by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie
I met a lady in the pub today who thought she recognised me, Christine wrote. Isn’t that strange? I think I’m going to leave Trevor when I get back.
It felt good to try out the words. She reminded herself that she didn’t have to actually post the card unless she wanted to.
She wrote two more postcards, one to her old teacher, Mike Claudel in Caversham, because she knew he enjoyed getting postcards, and one to Seven Frears who owned and ran the fabric shop and haberdasher’s where Christine bought her embroidery silks. Seven was called Seven because she was the seventh child in her family. Christine thought of her as her only real friend, even though she had never seen her outside the shop. She knew that Seven owned the small apartment above the business premises. It was just the two rooms and a shower room, more a bedsit than a proper flat, but she felt certain Seven would rent it out to her if she asked.
On her last card she wrote: Dear Tommy, I have always blamed myself for what happened to you. I don’t know if I was really to blame – I probably wasn’t – but I gave up swimming because of it. My mother thought it was because your accident made me afraid of the water, but it wasn’t that. I thought that if I gave up what I most loved it might bring you back. It was stupid to think that, I know that now. I’m sorry you died and I wish I could have warned you in time. I wish I’d been brave enough to make friends with you properly. I’m the girl in blue shorts who smiled at you, Christine Tregorrow.
She had to print her words very small and close together to fit them all in but she just managed it. The photograph on the postcard was of a Stormy Petrel. The Stormy Petrel was a strange bird, she knew. It spent most of its life at sea, coming in to land only to breed.
In some places they were known as Jesus Birds, for the way they had of seeming to walk on water. She put a stamp on the card and Tom’s name, Thomas Eltham. She left the address lines blank. She hadn’t known where Tom lived even when he was alive. His father would no doubt have moved away in any case.
Would her life have been so different if Tom hadn’t died? It was silly to think so but it felt true nonetheless. Perhaps she really was insane now. Who could tell?
She slipped the postcards into the post box on their way to the restaurant, all five of them, the one to her mother included. As they walked down the hill towards the harbour she found herself looking at Trevor in a new way, as if he were somebody she used to know, someone who was already part of her past. That made her feel sad for a moment, and she ran to keep pace with him. He did not slow down for her. If anything he quickened his step.
“You really are in an odd mood today,” he said at last. “Is there anything you want to tell me about?”
She remembered the months of their courtship, the first two years of their marriage, when any time spent apart would always have Trevor asking her that same question: is there anything you want to tell me about? There had been affection in his eyes then, and merriment, the sense that he really wanted to know. The phrase had been a private joke between them.
It wasn’t now.
Was it me? Christine thought. Did I kill it?
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m all right, honestly.” It occurred to her that she had never really told Trevor that much about herself. It was not that she had tried to hide things, simply that the deepest parts of herself had been inaccessible, even to her.
They walked on in silence. At the bottom of the town the sea was going out again. The exposed sand gleamed dully in the dusk, like hammered pewter. The sky dipped itself in the sea, the sun dissolving in a mist of vapours like a large pink pill. At the Schooner she ordered salt and pepper calamari and the monkfish curry. Trevor raised his eyebrows but did not comment. He didn’t like spicy food, and usually she pretended she didn’t either. He began to talk to her about the colony of dog whelks he had unearthed that morning, not the ordinary Nucellas but Nassarius reticulatus, which was much less common. He moved his hands as he spoke, and an excitement crept into his voice that had not been there earlier.
For those moments while he was talking Christine glimpsed again the man she had loved. The difference now had nothing to do with age. It lay in the fact that he talked, Christine knew, without ever truly caring what she thought or felt.
Trevor’s parents and perhaps Trevor himself had taken for granted that she would have children. It hadn’t happened, something that had once caused her grief but now filled her with gratitude.
A son or daughter would have tied her to Trevor forever; now she could disappear from his life like foam on the waves.
“Don’t you sometimes wish you’d taken that job in Swansea, like we planned?” she asked him suddenly. “We could have bought that little cottage on the Gower.”
“It was only a temporary contract, and the house was practically falling down. It would have turned out to be a dead end, if you ask me. We’re doing all right, aren’t we?” Without waiting for her to answer, he signalled to the waiter to bring the bill. “Time we were going, my little mermaid. You’re looking tired.”
He had not used that endearment in years. She knew he was only using it now as a means of closing off the discussion.
If only we had talked more, Trevor. I’ve been so lonely.
In their hotel room they watched the late news then got ready for bed. Christine lay on her side, turned away from Trevor. She felt no desire for him now, not just because they’d made love so recently but because she had already begun the process of separation.
She thought about her postcards, which would be collected with the first post the following morning. She had seen a documentary once, about the many thousands of packets and letters that for one reason or another were undeliverable. There was a warehouse in Belfast stacked full of them, a team of workers whose job it was to sort them and eventually mark them for destruction. She wondered if the postcard she had written to Tommy Eltham would one day end up there, or if by some miracle it would eventually find its way to Tom’s father.
