This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  And yet, though it makes no sense, she knows that of their own accord her moods are still in time with the moon, from darkness into light into darkness again; and she goes on keeping track of the tides, slack water and the phases of the moon, and the shifts over the year in the point of the horizon where the sun and the moon will rise and set; just as, pleasing nobody but herself, she goes in swimming. For most of the summer the morning sea is still too cold from the night, and in the heat of the day the beaches are a furnace and the air like fire, almost too harsh to breathe. Around four in the afternoon is the best time, unless a cold sea breeze has blown in. By then the water is like a pane of lamplit glass, thick and dimpled, a pub window. She gives herself up to the lovely lapse of the flesh as it dissolves and floats, barely visible, almost asleep.

  When she comes dripping into the house an orange afterlight lies sprinkled all over the floor. Sometimes the sky is dim and the sun scarlet, the red glow at the world’s end, as if a storm is brewing, or a bushfire laying its smoke over the world. The wind will change, the sky clear a little – the sun still not fully clear all evening, but creamy, opaque. Morning will be hot and still again in the town, no sign of a change, as if the heat wave were a spell it had fallen under, a blessed interval.

  She has never been a beachlover as such, never a sunbather. Her skin is as pale as the day she was born. The sea is what she loves, the undersea, and even so she can never stay in long without getting stone cold. There is an old wetsuit in the house, if she could be bothered wrestling it on; she prefers a T-shirt over her bathers, less for the slight warmth than as a shield against sunburn; and even so, between swims she has to change out of it and the bathers that cling too clammily, or else huddle in her towel. She fears the sea cold, the way it goes straight through her and lasts so long after she comes out, even if she is sweaty and red, gasping. The sea is a different, deeper cold than the weather, and she knows it to the quick of her, in her bones, as the saying goes. She feels the stiffness of cold in them as she walks. In her mind’s eye they are green and knuckly, those bones, under a filmy flange like egg white, like a jellyfish mantle. It must go back to when she was little, the X-ray machine in the shoe shops. You stood up straight up against it with your toes in the slot and through the window on top, like a diving mask, you saw them wriggling in the haze of the shoes, your own bony, cold, pale green ghostly underwater toes.

  This summer is another matter. For once she spends hours of every afternoon in the deep gold of the water, clear pale gold and dark gold, the colour of beer, in a tight webbing. It is murky underwater with the turns of the tide. Little fat fish flee to crouch in the weeds as they swing sharply back and forward in a shower of sand. Murky underwater, though seen from above the water has gone that transparent deep gold. But you must know not to trust it too far. There is turbulence around all the shores of the Rip, currents so suddenly icy, swirling in from the strait, that a swimmer can get cramp and be transfixed, helpless, struggling for breath. The Rip is all turbulences and surges, whirlpools, hidden platforms and scoured rocks, shallow as it is, except for the Entrance Deep, and the safe – for ships – passage known as the Abyss. Every once in a while a swimmer or diver gets swept out, only to be fished up hours later, by helicopter, drowned, while sightseers line the cliffs and jetty. Storms strike and boats overturn.

  Even so, you know where you are with the front beach. Two arms of rock shelter it and sand accumulates there, so that the shallows go out a long way and are safe, golden, faceted, warm as bathwater. In spite of the rocks – blanketed in seaweed and green out of the water, but, once underwater, shadowy – this is where everybody swims. Here she picks her slow way out through the paddlers and the rocks into the dark blue deeps and back. Day after day the world she comes up into is stiff to her eyes, dry and sparse, glaring with a yellow heat that is wearisomely heavy to move in. Families sit gasping in a film of sweat. All our summers have come at once, they tell each other. No one can remember one like it, the stinging flies, March flies, on the beaches, the dry gardens simmering day and night with mosquitoes. The regular afternoon sea breezes fail and what shade there is as it grows long with the day, even the dense shade of the pines along the seawall, is no match for the heat. You take to staying indoors, stripped to the skin, moving behind the sun as it goes from room to room, each room once the sun has left feeling for the moment as deep and dark as a tank of water. All you have the strength to do is drift from room to silent room, one tank of stale air to another, looming in glass, white edges in a dimness or briefly alight, in waves of your own making, as if you are your own ghost. Night brings little diminishment; if anything it is harder to breathe after dark in the blinded houses. In cupboards and wardrobes the heat brews. Even when a cool change sends a wind hissing all through the house, you only need to open a cupboard door for the stored heat to come spilling out over you. Masses, walls, the unmade bed, and the couch, are nesting their heat. Even fruit, so that a peach is a shock to the hand closing over it, so like living flesh is the blood heat under the felty skin. If the front and back doors are left open to air the house, they swing shut with a thud all night, open and shut, and at each thud the house shudders and takes a deep breath.

