Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “Oh God,” the woman said. “You’re bleeding. Marina? Were you shot? Oh God, oh God. She’s only a girl!”

  Marina raised her head to look at the woman.

  “I’m not only a girl,” she said.

  As well as the dribble of rain off her long wet hair, the woman’s face was dripping tears. She was a picture of bedraggled misery.

  “And you’re not Gwen,” Marina continued. “And you’re not Gawain’s mother, or my mother.”

  The woman’s arms opened again, tentatively. She might have been about to try hugging Marina again, but instead she hugged herself. Her shoulders shivered and rose and fell raggedly. She was out of breath.

  “No more,” she said at last. “That’s it. I’m taking you home.” She reached out an arm. “They can drown me or eat me, I don’t care. I’ve had enough.” She took hold of Marina’s hand, gasping slightly as their palms touched. “Down to the river,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Yes,” Marina said, looking across to the east, where the rain didn’t blow in her face. “Home.”

  • • •

  As they passed in front of the church the weather turned violent. The wind backed northward and gathered strength as if to herd them into the valley. Remnants of the pilgrims’ tent village blew past them and were impaled in the graveyard hedge. Some were lifted higher and got caught in the Monterey pines beyond, flapping there like huge wounded birds. Marina’s shift was soaked right through. It stuck to her skin, chafing. The hem flapped in the wind too. She stopped to take it off.

  “What are you doing?”

  It was too wet for the wind to play with. It sloughed onto the ground with all the other inert things.

  “Marina, don’t— Oh my God.” Iseult’s hands went to her mouth in horror. “Oh no. Oh no.”

  Marina’s shoes weren’t interfering, so she left them on, the last two things from Pendurra to survive the journey. Rain scoured and bathed the rest of her.

  “I’m so sorry.” Iseult shuffled close. Her voice had turned into a feeble croak. Marina could see she wanted to touch her but didn’t quite dare. “Oh, Marina. I . . . If I’d . . .” Iseult’s fingers knotted helplessly through one another. “I wouldn’t have let it happen if I’d been there. Never, ever. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

  Marina looked at herself. The skin around where the pain was jammed was swollen and bruised black. Not all the blood had washed away there either. But it would, she knew.

  “Will you let me hold you for a bit? Please?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Please, Marina.”

  “No.”

  The woman’s eyes were very red. “Okay. I understand.”

  The road ended at the church. A steep path descended through the pines to the river below, eroded by rain and the long thaw into little more than a scree of mud. Marina held on to branches to steady herself and went very slowly. When she looked down through the evergreen copse she saw whitecaps dancing below, where the river met the sea.

  Iseult, as thin and straggly as the branches, went slowly too, a little ahead, stopping often to look back.

  “I wish you’d blame me,” she said. “You should scream at me. At everyone. Just as long as you know that it’s not your fault. Promise me you’ll never think that.”

  “I don’t want you to say that word.”

  “Which one?”

  “Promise.”

  The woman stayed quiet for a long time after that. They inched along and down, the last steps of two long journeys, one measured in miles, the other in years. The slope steadied at last and met the top of low cliffs above the river. Another choked and defaced track followed the line of the coast there. Upriver, to the west, it led out of the pines and down to the shore, dropping into a cove at the mouth of a brief tributary valley. The wind roared in the trees above, flexing the pines into a frenzy. Marina stopped again when she got to the overgrown clifftop and looked seaward. Everywhere water met land there was a turbulent fringe of spray. The noise was continuous inverted thunder, a pounding from below. In the wide mouth of the estuary a cargo ship lay three-quarters submerged, listing toward the open sea, waves racing over all but its feebly lifted bow and its bridge. It made all the other wrecks look like toy boats. Her gaze followed the line of the opposite shore, over dense woods, to where one corner of an old grey house jutted out from its deep cover.

  “Is that it?” Iseult had followed her look.

