The Art of Not Breathing

by Sarah Alexander

  “School of death? So you can learn to die?” He seems amused. I hope he can’t see how red my cheeks are.

  “Maybe,” I mumble, trying to think of something else to say.

  “You’re very interesting, Elsie.”

  We smoke for a bit. I watch the way he maneuvers the joint to his lips and back down to the floor. I watch him cross and uncross his legs and play with a torn bit of leather on his shoe. He tells me that he once ran all around the Black Isle in a day and got attacked by farm dogs. I tell him that I once hid in a bus shelter during cross-country at school and only joined in for the last lap. He commends me on my initiative but says I should practice running in case farm dogs come after me. I tell him I’m not scared of dogs. I don’t tell him what I am afraid of. When the joint’s finished, he says he has to go.

  “We should hang out again soon,” he says. “I’ll swing by.”

  He slides gracefully through the panel, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t moved away from him before. I lie down on my back and smoke with my eyes closed, breathing in the tobacco, the cannabis fumes, and the lingering smell of Tay’s aftershave. I no longer care about Ailsa Fitzgerald or that scummy school, or even the flashing images. Eddie is deep inside me, laughing. I remember one of his favorite jokes.

  “Why are there fish at the bottom of the sea?” I ask him.

  “Because they dropped out of school,” he replies.

  9

  Eddie and I got joke books for Christmas when we were eight. Mine was red, Eddie’s was blue—his favorite color at the time—“the color of the ocean!” Eddie loved the water even more than I did. I liked looking at it from the shore because I was afraid of getting tangled in the seaweed, but Eddie always wanted to be in it, have the waves break over his head. He was fearless when it came to the waves.

  That Christmas day, we sat on the sofa together to open our presents. I was uncomfortable because Eddie was sitting on my leg, but he was so excited about Christmas, I didn’t want to upset him. So I sat still and let him cover me in ribbons and tinsel. Mum gave us the presents from Granny and we tore off the wrapping paper together. A joke book each. On the front they said Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds. I had to read the title to Eddie because he couldn’t read.

  “It’s full of sea creeeeeeeatures,” he exclaimed as he flipped through it wide-eyed, looking for dolphins. “Look, look!”

  He pointed to every page and illustration and held the book right up to my face so I could see. I remember feeling the shiny paper on my nose and the weight of it when he dropped it on my foot.

  We hadn’t seen Granny for a while. She lived somewhere near Loch Lomond on the west coast and apparently we went there lots when we were small, but I don’t remember. Most of the time, she came to us but the visits were becoming less frequent because she was getting too old to travel. The last time we saw her, she visited us here on the Black Isle for Christmas, when Eddie and I were nine. On her last night, she and Mum had a fight. I never knew what it was about, but from the closet Eddie and I hid in, I heard Granny say to her, “I didn’t know I’d raised a wee liar.” On her way out she hugged Dad and told him to visit and bring us kids. He never did, though. She died in January this year, and Mum hasn’t spoken about her since.

  The best thing about Granny was that she treated me and Eddie the same, even though we weren’t. I was normal. Normal height, normal(ish) weight, and about average at school. Eddie wasn’t. He was small. He walked like his legs were broken and fell over all the time. He wasn’t “clever enough” to go to my normal school. Sometimes it wasn’t always for the best that Granny treated us as twins, because she’d buy clothes that were too big for Eddie or books that were too difficult for him, but Eddie didn’t seem to mind that much.

  “I’m the same as you, Ellie,” he’d say, grinning, wearing a sweater that went down to his knees. Or, “If you read the words first, I’ll read them when I’m ready.” He got that from Granny. She told him that he’d be able to do stuff when he was ready, and she never lied about how old we were either. She didn’t pretend that I was eight and he was six like Mum did.

  “Ellie, what’s your joke book about?” Eddie asked when he’d finished showing me his.

  I pulled my book out from under the cushion and showed it to him. My foot was tingling.

  “Horsies!” he exclaimed. Then he looked at my face and reached out for my hand. “Oh. I am sorry to hear that. You can share mine.”

