mrs Armitage.

  “Thanks,” Jacob said again, unsure of what else to say. With Ella in his arms, he began the slow wade back to shore. When Ella’s feet touched the sand, he felt her let out a long breath of relief.

  “She can turn into a seal,” Ella said to Jacob.

  “No, she can’t.”

  “I wish I could turn into a seal.” And then, all in a rush, “Last night I was asleep and I thought the house was falling into the sea and we were falling through the water, and there was an old broken boat and some fish were going to eat our eyes and a crab was going to walk over our skulls.”

  “Is that why you were so scared? Oh, Ella.”

  “Is that going to happen one day?”

  “No, of course it isn’t, that was just a nightmare. Why didn’t you go and get Mum?”

  “It’s dark on the way to their room.”

  He sighed. “I tell you what. If you have that dream again, then come and get me. Don’t wake me up or anything,” he added hastily. “But if you’re really scared, you can get in bed with me for a bit. As long as you lie still and don’t wriggle. And you won’t need to be afraid, ever, because we’ll be together.”

  “Even if the sea comes?”

  “Even if the sea comes. I promise. Do you want to wave goodbye?”

  They turned to face the sea and saw that Mrs Armitage was still standing in the water, one hand on her boat, watching them.

  Chapter Three

  Now

  Objectively, there was nothing to distinguish Jacob’s class-room from the others along the corridor, and certainly nothing worth loving. But over the years, its quirks and individualities had grown on him. On the wall behind the radiator there was a vast, grotesque tumour built of discarded chewing gum. He checked on it from time to time, but it never seemed to grow or – thank goodness – shrink. The door to the stationery cupboard swelled in the winter and shrank in the summer, the change in effort needed to get it open marking the change of seasons as surely as the slimy glut of leaves in the playground. When he sat at his desk, the small crack in the bottom-most pane of glass sent in a liquid thread of air to chill his neck and stiffen his shoulders. The slow growth of his affection for these small details reminded him that time was moving forward, not simply around the same loop.

  The bell rang. When he’d been a pupil here, this signalled a riotous scraping of chairs on the floor, an instant rise in the noise level, the resigned shout of the teacher – “Wait, please, until I say you can go…” Today, pupils were called students, and despite what he heard from others, they seemed more civilised in a lot of ways than his own generation had been. They waited for his nod before putting their books away, and sat politely through his recommendations for holiday reading. Whether that would translate into actual reading was another thing, but nonetheless, it was satisfying. He held the door open for them as they left. He enjoyed the chorus of “Bye sir” that fluttered around his ears, but savoured even more the silence that fell like dust in the wake of their feet on the stairs.

  “Jacob, mate. I know it’s the last day but you’re not al-lowed to leave the building yet. One final meeting at four before we’re all free. Soz.” Donna popped her head around the doorway, sleekly pretty and still fizzing with energy even though it was the end of a long school year.

  “That thing about the new progress reports? Yeah, I know. See you there.”

  “I know it’s all bollocks but we’ve got to do it so we might as well do a decent job of it.” Her gaze fell on the open laptop. “You got much to do before you finish?”

  “A few bits.”

  “You got to get straight off after?”

  He nodded.

  “Thought so. Pity, I was just about to ask you to come out with the rest of us for a drink then. Good thing I remembered in time you don’t do fun. Can you believe they made us come in on a Monday? Who plans these things? See you at the meeting.”

  “See you,” he said to the back of her head. She was al-ready gone, whirling away to the next task that required her ferocious energy, her endless commitment. She was a far better teacher than he was, and a far better member of the profession, too. When he sighed and knuckled under to the endless assessment, the endless paperwork, she did all that was asked of her to an impeccable standard, then fought back and challenged and wrote letters and was active in the union. Perhaps Donna and Ella might have –

  As if he’d been stung by a small insect, he took in a sharp breath, rubbed the back of his neck, let his breath go slowly. The pain was always waiting. It would never go away. But he could manage it by approaching it cautiously, by not letting it ever fully wake.

  He sat down at his desk and opened his file. They’d spent the term ineptly dissecting Romeo and Juliet, and now he wasn’t sure he could ever stand to look at it again. Next year it would be Hamlet. Would that be better, or worse? At least there was a skull in it.

