Drift

by Penni Russon

  ‘It’s a gift,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Don’t be scared. Just go and see him.’

  And then there was only darkness. She pressed her eyes closed. Where would she be when the darkness lifted?

  She opened her eyes. The sun glared down fiercely. She was back, same courtyard, but no Phoenix. She blinked. And suddenly, briefly, she was disappointed … But wait. Something was different. Some faint quality to the day. She looked up. The clouds, the hue of the sky, the air. It was hard to define, but she had moved. As she looked down at herself she had the sensation of not being quite right with the world, of being stuck on. Her hand seemed too vivid in the foreground of her vision, while the rest of the world seemed to shift very slightly in and out of focus. It was a dizzyingly familiar sensation.

  ‘Go and see him,’ Phoenix had said. She looked up at the bank of hospital windows. Him? She had stepped through space before, through it, the very fibre of it. Could Phoenix … could he unravel time, send her back to Prospero?

  She pressed herself against the wall and edged out onto the street. She walked round the block to the hospital’s main doors and into the foyer. She drifted, as if in a dream, to the front desk.

  ‘I’m looking for a patient,’ Undine said to the receptionist, who seemed to be having trouble hearing her. Undine repeated the question.

  ‘Name please.’

  ‘Prospero Marine.’

  The woman tapped his name into the computer, her fingers tripping lightly on the keyboard. Undine held her breath.

  The receptionist read the screen. ‘Family only in that ward.’

  Undine breathed out, but her lungs still felt tight, as if they were full of air, full to bursting point. ‘I’m his daughter.’

  But now the receptionist seemed to have forgotten her. She frowned at the air and chewed her pen, then turned to serve someone else.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Undine said. ‘Excuse me.’ But neither the receptionist nor the person she was attending to paid Undine any heed. Undine edged round the counter, her heart fluttering, and looked at the blue screen of the monitor. Next to Prospero’s name was a room number: 803.

  In the lift Undine trembled. She had to push the button several times before it finally illuminated and the lift began to travel upwards. She almost lost heart. The coin Phoenix had tossed her dug into her palm, she was clenching it so tightly in her fist. What would she find? What kind of condition would he be in? She had never seen someone dying. Not even Stephen: it had happened to him so abruptly, so elsewhere, she had been spared the spectacle of it, if not the fact, if not the aftermath.

  She walked down the hallway slowly. It was as though she was living her dream. She knew where she was going before she got there, down the hall, almost to the end. She turned at the open doorway. Nurses milled around their station at the end of the corridor but none of them noticed Undine. An elderly patient sat with a child visitor in the hallway. The child seemed to look right through Undine, as if she were a ghost.

  There he was, sitting by the window. He was so thin, so partial, wearing away to bone. His head was bent drowsily. A fat blowfly buzzed against the glass. Undine walked closer to him. She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came. She realised she was crying, silent tears soaking her cheeks.

  As she stood by him, unable to speak, she reached her hand forward and touched the skin of his face, so lightly she was almost not touching it at all. She didn’t want to disturb him but she wished he would wake, she wished so hard her heart seemed to creak.

  Perhaps it was her creaking heart that woke him, or the light touch on his cheek. His eyes opened. He smiled, unsurprised.

  ‘Undine,’ he said. He licked his lips to moisten them, but his tongue looked dry. ‘You’re back. I’ve been waiting for you …’ He leaned forward a little, squinting his one good eye. ‘I can barely … see you …’

  She was crying in earnest now. Her hand rose to her mouth. The coin that Phoenix had given her slid from her grip and dropped to the floor. She saw it in slow motion, glinting as it spun in the air, then she heard it strike the ground.

  As it fell, Prospero said sadly, ‘You already told me you wouldn’t stay.’

  She felt herself pulled into darkness. ‘No!’ she cried out. But it was too late. She was already gone.

  Phoenix wasn’t thinking about Undine anymore. There he was again, lying in that hospital bed. He seemed to be coming back here more often now. He felt a heavy pressure against his abdomen and chest. At first he thought something was wrong with him, wrong with his body. But then he realised there was another person with him, moving his legs, bending them upwards, pushing his knees towards his chest.