  From across the room my father guffawed.

  “Celia, come in here, quick!” he called to Mum, who was in the kitchen cooking something that smelled like gone-off cheese.

  She came running through, with oil splattered across her apron. “What is it?”

  “Say it again, Eddie,” my father said, clasping his hands.

  Eddie looked at me, confused.

  “Can you remember what you said about my book?”

  “Horsies!”

  “No, after that,” I say.

  Eddie grinned. “Oh. I am sorry to hear that,” he said again, this time sounding even more like Mum when she’s on the phone to friends who’ve “had a terrible time.”

  Mum clamped her hand across her mouth and doubled over at the waist.

  “Oh, shit,” she cried. “Is that really what I sound like? Colin, why didn’t you tell me I sound so insincere? Shit.”

  “Don’t swear, Mum,” said Dillon from behind his encyclopedia. “Mum, did you know that black holes can have a mass of a hundred billion suns?”

  Mum didn’t respond to Dillon’s astronomy test and instead asked Eddie about the joke book.

  “Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds,” she read out. “Wow, aren’t you grown-up?”

  “It’s about sea creatures,” he said. “But I can’t find any fins in it.”

  “Well, never mind—there are plenty of other beautiful sea creatures. Why don’t you tell me a joke?” She wiped the grease from her hands on her apron and leaned on the wall, waiting.

  Eddie passed me the book.

  “Why did the lobster blush?” I read out.

  “I don’t know!” Eddie shouted.

  “Because the seaweed.”

  He didn’t get it. He started wriggling like he always did when he didn’t understand something.

  “Eddie, listen again. The sea weed,” I said, splitting the word.

  While Eddie bounced about and poked my knee, I saw Mum take off her apron and slide onto my father’s lap. Dillon held his encyclopedia in front of his eyes when they started kissing. I covered Eddie’s eyes, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He just wanted to kiss me.

  Eddie knew exactly what I thought about my book without me even saying anything. No one else understood me the way he did. I hadn’t told anyone I was scared of horses, but he knew.

  10

  The water is gray today, the same color as the sky, and the waves crash about inside the harbor, battering the fishing boats that line the wall. At least it’s not raining. I clear my throat before I enter the boathouse so that I’m ready to speak if Tay’s inside, and put more Ruby Red on to smooth my lips in case he wants to kiss me.

  The boathouse is empty and just as I left it yesterday, except now it feels miserable and gloomy. I’m barely settled under a blanket when a clatter from outside startles me. Then I hear music. Slowly, I creep back through the panel onto the pebbles and realize it’s coming from the clubhouse above me. I crawl out from under the clubhouse and climb the rickety steps up onto the veranda. One of the boards has been taken down from the clubhouse’s windows, and I can see inside. A man wearing glasses moves chairs around. In the far corner a large flat-screen TV shows a woman floating on her back in the sea with a bright red sun behind her. She sinks down under the water, her silver wetsuit making her look like a giant fish. The camera follows her as she drops through the water, going deeper and deeper until she disappears into the abyss. I feel breathless and queasy. I’m watching my dream play out right before me, only I’m wide awake. The music is lou
d but sounds tinny through the glass, and I feel like I’m the wrong way up. My legs start to give way just as the man turns around.

  I run before he sees me.

  It’s a mile from the harbor to our house on McKellen Drive. The quickest way is straight down the high street and through the cemetery, but I never take that shortcut. I used to try—I’d stand at the cemetery gate, but my feet would never take me in.

  Instead, I turn left just past the police station and take the long route around the back of all the houses. The roads weave in and out of the new subdivisions—great big houses with shiny garages and neat little bay windows. Our house is more like one of the old crumbly ones in Rosemarkie. There aren’t many like this left on our road.

  My father opens the door as I come up the path, tripping over the weeds, breathless and hot in the face.

  “Where have you been?” he yells.

  “School,” I say, and squeeze past him into the house.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  I try to ignore him, but he pulls me back. His face is taut. There are new creases around his eyes.

