This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Then the blood came back.

  Well, I told you! said her mother.

  You did not!

  You knew you’d get a period every month. It’s like the full moon.

  I didn’t.

  Then I’m sorry. You do now.

  I still can’t go in the water?

  There’s a good girl.

  Why don’t you have them?

  I do, she said. All women do.

  Well? – what about? – babies?

  Her mother threw up her hands. God help me, she said. One will have to do.

  So there is a curse.

  Her mother shook her head. It’s just a manner of speaking. It’s something you keep to yourself. Bodily functions.

  What was it, anyway, if not a curse, this clenching and queasiness that came over her as the blood drained, freely at first, then in a slow leak that turned her pads black and gave off a ripe stink no baby powder could hide, whatever her mother said, the stink she had smelt before on summer afternoons in school with the flies busy in the window panes. As if keeping it to yourself meant that no one could tell! Though, as far as she knew, no one in the class knew who else had a period and was keeping it to herself. She scratched, she was sour with sweat all over. Not that she wanted a bath in her own soapy water and blood – why not a shower though? Or a swim, she pleaded, was it in case sharks could smell the blood? They didn’t the first time!

  You heard.

  Do babies come out of there as well? How do they?

  You stretch, said her mother. My mother thought they came out through your belly button.

  Who said I wanted babies?

  You will. You wait and see.

  And so she did, and she found a husband and it was her heart’s desire and his. But while her blood had come back thick and strong just about every month of the moon year after year, she never had even one.

  And she was sprouting hair down there, dark fur, and in her armpits – what on earth was she turning into now? But that she would keep to herself. Thus far, no further.

  Always after sunset or a cool change, though the sea holds its heat for hours, it goes glassy and dim with the sun out of it and the tawny kelp forests gone dark. On days of heavy surf a hail of air drops and sand makes it impenetrable. Even on calm days all you see from the outside, from above, is a mass of glazed blue opacities. Not so once you see into it and beyond, though, from the inside – rock walls riven into canyons and arches furred with auburn plumes and rubbery straps of weed that roll and sway and slowly unravel, depending on the tide, and skeins of old rose or shrill green. Fastened in the dapple of the rock faces are fans, grapes and feathers and tight scrolls, flukes, foxtails, sponges, banks of moss, hairy pods, mussel-black and green, and soft ones like pussy willow. Now and then a shower of needles goes by, and silver coins hung on edge, as if on strings, twitching their wide eyes. A blunt fish there in a hollow is a parrot fish lurking, wary at the size of you; here a small one in a striped yellow and grey vest has waited almost until your hand can close over it before jerking away just in time as if on a string. Glass shrimps dangle like hairs in a cluster of bubbles. The tide swings back and forth, softly, or like a storm wind. Sometimes you take fright at the sweep underneath of a sudden giant shape scarred with growths of weed and shell, but you are the one in motion, and the carapace nothing but a rock, a smooth shield. Sometimes the blue limbs of other swimmers move in the distance, slow and magnified underwater, as you are, and reflected in shreds on the molten ceiling. As you approach the turbulent outer edge of the rock pools the water turns icy and is crossed with cloudy shafts of sun that dissolve all around you into sand, bubbles and specks of weed glittering like mica. Mostly you stay on the surface. The deeper you dive, the stiller and heavier the water, a dark weight. Out in the kelp beds the deeps must have the density and weight of stone.

  When no one else is at the pools, for as long as you can hold your breath and hang on hard to the rocks you can stay down on the seabed until you have to let go and rise up into your mirror image, your hands, yourself, your underimage – not the same one as when you waded in, alight over the ripples, with the weave of their threads falling all over you – and bubbling and splashing, gulp air.

  No matter how hot the weather you can only stay in a little while before you freeze. A cold fall of water is forever pouring through the Rip from the swell out in the strait, deep water overrunning the pools and filling the bay with a hail of sand.

  The town is a holiday place, a backwater, built on the last spit of scrubland dividing the bay from the open sea, and popular in summer for the chain of front beaches scooped out of the cliff between two headlands and only held in by the bluestone seawall. The high point is the last headland with its old white lighthouse, the first reason for its being, beyond which the dunes begin and the surf beach. The headland is the border where two seas meet, one higher than the other; and two weathers as well, as often as not, since it breaks the winds no less than the waters, so that the bay may be a choppy bowl of wind on a day that is all glassy stillness around the corner at the back beach; or mild, calm, barely moving, when around the corner the surf is running high and wild.

