Of the Water
Jo Morrison
I’m standing cold in the sand, trying to see Rottnest Island through the sky’s swathes of grey. My face is slick with tears that taste of you. No-one can tell me why the intensity of my grief—the savagery of it, the way it has me by the throat—isn’t enough to bring you back.
Sometimes I think you were born of the water, a child of the sea. The clues were all there, in the dips and shadows of your body, the salt on your skin.
First time you saw me, I was lying on the floor of our rehearsal space, timber boards cool beneath me. I was to be your Echo and you my Narcissus, to spurn me, reduce me to a bodiless state, no more than reflected sounds in a cave.
I’d arrived early and found the room empty, a silent space waiting for me, inviting me to shut my eyes, just for a minute. I closed the door and lay down in a darkness so dense I could barely see my hands held above my head. I could have been anywhere, anytime, breathing in the hush and breathing it out again. Until voices intruded on the soundscape, growing louder, coming closer. Light seared into the room when you opened the door, made me lift my hand to shield my eyes. I must’ve looked a strange waif, there on the floor.
Sometimes I think if I can just pick out these details, map them out with enough precision, then you’ll materialise here in front of me, just as you were. The way your left eyebrow kinked up at the edge, and that scar near your ear … I wanted to touch it even then, to let my fingers slide down the groove behind your jaw and slip round under the collar of your coat.
I stood up, brushing the fine dust off the backs of my legs, and I’m sure I smiled because how could I not have smiled on first seeing you, your lovely face, haloed by the light? A face I felt I knew, as though I’d run a finger along each line around your eyes already.
Lara turned on more lights and the boundless darkness became a walled room, not very big, only five rows of seats running along three walls. She got us to help her drag those two benches on to the stage. One to represent the seats in a train, the other a bench at the station. Remember?
You look at your watch, confused. I follow you as you walk along the platform to press the information button. A disembodied voice intones: ‘Your next train departs in seventeen minutes.’
‘Idiot,’ you mutter.
Softly, I echo you: ‘Idiot.’
You turn sharply and say, ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Sorry …’
You raise your eyebrows and smile before sitting on the bench and taking out your phone. I sit down nearby and take out my phone too. After a while, you put yours away and look at me. I blush under your scrutiny, until at last you speak.
‘Got off at the wrong station as well?’
‘Well …’
You wait for me to elaborate, but I don’t, so you rest your elbows on your knees and smile at me.
‘Is that a yes or a no?’
‘A … no.’
You look away, intrigued but wary.
We still have ten minutes to wait; you make another attempt.
‘So, what are you up to tonight?’
‘Tonight?’
‘You got any plans?’
I shake my head, but I love questions like this, questions I can reuse: ‘You got any plans?’
‘I’m supposed to be meeting my mates at the next stop. Got off too soon. They’re waiting for me there though, which is cool.’
‘Cool.’
‘Come out with us if you like.’
‘If you like.’
Being on stage with you, my body seemed to listen to yours, as though each move you made sent tiny waves radiating towards me, through the air, to pulse against me. It was too much and not enough, all at once.
* *
Early again, I waited outside the back door of the theatre, at the top of the steel steps leading up the eastern wall. I watched you come clanging up those steps towards me, a dark chasm of a construction site between you and the city lights, something building around us like the layers of a slow, sure song.
Inside the dark, windowless theatre, Lara retreated with her script to the back row, leaving the two of us alone in the dim light of the stage. We were so close to each other I could hear you breathing and smell the salt of your body, mingled with sweat and tobacco. It was so easy to be at your mercy.
In the woods, a sign reads: ‘Sculptures in the Trees: An Exhibition’. We wander around, studying the structures, the way they play with light and sound. Your favourite is a giant twisting curve of reinforced glass; mine is a large concrete cylinder, on its side, like a stormwater drain.
I spread out a picnic blanket. You pour wine, feed me cheese, but you won’t meet my gaze. I can hardly breathe, waiting for you to say something.
When you do, it’s such a relief I almost don’t hear the words:
‘You know I don’t love you.’
‘Love you,’ I whisper, touching your face.
‘Though I like the way you touch me.’
I close my eyes and say, ‘Touch me.’
And you do, but only to remove my hand from your cheek, saying, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’
‘That. Repeat everything. It doesn’t make for great conversation.’
I look up at you, smile a little and say, ‘Conversation?’
Lara told us to go out together after that scene.
‘You’re still awkward around each other,’ she said. ‘The audience needs to believe you’re lovers.’
