Sirens
Even without looking, without being able to see, Kellie knows exactly what the knife has just done. It’s split the third line of the lyrics tattooed on her side; the chorus from a song that she’s never liked, but which Zara had loved and so declared to be theirs. If it scars, Kellie thinks, then it will be like a redaction. The tease of a secret. A memory blanked.
Blood gushes out through the tear in her coat, and she presses hard with both hands in an effort to staunch it. The cracked rib shapes the wound into a model volcano; a science fair back at school, Second Prize in her year.
She used to be smart in that way. She used to be sensible. Too sensible to ever end up like this, to ever get involved with someone like Zara; to ever go exploring in the middle of a blackout; to ever decide to get a tattoo.
She’d had it done seven months ago, after a few drinks too many. She hadn’t really planned on it, but Zara had persuaded her. When Zara was in a good mood, when she was fun, it felt like the only way to live well was to follow her lead – anything else was a dereliction of duty.
“Growing up is giving up,” Zara had said, and how she said it made you hate the quitters, made you hate yourself for being one. Or nearly being. And every time you got close to the edge of all that, there Zara would be, to lead you out through the door.
And straight on ’til morning.
Their song had been playing that night in the last club they’d gone to, and guys had kept approaching them, and Zara had kept on pushing them away, and pulling Kellie closer, whispering things that she hadn’t been able to hear – that she wishes she had heard, could hear again now – and then kissed her, and stuck a finger up at the guys who were filming with their phones.
Afterwards, they’d stumbled out past the bouncers into the four a.m. moonscape, up the road to a falafel van, and from there to a tattoo parlour that Zara knew well. Kellie only went that one time, but she remembers it clearly – she hadn’t been that drunk – though she remembers mostly just staring at the designs on the wall.
Zara had ignored that selection and explained to the artist what she wanted instead. They would each get half of the chorus on their right-hand-side ribs; every line shared between them, so it would only join up and make sense when they spooned.
It wasn’t until the following evening, when they’d finally woken up, that they realised it should have been inked upside down, so they could read it, recite from it, without any fuss.
A stupid thing to fight over. As if they didn’t already know the lyrics by heart.
As if Kellie still doesn’t, whether she likes them or not. They tumble out of her, ragged, and she tries to find a position where it doesn’t hurt as they leave. She stops to pant, almost choking, after every other word. She presses harder on the wound, but the blood isn’t slowing. She used to know all about biology and all about chemistry and quite a bit about physics, but she can’t remember which organ is underneath where she’s cut. She can’t think of anything apart from the song. Apart from what people must think of her singing.
A group of six lights – or is it just three? – are drifting along on the far side of the street, but as the people holding them notice her, they stutter and pause. Kellie wants to try and ask them for help, but she can’t find any words besides these lyrics in her head. She can’t think of any way to tell them what’s wrong.
The lights begin moving again, in the other direction; the passers-by must have pegged her as a pitiful drunk. Or maybe they’re scared. Perhaps they were already out somewhere else when the power went down, and they’re nothing like Zara, they just want to get home.
Kellie can’t blame them.
But she can’t stop herself singing. No matter how difficult, how much it hurts.
There are sirens in the night, a block or two distant, and they seem like a backing track, a real-time trance electronica remix. If she still had her own phone, she could call the police, and serenade them down the line until they came to investigate.
And then she could explain.
Try to, at least.
That this wasn’t supposed to happen. That she knew it had been risky to hit the streets in a blackout, but Zara had wanted to know how the city adapted. How it felt and behaved. She’d heard stories about previous times it had happened, they both had – but Zara didn’t believe in second-hand stories. She believed only in what she could see and smell and taste and touch.
“I believe in you, Kellie,” she’d said. “But my faith’s a little shaky. Why don’t you come over here and remind me?”
Zara was the sole arbiter of what was real and what was not. And she could certainly be fickle when determining between the two. Her arms were a palimpsest of other lyrics and quotes linked to previous lovers, and there were a couple more on her back, and even one near the top of her inside-right thigh; but she hadn’t been able to afford the removal, and so simply pretended they were no longer there.