  All manner of curiosities wash up on this border, charred logs, crates, spars, oil-caked seabirds, shreds of fishing net and ships’ garbage that she picks up and puts in a bin or passes by angrily, according to her mood. She pokes about in mounds of seaweed and black stalks like trumpets, idly fossicking. Once as night is falling she stumbles on a shark hauled up against the seawall, alive, it seems, in the half light, a long leathery grey body as long as her own, with not a scratch, as far as she can tell, and heavy – she tugs at the dorsal fin and it drags her arms down. Slit white eyes and a puffy maw caked with sand, toothless, a gummy shark – can it really be dead, and so unscathed? She washes her hands in the sea and then over and over with soap at home, and even so the stench of shark fin lingers on.

  Another day at around sunset on one of the early hot days in November she comes around the point into the shade after long hours on the surf beach. Against the shadows the sand shows up as a sugary frosting, each grain distinct, as do the insects that are scarcely more than grains of sand, playing dead, until she flicks them with a leaf of seaweed and they waver in alarm. The waterline is alight with bottle glass or jellyfish or the egg-case aspic of the sand snails, no telling which, a glistening trail so bright that she is dazed, half-blinded, and when at last she is forced to turn her back on the sun it feels like going underwater, the light is so deep a blue and her shadow self is flung so far down ahead.

  She is on the secret beach before the front beach, already in twilight, a faint expanse, at high tide, of net on yellow net of water quietly cast up, loosening and pulling tight over the sandbanks. But this is low tide and a green glint catches her eye, new bottle glass, in a crevice of the rocks at the foot of the cliff, a cave under the high waterline. She makes a point of picking up the glass and cans and plastic, the shreds of net and fishing line, bait bags and hooks on her way. As she kneels and puts out her hand to this green glow, blinking, something else, something round, glints further in. She reaches down and there it is, wet on her finger and not, as she first thought, the ring pull of a can, but a ring of gold, uninscribed but for a scratch or two, a plain wedding band of the usual kind, a man’s by the size of it, she thinks, since she has thick fingers for a woman and yes, it is loose on her. A lot of husbands wear a ring these days. Not so much in her time, and never her husband, a man’s man who would have scorned the idea, a no-nonsense man who has been dead and buried for so long that she can barely recall his face, unless in her dreams. Loose as it is, the ring rasps the loose skin of her knuckle and, tugging uselessly, she feels the welling up of an old anger that is half panic. The ridges of skin and the knuckle bone make a bar and the ring has drawn blood, or the sand inside it has, by the time she remembers soap. Then it slips off easily enough.

  In the morning she catches the bus to the police station, where
the officer on duty says that if the ring goes unclaimed for three months she can have it if she desires. It says so on the form: I *desire / *do NOT desire to claim the above property. In the space for the description he writes One gold coloured Ring. She nods and he crosses out *do NOT. She signs on the line and is handed a pink slip. She writes a FOUND notice in black ink with a drawing of the ring and has it stuck in the milk bar window, where it stays put, fading to parchment week by week in the sun, and the bold ink fading to bronze.

  Down here the heat is hardly ever constant, it comes and goes in waves. But this summer is shaping up as one of the good ones, still and barely stirred by wind, becalmed, a heat wave without movement, like the eye of a storm. More and more as she picks her way at low tide on the sandy bed among the rocks she feels the presence of a swimming self who has hovered open-armed like a bird over this sand, these rocks, time and time again, and will again, its shadow in green shreds drifting over the dry sea floor.

