Under My Skin

by Alison Jameson

  Matilda took the trash out. Fed her cat and ignored his sulks.

  ‘You think you have problems,’ she said, and they would not even meet each other’s eyes. Godot walked to the window and watched the snow as if it was new to him. He had seen it for two winters now and yet he sat with his back to her, his head looking up and down as he tried to watch each and every flake. ‘Another break-up,’ he would say, if Godot would ever talk. She did her laundry. Changed her sheets even though they were almost new. She opened her post and paid her cable bill. Then she checked her mailbox and her heart sank a little further when she saw there was no email from Hope. She tried to practise returning to her old life. And then she turned off her phone and went where she had wanted to go all along.

  Matilda kept the wig in the closet in the bedroom. It was short with loose curls and peroxide blonde. She painted her lips red in her favourite MAC colour, which was Rage. Then she put the wig on and took a pill and went to the walk-in closet in the hallway. The inside of the door was covered in black and white prints. Glassman smiling at a barbecue – he hated barbecues. Glassman with his favourite Ben and Jerry’s – Caramel Chew-Chew. Glassman on the beach – he got a great tan – and on the sidewalk after the concert in the Beacon. Then his hands again. His fingertips. His smiles. His face. His eyes – his eyes, and it all came together to make a montage and a shrine to Glassman.

  He had told her and was direct about it – and yet in a simple clear moment in her hallway closet she decided something else. He said ‘Yes’ to releasing her. He said ‘Yes’ to ending it. He said ‘Yes – yes – yes’ as she packed all her little things and ‘Yes’ when he followed her down the stairs and on to the street. It was his arm that went up for the cab and he breathed ‘Yes’ to the one that swooped into the sidewalk straight away. Glassman said ‘Yes – oh yes’ to the final goodbye of it, but high in the dark shadows of her closet, when Matilda could not manage the word, Marilyn said ‘No.’

  7 No Running No Jumping No Diving (December 1992)

  Alter ego n. – 1. A second side to an individual’s personality, different from the one that most people know. 2. A very close and trusted friend.

  Daniel climbs the first snowdrift. His feet are sliding, his dark eyes blinking, white sky and white earth meet. The peacock is dazzled by it and flies up and sits on the roof. When my brother sees this he laughs, a bright shouting laugh that comes up from his feet. He walks on top of the drift, as high as the ash trees, and then jumps down and crunches into the frozen snow on the lane. The water tanks are frozen. There is no water for the house. One lamb is dead. A second one in my arms. The lamb’s brother, in a small pink cardigan. He makes himself at home in the warm kitchen and gives short sharp bleats, stepping around.

  My grandmother’s house is pretty, an old falling-down place, painted a very pale blue. There are trees, every kind, silver birch, Dutch maple, horse chestnut and pine. When Daniel passes the kitchen window he is singing honky-tonk, Benny Goodman, I think, and I put some hot toast into his hand. This year I am thirteen years old. In March we will both be fourteen.

  ‘Juna has a glass eye,’ he says. ‘That means she can see you inside and out.’

  My grandmother has driven up the front avenue with her little car puffing out lots of white smoke. It is a long winding gravel path, hard like concrete now, through wide-open fields. So she gets the best of it, the duck pond frozen in the hollow, the old-fashioned wooden fences and gates, the swing with snow on the seat. And in the distance she would have seen Ghost Lake between two hills, and then the house, beginning to crumble, with the stone arches into the stables, the old red-roofed byres and the grey tractor frozen in the yard.

  Juna is a tall woman with broad round shoulders and a shock of snow-white curly hair. When she gets out of the car she beams at us, first Daniel and then me. There is something raw about us. I already know this about myself, but she takes all of this in and absorbs us. The Wellingtons worn in the house. The holes in my elbows. The dirty jeans. We are all dressed in layers like onions to keep warm and my hair is in two long blonde braids, several days old. She smiles again at the hen who has decided to leave the kitchen and the lamb who puts his head around the door. She takes a look around the yard and then begins to carry groceries towards the house. Today she reminds me of the Snow Queen, with her white hair and mittens, except she is driving a Robin Reliant instead of a sleigh.

  Outside Daniel sits on the pink cart. It is rotten now. Left to die in the long frozen grass. There are two wooden shafts pointing upwards and I go and sit next to him. It is not a nice place to sit. There is a smell of old wet wood and underneath, a place for yellow fungus, frogs, slugs.