  Summer is daddy-long-legs in wisps upside-down in the corners, in webs that are invisible until the light goes on and pencils their shadow on the wall. The faintest current of air will sway the web and spin the spider, sending it whizzing into a tailspin before it calms down. A mosquito as it floats will be caught up and spun too, until the spider swings down headfirst on it. Some mornings, broken limbs litter the bench, webbed cellophane wings and furry moth skin, scraps of shell, even a bunched whole spider. They are almost as fine as their webs, as if they have spun themselves into being; so light that a daddy-long-legs can pick its stilted way over the hairs of your arm and you feel it less than a breath. Yet its venom makes it the deadliest of all spiders to any living thing its fangs can pierce, or is that an old wives’ tale? It becomes the shadow astraddle another spider, the incubus, sucking. It is highly territorial. Many have legs missing, the victors. One day two will be facing off on a wall, and the next day closer still, then grappled together in slow motion, a mating or death struggle. Then one hangs crooked and still. The next day it has shrunk to a ghost of itself; the next, emptiness. In the morning sun the anchoring threads have a sheen and a shadow as faint as dust.

  Summer is a stiff pillar of skin rimy all over with salt, itchy, a Lot’s wife of a body, a stuffy nose night and day, a rustle of fullness in your ears when your head moves, loud and furtive, like paper crumpling, the sea water shifting its weight. What you hear through water is magnified, like what you see. It runs out warm on the pillow at last, one side and then the other, a molten discharge. In the morning the pillow has snail crusts of salt and this was the way of the first summers ever, heatstruck, the amplified thunderous sea in your ears, the sea smell, the scrape of sand in tangled sheets, turning and turning over and waking up tasting of salt. You sail like a fish in the ribcages of shipwrecks. In your sleep you are any age and all the ages you have ever been. No lying awake on summer nights in a bed like an open coffin, in the full knowledge of the void, extinction. A heat wave floats you off into another life, swollen with lightness, diaphanous, a water being.

  Summer. If the dead walk in the light of day it must be in such a form as this, of water, she thinks, a formless flow, all shadow and shimmering transparency, shaking the air like fire. And what of the dead who never lived, were never born, had only an inner life?

  Shall these bones lie smothered, netted, woven in a shroud of spider silk?

  Late one sultry afternoon when she goes down for a swim she finds whitebait strewn about as bright and sharp as knife blades, nets, rods and buckets everywhere, and men down on the waterline scrabbling for worms. There is a throb over the beach, a pulse, and a hiss, a rustling she can’t place, until she sees the large barrel-bodied grey fish flapping on the wet sand in a heap behind each man knee-deep in
the water with a rod, reeling in, no time to waste finishing off what can be safely left to die in its own good time. In the gear are plastic bags, open, slimed and bloodied, crammed with more fish – mullet, yellow-eye mullet – arching, flailing, eyes and mouths wide. A little boy runs yelling out from heap to heap, poking them with a finger, looking up for applause. She turns away. Along its full length the beach is alive with their flutter and glint.

  Or they may walk, our dead, the way our reflections do, appearing deep in mirrors and windowpanes and still waters, shifting and fraying, back to front, the way the lighthouse at sunset lays its long self facedown in rock pool after rock pool.