  The house, like the sea, is slow to take in the day’s heat and as slow to let go of it. The winter sun brims up in the windows all day, but the high summer sun bears down from pane to hooded pane through leaf shadow, now flaring on a mirror, now melting and buttery, now red. At night she mostly does without electric light, for the sake of the small difference it might make, that one degree cooler. In the gloom the gas under her saucepan is a hot ring of blue teeth. If there is a moon she leaves the blinds up at bedtime rather than swelter in the dark, as if the icy moon, a full or a droop-lidded eye staring in, will cool her down. Her sleep is never so deep in the summertime and she wakes with a shiver at daybreak, or moonrise, only to see 2:28 in red light on the clock, and then 3:42, 5:00, the bed a raft in a sea of milk all the while. A heat wave at full moon is the best of times, when like water the moon finds every chink of the simmering house. In the cool of the morning she goes in for a swim and again in the late afternoon, almost always at the front beach. The surf beach is a long walk away and up and down the dunes and to be stranded there in the sun is to dissolve blinded in a world of shimmer and daze, of craving for the underwater. At night she sometimes walks there and loses count of time passing, the moon and stars for light, and the red tip of the lighthouse burning on and off, on and off, like a cigarette somebody is smoking. Afterwards in her sleep she swims through a milky trail of bubbles and from time to time a seal rises up from the sea, rises and sinks, and she hears its harsh breathing, or her own, or the sea’s. I stitch the sea red and white, in and out, she dreams, with a silver needle and my hot head fills with water.

  A trawler has set up shop in the boat harbour on Sundays this summer. Curious, she catches the bus over one Sunday morning to have a look. The tide is out and as she is walking along the footbridge over to the inner jetty, a shadow shifts. She sees out of the corner of her eye a turbulence under the shallow ceiling of the water, and peers down, but there is only the green jelly of the seabed. Suddenly dizzy in the bright heat, she steps back.

  By the time she has bought herself a small snapper, pearly pink in its ripple of skin, two or three families are strung along both sides of the footbridge staring down. Dad, Mum, a boy calls out. Over here! And now she sees in the green shallows vast platters of glossy black flesh, stingrays hovering, sweeping silently in and out of the stringy grey piles of the jetty and the hulls of the moored boats, above and below each other no deeper than their own sunken shadows and the shadows of hulls, and the reflections, roving like cats for the fish being tipped in the water from the trawler, whitebait, in a silver gush out of the bucket. They are nothing like sharks, there is no haste in them and no greed, lords of life though they also are, and death. They are basking, dancing together in peace and abundance, lustrously black and immense, by far the biggest stingrays she has ever laid eyes on. Children are sprawled full length on the planks now, heads over the edge, calling and pointing, trying to keep count, with a parent holding them down hard, here where a fall can only mean a lightning strike. But the stingrays might as well be under glass for all the notice they are taking. Can they see up through the smashed water? They have invisible eyes in among the smudges and spots of their backs and the watermarks, the speckles of shadow that come into focus as they swoop under the planks to reappear with a white flick of a wingtip, a breaking wave.

  A book is too small to live in but you make yourself small enough while you’re in it, and ever after, and whenever it comes to mind. As a girl she always dreamed of travelling to see the places hived in her books; but travel is for the young and she has been here too long, left it too late. Here at full moon and new moon the tide will sometimes pull so far out over the rock shelf that hidden places come to light, leggy peninsulas, all coves, outcrops and arches, sandbanks, caverns, pitted cliffs strung with seaweed, for an hour or so; and sink back down like the isles of the dead, the promised land. Something about this expanse of shoals in the lee of the lighthouse, the rock shelf moated in light, always makes her think, rounding the point, the beginning of the world, or the end of the world, so serene does it seem, so remote, and yet so near, hushed, like the sea in a shell held to one ear; lost, as it is half the time, under the tide. Day by day, tide by tide, the sea brims up and drains down the channels, some still and shallow and barely visible, and the beach rings its changes, so slight, as a rule, that you have to know it by heart to notice: pools as loose as clouds, pools within pools stacked high with sand or scoured bare; rocks dislodged, cracked, punched full of holes; driftwood and seaweed thrown up high and dry. A brown mat of weed snags on a high rock and for a week becomes the furry snout of a bull seal, until it rots and washes off. When sunset is at low tide, the hot cap of the lighthouse is a broken mirror in the dips and trickles of the rock shelf; in the deeper pools it makes a double exposure of itself with sea stars, weeds, rocks and shells in meshes of green light where slivers of fish, black-backed with silver bellies, hang over a drift of sky. At any time of the day when the reef lies open at low tide the rock pools at the foot of the cliff have a lighthouse in them, a column superimposed, twitching and fraying in the water light, fuming away like salt. Now and then someone rounding the cliff face will come on her bent over a pool, catching her off-guard and suddenly absurd in her own eyes. She never meets their eyes, never so much as moves an eyelid. With her pale hair loose, cobwebby, stiff with salt, windblown or stuffed under her black hood, she is as good as invisible anyway. Anonymous, a scarecrow. Even so, would she be so surprised if one day someone pushed her in, just for the sake of seeing her flap around gasping, gigantic, in what was suddenly too tight a fit, for all that she seemed to think it was a world?