  If he brought a skull in for them to look at, would they be willing to engage with it, to probe the delicate architecture with their fingers and marvel at the articulation of the jawbone? Would it help them understand how Hamlet must have felt in that moment, holding the clean bones of a man he had known in life? Or would they just declare the whole thing to be gross and refuse to touch or look at it? He could picture it going either way. Maybe he could borrow one from a museum.

  The meeting about the new progress reports was just under half an hour away. He had to have some thoughts to share; it wasn’t fair to leave all the burden of this hopelessly dull and thankless task to Donna. He opened a spreadsheet that he’d begun to half-heartedly populate with blocks of colour. The only part that caught his attention was the names he’d invented for his pupils. Scattered in among the Amber Stathers and George Rileys were Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Jean Grey, Ororo Munroe. He wondered if Donna would notice. Heather Violet. Was that a made-up name, or a real one? Where had he –

  (“Please, Jacob.” Ella’s hopeful lit
tle face, and the glittery book clutched in her hand. “Just once, and I promise I’ll choose something different next time.”)

  He shook his head and stared up at the ceiling, muttering under his breath don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it. When he looked back at the screen, the words blurred before his eyes. His heart galloped like a frightened cat.

  “It’s okay,” he said, into the empty silence of the class-room. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  (“Or you can choose next time. Or you don’t even have to read to me, you can just sit with me for a little bit.”)

  “Come on, come on, it’s okay, don’t think about it. You’re okay. That’s it. You’re okay.”

  He took a breath in and held it, and began the count. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. She’d dropped his phone in the bath that time, and he had been so angry with her – he couldn’t think about it. Keep counting. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

  She was still with him, still hovering at his elbow and whispering in his ear. He had to get out of here. He closed the lid of his laptop with a shaking hand. Sometimes movement helped, nothing too fast or panicky but a slow controlled orderly sequence of motion that would take him away from the past. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. His hand scrabbled at the power-cable, trying to free it from the socket. After a minute he managed it. He forced his hands to move smoothly. He was not going to drop his laptop. He was not going to drop anything. He was going to be fine. The door of the classroom seemed oddly far away, then suddenly the handle was jabbing into his stomach and he almost hit his head against the frame. He closed his eyes, then opened them. His lungs were burning, but he was free, the empty corridor before him a long reach of possibilities. Forty-five. Forty-six. Forty-seven.

  He deliberately chose the longest possible route to the staffroom to let both time and distance do their work on him, pushing his way through the grease-scented dimness of the dining hall, finally letting himself take deep sweet breaths of dusty, diesely air as he crossed from the new building to the old.

  The pain was leaving him now, ebbing away from his head and his heart. Eyes closed, hand on his stomach, he pictured a fast-running tide, racing down the beach to leave behind smooth pebbles and shining mud, and in the shelter of a clutch of stones, a lone crab hunkered down inside its shell. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that someone had stuck a jam sandwich to the roof of the canopy.

  In the staffroom, Donna was connecting her laptop to the whiteboard, swearing fluently and continuously under her breath as she did so. In a different life he might have dared to ask her out some time. In a different life he might have been a little bit less out of his league in doing so. But this was the life he had. There was nothing he could do to change it.

  “They’re doing that thing with the sandwiches again,” he said, to let her know he was there.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, not the sandwich game back a-fucking-gain. I thought we’d seen the last of that bastard load of nonsense. What’s wrong with our kids? None of the other schools – come on, you bastard –” she jabbed a cable viciously into its port – “have the twatting sandwich game. Why have we got stuck with it? Pissing well right you’re searching for connections, you motherfucker. Aren’t we all?”

  In his secret heart, Jacob rather enjoyed the pointless disgusting anarchy of the sandwich game, whose sole and only goal was to stick a slice of bread to the underside of the canopy between the two buildings, and have it remain there for the longest possible time before it fell to earth again. Where had it come from? As far as anyone could tell, the sandwich game was an original invention, belonging to their school only. How long had it been going on for? Impossible to say. It was only discovered when a festering slice of Warburtons peeled itself off a canopy and landed at the astounded feet of the Head of History. When he looked up, a vast colony of sandwiches clung like anemones to the underside of the roof. How had the headmaster kept a straight face while telling a hall full of enthralled students that sticking food of any sort to any ceilings anywhere in the school would be regarded as an S3-level offence? No one knew, but that announcement had gone down in history as the finest moment of his career.

  “At least they’re original,” he risked, and was rewarded with an answering smile that told him Donna rather enjoyed the sandwich game too.