“And what if you ever leave me, or I ever leave you?” Kellie had asked her, with their ink still in cellophane. Zara had been cooking something, a lentil curry, in a lull between fights.
Kellie didn’t like lentils.
The lull didn’t last long.
“Are you planning to leave me?” Zara had spun round, and the tendons in her neck had been warped with the strain.
The way she could flip, just like that, like a cat with its claws out, like a gold carriage at midnight, that was one of the reasons the answer should have been Yes. Was yes, though of course Kellie didn’t say that. She couldn’t say it, because she never knew what Zara would actually do; especially in the kitchen, with so many sharp objects lying around.
Instead, Kellie had told her not to be stupid, and moved in for a kiss, because it had always been best when Zara was angry. They’d half-stripped and gone at it right there on the floor. The curry boiled over and burnt to the hob.
She is running a fever. Or is she just very cold? It’s difficult to tell. Why is it so difficult? She shivers, keeps shivering, and it tugs at the wound. The blood seems to be slowing, but the breath rips in her throat. Is she still singing? Is it just in her head?
More lights floating by on the far side of the street. Only one, or is it two? It seems to come closer, and she stops singing, swallows, tries once again to form the word, “Help.” The words, “Save me. My friend. Hospital.” But when she shuts up she vanishes, and the half-hearted Samaritan vanishes too.
It’s like echolocation. Bio-sonar. In this blackout, and with the cloud cover as heavy as it is, it’s like being underwater. It’s like those deep-sea documentaries that she loves, but that she could only watch if she promised to do something for Zara, to reward her for sitting still and not complaining throughout.
Sometimes, she would ask Zara questions, to test whether or not she’d been paying attention. How far down can a blue whale swim? What is the name of the deepest point in the ocean? Which fish are famous for using a flashing blue lure?
Anglerfish, is the answer.
These phones – the few that pass – are beginning to look a lot like them. Bioluminescent. Kellie wants to swim over, to take the bait – no, better yet, she wants to be one of them, to have her own bait, to draw them towards her. But she doesn’t. She can’t.
Her phone has been stolen.
And now she thinks that maybe she doesn’t actually want to be noticed – what if the wrong person finds her, another deep-sea monstrosity?
Can you name a shark species that dives down to eight thousand feet?
Zara can’t answer, and neither can Kellie, not with the blood oozing out through her side.
Her pulse throbs in her head. She can still hear their song but it’s much quieter now, as if she’s singing it whispered, she’s struggling to breathe. Perhaps it still carries to the rare passers-by, and probably if it does then they still think she’s a drunk. The wrong kind of siren, trying to captivate sailors and smash them up on the rocks. They remain at a distance, bound to their masts.
But Kellie isn’t drunk and she doesn’t care what they think, about her, about this song, and she doesn’t even care at this point that she hates it, that the lyrics are crap and the beat is derivative. She whispers it anyway, because it’s a dirge. Because Zara had claimed it was theirs, and so it might as well be.
Zara had other songs on her body, from other relationships, but she would turn off the radio at their opening notes, and never put them in playlists, and always dragged Kellie to the toilets if they came on in a club. She was merciless when she stopped believing in something. She pulled it right out of existence and did her best to deny that it had ever even been. They had never, not once, run into any of her exes, and Kellie had often wondered if they’d all been made-up.
The few times she’d let Zara get her high, or if it was too hot in the night and sleep was impossible, she’d started to wonder the same of herself. Or if instead Zara just hijacked readymade hosts, moved into their headspace and used them for storage. And then when she left them they’d reverted to type, become their old selves again, conformist and vague. Easy to walk past without recognition.
At three in the morning, covered in sweat, that had felt slightly more plausible – that her soul had a squatter, someone else at the wheel. After all, she had always been sensible, smart, before she met Zara. She’d been totally different. She would have never got wasted, nor got tattooed.
She certainly wouldn’t have come out tonight.