  Sometimes at home a presence seems to amble up beside her, keeping her company, some vast and benign presence, ponderous, resplendent, just under the surface of the everyday, like the stingrays – a surface as clear as day, as sea, and yet, like sea, so covered in facets and flares of light that only shadow shows through. Now and then in her sleep the bed sinks under a slow familiar weight and she holds her breath hoping to not wake up, to stay under, in the dream – but at the first cold impact her head breaks the surface and there she is alone in the dark of her room, wide awake, the dream already a memory, an afterimage, out of reach, then gone, forgotten. The sheets, when she throws them off to let the heat out, breathe out a whiff of blood, rich and hot, salt blood, gone too, by the time she buries her head back in; but it stays with her all day as she moves through the hours with the shape and weight of the dream at her side, the absence felt as a presence; not that she ever brings it to mind; the lingering is in a form other than thought or dream, the residue, the feeling of this having happened before – has it? Has what? Some sense is vigilant in her and knows, riven with loss, and hope.

  Tides mould the beaches. Sand as well as water is always in motion, now thick and smooth, now so thin and gnawed away that the bedrock stands out, gaunt, from the seawall, the dunes, down into the shallows. Even halfway, with the rocks just poking through at slack water, they are as good as invisible. The sea wears holes and rings in the limestone, caves and tunnels, wears it wholly away in time, but not smooth. On these beaches, hidden or laid bare, the rock is all as crusty and finely fretted as coral and as sharp underfoot, sandy-coloured, but not sandstone. Limestone is the bedrock of these beaches where we walk in the flesh while we may; and limestone is made of the bones and shells of the dead. How stubborn life is, when you think, lodging its residue in the worn old skin of the earth until some convulsion crumples it into mountains, studded with coiled and spiny fossils from the earliest beginnings, beaks and claws and skulls. Whole stone mountains of the sea’s dead. Even marble is limestone, salted with mica, and metamorphic, and crystalline, however much like bare skin it looks. To think that all the statues in the museums are made of bone and shell, the dust of the dead given a new lease of life, an afterlife, or a semblance of one. Simulacra. All bearing the old gravestone words of foreboding. As you are now so once was I.

  High and dry in the cliff, in a pit, snug, a sea star, blue grey but for a red star at its core, like the core of a star apple.

  A heat wave to end all heat waves, a summer to end all summers. In some weathers the pulse of the sea stops dead and only after a long silence begins again, as her bloodstream does at night sometimes in the depths of her but also aloud in one ear, a swish, swish like the surge in a seashell, resounding, then a halt long enough to wonder if this is death, before the beat. It resounds in the still of the night like the sea. Use your head, she hears, remembering a black and white play she saw on TV once, when she still had the TV, that was putting her to sleep until a blind man said straight out of the screen that something was dripping in his head – a heart in my head – and she nearly jumped out of her skin, to think he of all people knew about that. It was a weird, jerky, fierce Punch-and-Judy kind of a vaudeville, all antics and nasty digs, and she saw it out to the bitter end she was so at home in it after that, with the four shabby actors onstage and the puppet master, the unseen, unknown, who had put the words in those heads.

  At the front door one hot morning, a knock, a policeman, taking her aback. He hands over the ring in an envelope, and his notebook for signing. One gold coloured Ring. She slits the envelope. The same ring, it’s come back. Real gold, no doubt, not that she cares, she who lost her own gold ring some time ago and never turned a hair. It was almost a relief, it got in the way, weighed on her. Did she desire this one? What had made her say she did? Of course she can always sell it. With this ring, she thinks, until death us do part and the marriage is over and done with, the handful of ashes scattered over the sea, the grief outlived, the loss got over in the end. This ring is cold in the hollow of her hand, her property. It had completely slipped her mind.

  She stares, puzzled why anyone would take a ring off at the beach, just asking for trouble. Unless you were having a quarrel, then you might. Whoever it was had never bothered to make inquiries. Though it might have come off in the water, or been thrown in from somewhere else, anywhere, the clifftop, a ship, to wash up in her hands, or slipped off a drowned man’s finger of bone, and been swallowed by a fish, or among ashes scattered at sea, unseen, until too late, a hidden ring. What are you worth, she wonders, slipping it into her purse with the vague idea of having it valued when she goes to the city, not that she goes much any more; and as the days pass, so does any thought of selling it.