So there we were in Hyde Park, traipsing across the grass, trouser hems soaking up the wet. There’d been a thunderstorm that evening and the sky was a dark wash of grey above white-barked trees, smooth-skinned benevolent creatures, watching. I looked up, I remember this, my eyes drawn by a pulse of lightning, far off to the west, probably over the sea. And my hand felt cold and stiff, clutching my beer in its brown paper bag.
The silence between us was spacious, like the night. Like you. The last bird had gone quiet; in its wake, a choir of insects had taken up the song, accompanied by a steady drub of frogs.
Near a low-walled fountain under one of the park’s aged fig trees, we sat with our backs to the bulging mass of trunk. You used that penguin bottle opener you kept on your keyring and handed me my beer, wet with condensation and still icy cold. I took it, ran my hair behind my ear.
‘Too awkward, hey?’ I said.
‘Apparently so.’
You smiled and I fidgeted with the grass, tore at it, needing something to do with my hand to stop it reaching for you, though I felt quite sure I’d be allowed to one day. That all the waiting was just a game, a ritual we had to enact to please the time gods, to maintain the illusion that time is linear, though everyone knows it’s actually circular, looping this way and that, folding over on itself such that you and I were already lovers in some other dimension.
The grass was too wet beneath us so you stood up and held out your hand for me. It was warm and dry, the same hand I’d held in rehearsals, and yet not the same because this time it was spontaneous, unscripted.
‘Come on,’ you said, not letting go. I ran behind you, my bag thumping against my hip, the air fresh and damp on my cheeks like ocean spray.
* *
Walking behind you along the open corridor to your door, two weeks into the season, I barely noticed the early moon or the swirling swallows, or the pot plants that supposedly beautified those ugly red brick walls. I was thinking about the way you kissed me on stage, so slowly, and how strange it was that an audience already so quiet could somehow go quieter still.
Your place was small, with all four rooms leading off a tiny entrance hall. There were two low sofas in the lounge room, and a guitar on a stand.
‘Have a seat,’ you said, opening French doors on to a tiny balcony overlooking the car park below. Life was loud outside, laughter from somewhere, sudden pulses of music. The branches of nearby trees brushed against the railings and you offered to make me some chamomile tea. I can still see your face as you delivered it to my hands in that funny old cup, green with leaf shapes carved into it. That easy smile.
‘Narcissus’s mother was a naiad, did you know that?’ you said, picking up your guitar and sitting down with it. ‘Called Liriope.’
Sounded like another language in your mouth.
‘What’s a naiad?’
‘A water nymph. His father was a river god: Cephissus.’
I blew tiny ripples into my tea. ‘So what does that make Narcissus? A river god too? A water prince?’
‘Something like that,’ you said, a dimple creasing your cheek as you arranged your fingers on the neck and began to play.
‘Sounds like someone else I know,’ I said. I knew about your daily surf; you’d told me already that nothing short of a hailstorm could keep you from it. I closed my eyes to listen to your melody as it merged with the sounds of the city and the dusksong of birds gathering on the tree outside your window.
You take hold of my hair, pull my head back so that my throat and jaw are bared, like prey, and I am frozen, hardly breathing lest you should stop. You run your face along my throat, first your cheek and then your lips, soft. Then you take my head in your hands and look into my eyes, saying, ‘Who are you?’
‘You,’ I say, because that’s all I have become: a reflection of you.
You release one hand to stroke my hair off my face. The breathing is loud between us. You lean in close, as though you might kiss me, but then you look away and stand back.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ you say. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I tried. I thought maybe I could … love you …’
‘Love you.’
‘I have to go.’
‘Go?’
I can still see your face, caught in the stage lights as you walked between the wire and plaster sculptures, past that sculpture made from broken shards of mirror. I can see the tenderness in your face as you smiled at your fractured reflection and moved closer, though I wasn’t meant to be looking at you. I was meant to be trailing my fingers along the damp wall of the cylindrical sculpture, humming a tune, finishing the water in the wine bottle. Lying down as an audio-track of restful, slowing breathing began to play.
* *
It was a Sunday evening, no show to turn up for, but there you were anyway, leaning against the doorframe, dark curls falling across your face.
‘Hi,’ you said, tucking them back over your ear. I wanted to say come in, but the sight of you made the words melt like gold flakes on my tongue.
‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ you said, so easily, as if this was now the natural order of things. Happiness coursed through me, a torrent of joy so potent it scared me for all the promise of loss it held.