  He tried to open his eyes, but it was as though they were sealed shut. He could hear though, a familiar voice describing the weather outside – a warm, peppery, late summer day. The voice was cheerful enough, but he could hear bravado in it and an immeasurable sadness.

  ‘Hi, Lou,’ he tried to say but, like his eyes, his tongue seemed stuck. He couldn’t make the words come.

  Lift and bend, lift and bend.

  He wasn’t really sure how much his mother could bear. She already bore so much, carried so many disappointments, devastations, in the grooves of her body. The Lou he’d been with over the past few days was nearly fifteen years younger, but she was already careworn. Her life seemed a struggle, it seemed … joyless. She laughed, she smiled, but her world was full of function. She’d raised one daughter to adulthood, and then turned around and there was him, Jasper, barely past infancy. She raised Undine and then lost her. Another loss, and loss would be all she was. She’d be entirely composed of absences, held barely together by skin, bone and hair.

  Lying here now, he was torn between a desire to reveal himself, his presence to her, and wanting to quietly slip away again, remain an absence, but one that didn’t have to think about itself. He wanted to walk down the street, he wanted to visit Liv, drink milky coffee. He craved a mouthful of something sweet and dusky like her blood plum cake.

  Anyway, it wasn’t a choice. Even if he’d wanted to utter, to speak, to placate, his body disobeyed him. Not an eye flicker nor a hand squeeze nor leg flex. Not even a moan. He’d tried it before.

  The darkness cleared. Prospero was gone, even the room. She was in the hospital courtyard again. She whirled around, looking for Phoenix.

  ‘Why did you do that? How could you be so cruel?’ she railed bitterly. But Phoenix was nowhere to be seen. She shook her head and whispered, ‘Why didn’t you tell me how to stay?’

  Her voice cracked on the last word. In her mind Stephen had eclipsed Prospero, had once again been the father in her life, her true father. But as she had grieved for Stephen, now it was Prospero she mourned, the loss of him was suddenly her loss, deep and true. Finally, Undine let herself cry for him, really cry. She’d been holding it in for so long. Undine cried for Prospero, for how brief their time together had been. She cried for his ravaged, dying body – dead now, ashes. She cried for Stephen too, and for herself, for both the fathers she had lost. She cried because she didn’t know how to stay with either of them. Always now, they were close, they were just on the other side of the magic. And always now they were distant, living in worlds she did not belong to, occupying the past.

  She remembered that sorry, small girl she had seen reflected in shop windows and she cried for her too. When had she become that girl? When had she become this girl? She wiped away her tears and struggled to breathe deep regular breaths. She had her own magic, she was strong. If Phoenix could control it, shape it, bend it to his will, then Undine could do the same. Magic was magic … wasn’t it? That’s what Prospero had taught her. It wasn’t spells, potions, tricks. It was power.

  She moved into the centre of the courtyard, raising her face to the hot, fierce sky, and closed her eyes, lifting her arms above her head. The magic surged inside her. She listened to the magic, rising and falling inside her like the ocean. She wanted to release it, all of it, to let it flow outwa
rds into the air. To let it off its leash. She could do it. She could. She could let it out, let it go. She could make a path, make a tunnel, through space, through time, to Prospero, or … or to Stephen. She could go back to a time when Trout loved her. She could go back to a time before magic, change herself, live her life over again.

  She tunnelled through her own bitter heart, pushing the magic out into the world. From the centre of her, a vortex formed, dark, filled with grit and dust and debris.

  ‘I want to go back,’ she said, desperately, telling the magic what she wanted it to do, begging it to bend to her will. ‘I want to go back.’ But Stephen or Prospero? What did she really want?