She hadn’t really wanted to, as soon as she’d seen the street, the dimness, but Zara had stood firm and told her not to be a wuss. Said they’d only go as far as the nearby park. Ten minutes’ walk, at the most. There were bound to be people there lighting campfires, she’d said, and setting paper lanterns adrift on the river. And Zara didn’t want to miss that. She never wanted to miss anything.
They held their phones out in front of them, the only glimmers on the street, and bins and piles of garbage bags looked ghostly where the torchlight caught them.
“Like ectoplasmic blobs,” Kellie said.
“Who ya gonna call?” said Zara, and strutted ahead, screeching out the famous tune. She thrust her arms in the air with the phone-torch still glowing, and it skewered up like a Bat-signal, or a searchlight for drones.
But there was far too much cloud cover to spot anything much; the sky seemed as empty as the street spread around them.
No birds, even. Quiet.
The shadow sprang out of nowhere, from a doorway, from a side alley. Zara spun at the sound, and the blade flickered blue in the glow from her phone, and so did half of her face, and then she just fell. Then the attacker was on Kellie, and her phone went, her hand grabbing thin air, then hair, and then a fist hit her chin, and then came the knife.
Bluntnose sixgill shark, is the answer.
Eight thousand feet down until it rises to feed.
A sharp savage impact and then it was done.
It hurts less, in a way, than when she got the tattoo, even though she was hammered for that and is stone sober right now. She’s beginning to lose feeling. The shivering has stopped. She isn’t even sure if her eyes are still open, or whether or not she’s still singing, or if it’s all in her head. The backing track sirens are still playing, somewhere, but they must be fixing a problem for somebody else.
Kellie’s problem is about twelve feet away, she guesses, up the street to her left. Kellie’s problem is in and around the right side of her torso. It’s a terrible chorus; it’s the same old song. You heard plenty of stories about this kind of thing, and people had said to watch out for this neighbourhood, because the statistics about muggings and violent crime were not good. But Zara had never believed in second-hand stories. She’d only believed in what she could see and smell and taste and touch.
Kellie’s hands are still pressed against the hole in her coat, but the blood seems to be clotting, to have halted its flow. Though her mouth when she swallows is bitter with iron, she decides to risk moving, to rise up on her knees.
Straight away, she drops forwards, but still begins to crawl hesitantly across the cold, pitch-black ground. She is no longer singing, not even whispering, because the forward momentum requires too much breath. Too much strength. She’s only just about able to grope ahead blindly. She wishes that Zara could glow like an anglerfish. She feels like a bottom-feeder. She feels like the drowned.
Then she hits something. A bump in the road. A lump in the throat. She wants to be sick, but her insides are so drained and so sore that she can’t. There is nothing left. Only this shoe, this ankle, this calf, this knee. This right thigh, which bears somebody else’s lost hymn at the top of it, and then in between, and towards the left hip. Then the thin, taut belly, the breasts, and the collar bone, and the throat, where the hurt is, and the face the mouth the nose the eyes. She gathers the body in her arms to reposition it, and as she does this there are lights, right on cue, and she can see what she’s doing; she can unzip the jacket, and then her own coat, and she can curl like an atmosphere around this cold little star. She tries to wipe the blood clear from her half of the chorus, tries to match it together so she can read upside down, even though she knows the all the words off by heart. And the lights have gone blue now and red now and blue, and the sirens are louder, and another voice says something, but she doesn’t hear clearly because she’s singing again. And she kisses the back of that beautiful neck, where it is still whole and normal, and decorated only by another tattoo, of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis skull – the first Zara got, when she was fifteen years-old – and it really does look good, great, brilliant, perfect, and Kellie thinks she might go and get one just like it, to remind her, and she doesn’t listen to anything the other voice says, even though it’s closer now, really close, right next to her, booming. Even though it comes with a baton slamming into her back.
Even though hands wrap around and try and tear her away.
Even though the full weight of the water is pressing above her.
She doesn’t really feel it.
She doesn’t feel smart and she doesn’t feel sensible.
She just carries on singing, and tightens her grip.