  “School finished an hour ago. What have you been doing?” He breathes noisily through his nose.

  “Nothing. Just walking,” I say. “I’m allowed to walk.”

  His arm pushes down on my shoulder as he searches my face. “You weren’t at the Point?”

  “No,” I say, focusing on a mole on his neck. He doesn’t specifically ask about the harbor.

  “Are you sure you’re not taking any drugs? Because if you are—”

  “You’re hurting me,” I whine, and wriggle out of his grip.

  He looks down the path, confused, and I resist the urge to ask if he’s the one taking drugs.

  It’s been months since I last had the dream, maybe even a year. I used to wake up feeling seasick. I would crawl into my parents’ room and slide between them. Mum never asked me what was wrong, but in her sleep she stroked my hair and whispered that I was safe.

  When I turned twelve, my father sent me back to my room.

  “You’re too old to sleep with us, Elsie,” he said, rising naked from the bed. “Turn the light on if you’re scared, but go back to your room.”

  He thought I was afraid of the dark. It never seemed to occur to him that I longed for the dark.

  11

  On Thursdays Mum goes to see a therapist called Paul. Her appointments are in the afternoon, and she gets back just before we come home from school. We’re not allowed to disturb her. Usually by the time my father gets home from work, she has got up and redone her makeup. Over dinner, she says things like “Oh, silly old me, crying again,” but later, after I’ve gone to bed, I hear her shouting at my father—telling him that he’s insensitive and that he should know by now that she doesn’t mean it when she says she’s okay after a session.

  Today, I wait an hour before I take a cup of tea up to her. She is lying splayed out on the bed like a rag doll, holding a scruffy teddy that used to be mine. She doesn’t acknowledge me, so I leave the tea next to her. She never drinks the tea. Usually the mug is still full and cold when I pour it out the window later onto the overgrown garden below. There are a few smashed mugs down there too, and I didn’t put them there.

  Dillon and my father are not as patient with Mum as I am. She says that they don’t get as sad about Eddie as she does, although I don’t know if this is true. It could be a bit true. I read in one of her books about coping with grief that the mother always suffers the most because she carried the child. The book didn’t say anything about twins, though. I asked Dillon about this once, and he said that I probably had the strongest bond with Eddie, but he also said it was a bad idea to read books about coping with grief. He said instead of reading, Mum should go to back to work full-time and look after her family properly. She works three days a week as a receptionist at a dental surgery, a job that she discovered while she was at school. Instead of finishing school, she stayed in the job to save up for a pair of knee-high boots. Whenever I ask for pocket money, she tells me that those boots were the last thing she ever bought for herself.

  There’s a knack to leaving the house quietly. I have to push the glass into the frame as I open the front door and then push it again from the other side so it doesn’t rattle. No one knows I’ve gone. It’s not a conscious decision to go to the harbor. I start walking, and then my brain fills with thoughts of Tay and the way he smokes—so delicately. If it weren’t for the smoke, you wouldn’t even notice what he was doing. And then I think about the man I saw inside the old clubhouse, and the woman in the silver wetsuit.

  It’s dark when I get to the harbor. I climb the steps onto the veranda and they creak. I have to press my face right up to the window to see into the clubhouse. The man with glasses leans on the bar reading a newspaper. His hair’s not quite gray, but it’s light and wispy and the skin on his face is loose. He licks his fingers to turn the pages and pushes his glasses back up his nose every now and again. Eventually he looks up. I duck down under the window ledge, but a second too late.

  The door opens. “Freezing out here,” he says, smiling down at me. “Come in if you want.”

  “I’m okay here.”

  He holds a hand out to pull me up, and I take it because I don’t know what else to do.

  “I was making tea.”

  He goes behind the bar and pours water from a kettle into two cups. He smiles the whole time and moves his head and shoulders as though he’s listening to some music I can’t hear. The barstool is slippery. I hook my feet around the legs but still feel like I’m sliding off.

  “Are you the owner?” I ask him when he passes the tea across.