  And so it is, the underwater, another world half-hidden in this one, a world of its own, and mirroring, matching, where one twitch of the waterskin is enough to send hills and valleys warping to the horizon. The whole lighthouse fits in, from its green hood and coils of glass to its pedestal, as does her own tall shadow looming over her reflection laid flat on a roof of sea and sky. Only keep still for long enough and whatever is hidden – fish, sea stars – will venture out. A sea star is a star born of hard flesh. As above so below. There are sea whips here, sea wolves and sea leopards, leafy sea dragons, sea spiders, sea scorpions, sea serpents and horses and snails, sea urchins. Sea purses, that are the shark egg cases drying on the waterline into crackly amber pods. Sea ears, the abalone shells, grey crusts pierced and lined with satin. Sea swallows, sea grass. Lantern fish, sun fish and moon fish, watery equivalents everywhere you look. Equivalences.

  Out on the edge of the rock shelf a squat black and white Pacific gull or a pair is perched most days, and in still weather a grey heron, either transfixed, so that a grey shadow in the pool is all that betrays it, or out and about, unruffled, keeping a sharp eye out, wading, peering, pricking down on a crunch of shell; here and there around the high tide line is this or that sodden blue black mound and ruffle of white, a penguin, a mutton bird, wry-necked; one week a pelican lies in rags under the lighthouse, the next a cormorant, and a gannet
in great plumy flounces under the brow of the dunes; a seal pup swaddled in seaweed, hollow-eyed, its fingerbones like rosary beads and its hide gaping on the bone, comes washing in and out of the swill, shrinking by the day. But of the bull seal neither hide nor hair.

  East across the water from the tip of this peninsula is another one, a mirror image, except that it has no lighthouse and no town behind its spur of headland. The space between is a haunt of rainbows, sometimes a whole one spanning the Rip, sometimes a patch swallowed up in the cloud that sits over the far headland, black as mud, raining down. But it has been a long time since the last rainbow or fall of rain here where time and the weather are coming to a standstill. Sometimes a haze will gather over there at sunset, a fume of haze masking the jagged rocks at the waterline, the shipwreck rocks, and then the other peninsula seems to float in midair. At dusk when the last sun goes and the lamps come on in the streets, a full moon in its blood may rise behind the other headland and heave into the wad of cloud with its bottom hanging out, a boat of fire high over the sea, only to bob up again, on top of the cloud, upside down, and up through the ladder of cloud, higher and smaller and whiter all the time. Once, by magic, a smouldering sun came up on the far side, a copper gong, the mirror of the one that had just slid underwater in the west, as if time had skipped a beat, behind her back, to daybreak. More often a filmy pale full moon and watery reflection appear together in the dusk of the east while the west is still aflame. Summer after summer, full moon after full moon, the heron stalks aslant in the mirror of the pools and gulls skim overhead, a spindrift of twilight closing in and the sea and sky one blur. She has times when it seems as if she has been here on every full of the moon on this or that ramp of sand or rock shelf with the sea of the bay so silky, so almost motionless, and, once past the lighthouse, into the Rip, turbulent. This is the western portal of the bay. The opposite portal, that hummock alight in the sun or gloomy, nearer or further away depending on the light, is in fact so close that if the bay were dry land, swamp and river flat, the way it was before the ocean flooded in, you could walk across in an hour or so. Two headlands, two seas, and in between them this gash of a waterway, the Rip, beyond which is opacity, upheaval. But the waters are all the one water and once in a while even here it falls flat, a sky mirror, with the full moon low in the east and the sun, gold vermilion, low in the west, suspended.