  The magic swirled euphorically, as if delighted in itself. She could feel its pleasure at being unbound. Then, out of the magic, out of the swirling centre, came a voice: ‘Sister.’ It clawed at her mind, winding around inside her. And then it was all around, a trapped bird, fluttering urgently against the enclosing walls. ‘Sister darkness. We are. Sister of dark, you are. Sister darkness. Siss-ter. I’m waiting. Come closer.’

  ‘Stop it!’ Undine shouted. She grabbed her head, silencing the voice. ‘Shut up! You don’t know me. I’m not your sister, I’m not dark.’ The vortex spun, growing enormous. ‘I just want to go back,’ she pleaded, but go back where or when? What part of her existence was untroubled, unmarked by the magic, by the things about her that made her so wrong and different and difficult? Magic was why she existed. Magic had drawn Lou and Prospero together all those years ago, when they made a girl, when they made Undine.

  The vortex spun, rose up and seemed to look at her with one devilish eye. And then rapidly it descended, back to the earth and it blinked, closing over her, blinking her into nothingness.

  For Phoenix, it was a relief, as always, to feel himself slipping again.

  For a moment he seemed to hover, occupying a space slightly sideways, slightly skewed. As if he were a ghost, haunting himself. It wasn’t a life, his life. Lying there on the bed, intricately wired to machines that breathed for him, fed him, made him a living, growing boy. They could not speak for him, nor make him dance, and he wondered, since that was the case, what was the point of them.

  But then he slid again, even further sideways, and he was back in the courtyard. And this was the point of them, for him anyway. As long as he lived, he lived here. It was more than worth it, more than a fair exchange, his half-life there, for this: the sun on his face, the taste of Liv on his lips, the sensation of juggling – everything in the air at once, as though he could step away and it would keep rotating, soaring through space. It was as though everything that happened here happened twice over, was extra. Here, he was more alive than anyone had ever been.

  He looked around for Undine but she was nowhere to be seen. Glinting on the ground, though, was the silver coin he had tossed her. So she was back anyway. He’d kept his promise to her old man. He hoped she’d been smart enough, been grateful enough, to make the most of it.

  He picked it up and put it in his pocket. The sun was still high in the sky. He grinned. He would go and see Liv. That was where he truly belonged. This time, this space, this afternoon, they were laid out, stretching before him, for him.

  Undine stood over the sleeping boy. The wildness about her, the angry air, had settled and everything, the room she occupied now, was deathly still. She stood at the boy’s feet. This was Phoenix, sleeping, surrounded by machines that seemed to supply him with oxygen and nourishment. In other words, they lived for him. She’d seen him like this before, in her dream. Had she been dreaming? Or had she been passing through, on her way from one world into the other?

  Sitting by his head, staring at his face, was Lou. Older, impossibly so, because she had seen Phoenix and Lou in the same room together only yesterday. Now, Phoenix was still a teenager, a boy, a Peter Pan who never grew up, but Lou was grown old.

  ‘Lou?’ Undine said. ‘Mum?’ But her voice was nothing, even to herself – it didn’t work here, it didn’t even ripple the air. She looked down at her hand, saw light and shade pass through her, and realised she couldn’t even see herself.

  Lou stirred and glanced around uncomfortably. Then she turned back to the boy.

  Why would Lou be here? Why was she so interested, so caught up in Phoenix? Why was the potential loss of him so deeply Lou’s loss that she hunched now, as if part of her own self was dying?

  Undine stepped closer. She was so light that the air resisted her. It was like trying to walk underwater. ‘Phoenix!’ Undine called. ‘Phoenix, I’m here. Is this what you wanted?’

  His face looked so peaceful. It reminded her of … of … Lying here now, with Lou beside him, and Undine here too, just the three of them together, it was … Jasper. Suddenly she knew. How had she not always known? Phoenix was Jasper.

  Lou stood up and bent to kiss his pale cheek. ‘Goodbye, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I have to go. I’ll come back tomorrow.’ She reached over and tucked the bedclothes around his neck.

  A nurse came in as Lou was stuffing a book into her small backpack. ‘All right then?’ the nurse asked. ‘Is he behaving himself today?’