  ‘She’s cleaning,’ I tell him, and he kicks at the ground. A loose stone skitters across the frozen earth. He looks worried. We are both wild but Daniel is worse than me.

  He scrunches his face up in the cold and refuses to come inside. His knuckles are red and blue with a summer suntan still on the backs of his hands.

  ‘She’s like a white tornado,’ he says and we both start to laugh. And from the window she watches us as she piles old newspapers into bags for burning. We have grown up on toast and cornflakes and we eat everything from paper plates and she sees us now, exactly as we are, in the mess of our lives and how we stand in the middle of it, laughing.

  Upstairs Pappy is painting again. The older canvases are turned away from us now. There are paintings of grey stormy skies over the lake, with rolling clouds and pale yellow shafts of sunlight pushing through. Everything is the colour of a wet autumn, always damp and dark. Or as Juna says, ‘The colour of a bog.’ His new paints came down on the Dublin bus. They were wrapped in brown paper and different to before. They have flashy lipstick names – ‘African Dust’, ‘Rhinestone Blue’ and ‘Lemon Ice Cream’. He is using acrylics and crayon instead of oils. We collected them for him along with Juna’s three-day-old chicks. They arrived with their little feet sliding, in another brown box, one that felt alive and warm. He wears an old white shirt when he paints. There is a red splash of paint where his heart is and some yellow flecks up near the collar. He stands in his socks with the shirt on over a jumper and there is a hole in the heel of his sock. His bedroom is used as his studio now and there is a two-bar electric heater sitting in the grate. Old canvases lean on every wall but there is something different on the easel today. Sometimes he goes to it and makes a lot of tiny brush strokes – but mostly he just stands still and stares. He puts his hands to it and mixes the colours and blurs the harder lines with his fingertips. Then he pulls the corners of his mouth down and nods and shrugs and then he sits down on the chair. After supper I bring him some of Juna’s special walnut cake and a pot of coffee on a tray.

  In the end the painting is of two leather slippers. Soft calfskin slippers with pointed toes. They are covered in as many colours as he could think of. Blue rhinestone, ruby-red, hot pink, azure blue and emerald-green. There is turquoise and jade – a million tiny jewels perfectly positioned and formed. Indian Slippers it is called.

  Daniel. Origin, Hebrew, meaning – God is my judge.

  It is September. Almost one year later, 1993. We are standing at the lake. ‘Ghost Lake’. It is calm. Warm. Quiet. There are smooth grey and white rocks near the shore. Two small wooded islands. A ramp with worn-out wood, pounded for years by children running in bare feet. I can hear the hollow call ‘Geronimo!!!’ They whooped it out like young braves going to battle, the words flying up and echoing in the trees and hills as they ran and bombed off the end. The trees where we found the charm bracelet. The red and white sign that says, ‘No Running No Jumping No Diving’.

  It is Daniel’s idea to take the boat out.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Just a little way and we’ll come straight back.’ He watches me for a moment and smiles at my face. The sun is going down. Late afternoon. No cars. Not even the grey-haired lady who swims for her arthritis. Behind those hills, the house. Behind those trees there is an orange tent
. The swimming coach who leaves tomorrow morning. A dental student from Dublin. A young, muscular man in Speedos who has taught me, amongst other things, to swim.

  Daniel walks to the edge of the lake.

  He makes a stone jump six times over the water.

  ‘Six,’ Jack says and he frowns into the sun. The boys are wearing shorts. Denim cut-offs to their knees. Both darkly tanned. I am wearing a new sky-blue bikini made from towelling material and it soaks up the water like a sponge. For a moment the boat is forgotten and Daniel walks to the end of the ramp. He stands on the first diving board. His hands are on his hips as if he couldn’t care less. His legs are tanned. Even his toes. My brother is more beautiful than I am. Jack waits with me near the shallow part. I know nothing about him yet except that he is a tall, silent boy and Daniel’s first real friend after me.

  At fourteen I am growing. ‘Coltish,’ Juna said. An awkward country girl with red cheeks and tangled blonde hair. There are bruises on my knees and a star-shaped scar over my navel. I could not say Daniel as a child, so I called him Danny and Daniel called me ‘Star’.

