Still Water by Catherine Marshall
Gil wants to go back to the hotel but I resist. Instead we retrace our route to the vaporetto stop and wait for the bus. He stays near me, watchful, his hand on my shoulder, trailing down to the small of my back. “Are you okay?” he murmurs.
“Mm.”
After a moment he says gently, “You know nothing happened, with Henry. You know he was never there.” I nod, once. He takes a breath. “I don’t know. Maybe you blame him, for setting things in motion, for – ”
“He has been following us though.”
He says nothing.
“Gil, he grabbed me at the station in Milan. We’ve seen his car like a zillion times.” I look into his face, which is closed against me. “Are you denying this now?”
“Shh.” He strokes my hair. “No. I’m not denying anything. I think we both need to get some rest. Not a few hours’ fitful sleep back at the hotel. Real rest.”
“How do we do that?”
“Quit behaving like fugitives for a start. Find somewhere we can stay for longer than a couple of days, lie low. Try to live some kind of life.”
I gaze at him, so grateful he’s saying this, pretending for both of us that it might actually happen. He squeezes my shoulder. The bus whirrs and churns into view. We board and ride the shifting waters of the canal back to St Mark’s Square.
I still can’t face the hotel so he takes me, inevitably, to a bar. I murmur that our whole relationship has been spent in bars and he looks surprised – “Isn’t everyone’s?” I remember how happy he was that night in Patrick’s, before Cecily turned up and everything changed. I remember us talking that first time in bluewave, about music and family and fate. We will never be so carefree again. We will never be in either of those places again. I shudder and knock back the brandy he’s bought me in a single gulp. “We could just get hammered,” he suggests. It’s an appealing idea. I can’t take any more of being aware, all the time. Of being conscious. He says, “Why don’t you want to go back to the hotel?”
I don’t know how to answer him. I don’t want to tell him that I dream, nightly, of being beaten, drowned, hacked to pieces. He used to hold me when I woke screaming but I am so inured to it now I no longer scream. Instead I sit sweating and trembling on the edge of the bed, and he doesn’t stir. In the end I settle for, “I don’t want to be on my own.”
He frowns. “I’ll be there.”
“Will you?”
He pauses. “Tell me,” he says earnestly, “tell me you understand that I will always be there. That you are bound to me now for the rest of your life.”
I like that he says I am bound to him, not that he is shackled to me. I swallow, rub my forehead. “You’re being very kind.”
He tries to make light of it. “I was always kind to you.”
I look at him. “Except … ”
“Yes,” he concedes. “Except then.”
“And I … ”
“Don’t.” He touches my wrist as if to stop my words. “Don’t, Jem.”
I’m crying again. For all the talk of living a life we both know this is the end. My blurry gaze travels from his face to the darkened cavern of the bar. In a distant pool of light near the door a shadow moves.
Hours later, and we are both hammered. I cannot see a yard in front of me, let alone remember the route back to the hotel. Gil, a little more steady on his feet than I am, leads us back and forth down alleyways which seemed sinister in daylight. Now, the faint lap and gleam of water every way we turn and the far distant sussurus of voices, the night seethes malevolent around us.
“Fuck,” Gil says, distinctly enough.
“Are we lost?”
“No. I just … I could’ve sworn … ” We are crossing a small stone bridge between two sheer walls of shuttered windows and he strides to its end.
“Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not. I just need … ” And he’s gone, swallowed up into the blackness.
I wait.
“Gil?” I say after a minute. My voice sounds as vulnerable as I feel. I remember when he went missing in the night at the petrol station in France, and I was as deranged with fear as I am now. He keeps slipping away. “Gil!”
She comes from nowhere, swooping down upon me, pushing me hard against the parapet of the bridge, her arm against my throat, such rage in her eyes that I cannot even cry out. I can barely breathe. Her face is inches from mine, her eyes wild, lips drawn back, a vein throbbing in her forehead. Death has transformed her beauty into something savage. “Where is he?” she hisses.
Why do they keep coming for him when he isn’t here? “He was … ” I indicate the foot of the bridge. It’s a strain to talk, to point. She jerks my head back.
“I could tear you apart with my bare hands.”
She could. I would put up no defence. I’m crying. “You’ve come to take him away.”
“Damn right.” Her dress is still covered in blood. I stare, want to touch. I want to know if it’s still wet. She shakes me hard. “He doesn’t belong to you.”
“I know – ”
“He never did.” Her fist hits me hard between my breasts and I gasp for air, her other hand ripping back my hair. I sink, my arms raised to protect my face, until I’m crouching against the stone parapet, accepting her blows as if I deserve them. Because I deserve them.
“Jem!” Gil’s voice. I can’t move. “Jesus Christ.” He is kneeling beside me, parting my arms to see my face. “What happened?”
“Cecily was here.”
He stares at me. The bridge is empty but for us.