  Marina had never imagined seeing her house, her world, this way round. It occurred to her that the window she could just about see, far away, a dark blob as tiny as a fingernail, was the window in the narrow niche in the corner of the room above her father’s study, the niche with the heart-shaped speckly stone she used to be able to sit on in a perfect fit until on the day of her ninth birthday her legs turned out to have grown too long, the room where one of the chairs had lions’ faces carved on the ends of the arms, one of which was named Leo and the other Aslan, and she and Daddy used to make them argue with each other, Aslan always saying things like Aslan in the books and Leo being mischievous and silly and interrupting by saying he wanted to pop out for a wildebeest; if she sat in the niche, wiped a pane of glass, and tucked her head close to it sideways (watching out for the sharp flake of iron in the frame of the window, which used to miss her but got in the way now that she was tall), she would be able to see the church tower and the stand of pines—so differently shaped from every other tree, their tops squashed flat like storm clouds—and, below them, the hump of cliff, which was where she was actually standing, now. There had become here and here was now there. Her home was away. Empty. Not her home; she was gone from it. One by one everyone had left it until no one remained.

  The gulf between them and the southern shore heaved with rage. Tide against wind in the narrowing estuary mouth made the waves appear to be circling and surging, a mob waiting for the next victim to be thrown down.

  “I didn’t tell you this,” Iseult said, “but when I met your mother before, she told me to go away and kill myself. She won’t let me go across with you. But I don’t mind. I couldn’t look after you. I said I was going to and I couldn’t. I couldn’t look after Gavin either. Gawain. It doesn’t matter about me. I just want to see you safe home. Are you ready? Shall we start down?” Iseult came and stood in front of her and bent to look in her face. It was odd how like Gwen she looked, especially when she was sad. Unhappiness pulled in her cheeks and softened the set of her mouth and so took away that grimness Gwen never had.

  But then Gwen had turned into the worst thing in the world, or what she’d thought was the worst thing in the world until she’d gone over the gate and out into the world proper and discovered it was all like that.

  Iseult’s head dropped and she turned away.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’m so tired of everything. I’ve had enough of being cold and wet, I really have. It’ll be a relief. Come on.”

  They edged and slipped their way along the coast path to the cove.

  In the weeds at the back of the beach was a crude boathouse, its wooden door hacked and splintered. A rough circle of large flat stones had been assembled above the high-water line. There were bits of unlikely debris inside it, smeared with wet sand: metal tools, animal bones, and scraps of shredded fur, books turned to soggy mush. The pilgrims had tried to appease the murderous river, perhaps, forgetting that the sea had plenty of sacrifices to choose from.

  She came from the waves as soon as Marina and Iseult limped onto the sand. The wind shrieked in welcome and the rain hammered down as if it wanted to raise the river with her. She was as white as death. She stood upright where the breaking wave lifted her, at the foaming river’s edge. This time she didn’t reach out in supplication. Marina hobbled toward her anyway. Iseult came behind, her borrowed boots scraping pebbles and broken shells.

  The sea-woman’s voice had
a terrifying heft. It was the seething exhalation of water chafing against rock.

  “Curse them,” she said. “Curse the men who did this to you. I curse them and I curse all men. All your father’s race.”

  Marina pulled herself closer, though the heavy pain tried to hold her back. She went on until the longest waves were tugging her shoes and breaking over her ankles: the dividing line.

  It wasn’t cold, or if it was she didn’t feel it like that. It was huge, that was what she felt: huge enough to overwhelm the hurt in her middle. She waded farther out. Her mother folded gleaming white arms around her, and held her.

  “My daughter.”

  Marina had forgotten she still had her shoes on. She started trying to prize the heel of one shoe off with the toe of the other. She couldn’t bend down, but she had her mother to hold her up while she worked at it.

  “We were going to take her home,” Iseult said, from the beach, a few paces behind. She was difficult to hear. She was so much smaller than the wind and waves and the downpour. “She’ll be all right now, won’t she?”