  Since it might slip through her fingers among the loose change in her purse, she puts it on a shelf of the old wooden dresser in the back room with her other keepsakes on a nap of sand: the whelks and earshells and crab casts, the rosy cuttlebone with its white hood, the stubbled red sea urchin, the seabird skull on its fretwork of neck, the crab nipper inkwashed blue, the chunk of jade green bottle glass. There it catches the sun, the ring of gold, immortal. Wherever she moves it to among the relics sooner or later it catches the sun.

  When it begins to weigh on her mind she shuts it up with her jewellery, the pendants and necklaces, amber, glass and bloodstone, in the camphorwood box she has had since she was a girl. Still it feels wrong to have it there, as if it belonged among the trinkets of her young days or anywhere else in this house either. Whose is it really, the above property? At a loss, she holds it in the palm of her hand, a circle of light and shadow, bedded on wrinkles. Where was it at home, if it comes to that? Meanwhile she slips it in among the folded clothes in a drawer. She is never going to wear it and yet selling it has become unthinkable; she would as soon have sold her real, her own wedding ring. Losing it was one thing. Selling it, never. I *desire. In her dreams it dilates as she bends closer, auburn frills of seaweed and then a glint, a pale hoop half in half out of the sand, the water.

  All the same, one day close on sunset, her heart in her mouth, she clutches it in her fist and runs to the old concrete lookout on the clifftop. The crevice where she found the ring is right underneath, but the tide is in and there is no sign of the secret beach under its swill of froth, the waves swinging, crashing headlong through the sunken caves and rifts. All the cliff face is deep in shadow, only a flock of gulls drifting, balancing on the wind long-legged, still alight with sun. She hurls the ring out as far as she can, so high it shines like a star among them before diving down and taking a shred of the flock down with it out of sight.

  But not out of mind. It preys on her at odd times, awake or asleep. With this ring. As if she has been unfaithful and this is a sign that even in death he knows and is angry – or is he simply angry at dying, when he might have been saved? He has a right. She got the blame. They all thought she should have known when he was struck down – instantaneous, so the doctor said, there at the inquest – when his heart was torn in two. But nothing broke the surface of him, or of her sleep, or not enough to wake her up; unless she just went back to sleep, as she usually did when he turned over or got up in the night. You would call yourself a heavy sleeper? She would. He was always so fit and strong, she hears herself say. He had no time for doctors. He said you took w
hat came in this life. She had woken up shivering to find him half on half off the bed, headfirst like a toppled statue, immovable, a man as solid as a rock. And that was enough for her to tell that he was dead, was it? He was like a drowned man, she said, stone cold. No pulse, no breath, his eyes and mouth gaping. Do you have medical qualifications? She shook her head. I’ve seen my fair share of bodies. Anyone could have told. In my experience, she said, there is an absolute difference between the living and the dead. She can see him now in her mind’s eye, like lard under the lamp, only livid all over, except for his face. And naked? We always sleep naked, he must have thrown off the bedclothes. What time was this? She never thought to look. So she had just got into bed and gone back to sleep, her words, had she? In fact she had run to the toilet and been sick and got out a clean sheet to fold him in (a flow of fall, a white wave) and heaved him back up and got back in beside him to lie awake as anyone would with a death in the house. Anyone? But she has remembered the clock emblazoned in red. Half past three! she said. We’re not on the phone. It was not as if it was an emergency to be getting a doctor out of bed to. How could I leave him on his own? You disturbed the body. I got him back to bed. When had you gone to bed? About nine, she thought. What more could anyone do, she said, but see him through the night, as I knew he would have wanted? – as I would in his place? All we had was each other. And so she believes to this day, in the dream and lying awake, knowing that if her heart is riven in two in bed one night she will be down to rags and bones before anyone finds her; raging at him in her heart for dying on her like that, behind her back, as she had on the night, mourning and going cold and quiet under the lamp and the longer she lay the harder it was to move.