“I can’t do this anymore.” I’m sobbing. “I can’t do it, Gil. I want to go home.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Jem stood knee-deep in a fast flowing stream, unsteady with the stoney bed and the hard buffeting of the water. Just beneath the surface swam shoals of minnow, brushing against her like lengths of ribbon. She was hysterical, for these fish were poisonous. As they bit into her skin when they passed they released into her bloodstream an amount of venom so deadly she would soon topple beneath the surface, the tiny killers rushing into her mouth and throat, river water filling her lungs. She could feel the pricks of their teeth in her bare shins and calves even now.
She woke, her heart racing. The bedroom clicked into reassuring focus around her: soft white bedding; a tapestry throw; wide waxed floorboards; Prussian blue walls. And, but for the muffled rumble of traffic, silence. She sat up, flipped back the sheets to pad into the bathroom, where the tiles beneath the chrome shower were wet, the glass steamed. There was a single towel on the heater, in the cabinet the barest of essentials. Months since he’d lived here, but even so.
She pulled on her clothes, crept through to an olive green sitting-room, its shuttered windows overlooking the square below, a battered leather sofa opposite the fireplace, a desk in the corner on which a laptop sat with its lid shut. Near the windows a low table held a small television and a CD player but none of his technology was state-of-the-art. There was so little of anything, she thought. The authors on his bookshelf were an eclectic mix – Jack Kerouac and Paul Auster, Ian Rankin and Nick Hornby - but had he actually read any of them? She couldn’t remember ever having seen him read anything other than a menu.
The rooms were so quiet she heard his key turn in the lock, and hastened out into the hall to greet him. “Hey.” He was laden with carrier bags. “I had nothing in. Did you sleep okay?”
“Mm.” She followed him into the kitchen, where he began unloading his shopping into the fridge. She watched as he unpacked cartons of juice and cans of beer, polystyrene trays of chicken fillets and bloodied steak.
“No nightmares?”
“No.” She chose not to mention paddling with piranhas.
“Good. Do you want a coffee?” He flicked on the kettle.
She gazed along the oiled wood worktop. The kettle, a toaster, a block of knives, the tins and packets he had yet to put away. No dust or grime. Nothing useless or broken, nothing that had been sitting t
“Yeah? What did you imagine?”
“Something less grand. How do you live like this?”
“It was in such a state I got it at a really good price, did all the work myself. My parents chipped in quite a bit – glad to finally get rid of me.” He almost smiled.
“It’s so tidy.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have much stuff.”
“No wonder you hated my house.”
“I didn’t hate it. It just felt … claustrophobic.” He said it apologetically, put her coffee mug on the oak table in front of her. He didn’t join her to drink his, instead stayed leaning against the sink. “What do you want to do?”
“Now?”
“Today, tomorrow. We could stay holed up here if you like. Or I could show you around.”
“And after that?”
“I don’t know.” His gaze was direct. “We’ll do what’s best for you, but I honestly don’t know what that is.”
She was unnerved: he had, until now, seemed to know exactly what was best for her, had at times been quite insistent upon it. But they had driven two hundred miles last night and into another world. This was his territory now. It must be weird for him. She said, “Can we just see how it goes?”
“Sure.” He sipped his coffee.
She said suddenly, a cry from the heart, “It’s like we’re strangers.”
“Well,” he said after a moment, “we are.”
She stared at him. The five or six feet between them had become a chasm. His face told her he knew as well as she did that he had, for the first time in as long as she’d known him, said the wrong thing. She couldn’t tell whether he was going to back-pedal or hold his ground. Her throat burned. “How can you say that?”
“Listen.” He pulled out a chair, a conciliation of sorts, and sat down. “I know what you’ve been through the last few months. That’s not everything you are, is it? No more than that the person I’ve been with you is all that there is to me. That’s all I meant. We’ve been through a very intense time and maybe it’s time now to crawl back out into the world again. To be … normal again. That’s what you said you want.” She nodded. “Okay, so normal for me here is work and this place, it’s friends and family. How far you want to be a part of that is up to you.”
She shook her head. “It’s up to you.”
He sighed. “I wouldn’t have brought you if I didn’t want you here.”
“So it wasn’t just you being heroic then?”
“What? That makes no sense.”
“It makes you look good.”
“You think I’m doing this for me?” She saw the flash of hurt and anger in his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Come with me.” He didn’t take her hand, draw her along with him. He just stood up. She went with him into the sitting-room. “Look,” he said.
The painting she hadn’t noticed earlier on the alcove wall was of a surfer, balanced on his board, a great swell of tide advancing behind him. You could admire the skill with which the artist had reproduced the texture of the sand, the clarity of the sky, the sun upon the water. You could read it as a celebration of youth and freedom, of a man caught in a moment of euphoria. Or you could interpret the weight of that terrible impending wave and the darkening of the sky behind it and you would shudder. She had said this, to Alex, when he had been painting it.
“I get this,” Gil told her. “That’s me, the guy on that board. But that aside, your dad was a great man. He doesn’t deserve to be rejected by you, even in memory, because he reached out to someone when he was in trouble. If staying here with me helps you reach some kind of peace, well … ” He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
She wanted to say, so it’s not about us? It’s not about wanting me with you? She swallowed. “Yes. Okay. I’m sorry.”
“So we’ll do our best?”