  He jumps lightly on the diving board. It is at least ten feet over the water. He stretches. Yawns. We watch. He lifts his arms. Out by his sides like he might flap and fly. And then he swings them back quickly and with one single bounce – and in his t-shirt and shorts – he is diving in. The water splashes back and then there is silence again. Daniel cuts through the water, taking several strokes before surfacing, and by the time he comes up Jack has looked right into my eyes and I have blushed and looked away. Daniel’s black hair is sleek and shiny when wet. He swims towards the red ladder and begins to pull himself up. He is panting and he stands for a moment watching us and sees that something has changed. He looks at Jack and then at me as if we have betrayed him.

  ‘Hope, come here to me,’ a voice says and when I turn I see Juna standing on the shore. Sometimes my grandmother is like a vapour. A bright streak of light. She just appears out of nowhere and I think she must be able to fly and get in under doors.

  I lift myself with my hands and drop easily into the water. I swim slowly because I know they are watching me and I keep putting one foot down because I am terrified I will drown. I swim as far as the red buoy and wait there, my eyes turned to the horizon, away from him and away from her.

  Jack offers Daniel a cigarette. My brother grins and then wipes the water from his face and puts one between his lips. They stand then as they usually do, saying nothing but liking the fact that the other one is around. I had never seen two boys who are good friends until then. How quiet and calm their friendship was. When my friendship with Doreen is built on laughter and talk and sound.

  Daniel turns towards the boat again and blows cigarette smoke towards it.

  ‘We’ll row out to the first island,’ he says casually and all the time he refuses to meet my eyes.

  ‘Come on, Star,’ he says suddenly, and his face breaks into his bright happy smile. He knows I will not go out there with them, that my fear of the deep water will keep me on the shore. He knows he will win with this and he also knows that there was somewhere else I want to be.

  ‘Teach her to swim,’ Juna said, ‘and I’ll bake you a flan.’ The dental student thought we were mad. He arrived at her house when we were trying to get a cow off the front lawn. He came on a five-speed racing bike and Daniel, for no reason, began calling him ‘Doc’. In the middle of our tea Pappy came in smelling of sweat and manure and ordered everyone, including Doc, outside to help bring a heifer in. ‘Get a bottle of treacle,’ he said to Juna, ‘she’s bound up.’ I was mortified. My family are generally embarrassing people and I already thought Doc was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.

  When we came back there was a cat on the kitchen table with his head stuck in the milk jug. ‘Get down, you bastard,’ Pappy said without even blinking, and I felt like crawling under a chair.

  ‘Doc… Hope’s afraid of water,’ Daniel said. We were sitting around the kitchen table eating salad with all the windows opened up over the fields. Everyone was passing the real plates around and being helpful and polite.

  ‘Daniel,’ I said, ‘please shut your cake-hole.’

  Sometimes I have no time to check myself. I am always saying that sort of thing. And Granny Juna was looking at my father and shaking her head. Doc, who has just turned seventeen, looked at me and gave me a smile.

  ‘I’ll have her swimming by the end of the week,’ he said.

  My grandmother always pays in food. Tomatoes from the greenhouse. Heads of lettuce. Gooseberry jam, and she is very good at pies. Fish pie. Steak and kidney pie. Chicken and ham pie. Shepherd’s pie. Cottage pie. But it is summer so she offered Doc her aquaphobic granddaughter and a flan.

  He stood on the ramp wearing a t-shirt over his Speedos. Sometimes he jumped up and down lightly on the diving board but he never got wet. His blond hair fell to his shoulders and his Speedos were like a postage stamp at the top of his legs. I waded in, terrified and delighted that it was just me and him and the lake. Every night he stood on the ramp and gave orders. He swung his arms around as if getting warmed up for a race. He told me to stand two feet away from the bar and then throw myself towards it.

  ‘The water will carry you,’ he said. ‘You just have to let it.’ And he watched me doing that for a long time and then he told me to move back another foot and do it again. And that is how I learned to swim. Standing up to my waist night after night, the sun going down, shivering, sometimes freezing, hugging myself against the cool evening breeze, and always looking up at him.

  ‘Back another foot,’ he said, ‘and do it again.’