  Her mother didn’t answer, though Marina sensed her attention fall on the woman. The arms wrapped more tightly, one around her head, the other her back. She thought she could feel a thing like a heart beating beside her ear, but slow, hollow, effortless. Its pulse was the tranquil back-and-forth of sunken things.

  “I brought your girl. I know an awful thing happened to her but I couldn’t do anything, I wasn’t there. At least you have her now. What about me? Can you bring me my boy? And don’t say he’s not mine, just . . . don’t say that.”

  One shoe came off. It floated up like a dead and bloated fish. A wave tipped it onto the sand. Marina’s bare foot wasn’t as good for pushing at the heel of the other one, but she tried anyway.

  “You don’t have anything to say at all, do you. Of course you don’t. Marina? Can’t you ask her? Please? Don’t you care about Gawain anymore?”

  The soaked lining stuck to her skin, that was the problem. She tried to catch the heel in the wet sand and pull her foot free that way. There was a heavy scrunching noise, the noise (probably) of someone dropping onto the beach.

  “I can’t go any farther,” Iseult’s voice said from back there, hoarse now. “I’m sorry, Iggy. I just want to die.”

  The shoe slipped. Marina kicked and squirmed and wriggled her foot, and at last it came free.

  “Bye, Marina,” Iseult said.

  “Peace.”

  The sea-woman said the last word, yet the whole scene seemed to speak it with her. Its long final sibilance was the shuffle of pebbles under ebbing waves and the static crackle of rain. As soon as it was spoken the wind began to fade, as if abashed. She said it again—Peace—and again it was a kind of command. The storm curled up under it and turned into a shower. Without the gale driving it, the rain turned gentle, falling straight. The river sloshed and broke without anger.

  “Everything returns,” Swanny said. No one could have described her voice as kind, but a force had left it; it had calmed too. “My daughter, today. My wedding band, to him to whom it was bequeathed. I myself, though it almost cost me my life. I’ve been patient for twelve years. Be patient.”

  The second shoe bobbed up and grounded itself. Naked, Marina felt the terrible pain beginning to dissolve. Water was getting rid of it. When her mother’s embrace began to draw her deeper into the river, she felt a surge of happiness as irresistible as the sea itself.

  “You found me my daughter.” She didn’t care what her mother was saying, she only wanted to listen to her speak, to hear the liquid sound flow from the body she squeezed herself against. They went deeper. The water came up and over her shoulders. “The river will bless you as the road has. You’ve gone far enough now. Cross in peace, and rest.”

  Peace, Marina heard. She opened her lips and the river came in. Rest. Ssss, sssss. She opened her eyes too. They dipped down through a soft barrier, the world went away, and everything became infinitely hushed, infinitely the same.

  PART VII

  32

  Packing boxes.

  Whether it was the actual smell of cardboard or some more nebulous aura of transience, of dust and things unfinished, it was the packing boxes that gave it away.

  She’d been trying to establish which of the various beds that counted as her own bed she’d woken up in. (Woken, she thought, by the distant shatter of breaking glass, or was it an accelerating engine, or a nocturnal shout?) It was, certainly, her own bed. Before she knew anything else, she knew that. Instinct told her she was home. But . . . her bedroom next to Tess’s, with the brass headboard where she hung medals from school and arranged hockey stickers from packs of gum? The basement apartment in Toronto, where condensation beaded on the paint above the bed because there wasn’t an extractor fan in the shower? Or was it her place in Victoria? Which smelled of Chinese cooking from the restaurant backing onto the overgrown yard. . . . In the absence of light or noise she thought about smells, and so caught the ambience of boxes and paper and stuff still not put away. Alice. Which meant the Anglepoise lamp would be there (she stirred, reached out . . . ).

  Her arm moving in the dark: it was warm, dry. Or at least not cold, not wet. She held still, not feeling the metal bell of the shade (had she moved it?—when she, when she . . . ).