  Lou smiled at the nurse’s weak joke. ‘Sometimes he feels so close, as if he’s just beneath the surface. Listening.’ Lou’s eyes drifted over Phoenix’s – Jasper’s – still face. ‘When he was a little boy, I used to watch him sleep.’

  Undine looked at him again. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Jasper! He was there, so completely there in every feature of Phoenix’s face.

  ‘That’s right, darlin’,’ the nurse was saying. ‘You keep speaking to him, doing those exercises. He can hear you, he knows you’re here. He knows you don’t miss a day.’

  Lou smiled again. She stroked Phoenix’s brow, pulling a lock of his hair over his forehead and watching it spring back. She lifted her bag onto her shoulder.

  As she left the room, she walked straight past Undine. ‘Lou,’ Undine said again. She reached out to touch her. ‘Lou, please. See me.’ But as Undine tried to make contact with Lou’s skin, she heard a terrible disturbance above her.

  Neither the nurse nor Lou paid any heed to the swirling dark vortex that formed rapidly on the room’s ceiling as Phoenix lay sleeping. Undine looked up and gasped as it descended over her, breathing the seething bitter blackness into her lungs, suffocating. She buckled to her knees, and instead of hospital lino she struck dirt, and something else, something jagged that cut her knee. As her vision cleared and the darkness dispelled she saw it was a broken tile. She was back in the rubbish filled courtyard. She breathed again and this time it was air, and as it flooded through her she felt heady relief.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Most times when Lou had gone to visit Prospero in hospital, she went alone, when Jasper was at creche or playing at Maddy’s or with Mim. But sometimes on the weekends, Lou would take him. She always gave him the option of waiting outside in the hallway with a book, but Jasper didn’t mind seeing Prospero. He wasn’t bothered by the evident signs of Prospero’s illness. And in actual fact, though Lou worried that the boy would tire the old man and that the old man would frighten the boy, Prospero seemed slightly cheered by the presence of Jasper, and Jasper by the presence of Prospero – though it was true they were both tired when these visits were over, as if simply being in each other’s company was somehow depleting.

  One bright Saturday after a visit to the markets, Lou had gone to find a vase for flowers and the man and the boy had sat together at the window.

  It was early summer. Phoenix had still been disoriented, unsure why he kept returning to the same place, the same summer, over and over again. He would appear for short spurts, and then he would be catapulted back into that alarmingly still body. Prospero, who spent whole days looking out this window, had seen this occur, the appearance, the disappearance. But on this day Phoenix was just there, as if he’d always been. He was juggling, not magically but cleverly, and it was a joy to watch his effortless talent for keeping thing
s aloft.

  Phoenix, now, remembered being Jasper, watching Phoenix.

  Prospero had leaned forward and squinted down at the juggler. He’d turned to Jasper and said, ‘You’ll bring her to me, won’t you? One day? You’ll bring her back to me?’

  Jasper, mesmerised by the circle of moving objects, and not wanting to talk about Undine anyway, said nothing.

  ‘Promise me though. When you find her. You’ll bring her to me. I just want to see her one last time. Do you promise?’

  And Jasper, who was only four, made a promise, more to make the old man stop leaning so intensely towards him. And afterwards he remembered making it, even though it wasn’t till he was almost grown that he realised what it was exactly that he had agreed to do. And now, years later, Jasper was grown, Jasper was Phoenix, and he had kept the promise he had made to a dying old man.

  Actually, it felt pretty good.

  Undine walked dazedly through the city. Her knee hurt and she was bleeding a little where she’d cut it on the tile. She wanted to sit down and cry about it, it was sore, everything was sore, too bright, too sharp.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Phoenix, about Jasper. The image of Lou’s aged face haunted her. If Jasper was in hospital, all grown up, and Lou was there – where had Undine been? Future Undine, grown even older than Jasper. Did she visit every day? What was wrong with Jasper anyway? Was he sick, injured, dying? Was it the magic, or was it something ordinary, something deeply, horribly banal? Cancer, like Prospero. A car accident, like Stephen.