  At the end of the first week I made my first proper stroke. And that night Juna made the flan. It had lots of mandarin orange slices and cream on it and I carried it down to him under an umbrella because it rained. I wore a new swimsuit with trainer straps and a heartbeat pattern across my chest. I let my hair loose and it got wet. ‘Relax,’ he said and this time he got into the water with me, and as it grew dark and with the water still warm from the sun of the day, he balanced me on his arms. He smelt like salt and suntan lotion and later I watched as he dived from the highest board and clapped when he surfaced again. We ate the entire flan inside the tent and listened to the rain on the canvas and he asked if he could kiss me then.

  The boat is old. It is wooden with a flat bottom and dangerous in a lake like this. A lake called ‘Ghost Lake’ because it has no bottom. Imagine a lake without a bottom. A place that could take you right down into the centre of the earth. There are no life jackets. We are not allowed to take it out. We have been told often enough. But Jack is here and everything is different. Sometimes Pappy rows out to the middle of the lake to fish. He takes us with him and we are not allowed to talk and we like the respect for the boat in the water. We like the sound of the oars when they first touch the surface and the rub of the oarlocks on the wood. The knocking of wood against wood. We are not supposed to take the boat out but Jack is here and we are all able to swim now.

  The boys row out towards the first island and I stand watching. I envy them and their adventure and the cigarette is held between Jack’s teeth now as he rows. He messes it up too and one oar misses the water completely. I want to be there with them but I can’t go out that deep. Daniel takes over and Jack moves unsteadily to the stern. The lake is so calm and silent and in a little while I can’t hear their voices or the sound the oars make as they fall. I walk to the end of the ramp and sit and watch the boat. I hug my knees, my wet hair pulled into a ponytail. The air is growing colder. What happens? I don’t know. That is the truth. I grow tired of sitting here and turn and walk towards the shallow part. I am thinking of skipping stones. Of going home. Of hot tea. Of salad. Of Pappy painting in his studio. Of Juna’s nice kitchen. Of our red shop just on the edge of our town. Of hanging wet swimsuits on the line. Of falling into bed and sleeping in wet hair. Of the orange tent behind the trees.

  Doc is waiting near
the fire. It crackles and sends sparks into the air. He holds the flap back and without a word I creep inside. He begins kissing me and no one says a word. At one point there is a voice. Somewhere far away. ‘Star,’ it calls and then ‘Star’ again. The boys. It is almost an hour later when I come back out and when I walk out on to the ramp I am dizzy and jelly-legged and carrying the empty flan plate.

  The boat is upside down and there are hands and splashing near it. I almost laugh. I think I do and then the laugh is swallowed until it disappears back inside. There is one head. Dark hair. Who? Daniel or Jack? And then I know that this is different. That something has happened and I am running to the end of the ramp. I can hear Jack’s voice, ‘The buoy!’ and then ‘The buoy!!’ again. His voice breaks into a cry the second time. He is in the water and somehow crying now. My hands begin to shake when I untie it. I want to pee. My stomach feels as if it is suddenly opening up. My left arm aches badly. My limbs are heavy and from nowhere I am crying too. Whimpering. Crying because the flat-bottomed boat has turned over and because it will sink now and because it is my brother Daniel I cannot see.

  The boat is too far away. It is too far to throw the buoy.

  Too far. Too far. I would have to swim. The buoy is hollow, old. It won’t hold me. I will throw it. I won’t throw it. If I swim I will have to go out into the deep water. Deep green cold. The lake without a bottom. Water filling my lungs. Covering my face, my hair, my head. Going down. Down. Down. Goodbye, everyone. In the water Jack leaves the boat and disappears and now both boys are gone. There is a sudden silence and then the boat is going down too. Total silence that chills me to my bones. I begin to whimper and still I am frozen on the ramp. Why? Jumping up and down. Crying. Whimpering. Then I remember Doc. And I run, run away, run away down the ramp. Bare feet smashing over stones. Into the trees over nettles. Grass. Tree stumps. Crying, screaming now. The tent is gone. His fire still smokes. A pale yellow rectangle on the grass but his bike is there, on its side, and when he appears I can only point. My speech is gone and my body gives up and I sink down into the grass. My left side agony now. My breath gone. Where is Daniel? Where is Daniel? Jack is back up again. I can see him. Hear him. Sobbing. Big girl cries. I can hear his crying from here.