The Water Claims Its Payment

CHAPTER ONE What the Water Left

CHAPTER ONE

What the Water Left

I had been in the bath a long time. That was the first thing I knew.

The second was that I had no idea how long.

The water had gone from scalding to warm to the temperature of the room, which meant an hour at least and likely two, and I couldn’t remember a minute of it.

Only the ceiling. The crack in the plaster over the window, the one Liora never fixed and I never got round to either, running out from the corner towards the middle like a finger feeling its way.

I had been under the whole while. Under, not floating. My hair spread over the bottom of the tub, my eyes open, and the cooling water lying on my face like a pane of old glass.

I sat up so fast half of it went over the side onto the floor.

I wasn’t gasping.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. A woman who has held her breath for an hour ought to come up the way a drowning man does, all shoulders and flailing.

I came up the way you sit up in bed when you’ve remembered you were meant to buy thread.

Calm. My chest perfectly quiet. My body hadn’t asked me for one thing, the whole time I’d been down there.

I sat in four inches of tepid water, arms wrapped round my knees, and waited to be frightened.

Nothing came. I listened to my heart go about its dull business and waited for the terror like you’d wait for a knock somebody swore they’d make, and the house said nothing at all, and after a while my feet got cold.

So I climbed out and dried off and put a dress on.

That was the morning of the nineteenth day.

? ? ?

Nineteen. I had started counting on the second day and couldn’t make myself stop.

Duskmere does a thing with the light in autumn.

Late in the afternoon it comes off the water low and flat and turns every white wall in town the colour of weak tea, and I had loved it all my life.

Now I stood in it, arms bare, and watched what it did to my skin.

I stepped out of it so it couldn’t. After a minute I stepped back in.

Because in that light, only that light and only at that hour, there was something underneath.

I wouldn’t call it a glow, because a glow comes from somewhere and this didn’t.

It was closer to a stone that’s sat in the sun all day and gives the heat back after dark, slowly, running down.

Blue-gold, a layer or two beneath the skin.

In the soft place inside the wrist. Along the ridge of the collarbone. Fainter each week.

Fainter, yes. I kept checking, the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts, wanting it gone and counting off the days till it would be.

Or not wanting it gone. I couldn’t have told you which, then. I’m no better at it now.

? ? ?

Elias had slept in the front room ever since the shore.

Not with me. That was his choice first and then, after he’d explained himself, mine too, though I spent the first four nights being unkind to him about it in small ways he was too decent to point out.

He’d told me, in the flat careful voice he uses when he’s telling the truth and knows it sounds like an excuse, that he wasn’t going to touch me in a week when I couldn’t tell which parts of my wanting belonged to me.

I wanted to throw something at him. Then I wanted to throw something at him and put both hands in his hair afterwards, and the fact that I couldn’t pull those apart was exactly his point, of course it was. I hate it when he’s right that early.

So he had the front room. A blanket, a stiff neck, and a lamp going half the night while he read.

He was reading when I came down with my hair soaking through the shoulders of my dress. He looked up and his eyes went over me once, fast, and it wasn’t how men look at me. It was the other way, the way a man checks his roof after a storm.

“You were in there a while.”

“Was I.”

“Two hours and twenty minutes.”

I stopped on the bottom stair. “You counted.”

“I didn’t mean to.” He put the book down open and face down, which he never does to a book. “I heard the water stop. Then nothing. Then I sat here two hours and twenty minutes deciding, about every four minutes, not to come up and knock. You’d have hated it. And if you’d needed me, you’d have.”

He stopped there.

“I’d have what?” I said. “Called? Elias. If I’d been drowning up there, I wouldn’t have called anybody.”

That sat between us. He picked the book up, put it down again, didn’t read a word. I went to the window and stood with my back to him. Two children in the lane were fighting over a stick, and I watched them a good while because they were the only thing in my life that made any sense.

“For what it’s worth,” he said behind me, “I’d have knocked at three hours.”

“How generous.”

“Two hours fifty. I’d have been on the stairs by then.”

I didn’t turn round. But I stopped wanting to throw things at him, and he could probably see that in my shoulders.

? ? ?

Nobody tells you what it’s actually like, turning into something.

