by Unknown
She had shown Adrian and Laura, from when they were quite small, the walks of her childhood – the hills above the town, the cliff path and down along the beach. Adrian said that walking was the metronome of thought, that humans needed to walk to keep sane, to keep body and soul together. The leg bone was connected to the brain bone, and if you needed to work something out, you should just take a walk until it was sorted. She thought of his slow, loose body, of how he folded his legs beneath him like a deer and told her what he thought.
Dear Adrian.
It wasn’t sudden. It took me fifty years to disappear, a slow rubbing out until the final days before I went, when far from feeling absent, I felt painfully present, like a bulb filament that glows too bright before it blows, and on that last day, when I walked to work, I walked the long way and just kept walking . . .
THE TRAIN journey was a mistake. Geography had never been her strong point. She changed in Turin, Milan, Bologna and Ancona. She found the stations hectic and hostile, the information system confusing. Food and water became a problem. Often, she was too anxious about missing her connection to buy food at a station and on board the train she was afraid to leave her bag unattended. Her route was shackled by the hard, implacable iron of the tracks. She travelled north, south, north-east and south again. The train stopped frequently, at deserted stations and in the middle of nowhere. After the first twenty-four hours, at each stop she felt hope trickle from her on to the filthy track below.
On the second day, beginning the final eastern stretch, she caught glimpses of the Adriatic Sea and she prepared herself for arrival at Brindisi at any moment. Yet hours and station names rolled interminably by – Barletta, Trani, Bisceglie . . . As night fell, she woke, freezing, from a dream of needles and steel. She was alone in the carriage. The train had come to a halt and sadness lay in her lap. The aborted child of ten years ago. Had it really travelled with her all this way? She knew that it had, that now, fleeing her failed life, there was the realisation that she had destroyed the only part of her that would have made any sense.
The writing pad before her was blank.
Dear Laura.
It was nothing and everything. It was you. It was him. It was me.
Yes
A DEEP tremor ran through the body of the ferry as it docked at Ithaca two days later. Bea was asleep, wrapped in Kiff’s blanket, stretched out like an effigy on the plastic banquette in the bar. She got up and was helped down the gangplank, blinking up at an Ithaca shrouded in cloud. The air, warm and damp on her face, carried on it the scent of the soil.
She took a taxi to Kioni. She was done with travelling. She had no strength or patience for the bus. The cloud lifted and they drove past fields carpeted with flowers. She asked the driver to drop her at the taverna, where she drank strong, sweet coffee, ate halva and almonds. Her body hummed with fatigue. Kioni was quiet; Penelope’s, the taverna, was empty. From her table she noticed a For Rent sign not far from the waterfront. She asked about it and was directed to Elli in the village shop, who told her yes, it was available, and yes, of course she could see it. Elli called through the beaded curtain at the back of the shop – Yannis! – and talked to him in Greek. Then Yannis appeared, with a key and a cardboard box. He led Bea to the apartment, up whitewashed steps through a heavy wooden door painted blue. Inside were more steps leading up to a simple bedroom, painted white with rush matting on the floor. Next to it was a small kitchen where painted plates hung from one wall and another blue door opened on to a terrace looking away from the village over the headland and out to sea. There was a table topped with turquoise tiles and shaded by a vine. Bougainvillea and wisteria bloomed out there, and geraniums, crimson and white in terracotta pots. Yannis switched on the electricity and the water, and showed her the cupboard where linen, towels and blankets were kept. Then he left. Are you sitting comfortably? Bea peeled off her dress, dropped the Moroccan blanket in a corner, and stood on the terrace in the sun. Then we’ll begin. She looked in the cardboard box. Honey, yoghurt, oil and bread. ‘See?’ she said to Precious. She looked around at the whitewashed terrace, the sea and the sky. ‘This is why I came.’
For eight days, Bea barely stirred. From her terrace she could just make out Patrick’s house, half hidden by trees in the hills across the bay. There were no signs of life. Each day she felt the sun feed her body and gladden her mind. She was happy to be mute and still. She shed her shame and shyness like a skin. The sun grew stronger and so did she, until the day came when she felt well enough to go down to the sea to swim.