She nodded. The painted figure on the surfboard would haunt her dreams.
Gil sat in the dark on a bench in the communal garden, a bench which would be screened from the view from his sitting-room window by the plane trees and rhododendron bushes lining the square. He scrolled through his contacts list, tapped her name, which brought up her photo and her number. He tapped this too and closed his eyes.
“Hello,” she said in his ear.
“Were you asleep?”
“No. Not yet. How are you? How’re things going?”
He paused. The sound of her voice undid him.
“Gil?” she said. “Are you okay?”
The lump in his throat almost prevented speech. “Jesus, Cecily, what have I done?”
“Oh my love – ”
“I can’t bullshit her but I can’t be truthful either. I ramble on, spouting so much crap I hate myself for it. I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to be there, with you. I want to sell up here and come to you. We could do that, couldn’t we? We could make it work. We’ve wasted so much fucking time already.”
“Are you crying?”
“No.” He was. “I can’t stand this. I just want to hold you. I want to sleep with you, wake with you. I want to be inside you, beside you, now and for always.”
“Gil, listen to me. We have to be patient. She’ll get through this, she will. And when she does you’ll deliver her back home and kindly, regretfully, step away.”
“It’s only been a few days and it feels like a lifetime. I don’t know if I can keep going for as long as it takes.”
“Of course you can. If I can, you can.”
“I love you,” he said desperately. “I love you.”
“I love you too and I want you here but Gil, I can’t go through this again if it’s not going to come out right.”
“I know.” He pressed the heel of his palm against his eyes. “I know.”
“Maybe I could come and talk to her, if it would help.”
“It wouldn’t help. Christ. I don’t know what … ” But his heart twisted with longing at the thought of seeing her again. “Maybe.”
She was so cold. In the flat she took his jumpers from the wardrobe and tried them on, choosing one she thought would suit him, or on which the scent of his skin lingered, and wearing it to sit huddled on the sofa. She was cold and she had no energy. Sometimes she climbed into his bed and slept through the hours he spent at his workshop. Sometimes she walked listlessly through town, doing nothing, seeing nothing. Once Alex had come to sit beside her and she had willed him away. She could no longer cry. She was so cold.
Gil crouched beside the sofa to try to meet her eyes, said he was worried about her, wanted her to eat something, tried to persuade her to come out with him. She watched his mouth opening and closing as he talked, saw the mask of concern he strapped over his irritation. He didn’t touch her anymore. He rarely smiled.
Weeks passed. She wanted to cling to him but he was hardly home. When he was she was so numbed by her isolation she could barely speak to him. He gave up suggesting trips to the cinema, to restaurants. He never did introduce her to his family. One evening he arrived with packets of wires and stones, exactly the same brands and styles she always used, so she could be building up her stock while she was away. He gave her his laptop to check up on her sales. She left it all in a heap on the kitchen table, untouched.
It was the final straw.
“I don’t know what to do for you.” Exasperation sharpened his voice. “You know, tell me, what I’m doing wrong here because I don’t get it.”
She was afraid when he was angry, not of him but of what it meant. “I don’t know. It takes time.”
“It takes a bit of bloody effort on your part!”
“That’s not fair.”
“It is fair. I’m trying, I’m really trying, and you’re just hiding away in here like … a prisoner on hunger strike.”
“I am a prisoner.”
“Jesus! Feel free to leave any time, the doo
She didn’t recognise him. Her voice wavered. “You weren’t like this before. You were kind and loving and you supported me - ”
“Yeah and being kind and loving and supporting you had you mowing down my friends in the street! I don’t think it’s enough, do you?”
“Stop shouting at me.”
“I’m not shouting, I’m … ” He stopped, made an effort to speak more calmly. “I’m scared, Jem.”
“Of me?”
He sat down wearily, ran his hands through his hair. After a minute he said, “I’m not this hero who makes a habit of plucking kids out of the sea, you know. I’m just an ordinary guy who gets tired and frustrated and pissed off like anyone else. People who’ve been together twenty years bail when things get tough. Are you really surprised I’m struggling with this?”
“No.” Her voice was very small. “But I need you to be strong.”
“And I need you to try.”
“All right.” She paused. “It’s hard.”
“I know.”
She wanted him to hold her. Just touch her hand. He was the most tactile, demonstrative man she had ever met.
He stood up, and walked away.
She sat at the foot of a tree beside the harbour, yellow lights reflected off the water, tall masts shifting as the boats knocked gently together. Above the rows of trees were the spires and towers of churches, around her bars and clubs not yet busy with the night ahead. She leaned against the trunk, playing with the fraying strap of her bag, and wondered how deep the water was. Her parents had both drowned.
“I didn’t actually,” Alex said. “My skull was smashed. Had you forgotten?”
She turned away from him.
He said sternly, “I can’t see you like this.”
“Then don’t look.”
But this time he wasn’t going anywhere.
She gave in. “I thought about you all the time because it helped. It kept you with me. It doesn’t help anymore. Now when I think about you all I can see is you with her.”
“She was a great source of comfort to me.”
“Oh for God’s sake. You were fucking her.”