She realised it didn’t matter either way. Just writing down the words had been enough. She closed her eyes, imagining an alternate past in which she and Tommy had chased each other along the beach, pelting each other with seaweed and screaming with laughter.
She had never done such things, not with anybody, but in some secret part of herself she felt that she had.
When she and her mother had returned from Kalamata they had spent a week together in Gwithian with Christine’s grandmother. Christine’s mother had gone off walking by herself a lot and seemed unusually impatient when Christine tried to talk to her. Years later she told Christine she had slept with Thomas Eltham’s father, just the once, the night before they flew back to England and three days after Tom died.
It was just something that happened, she said. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
Her grandmother was the same as always. She taught Christine how to make a fish pie and took her for walks along the beach and told her stories. One of the stories, Christine realised later, had been Hans Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’ only her grandmother had changed all the names and places. In her version of the story the prince was a merchant’s son from Truro and the Little Mermaid swam ashore in Lamorna Cove.
She remembered that for the Little Mermaid exchanging her fish tail for legs had been a one-time-only decision.
You will never again see your father’s kingdom, the Sea Witch said. Your new legs will hurt you like knives, and you will feel the pain of your loss with every step.
Christine supposed the Little Mermaid had most likely regretted her decision many times. She waited until Trevor was asleep then slipped out of bed and began putting on her clothes. It was past midnight, and the centre of town stood empty and quiet, the shops, the banks, the fast food kiosks closed and shuttered like circus booths after the crowds have departed and with as little purpose.
It could all be washed away in an instant, Christine thought. Her sandals flapped against the paving stones. She thought about what Jef
f Turner had said, about most of the planet’s surface being covered by water. We think of ourselves as the real world, but really we’re just outposts, just colonies, she thought. We don’t know anything.
She imagined the main street of the town inundated, the rusted flanks of cars encrusted with barnacles, the sunlit courtyards behind the cottages a playground for wrasse and sand gobies.
Somewhere in the lower depths vast leviathans would grind through the murk, the stuff of terror and legend even for the sea people.
Here be dragons.
The moon was full and the tide was out. She had to walk a long way across the sand flats before she came to the sea. She took off her sandals and went in up to her knees, the wavelets licking her skin like the tongues of black hounds. The horizon was so wide she could not encompass it. It was a clear night. She was aware of herself, as never before, as a speck on the surface of a planet spinning in space.
She saw them coming towards her, first as flickers of movement then as dark shapes, then as the muscular bodies of swimming women. They were the woman from the Lobster Pot and the one from the jetty who resembled her so closely. Their hair was down, floating behind them in the water like black seaweed. Their shoulders flashed white in the moonlight and Christine saw that they were both naked.
She slipped off her dress. It blew away from her and landed in the water. The salt, night air flowed in under her arms, seeming to bear her upwards, although Christine supposed that was mostly the rocking movement of the waves. She leaned forward in the water, letting the sea cover her shoulders and back. For a moment she felt its chill, but only for a moment. She let her feet rise up from the sand and she was swimming.
My God, how I’ve missed this, she thought. She swept her arms through the water, propelling herself forward. She had never swum naked before. The sea invaded her body, persuasive and irresistible, her secret lover.
Soon she came abreast of the two women. She thought they might all go back to shore together, but they moved in to swim either side of her, urging her onward and at the same time cutting off her retreat. The younger girl had a cut beneath her right eye, as if something in the water had tried to go for her. The injury didn’t seem to bother her. She kicked out playfully, sending a splash of water over Christine’s head.
“You need to get under,” she said. “It’s not real until you go beneath.” She put out a hand, squeezing Christine’s upper arm and tugging it downwards slightly as if in an attempt to submerge her. Christine felt panic nibbling at her insides like the mouthing, biting motions of tiny fish. She wondered what she was doing there, if any of this was even remotely real.
“I can’t,” Christine said. “I won’t be able to breathe.”
“You will though,” said the pub woman. “It’s a matter of faith, that’s all.” There were shells in her hair, large cockles, and to Christine she seemed both kinder and more patient than her daughter.
It’s because she knows what it’s like, Christine thought. She knows what it’s like to have made mistakes and not have a clue how to undo them.
“I’m scared,” Christine said. “How will I know what to do?”
“Just remember who you are, and do what comes naturally. Remember how beautifully you can swim.”
Like a fish, Christine thought, and dived down.
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Things That Are Here Now, Things That Were There Then
Andrew Hook
Fractured glass sparkles rainbow rays in the sunset, mirrored by surface oil in the puddle where a rusted bicycle is reflected at angles. Rust flakes lift and blow in the wind, thin metallic leaves; pseudo-papery fans which sooth no one. Nearby, crow picks at the ground desultorily. Neither expecting anything nor nothing.