  Her consciousness drew its own outline and came back where it started. Whole, and home. She felt . . . fine. No pain, no hunger.

  It was absolutely dark, a hundred percent dark. Whatever fragment of noise had woken her had vanished, the pop of a bubble. She batted a cautious hand but still failed to find the lamp or its cord. No light. There ought to have been an infinitesimal electric shimmer from the kitchen, the LED on the stove, as well as a rectangular blur around the edge of the blind, but neither was where it should be, unless she’d forgotten which way around the room was.

  She sat up. A soft presence sat up with her, attached; not sheets. She drew her own outline again and found she’d gone to sleep in her uniform shirt and pants. She never did that, no matter how tired she was when she got home, and anyway, she couldn’t have been that tired because the one thing she’d learned over the couple of weeks she’d been posted up here was that nothing ever happened. She should have finished unpacking days ago.

  The clock she’d had since seventh grade (when she started having to wake herself up to go to school; she couldn’t drive with Dad anymore because Dad had moved out and her mother didn’t like driving in the snow or before breakfast) had glow-in-the-dark hands. They weren’t glowing. Unless she hadn’t unpacked it yet, though she thought she had, on the second shelf of the unit by the bed. No light. The luminescent stuff needed something to reflect, of course. The power was out. She thought she remembered that. The power had been out since, since . . .

  “Tell him to go home to his father,” someone said.

  Goose looked around, or thought she looked around, though the futility of the effort impressed itself on her straightaway.

  “Who’s there?” she said. Not being able to see herself had the weird effect of disembodying her voice also.

  “He can undo what was done to me. What I did. He can refuse it. He can go back and say no. Tell him that.”

  The other voice was hard to place, close and far away at the same time. Was she listening to the neighbors talking, through the wall? She didn’t remember a Brit woman living anywhere in the building, though. Not that she’d met everyone yet.

  “And that I loved him. For the few days we were together. I carried him as far as I could. Remember.”

  “Are you talking to me?” Goose tried to ask so quietly that only someone in the room would be able to hear. Hardly moving her lips, if at all.

  “Tell Gawain.”

  “What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

  “I can’t stay any longer. Remember. Three things. Return. Refusal.
Love.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “Say them. Return, refusal, love.”

  It must have been a neighbor after all, talking to someone else. Or perhaps a crazy person in the corridor. Goose put her feet down carefully. The problem with leaving packing boxes everywhere was that she couldn’t remember where the clear space was in the room. She swept a half circle with her toes and took a pace toward where she thought the door was. Repeat.

  “You still there?”

  A whisper of light. She was in the corridor outside, and over by the stairwell was something that wasn’t entirely nothing. She must have left the apartment door open, another thing she never did. At least that accounted for hearing the voice.

  “Who’s out here?”

  Or had she imagined it? Like she’d imagined, or dreamed, the other . . .

  She certainly wasn’t imagining the power outage. There was supposed to be one of those motion sensor lights in the corridor, and an exit sign, both over the stairwell. She remembered them working the day before, or whichever day it was, whenever she’d last come home. Anyway. Neither was working now, for sure. The something that wasn’t nothing in the stairwell was a dim blur reflected from somewhere else, down at the bottom, by the door. She went that way. She did remember that things had started going wrong. Top to bottom. Her job was to know that sort of thing and be prepared.

  She remembered fog.

  She remembered it so vividly she knew it was true. She could feel the nonweight of it. The absence. She had a strong, clear recollection of that absence, that hush, that shrouding invisibility, descending on the town and on the sea. And a ferry blasting through it. And a blind ferryman, and no passengers. Or one passenger, Goose herself, crossing dark water with the ferryman her guide.

  Which couldn’t be right, because here she was. Here. Corridor, stairwell. Alice. Vous êtes ici.

  She went down toward the intimation of light.