  “I am now,” he says proudly. His teeth are so white, I think he could be a Hollywood actor. “My son and I are going to do it up and turn it into a diving club. It’ll be open to the public—anyone can come in and have something to eat or drink—but we’ll also rent out snorkel and diving gear, run dive trips, and eventually hire out boats. I’ve got big ideas for this wee place. See those boats out there? I’ve bought a few of them—they’re almost rotten, but I’ll replace some of the timber and they’ll be as good as new. We should be ready for business in about a month.”

  “Oh,” I say. I stare into my cup at the black tea, wondering if Tay is his son.

  “I’m Mick.” He shakes my hand. “What’s your name?” he asks. And then I smile because he doesn’t already know.

  “Elsie.” I pronounce it carefully, as though I’m saying it for the first time. I slide myself back on the stool and sit up straight. “Elsie Main.”

  “What you doing out here on a Thursday night?” he asks. “Have you lost your friends?”

  “I don’t have any friends,” I tell him. “I just have a brother, but I don’t know where he is.”

  He tells me he lives in Munlochy. “A quiet wee place.”

  Munlochy is a few villages away, back down toward Inverness. That’s where Paul the therapist lives too. There’s nothing there, not even a supermarket.

  Behind the bar, there’s a poster of a pale-skinned woman underwater. She’s smiling, and tiny bubbles trail out of the side of her mouth. Her black hair fans out into the water like a silk scarf, and her body is long and curvy in a shiny wetsuit. Her arms are lifted away from her body, like a bird’s wings just before takeoff.

  Mick sees what I’m looking at. “That’s Lila Sinclair. She’s the under-twenty-one national freediving champion. Scotland’s deepest girl.” He winks and says quietly, “I taught her myself.”

  “She’s pretty,” I say, wishing I had a body like hers.

  “It was her in the video you were watching from outside the other day.”

  When I don’t reply, he winks at me again. I can’t help but smile. I take a gulp of my tea, and liquid burns my mouth and throat. I know that later the skin on the roof of my mouth will feel rough and I can play with the dangly bits with my tongue.

  “Can you swim, Elsie?”

&nbs
p; “I used to.” I hope he can’t hear the tremor in my voice.

  “If you can swim, then you can dive. The only difference is, you hold your breath and stick your head under.”

  The thought makes me feel lightheaded. I thank him for the tea and tell him I have to go.

  “Come whenever you want,” he says. “I do a great hot chocolate too.”

  As I slide off the stool, I think that I’m not going to make it home without peeing myself. I look around, but I can’t see a sign.

  “Erm, is there a toilet here?”

  I’m so embarrassed when he takes me behind the bar and through a door that leads to steps down into a storage room.

  “We’ve not got the main ones up and working yet,” he says apologetically.

  The storage room is cold, and it takes me ages to go. I think about the video of Lila Sinclair, and I feel a mixture of excitement and fear. It’s not that I want to go into the water, but I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be down there and not feel as though I’m drowning. Goose bumps appear on my legs as I sit on the toilet. Maybe I’ll just stay for a hot chocolate to warm up.

  When I head back up the stairs, I hear voices and panic that it might be my father. I’m sure he follows me sometimes, because I know he doesn’t trust me. I look to see if there is another way out, but there isn’t. I am doomed. I step through the door, ready to face the music.

  There are four boys, all in various states of undress, and Tay is one of them.

  “You’ll never beat me!” he says to a boy with extremely curly hair, and then he sees me and goes quiet. His Adam’s apple rises up and down, and he gazes at the floor. His wetsuit is rolled down to his waist, revealing a blue shiny running top, and his feet are bare. He throws a cigarette into his mouth and runs his fingers through his slicked-back wet hair, spraying water everywhere. I wish there were a hole to fall through. I look away from him, and my eyes fall on the tallest boy. He has blond hair like Dillon’s and is bare from the waist up, with muscles so defined, I want to run my fingers over them. He puts a dripping-wet net bag on the table and slaps Mick on the shoulder.