  “Yeah. At least there’s that. Maybe we can include it in their evaluations. Evidence of original thinking. Not that anyone values original thinking these days. Another term like this one and I swear I’ll quit.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “But if you’re not here to swear at the projector it’ll never work again.”

  Donna laughed. “You could be as sweary as me if you had to be.”

  “I’d miss you.”

  “Well, maybe I’d miss you too. I bet I’d get over it though.” The door opened and a thin trickle of people began to arrive, shoulders heavy with end-of-term tiredness and the knowledge of a mountain of work still to come before they could claim a small slice of the six-week break for their own. “I’ve got the projector working so you can all come in now. Just the meeting left to get through and we’re free.”

  In another life, perhaps he could have been like Donna. He could have thrown himself at the rough bright surface of the world, exposing his whole self to the unwelcoming forces waiting to bruise and pummel him. He could have taken the blows on the chin and kept on fighting, determined to face down the storm. In another life, he might still have been driven on by the glorious, show-off urge to be someone’s hero.

  No, he thought. Not here. You’re not going to do this here. Not now. When you get home. That’s the place where you can think about this. But not here.

  He took his place on the uncomfortable plastic chair, and let the meeting close over his head.

  It was always a relief to get back home to the village and find there actually was still a village. The original estimate of fifty years until Doomsday was proving wildly inaccurate. Last autumn, the final remnants of the coast-road had been taken by the ocean. How long until the first houses began to disappear? Ella was plucking insistently at his elbow now, but he didn’t dare give in to her, not while he was still behind the wheel of the car. He drove slowly along the high street, raising a hand to the people he recognised. A dog sat patiently at the side of the road, waiting for permission from its owner to cross. A slim little cat streaked over the tarmac like a weasel, and the dog’s disapproving gaze reminded him of the way his students could look sometimes at a misbehaving classmate.

  Some days the rough track that led up to his home could look charming, especially when the sun shone and the clouds scudded across the sky and dappled your eyes with shadows. Today was not one of those days. Nonetheless, he felt his shoulders sag a little with relief.

  “It’s just me,” he called to the empty hallway. As always, he was filled with the superstitious fear that there would be no answer. But almost immediately he heard movement, and then Mrs Armitage appeared.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I had a meeting that ran over.”

  “I’m not asking you to apologise, you fool.”

  “Who’s there?” His father’s voice, stretched tight and anxious. Jacob felt his heart drop towards his stomach. “Who is it?”

  He followed Mrs Armitage into the living-room, where his father stood at the window. He’d been watching the apple tree – dripping with half-grown fruit and oblivious to its peril – that now marked the last outpost between their house and the waiting water, but Jacob’s arrival had jolted him.

  “It’s just me, Dad.”

  “Thank God for that.” His father looked him up and down. “You’re late, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t mean to be.”

  “I was starting to worry.”

  “I didn’t think.” His father raised his eyebrows and looked at him sternly, but Jacob was well-practi
sed at deflecting these moments and knew he didn’t need to panic, not yet. “How about you? Have you been busy?”

  “Not so bad. You look tired, though.”

  “It’s just been a long day.”

  “They work you too bloody hard up at that school. It’s a disgrace.” His father’s hand came up towards him and he tried not to flinch, but it came to rest against his cheek. “Don’t you let them do it to you, you hear me? You’ve got to find time to relax as well.”

  He put his own hand over his father’s, feeling the papery warmth of his skin. Mrs Armitage must be in the kitchen. He could hear the small sounds of someone moving around. His father heard them too. Instantly he was on the alert.

  “Is there someone in the house? Can you hear someone?”

  “Dad, it’s fine, I promise. It’s just Mrs Armitage.”

  “Who?”

  “You remember, Dad. Mrs Armitage. She comes in to help look after –” he caught himself in time – “you know, to look after us.”

  His father shook his head impatiently. “No, she’s gone, she left earlier, she always goes when you get home. Listen!” He held up a hand. “That was footsteps – there’s someone coming to the door – get back.”

  “Mr Winter?” Mrs Armitage’s voice was very clear, very calm. “It’s Mrs Armitage. I’m outside the living-room door and I’m going to come in now. There’s no one with me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Mrs Armitage opened the door, slowly and carefully, and as wide as it would go.

  “Very sure. Do you see? It’s just me. I’m leaving now. It’s the summer holidays so you won’t see me for a while.”