From overhead the wingspan of a plane projects a moving cross on the rough ground, a chemtrail easing from its rear like trailing fish excrement. Once it passes, the shadow is replaced by lengthier ones of approaching evening. To the right of crow a flower, which once pushed itself out of the ground, catches the dying light of the sun, and drinks it in, stores it, anticipating the advent of yet another day. A day which never comes.
Constance always woke with the word no in her mouth, a password from dream into awakening. I watched her from the edge of the bed as the sunrise pulled objects from shadows like a magician’s reveal. The pine wooden bedroom furniture, the black anglepoise lamp – bent like a tall old man, the hairbrush filled with cement, the television that showed only a film of dust.
If the sun was the magician, Constance was the glamorous assistant. Her natural blond hair fanned across the pillows like fibre optics, her lips a pale smudge on her mouth, her nose a tiny reminder of olfactory memories. She shifted in the bedclothes, reached for me.
I remained quiet. Perhaps she couldn’t see me.
Beside her on the bed woke the shadows of the past.
I glanced around the room. Objects which were once here were no longer. Objects which had never been here now were.
Constance had moved with the times. I had moved in.
She blinked. “Did I say it?”
I nodded. “You always say it.”
“I saw crow.”
“You think you saw crow,” I said. “But even in a dream you don’t really see.”
She rubbed her eyes half-heartedly, resisted awakening. “So you say.”
“So I say,” I agreed. Then I reached over and pulled back the bedclothes, revealed nakedness.
Later that morning we exchanged soft kisses tasting of milk. Constance photographed her breakfast both before and after she ate. I took a photograph of her spooning cornflakes into her mouth. She always took more pictures than me.
Outside, shotgun-shattered bullets of rain smashed against the windowsill. A summer storm. We had turned off all the electrical items as the skies darkened. Lightning split the clouds like a rip in a dark pillowcase, revealing white feathers. Constance froze for a moment, as if the flash of lightning preceded a photographic shot: as though she posed. To an onlooker, at least, this is what they would have seen. But I saw beyond it. I saw the feathers and the memory.
Constance was an artist, and like all artists her belief in herself was stronger than she was. But this was an integral facet of her artistry because without that belief she would be a checkout girl, an usherette, a baker. Her art came out of herself like sunlight: pure. Yet also erratic. Anything which passed in front of her cast a shadow. And it was in the shadows that the weird stuff was born. The cement-filled hairbrush, the upside-down floorboard halfway up the stairs, the childhood photographs with her own face scratched out and then drawn back in. Those elements of Constance represented her dark side, and whilst she didn’t know as much I was here to cure it.
For eight months she had photographed her every waking task. Finding it insufficient, two months ago she hired me to photograph her in sleep. This proved impossible without falling in love with her, and the romantic artist inside herself realised that it was impossible without falling in love with me.
The difference between us was that her love was a falsehood based on a belief in the purity of art. Whereas mine… Well, mine was also a falsehood, a temporary aberration.
The photographs were all Polaroids. Constance disliked permanence yet craved it. One copy. This was her compromise. Some of them filled shoeboxes, others Lever Arch files. Those which depicted places within her house were pinned to the walls with interconnected photo clips. We were living inside a house inside a house. Each of the four walls of each of the rooms was wrapped as though from the inside out in photos representing what had been and what no longer was. Imagine, if you will, living inside a memory. Objects changed, but the photographs remained the same.
This was all very well. Until the arrival of crow.
“A crow, you say?”
She shrugged. “What do I know about birds? It’s black, has thick wings, a beak, speckles on its feathers like oil on water. I’m not an ornithologist.�
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“Maybe it’s a starling?”
She looked puzzled; a frown creased her brow as though drawing a line under her blond fringe.
“Or simply a blackbird,” I ventured.
“No,” she said. “It’s a crow. And if it isn’t, then I want it to be.”
Artists always wanted to find significance in everything.
I was the first to tell her that she woke every morning with the word no in her mouth.
“Really?” Her eyes were wide, like gobstoppers painted with blue circles.
“Really. It’s a reaching out for something. Or, it looks that way.”
“Does it worry you?”
I could tell that she wanted it to worry me.
“No, it doesn’t worry me,” I said. “Has no one told you this before?” I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that she had never slept with anyone.
“No,” she said. “Maybe it’s you.”
I thought about that. “Maybe,” I said.
That morning she pulled the covers away from me. My foreskin was shrivelled around the head of my penis and she laughed.
“It looks like a walnut whip.”
Then she photographed it.
One day she went shopping and I searched for a box of photographs that I knew would exist and which I eventually found under the bed, like a schoolboy’s stash of pornography. They were unclear. Body parts captured too close to the skin to identify an owner or owners. I put them back carefully and decided not to think about them ever again.
But if Constance had a secret then I also had a secret. I was not who I pretended to be.
Down in the dirt, right at ground level, the twisted spokes of the bicycle spoke volumes about evolution.