We walked together beneath whispering trees. The night air was cool and the silk of my gold dress brushed against my skin. I kept catching you looking at it, your eyes drawn to its shimmer, its softness. You laughed at something I said and put your arm around me, and I knew it was coming.
‘You’re too much,’ you said. ‘I can’t take it.’
‘You can take it,’ I said, managing to hold your gaze, emboldened by your tone, your arm around my shoulders. You stopped walking, held my hand to make me stop too.
It was so soft, that kiss—no trace of Narcissus’s cruelty then, no lights, no audience holding its collective breath. It was only my breath in the darkness, and yours.
* *
I see you, Narcissus, brought down by desire. Brutal, isn’t it? The way it barrels through, trailing grief and longing behind it.
‘Why?!’ you shout at the reflection that won’t let you close enough.
The image shouts too, same time, same word.
You put your hand to the glass, don’t hear me in my concrete cave, echoing,
‘Why? Why?’
And you scoff at yourself: fool for your own face.
‘There is no hope for me,’ you murmur. ‘I will never know love.’
‘No hope,’ I whisper. ‘No love.’
You sank to the floor as a second audio-track of breathing began, heavier than the first one, slightly out of synch. Both tracks slowed to silence as the lights dimmed and all was dark.
I found it eerie, every night, pretending to be dead, the unflinching stillness of it. The applause came as a relief, a kind of resuscitation.
* *
I watched from the bed as you pushed a towel into your bag. I can barely think about this now, much less recount it, but I have started, and so I must finish, and maybe when everything is recorded, every last detail, you will emerge from the page, like a tapestry or one of those macramé creations, woven out of the golden threads of my memories.
You came to me, put your arms around me and rested your forehead on mine, your lovely forehead with those very faint lines. I can still trace the shape of your hairline in the air in front of me. I’m doing it now.
‘You’re so sweet when you’re sulking,’ you said.
‘I’m not sulking,’ I said, though I was, of course. ‘I just wish you’d let me come with you.’
‘I’d love to have you there,’ you said, jabbing me gently in the ribs, ‘but you know I spend more time with you than I do with Anthony these days.’
I smiled but it wasn’t your old friend I envied; it was the ocean itself, the way you looked at it, as if you couldn’t breathe without it. The way you would leave me for it every morning, leave me to wake up alone and wanting your warmth beside me in bed instead of seeping out into that watery vastness.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘go on, be free.’
I offered to drop you off at the island ferry because that would give me more time with you, just a bit more time.
We arrived at the terminal and you got out, opening the boot, letting in a whoosh of sea air and the rocking, creaking, clanging sounds of the wharf. A cruise liner was docked nearby, gargantuan against the sky, a towering city all its own.
‘Come on, brother,’ you said to Anthony, ‘let’s get moving.’
You dropped the car keys into my outstretched palm.
‘Have fun, boys,’ I said, though what I meant was: please don’t go.
‘Not too much fun though, right?’ you said, kissing me, shutting out everything but the surge and slap of water, the ting-ting-ting of steel on concrete. ‘I’ll miss you.’
‘You will not,’ I smiled.
Anthony was ahead, near the terminal already.
‘Oh yes I will,’ you said, hoisting your bag on to your shoulder and picking up your board. ‘And you’d better miss me.’
I should have said: I will … I always will . I should have run after you, gone with you, no matter what you’d said. But I didn’t because I wanted to be serene, self-contained, the antithesis of Echo, waiting for you but not too hard. And so I let you go, watched you smile and walk away, wind-whipped into the glare.
That was the last I saw of you, disappearing into brightness, into a light as ethereal as the one you’d emerged from on that first rehearsal afternoon. As though you were leaving by the same unearthly portal that had let you in.
The pines stand dark and moaning now against a heavy sky. Rain and white horses jag across the sea, cursing it, as I do, for taking you away. For letting Anthony be the one to ride the ferry home alone, lugging two surfboards instead of one and carrying your weekend bag, yours until you fell off your board and hit the reef.
Your beautiful head, lifeless.
Your blood, pluming into the water, taking the essence of you—of both of us—into the coldest, deepest, darkest of places. Into the depths of that ocean you always smelled of, that place you loved more than me. Not that you had a choice, I know. You were just an ocean creature, of the water not the land. No-one can tell me why, but out of the light you came to me, and back into it you went, going home, no more now than a shimmer on the darkening skin of the sea.