She wore a white cotton dress and leather sandals, and carried a bright blue towel. She headed out of the village towards the ruined windmills standing sentinel on the headland. Where the road climbed up the hill, she picked her way down a steep trail towards a small cove, nearly a perfect O. The rock was rough underfoot and pitted with pools, pools with smoothed pink sides like flesh, where alien creatures waved up at the reflected sky. Bladderwrack sprouted at the water’s edge, swaying in the swell like an animal pelt. Bea watched the sea for a long time, its slap and hiss at the rocks, the sigh in and out at the mouth of the cove. Looking down through the translucence of greens and blues, she longed to be in it. Here would be a good place, where the rock dropped away so that it wouldn’t graze and cut. Tall rocks formed the opening of the cove, where the sea sometimes rose in a silent surge powered by the expanse of blue beyond. Watch the tide, her father always said. You have to know whether it’s coming in or going out. She watched now and frowned. Were there tides here? She had never quite managed to work that one out.
No sooner had she taken off her shoes and put down her towel than it began to rain. Laura hated the rain but Bea would tell her that the rain doesn’t matter, it’s easier to get in if you’re wet, and anyway, this time of year it’s rain, sun, rainbow, sun, then rain again and . . . Bea looked down. Here the rock was ridged with a crop of baby mussels. She squatted to examine the glistening rows of tiny black shells, clustered on the raspberry-ripple rock. Laura would love them.
At the water’s edge, Bea gathered up her dress, clung to the rock with one hand and put a foot into the sea, feeling gingerly for an urchin-free spot. The cold surprised her as the water rose up high to her knees, making her gasp, before it sank back down low in a sucking rush. Her fingers held tight as she lowered the other foot, thinking that perhaps today she would just have the coward’s swim, the quick dip in, then out, without leaving go. But, she would tell Laura, it’s always good to do a few strokes, however cold, because of how good it makes you feel afterwards.
The water lapped higher, wetting her dress, and she hesitated, unable for a moment to catch her breath. Yes, afterwards. That’s the feeling she wanted Laura to have, when every cell of your body becomes crystal and you walk away from the sea a chandelier of light and life.
And she had seen Patrick. Yes. She saw him swimming yesterday. He did a quick dive in, then a steady, worn-out crawl towards the village, and it made her smile. He turned when he was halfway there and dragged himself back towards home. One day, when the sea was warmer, one day perhaps when Laura was with her, they would swim out to meet him. Yes, one of these days she would get in at Penelope’s and swim over to his place to say hello. But not yet. For the time being she was doing nothing. She wouldn’t be bad and she wouldn’t be good. She would, as Adrian liked to say, just be Bea.
The rain stopped and the sun came out. She felt its heat on the nape of her neck and shoulders and knew that she should do the swim now, before she lost her nerve. She climbed out, pulled off her dress and underwear and looked down at her vanished body, thought how she was more in her body now than she had ever been before, more in herself than she had ever been, on the inside now, looking out. Yes, she thought, shivering despite the sun, and hurrying back to crouch down at the place where she could get in, that was something else Laura ought to know, and with a bold gasp and a shudder and a smile, she let go of the rock and sank backwards, down and into the sea.
<
br /> Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Copyright
By the same author
Dedication
You Don’t Have to be Good
1. Gone
2. What
3. Cow
4. Fetch
5. Love
6. Hot
7. Work
8. Endgame
9. Urn
10. Pray
11. Go
12. Rip
13. When
14. Late
15. Missing
16. Bad
17. Sign
18. Because
19. Night
20. So
21. Memo
22. But
23. Wife
24. Beach
25. What
26. Sorry
27. Best
28. Scream
29. Gin
30. Cold
31. Tender
32. Stairs
33. Fair
34. Exit
35. House
36. Flat
37. Temp
38. Over
39. Sorry
40. Venus
41. Daddy
42. Went
43. Ithaca
44. Bitter
45. Seen
46. Her
47. Lost
48. Us
49. Found
50. Yet
51. Snap
52. Perhaps
53. Falling
54. Ever
55. Steel
56. Yes
