Words in Deep Blue(61)

‘I know everything about you,’ she says.

‘Impossible. There are always more things to be known. I’ll prove it. I will ask questions of myself, and you will answer them, and we’ll see if you get them right.’

‘And shall we call the game Narcissism?’

‘We shall call the game Henry. Question one: Who was my first kiss?’

‘Amy,’ she says.

‘Incorrect.’

‘Who?’

‘You. I kissed you on the mouth in Year 4.’

‘Really?’

‘Kiss-chasey. You don’t remember?’

‘I have no recollection,’ she says. ‘But trauma will do that to a person.’

‘Question two: What is my favourite colour?’

‘Red. The colour of Amy’s hair.’

‘Incorrect. It was red, and now it’s blue,’ I say, looking at her eyes. Closely followed by lemon. She looks right back at me. It doesn’t get weird. It doesn’t get awkward. This is Rachel. She throws a piece of bread at me when it’s time to stop staring.

‘Should we play the game of Rachel?’ I ask.

She looks out of the window, in the direction of the ocean. She says, yes. But the game of Rachel really needs to be played on a beach.





Rachel




holding the dead here with their stories

I keep telling myself that there’s some other way to interpret the game that Henry’s playing with me, some other way to read the way he looked at me in the bookstore. But it’s my eyes that are blue. My dress that is lemon. Me who was his first kiss. It’s the last night of the world and Amy is far, far away. The Walcott, both of us are thinking, is some kind of sign.

‘Should we play the game of Rachel?’ he says, and when I think about that game, I know that it really needs to be played on a beach.

We’re on the peninsula, less than two hours out of the city, the opposite direction from Sea Ridge. The ocean will look different and smell different. It will be called by a different name. But it will be the same unpredictable thing.

‘Are you sure you want to go?’ Henry asks, and I’m sure and not sure.

I’ve been thinking about it since we got out of the car. I’ve been away from it for too long. I thought about it in the bookshop before lunch as I watched Henry run his hands over the spines of books, hovering over the ones he loved. I thought about him living a life without the bookstore, and at the same time I thought about me, living a life without the ocean. A dry, bookless world. It’s too bleak even to imagine.

I hear the water as we get closer, the hush of it, circling and flattening out. When it appears, I’m ready. It’s long and achingly flat, not like the rough waves that heap over themselves continually back home.

Henry and I sit on the beach and stare at it for a long time. This is the water of my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes it’s the thing that takes Cal away, dragging him out in currents, and sometimes it’s the thing that brings him back, bleached like that beaked whale. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, he’s alive, and grabbing at those silver fish.

I tell Henry about the three layers to the ocean: the sunlight layer, the twilight zone, and the midnight zone, each named for the amount of sun in them. In the midnight zone, creatures have to make their own light. Before Cal died, the midnight zone was my favourite. The idea of no light fascinated me.

‘I wanted to dive, do you remember?’ I ask, and Henry says he couldn’t understand how I could be that brave.

Bravery had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t imagined that anything terrible would ever happen. To me, or to the people I loved. I assumed we’d always be safe.

I think about the things I wanted to see – killer whales, hatchet fish, and vampire squid. I think about how I pored over books: fascinated by dragon fish, metal and frill, teeth and eye; fascinated by beautiful creatures, too, in colours that I’ve never seen in the surface world, both electric and pale, creatures glowing like fresh snow in the darkness.

‘It scares me, but I want it again,’ I tell Henry.

‘You shouldn’t feel guilty about that,’ he says, and I wonder if that’s what I’ve been waiting to hear, that I’m allowed to love it again.

‘You want to swim?’ he asks.

‘Yes, but I’m not ready yet.’

We sit for another hour. I watch the ocean and Henry. He makes a sandcastle and puts a ring of shells around the battlements. Before we leave, he walks to the edge to wash his hands. I think he does it deliberately, so that he can come back and splash me, and I can feel the water on my skin.




There’s a soft pink glow in the sky by the time Henry drops me at the warehouse so that I can get ready for tonight. I remember something that Gus said to me once. ‘It’ll just arrive. A feeling of being okay. If you do all the things we’ve talked about, it’ll arrive.’ He spoke as though it was a physical thing, something as real as a package that would come to me in the mail.

As I step out of the van, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window. I’m not the old me or the me I’ve been for the last eleven months. I’m another me. I still don’t quite recognise her. She looks, if I had to describe her, expectant.




By the time I get back to the bookstore the sky has clouded over. ‘It’ll rain by the end of the night,’ I tell Henry.