I’d imagined it. Not this, I had nothing to imagine this with, but the rough shape of it, the way you imagine being rich or being loved or any of the things that happen to other people.

In my version there was a moment. A door, with one thing on this side and another on that, and you’d always know where you stood.

What really happens is you climb out of the bath with cold knees and somebody down the row is frying onions and the neighbour’s boy is shrieking in the lane and you’ve still got to work out what to eat.

The world doesn’t move its furniture for you. It goes on just as loud, and you stand in the middle of it with this enormous thing in your arms and no table to put it on.

I ate bread standing up at the counter. Sitting down felt like a commitment.

? ? ?

It started with the Pell girl, and she was four, so I can’t very well blame her.

I was at the fish steps on a Tuesday, in the queue behind her mother, and the child was doing what children do, which is stare at whoever’s nearest without a flicker of shame. I pulled the face I always pull at small children, the scandalised one, as if they’d caught me stealing.

She didn’t laugh.

She kept looking, a beat too long. Then she turned round and pushed her face into her mother’s skirt and left it there.

Her mother said sorry. That was what did it, really.

She turned with the fish in her hands and said sorry, she’s gone shy lately, and her voice had a brightness in it like a plank laid over a hole in the floor.

She never once looked me in the eye. Then she went up the steps at a fair clip with her daughter’s hand tight in hers.

Marta Pell has known me eleven years. I sat with her the week her husband’s boat came in without him. I cut bread in her kitchen and put it in front of her children, and she ate none of it herself, and I stayed until two in the morning.

I stood at the bottom of the fish steps with sixpence in my hand and couldn’t remember what I’d come down for.

? ? ?

After that I saw it everywhere, which is the trouble with noticing anything.

Nobody was hostile, I should say that. Duskmere had been fair to me for most of my life, and it would be easy to be unfair back, and I’ve never trusted the easy version of anything. Nobody was cruel. Nobody said a word.

It was smaller. The fish sellers’ talk dropping half a tone when I came down the steps and coming back up once I’d gone by.

Hallam at the rope stall, who’s flirted with me shamelessly and harmlessly since I was twenty-two, suddenly very taken with a knot while he served me.

And the gap. People had started leaving a gap.

They didn’t step back, exactly. They just never quite closed the distance, so I went everywhere inside my own little travelling pocket of spare air.

Here’s what I’ve had to live with since.

For nineteen years that was exactly what I’d wanted. Men looking somewhere else when I went by. One market in my life where not a single head turned. I’d asked for it in the dark, over and over, in the very words of somebody who had no idea what she was asking for.

Well, then. I had it.

I stood in the middle of it with fish in paper under my arm and I wanted the old thing back so badly my throat hurt.

At least the old thing had been about me.

Horrible, and false, and nothing I’d done, but mine: my face, my mouth, the plain fact of me standing in a room.

This was about something they couldn’t put a name to and felt anyway, like animals going quiet before weather.

I wasn’t a woman they wanted any more, and I wasn’t one they knew yet either. I’d turned into a change in the air.

I got most of the way home before I had to stop and lean against Tolley’s wall and breathe.

? ? ?

Somebody had left salt on my step.

Poured, not spilled. A line right across the width of the door, the way Mara lays it on nights she thinks the wood’s gone thin. A whole handful of good salt, and in Duskmere in autumn that isn’t nothing. Whoever did it had counted the cost and spent it.

I looked at it until my shadow had moved.

Then I crouched and pushed it apart with two fingers till the line was broken, and went in, and didn’t tell Elias.

? ? ?

The Gull and Anchor at six on a Thursday is nothing but clatter. Stools dragging, the door banging, somebody’s sleeve knocking a cup and somebody else’s hand catching it, the rolling scrape-and-bellow that means the fleet’s in and nobody’s tired yet.

I came in and stood at the edge of it and braced for the drop.

It didn’t come. Half a dozen men looked up and half a dozen went back to their ale, and the noise closed over my head like water, warm and stupid and gloriously uninterested in me.

I was standing in the doorway of a tavern I’d been walking into since I was fifteen, and I had to press the inside of my wrist against the doorframe, hard, for a second.

“Well, don’t just loom,” Wren said from somewhere behind the bar. “You’re blocking the draught and half these idiots are damp.”